Cricket Paddle or Deadly Weapon?…Sparkly Dress Confusion…a Swirl of Color and Sound at Hollywood Casino
"Now off the escalator and into the casino, big crowds still tight around the crap tables. Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from?” – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
We were somewhere around Winchester just outside of West Virginia when the drugs began to take hold. Did I say drugs? I mean caffeine, which I guess is technically a drug, but certainly not, like, mescaline or cocaine or anything heavy like that. My father-in-law had just guzzled two 16-oz Red Bulls and was now singing along at full volume with Robert Earl Keen’s “Gringo Honeymoon,” slapping his knee like he was riding a mule. A couple hours earlier, after attending an unexpected funeral on New Year’s Eve, we sat in a Subway next to a gas station, a quarter-mile from the funeral home. We were staring out the window as if the parking lot was a theatre stage: the sky was low and dark, and as it began to drizzle a mulleted heavyset man who worked at the convenience store limped into view, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He popped open the trunk of his rusty Toyota Camry, revealing a shellacked wooden stick.
“What kinda paddle is that?” asked my father-in-law (aka Papa), a spry and slender native Kentuckian of 72, between bites of a footlong.
“Cricket,” I said. “But for all we know he could be using it as a weapon.”
Another man approached the Camry: he wore an untucked postal worker shirt and was also smoking a cigarette. The heavyset man grinned and handed the paddle to the disheveled postal worker, who ran a finger over the smooth wood and grinned approvingly. The Subway bread, or maybe the meat, was turning my stomach into a deep fryer, so I went to the bathroom. When I returned, both men had vanished, and it was pouring rain. A crack of thunder shook the building. “Since when do we get storms in December?” mumbled a Subway worker behind us. Papa walked over to the gas station and bought those two Red Bulls from the heavyset guy. Somewhere between Harrisonburg and Winchester, he guzzled them.
“Papa, your pacemaker!” said Caitlin (my wife, his daughter) from the back seat.
“Eh,” replied Papa, waving his big purple hand dismissively.
The drive from Botetourt County, where we left the funeral, to Charles Town is a straight shot up I-81. It felt less like I was driving and more like I was being pulled toward West Virginia by some Great Magnet buried in the heart of Hollywood Casino. I was tired, bloated with Subway bread, and emotionally drained from the funeral, my left eye twitching like it was being shocked by a taser. The weather seemed even more doomed than it had when the sky cracked open at Subway. Behind us were a few white clouds painted on a fleeting blue sky, in front of us was an impenetrable wall of black, stretching from the mountains in the west to the mountains in the east. Gray wisps hung just above the freeway like smoky ghosts.
“It looks like we’re driving into the gates of hell,” I said, right before a rainbow appeared in a pasture to our right, where scattered cows stared blankly at the mud.
“Got dang, can you believe that?” shouted Papa, pulling out his phone to take a picture, his hands shaky from the double Red Bulls.
Later I saw the end of another rainbow inside of a tractor trailer directly in front of us. We moved towards it, but it disintegrated before we could truly reach it. The blue skies to our rear disintegrated, too, as black clouds settled on top of us like a thick wool blanket. The rain was so violent that the wipers had trouble keeping up. We wouldn’t see the sun for another two days.
Back in the 2010s, my in-laws used to make this trip from Botetourt to Charles Town every New Year’s Eve, for a good number of years. They owned 14 FedEx routes, which snaked through the dark hollers and high ridges of Southwest Virginia like veins in some great beast supplying blood to the heart of American consumerism. Work would get viciously busy starting in November, and wouldn’t relent until a few days after December 25. Pull a 14-hour day, eat dinner, jump in the hot tub for a few minutes, then awake before dawn to do it all again. All those damn Christmas packages to deliver. “Got dang peak,” as Papa called it. This New Year’s Eve trip to Hollywood Casino in Charles Town was their pressure relief valve, their chance to blow it out after working like sled dogs for more than a month, their wallets fattened by America’s insatiable lust for online shopping. This would be Papa’s first trip to the casino since Mama was diagnosed with multiple systems atrophy in 2019. This would be his first trip there since her death in April.
“Boy, your Mama would be twitchin’ in her seat right about now,” said Papa after we turned onto Route 7, 35 minutes outside of Charles Town. “She wanted to get on with it.” He made a fist with his left hand and yanked down on an invisible lever. “Those dang slots would be calling her name! She’d say ‘leave me alone. Shut up and gamble!’”
When we arrived at the hotel, the Hampton Inn about a quarter-mile from the casino, we donned our finest clothes, because there’s no point in going to a casino on New Year’s Eve unless you’re dressed like you’re going to a gala at the End of the World. I wore the second suit I’d brought with me…not the one I’d worn to the funeral, but a slim plaid number with a floral pattern on the inside of the jacket that I’d purchased for a wedding in New York City. Caitlin changed into a sparkly gold dress that had caused some confusion when she modeled it at her friend’s house the night before the funeral.
“I mean, it’s a little much,” her friend said.
“Yeah, but everybody’s going to be dressed up,” said Caitlin.
“Sure, but it just seems, I don’t know, a little loud.”
“That’s the point!”
It went on like this for at least five minutes until it dawned on them that this was the New Year’s Eve dress, not the funeral dress. The funeral dress was your typical sad-black. “She was being way too nice about it,” said Caitlin. “If I thought she was going to wear some flamboyant, sparkly thing to my mother’s funeral I would’ve been like ‘change now.’” The fact that both of them had to attend funerals for their mothers in the same year tells you something about this foul year of our Lord, 2024.
