Fat Old Woman in Las Vegas: Gambling, Dieting and Wicked Fun (15 page)

This was the situation as I described it later to a friend: Thousands of tourists were strolling nonchalantly down the sidewalk, a guard rail separating the walkers and me. However, I wasn’t alone. A million cacti, palm trees and any other sticky and body invasive foliage the original landscapers could find surrounded me. Underneath my feet were small pebbles that, with every step I took rolled down the hill I found myself on, and into the traffic.

My terror was now two-fold. I was terrified I might slip and tumble downward, run over by the Deuce Express. Or that a cop would walk by at any minute. Jaywalking comes with a hefty fine in Las Vegas. The last I read, it was one hundred eighty dollars. Plus, I was destroying property with every step I took. Ripping off leaves, sending gravel into the stratosphere, kicking at cactus in anger when I felt a stabbing pain. I feared I would end up in jail just for being stupid.

So I continued to shuffle along the guardrail, hoping there was some gate in sight, or a place I could easily climb over the barricade. At my current weight, no one except a crew of fireman could lift me over the railing. And I certainly didn’t have the strength to climb over it myself.

Instead, I held onto the guardrail tightly and moved crablike down the railing. This forced me to horizontally face the people passing by. Their faces were filled with looks of bemusement or a look that said, "Well, you're obviously homeless so you are invisible to me." I did manage to get a few chuckles when I said, "I kind of got lost" to people who bothered to ask what I was doing.

No one asked if they could help me.

I felt like an idiot. My legs were being continually cut by the cacti. My flimsy shirt snagged on palm trees. I could hear the material rip. When I came to the end of the railing, an entire block's worth of shuffling, I was overjoyed that there was an easy way for me to step around the railing and back onto the sidewalk. I was trembling as I did.

Continuing on to Circus Circus was now out of the question for me. All I wanted to do was hide out in my room until I stopped shaking.

Earlier that day I had hit a small jackpot of one hundred dollars. A man strolling by me at the time said, "You are one lucky lady.”

He was right. I am lucky that my refusal to obey the obvious signs didn’t turn out to be fatal. The only thing damaged was my pride.

“What’s the temperature at home?”

“Thirty-seven degrees, but it’s going to warm up to forty-three,” my husband answered.

Forty-three isn’t a warm anything.

“Vegas?” he asked.

“Below normal, seventy-one degrees.”

A mere one-degree below normal, but when you’ve traveled two thousand miles from the Northland you deserved every single degree.

“Call me from the train,” he instructed.

“Yep,” I answered. “Tomorrow morning, sometime.”

In fourteen hours I would be leaving via an Amtrak shuttle to Kingman, Arizona. The van driver would be pulling out of McCarran International Airport at 10:00 p.m. It would be 1:30 a.m., or later, when I boarded the train and flopped into bed exhausted.

I hung around my hotel room longer than normal, checking email, taking time to write a decent five hundred words, reading another chapter in
Tracks
, calling a few friends. Before beginning or ending a journey, I feel a need to communicate to those I hold dear, the drama of a potential final farewell looming in the back of my mind.

I was still reeling from the previous day’s cactus assault and sidewalk humiliation. Though I had made it to the last day, part of me was still convinced I’d keel over in Vegas, never to rise again. Or at least end up in the hospital emergency room, my head filled with a million
I told you so’s
.

After finishing my fond adieus to my buddies, I headed to the ATM machine for the last time. So far, my expenditures had been a worst-case scenario. Every possible penny was either lost in gambling or spent on buffets or fast food salads.

Shuffling through the maze at Paris, I gave a few hateful looks to the slots that hoovered my money the night before. I was being childish. It wasn’t the machines fault that I’d acted like a fool, nor was it a conspiracy of the gambling gods dooming me to a life of perpetual loserdom.

It was just math. Period. Nothing more.

Reading, writing and arithmetic were never my strong points. Being dyslexic and brimming with learning disabilities in a period when such a diagnosis wasn’t even on the horizon, I was never more than a C plus student. Being published at seventeen years of age didn’t convince my high school English teacher that I was anything more than a weirdo who accidently, through no skill of her own, channeled a bit of talent from time to time.

Math was my particular downfall. Not only did the numbers appear backwards and upside down, my vision tended to be myopic. I could visualize only one number at a time.

I do the same thing now with the lottery. Most lottery players do. The phrase “Odds: 1 in 160 million” allows me to focus only on the “1”. The one hundred sixty million assurances I would definitely not win a dime faded into the background.

