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The Casino
You notice the faces, paranoia tension pride, neurotic nervous bravado. Apathetic aged gamblers and truck drivers in smart casual nervously glancing everywhere.
Young men in thongs and t shirts or decked out in outrageously bad taste gangster white suits. Beautiful woman and prostitutes, bosoms and pushed up cleavage. A celebrity looking black man with gold rings and versaci sunglasses, being chatted to by a mesmorphic impressive red headed man reminiscent of David Spade of CSI fame, at the dice table. A buxom blonde throws the dice. She's in a purple hugging dress, is she a hooker? She's playing a role whatever she is. This whole place is a smoky shot of heroin. All the people are happy, but they will wake up sad and financially devastated. False happiness. Its the sort of place one can imagine finding a refugee from a domestic argument. Slamming the front house door, striding to the car roaring off and sinking into interzone a wooly jumper at the poker machine.
You can win $40000! The draw is at 9pm. The cheesy guy on stage smiles at the victims. The b grade singer comes on accompanied by her dancers.
And to think this joint is sanctioned tolerated endorsed by the community through the government! Casinos justify their existence by supplication to heavy taxing for the purpose of enhancing the community. They also provide funds for rehabilitation of problem gamblers. Some poker machines near the entrance have small propaganda signs laminated and tacked to the side depicting in black and white a glum asian man or a stunned looking middle aged white lady and a slogan such as “Keep control” and “Think of the consequences”
We lament: If only those five or six gamblers at the roulette table would give us the money instead of the casino. What’s the difference to them? There five or six hundred dollars in 50’s splashed down on the green velvet. Chips are lost, swept into the hole in the table, money gone. How is this cash holocaust sustainable? If you wrote me down a business model on paper and submitted it for my perusal, I would never believe the concept would succeed. The notion that otherwise rational logical people would wilfully go into a financial situation in which they know the odds will not let them profit and in fact that the business knows that the patrons are aware of this non secret stacked deck. The house always wins. I’d never have believed even one person would participate in this money drain, yet off they go to pack the tables and set flame to their polymer bank notes.
Cloak room ladies deride my justified question “will my computer in my bag be safe?” She turns her lizard’s gaze to her wrinkly female colleague “He wants to know if it will be safe” said one shriveled lizard to the other.
The Boomer aged Asian lady large supple leather handbag slung over a fat sagging shoulder she's by herself at the roulette table, Martin alerts me to the event of her putting $200 cash on the table. She places chips on her chosen numbers and she loses, the money - $200 – is promptly the casino’s property and profit. She seems to leave, but no, she has just traveled 2 meters away to the adjacent roulette table. There she resumes her madness. It’s a game that cannot be won.
I look around me: The flashing lights the laughter the tension, the smell of rum the pattern on the carpet the plaster hollow greek architecture columns, the glass of liquor on a green felt table, “The casino is the enemy of the family.” I mutter
The three young men so happy, so happy they forcefully slap high fives on a win or two, the losses are a bit quieter I imagine. They are also at a roulette table. They also play the game they can never win. Idiots; yet they are ecstatic, its as though they are alive. But they are sad inside; hiding from the sorrow filled real world of hard work and infinite possibility of failure and death.
Its a maze, a labyrinth, glass mirror walls, and walls of poker machines we’re walking the left wall to find the way systematically through. How deep is this room? Banks of old people squinting into space or operating opium machinery. The first lady we scrutinise is periodically swiping a magnetic strip card into an aperture in the slot machine. We coin her card the dumkopf certificate. Every ant in this gray haired army holds one, one lady has her dumkopf card on a lanyard attached to her so she can’t misplace it in the absent mindedness of opiate trance. The BMW's on display you could win, they are only 1 series, not even 3 series let alone an M6. A Harley Davidson perched above some coin eating machines, the Indian security FBI wannabe man talks into his suit importantly at the base of the escalator as though he’s saving the president from assassination. He’s a no body. Up the escalator into the smoking deck, a bridge enclosed and smoky across the road, suspended a view of the structure that is the casino. Smokers: Why do people smoke? Because they have lost hope and do not care.
Outside the Casino a young man dressed in a cheap suit drunk, discretely yet tell tale stance urinates in a large pot plant meters away from tens of passers bye – including families. This is the main foot road along the river bank at the Casino’s entrance. Behind his back 4 star open air restaurants a bottle of wine and cain chairs.
In the dark after the gas fire eruptions, at 5 past the hour, a troupe of be-suited bogans and their woman folk menace by. We notice the girl dressed to the nines has her shoes in her hand, “Quick, hurry go go!” I hiss, as Martin struggles to ready the camera and chase after the troupe without getting beaten up whilst taking her photo as evidence of bogan chav stupidity at the casino.
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