by Dan Savage
My last night in Dubuque was my last chance to be a whale. I wouldn’t be able to bet the maximum—$500 per hand—but I decided to up the ante. I added a zero to the amount of money I was prepared to gamble. Instead of $300 and $5 bets, I gambled $3,000 and made $50 bets. I went to a bank that morning and cashed a money order for three thousand dollars, and I was given a short stack of hundred-dollar bills. I expected three thousand dollars to make an impressive roll, not realizing that three grand is only thirty hundred-dollar bills. It’s thick, but it doesn’t look like something a gangster carries around with him. Still I was nervous on the walk from the hotel to the casino, which was deserted as usual. In the week I spent in Dubuque, I was the only person I ever saw walk from downtown to the riverfront. Everyone else drove.
It was on the walk to the casino that I made a fatal blunder: I began spending the money in my head. If I played as well as I played the night before—and why wouldn’t I?—I would leave the casino with about seven grand, four of it profit. The three grand I brought to gamble with would go back in the bank, of course, but I would return to the tavern and establish a thousand-dollar tab for my coaching staff before I left Dubuque. Every morning for breakfast, I went to a small café around the corner from my hotel, a place called Dottie’s, and every day the same waitress took my order. If I won big, I would leave her a hundred-dollar tip. Shit, I’d give her a grand, too. The rest of my winnings, the other two grand, well, I would donate it to some charity or other, or to a group trying to legalize nonmedical marijuana. I would put my ill-gotten gains to good use, I swore, as I walked into the Diamond Jo and found an empty table. Two old men wouldn’t have to worry about their bar tabs for a long, long time, and I would use the rest of the money to make the world I live in a slightly better place. I wasn’t greedy; I was good.
Do I even need to mention that I walked out of the Diamond Jo—four hours later—without a cent in my pocket?
Leaving the Diamond Jo after losing three thousand dollars was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. You would think a person who just lost three grand playing cards would be anxious to get the hell out of the casino. That wasn’t the case. I had to force myself to keep walking—off the boat, past the cash machine, out the doors, over the bridge, up the street to the Julien Inn, across the deserted lobby, onto the elevator, down the hall, into my room, over to the couch. Every step was a battle. I didn’t want to leave the casino: I wanted to run back to the ATM, withdraw another five or six hundred dollars, sit back down at a table, and try to win back all the money I’d lost. The urge was overwhelming—it was what the bartender at the tavern had warned me about. The cards weren’t falling my way, and I didn’t get up and go. I kept playing, and now that I was in the hole, all I wanted to do was go back to the casino and keep playing until I made it right, until I won the money back.
I couldn’t quite understand how it had happened. What about all the good things I planned to do with my winnings? Didn’t that count for anything? What about the tab I established for my coaches? Didn’t that count? I played the exact same game, the same game I played the night before, when I turned $300 into $710. Playing that same game twenty-four hours later, I turned $3,000 into zero dollars. How was this possible? It wasn’t as bad as my first attempts at blackjack, when I would sit down, lose fourteen straight hands, then get up and go. Shit, I was up much of the night. But the times I was up I wasn’t up by much, and those times started coming further and further apart as the night wore on. In between the short times I was up, I fell into the hole, and as the night wore on, the holes kept getting deeper and deeper. I was up $200; then I was down $500. Then I was up $100; then I was down $1,000. Then I crawled back up to around $2,700; then I started falling, falling, falling. When I got down to $1,000, I thought maybe I should quit. Then the money was all gone.
I walked back over the bridge to downtown Dubuque. I had to force myself to keep walking, remembering not to turn around. Turning around and looking back at the Diamond Jo wouldn’t turn me into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife. It would, however, pull me back in. I knew that if I turned my head to look, my body would turn with it, and then my feet would carry me back to the casino. I felt as if I were turning inside out, like I was walking through thin sheets of acid, as if each step that took me closer to the empty Julien Inn peeled off a layer of my skin. My heart was pounding. I was raw and I felt exposed and violated and . . . and . . . completely . . . desperately . . . alive.
