The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

It was Monday morning at Treasure Island casino near Red Wing, somewhere in the vicinity of 5:00 a.m. It was hard to say for certain; I didn’t have a watch, my cell phone was dead, and there were no clocks anywhere. I know the slow, grinding pace of late nights, though, can feel the hours turnover in my head, and in my skull it felt like 5:00 a.m.

 

I’d been on the floor of the casino since eleven o’clock the previous evening. My head hurt. I am not a gambler, and am pretty much a stranger to casinos. I was running down, and decided to step outside for a breath of fresh air. The first light of dawn was creeping along the horizon, and standing at the edge of the parking lot you could hear little beyond a distant pulse, the stirring of birds, and the sibilant, sedative rhythm of the sprinklers swiveling in the grass. A distraught woman sat on a curb near the motorcycle area, talking on a cell phone. “Tell her not to be mad at me,” she said. “No, listen. Would you please just tell her not to be mad at me?”

A few feet from me, just outside the main entrance to the casino, a much-older woman sat parked in her elder buggy—one of those motorized contraptions with handlebars and wire baskets. She had a cigarette clenched in her teeth, her eyes were closed, and her head was thrown back at what appeared to be an excruciatingly uncomfortable angle.

The number of players at Treasure Island had thinned out considerably after last call at the casino’s liquor dispensaries, Bongo’s and Toucan Harry’s Bar. The groups of whooping, collegial gamblers—students, older folks from the RV park up the road, golfers unwinding after a day on the course, couples taking advantage of the package deals at the hotel—had departed, but somehow the casino seemed even noisier. Now, though, it was essentially a cacophonous province of solitaries. Among them were an agitated Vietnamese man shuffling numbers on a video roulette game, and an elderly fellow, wearing overalls, driving gloves, ear plugs, and what appeared to be yellow-tinted scuba goggles, who was pounding away at the Nurse Follies slot machine. Nearby, at the counter of the Mongo Bay Grill, a stooped little woman slowly pinched nickels out of a plastic cup and slid them across the counter to pay for her chicken strip basket.

Earlier, after the bar-crowd exodus, I had ventured up to my hotel suite to rest my feet, scribble some notes, and pound down caffeine. The place was lavish: two rooms, two bathrooms, two televisions, a king-size bed, akitchenette, and a huge Jacuzzi. The walls were adorned with art involving palm trees, expanses of blue sea, sunsets, and people strolling on the beach, in keeping with the casino’s Caribbean theme.

In hindsight, the suite was a foolish expenditure. I would use it as little more than a locker for my stuff. Except for this break, I would be downstairs from 11:30 p.m. until 7:30 the next morning, wandering the floors of the casino. I would not sleep in that king-size bed. The Jacuzzi would remain unused.

At 2:00 a.m., when I went back down to the casino, hundreds of people were still scattered around its 120,000 square feet, hunched alone at slot machines or huddled in quiet groups at the blackjack tables. Many of the wee-hours gamblers were quite old, and many of them were Asian; a number of them were Asian and quite old. Some of them were in wheelchairs or motorized carts. The majority of the gamblers who were not old, Asian, or in wheelchairs were young men, most of whom were wearing backward baseball caps and smoking cheap cigars. These characters tended to sport the kind of carefully groomed facial hair common to professional athletes, along with wrap-around sunglasses and sweatbands.

At that hour, the majority of the blackjack action was consolidated at a handful of tables. The players seemed intimidating in their concentration and silence. The dealers had a rapid, almost comically formal style, marked by a stoic demeanor and elegant flourishes that often looked like the sleight-of-hand routines of a magician.

