The casino at the end of the world

Originally appeared on my personal blog.

I like classic rock. I like the Moody Blues. To see the Moody Blues in concert, I must go to The Venue. That’s what it’s called. To go to The Venue, I must go to the casino, for The Venue is attached to the casino.

Before my first trip to The Venue, I had never been to a casino. My initial experiences, getting there and being there, play in my brain as a slow-motion video loop.

We drove into northwest Indiana via the main roads. We arrived in the part of Hammond anchored by Purdue University Calumet. We diverged onto the side streets.

I sensed the houses were ramshackle. Yet I couldn’t confirm it. Most windows and porches weren’t illuminated, though it was autumn and after 7 pm. Street lights were dim and far between.

We drove through the business zones expected of rust-belt towns that have suffered and gone sour. I saw odd hybrids like the New Age Tobacco and Shirt Store. A full-service mart offered not only “Food” and “Liquor,” but “T-Mobile” and “Cash For Gold.” Stores advertised their acceptance of electronic benefits transfer cards, the way other places enticed patronage with “buy one, get one free” or “local organic ingredients.”

Restaurants provided cheap abundance for people who needed to get full fast. A sandwich joint served the “HOAGIE MAX” and the “STEAK MAX.” They sounded like they would make you die in your chair soon after eating them. Some places had names like Chop Suey King, which they couldn’t get away with if they were closer to Chicago.

We drove past the remaining factories that hadn’t been off-shored. They ascended into the sky like spaceships with spires, belching neon purple-green smoke and blazing with hundreds of lights. I realized they produced that reassuring sulfur smell, blown through the South Side during summer by cooler winds off the lake. I also realized, wrinkling my nose, that the fug would provoke respiratory ailments and sinus hemorrhages if I lived next to the source.

The factories became mightier. They thrust up harder and higher. They spewed bigger, more surreal tornadoes of fumes, boasting more and more lights. At the same time, they thinned out. Now the casino logo, a great disembodied glowing horseshoe, ruled the darkness. We were here. We turned off.

*****

I never saw the casino from the outside. Just as the disembodied horseshoe was an illusion–it sat atop a pole–the casino appeared nothing but parking garage on all sides, several floors high. It was hard to find a space in this garage. It was jam-packed.

Even in the garage, I smelled the smoke. Back home, municipal ordinances from about 2006 onward protect your lungs even at a dive bar. But the casino, as insisted by large signs scattered throughout the building that displayed a weathered old man in a cowboy hat, was all about the needs of the gambler. And, as the state gaming board permitted and acknowledged, what the gambler needed was nicotine.

Just as we entered, I observed a little depot. It offered a modest array of crunchy snacks, Combos and Chex and Gardettos, and a full, elaborate suite of Marlboros: Reds, Golds, and Silvers (in my youth “Filter,” “Lights,” and “Ultra Lights”); Blend No. 27; Green and Blue Menthol; Black-and-Green Menthol; kings and 100’s. The people used them. Every second or third person puffed away. Packs constantly jutted from pockets or got flipped open. A fog hovered above us at about fifteen feet.

I saw one sweatpantsed patron, more parsimonious than the others, preserve his half-smoked butt by inserting it into a special thimble. I did a double-take. This was the kind of thing sold twenty-five years ago by novelty catalogs that made their real money from carcinogenic insulated mugs, aprons that proclaimed “CHEF BOB” or “BOB’S RESTAURANT” or “BOB: THE LEGEND,” and vibrating massagers that were officially for sore muscles.

In the same way that every second or third person smoked, every second or third person had a glass full of ice cubes and amber liquid. The bar did brisk business. So too did a kiosk that sold pizza and calzones in cardboard boxes through which the trans fat had soaked. I observed a delighted old man hobbling into the maelstrom, escorted by people in their fifties whom I took to be his children.

All this was in the front part of the building. It took a couple of minutes to get to what I call “The Factory,” where the actual gambling was performed.

My sole exposure to casinos was on television: James Bond passing through Monte Carlo, Robert Wagner tasting the nightlife of Monaco, CSI characters hunting clues in the finest Las Vegas establishments. One was worldly, suave, and/or a detective. Nothing prepared me for the football-field sized arena, for the banks and banks and rows and rows of singing and chattering machines, for the industrial-strength wagering that the customers were mainlining like crack cocaine.

The room was full of noise. But nobody I looked at was speaking. They sat pulling levers and staring, or bending down to look for more tokens. I dare to generalize: their bodies were too fat, their eyes were without light, their faces had no expression. Dozens and dozens. Hundreds and hundreds. The people were interchangeable, whether the eighth from the left or the fifth from the right. The tableau only changed when somebody lit a cigarette, put out a cigarette, lifted a drink, put down a drink, or chewed their pizza.

It was not a happy room. It was a numb room. You came here not to feel good but to feel nothing.

There was a bit more life around the gaming tables. Here one had to interact, placing bets or saying “hit me.” I wondered, gazing up at the solid stratus cloud of cigarette smoke, if anyone had ever done a statistical study of emphysema among croupiers.

As we strolled through the wall-to-wall monotony on our way to the rear, where the Moody Blues and The Venue awaited us, I felt my eyes pop and my breath get shallow. I knew that for every person I saw here tonight, there were hundreds more. And for each of them, hundreds more. I had a nagging thought that seized me as in a vise.

This is the way the world ends.

*****

Perhaps I am an elitist who, in writing this, demonstrates contempt for the felt needs and real lives of average Americans. The gargantuan crowds of the casino, both those who are dropping all of their money and those who are agreeably vacuuming it up, are not bad people. They are people who are making it through.

I did not interview anybody. But I feel safe saying that the lives of the gamblers, many of whom surely live amid the poorly-lit neighborhoods and poisonous factories and Chop Suey King restaurants I cataloged on the way in, are often hard. They need entertainment. They need somewhere to dress up, or to dress down. They need somewhere to light up, eat up, and drink up without lectures from the well-to-do, the moralistic, and the thin. They need diversion from situations that will not be better tomorrow, even if they save their money or put down their glass.

The casino provides a service to them. It also serves those employees whom it pays to oversee the process. For while not all of us can live our vocations, all of us need jobs.

But a life of escaping from escape-worthy things, or a life of facilitating those who do, is unsustainable. The moving parts of this dynamic will grind against each other until the whole thing blows up in a hail of sparks. In the meantime, instead of asking each other what is wrong with this picture, instead of asking in whose interest it is that we get funneled by the millions into “STEAK MAX” lives–which we then momentarily purge with chemicalized and mechanized diversions that eat our arteries and our assets–we are wasting our time.

And the casino, with its surrounding environment, is merely one gross and obvious case in point. Most of the rest of us are just making it through, and wasting our time, as well.