Back at the Julien Inn, skinned alive but safe in my room, I sat next to the window and looked at the Diamond Jo. Every once in a while, a car went over the bridge, carrying some other sucker down to the boat. I suddenly remembered that woman playing War in Las Vegas, the woman who burst into tears when she lost her last chip. She took a risk, she lost, she cried. She felt something specific and painful—and something personal, since it was her pain. She wasn’t living vicariously through Nicole Brown-Simpson or Princess Di or New York City firefighters or an unhappy couple hashing things out on Oprah with Dr. Phil. Something happened to her. She had a sensation, something sharp and specific and personal. We live in a culture that celebrates and elevates the victim, so perhaps that woman secretly enjoyed her safe, packaged, consensual victimization at the hands of that casino. She sat in a plush room, on a padded chair, had a complimentary cocktail, and wagered her way to victimhood. And when it was all over, she got to have a good cry—for herself, not for Diana or Nicole or New York City.
I’d been victimized, too—by my own greed and my own inability to get up and leave the casino when it was clear the cards weren’t falling my way. Three thousand dollars is a lot of money, but sitting in my room, the lights and TV off, looking out over the Diamond Jo and the Mississippi River, I had to admit that I didn’t regret the gambling, even after losing so much money. The feelings I had walking back over that bridge the night I won $410 and the night I lost $3,000 were intense and, I had to admit, worth it.
We know the house always wins—the house even tells us so. Shit, the house rubs our noses in it. They give us free cocktails, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we can afford to give booze away.” They build billion-dollar hotels and resorts and rent us rooms at less than it costs to have our room cleaned every day, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we can run the hotel part of this business at a total loss and still make millions.” They fill their casinos with brass and glass and marble and gold and carpets and chandeliers, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we have to sit up nights thinking of new shit to blow it on.” The casinos make money because once we’re in Las Vegas or on the boat or at the Indian casino in the middle of nowhere, they know we’re going to gamble, and when we gamble, we lose. We know we’re going to lose, because they told us so, and yet we gamble anyway. So I don’t think greed is the reason people gamble—greedy people own casinos; they don’t visit them. People gamble because they want to feel what I felt the night I lost three grand, or that woman felt the night she busted playing War.
“Affluence brings with it boredom,” according to Robert Bork, and I think on this one occasion he’s right. “Of itself, it offers little but the ability to consume, and a life centered on consumption will appear, and be, devoid of meaning.” When Robert Bork worries about bored, affluent Americans seeking out ever more degraded sensations, he’s slamming the entertainment industry—gangsta rap, teen sex comedies, and TV sitcoms in which small, smart, fictional children disrespect their elders. But entertainment doesn’t really provide us with true sensations, only vicarious ones. Films and television rub our noses in the exciting lives of people who almost never seem to be watching films or television. Americans sit in theaters or our living rooms and watch Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts or Denzel Washington take risks, live their lives on the edge, and court disaster. Movies and television feeds us an almost constant diet of cliffhangers, with protagonists making a half a dozen life-and-death choices in under two hours
.
In real life, though, how often do we experience a cliffhanger? Our entertainment is aggressively overstimulating because our real lives are oppressively predictable. Bork’s right, we’re bored—even after September 11, we’re bored. Compared to our entertainments and our collective, subconscious fantasies, our lives are too safe, and we’re constantly working to make them safer and more boring and predictable. In film and television, however, in our collective fantasy lives, the world is a dangerous place filled with excitement and cliffhangers and life-and-death choices. We learn how to kiss watching movies, we learn how to lie, how to fight, we learn how to break up—all the things we used to learn by observing each other, we now learn by observing a few highly paid stars. We can’t help but compare the lives we lead to the fictional lives we consume. We’re encouraged to live vicariously through the impossibly exciting lives of fictional characters. In a hotel room recently, I was half-listening to the previews on the in-room movie channel while I sat in the tub; for a small fee, I could watch Spy Game, Behind Enemy Lines, and Lord of the Rings in the safety and comfort of my own room. Suddenly a smarmy voice-over started asking me questions: “So who do you want to be? A CIA operative? A downed fighter pilot? A sorcerer’s apprentice? With On Command, you can be whoever you want, whenever you want. So who is it you want to be?” The exciting lives we’re encouraged to fantasize about, the lives we dream about, the lives that are implanted in our subconscious by film and television, are enormously out of step with the lives we actually lead. The comparison between the lives we lead and the lives we watch can be pernicious and suffocating. There is very little suspense in real life, very little drama, risk, or danger.
