by Dan Savage
So that was the plan: Fly to Iowa, bet five bucks, and, hey, look at me! I’m uh . . . Christ, I’m Larry Flynt. Blech.
The Diamond Jo was small, and compared with the casinos I’d been to in Las Vegas (my only reference point), it was spartan—but, hey, compared to some of the newer casinos in Las Vegas, Vatican City is pretty spartan. And unlike the casinos in Las Vegas, the Diamond Jo was kind of cozy and intimate, something like what I’d imagined the private rooms for whales in Las Vegas to be. Unfortunately, the Diamond Jo was doing well enough to commission and produce its own jingle, which it plays over and over and over again, for hours on end, all day and all night: “The Diamond Jo Casino! Where the river runs wild! The Diamond Jo Casino! Where the cards run wild! The Diamond Jo Casino! Where the river runs wild!”
After getting my bearings, I sat down at an empty blackjack table. The dealer—a middle-aged man with a hangdog face and the skin of a lifelong smoker—seemed friendly and approachable, unlike some of the other dealers, who looked miserable. (Or were they just wearing their poker faces? Or perhaps that jingle was getting on their nerves?) Most important to me, there was no one at his table. Part of what makes card games so intimidating for the inexperienced gambler is the fear of making a fool of yourself in front of card players who know what they’re doing. I was happy to be alone at his table—not that I was winning. I wasn’t; I was losing, but I was losing in peace and quiet. I was losing five dollars at a time, one little red chip per hand, but that wasn’t the maximum bet anymore. The sign on the table said, MINIMUM BET: $5/MAXIMUM BET $500. Five hundred dollars! My dreams of being a whale in Iowa were dashed.
Curious about what had happened to the five-dollar minimum bet, I contacted the business reporter of Dubuque’s daily newspaper, the Telegraph Herald.
“This is a state and a community that has overwhelmingly supported gaming,” said Matt Kittle, who covers the casinos for his paper. “Every eight years the voters in any county with gambling get to vote on whether or not gambling will continue to be allowed in their county. The last time we voted, about 70 percent of the voters were in favor of gambling continuing.”
Gambling came to Iowa in 1984, when the state legalized “paramutual” gambling, that is, betting on dog and horse races. Any company that wanted to open a dog track would have to win a referendum in the county it wanted to build in. A referendum was quickly organized in Dubuque County, it passed, and the state’s first dog track—The Dubuque Greyhound Park—opened in 1985. “You have to bear in mind that, while this is a conservative town, it’s also overwhelmingly Catholic. Bingo primed the pump in Dubuque.” (Eighty percent of Catholics gamble compared with 43 percent of Baptists.)
But a state allowing just a little bit of gambling is like a woman claiming she’s just a little bit pregnant—it’s a pretense that’s difficult to keep up. So with dog tracks up and running, the Iowa state legislature soon passed a similar riverboat casino bill, and Iowa is now home to three dog tracks and ten riverboat casinos.
“Some of our ‘riverboats’ aren’t even in rivers,” said Kittle. “They’re floating in ponds that were dug just for the casinos. It complies with the letter of the law, but the Lakeside Casino Resort in Osceola isn’t near a river. It’s a boat in a moat.”
Kittle is sometimes surprised by just how thoroughly gambling has been woven into the fabric of corn-growin’, pig-farmin’, Godfearin’ Iowa.
“First we had betting on dog races on dry land,” said Kittle. “Then we had dog races on dry land, with slots, craps, and blackjack on boats so long as they were in the middle of the river.” Iowa’s riverboats were packed with tourists—busloads would come in every day from surrounding states. Then the state of Illinois introduced riverboat casinos on its side of the Mississippi, and other states legalized casino gambling, and Native American tribes opened their own casinos. Other states didn’t require gamblers to float around the Mississippi while they gambled, and there were no limits on bets or losses. Pretty soon Iowa’s boats were empty.
