Another Sunday Night in Hell

God damn it was cold. The wind like an icy lover's dead kiss. Which was most of them. The bright lights did little to hide the reality. It was still a shithole. Full of degenerates, morons, and losers. Well they (we) were all losers, otherwise they wouldn't be in a second-rate casino, in a two-bit town on a Sunday night feeding quarters ad infinitum. What a joke. What a cruel cosmic joke. Even if you win, you end up losing. Life is one big losing bet, so I guess it's as good as any way to pass the banality. For a place so full of desperation, these people sure were full of hope. Or maybe it was delusion. The delusion that the next pull or deal was going to be the big one. The big payday they've been waiting for. Clawing for. All the buzzers and bells drowning out any semblance of rationale. A subliminal shove to keep emptying their pockets, you're so close, the next roll is it, you feel it. Can't you feel it?

What a character study. A home for the broken, despairing, and failed. No one is smiling. No one is having a good time. Not like on those dazzling highway billboards. Oh no. Those gorgeous youthful yuppies, beaming brightly with their over-whitened horse teeth, heads thrown back, hundred dollar chips in the air. Look what a magnificent life you could be leading if you only unload your savings account. Who's needs an IRA? You'll be blonde, thirty years younger, and forty pounds lighter. Well, your wallet anyway. Man, peering about, it looks as though a few of these people swallowed that poor blonde whole. Or maybe they just ripped her limb from limb and feasted upon her bit by bit. Savoring all that unfulfilled promise. Quite a few look so damned thirsty, they would shiv her for 50 bucks and a 40 ounce of malt liquor. No, there was no one from that planet here. The brow-beaten, the used-up, the crazed, this was their shift. This was their world. Stupefied and blinded by the flashing bulbs and jangling cacophony. Like an infant in a crib, dumbfounded by the whirling mobile above. Even the cocktail waitresses looked spent, in their run-laden stockings, and ill-fitting pewter-spandex mini dresses, the glitter and lurex of which only highlighting the thinly-veiled sadness of it all. Toddling from putz to scoundrel to shithead, with their tray of watered-down cocktails and never-to-be-realized dreams. Each night gone unraped, an answered prayer. Each slap on the ass one step closer to begged-for death. This place reeked of despair. The stone-faced dealers, dishing out cards like automatons, raking in the failed life bets like zombies. Being surrounded by all that untouchable money must make them insane, kill-crazy. Those are the ones to watch. They will be the first to snap come the revolution. The menacing and posturing pit bosses, looking on like snarling Dobermans, just waiting for something to happen, willing it, so they could act half as important as they felt. What a river of misery, flowing down like the tears these people would cry if their emotion hadn't already been pummeled out of them. Nobody here was going to beat the house. Nobody ever did. So pull the handle, roll the dice, take the hit. What did it matter. So Suzy has to strip her way through college, so Billy ends up in jail. They would have made it there eventually. It's just a matter of time. It's better they learn early. Life doesn't pull any punches. Life doesn't give a shit. About your dreams or your happiness, so neither does anyone else. It's all empty. Every gesture, every word. Nothing's real. Of course it isn't. Realness comes in electric waves. And the tide is rarely high. Life's just real enough to let you know what you're missing. Just a breath of ecstasy here and a cheap pleasure there to kill your apathetic hard-on. A hint of joy; handjobs of happiness. Just enough to make it hurt again, just enough to let the pain flood in. Enough to pick the scab, scratching at it, digging with a dull fingernail, slowly, deliberately. Salting the freshly reopened sore until it sears with pain, only to walk away laughing. But they all get up on their sadomasochistic nags and try their best to cross that arid canyon. Good fucking luck. We all fight our losing battles, it's just a matter of degree. Some with vigor and ferocity, others with involuntary blankness, and the smart ones with conscious nihilism. The tenacious ones are admirable, but stupid. As if the universe is really going to acquiesce. The house always wins. Delusion by self-medication is the only honest response.

God all this ad hoc pontificating and unsolicited philosophy while staring at this soul-sucking machine. Cherries, diamonds, bars, and sevens. Peppers, stars, hearts, lions, tits, coins, cars, dicks, clovers, assholes, pots of gold, steaming turds, Old Glory, rainbows. It was all the same shit. Row after row of the same hideous bullshit. I need to get the fuck out of here. This place is a live wire of abject cruelty. You would think with all these empirically-tested distractions, they could keep their eyes on their lives flushing down the toilet, but no such luck. They all look at me as I walk past, like some novelty. They probably think I am a prostitute. They're probably right.