The casino’s 2,500 slot machines were, at least initially, entertaining, a hodgepodge of elaborate designs and themes that ranged from movie and television tie-ins to purely absurdist kitsch. There were games inspired by Star Wars, Alien, Casablanca, Phantom of the Opera, The Terminator, Austin Powers, Creature from the Black Lagoon, A Fistful of Dollars, Wheel of Fortune, I Dream of Jeannie, South Park, That Girl, and The Munsters. One was called Bowser’s Rock ’n’ Roll Party. There was Lucky Larry’s Lobster Mania and Super Sally’s Shrimp Mania, Cashsquatch and Cops and Donuts, Frog Prince and Flame of Olympus, Treasures of Venice and Queen of Atlantis. Dale Earnhardt, Kenny Rogers, and Evel Knievel all had their own games. This overwhelming mix displayed not just a shrewd and perverse psychological calculation on the part of the designers—there’s no doubt a refined science to th ebusiness—but also a sort of gleeful ingenuity. Clearly, slot-machine manufacturers have a firm grasp on myth and memory’s power to exploit all manner of human vulnerability. In a particularly bleary moment, I deposited my dollar into a machine called Enchanted Vatican, only to discover upon closer scrutiny that it was actually called Enchanted Unicorn.

During a later, manic stretch I was defeated in succession by Avalanche of Cash, Sneaky Devils, Jamaica Me Money, and Mariachi Madness. As I wandered from room to room, losing small amounts of money here and there and attempting to strike up conversations, I became convinced that the Evel Knievel machine was going to be my ticket to good fortune. I would return to it periodically throughout the night, even if I never did get any money out of the thing. Upon depositing your coins, Knievel’s voice would bark, “Life isn’t worth anything unless you got some gamble in you.” Periodically, the spinning tumblers would freeze and you would be provided with a “reality check bonus”: video footage of the motorcycle daredevil soaring through the air and tumbling ass-over-elbows across the handlebars. Near as I could tell, this bonus was purely for entertainment purposes.

Modern America offers all sorts of diversions for its growing legion of insomniacs. In even the smallest towns, a guy who can’t sleep can find ways to pass the time or places to rustle up a microwave burrito. There are grocery stores and oases of convenience that never close. Cable and satellite television bring hundreds of far-flung stations into the average American home, and a debased form of communication and connection is available at all hours via the Internet. But nowhere is garden-variety sleeplessness so hectored by relentless external stimulus as at a casino.

The strange, crepuscular light, sputtering with the constant flash and strobe of agitated machinery, filtered through the slowly drifting scrim of tobacco smoke, is disorienting. The noise level at Treasure Island, especially in the dead of the night, is mind-boggling. It is a pure digital Babel, albeit absent, most noticeably, of human conversation; a mash-up of seemingly every sound effect and sonic abomination capable of being produced and spit out by circuitry: blips, beeps, burps, disembodied voices, a jackhammer, the chatter of monkeys, the distorted arpeggio of an organ, the chugging of a locomotive, the rattle of coins, all manner of bells, whistles, and whooping alarms. This technological racket competes with the music leaking out of ceiling speakers (I heard Blondie, I heard Kool and the Gang, I heard Michael McDonald), both rolling together in a continuous, never-ending loop that approaches at times the most grandiose and chaotic aspirations of musique concrète composers. The most disconcerting moments come when this dense quilt of noise is occasionally punctuated by the briefest, almost-eerie pinholes of silence.

Not surprisingly, an intense headache ultimately complicated my growing feelings of disorientation and exhaustion. I lost track of time, and I lost track of money. “Lost track” is perhaps not quite accurate. I simply lost money, and after a certain point I had no idea how much money I had lost. Shoving dollar bills into slot machines and video poker games rather quickly became an exercise in abject abstraction. Occasionally a machine would sputter and clang and a few credits would be added to the tally on the video screen. But by the time I was done pressing buttons and pulling handles I’d have nothing to show for my investment, an investment that was entirely devoid of hope or expectation.

Nor did the other players scattered around the casino display any sense of hope or expectation. They mostly sat alone, usually smoking, often nursing a cup of coffee, all the while staring blankly at the consoles in front of them and going through the same routine over and over. As I trolled the aisles, it seemed that some of these folks never budged from one particular row. A plump, hennaed woman who looked to be in her seventies spent most of the night camped in front of a Sizzling Seven slot, and over time the floor beneath her chair became crowded with plastic cups heaped with change.

I settled in at a game next to her and tried to strike up a conversation. Perhaps I should have taken the hint conveyed by the message on her pink sweatshirt—“You Have the Right to Remain Silent – Use It!”—but I was increasingly desperate to chat with someone, having been rebuffed time and again all night (“Not here to talk,” one old fellow had said earlier). A guy with a notebook and a pen perhaps rightfully arouses suspicion in a casino at four o’clock in the morning. Indeed, I had been repeatedly checked out by floor security guards and warned about bothering other patrons.