“Hearing the sounds of slot machines while you’re stuck in the middle of the river is a circle in hell,” said Kittle. “People would come to Iowa, lose their two hundred dollars in a half an hour, and they had nowhere to go and nothing to do for four more hours, while the boat cruised around. They had to sit there listening to the dings and chirps of the slot machines for hours and hours. It was a nightmare.
“So the state legislature passed a law doing away with the five-dollar maximum bet and the two-hundred-dollar loss limit, and changed the law so that the boats only had to ‘cruise’ one hundred days a year,” said Kittle, “and our boats filled back up. Now we’ve got slots at the dog tracks and boats that are more or less permanently moored to their docks.” And the law that requires riverboats to “cruise” the Mississippi at least one hundred times a year? The Diamond Jo meets this requirement by cruising on weekdays only during the summer between the hours of 5 and 7 A.M. The boat is usually empty when it goes out.
“Now Illinois is debating whether or not to allow video gambling in bars,” said Kittle. “If they do that, we’ll probably have to do that, too, to stay ‘competitive,’ just like we had to do away with the five-dollar maximum bet and the two-hundred-dollar daily loss limit.”
You can’t be a little bit pregnant.
“No, you can’t.” Kittle nodded. “You would think farm people would’ve known that all along.”
Blackjack for beginners: You place a chip on the small circle on the felt in front of you. The dealer deals one card faceup to everyone at the table and then gives himself a card facedown. Then he deals a second card faceup to everyone at the table, before giving himself one card faceup. If the dealer has an ace up, he checks to see if he has blackjack; if he does, he wins. If he doesn’t, the players can ask for more cards, to get as close as they can to twenty-one. Hopefully you won’t take too many cards and bust your hand. When all the players have either busted or decided to hold, the dealer turns over his facedown card. The dealer draws more cards until he has seventeen or higher, and then he holds. If your hand is better than the dealer’s hand—closer to twenty-one without going over—you win. If you bet five dollars, you win five dollars. If you bet five hundred dollars, you win five hundred dollars. If the dealer’s hand is better than your hand, you lose five dollars. Or five hundred dollars.
A few hands after I sat down, another man joined me at the table. I didn’t think my inexperience was obvious—it was blackjack, so all you have to do is count to twenty-one; how hard is that?—the experienced gambler could tell I was a novice and started offering me pointers. As it turned out, counting to twenty-one is a lot harder than it looks—the experienced gambler, who bore a passing resemblance to the actor Christopher Walken, was playing twenty-five-dollar chips. He walked me through different bets—double down, splitting my hand, playing two hands at once—while the dealer looked on, turning over cards and taking my chips from me one at a time.
“Blackjack is easy,” the experienced gambler said, lighting a cigarette. “Gambling is easy—if you take the time to learn to play the game. And if you do that, son, you’ll make money. But the only way to make real money is to do something stupid every once in a while.”
The dealer didn’t try to stop the experienced gambler from coaching me. He just kept on turning over cards, a little service-industry smile on his face.
“It’s stupid time,” the experienced gambler said.
The dealer caught my eye. I couldn’t read his expression; his face was a blank.
The experienced gambler started making hundred-dollar bets— hundred-dollar bets!—one right after another. He wasn’t on a winning streak, though, and his stack of chips quickly disappeared. After about two dozen hands, the experienced gambler lost his last hundred-dollar chip.
“Well, that’s it for me,” the experienced gambler said. He got up, wished me better luck than he’d been having, and left for the craps tables.
The dealer looked down at
me and held his palms out, asking me with a gesture if I was in or out. I moved a five-dollar chip out onto the green felt.
“Don’t listen to him,” the dealer said softly, leaning towards me. “Gambling isn’t easy. If it was easy, they would call it winning.”
He turned over a few more cards and took my last chip from me.
“And just between you and me, stupid is just stupid.”
For three nights in a row, I had returned to the Diamond Jo, sat at the same dealer’s table, and lost seventy dollars. I always arrived intending to gamble larger sums of money, but I couldn’t bring myself to put more than one five-dollar chip on the table at a time. I wasn’t a whale in Dubuque—just an inept five-dollar-a-hand blackjack player. The dealer was always there, and he smiled when he saw me coming. He smiled exactly like the craps dealer in Las Vegas, like a cop. The fourth night I went to the Diamond Jo, the dealer didn’t smile—he gave me a look. He even lifted his eyebrows.
