by Dan Savage
“Look around, son,” the old dealer said, chuckling at the frat boy joylessly. We all took in the gaudy, over-the-top, brass-and-smoked-glass, football-field-size casino floor. It was Angie Dickinson vintage, but it was still very, very impressive. “Does it look like we get taken very often? I said your odds were better at craps. But they’re not better than the casino’s odds. They never are.”
Craps is the most complicated game ever devised by the mind of man. The table is a rectangular oval with foot-high sides that looks like a strange sort of shallow bathtub lined with green felt. The felt surface is covered with numbers and boxes, and the table itself is surrounded by four or five dealers and sometimes twenty or more players. One of the dealers wields an intimidating-looking stick. The game is played with dice, and everyone who steps up to the table has to take a turn throwing the dice. There are about ten million different kinds of bets you can make, and one bad throw of the dice can cost everyone at the table a whole lot of money.
“Dice tables bring out the emotions more than any other game,” writes the author of a book on craps. “There’s a certain camaraderie among players that for some reason doesn’t occur at any other tables. Players feel free to yell, shout, scream, applaud, and cheer. . . .”
Which means, of course, that craps tables invariably attract big, loud, drunk assholes. Frat boys, angry suburban dads, Wall Street types, good ol’ boys with their mouths full of chewing tobacco: these are the guys who play craps. Cigar smokers play craps. Mobsters play craps. Bullies play craps. They all scream and yell at the person who has the dice, which is why I just couldn’t bring myself to play the goddamned game. Being an unathletic, uncoordinated fag in high school left me with many unhappy memories of being the person who had the kickball or the soccer ball or the bat. While other players yelled and shouted, I would invariably disappoint. Knowing how angry a group of junior-varsity boys can get with only the honor of defeating another group of junior-varsity boys, I couldn’t face a table full of angry adult male gamblers with actual money at stake. If I was going to gamble, I would have to learn to play cards. I played cards with my mother as a kid, but I couldn’t find any gin or hearts tables in the casinos I was in. And just when I thought I might have to learn to play poker or blackjack I discovered . . .
Casino War! Remember war? It’s a kids’ game, played with two fifty-two-card decks. Two players simultaneously turn over one card. The higher card takes the lower. If the players turn over cards of identical value, you go to war: You both put two cards facedown, then one more card faceup. The winner takes all the cards. Winning “wars” is the only way to win the game—and wars are rare. Consequently, a single game of war can take hours, which is why my parents taught it to their four children. It kept us occupied while they sinned. Well, war only recently arrived in Las Vegas, where it’s played primarily by nongamblers. I stumbled over the game in the casino of the Venetian, one of the big new hotels, and I knew that this was a card game I could play. The rules were a little different, though. The players didn’t get their own decks; instead, the dealer gave you one card, then dealt himself one card. If your card was higher, you won. It was so simple that I figured I couldn’t mess it up.
So I pulled up a chair. Pretty soon I had a complimentary cocktail in my hand, and I was chatting away with the other warriors at the table. While we played, the dealer treated us to a long, humorous monologue designed to discourage us from ever playing Casino War again. He pointed out again and again that the best we could hope to do was leave his table with the money we sat down with. The fifty-fifty odds meant we were likely to break even, but unlikely to win.
While the dealer tried to talk us out of playing War, some frat boys gathered to watch as we played. Soon they were making fun of us.
“Oh, they’re playing War,” one said. “Watch out! High rollers! Give these whales some breathing room!”
“What a pussy game,” said another.
“Bock, bock, bock,” said a third, flapping his arms like a chicken.
No security guard came to shoo away the frat boys who were calling us names, and the dealer didn’t seem to mind them. Why should he? He was trying to talk us out of playing this game himself.