Nevertheless, I plugged a few dollars into the machine and then casually, out of the side of my mouth, asked the woman if she had a particular strategy for this business. She sized me up briefly, and then offered this advice: “I don’t flit about.” She gave her console a few more spins and elaborated. She picked a bank of machines, she said, and concentrated on those. “They’re all the same,” she said. “Eventually they have to give you something.” I asked her why she wasn’t home sleeping. She had raised six kids and spent thirty-five years farming with her husband, she told me. She was apparently an expert in not sleeping.

Did she still farm?

“I live in town now,” she said, and then gave a little dismissive wave of her hand that indicated the conversation was over.

I left the woman alone with her cups full of coins and her remaining hours to kill. En route to the bathroom I encountered an agitated fellow hustling away from the blackjack tables, headed in the same direction. He was making a noise from somewhere at the bottom of his throat, a hum that occasionally wound its way into unintelligible muttering. By the time he was five steps from the bathroom he’d already unbuttoned his fly and had his hand down his pants.

Time is money, I suppose, but this looked like a man who was clearly running out of both.

When I returned to the casino floor after my 5:00 a.m. breath of fresh air, only a smattering of patrons remained. It was noisier than ever, though, because on top of the general racket, the custodial staff was busy with its giant floor sweepers and vacuum cleaners. I came upon a stylish woman playing three-card poker, sitting alone across from a clearly bored dealer. For about fifteen minutes I watched her as she cashed in four hundred-dollar bills—in separate installments—and then lost everyone of her chips in what seemed an impossibly rapid fashion. The woman betrayed absolutely no emotion as she handed over another hundred dollars, but I did seethe dealer wince almost imperceptibly as he swept up her pile of chips one more time. When I strolled past again, perhaps twenty minutes later, she was still slumped at the table, jiggling a few remaining chips in her hand and staring at the green felt in front of her.

Before calling it a night, I settled in at a blackjack table where two young guys from Menomonie, Wisconsin, were smoking and agonizing over each hand. The guy holding the cards didn’t have a whole lot to say; he pretty much just sat there scowling and smoking. His partner, though, a pint-sized, pasty-looking kid who didn’t look a day older than eighteen, stood behind him offering high-strung advice in what sounded like a Maine accent. This guy was a compulsive talker. His name, he told me, was Bobby, but his friends called him “El Toro.” He and his friend were third-shift workers with a night off, just killing time. As Bobby rattled on about his blackjack prowess, I saw the dealer roll his eyes dramatically a couple of times. I bought some chips and played three hands, each time heeding El Toro’s insistent advice. I held at sixteen, and the dealer turned over eighteen. I held at seventeen; the dealer had twenty. Finally, after receiving a five and asix, and with the dealer showing three, Bobby talked me into doubling down. It didn’t take much persuading, actually; I was barely conscious and had no ideawhat the decision entailed. I can only tell you that I drew a two, and the dealer somehow, again, ended up with twenty.

I suppose it was around seven o’clock when I headed upstairs. A woman sat in the Mongo Bay Grill, nodding off over a bowl of split-pea soup, but by this time the hotel lobby was showing signs of life. The hotel was hosting a Freightliner company convention, and some attendees were heading out for golf or taking a crack at the casino before the day’s scheduled activities. At the poker tables, a couple of games were still going strong, and in the high-stakes blackjack room a lone figure—a fifty-ish guy in a plain gray T-shirt, khaki shorts, and baseball cap—was drinking bottled water and going head-to-head with an exhausted-looking dealer.

By 9:00 a.m. I was on Highway 19, headed west for Jackpot Junction in Morton and almost literally driving blind. I hoped to check in to my hotel room early, so I could at least attempt to sleep for a few hours. At one point, just after I realized I was driving less than forty miles per hour, an ostrich, or perhaps an emu, loped across the road in front of my car. It’s possible I was hallucinating by this time.

I eventually made it to Morton in the early afternoon. Save for its casino, there’s little to distinguish this place from the other tiny towns strung every five or ten miles along a railroad that swoops through western Minnesota. When I arrived at Jackpot Junction—for a severely sleep-deprived, possibly hallucinating man, the parking lot of a rural casino, snarled with creeping automobiles piloted by old people, might be one of the most perilous driving experiences in North America—the hotel clerk delivered crushing news: My room wouldn’t be ready for another couple of hours.

