Year: 2008

Crossing the casino floor (I’m legally prevented from saying which one by a NDA so profound I can’t even comment if it’s on this planet, let alone something as simple as it’s name) is like wandering through a menagerie of Darwinism (indeed, and participants in the Darwin Awards).

Though the dude sucking back the eighteen pound hamburger pictured above has never hopped on his electrified fat-mobile and zoomed through the double-wide front doors to drop a few bucks before eating himself into a grease-coma, more than a few of our ‘guests’ (we don’t call them customers because apparently they feel better about being fist-fucked over impossible odds than if we called them ‘marks’, ‘shills’ and ‘rubes’) are surely competing with him for the last chicken-fried french fry.

Truly. It’s like they all sat around the picnic bench in their living rooms and themselves a meeting, of which the primary question was ‘How fat can we get and still be in public without being assaulted by ivory whalers?’. Then, over a meal of KFC skin and liquified Krispy Kreme shakes, they slowly work their way towards an answer, much like the Ents in Lord of the Rings; no answer is ever come to quickly because, well, the only thing they’ll do quickly is make a grab for that last bit of deep-fried cheese.

The answer is very very big.

So big, in fact, that they can’t use the slot machines properly. This is more of an achievement than you might imagine, especially since they’re constructed in such a way as to encourage anybody (including people with walkers) to wander up and steadily lose their life savings to a machine that will, from time to time, proclaim ‘Ma, you have the purtiest tooth in the trailer park’ (this is absolutely true, there is a slot machine that makes this, and other noises).

The chairs are neither constructed for nor intended to contain the weight of people who put you in mind of slow moving herds of four-footed stomachs. This has led to various bits of insanity (at least until the leather bucket recliners are installed … you know, the ones with the colostomy insert and the panic button that releases a few pounds of purified starch when hammered on by the scratching stick); they sort of park their fat-mobiles at an oblique angle to the machine and, if they are able, heave themselves bodily at their penny slot seat and wait until the world stops spinning before commencing in the ultimate expression of Pavlovian responses. If they’re not capable, they teeter ever so precariously on the edge of said lard-mover, totally defying Newton and giving the security guys (who are also First Aid attendants) a screaming case of the heebie-jeebies.

Would you wanna mouth to mouth that, or have to roll it over? Fat spreads out on when it’s on the ground, you know. Where do you put your hands? Do you just … grab hold and pretend you’re playing football? With a soggy metric ton pigskin? God forbid they have to go down there and administer the breath of life and find a fucking deep-fried turkey husk stuck to a back molar. I honestly think I’d rather be charged with manslaughter (if you read that right, it comes out as mans laughter, which always makes me kinda wonder) than risk that kind of creeping horror.

And it’s not just the morbidly obese that come and hang out in the casino, either. Oh no, that would be too simple, too … not as creepy.

Never in my life have I seen such a profound accumulation of no-chins, bird-eyes, pointy-heads, funny walks, indeterminate genders (and not just the usual man, woman and both, but some kind of weirdly creepy one-minute-man-next-minute-woman depending on the light), and crazy talkin’ to themselves weirdos. They sit cheek by jowl by feather with each other on chairs that are not designed to be comfortable for hours on end, and I wonder to myself if they’re thinking (independently, of course) ‘God, the person next to me is a fucking weirdo’. There is such an astonishing amount of strangeness inside the casino that Mr. Ringling himself would doff his hat, hold it to his chest and say ‘Good job, sir, you have a circus far in surpass of my own’ and bugger off to the nearest McDonald’s.

There are normal people who come to the casino

You might think I’m talking about the people who work there, but since I work there, I can tell you, not all of us are sane.

No, the norms who come by the casino are the ones who’re dropping off or picking up friends, family and/or relatives. They’re the ones who don’t come in. They roll through the casino parking lot at three or four miles an hour, pop open the passenger door and either kick their co-pilot out or motion frantically for the person they’ve come for to hop in; stopping practically guarantees one of the gamblers smoking in their protected areas will come out and discourse at great length on things no sane person cares about in some kind of vaguely formed half-language based on the odds of gambling.

I work there because it’s the only place I’ve found so far that gives me both the opportunity to work ridiculously hard (which is more often than you might imagine) and to catch a few z’s without running the risk of being dismissed for absolute laziness.