Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read Online Free PDF Page B

filled with little old ladies, respectable-looking soccer moms, and conservative-looking dads. In the lobby of the Venetian on my last trip to Las Vegas, I started asking people who they voted for in 2000: Bush or Gore? Among the sinners in Las Vegas, among the gamblers, drunks, and sleazily dressed women, Bush—President Abstinence, President Born Again, President Doesn’t Drink—won by a landslide. Of the forty-six people I asked before a security guard told me to knock it off, thirty-two had voted for Bush.
    The list of sins I haven’t committed isn’t very long. You name it and, with the exception of cunnilingus, I’ve done it. I’ve burned with lust, eaten myself sick, envied people who were smarter or better looking than I am, and lain around the house watching television when I was supposed to be studying or writing. Gambling, however, was a seedy, sinful pursuit that I could resist with very little effort. I’ve never made friendly wagers, I don’t own stock, I’ve purchased lottery tickets three times in my adult life—and felt like an idiot every time. So while everything else in Las Vegas attracted me, the casinos in themselves held all the appeal to me that I imagine a thorough prostate exam has for Tom DeLay.
    Even after I got over my anti-Vegas animus, I still felt dirty walking into casinos. Being in a casino said something about a person that I didn’t want to say about myself. It said, “I am greedy and gullible.” The losers far outnumber the winners—everyone knows this, right? That there are and always will be, by design, many, many losers in Las Vegas isn’t a secret. Casinos aren’t run like tobacco companies; they don’t make much of an effort to hide the bad news.
    The reason that I always had fun in Las Vegas—going to restaurants, shows, stores, and getting the occasional overpriced massage at the spa—was because I avoided the casinos. I never looked around Caesar’s Palace or the Bellagio and thought, “Hey, I’m gonna take this place for all it’s worth.” Ironically, by not gambling I was taking the house. Resort owners lose money on hotel rooms; they make money when their guests gamble, not when guests check out. So while I never left Las Vegas with more money than I came with, I never left Las Vegas out more than the cost of my room, food, and entertainment. Las Vegas lost money on me—and, being Catholic, I felt guilty about it. In a city built on sin, the nonsinner is the transgressor.
    So after seven trips to Las Vegas, I succumbed. Guilt got the best of me. If I wanted to keep going to Las Vegas—and I did—I would have to learn to gamble, if only to give the hotels a chance to start breaking even on me. And here was this sinful pleasure—gambling—that was so attractive that a multibillion-dollar industry had been created to indulge people who longed to commit it. It didn’t look like fun to me, true, but neither does cunnilingus, and lots of people seem to enjoy the hell out of that . And if gambling was all about greed, as I suspected it was, hey, I’m greedy. I could be flattering myself, I suppose, and claim that I don’t care about money. But I love money just as much as the next guy. And someone had to be making money somehow—I mean, if everyone lost, and lost big, every time they came to Las Vegas, well, people would stop coming, right? I’m a pretty smart guy—at least I like to think I am—maybe I could, with some practice and a little help, beat the house at the gaming tables instead of just at checkout.
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    F irst, slots.
    There’s not much strategy to slots. Find a slot machine in a maze of slot machines, one that hopefully isn’t too close to a smoker or a granny hooked up to an oxygen tank (most of whom are also smokers), park your ass on an upholstered chair that’s bolted to the floor, and start pumping in