Reluctantly—very reluctantly—I ventured into the casino. There was really nowhere else to go, and I was in absolutely no shape to get back in the car. The blackjack tables were as crowded as if it had been midnight, but if anything, the Monday-afternoon clientele at Jackpot Junction was almost as disconsolate and tight-lipped as the wee-hours gang at Treasure Island, and easily seventy percent of the patrons appeared eligible for AARP membership. Wandering among these senior citizens intently feeding the slot machines and disconnected from human contact and conversation, it was hard not to recall the title of the wretched book written by Caitlin Thomas, Dylan Thomas’ widow, in the wake of his death: Leftover Life to Kill.

I eventually was allowed to haul my bags up to another room I wouldn’t have much opportunity to use. Sleep was difficult, since my head was still clanging from the aural onslaught of Treasure Island. After taking a shower in an attempt to wash some of the cigarette smoke out of my pores, I sat down and watched a baseball game before beginning the second night of my grim anthropological adventure.

The evening crowd at Jackpot Junction was much more convivial and boisterous than Treasure Island’s—at least in the hours before liquor sales were cut off. There were lots of couples and groups of young people, almost all of them loud, laughing, and clearly having a goodtime. Some construction workers from Pocahontas, Iowa, had driven up with their wives for a couple days of golf and gambling. They were, a guy named Mike told me, “having some drinks and getting killed at the blackjack tables.” He said this with a big smile on his face.

After the Portside Bar shut down, however, the place emptied out in a hurry, and by 2:30 a.m. it had the feel of an abandoned carnival still running on full wattage. It seemed like both the music volume and the air conditioning got cranked up in the dead hours, which was a good thing, because otherwise I—like many other patrons, no doubt—would not have been able to stay on my feet.

Sometime around 3:00 a.m., judging from my inner clock, I took the lay of the land. One woman who wore dirty, canvas gardening gloves was robotically removing change from the tray of a Tiki Torch machine and depositing it in plastic cups. For a while I took refuge from the tobacco pall in the non-smoking room; it was empty save for a man, perhaps in his late forties, intently playing the slots, and an elderly woman next to him (his mother, I presumed), bundled in a blanket and dozing in her wheelchair. There was a guy in a shiny, black nylon Lakers sweat suit, Fila sneakers, and mirrored sunglasses sitting before a That Girl game, absolutely unmoving. I was reminded of the human statues sculpted by Duane Hanson, which are so lifelike that they can draw double takes from passersby.

At around four o’clock I did manage to have something resembling a conversation with Gary and Bill, truck drivers—“sort of”—from Armstrong, Iowa. They were flat, amiable sorts, and didn’t seem to move from the Lucky 7 machines all night. “What else are you gonna do?” one of them asked, by way of explaining their presence at the casino. “There’s not exactly a lot of night life out this way.” They both seemed entirely unconcerned with the ultimate arithmetic of the enterprise. “You win a little, you lose a little,” Gary (or perhaps it was Bill) said with a shrug. “You can’t have much more fun than this,” his partner added with a perfectly straight face. I couldn’t for the life of me tell if he was serious or pulling my leg.

At five o’clock I sat down at a blackjack table and had a little roller-coaster run, playing through three different dealer changes. For brief moments I played alone, but most often I was joined by a rotating and diverse cast of characters: a couple guys from Kenya, two men and a woman from Southeast Asia, a man from somewhere in the Middle East, and an out-of-work, heavily tattooed construction worker who lived, he said, ten minutes away and had once spent a year dealing blackjack at a casino.

Twice I got a push on blackjack, and I lost twice with twenty. At some point, while playing in a complete stupor and from a position of total ignorance, I was up almost two hundred dollars, but by 6:00 a.m. I’d lost all my chips. By then, the former dealer was the only player left at the table with me. Shortly before I walked away I asked him if he believed in luck.

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Ask any dealer. They all believe in luck. Good luck, sure, but especially bad luck.”

The dealer across the table smiled, offered a little shrug, and wished me a good night.