Standing Up for Las Vegas

A time and a place for everything

The sailing of the Mayflower to colonize the New World was financed by a lottery in England. So much for our Puritan heritage.

One of the 12 Apostles was chosen by lot, or lottery, and it wasn't Judas.

George Washington may never nave told a lie, but he gambled on anything, anyplace, any time. The night he crossed the Delaware to surprise the Hessians may have been the one night during the Revolutionary War that he didn't play cards or shoot craps. But he knew it was bad, because enlisted men were forbidden to gamble.

As in all armies before and since, nobody paid any attention to the order. In fact, lotteries helped raise funds to pay the Revolutionary Army.

Yale, Harvard and Dartmouth were built with funds raised by lottery. So were many of the first Puritan churches in the New World and the early schools and bridges.

These facts are mentioned to forestall any attacks on an article about Las Vegas' being unclassy or even un-American. Nothing can be done about the feeling that Vegas is an uncouth, moneygrubbing, sex- and sin-laden metropolis, vulgar in its architecture and its culture. Nothing can be done, because it's hard to disprove. But, still, there is a time and a place for everything. There is a time for champagne and a time for Coca-Cola. There is a time for haute cuisine and a time for pizza. There is a time for James Joyce and a time for Agatha Christie. There is a time for lust and a time for true love. There is a time for a two-week celibate retreat to a monastery and a time for three days of gambling, boozing and wild women in Vegas. So an article about Las Vegas can't hurt. And who knows? Life enters through many doors, so maybe a little something can be learned.

I love gambling in Las Vegas, but I must tell you that you cannot wind up a winner there over any period of time. Not because Vegas is dishonest. It is the first honest gaming establishment in the history of civilization and gambling has existed since the beginning of man's recorded history. It's just that the house percentage, or edge, cannot be beaten by an honest player.

So this article will not tell you how to win. There is no way. It will just tell you how not to get killed and that is very simple. Never sign a marker, or IOU. Never make out a check. Just gamble with the money you take there. And be resigned to losing that.

Sure, you may win on some trips. You may win five, six or seven trips in a row. But eventually you will get wiped out. A losing streak is more deadly than a winning streak is benevolent. And that's all you have to know about gambling in Las Vegas.

Remember that 30 years ago, Las Vegas was a small town with a few Western-style casinos you could break with a 50-grand win. It is now a city with a billion-dollar gambling plant of luxury hotels that generates close to two billion dollars in winnings a year. Remember always: The money to build that billion-dollar gambling plant came from losers.

Now that this basic truth has been mentioned, somediing else can be said. On a three-day visit to Vegas, you can have one of the best times of your life. To do that, you have to forget about great museums, the pleasure of reading, great theater, great music, stimulating lectures by great philosophers, great food, great wine and true love. Forget about them just for three days. Believe me, you won't miss them. Ye shall be as little children again.

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Vegas and its casinos have a mistlike, fairy-tale quality. Gamblers are shielded from air and natural light and the running of time so as not to distract them from the primary purpose. You are a sleeping (continued on page 200)Las Vegas(continued from page 178) beauty waiting for the prince of good fortune. It is not too important that your pockets are being emptied while you dream. You are glad to pay the price. You even feel you are getting a bargain.

At night, the scene is breath-takingly vulgar. The small city is lit up with literally millions of dollars' worth of neon surrounded by desert. On the horizon, forming an almost perfect circle around the city, are blue-black mountains to close the magic ring. After a good free dinner with brandy, you saunter down the Strip, breathing in the desert air, seeing the great names--Frank Sinatra, Buddy Hackett, Don Rickles, Ann-Margret, Shirley MacLaine--emblazoned in gold and red on electric signs four stories high. You have your choice of casinos, the red plush and white togas of Caesars Palace, the classy, bluish Tropicana casino, the deeper red plush of MGM, the chandeliered Hilton; or you can go into downtown Vegas, Glitter Gulch, the Western garish of the Four Queens, the Golden Nugget, Billion's Horseshoe and The Mint. Awed, you carry inside you the hope, the fierce desire that not only is this all free but you will win their money. Who could ask for anything more? Dreamers come from Japan, Araby, India, the Argentine, Mexico, Estonia, Los Angeles and all of the United States.