Before catching the shuttle to the casino, Papa, wearing a leather jacket and bolo tie, poured everyone a small cup of champagne and gave a blunt toast: “Happy New Year, because I am happy 2024 is in the dust and behind me. This past year has been extremely, extremely bad…so here’s to 2025.” Our shuttle driver was a robust old man who looked like Santa Claus, save the hairy wart on his left cheek. Over the driver’s seat was a golden plaque spelling out his name for the passengers: Kristoph. As Papa slid into one of the fraying green leather seats, he noticed a crumpled $50 bill jammed into the corner against the wall. Within a minute, we’d arrived at the casino.
“Have a good night there, Kristoph,” said Papa, slipping a bill the size of which I couldn’t make out into the cupholder as he ducked out the door.
“You do the same, now,” said Kristoph, a half-frown seemingly etched onto his face like a terrifying plaster.
I felt about Hollywood Casino like Hunter S. Thompson felt about the Circus-Circus in Las Vegas: this is what we’d all be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. The bright lights and loud sounds are designed to disorient. A haze of cigarette smoke hangs in the air, because casinos are one of the few places in America where it’s still OK to subject strangers to known carcinogens. Scantily-clad, heavily made-up women push booze carts around and hand out free drinks in tiny plastic cups. The object is clear: ensure everyone stays drunk so they’re willing to play fast-and-loose with their money. “In this town, they love a drunk,” wrote Thompson. “Fresh meat.” I observed a roulette game for a few minutes: a man in a polo shirt with sweaty armpits lost a grand on one spin, disappeared for a few minutes, then returned with a thick stack of bills to toss on the table. I felt above it all, like I was morally superior to the degenerates who were gullible enough to think they’d come out on top. The house always wins, I thought. “This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice,” Thompson wrote. “The gambling action runs twenty-four hours a day…and the circus never ends.”
Within 10 minutes, Papa won $500 on a two-dollar slot machine. He was wearing a cheap black bowler hat the casino had given out for free. It was comically small on his head. Caitlin tried to snatch the $500 money ticket from him so he wouldn’t gamble it away. “Give that back!” he said. She made him promise he wouldn’t slip it back into a slot machine. “OK, OK, got dang it,” he said “I promise.”
On the ride into Charles Town, shortly after chugging the Red Bulls, Papa said that he and Mama liked to go to the casino on New Year’s Eve because it was something different. If they stayed home, it’d be just another night: he’d sit in his room and watch sports or the news, she’d sit in her room and watch HGTV, and they’d be asleep by nine o’clock. Here, they’d stay up until well-past midnight, lost in a swirl of color and sound, pausing from gambling for only a moment when it was announced over the loudspeakers that the ball had dropped in Times Square. They would kiss, if they remembered, then get back to gambling. We, too, almost missed the ball drop: I heard a commotion behind us and turned to see it happening on a television hanging over the bar. A young man, a kid really, in a backwards hat with “RIZZLER” stitched on the side was mashing faces with a girl who looked like an Instagram influencer. I grabbed Caitlin and planted a firm one on her, too, and just like that, it was a new year. I didn’t see how it could matter, though. A flip of the calendar is a meaningless gesture, a mere formality: it has no bearing on the cards we’re dealt, the cards we’re then forced to hold for the next 365 days…or, in some instances, for a lifetime.
We lost track of Papa well before midnight. He’d stumbled into the jungle of blinking slot machines, that silly fake bowling hat perched high on his head. He was on his own trip, it seemed, and so were we, or so was I at least, considering Caitlin had wandered off somewhere with her friend, and I was left to myself, stalking the roulette tables like a feral hyena, resembling the people I’d perceived as degenerates just a couple hours earlier. I had no interest in slots, they seemed too primitive, and brought to mind lobotomized crones sitting motionless for hours on end, smoking cigarettes and pressing the same button over and over again…a lab rat begging for its meager reward. Roulette, though, now that was a game I could get into. My approach was simple: bet against the run. Wait until four of the same event occurred (i.e. black/red, high/low, odd/even) then bet on the opposite. If I lost, I’d double my bet against the run again. It worked: I started the night with $25 and soon I was up to $75. High roller, I thought. I alone had cracked the code of chance-based game that had baffled the human race for hundreds of years. Gambling wasn’t for degenerates, it was for winners – heroes, even! It was like taking candy from a baby. Actually, it was much easier than that…a baby could potentially bite and kick, a baby could put up a fight. Suddenly I saw Caitlin emerge from the thick slot machine underbrush like a graceful leopard stepping into the sunlight.
“You look like a psychopath,” she said.
I went to the bathroom a few minutes later to inspect myself in the mirror; she was right: the top two buttons of my stained white shirt were undone, two black craters were punched under my eyes, and the fake bowler hat (where had that come from?) sat cockeyed on my head like I was some kind of wannabe 1920s gangster. What time was it? What year? Where were the windows in this place? The clocks?
“It’s time to go back to the hotel,” Caitlin said. “Let’s find Papa.”
OK, I said, but first let me play one more game of roulette, dear, I’m on a roll, I can’t lose, sweetie, ya just gotta believe in me. She rolled her eyes, but let me have my fun. I put $50 on even after five straight odds. When it landed on “two,” I high-fived the three other guys standing around the table who had won far more money than I had. These casino people, they weren’t losers, they were upstanding citizens! Thrill-seekers of the highest order, moral champions who knew how to live life the way it was meant to be lived: straight from the gut, with all of their chips on the table. I walked out of the casino at 2 a.m. with $175 in cash, utterly convinced I was a roulette savant. Things, it seemed, were looking up for 2025.
