DEUCES MILD

Daily Breeze, June 7, 2002

DEUCES MILD

Nevada casino junket a dicey proposition

I can't say exactly what lady luck was doing on me, but shining wasn't it. Little went right during my gambling adventure.

"This never usually happens, but the bus broke down," said Harry, the dispatcher at Complete Charter Tours in Gardena. He didn't have my phone number, so he couldn't warn me not to bother showing up at 7:15 a.m. to catch the 8 a.m. Saturday bus to Laughlin, Nevada.

I was told that mostly sweet old ladies embark on one-day gambling junkets, which sandwich eight hours of gambling between five-hour bus rides. I imagined women like my Aunt Ida regaling me with casino war stories and fixing me up with their granddaughters.

Humor would spark from watching these sweet old ladies transform into rabid gamblers at the tables.

Commensurately, I would reveal my true colors. As usual, I was a poser whose only qualification for the experience was clothing. (This time, I duded myself out like Dean Martin in the original "Oceans 11," in a polyester printed shirt and black wool suit.)

My gambling problem is not knowing how. The only dice I'm used to throwing land me on Ventnor Ave.

Before the usual wackiness commenced, however, I now had a five-hour wait until the next bus, which didn't return until a whopping 5:30 a.m. the next day. I went home and tried sleeping. I couldn't, of course, due to anxiety over how little sleep I'd get even if I were able to.

The new junket would whisk me not to Laughlin but to the considerably less chic Jean, Nevada. The cost was $10 per passenger, including a buffet meal.

After several stops east of L.A. I noticed the bus filling not with sweet old ladies chatting away, but with grim working-class men and women saying absolutely nothing to each other -- and even less to me.

Row after row, they shrugged off my invitations to be part of this article. A few wouldn't even look at me. The friendliest man, who identified himself only as Meadows from South Central L.A., agreed to take a photo -- but of me without him in it.

I withdrew to my seat in the rear, transcribing my tales of rejection into a laptop, studying a card filled with craps tips given to me by the same co-worker who guaranteed me a fun bus ride, then trying unsuccessfully to doze while being jostled like jello in a temblor.

Oh, and I also watched Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin fend off a vicious grizzly bear in the on-board movie, "The Edge," noting to myself that at least their adventure was exciting.

At 5 p.m. the bus pulled into Nevada Landing, a riverboat-shaped casino off the 15 Freeway. Our driver, who earlier introduced himself as Johnny, handed us badges identifying our tour bus group, explaining that we had to wear them at all times in the casino.

I don't remember Dean Martin ever wearing a puke-green piece of plastic screaming which charter bus group he belonged to.

"I'll be back at 1 a.m. to pick you up at the other side of the casino," Johnny said.

The Nevada Landing is small, about a quarter of a football field, with only one craps table and a buffet restaurant that creates nostalgia for summer-camp spaghetti. Driving 9/10s of the way to Las Vegas, with this hotel as our sole destination, was like flying into New York City to hang out in Kennedy Airport, then turning back.

My first order of business was procuring a room. A shower and a short wink seemed necessary, as did unloading my bags. How into these games could I get while constantly watching my laptop bag?

"That'll be $89.99," said the woman at the reception desk. "Plus tax." It was the cheapest accommodation.

"If you charge me $50 for an unused room, you'll make $50," I said, noting that the parking lot was only a third full. "If you charge me $90, you'll make nothing, because I won't take it."

That's OK. We passed a hotel during the ride in, the Gold Strike. With no taxis or shuttle buses in sight, I walked across the street.

The thing about the desert is that everywhere looks like it's just across the street, until you attempt to cross that street. In this case it stretched through miles of baking sand, with no pedestrian access, under the 15 Freeway.

As a native New Yorker, I'm used to long walks -- but even Moses' eyebrow would have raised at this one. Through piles of sand and jagged rocks in the 90-degree afternoon sun, it placed me directly on two freeway ramps. And no matter how much my feet moved, the Gold Strike sign remained the same size in the distance. I had forgotten everything I learned about desert mirages from that movie in which Abbott and Costello joined the foreign legion.

In addition, upon reflection, I realized that Dino probably wasn't dumb enough to wear wool in the desert.

"That'll be $79.95," said the woman at the Gold Strike reception desk. "Plus tax." Incredible. It was only $10 cheaper, the same $10 I would have saved on the free buffet meal at Nevada Landing.

I trudged back, actual grooves digging into each shoulder from my two 10-lb. bags. I can't say how many miles I covered in total, but my brand new Skechers were now the equivalent of three years old. And I smelled like one big used gym sock. I wondered if Complete Charter had facilities for transporting the deceased, after identifying my unrecognizably decomposed body by the uncool ID badge.

Back at Nevada Landing, I realized that you can check your bags at the front desk for free. Trying not to get too upset at what a dumbass I am, I did and hit the casino floor. Killing my first two of eight hours was not such a bad idea anyway, as I was about to learn.

I approached one of the women who shunned me on the bus. Laura ("no last names, no pictures") pumped quarter after quarter into a video poker machine.

After a while I grew bored of watching and wandered off to a blackjack table, feeling like the John Favreau character in "Swingers" with no Vince Vaughan to help him be cool.

"Are you gonna take a hit or not?" asked the man with a shaved head and tattoos next to me.

I visualized every lyric I could remember to Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler," but the answer wasn't there.