“Welcome back,” he said, gesturing to an empty chair. “Still haven’t learned your lesson?”
He began taking my seventy dollars from me, as was our custom. I looked up at him, and he smiled—a real smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling up, his eyebrows rising on his forehead. He shook his head and asked me why I was doing this to myself.
“I’ve come to Dubuque to learn to play blackjack,” I said. “How do you think I’m doing?”
“As far as the casino is concerned, you’re doing beautifully.”
I asked him if the experienced gambler, the man I played with the night before, came around often. I needed some more lessons.
“First of all, that ‘experienced gambler’ sat right next to you and lost a couple of grand in twenty minutes,” said the dealer. “So I wouldn’t recommend you model your game off of his. And all he taught you was how to place different kinds of bets. Which, if you don’t know what you’re doing with the cards, is as good as teaching how to lose money more quickly. He didn’t do you any favors.”
“But how complicated is blackjack, anyway?” I asked. “You give me two cards and I ask for more until I get close to twenty-one. That’s pretty simple.”
“You can play a simple game if you want to give the casino all your money,” the dealer said. “But if you ever want to leave this boat with money in your pocket, you’re going to have to learn how to play a more complicated game.”
The dealer owned a used bookstore in downtown Dubuque, and he suggested I drop in sometime. He didn’t think it would be right for him to give me advice, but he would happily sell me one of the paperbacks on gambling strategy that he had in stock.
I handed him my last five-dollar chip and said I’d see him in the morning.
Catherine’s Used Books is one of the few nonpawn, nontavern, nonbarber retail operations in downtown Dubuque. A clean, white storefront with shelves that go up to the ceiling, Catherine’s Used Books had, “Over 80,000 used books in stock—come in and count them!” and had that wonderful paper-ink-rot-dust smell that only a room packed with used paperbacks ever does. In addition to used books, the dealer who urged me to learn something about blackjack before running through my money at his table—his name was Bob—also sold Native American prints, dream catchers, and knickknacks in his shop. He opened the store a few years ago with his wife, herself a retired card dealer. His daughter, a dealer, also lives in an apartment above the store.
The store was empty when I dropped in to pick up a book on casino gambling. Bob was in the back shelving, heard the bell, and came to the front of the shop. He laughed when he saw me.
“So you’ve come for the book, eh?” he asked. “You might have saved yourself some money if you’d come for the book as soon as you got to town.”
Then Bob asks me what I’m doing in Dubuque. I tell him the truth. I’m here to write about gambling. And sin. Bob stiffens and folds his arms across his chest.
“Don’t write the same stuff that everybody writes,” he said. “Don’t you go on and on about, ‘Oh, it’s so awful, all these people losing their farms, their houses, all these people getting addicted.’ ”
But surely some gamblers lose their houses and farms and get addicted?
“Sure. I’ve seen it happen. But people who don’t go to casinos lose their farms, too. It happens all the time. There are farmers who drink themselves bankrupt, too, but you don’t hear a lot of calls for making alcohol illegal again.”
He had a point—even if he was wasting it on me. I wasn’t in Iowa to write about how awful gambling is or to call for its prohibition. Quite the contrary. I was here to celebrate the sin a bit, and to get to the bottom of gambling—what’s the attraction? What’s the appeal? Since the odds always favor the house, why bother? What brings people back—time and again—especially as their loses mount?
“Good jobs, jobs that pay good money.”
Bob was still talking me into casinos. He set a stool down in front of the cash register and gestured for me to sit. Then he sat at a chair behind his register, leaned back, and continued.
“No one ever writes about that—the good jobs,” said Bob. “The casino was the best thing that ever happened to me. I went from ten-dollar-an-hour district manager for a retail company to fifteen dollars an hour with the tips as a card dealer. Dealers in Chicago make more than that. Some make a lot more. You can have a life on a dealer’s income.”