When I got up from the table two hours later, I wasn’t even, as the dealer predicted. I was ahead. I sat down with $100 in five-dollar chips, and got up with $150 in chips. But some of my fellow warriors weren’t so lucky. A smiling Asian man made dozens of hundred-dollar bets and lost almost every time. A slightly tipsy, very chatty woman who was sitting next to me burst into tears when she lost her last chip. And a man who claimed to have won three thousand dollars the night before at the Bellagio left the Venetian after two hours with the same money he sat down with.
Sitting at the table with strangers, playing a pussy game, I felt as if I were watching the American tragedy restaged as farce. Losers come to Las Vegas in hopes of feeling like winners, if only for an evening, and winners come to Las Vegas because they can afford to lose once in a while. Out there in real-life America, the winners and losers live in separate worlds: winners in gated communities, losers in ever-harder-to-find “affordable housing.” Only in hyperunreal Las Vegas do the winners and losers rub shoulders—some sitting right next to each other at the card tables—and enact a highly ritualized, booze-soaked version of the striving, winning, and losing at the heart of American life.
Historically, Christian moralists in America have opposed gambling. Dice, cards, slots—the sin of gambling was right up there with adultery. By placing their faith in chance, gamblers were refusing to submit themselves to the will of God, making a false idol of money, worshiping luck and not Christ. Gambling was long seen as a form of stealing, because for someone to win at a game of chance, someone else has to lose. Duh. The winner profits at the expense of the loser and gives nothing in return, which was seen as violating Christ’s instruction to love thy neighbor. Christian moralists believed that gambling encouraged the sin of envy, and while gambling is not forbidden anywhere in the Bible, there are many passages that discourage the love of money or wealth:
“The lover of money will not be satisfied with money; nor the lover of wealth with gain” (Ecclesiastes 5.10). “No one can serve two masters . . . you cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6.24). “Be sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy, has any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and of God” (Ephesians 5.5).
And let’s not forget those Roman soldiers who threw dice for Christ’s robes.
Considering the long tradition of antigambling sentiments and agitation (see Guys and Dolls) among Christian conservatives, it’s strange that gambling rarely comes in for criticism from the Bill Bennetts and Robert Borks. The gambling issue doesn’t get a lot of play with reliably conservative members of the U.S. House or Senate either. How did something that was once viewed as a sin comparable to adultery become so widespread in a country filled-to-bursting with self-appointed virtuecrats, moral scolds, a Christian Coalition, and hundreds of conservative members of Congress? Do they all agree with the gaming industry when it argues that gambling isn’t a moral issue at all, and certainly not a sin?
Or is it the money, honey?
House Speaker Dennis Hastert visited Las Vegas in August of 1999. “Hastert rarely missed an opportunity Wednesday during his visit to Las Vegas to rip vocal gaming industry opponent Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va.,” the Las Vegas Journal-Review reported.
“They are (his) own personal views and certainly not the views of the party leadership,” Hastert, R-Ill., told Las Vegas reporters. . . . Hastert repeated the line during a private meeting with Mirage Resorts Chairman Steve Wynn and a midday fund-raiser with gaming industry executives, who donated an estimated $600,000 to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. . . . “The consensus in the Republican conference is anti-personal gaming but pro the right to choose,” said one House observer. “A majority in the Republican conference do not personally like to gamble and do not gambl
e, but most of them don’t want to restrict the rights of others to do so.”
So let me see if I have this straight: Republicans are pro-choice, pro-personal-freedom, and anti-restricting-the-rights-of-others when it comes to gambling, but not when it comes to anything else. When it comes to gambling, conservative Republicans will ignore thousands of years of moral teaching, Scripture, and tradition to support “personal gaming” because adults have a right to choose. Hey, Dennis: How about the right of adults to choose to have an abortion? Or commit adultery? Or listen to rap music? Or visit a prostitute? Or smoke pot?