But where was Papa? Caitlin tried to call his phone five straight times without an answer. It was after 1 a.m., we’d been there for almost five hours…who knows how many of those free drinks from overly-made up women he’d guzzled down? We’d been using the phone-tracking setting on Google Maps, and early in the night it had worked, but now every time we followed it to where he was supposed to be, he was nowhere to be found. We tramped through the maze of slot machines displaying 3D images of snakes and stampeding buffaloes and Frankenstein faces, past the smoke-free section called the OK CORRAL, in search of a tall man wearing a comically small bowler hat. The only problem was that everyone more or less looked the same sitting at a slot machine: slumped over and exhausted and vaguely lizard-like, and they were all wearing bowler hats.
“I’m going to kill him,” Caitlin said. “Why’s he not answering?”
We were running out of options, so we decided to try the GPS tracker one more time. We followed it to what appeared to be the bathroom, but when we got there, his pin leaped several centimeters to the right. “He’s on the move!” I shouted, turning towards the new location. We shuffled past an older gentleman smoking a cigarette while connected to an oxygen tank, when suddenly there was Papa, towering over everyone in all his red-cheeked glory, the bowler hat perched on his head as he stuffed a casino ticket into the cash machine. There were at least 15 semi-crumpled tickets in his left hand. Caitlin slugged him on the shoulder and shouted “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” A drunk guy in line behind us slurred “YEAH! HIT HIM HARDER!” Papa explained, logically, by my estimation, that he was eating a turkey-and-swiss in the food court and didn’t want to reach into his pocket to answer the phone with mayonnaise all over his fingers. “Makes perfect sense,” I said.
We shivered in front of the casino in freezing temperatures -waiting for Santa Claus Kristoph to return and shuttle us back to the Hampton Inn. A young man best described as a Joe Rogan bro was stomping around like an ingrate and shouting obscenities at two security guards. “OH SO THE GUY WHO STARTS THE FIGHT DOESN’T GET THROWN OUT, BUT THE GUY WHO HITS BACK DOES? THAT’S WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS [EXPLETIVE] COUNTRY, MAN.” On the bus ride back, a middle-aged guy carrying an extra large pizza box asked Kristoph if he wanted to come up to his room and party. Kristoph grunted like a depressed hog and opened the door to let us all out. On our way back to our rooms, loping down the narrow halls of the hotel, I patted Papa on the back and said that it sounded like he’d made out pretty good, considering he’d hit that $500 jackpot early on.
“Not so much,” he whispered. “I barely broke even.”
Hotel Revolution…the Banality of American Violence…the Haunted Egg of Darkness…the Divine Providence of Greedheads
Hotels: remember those? Millennials tried to destroy the hotel industry with their single-minded love of AirBnBs, and I, too, thought I preferred a whole apartment or house to a tiny room with a subpar coffee machine and, if I was lucky, a minifridge. But I couldn’t help but wonder, sitting in the dining room at 7:30 the next morning, eating a complimentary omelette and drinking coffee that was far more delicious than it had the right to be: had my generation made a terrible mistake with its wholesale dismissal of hotels? I’ve yet to stay in an AirBnB where I could walk into the kitchen and have a full breakfast laid out for me like I was some kind of 19th-century Bavarian prince. And what awaited me after breakfast? Some minor weight-lifting and 30 minutes on the elliptical, followed by a quick dip in the pool and a 10-minute soak in the hot tub, followed by another leap in the brisk pool, just to get the nerves firing again. Hotel life was the only way to travel…I resolved to never book an AirBnB again. I alone would start a hotel revolution, and my millennial brethren would have no choice but to follow me into the land of complimentary breakfasts and early-morning hot tub soaks once they, too, saw the light.
I spotted Papa walking down the hall towards the gym. He was moving at a brisk pace for a man in his 70s who’d been up until three in the morning. He was of the same mind as me, in the sense that the only sound means of combating sleep deprivation and/or a hangover was vigorous physical activity and a protein-dense meal. Just as he was about to disappear behind the wall, he turned around and squinted in my direction, unsure if it was me he was seeing, unsure if I possessed the fortitude to pull myself out of bed at dawn after such a brutal night. Once he realized it was me, he flashed a quick smile and a wave, then continued towards the gym, yanked forward by some invisible magnet that was his innate need for order and routine. The following day, on the ride home, Caitlin said she was going to have to divorce me. I was too much like Papa, and it was freaking her out: we liked the same music, held the same political beliefs, followed our daily routines unwaveringly, and were maddeningly passive-aggressive. The only reasonable solution was to kick me to the curb, to force me to live under a bridge somewhere in sparsely-populated West Virginia, to turn me into the transient I was already becoming, because not only was I like Papa, I was also sprouting the buds of a gambling addiction that would inevitably bankrupt our family and leave all three of us sleeping under a bridge in no time. What the hell, I thought. Might as well get a head start on all that.
One bad thing about hotel life is that the television in the lobby is inevitably tuned to the news, and the news is mostly depressing. This is true on an average day, but New Year’s morning turned out to be anything but average, because as I sat in that surprisingly comfortable booth, gumming an underripe banana, my left eye twitching even more violently than the night before, I glanced at the television to see that some maniac had driven a car into a crowd in New Orleans, killing more than 10 people. It was depressing to fathom, but sadly predictable: could we not go one godforsaken day without a tragedy occurring somewhere in this country? Without some psychopath blasting innocent people to hell with a firearm or a vehicle on a seemingly meaningless whim…or no whim at all, just some vague sense of misdirected rage? Mass violence verges on the banal in America in 2025, as baked into the fabric of our country as football and McDonald’s and obscene wealth inequality. Are these types of tragedies occurring more frequently in modern America, or are we simply more attuned to them because of the 24-hour news cycle and social media, both of which have been laid over real life like an infected blanket?