So, it did not surprise me that although the odds were against it, I felt there was still a chance I’d redeem myself by the end of the day. If not on The Strip, then at the airport slots a few minutes before my scheduled departure.

∞

The waters from the Bellagio fountain shimmered across the street. Traffic was picking up and the sidewalks were filling with bodies. At the last possible moment, I decided to board the slow moving Deuce and head north.

I was fortunate a woman in her 50s gave me her seat. From my perspective, she looked older than me. But then, on some days I think I look thirty, thirty-one tops. Winning at gambling isn’t my only delusion.

One of my favorite comedy bits in my stand-up routine is when I tell the audience, “The last ten decades have been the happiest of my life. Want to know my secret?”

The crowd bleats out a resounding yes.

I respond, “Because ten years ago I stopped looking in the mirror.”

That statement pretty much rings true for everyone, even the beautiful.

The bus is painstakingly slow. At every stop a passenger will board with a plastic container of booze in his hand, holding it proudly, knowing he can drink with ease on the streets of Las Vegas. The hawk-eyed driver will announce again that no drinks are allowed on board. The bus will wait an eternity until it dawns on the tipsy rider that the driver is talking about him. Sheepishly, the passenger will stumble off the bus to continue his drinking on the sidewalk.

I’ve yet to witness a drinker who chose riding over imbibing.

Thirty minutes of stops and halting starts later, I entered the Riviera for the last time. Two months earlier, the property was purchased by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority for a whopping one hundred and eighty-two million dollars. In a year or so, the one time glamorous and glitzy structure would be imploded, making way for a new convention center.

I’ve seen just about every movie in its entirety filmed at the Riviera:
Oceans 11, Casino, Showgirls, Austin Powers, The Hangover, 21, Vegas Vacation
, and
3,000 Miles to Graceland
were a delight. But, try as I might, I couldn’t finish
Crazy Girls Undercover
. A low budget, B-movie combining terrorists and Vegas showgirls who worked on the side as CIA agents just didn’t grab my attention. To be fair, eighteen percent of the viewers on Rotten Tomatoes did give it a thumbs-up.

For over a quarter of a century, the Crazy Girls bared breasts and buns in a dance revue that originated at the Riviera. I witnessed the erotic extravaganza only once, but I’ve never forgotten it. I’ve never laughed as hard in my life as I did that night.

Oklahoma
is one of my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. In high school, I proudly wore a simple farm girl dress and stood in the chorus, singing loudly in virginal innocence. Even with my vast and often sordid imagination, I could not have dreamt that decades later, a silicone enhanced, topless bimbo would burst onto the stage in front of me, lip syncing my favorite song from the musical,
I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No
. Her mini-skirt and thong made of the same red and white checkered gingham as my onstage prairie dress.

Our breasts and buns, however, had nothing in common.

I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for the Riviera ever since, and it was no wonder I wanted to say goodbye to it. A dozen people were scattered around, sad looks on their faces, their hands pressing buttons while their other hand picked up a cocktail.

Struggling to breathe normally, I plopped in front of a penny slot. The older casinos were built with low ceilings that capture cigarette smoke and send it swirling back downwards to form clouds that circled my head.

“Would you care for a drink? Bloody Mary? Screwdriver? Whiskey?” the aging cocktail waitress offered.

“Just water,” I answered and tipped her two bucks for the bottle. From the looks of her, she was hired the day the Riviera opened in 1955.

I played for a few hours, managing to leave eighty dollars as a memorial. During my entire stay at the Riviera, I didn’t hear a single jackpot being won, or a whoop of happiness streaming across the room.

Joy had left the building.

∞

Directly across the street from the Riviera, a one hundred and seventy-three foot neon Jester welcomed me as I entered Circus Circus. I wasn’t “stoned, ripped and twisted”, like Hunter S. Thompson was when he wrote his masterpiece,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. If I had been, I might have walked out. The atmosphere hardly needed drugs to enhance or exaggerate it, though they might help to describe it.

Billed as family friendly and fun-for-all the casino is a kitschy mixture of cheap Barnum and Baily extravaganzas, rundown county fair midways with questionable carney workers and budget-minded gamblers rolled into one big appetizer and spread across a worn, ugly multi-color carpet of reds, greens and dust. Kids and family are everywhere, running to view the free circus acts presented throughout the day.