"Take a hit," he said, looking as though he was willing to deliver me one himself.

"We're not giving lessons here," the tattooed man said. "Why don't you go learn how to play Pai Gow poker? There's no one over at that table."

I finally found my Vince Vaughan in Eddie Evans of Greenville, Mississippi. I knew he was cool because he was the first gambler willing to provide me with a last name. The former L.A. resident was in town on trucking business, and his game was dice.

"I call myself five-finger Jack," Evans said, "and they can't beat five-finger Jack. Believe me, when I get hot, the house can't beat me."

"The reason I'm kind of losing is because I don't have my money," Evans explained.

"Two pays double, 12 pays triple," he said. "our field numbers start at 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11 and 12, and never throw a 7."

I have enough trouble with numbers without my sleep-deprived eyes burning like hot pokers into the back of their sockets. At this moment, I felt like Pai Gow poker had just been explained entirely in Mandarin Chinese.

I nodded, purchased $20 in red chips, and let Evans lay them out. I handed him my digital camera and instructed him to shoot me shooting dice. This was to be the visual centerpiece of this article. I crossed my heart and grabbed the die.

"Hey, you can't take a picture at the tables!" the biggest one screamed. "Hey, hey, hey!"

About to get tossed out into the desert for five hours, I collected my chips and departed the table.

One-armed bandits always seem to prove their nickname to me, but by now I was excited by the prospect of a game dumb enough for me to understand. My old friend Meadows said I had it wrong, however. There was more to playing the slots than just pulling a lever and doing nothing.

"The secret is to sit there and wait," said the retired construction worker. "Don't be anxious. Feel the machine out."

Meadows had a theory. Slot machines don't work on computerized random number generators, information I relayed to him from a recent cable documentary, but on what he called "heat magnets."

"If you put your hand over the front, you can feel when a machine is hot," he said.

He walked around to various machines, scientifically placing his heat magnet-seeking hand over them.

As I fed it a dollar, Meadows backed away several steps and jumped from foot to foot, yelling at three bars to come up on the line.

They listened to him. Although the bars didn't exactly match, they returned $40 on only my second dollar bill. I instantly promoted Meadows to the position of my slot machine manager.

It was then that I realized exactly why Meadows was so helpful. Like all managers, he expected a percentage. I gave him the industry standard 10 percent.

Despite further heat-seeking and fancy footwork, what remained of my $40 eventually disappeared. But Meadows wouldn't.

When there were no more dollar bills in my wallet, I told him, "I'm done for the night."

But Meadows reminded me of all the fives, tens and 20s he had seen in there. He tailed me around the casino, pointing out every machine he sensed was hot.

He had a point, my weary mind reasoned. For instance, after I lost on one of his recommended machines, the very next person up won $250.

Sometimes I came close to breaking even in the process of losing the remainder of the $200 I brought to gamble. But somehow, I could never motivate myself over to the change booth while staring at my winnings, giant coins that looked about as valuable as Greek Drakmas. My only fun was pushing the cash-out button every few spins, initiating a loud conversion of my few remaining credits into the metallic tray.

Meadows rolled his eyes whenever I did that. He was in no mood for pranks. More fed up by my deficit than I was, he pointed out two ATM machines against the wall.

It wasn't will power that prevented me from taking his suggestion. It was the fact that, after paying off my last credit card bill, I had nothing in my bank account.

"Meadows, I'm going through some rough financial times," I said, "and I'm going to have to downsize. I'm sorry."

It was a difficult decision, but he did receive a generous severance package of three more dollars.

"Note to self," I scribbled in my pad. "Eight hours is a long time to spend in a casino when you don't gamble."

Around 9 p.m. I found a leather couch by the sports betting room, and a chair for my blistering dogs. NASCAR racing flickered from the screen.

There I was, in a sweaty suit, penniless, stinking of b.o., trying to doze off in a public place, hoping I wouldn't wake up to the poke of a security guard's nightstick on my feet. My parents' dreams had all come true for their only son.

Thanks to the deafening vroom of pace cars, my nap was about as pleasant as one taken on an outside bank at the California Speedway. But at least I saw some solid eyelid -- until a huge thump beat against my ribcage. In front of the screen was a stage, and a live band was preparing to take it. They were sound-checking the bass drum.

It was time to change out of these stinky duds anyway. I entered a toilet stall. Due to the compressed space, my craps tip sheet fell out of my pocket and, well, into an appropriate place for a craps tips sheet.

There was only one more way to help kill the four more hours I had before the five-and-a-half hour bus ride home. I accepted my fate and entered the buffet, helping myself to heaping plates of food-like substances.

I spotted Laura and invited her to dine with me. She opened up, providing unexpected insight into all the cold shoulders I got on the bus.

"I probably ain't supposed to tell you this," she said, "But people think you work for the casino, checking up to see what they're doing."

"You come on the bus asking all these questions in your fancy clothes, talking into a tape recorder."

With my newly discovered assumed authority, I considered making an arrest on the ride home.

"Come with me, sir," I'd say. "I saw you engaged in suspicious Pai Gow activity."

But the ride home was all about sleep. I know because I watched everyone else do it. Johnny the bus driver found himself navigating through a thicket of blinding fog that paralyzed me with fear.

We pulled into Gardena exactly 23 hours after I woke up to tackle this adventure. Its total cost: $200 in cash, $95 in shoes, a weekend of sleep and all my gambling curiosity.