On the one hand, America is so vast that it’s almost a given that something bad is going to happen somewhere on any given day, then become amplified by ravenous news networks and the ceaseless internet. Still, it’s hard to deny that something fundamental feels amiss: You look at a time like the ‘60s, for instance, when major political figures were being assassinated left and right, when Charles Manson was leading a murderous cult, when young men were being arbitrarily slaughtered in Vietnam, and you think surely people back then thought they were living in End Times. “We have become a…monster in the eyes of the world – bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully,” wrote Thompson, in a slightly different context but one that, I think, applies here, too. To live in America in the ‘20s is to feel that same visceral sense of impending doom: two assassination attempts on a presidential candidate within two months of each other, the re-election of said candidate who stoked the flames of a deadly insurrection at the end of his last term, never-ending wildfires, school shootings on the regular, thousand-year floods in the Appalachians, lunatics driving vehicles into crowds, the looming prospect of a Civil War and/or WWIII, a former valedictorian executing a healthcare CEO in the middle of New York City and then being propped up as a saint-like figure…and all of this madness is just the tip of the iceberg.
Probably this scale of violence isn’t new or novel to America, and certainly not the world: it’s the way the human race has always been, and will continue to be, until thousands of years in the future, when we reach some higher rung on the evolutionary scale or otherwise eliminate ourselves from the Earth entirely – a short-lived virus that blindly devoured itself.
Maybe this widespread violence and disaster is leading to greater societal collapse, or maybe it’s just the Great Pendulum swinging too far in the direction of the sinister for the moment, but before the New Orleans tragedy even had a chance to sink in, another breaking news item flashed across the screen: a cybertruck had exploded outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, killing one. Probably this scale of violence isn’t new or novel to America, and certainly not the world: it’s the way the human race has always been, and will continue to be, until thousands of years in the future, when we reach some higher rung on the evolutionary scale or otherwise eliminate ourselves from the Earth entirely – a short-lived virus that blindly devoured itself.
A casino in late-morning has a distinctly different flavor compared to a casino at night. A casino at night, especially New Year’s Eve, feels like a brightly-lit dream, an escape from reality where a man could do anything short of lighting himself on fire without attracting attention. A casino at 11:14 a.m. on New Year’s Day, though, feels like a brutal reminder of reality: the heady freedom of the previous night has been sucked away, revealing the savage husk underneath. It’s like tip-toeing through a living room the morning after a house party and having to step over beer cans and random piles of vomit, shuffling past burn-outs and junkies turned even more hideous in the daylight. “They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas,” wrote Thompson of Vegas casino-goers. “And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them.”
I parked myself at one of the roulette tables. Papa had come about an hour earlier: by now, he was surely miles deep in the dense forest of glowing slot machines. He was doing his thing, I was doing mine, and Caitlin was (wisely) resting in the hotel room, like she did for much of the trip, temporarily freed from the rigid constraints of parenthood. A skinny white-haired man wearing a surgical mask was seated a couple of tables to my left. He was talking to a man with leathery skin in a seersucker suit who was looming over him, his thick arms crossed and matted with coarse air: “I was up last night, but I’m down today,” he said. “I don’t like to talk about my losses.”
Who does? We’re programmed to deceive ourselves about our shortcomings to preserve our fragile, distorted senses of self. If we were forced to confront our identities in full, not just the socially acceptable sheen on top but the mangled id underneath, we’d be so aghast by what we’d find that we’d become paralyzed by Fear. We’d curl up under thick blankets and refuse to leave our homes. The only solution, then, is to unconsciously lie to ourselves about the haunted egg of darkness that trembles in preparation of bursting in the darkest corners of our soul, to paint over that horror with a convenient gloss, to refuse to talk about our losses. The only means of self-preservation is self-delusion…and the only way to feel alive in a world full of boredom is to put all of your chips on the table, to gamble until your nerve-endings fray and explode like a malfunctioning lithium-ion battery. “With the truth so dull and depressing,” wrote Thompson. “The only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.”
So I gambled, and exploded, right there in the middle of the day in that smoke-filled casino. I sat down at the roulette table near the masked man who refused to talk about his losses and watched an adult version of Dennis the Menace spin a tiny white ball around a wooden board, over and over again, ad infinum. There’s something meditative about roulette, the woosh of the ball circling the outer rim, the wooden clink clank clink as it slows and falls heavily into one of the seemingly preordained slots. There’s an ordered beauty to it, like the colors of a fleeting rainbow arranged in exactly the same manner every time you see one. Also like a rainbow, you can never quite get to the heart of it. “He ain’t rolling right,” the masked guy said, turning his soft scared eyes toward me. “They need to bring back the girl who was doing it before!” A few minutes later he stomped away without printing a redeemable ticket. The last I saw of him, he was limping into the thick underbrush of slot machines, rubbing his palm on the back of his head and looking like a transient on a dark street in New Orleans, or Las Vegas, or any one of America’s doomed and brilliant cities.