Except in a casino.
Observing the action at one of the newer hotels on the Vegas strip one night, I was reminded of Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. There is a mosque in Mecca built around a rock that Muslims believe the prophet Mohammed was standing atop before he ascended into heaven. That rock now sits in the middle of the mosque’s enormous courtyard, and during the hajj, Muslims crowd into the mosque’s courtyard, swirling around Mohammed’s last known whereabouts, trying to get themselves a little closer to heaven. I thought to myself, Las Vegas is the American Mecca, a holy city, site of the American hajj, a place in the desert where we gather to worship our American God, money. Like the courtyard of that mosque in Mecca, Las Vegas’s casinos swarm with people, circling the casino, but instead of circling the last known whereabouts of a long-gone prophet, we circle slot machines and card tables and craps games. It’s all about money, I thought, greed, worshiping money.
I was wrong. It’s not about money, it’s about risk and danger and purchasing a little of the action we see on the screen. In a casino, you can sit down at a table with a drink in your hand and treat yourself to a night filled with cliffhangers. You’re taking risks, and the bigger your bets, the more you have at stake, the closer you get to feeling like you’re making life-and-death decisions. I felt burning alive—or cinematically alive—when I walked into that casino with three thousand dollars in my pocket, ready to risk it all. And I felt flayed alive, but alive, walking out three hours later with nothing left. And it was worth it.
Americans don’t gamble because we’re greedy for money, but because we’re greedy for reality, for a sensation that isn’t a palliative, for the real deal, a real risk, a risk that’s our own and not Brad Pitt’s. We gamble because we want a cliffhanger of our own. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that gambling exploded in the United States at the end of the Cold War, when our daily lives were no longer lived in the shadow of nuclear war. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that America’s casinos were empty in the days and weeks after September 11, 2001, when we felt like our lives were filled with risk. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Americans returned to casinos just as soon as the war on terrorism became another television show, another thing we watched on TV that was so much more exciting than the lives we actually live.
The Erotic Rites of David and Bridget
At one time, wearing a wedding band meant you were off limits. Today that is less and less the case.
—William J. Bennett
The public scandal is what constitutes the offence. Sins sinned in secret are no sins at all.
—Molière
There were a lot of wedding bands on a lot of left hands at the Tropicana Hotel one recent weekend in August. Thousands of married couples from dozens of states were strolling in and out of the hotel’s casino and convention center. Couples were saying hello to friends they hadn’t seen since last year’s convention, comparing tans, and gathering in even-number clumps to gossip and catch up. Most of the couples in the hotel were holding hands or engaged in some form of PDA. Couples strolling through the casino would suddenly stop and kiss—and, really, why shouldn’t they? This weekend was a long-planned, much-anticipated romantic getaway, a time when the normal pressures and expectations of daily life were supposed to fall away. Over the next three days, the couples planned to dress up, drink, gamble, and dance.
Oh, and commit adultery. For while the couples at the Lifestyles 2001 convention at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas were most decidedly married, none were off-limits. (I know, Las Vegas again. But, come on, it’s a book about sin. More than one trip to Las Vegas was inevitable.) Married heterosexual swingers, aka “playcouples,” had descended on Las Vegas and taken over the hotel.