“Gambling has become accepted as part of America’s mainstream culture, alongside leisure activities such as attending movies, athletic events, and the theater.” So begins Keeping It Fun: A Guide to Low-Risk Gambling, a pamphlet produced by the American Gaming Association. “The vast majority of Americans who gamble do it recreationally without any adverse consequences. . . . Keep gambling what it should be—entertainment. Know how to set limits, and, most importantly, know when to stop.” According to the American Gaming Association, no one should gamble alone, no one under age should gamble, and no one should gamble to compensate for feelings of depression or low self-esteem. It’s good advice—in fact, it’s the exact same advice I would give pot smokers, adulterers, and gluttons.
“Bet with your head, not over it. 1-800-BETS-OFF.”
That message was brought to me courtesy of a cash machine in Dubuque, Iowa. Gambling long ago left Las Vegas, and I figured it was about time I did, too. Las Vegas is an overwhelming place, and the longer you stay in the city the less it charms. Two days is the ideal length for a visit to Las Vegas, and I had been spending weeks at a time in the city. So I decided to leave Nevada and visit the first American city to welcome riverboat gambling. Only after making that decision did I learn that city was Dubuque.
Iowa and I have a rather unpleasant history. During the 2000 presidential primaries, I went undercover as a volunteer for Gary Bauer’s campaign while I had the flu (where I may or may not have licked Bauer’s doorknobs, staplers, and officer supplies in an attempt to give him the flu), but more problematically, I may or may not have broken the law when I participated in Iowa’s presidential caucuses. People don’t actually vote in Iowa’s caucuses, they “express a preference” in an informal balloting. When I found out that you didn’t need a state ID or proof of residency to “express a preference” in Iowa’s caucuses, I thought that was pretty fucked up. What was to stop out-of-state campaign staffers and activists who flood the state during the caucuses from showing up at caucus sites and expressing their preferences? A wealthy candidate like, say, Steve Forbes could flood caucus sites with paid supporters. (Forbes, in fact, placed a rather mysterious second in the 2000 Iowa caucuses.)
I pointed all of this out in my story, imagining myself to be something like a reporter who goes downtown, buys drugs, and then writes about how easy it is to buy drugs downtown. No one arrests those reporters, do they? There was much yowling from conservatives about the doorknob licking, and the Drudge Report, the New York Post, and Free Republic came after me in a big way. A few weeks after the piece appeared on Salon.com, I was charged with felony vote fraud, and Iowa tried to put me away for six years. I signed a confidentiality agreement with the state of Iowa and Gary Bauer that prevents me from commenting any further. But please see these footnotes, which will hopefully explain everything on my behalf.1,2
The particular ATM with the antigambling message sat in the lobby of a three-story brick building that housed a restaurant, buffet, and the Iowa Welcome Center. The building also served as the entrance to the Diamond Jo, a riverboat casino moored in the muddy stretch of the Mississippi River that flows past Dubuque, Iowa. There was also a small rack on top of the ATM filled with information about gambling addiction. It was kind of like going to a crack house and finding a picture of Nancy Reagan and her JUST SAY NO slogan hanging on the door.
Dubuque had the first riverboat casino in the United States, but the Dubuque Diamond Jo Casino—this particular boat—was actually the second riverboat casino moored at Dubuque. The first, “the majestic Casino Belle,” according to Dubuque’s daily paper, the Telegraph Herald, was replaced by the “spartan Diamond Jo,” after the owners of the Casino Belle moved their boat to Alabama. I didn’t find that out until after my first visit to the Diamond Jo, but even so, I knew something wasn’t right about the Diamond Jo the first time I laid eyes on it. The three-story brick building that serves as the casino’s entrance literally towers over the Diamond Jo. The scale is all wrong. Sitting next to the building built to complement the larger and more “majestic” Casino Belle, the Diamond Jo looks like a Honda Civic parked in front of Tony Soprano’s four-car garage.