Statistics have been compiled, surveys made. I distrust them, but personal observation sort of makes me believe Vegas statistics are mostly true. (Remember, everything connected with gambling is suspect. But you might say that about politics, the stock market and even banking.)

Anyway, 96 percent of the people who go to Vegas say they enjoy their visit. A very interesting statistic, because it is certain that 90 percent of the visitors to Vegas leave as losers. No sweat; the customers are loyal. Thirty percent of those interviewed claim they visit Vegas twice a year or more. (How can they afford it?) The average length of stay is four days. This has to be true. No gambler can afford to stay there more than four days. I love Vegas, but after three days I'm dying to get out, and economically have to.

Typically enough, Friday and Saturday are the heaviest days. Tuesday is the lightest and this is logical. People have to go to work for the money they will lose at the tables.

You'll have the best chance to win in Vegas if you fly in for one evening. Take the five-p.m. plane from Los Angeles and leave Vegas on the midnight plane. For Hong Kong, if necessary.

The morality of gambling

Everything I have ever read or been told about why people gamble is just plain bullshit. Some psychiatrists claim gambling is masochistic, that gamblers want to lose to punish themselves. Sure, some do. Some people like to jump off the Empire State Building. But millions go up to look at the view. What is true is that there are guys who can win 50 or 100 grand and keep on gambling and then wind up losing. They are known almost affectionately as "degenerate gamblers." I was one on a small scale. (I once walked out of a Vegas casino with ten grand in cash.) My biggest win was $30,000 at baccarat, but that didn't count, because I owed the hotel that amount in markers, so I just traded in the cash for my IOUs. But in my very worst days, I was only a mildly degenerate gambler, which gives me an understanding, I think, of the syndrome. It's not that you want to lose the money back; it's just that you cannot believe it possible to lose. When winning, you are convinced God loves you and that some inner vision enables you to pick those numbers that are about to appear magically as the red dice come to a stop, as a dealer unlocks a blue-backed card.

A winning streak inspires a belief in your own infallibility. Why stop now? Also, what nongamblers do not know is the feeling of virtue (there is no other word to describe it) when the dice roll as one commands. And that omniscient goodness when the card you need rises to the top of the deck to greet your delighted yet confident eyes. It is as close as I have ever come to a religious feeling or to being a wonder-struck child.

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How come our moralists don't bitch about the stock market? I bet craps, blackjack, keno, roulette. I bet basketball, football, baseball, boxing. I even lost $1000 on a tennis match, betting Bobby Riggs against Billie Jean King. (Male-chauvinist father against women's lib daughter.) With horse racing, I have a snobbish dislike of placing my fate in the hands of an animal--lovable, it's true, but not that intelligent. With the stock market, I feel the same way I once did gambling with a friend who owned a marked deck. He promised not to read the markings when we played casino. He beat me ten games in a row. This astonished me. (As a teenager, I had won my neighborhood candy store in three days of solid casino playing.) So I went out and bought an unmarked deck and won my money back. The slock market is the same. You give your money to a bunch of guys who have promised the SEC they won't read the markings.

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How lonely old people are. How hard it is to make close friends: When you are past a certain age, the juice to love your fellow man seems to evaporate. And we all know, no matter what our age, that younger relatives find older people burdensome.

And so it seems strange to me that writers and intellectuals single out old women playing slot machines in Vegas as objects to ridicule and use them as examples of our decadent society. I take pleasure in seeing those old women intense as children, waiting for cascading silver to fall into their laps, oblivious for those few hours of approaching death. Yet they are reproached for not worrying about the coming atomic war, the destruction of the world's ecology, the pollution of the stratosphere.