My masked friend may not have liked Dennis’ rolling style, but he was doing it right for me…I was winning, again, for I alone had discovered the secret. The seeds of a gambling addiction grew a little fuller in my heart center. It wasn’t a flashy strategy. Quite the opposite. I was gambling like the 2000s Spurs played basketball, like a sequoia grows, like centuries unfold: boring and plodding, but inevitable and efficient. Most people don’t have the patience for it: those people, those degenerates, crash into a casino half-drunk determined to play their “lucky numbers” and inevitably leave a few hours later fully drunk and bemoaning the bad luck that has drained their bank accounts once again. I sit at the roulette table for hours on end like a grease-covered worker in a Ford assembly line, sober and hunch-backed and eyes glazed over, tiny explosions firing in my mind, playing the odds and putting my faith in a system I was gaining more confidence in with each passing spin. I walked in with $20 that afternoon and left an hour later with $120. High roller, I thought. My strategy was 100-percent effective after two trial runs. Sure, I was betting meager sums, but what if I scaled up? What if I started with $200? Two-thousand? Started placing hundred-dollar bets? I could make vast sums of money in no time! I could supplement the down payment on a new house, pay off our debts, fund a trip to Colombia and sit on a patio overlooking the lakes of Guatape, feet kicked up, hundred dollar bills spread out on our sun-drenched California king.
Christ, this had the potential to get very ugly. Two distinct future versions of myself flashed across my mind: the first was me chomping on a cigar in Guatape, dressed up like some kind of poor man’s Al Capone, living the high life with a rotten emptiness in my soul; the second was me wasting away in front of a roulette screen, so crook-backed and malnourished that I’d essentially solidified into an emaciated gargoyle, feeding hundred-dollar bills into a soulless machine, sucking on a cigarette while my oxygen machine hummed in the background, shouting obscenities at the game host whose rolling technique I found suspect, refusing to discuss my loses. Both of these visions gave me so much Fear that I considered retreating to the hotel room, shutting the blinds and having a long, Biblical think about what I was getting myself into.
That afternoon we stuffed our faces with black-eyed peas and collard greens at Mountain View Diner, one of Mama and Papa’s favorite restaurants during their yearly trips here. Afterward, we drove around the area, first out to Harpers Ferry, which is one of the most historic and stunning little towns on the East Coast. It was a quiet, bucolic escape from the hedonistic scene inside the casino. The town seems to be cut out of the mountain, and as you make your approach, past buildings that were likely built in the 1700s, the Potomac River to the North and the Shenandoah River to the South, a dramatic rock face appears along the water that looks like it was plucked out of the American West. Ah, the people of the West…they act like they alone are the keepers of our nation’s natural beauty, as if Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone are the Major Leagues and everything on this side of the country is merely Single-A ball. They don’t know what they’re missing. The sights out there may be more flamboyant and attention-grabbing, crowded as they are with groveling tourists from all over the globe, but here in humble Appalachia we’re blessed with silent moments of transcendence that are just as awe-inspiring as gazing up at an immense sequoia in Northern California or down into the Great Pit of Arizona.
Ah, the people of the West…they act like they alone are the keepers of our nation’s natural beauty, as if Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone are the Major Leagues and everything on this side of the country is merely Single-A ball. They don’t know what they’re missing.
We tried to find a place to park, but the town was so packed with coat-clad retirees exploring its cobblestone streets on New Year’s Day that we gunned it for Route 27, heading toward Shepherdstown, another picturesque village in the northeast corner of West Virginia…a flimsy strip of land that looks like a malignant tumor on an otherwise normally-shaped state. This tumor-ish part of the state is quite unlike the rest of West Virginia: more “D.C. and Maryland West” than Huntington or Morgantown. There’s money here and there are mansions; the rolling drive to Shepherdstown proved this. Poverty seems less visible, though surely it is here, tucked away down scarcely-traveled gravel roads, past old rusted-out trucks and dilapidated RVs abandoned on the muddy banks of contaminated creeks. Mama and Papa stayed in Shepherdstown, a mere 20 minutes from the casino, several times during their annual gambling excursions. Papa vaguely remembered the place they used to frequent: he couldn’t recall the name, but it was a large, ornate old building with a steam room and a sauna.
“Great for New Year’s Day hangovers,” I said presumptively.
“Fancy dang place,” he said. “Presidents used to stay there.”
This made sense, I thought, given our proximity to the nation’s capital. Caitlin, our navigator, eventually tracked down the building: an expansive four-story brick number that looked partially abandoned. Papa squinted: he didn’t recognize it at first. “I guess that is it,” he said. “I remember this dang parking lot. It’d usually be covered in snow.” We drove aimlessly around Shepherdstown for a while longer, happening upon a small German-style resort called the Bavarian Inn at the top of Shepherd Grade Road. The views were incredible…plus there was a pool, and a hot tub. “Dang!” said Papa. “We should stay up here next year!” Caitlin Googled the room prices: $500 for a suite. I’d have to get heavy into roulette if we wanted to afford that.
I tried to picture Mama and Papa staying in that old brick building in the mid-2010s, fresh off the month-and-a-half Christmas peak, vibrating with excitement about doing something, anything, other than driving FedEx trucks around Southwest Virginia and worrying about whether the proper packages would be delivered to the proper people in the proper amount of time. They’re in their mid-60s, just a few years from retirement…and once they retired, well, that’s when they’d really start living. I see them perched like two crows in the steam room the morning after either winning or losing big the night before, their pores oozing corn and rye, believing that this was a New Year’s tradition that would continue in perpetuity, or at least until they reached their 80s or 90s, when health problems would inevitably restrict their ability to travel and they’d have to stay home on New Year’s Eve.
