Virgin's Guide to Gambling and Booze
Category: General
Tags: 21st Birthday, Casinos, Bars, Nausea
Retching nausea boiling the flesh of my intestines and throat wake me with a sick jolt, my contacts crusted onto the dark red veins of my eyes and one hand groping blindly for a trash can. Or a toilet, but I've never slept on a bathroom floor that was this comfortable, surrounded by a mattress and at least three sets of soft sheets, and even in my addled mind I know that I am best off looking for a can, not The Can. A large garbage bucket is thrust under my mouth, and as I vomit the searing pieces of my expensive dinner into its recesses, my mind can only comprehend two thoughts:
1) What did I eat that was red? That better not be blood.
and
2) Happy Birthday, me.
My 21st birthday was an assload of fun--yes, puking is never exactly pleasurable, but it was nothing worse than I'd experienced after previous house parties and/or bouts of the flu. Through the haze of projectile vodka and deep fried shrimp, however, I realized that I learned a lot, or at least enough to call the previous 24 hours a successful rite of passage.
Casinos
If I were a more violent person and had the ability to travel through time, I would find the person who first thought of the sick and gluttonous machine called The Casino and beat him and his entire family to death with a slot machine. Thankfully for him, I'm not violent and I can't bend space or time, but that doesn't mean he doesn't deserve it.
Wild Horse Pass Casino, located in a lonely stretch of desert off of Arizona's I-10 highway, is a depressing place. The complex is polished and lush, complete with a night club, a hotel, a series of bars and top-ranked restaurants, and of course an expansive gambling floor. We went on a Saturday, the first night of my 21st year, and the last night of my faith in the American people.
The first thing I noticed was that it was crowded. The floor was stocked with bright lights and flashing buttons, with thousands of patrons milling slowly between the aisles, hands clutched on their purses and across the bulges of their wallets, narrowing their eyes in disgust each time they passed someone at a winning machine, even at the penny slots. There were no young, scantily-dressed people here; there were no high rollers cheering in ecstasy as they doubled their fortune at the poker table. These people were old and dressed in last season's Ed Hardy specials, their faces lined with the disappointment of decades. All of the tables boasted a $10 buy-in minimum. I came with $40. Needless to say, I stuck to the slots.
I lost it all and more, courtesy of birthday hospitality, in just under two hours. I watched a friend slide $20 into a slot machine, and a minute later saw his screen flash "$0." The drinks were good, but the bar is just as greedy and misleading as the slots and we lost just as much there as on the floor.
In one of the bars on the second level, surrounded by lighting dim enough to match the room's occupants and the discomfort of modern, trendy furniture, I held a bright red Grateful Dead in my hand and begged for a shot of something more alcoholic. Suddenly I understood the necessity for ingesting unhealthy amounts of poison when one subjects oneself to such a cliched, depressing place as a casino bar. Fortunately, my friends are generous and at least in this respect, relatively sane. We drank more and then promptly left, discussing the disgust at our backs.
Bars
See above.
But really--apparently bars aren't my scene. I don't want to wait in line for entrance to a place full of people that I don't want to know, just to buy a glass of over-priced beer. The small restaurant-bars seem more my taste; maybe I watched too much Cheers while growing up, and not enough Beverly Hills 90210. This is only after one night, mind you, and I didn't pay for a drink the entire time--thank you, friends and family.
House Parties
They're exactly the same, only now I can collect the money and buy the beer. I'm still not sure if this is a perk or not. It sounds suspiciously like more work.
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