Staying in downtown Dubuque can be a very lonely experience. The streets were empty, and the downtown retail core felt abandoned. When I checked into the Dubuque’s “historic” Julien Inn in late October 2001, I was the only person in the lobby besides the clerk. Once a fine, old Victorian hotel, the Julien had been remod- eled in 1965 to look like the lair of some minor-league villain, the kind of evil subgenius Sean Connery disposed of in the first reel, and it doesn’t seem to attract many paying guests these days. In fact, the clerk seemed genuinely startled when I walked in and asked for a room. She quickly transitioned to vaguely suspicious when I made it clear that I was serious, and after I asked for one of the hotel’s one-bedroom apartments (a steal at $225 a week), she idled on hostile for the rest of our time together. I rode the elevator up to my room on the eighth floor of the hotel all by myself; I ate dinner in the hotel’s German-themed restaurant, the Alte Glocke, all by myself; I had a beer in the hotel’s deserted bar all by myself. The only time I saw anyone else on the eighth floor was when an older man in a motorized wheelchair left his room for his weekly trip to the nearby pharmacy that stocked a small selection of groceries.
“Dubuque was founded in 1788 by French-Canadian fur trader Julien Dubuque,” reads the historic marker in front of Dubuque’s red-and-white county courthouse, an impressive wedding cake of a building constructed in 1981.“[Dubuque] joined with the Mesquake [sic] Indians to exploit the rich lead mines of the area. In 1833, [the area] was opened for American settlement, and the resulting lead ruch created a boomtown”. I know enough about American history to be deeply mistrustful of historic markers, especially ones in lily white parts of the country that speak of whites “joining with” local Indian tribes. While Julien Dubuque may have been a nice guy who was soliticious of the Mesquake Indians in the extreme, I didn’t see a lot of white people, though, and no one seemed to know what had happened to the Mesquakes. And who the hell ever heard of a lead ruch?
Like many of the dying river cities along the Mississippi, Dubuque’s civic boosters hope to lure visitors to the city with its many fine examples of Victorian architecture. (“Dubuque: Master-piece on the Mississippi,” is the city’s official tourist slogan.) But an earlier generation of Dubuque’s civic boosters went on an urban renewal binge in the late 1950s and 1960s, tearing down everything in sight—including block after block of Victorian buildings in downtown Dubuque. Nothing much besides parking lots was ever built to replace these buildings lost to “urban renewal.” In the right light, Dubuque looks like a tintype of a smiling Victorian woman who had half her teeth knocked out. Worse yet for Dubuque, other nearby cities didn’t tear down any of their older buildings in the 1950s, leaving them with more charming—and hence more touristed—Victorian city centers. Even today Dubuque’s architectural heritage can’t seem to catch a break: a row of Victorian buildings in the downtown area was evacuated during my stay in Dubuque when a parking lot being constructed directly behind the buildings destabilized their foundations. The buildings will probably have to be torn down. Adding insult to injury, downtown Dubuque needs another parking lot like Jerry Falwell needs another chin.
There was another reason I decided to leave Las Vegas and head to Dubuque: I wanted to feel like a whale.
In gamble-speak, a high-roller is someone willing to lose a hundred thousand dollars on a trip to Vegas; a whale is someone willing to lose up to a million dollars or more. The average bet for a whale is ten thousand; 70 percent of whales are Asian men. At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the maximum bet is a closely guarded secret, falling somewhere between twenty and forty thousand dollars. Maximum bets can be higher in the exclusive and intimate gaming rooms Las Vegas casinos have been building to attract “superwhales” like Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who is famous for betting ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on a single hand. I’d never made more than a five-dollar bet in Las Vegas—not only wasn’t I a whale in Vegas, I wasn’t even a sea monkey. I probably wasn’t plankton.
I could be a whale in Iowa, though. The state legalized gambling on riverboat casinos in 1989, and at that time the maximum bet in Iowa was five dollars; the most money any one gambler was allowed to lose in a twenty-four-hour period was two hundred dollars. I remembered reading about Iowa’s prim betting and loss limits at the time the riverboat casino opened in Dubuque. The same lawmakers in Iowa who wanted to haul in the tourists and create new tax revenues and hundreds of jobs didn’t want to be accused of exploiting problem gamblers—or creating them.