Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Onthewayoutmyattentionwascaughtbyamachinemakingalotofnoise.Awomanhad
justwon$600.Forninetysecondsthemachinejustpouredoutmoney,awaterfallofsilver.
When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back
into the machine. Ifelt sorryforher.It was going to take her all night to get rid ofthat kind
of money.
I wandered through room after room trying to find my way out, but the place was clearly
designed to leave you disoriented. There were no windows, no exit signs, just endless
rooms, all with subdued lighting and with carpet that looked as if some executive had
barked into a telephone, “Gimme twenty thousand yards of the ugliest carpet you got.” It
was like woven vomit. I wandered for ages without knowing whether I was getting closer
to or farther from an exit. I passed a little shopping center, restaurants, a buffet, cabarets,
dark and silent bars where people brooded, bars with live music and astonishingly untal-
ented entertainers (“And gimme some astonishingly untalented entertainers while you're
at it”) and one large room in which the walls were covered with giant TV screens show-
ing live sporting events-major league baseball, NBA basketball, boxing matches, a horse
race. A whole wallful ofathletes were silently playing their hearts out forthe benefit ofthe
room's lone spectator, and he was asleep.
I don't know how many gaming rooms there were, but there were many. It was often hard
to tell whether I was seeing a new room or an old room from another angle. In each one it
was the same-long ranks of people dully, mechanically losing money. It was as if they had
been hypnotized. None of them seemed to see that everything was stacked against them. It
is all such an incredible con. Some of the casinos make profits of $i00 million a year-that's
the kind of money many large corporations makeand without having to do anything but
opentheirdoors.Ittakesalmostnoskills,nointelligence, noclasstorunacasino.Ireadin
Newsweek that the guy who owns the Horseshoe casino downtown has never learned how
to read and write. Can you believe that? That gives you some idea of the sort of levels of
intellectualattainmentyouneedtobeasuccessinVegas.Suddenly,Ihatedtheplace.Iwas
annoyed with myself for having been taken in by it all, the noise and sparkle, for having
so quickly and mindlessly lost thirty dollars. For that kind of money I could have bought a
baseball cap with a plastic turd on the brim and an ashtray in the shape of a toilet saying,
PLACE YOUR BUTT HERE. SOUVENIR OF LAS VEGAS, NEVADA. This made me
deeply gloomy.
I went and ate in the Caesar's Palace buffet, hoping that some food would improve my
outlook. The buffet cost eight dollars, but you could eat all you wanted, so I took a huge
amount of everything, determined to recoup some of my loss. The resultant plate was such
a mixture of foods, gravies, barbecue sauces and salad creams that it was really just a heap