But surely there were other good jobs in Dubuque before the casinos came to town?
“The only two good jobs in town were at the John Deere plant and the meatpacking company,” said Bob. “John Deere hasn’t hired anyone in twenty years, and the meatpacking company went out of business two years ago. Some people say it’s not dignified work, that Iowans who used to make a living building things or farming have been ‘reduced’ to dealing cards. That’s a city person’s perspective. It’s hard to make a living farming. And dealing is all that helps some people hold on to their farms.”
But surely some people don’t like dealing?
“They don’t last, the ones who don’t like it. They don’t last! And what they don’t understand is that they’ve got the best job in the world. You get paid to play cards! You’re not working in a factory floor; you’re not gutting pigs. You’re out there on the floor, interacting with people, playing a game. And all people gamble—all human cultures have their gambling games. You want to talk about a sin? Talk about the lottery. Do you know what your odds are when it comes to a state lottery? Three hundred million to one. A casino owner would go to jail for offering odds like that. And the commercials on TV for the lottery make it look like it’s only a matter of time before you win the lottery, if you just keep playing. That’s a sin.”
Bob and I are getting on like a house on fire—until I ask him to give me some pointers on improving my game.
“Oh, no, no, no.” Bob shook his hands and held them out in front of himself, the way dealers do at the end of a session, to show that they have nothing in them. “No can do, no way, no how. I’d lose my job in a flash. Like that—” He snapped his fingers. “If the casino managers found out I was coaching gamblers in my free time, I’d be out a good-paying job. I’ll sell you a book, that I can do. They sell that book in the gift shop at the Diamond Jo, so they can’t be mad at me for selling you a used copy here. But I can’t coach you, sorry.”
Bob was nice guy, a wonderful guy, and I didn’t want to get him in trouble with his boss. So I thanked him for the book and stepped out onto the street.
“You know what?” Bob called to me, leaning out of the door to the store. “The establishments around here are full of dealers. Dealers, retired dealers, fired dealers. That’s just a fact I’m telling you.”
“Man goes into a casino, loses four thousand dollars playing blackjack. Walks over to a slot machine, puts a dollar in, wins four thousand dollars. Is he even?”
Yes.
“No!” The old dealer slapped his hand down on the bar for emphasis. “Casinos have to report the names
of people who win more than a certain amount. So that guy is going to get a note from the IRS telling him he owes them almost half of that money. So he’s still two thousand dollars in the hole!”
Three old-time dealers—one hired, one fired, one retired—were trying to teach me a few things. I was sitting at a long, nicotine-stained bar, drinking Hamm’s and talking cards while a sports show blared from one television and Fox News blared from the other. When I first walked in, I felt slightly suspect. It was a bright sunny day in late fall, but it was pitch-black inside the bar, and it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. There were only two other men in the bar besides the bartender, and they were sitting together at one end. The rest of the bar was deserted. I sat on a stool at the other end of the bar, and the bartender ignored me for a few minutes, as if he hoped I might go away. When he finally walked over, he asked if he could help me—not if I wanted a beer, but if he could help me, as if I were lost and needed directions out of his bar. I asked for a beer, which I sipped at after the bartender returned to his other two customers.
Ten minutes later, the bartender looked over at me, and I raised my eyebrows, the international sign for “I need something.” He acknowledged my raised eyebrows with a quick nod and then turned back to his other customers. I was confused. Was he ignoring me? Would he be right over? What should my next move be? When the bartender looked over at me again, I raised my eyebrows again. “I need something,” my eyebrows said. The bartender sighed, told his other customers he’d be right back, and then walked over to my end of the bar.
“Something you need?” he said.
I asked him if he knew any card dealers who might be interested in giving a novice blackjack player a few pointers. He stared at me for a long, long time.
“Anyone want to teach this guy blackjack?” the bartender announced to the men at the other end of the bar. Two minutes later, the two other men in the bar—both dealers, as it turned out—were sitting beside me. The bartender stood and listened to our conversation, leaning against the back bar, his arms folded across his chest, one foot up on the beer cooler under the bar.