That’s not how the Great Magnet wanted it to happen: it struck Mama down well before her time, just as it has struck down so many other people, instead of allowing the natural progression of atrophy to unfold. Death at 100, or even 90, is as expected as the changing seasons. Death at 69 feels briskly wrong, like a 28-degree day in July. The Great Magnet, I thought, is a hateful, callous bastard. You could spend your whole life delivering FedEx packages, grasping for the illusive (or perhaps non-existent) American Dream, motivated by some grand vision of a gold-plated retirement that convinces you to sacrifice happiness and comfort in the present for the vague prospect of bliss in the future. Why wait? With so many people croaking before their time, with maniacs driving two-ton hunks of metal into crowds of innocent people, with Cybertrucks exploding for no good reason, with everything burning, with the doomed prospect of a terminal illness striking us down at any moment, it’s illogical to reserve happiness and pleasure for tomorrow. Throw all your chips on the table now, while you still have a fighting chance.
The heart of this country has been hollowed out by greedheads who don’t have the slightest idea of how stressful life is for the average American, who operate on the flawed notion that the poor (and to them everyone is poor) get what they deserve, who believe that they accumulated their disgusting amounts of wealth by good old-fashioned hard work, with a dash of divine providence sprinkled in. To hell with anyone who isn’t able to do what they did: it was, after all, destiny.
But how? That live for today crap is appealing in theory, but virtually unachievable. We must work never-endingly just to survive, usually to our mental, physical and spiritual detriment. The system is rigged against us. The wealth did not trickle down; in fact, it’s getting worse. Billionaires waste grotesque amounts of money planning the colonization of Mars, or launching rockets into space for an ego orgasm, while the rest of us are down here in the pit, trying to figure out how we’re going to afford childcare and the mortgage this month, while also paying for ever-more-costly groceries and student loan debt, and God forbid if someone in the family has a medical emergency…there goes the little bit of money set aside for a college fund or a down payment on a slightly less-small house. The heart of this country has been hollowed out by greedheads who don’t have the slightest idea of how stressful life is for the average American, who operate on the flawed notion that the poor (and to them everyone is poor) get what they deserve, who believe that they accumulated their disgusting amounts of wealth by good old-fashioned hard work, with a dash of divine providence sprinkled in. To hell with anyone who isn’t able to do what they did: it was, after all, destiny. “The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it,” wrote Thompson. “They worship money and power and death.”
All three of us were exhausted after our brief road trip through Harpers Ferry and Shepherdstown. The sky was gray, just like it had been the day before, and we’d yet to see the slightest sliver of blue sky since arriving in Charles Town. The temperatures were in the 20s and there was no denying we were marooned in the frigid heart of winter…a perfect time of year, I thought, to isolate oneself inside a windowless, clockless casino and embrace the sugar-like high of serious gambling. Why not? West Virginia’s motto is “Wild and Wonderful,” and while the outdoor opportunities are brilliant in this state during the warmer months, there were minimal naturalistic thrills to be found in weather like this, save contracting frostbite under a bridge somewhere. Why not disorient oneself inside a hideous orgy of lights and cigarette smoke and free booze, riding the dopamine peaks and valleys like some kind of drug-addled motorcyclist with nothing better to do? Yes…there was more gambling to be done that night, but right now I didn’t want to think about any of that. I was sleep-deprived and nursing an Old Testament headache. My left eye was twitching even worse than the previous day, my neurons were shot to hell from sensory overload. My throat was dry and sticky from second-hand smoke. All I wanted to do was make our hotel room as dark possible and disappear into the realm of the unconscious, to reset my battered nervous system, to forget about myself for awhile before getting back out there and doing it all again, a once-normal 35-year-old man quickly regressing into a sap-sucking degenerate.
Groundhog’s Day at the Hampton Inn…The Siren Song of the Pink Unicorn…’Those Dang Snakes Were Spitting Money at Me!’…Lord, If I Could Only Fly
The next morning I found myself returning to the same breakfast booth, shoveling omelettes into my sad mouth and drinking coffee that was still more robust, I felt, than it had any right to be, given that American coffee, on balance, tastes like pond water rung from a muddy sock. It felt eerily like Groundhog’s Day: I was protein-loading to overcome sleep-deprivation, the television was spewing news about the violence in New Orleans (the Sugar Bowl, originally scheduled for the night before, would now be played this afternoon) and I once again spotted Papa walking down the hall towards the gym, and he did the expected turn-and-squint, followed by a quick wave, before continuing on with a morning routine he dare not deviate from. The day was unfolding so identically to the day before, and I was so disoriented from my erratic sleep schedule, that I began to have a sneaking suspicion that I was, in fact, reliving the previous day. Jumping Jesus Lord, I thought, was this Hampton Inn some sort of time warp? Was I going to be stuck in West Virginia for the rest of my life, doomed to live the same day over and over again, forever shuttling between the hotel and Hollywood Casino, slowing morphing into a hunch-backed full-time gambler with no sense of justice or morality…or even time and history, for that matter?
There was a mirror in the lobby, but I didn’t dare look at myself. I understood the toll the last two days had taken on my face and soul, and I was loath to confront the man standing pitifully in that reflection. Better to ignore all that and act like he didn’t exist…so long as I refused to look into my manic and desperate eyes, I could go on tricking myself into believing that I was living on a higher ethical plane than I actually was…
There was a mirror in the lobby, but I didn’t dare look at myself. I understood the toll the last two days had taken on my face and soul, and I was loath to confront the man standing pitifully in that reflection. Better to ignore all that and act like he didn’t exist…so long as I refused to look into my manic and desperate eyes, I could go on tricking myself into believing that I was living on a higher ethical plane than I actually was, that I wasn’t on course to become a man in a surgical mask playing roulette at 11 in the morning, inhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke through fabric and refusing to talk about my losses. Thompson understood the grim dangers of mirrors, about how they could reveal to a man the worst side of himself, the shadow self he attempts to shellac over: “My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition,” he wrote. “For a confused instant I thought that Ralph [Steadman, the artist] had brought somebody with him – a model for that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God – a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature…like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for – and it was, of course, my own.”