Lust was in the air.
As you might recall from the first chapter, lust is one of two “natural” sins (gluttony is the other), and to explore the dynamics of lust, I decided to hang out with adulterers, people who give in to this natural sin. Selecting adultery, of course, had one big perk: I would have to commit adultery myself, and my boyfriend couldn’t really complain, since it was, you know, my job.
“We’re not technically married,” my boyfriend pointed out when I explained to him that the terms of my book contract obligated me to cheat on him. “Can unmarried couples even commit adultery?”
Faced with a relationship crisis grounded in a theological debate, I decided to call on a member of the clergy to settle this dispute. My boyfriend and I are not regular churchgoers and we don’t know any priests or ministers, so I called a prayer line I saw advertised on a Christian cable network. A very nice Baptist minister working from his home in North Dakota explained to me that it was impossible for me or any gay man to commit the sin of adultery.
“You aren’t married and you never will be married and that means you can’t come together in a holy sexual union that pleases God,” my prayer partner explained. “Only man and wife can do that. What you do is fornicate, and fornication is a sin. God hates all fornication, and all fornicators are sinners. Fornicating with another homosexual does not make you an adulterer. It’s only makes you a fornicator.”
Which I already am?
“Which you already are.”
I asked my prayer partner if God would prefer that I be monogamous, even if I was being faithful to a man.
“I’m trying to be clear here. On Judgment Day, God isn’t going to say, ‘Oh, I see here that you fornicated with only one man.’ God doesn’t care if it was one man or one thousand men. All fornicators go to hell.”
And a little extra fornicating isn’t going to make the lake of fire any hotter?
“Fire is fire,” my prayer partner warned me.
Much to my boyfriend’s delight, adultery was a sin I could only observe, not indulge in. Crap.
Wife-swapping was first mentioned in the media in the mid- 1950s after a small group of military officers in Southern California gave birth to the modern swinging movement. In swinging circles, legend has it that a tight group of Cold War-era military men shared their wives to cement their bond. (Organized wife-swapping among military officers in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the air force, is well-documented and routinely denied.) Nonmilitary swing clubs started popping up in the early 1960s, first in arch-conservative Orange County, then in
San Francisco, Hollywood, and Los Angeles. Clubs started out as gatherings in members’ homes; then certain bars began catering to swingers. In 1971, social scientist Gilbert Bartell claimed in Group Sex: A Scientist’s Eyewitness Report on the American Way of Swinging that 1 million people—half a million couples—were involved in organized swinging.
The host of the world’s Lifestyles 2001 convention in Las Vegas, the Lifestyles Organization (LSO), grew out of a California swingers club called WideWorld, founded by Robert and Geri McGinley in 1969. Their club, according to LSO’s Web site, was founded “to provide recreational opportunities to couples who yearned to lead lives free from archaic religious and political restrictions.” The group held its first convention in 1973, which was attended by 125 couples. The convention I attended in 2001 attracted more than three thousand couples—six thousand men and women wearing color-coded plastic wristbands that identified them as swingers. Most of the men dressed in conservative sportswear—chinos, polos, bolos—while most of the women were dressed more revealingly. There was an awful lot of cleavage on display. Some of the couples were young, some were old, but it was always the woman who was on display.
LSO’s founder Robert McGinley is widely regarded as the father of the modern swinging movement. In his brief history of swinging, he cites an unnamed (and unpublished) report by “two well-known sociologists” that predicts 15 percent to 25 percent of all American married couples—some 22 million people—will become swingers at some point in their marriage, a statistic that should be taken with about a hundred thousand grains of salt. But it’s impossible to dispute McGinley’s claim that organized swinging is going on all over the United States. The Internet has emerged as a powerful tool to facilitate swinging, and a quick Internet search turns up swingers’ clubs in every corner of the country—including clubs in “red” states like North Carolina, Mississippi, Indiana, Idaho, and Utah.