a malt glengarry for me and my friend here
Taking advantage of our time off, Mr. Curtis and myself ventured to the Catfish Bend Riverboat Casino. Now I didn’t expect to be transported to Vegas circa 1961, but somehow this place wasn’t what I had imagined. The dealers were all wearing football jerseys and looked like they just posted bail. Those playing the tables could remember the Truman administration.
But I suppose guys like Matt and I don’t need all that Pirates Of The Caribbean horseshit, or the rock and roll grunge tip. Guys like us need to kick it old school.
Now don’t get me wrong. This place reeks of class. I mean, the chips have a catfish on them. Still, I’ve got a feeling that the skank shift isn’t limited to midnight to six. But there is this one guy. He’s dressed like Aristotle Onassis. He's wearing a silver suit with a shiny purple shirt, gold tie tack with matching cufflinks, big pinky ring - casino panache at its finest. He smokes out of an ivory pipe as he walks around checking people out and watching the tables like he owned the place. But no way could such a debonair fellow own this joint. The guy in charge of this place is probably at home somewhere getting drunk on cheap beer as he sits around with salsa stains on his already worn-out sweatpants. I can’t stress how informal and matter of fact this place is. Not an ounce of magic in the whole joint. If Wal-Mart owned a chain of casinos, this is what they would look like. You know that part in Casino where De Niro gets a hammer and bashes the hell out of a guy’s hand for cheating. Something tells me the worst they would do at this place is give you a really nasty Indian burn.
We walk around for a bit. The first floor is slots and table games. Go up a floor and all you see is slots. One floor more and it’s the $10 buffet with free drinks. Matt and I get a drink each and go out to hit the tables.
The two of us go down to the first floor and play slots for a bit, and I stress the word play. Almost as a parody of the old ladies that surround us, we play three machines at a time, running up and down the aisle hitting the spinner with every body part imaginable. We turn it into a full contact sport - intercepting the other player’s quarter to play your own, taking the other man’s winnings, blocking him from playing a “good” machine. A lady in the row of slots next to ours is playing four machines at a time. She wins $200 on one and doesn’t flinch. She must be a regular as we later recognize her on the “Wall of Winners” as Janice C. from Davenport. It is a shame the Wall of Winners is measured by monetary winnings. If fun could be measured in catfish tokens we would be the indisputable victors and have a wall all to our own.
We move to blackjack. $5 a hand. I change twenty and get four catfish chips in return. Fantastic. I actually manage to make my $20 last for a while, but in the end I lose it all. We move down to the roulette table. This is more my style. Here you can bet as little as 50¢. This I can handle. I change another $20. Since these chips are worth only 50¢ I get a two huge stacks in return. I feel like a winner already. We pick up on the rules pretty quickly, however, a few times the dealer had to explain the finer points to us or would stop us from making an illegal bet (perhaps he took cue from our sport of slot machine playing as he once deflected one of Matt’s wagers after he called ‘no more bets’).
Inside ten minutes I managed to double my stack size. Fifteen minutes more and it is five times the size, spilling over on itself. It is all happening so quickly that it takes some time to realize that this is for keeps. It slowly hits me that I have turned $20 into well over $130. And I’m not the only one doing well. Matt, after being down $60, managed to work back the $60 he lost and keep going for $75 more. We look at each other and realize that we should get out while on top. We play one more spin and I bet huge. I’m throwing chips all over the table without a care in the world. If I had time to sit back and realize that I had $20 riding on a single spin I would’ve taken it back, but I suppose it was foolish betting like this that got me ahead in the first place. Suffice to say I lost the spin and walked away a bit disheartened from losing the battle. But it didn’t matter. I had already won the war.
We get off the boat and try to take some trick photography pictures. But it is too cold to do this for any length of time as the wind coming off the “Mighty Miss” is bitingly frigid. The two of us get in his car and head home. As we turn on to the interstate Matt notices that his needle is ridding E. Do we get gas? No. We gamble. And though it was close, the luck that preceded us earlier in the night didn’t fail and we rolled into Macomb richer men.
But I suppose guys like Matt and I don’t need all that Pirates Of The Caribbean horseshit, or the rock and roll grunge tip. Guys like us need to kick it old school.
Now don’t get me wrong. This place reeks of class. I mean, the chips have a catfish on them. Still, I’ve got a feeling that the skank shift isn’t limited to midnight to six. But there is this one guy. He’s dressed like Aristotle Onassis. He's wearing a silver suit with a shiny purple shirt, gold tie tack with matching cufflinks, big pinky ring - casino panache at its finest. He smokes out of an ivory pipe as he walks around checking people out and watching the tables like he owned the place. But no way could such a debonair fellow own this joint. The guy in charge of this place is probably at home somewhere getting drunk on cheap beer as he sits around with salsa stains on his already worn-out sweatpants. I can’t stress how informal and matter of fact this place is. Not an ounce of magic in the whole joint. If Wal-Mart owned a chain of casinos, this is what they would look like. You know that part in Casino where De Niro gets a hammer and bashes the hell out of a guy’s hand for cheating. Something tells me the worst they would do at this place is give you a really nasty Indian burn.
We walk around for a bit. The first floor is slots and table games. Go up a floor and all you see is slots. One floor more and it’s the $10 buffet with free drinks. Matt and I get a drink each and go out to hit the tables.
The two of us go down to the first floor and play slots for a bit, and I stress the word play. Almost as a parody of the old ladies that surround us, we play three machines at a time, running up and down the aisle hitting the spinner with every body part imaginable. We turn it into a full contact sport - intercepting the other player’s quarter to play your own, taking the other man’s winnings, blocking him from playing a “good” machine. A lady in the row of slots next to ours is playing four machines at a time. She wins $200 on one and doesn’t flinch. She must be a regular as we later recognize her on the “Wall of Winners” as Janice C. from Davenport. It is a shame the Wall of Winners is measured by monetary winnings. If fun could be measured in catfish tokens we would be the indisputable victors and have a wall all to our own.
We move to blackjack. $5 a hand. I change twenty and get four catfish chips in return. Fantastic. I actually manage to make my $20 last for a while, but in the end I lose it all. We move down to the roulette table. This is more my style. Here you can bet as little as 50¢. This I can handle. I change another $20. Since these chips are worth only 50¢ I get a two huge stacks in return. I feel like a winner already. We pick up on the rules pretty quickly, however, a few times the dealer had to explain the finer points to us or would stop us from making an illegal bet (perhaps he took cue from our sport of slot machine playing as he once deflected one of Matt’s wagers after he called ‘no more bets’).
Inside ten minutes I managed to double my stack size. Fifteen minutes more and it is five times the size, spilling over on itself. It is all happening so quickly that it takes some time to realize that this is for keeps. It slowly hits me that I have turned $20 into well over $130. And I’m not the only one doing well. Matt, after being down $60, managed to work back the $60 he lost and keep going for $75 more. We look at each other and realize that we should get out while on top. We play one more spin and I bet huge. I’m throwing chips all over the table without a care in the world. If I had time to sit back and realize that I had $20 riding on a single spin I would’ve taken it back, but I suppose it was foolish betting like this that got me ahead in the first place. Suffice to say I lost the spin and walked away a bit disheartened from losing the battle. But it didn’t matter. I had already won the war.
We get off the boat and try to take some trick photography pictures. But it is too cold to do this for any length of time as the wind coming off the “Mighty Miss” is bitingly frigid. The two of us get in his car and head home. As we turn on to the interstate Matt notices that his needle is ridding E. Do we get gas? No. We gamble. And though it was close, the luck that preceded us earlier in the night didn’t fail and we rolled into Macomb richer men.