"Hey, where your boyfriend at?" yells a minuscule old black man.
Oh Jesus, can't I just keep walking?
"I said, where your boyfriend at?"
Fuck. At least he has a full set of teeth. Yellow like kernels of fresh-picked sweet corn, but there.
"He's at home," as I try to shuffle past.
"How come you didn't bring him? How come he not here wit chu?"
Sweet fucking Christ. Does every God damned come-on have to be a fucking existential reminder too? Fuck off, old man.
"You know, you have some real sexy knees. I mean some of the sexiest knees I've ever seen."
"Thanks, I guess. I don't think I've ever been complimented on my knees before..."
"You know I don't ever say this to women, but you are one beautiful girl, so I had to stop. You don't have any makeup on, well some lipstick, but that's alright. I mean you real natural-like, ya know. Real nice."
Where the fuck is this going?
"Okay. Thanks."
"So can I buy you dinner sometime? I know you said you got a boyfriend, but where he at? He ain't here."
Fuck you dude. Thanks for pointing that out ten fucking times. If there was ever a time for the adoration taser. Or the adoration Luger.
"I really can't, but thank you."
"Why not? I don't care about race, ya know. I like everybody. Don't matter if they black, white, brown, whatever. I like everybody."
No shit it doesn't matter to you. You'd fuck a hole in a tepid cantaloupe if it were willing. Or not. Especially if it had sexy kneecaps.
"Why can't you just kidnap me for the night? I'm Rufus," or Simon, or Beelzebub or Porky or whatever the fuck pointless name it was. "What's your name?"
"Marilyn." Immediately reminding me again why I need a less iconic pseudonym. I should use Ester or Gertrude, Bev, anything else. Margie. That's pretty awful. Awful enough to equal these dipshits. Awful enough to equal how I felt. Girls named Margie didn't get raped in parking lots. You never heard of a women named Ester getting drugged and sold into the underground sex trafficking racket.
"Oh that's a nice name. I like that," sticking his hand out for me to shake. "So you sure, you can't kidnap me for just one night?"
Ew. Did he really just say 'kidnap" twice during this pick-up? What the fuck.
"Yeah, I'm sure. Nice meeting you."
I silently pay reverence to the casino gods for the touchless hand-sanitizing kiosks. Oh sweet, sweet, alcohol. You save the day again.
I check my messages and call a friend back.
"Where are you at? It's so loud."
"Yeah, I'm at the casino."
"What the hell are you doing down there? Trying to fulfill your death wish?"
Probably.
"Sitting on a bench."
"Uh, rule number one in the jungle is never stop moving."
"Yeah, it doesn't matter. They get you either way." I recount the kneecaps Valentino that I passed up for a laugh to keep from crying.
But like clockwork, another slack-jawed, virulent refrigerator on legs saunters up. Slovenly and panting from that marathon walk all the way from the parking garage. The beauty queens he was with just had to stop and look for something in their knock-off handbags, while he eye-raped me while licking his crusty, mustached lips and elbowing his only slightly less vile buddy.
Like I can't hear him, "Look at this one. This hot-ass elf."
Elf?
"Elf?" the lackey asks.
"With that red and green coat and green dress. She looks like one of Santa's elves. What I wouldn't do to her. She fucking looked right at me. Smiled. Oohh, I'd fuck that smile right off her prissy little face."
"Yeah, she did smile at you Ernie," or Larry or Jeb. "But now she won't even look over this way. She's just a lousy tease."
"Yeah, I don't like teases. Stuck-up bitch. Thinks she's better than me. I should show her. Show her a real man. Teach her a lesson."
"Hell yeah you should. Teach that snotty bitch a lesson."
"I think I'm gonna."
By the grace of God or Zeus or Joe Pesci, the unlucky ladies found whatever the hell pills or meth they were looking for and they mercifully moved along. What a fucking place. What a fucking roomful of dejected, sad sacks and low-down, beastly animals. I fucking hate them all. But at the same time I hate them less than most. They are pitiable and awful, but they are real. They lead shitty, terrible, real lives. Working, cheating the system, knocking over liquor stores, clawing at life's discarded scraps. The vultures. These salt-of-the-earth folks didn't burn the wound as much. They commiserated. They spotlighted, with their shadowy, sleazy lives. These were the people that were supposed to inherit the earth. That's about all they would ever inherit. Besides heart disease and alcoholism. They would become earth soon enough. Religion is for poor people. They need something to believe in because their present, sure as shit, isn't lending any hope. It's a way for people with nothing to go on despite their abhorrent circumstances to keep on and a way for people with everything to justify their guilt until its eventual dissipation.

I have to laugh at their grit. They clutch their lucky charms, talismans, and crucifixes, their eyes wide and bright with possibility. That's all it really is. They peddle the illusion of possibility and these people are buyin'. That's how they continue. All the brilliant lights and screeching bells, the free booze, and ambient temperature. All trickery to keep you pouring dollars down the gullet of life. The smart ones, the smart and the tortured ones, the ones with any spunk, they pull out early. They know the house always wins. But the deluded, the sadomasochistic, the incrongruously optimistic, the weak-hearted, they sit in front of that machine, catatonic. Just endure a little longer, the voice whispers. One more pull, the next one, it's going to really pay off for you, just a few more coins, it goads, as it laughs all the way to the bank.