High in the air, a Ukrainian dancer dangled, a silk scarf wrapped around her body the only means of support. A stunningly beautiful female Asian foot juggler laid back on two wooden chairs swirling brightly colored parasols with her feet. A family of South American trapeze artists leapt from platform to platform. And then there were the clowns, friendly, scary, real, and even, at times, plastic.

Slot machines are positioned on revolving carousel platforms, reminiscent of the amusement park ride I loved as a kid. Brand, spanking new automobiles are set high above slot machines with posters on all sides declaring, “Win This Car.”

A few hours into play, and after I’d given up on winning a silver Ford Taurus, I ended up seated next to an older woman at a dollar slot machine. A look of confusion displayed on her face, she kept mumbling, “Damn it, the machine’s broken.”

I looked over and saw three sevens lined up. Yet, she continued to pull at the lever. Unknowingly, she’d just won one-thousand dollars.

“It won’t spin,” she told a slot attendant who stepped up to her side. “I think I broke it.”

His response was to nod his head, and mumble back, “Broke it?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” he said, reaching over to open the door of the machine, in order to “fix it.”

What the hell! I’d never seen that happen in a casino, though I’d heard rumors that it did. In my eyes, the slot attendant appeared to be trying to con her out of a win. Once the machine door was opened, and the inner workings were reset, her thousand-dollar win would be invalidated – though she didn’t know she won it in the first place.

I reached over and touched the lady’s forearm, and said, “It isn’t broken. You’ve won a thousand bucks. That’s what those three sevens mean. That’s why the light is flashing on top.”

She looked up at the spinning beams before asking the slot attendant, “Really?”

He stood silent, as if I would retract my statement and admit I was wrong.

In a louder and more irritated tone, I said. “She
won
a jackpot.”

He grumbled, “Oh yeah, I see that now. I’ll get someone to pay her.”

“Thanks,” the woman said to me, still somewhat in shock over her good fortune.

“No problem,” I answered, livid in my assumption the employee had tried to rip her off by agreeing the machine was broken. Whether his actions were casino supported or just his own little power trip, I had no idea.

I remained there until I made sure the woman was paid her due. By the time ten, one hundred dollar bills where placed in her outstretched palm, I was down to sixty bucks. It was time to head back to my hotel and pack.

No big deal
, I decided as I sat on the Deuce, watching The Strip zip by me. There was still a chance to win all of my money back, the entire two thousand sixty dollars for the week. And, I’d do it right before I left town, at the airport.

It could happen.

It has happened.

So, why not happen to me?

∞

On February 27
th,
a mere five weeks before I pathetically stood in front of an airport slot hoping to win back a week’s worth of wagers, a $300,499.30 jackpot on a Wheel of Fortune machine was awarded to a lucky traveler at McCarran International Airport. The win, though a life changing amount in my eyes, didn’t even make the papers, the dollar amount too trivial to report by Vegas standards.

Over thirteen hundred slot machines are situated around the Las Vegas airport. Online trolls warn the slots are notoriously tight
. According to a much dated survey on the website wizardofodds.com (some of the data going back as far as 2001) McCarran’s payback is at the bottom of the list. There are seventy-one casinos listed and McCarran’s payback was reported to be 81.2%. The Palms casino was the highest at 93.42%. The Strip, where I lost most of my cash, ranked in the 91% ballpark, give or take a few decimals.

Even knowing the statistics were not in my favor, I always keep sixty dollars in my pocket to gamble at McCarran. It’s not that I think I will win, I won’t. Of that I am pretty certain, but I am enthralled with the possibility of a story—the one I could tell my friends.

“
It was three minutes before I was scheduled to leave Las Vegas. I was down to my last dollar when suddenly three red sevens lined up in front of me. The jackpot amount was staggering. I won
…”

Yada

Yada

Yada

I have done many things in my life I wished I hadn’t. After making life altering mistakes, I’d rationalize that someday I would write about the mistakes, and that would make it all better. I truly believed scribbling down words would help me to be forgiven, or at least understood. Growing up in a fundamentalist family, confessing your sins, and seeking redemption were always the elephants in the room. They were the promised elixir for all things sinful, or human.

So it was easy to understand why, in the airport’s baggage claim area, I sat at a slot, once again pondering. The trip to Las Vegas had been taxing, physically and emotionally. It had also been expensive, but not more so than a week at a fancy spa resort or renting a cabin in Northern Minnesota. I had fun of sorts, but then I always had a limited amount of fun wherever I go. I usually don’t have to travel two thousand miles one way to achieve that.