Why should they give a fuck? They have lived their lives and they have paid their penalties.

OK, maybe that's why old people gamble. But what about children? Here, I can speak again from firsthand experience. I spent a good part of my childhood gambling. I taught my children to gamble at an early age. I'm an expert on why children gamble. They gamble because they are greedy. They want to have everything and are astonished when they don't get it. To me, this is the most obvious characteristic of the gambler. It is a form of infantilism. And here again, I must say that I don't think this is altogether bad in adults. It is a mistake (a drastic mistake) to structure your life on a form of infantilism, but a little bit can help get you through it with a little less pain.

In my childhood, I squeezed in a lot of card playing while becoming a sports hero on Tenth Avenue. Before I even got into my teens, I was playing poker with very tough adults beneath lampposts in the streets of New York or behind the local candy stores. Playing with the local strong-arm punks and nickel-and-dime stick-up artists, I had the infantile audacity to dieat. I dealt the ace of spades from the bottom of the deck; I stacked the cards; I went light in the stud-poker pot.

I was an unskillful cheat. A simple cut would ruin my stacked deck, but I would "forget" to offer the cards to be cut. My age placed me above suspicion. Later, when I taught my children to play poker, I never let them deal the cards without cutting the deck. You can't trust kid gamblers.

All parents should teach their children card games, mainly because they are a great preparation for the disappointments of life. Once a child has drawn to an inside straight and missed, he will understand that life is not all peadies and cream. And when that same child loses a sure-fire pot with a pat hand, he (continued on page 224)Las Vegas(continued from page 200) will understand that life is full of nasty surprises. Also, I think gambling keeps kids out of jail. I grew up in a tough neighborhood with a lot of opportunities to get into serious trouble. While some of my buddies were out late at night burglarizing and strong-arming, I was trying to break the candy-store owner in casino.

Why do adolescents gamble? When I was in my teens, I stayed out until four a.m. My mother screamed that I would be forced to marry the girl, that I would get her into trouble. I only wished she was right. I was too shy with girls to have any luck or any dates. I was out until four a.m., playing poker. But at least by that time, I had stopped cheating.

I had stopped cheating because I was a star athlete and fancied myself a hero. Heroes did not cheat. I was better than anybody else. I knew it and I assumed the rest of the world knew it. I had the same attitude as French and English noblemen who considered themselves gentlemen because they did not cheat at gambling and who would commit suicide before refusing to repay a debt of honor incurred at the tables. So I always paid my gambling debts. Forty years later, I realize finally I am no better than anyone else. I still have markers in Vegas I have not paid.

Gambling tales

There was a woman from Brooklyn. She lived a full life. She married and had children. Her sons became successful professional men. Her daughters gave her grandchildren. Her husband operated one of the most successful delicatessens on Coney Island. She was a model Hausfrau, a loving mother and a faithful wife.

When she reached the age of 65, her husband died. She knitted a great deal; she visited her grandchildren. Friends took her to Miami Beach. She found the people there too old. She visited a married daughter in California. She found the people there too young. On the way back to New York, she stopped over in Las Vegas. And there she became a pennyante degenerate gambler, a rare species in America. She took a small apartment there.

The Brooklyn lady gambled all day long. She read up on roulette systems. She played the slot machines until her shoulders ached. She accumulated treasure boxes full of nickels and dimes and quarters. She made friends of fellow pennyante degenerate gamblers and went for picnic lunches with them to Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon. She never dipped into her savings. She took from her Social Security and pension money to pay the rent and the rest she gambled on a daily budget.

It is not enough to say she was happy. She was in a state of bliss, entranced with the whirring slots of the casino, the red and black swirling numbers of the roulette wheel, the diamond-backed blackjack cards unfolding before her. She could forget her approaching death. She did that for 15 years.