But what the hell? Who really gave a damn if I was throwing around a comparatively miniscule amount of money on the roulette table? The previous night, on the shuttle over to Hollywood Casino, we’d met a self-proclaimed professional gambler who claimed to have won $13,000 on one pull of the slots on New Year’s Eve. He was tapping his foot like he was playing a bass drum in an invisible band, and his whole body seemed to be vibrating to the gluttonous tune of a serious gambling jones. “Scared money don’t make money,” he said. “I’m here every day.” What he didn’t say, what he probably didn’t even care to know, was how much money he’d lost before winning 13 grand. The shuttle was being driven by a white-haired man named Spider, who was like an off-brand Kristoph: he seemed burdened by some great tragedy, full of regret at the life choices that had led him to shuttling delusional gambling addicts to and from the casino for what had to be marginal pay (the federal minimum wage in this grotesquely wealthy country is still, unfathomably, $7.25 per hour, just as it has been since 2009), and maybe a few extra bucks in the cupholder at the end of the night if his riders were generous of spirit…or, perhaps more importantly, if they’d had a good night at the slots, or found a loose 50 lying in one of the seats.
It had been a good night for me again, all things considered. I once again deployed my 2000s Spurs/growth of a sequoia/unfolding of centuries strategy at the roulette table, and it produced a rousing victory for the third time in two days: I was still operating at a 100-percent success rate, albeit with an admittedly small sample size. I’d started with $40 and walked out of that cancer-filled building at 11:30 with $440 in my wallet, a net total of $650 for the weekend. It wasn’t 13 grand, but still, I felt a muted sort of pride in myself, even more convinced that I was some kind of roulette savant, that I alone had cracked the code for a game of pure chance…which, the more I thought about it, is probably exactly how most gambling junkies feel at the onset of their dependency: riding a glittery high from early wins, they seemed primed to conquer the world, and begin devising plans for what they’ll do with all the money they’ll continue to win as a matter of course: pay off debts, quit their jobs, buy a bigger house, take an extended vacation in Guatape with a fat stack of cash spread out on a California king. Yet right as they’re poised to take flight, just when their lives are going to irrevocably change forever, they get too greedy, their fortune turns grim, their lucky numbers sour, their unbeatable strategies reveal cracks that had been hiding in plain sight, at which point they have no choice but to sell cricket paddles out of the trunks of their cars to fund their spiraling addiction. They’re drawn to those early winnings like an illusive pink unicorn, forever chasing that mythical beast down dark halls and haunted alleys, hoping to one day wrangle the thing to the ground and force it to pay up, like it did so freely at the start of all this, like they always knew it would.
The main problem is that the unicorn is always faster than you…it is, after all, a unicorn: it can gallop like the wind, and also it’s magic. The house always wins, I thought. This is the tilt of the universe. Every casino in the world would go bankrupt tomorrow if the majority of people started coming out in the black. I understood all of this as a matter of truth, yet I couldn’t shake the cock-eyed feeling that I was the chosen one, that I alone would charm the unicorn into returning to my side, never to flee again, and that I would do it through singular force of mind instead of brute speed, and I would keep the mystical creature as a pet in a vast pasture at my rustic homestead in rural Colombia, as I sat on the patio smoking cigars that I actually hated and counting fat wads of cash that made me feel more alive with the spirit and more vacuous than I ever had in my life.
They’re drawn to those early winnings like an illusive pink unicorn, forever chasing that mythical beast down dark halls and haunted alleys, hoping to one day wrangle the thing to the ground and force it to pay up, like it did so freely at the start of all this, like they always knew it would.
What’s that? Where was I? Good Christ, snap out of it! I needed to sleep, badly, or at the very least drive as far away from this godforsaken place as possible, to cross Charles Town off on the map and forget it even existed, to turn it into a black hole in my mental geography. There was nothing to do around here during the brutal winter months but gamble and give oneself frostbite under a bridge…that, and wait for the horse track to open up in the summer, which would of course lead to more gambling and an inevitable draining of the bank account and, good Lord, it was all too much to ponder at 7:30 in the morning with a head full of guilt.
I looked up from my half-devoured omelette to find Papa towering over me, his cheeks red from the hot tub, his soul invigorated by an early-morning workout, his lips spewing words in a recounting of what, if I was piecing it together correctly, seemed like a pretty good night at the casino. I sat there with dark craters punched under my eyes, sipping coffee, avoiding the nagging pull of that terrible mirror near the front desk, trying to latch on to what my father-in-law was saying:
Got dang it, I’d had a bad night. I thought ‘man, I’m going to leave here with no dang money. Yeah, man, I was walking out and I saw these two lonely slot machines in a dark corner. They were the ones with snakes on them that spit these dang coins at you. They were Terry’s [Mama’s] favorite, she would sit at those things for hours, so I thought ‘heck, I’ll give it a shot.’ Maybe Terry’ll give me some good luck here at the last minute. Well dang if I didn’t walk out of there with $300! Those dang snakes were spitting money at me like it was nothing! Terry would’ve been proud, I’ll tell ya that.
