high roller

I started a two-week staycation last Thursday night. A staycation is the best kind of vacation for me because it gives me a chance to roam the Southland. I think a lot of people who live here find the physical vastness and dispersal of LA either intimidating or alienating, if not both. It can make you feel alone and disconnected from any sort of community. In other words, it's an ideal place for me to be living. I revel in what others find overwhelming, and I love to wander when I have the time do so.

I'm too nervous about money these days to do much gambling anymore, but I was in the mood for some casino action yesterday, so I drove from my house in Alhambra, first to the Bicycle Casino in the city of Bell Gardens, and then to the Commerce Casino in the city of Commerce. Back when I was a teenager and didn't have to worry much about money since I had well-to-do parents who provided for almost everything, I used to do quite a bit of gambling. I think it might've been my way of thumbing my nose at what I perceived as my parents' upper class pretentiousness. They were always dragging me to the ballet, the theater, and museums. My mom would take me for 'tea' with her fancy friends and refer to our neighborhood on the upper East Side of Manhattan as an arrondissment. All we needed were some fucking finger bowls at the dinner table to make the whole stultifying vibe complete. Gambling seemed like a suitably low-rent pastime and I gravitated towards it with a few friends in high school. One of these friends is a gambling addict to this day, and he's completely destroyed his life. Lucky for me, I recognized my true class position in time to avoid the same fate. One advantage of being a bourgeois teenage gambler is that there wasn't much in the way of consequences if I lost a few hundred bucks at the track or at one of the underground blackjack joints in NYC. There was always more where that came from. My father used to keep a huge wad of cash hidden in the house - several thousand dollars, mostly in hundred dollar bills. I found the wad one day by accident and was able to bankroll my gambling habit thereafter. I pocketed all the winnings, of course. My dad never seemed to notice that the money was missing... But nowadays, with a mortgage and bills to pay, and with an economy that seems like it will stagnate for the foreseeable future, I don't feel nearly as free and easy with money. There's no wad without consequences hidden in my house. My savings are all in cds and bonds and gold. I'm in full-on protective mode, and I'm entertaining the possibility of purchasing a handgun so I can be prepared when the generalized rioting begins any day now. Still, last night I wanted to gamble. I'm on vacation. I wanna wander. I wanna gamble. I'm not such a peasant that I'll completely deprive myself of a little action on a Saturday night...

I took Atlantic Boulevard south through Alhambra and Monterey Park. Without much warning, Monterey Park becomes East Los Angeles, where Atlantic Boulevard has degenerated over the last three decades into a wasteland of pawn shops, payday advance sharks, bail bondsmen, liquor stores, and fast food joints. There are actually still some lovely little latino working class neighborhoods in East LA, but the impact of 40 years of deindustrialization is unmistakable in the commercialized areas...

Atlantic becomes Eastern Boulevard in the city of Commerce, and Eastern takes you directly to the Bicycle Casino in the city of Bell Gardens. The Bicycle Casino is not what I would call an inviting establishment. A lot of casinos, whether they're in Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, or on Indian Reservtations in the Southwest part of the country, attempt to create a hospitable atmosphere so that you don't notice yourself losing your shirt. Not the Bicycle Casino. Their aproach seems to be to underscore the built-in antagonism between the house and the players. There are armed guards all over the place. I may admittedly have been a little oversensitive to this after taking a few hits in the parking lot beforehand, but whatever... From what I could tell in the hour or so I spent at the Bike, there's no free food or drinks for the players sitting at the tables. The dealers all seem to be quiet in a sullen and unpleasant way. Plus, the place is dirty. In fact, it's worse than dirty because it has the same tacky glitz most casinos have, but it's not kept clean so it really looks like shit. I sat down for a few hands of blackjack and won $25. I would have won more had it not been for the old Chinese lady sitting next to me who hit on 18 and drew a picture card after I split on aces. I didn't do that douchey thing that some people do and yell at her for fucking up my hand, but I was a little chapped. I took it as a sign and cashed my chips right there.

While the Commerce Casino also has its trashy aspects, it's much nicer than the Bike. The atmosphere is much more welcoming. I sat down at a minimum bet blackjack table and bought $300 worth of chips. This seemed to send an invisible signal to some central nerve center because within two minutes a waitress came to get my drink order. I went on a good run right away. On all of my first three hands I pulled 21. A black guy in green coveralls smacked my back on the third 21 and said, 'You are hot tonight, baby! Gimme a little 'o what you got!' After 45 minutes at the table, I had more than doubled my money. Then I did the right thing when I felt myself cooling off. I walked away with a nice profit of $265. Now it was time for some sports betting. This is the great thing about the Commerce Casino - you can bet ball games in the sports betting parlor. I put $400 on the Angels to beat the lowly Baltimore Orioles. Why not? Fuck it. I'm on staycation. Scott Kazmir against Kevin Millwood. Kaz should be able to beat the Os, right? The line was even money. I felt the Angels were due for a win. They've had a bad year, and I thought they could at least begin to creep back towards .500 playing a weak team like the Orioles. Luckily I don't make a living at gambling because my thinking was entirely faulty. The Angels couldn't even scratch out a run. They made Kevin Millwood look like the next coming of Nolan Ryan. Four yards down the toilet. But it was fun watching the people watch the games on huge flat screen TVs. I watched them, and I smelled them, too, as the sports betting room was imbued with an odor of generalized hard living. I assumed the smell was the essence seeping collectively from the pores of the players. The only way I can describe it is that it smelled like there was an invisible gas in the air around all of us, composed of liver disease, farts, fast food, and the kind of body odor a guy gets when he's being yelled at by his superiors at work all day long. It's a smell that's both primal and incredibly vile. After a while it really started to get to me and I tried to make it go away by chugalugging as much beer as I could. No dice... A lot of the guys betting the games looked dirt poor, and yet here they were betting what little money they had. It's admirable in a weird way, the capacity in an otherwise hopeless life to create a little bit of hope for a few hours on a Saturday night... With the game over it was time for me to go home. I thought about trying to win my money back at the blackjack tables, but I know this is how people get in trouble, so I just got in my car and drove home.