Her sons and daughters went to visit her periodically. They took her grandchildren to see her and receive presents from her. She refused to leave Las Vegas. But then, finally, one of those old-age diseases began to grind her out like a casino percentage. She was bedridden and became frailer and frailer. But every day her cronies crowded around her bedside to play gin rummy and that is how she died, with a hand full of playing cards and an 87-cent loser on the sheet.

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In the early days of Vegas, an old desert rat collapsed outside a small-town casino. Good Samaritans lifted him up, took him into the casino and laid him out on the blackjack table. A couple of degenerate gamblers gathered around and placed bets on whether he would survive until the doctor arrived. The "NO" bettors would not allow any first-aid treatment, because that would interfere with the fairness of the bet.

This story, again like a lot of gambling stories, has a happy ending. The desert rat recovered. The "Yes" bettors made up a portion of their winnings to give him a new grubstake when he left the hospital.

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Perhaps the only foresighted, prudent degenerate gambler in Vegas history was Odds Bodkin. He was a man of honor who would always pay his debts. When he made a big score, lie would make huge advance payments to his hotel, three or four of the best restaurants in town, a clothing store, a jewelry store, his barber and his manicurist and the madam of the nearest whorehouse, so that no matter how badly the cards went against him, he could live well without cash for the next few months.

Finally, in his old age, he went broke. Two years of poverty broke his spirit. He couldn't believe that he was a loser, and so at the age of 70, he sent letters to all his friends, announcing that he was going to commit suicide. A devout Catholic, he asked his friends to intercede for him so that he could be buried in holy ground.

His friends rushed to see the local Catholic priest, who indignantly refused their bribes. They went to collect their friend, who on the final day of his life had finally gotten lucky. He had prepared the noose in his dining room and, after doing so, had reclined on his bed to recover his strength. While lying there, he had fallen into a deep sleep and expired of heart failure.

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At one of the Strip hotels, the dice got really hot and the action was fast and furious. The shooter became so excited stacking up his chips and throwing his dice that his false teeth fell onto the green-felt table. The box man, without skipping a beat, whipped out his false teeth and said, "You're faded!"

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A hybrid degenerate Chinese-Swiss gambler named Gerhard Goda established a great and famous restaurant in San Francisco. For some years, his Swiss blood predominated and he socked away huge amounts of cash, since there is as much skimming done in restaurants as in gambling casinos' counting rooms.

But over the years, his Chinese gambling blood boiled to the top and it became his custom to spend three or four days in Vegas each month. He was a desperado degenerate gambler and he lost huge amounts each trip, but the restaurant in San Francisco kept piling up the money.

The Vegas hotel began to feel a form of reverence not only for his celestial bad luck but also for his inexhaustible bank roll. One day, the hotel's owners decided to give him a birthday party. Four hundred Vegas gamblers were invited. As a climax, a huge cake was wheeled into the dining room. The cake opened, the sides folded away and there was a gleaming "Italian red" $30,000 Stutz-Bearcat.

Goda burst into tears at this sign of friendship, forgetting that his losses of just one year could have bought him at least ten of those magnificent automobiles.

The next year, a rival hotel threw him a birthday party and presented him with an even more magnificent car, hoping to get his business away from the other casino. Again, Goda burst into tears of happiness at finding such true friends.

This went on for six years. Goda soon owned a fleet of automobiles. Unfortunately, his restaurant died from neglect and the draining away of its life's blood of cash. He closed the restaurant and went to Vegas. His friends drove the automobiles there for him. He proceeded to lose the automobiles and became a penniless vagrant.

Again, as in most gambling stories, this one has a happy ending. One of the hotels employed him as a host and be performed his functions magnificently.

Today, in the little garage of his home, he constructs antique jewelry and gives it away to his degenerate-gambler clients, who weep on his shoulder from the joy of his friendship.

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In all the arguments about degenerate gamblers, the discussion narrows down to what game holds the biggest fascination for the player: blackjack, crap shooting, baccarat, roulette or the slot machines. The argument is resolved by the following true story.

At the Sahara Hotel years ago, with the casino jammed with gamblers of all types, the management received an anonymous bomb threat. The casino manager announced over the loud-speaker system, "A bomb threat has been received; please vacate the casino." Nobody moved. Five minutes later, the manager announced again, "Please, everybody leave the casino. A bomb threat has been received."

The blackjack players were the first to go, then the crapshooters, then the baccarat players; finally, the roulette players left. But the slot machines kept whirring and flashing, the players still thrusting in their coins. Of the 1000 players, only four would leave their machines.

Luckily, the bomb threat proved to be a hoax.

Man does not live by art alone

It is natural that the most intelligent, gifted, worthwhile people disapprove of gambling. They have many valid reasons to do so. Gambling is nonproductive to society. Gambling is nonproductive to the individual. It does not improve your mind, it does not improve your health. It does not help you love your fellow man or even understand him. Gambling makes you waste time and energy. It prevents you from accomplishing your career aims, keeps you from writing your novel, studying to be a doctor, and even prevents garbage from being collected from the streets of New York, because in cold weather, the garbage men play cards in their warm trucks instead of working. Gambling keeps you from making love to your wife as often as you should. Gambling keeps you from helping your children with their homework. Gambling makes you squander your hard-earned wages, so that your wife and children go hungry, sometimes without a roof over their heads. It makes you unhealthy, because you stay in a smoky room or a casino and never get any fresh air or exercise.

If you are intelligent, gifted and conditioned to appreciate the finer things in life, you don't need gambling--most of the time.

Gambling is foolish, because you cannot win. The house has that two percent to 14 percent edge on the player in every kind of game. A gambler is a loser. Then why not abolish it by the strictest law and punishment? Why not educate people not to gamble? Why tolerate it at all in a civilized society?

Well, man does not live by bread alone. He also does not live by art alone. Man needs his foolish dreams perhaps more than he needs anything else. For two reasons. He must forget the hardships and pain of life. He must forget that he must die. Also, it can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey in the trees.

It is true that gambling has been a deadly disease; but I think that this is no longer true. As penicillin made venereal disease a comparatively minor ailment and so encouraged the sexual revolution, so have the ability to read, the advent of television and movies, the ability to travel long distances easily and see strange countries relaxed the strangling grip that gambling had on mankind. We have other pleasures 10 relieve our anxieties, to divert our fears.

I had to give up gambling at a certain period of my life because I found I could no longer write if I continued to gamble. Now, for the first time in my life, making more money than I have ever made, financially more secure than I have ever been. I have come to the conclusion that I cannot economically afford to gamble, the simple reason being that to gamble is to risk, that is, to approach, the "ruin factor." When I was poor, the ruin factor was not important. Hell, I was ruined, anyway. But now I have too much to lose and the ruin factor is decisive. Of course, I had to lose a great deal of money and come near ruin before I could figure that out. Gambling education is not cheap.

Everyone misses his childhood, even if it was an unhappy one, because then the world was pure. That is why so many people gamble. I think it is a desire to be happy in an innocent way. You can easily call this infantile. But I have noticed that the acquiring of knowledge, of power, of wealth does not always make a man happy. The love of a beautiful (throw in virtuous) woman does not invariably make a man happy. Certainly, all of these give him pleasure.

Here is the terrible truth: I got more pure happiness winning 20 grand at the casino crap table than I did from a check for many times that amount as the result of honest hard work on my book.

Before anyone thinks I'm completely crazy, let me say that I recognize that it was better for me as a social human being to earn my money by hard work. I realized that gambling could only lead to the ruin factor in my life. I was smart enough to give up high-stakes gambling before I went broke. Still, the mysterious question remains: Why did I so much more love getting and winning money in a way over which I had no control than in a way that was to my credit?

I think that the magic power of gambling lies in its essential freedom from endeavor and its absence of guilt. No matter what our character, no matter what our behavior, no matter if we are ugly, unkind, murderers, saints, guilty sinners, foolish or wise, we can get lucky.