I couldn’t help but feel happy for him, knowing he’d made some money right at the two-minute warning, and just enough to make the whole trip worthwhile. I’ve always been amazed at Papa’s vitality and relative optimism…the way, at age 72, he seems sharper and more invigorated than most people half his age, myself included. I really hit the jackpot when it comes to father-in-laws: where most husbands are loath to spend time with their wife’s father, I consider mine a friend, and trips with him are genuinely enjoyable ventures. Trips, yes…had I forgotten what this trip was all about? It was supposed to be a rekindling of a New Years’ tradition, an opportunity for quality family time in the wake of my mother-in-law’s passing. But what had I been doing? Isolating myself at the roulette table while Papa wandered the slot machine jungle and Caitlin laid alone in the hotel room with the curtains closed, watching reruns of Seinfeld and enjoying some genuine relaxation while a trusted friend watched our three-year-old son back in Staunton. Papa had had a good time, that was the most important thing, but he mentioned one aspect of the trip that had started to eat at him: how lonesome he’d felt after returning to the hotel room by himself at the end of the night. “I wasn’t expecting to feel so dang sad,” he said. He was only one door down from us, but still: the person he used to share that space with was gone, never to return. Where was she now, and when would he join her – if he would ever join her at all? “Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday,” wrote Thompson. “Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street. A young girl looks out a window and wishes she were married. A drunk sleeps under a bridge. It is tomorrow.”
It was the right tomorrow for us to get out of West Virginia. We’d made our money, we’d had our fun, and it was time to skip town before the Great Magnet reversed course and hurled us back into the realm of the downtrodden. Before the Siren call of the pink unicorn bankrupted me, before some maniac walked into Hollywood Casino with an automatic weapon and blasted us into eternity. That may seem grim and hyperbolic, but who can predict when and where it’ll happen next? This is the reality of American life in 2025.
Our departure was mostly unceremonious: we stuffed luggage into the back of our Buick Enclave and I grabbed a to-go cup of that uncommonly delicious coffee. The sparkly gold dress Caitlin had worn on New Year’s Eve was tossed haphazardly on top of a lumpy pile of duffle bags. A two-hour drive back from the casino after coming out ahead is a mostly pleasant experience: you feel accomplished, like the whole mess of traveling through an eerie December thunderstorm and booking a relatively expensive hotel room for two nights was, on balance, worth it. The same drive after being beaten down into the red would’ve been, I think, a vicious burden. Papa had some experience with this, during those years when he and Mama would make the trek from Botetourt, which is an hour past Staunton on I-81: more time to ruminate on their losses, more time to regret making the trip in the first place. “We’d leave and Terry’d say ‘we’re never doing that again,’” Papa muttered in the passenger seat, gazing out the window at a blue sky that had cracked through the nightmare clouds for the first time in the new year.
It was the right tomorrow for us to get out of West Virginia. We’d made our money, we’d had our fun, and it was time to skip town before the Great Magnet reversed course and hurled us back into the realm of the downtrodden. Before the Siren call of the pink unicorn bankrupted me, before some maniac walked into Hollywood Casino with an automatic weapon and blasted us into eternity.
I had music playing on low volume over the stereo system. I’d started with a John Prine album, but now the algorithm was hurling songs at us from random outlaw country artists, including a good number of tunes by the late great Blaze Foley. “Blaze Fo-lay,” said Papa. “You know Townes Van Zandt said he was the greatest dang songwriter who ever lived.” I had no reason to dispute this, figuring if a man like Townes had said it, there must have been some truth to it. What the hell, I thought. Anybody’s good as anybody else. My head was pounding from two days of reckless shenanigans, my spasming left eye causing an even greater disturbance than it had during the drive into West Virginia. At least we weren’t dealing with black skies and thunderclaps, I thought: the weather, though cold, was pristine, and there were no storms, but also no rainbows, in sight. I found it hard to focus on much of anything, though in fits and bursts I felt the Great Magnet reeling me back towards the casino, my mind running the numbers of my inexorable future winnings through a psychic haze. There were no Red Bulls being chugged on this trip; only bottles of water being sipped on and a muted tone of, if not contentment, at least subdued complacency. My eyes were syrupy, but my ears perked up halfway through one of Papa’s stories about how he’d sprained his ankle while climbing a ladder on Mother’s Day, sometime around 1995:
“Why weren’t you spending time with Mama?” asked Caitlin, bleary-eyed from the backseat.
“Ah, I don’t know,” said Papa. “Must’ve been putting up Mother’s Day decorations or something.”
I smiled; what else could I do? Mother’s Day decorations weren’t a thing. I was happy and tired…we all were. The frantic high of the holidays had been burned out of existence and we were headed southbound on 81, back towards the mundanity of our workaday lives, back towards reality and all of the repetition and quiet desperation that entailed. The algorithm threw a Blaze song at us that seemed to justify Townes’ superlative compliment, one that put a more achingly beautiful bow on the trip than my own paltry words ever could’ve expressed:
If I could only fly, if I could only fly
I’d bid this place goodbye to come and be with you
But I can hardly stand and I got nowhere to run
Another sinking sun and one more lonely night
“We were still on the road,” wrote Thompson. “Heading for somewhere that wasn’t there. And I still have the taste of that last wild moment in my mouth – that sweet, sick feeling of the end of the whole damn American Dream.”
On the one hand, America is so vast that it’s almost a given that something bad is going to happen somewhere on any given day, then become amplified by ravenous news networks and the ceaseless internet. Still, it’s hard to deny that something fundamental feels amiss 
…the second was me wasting away in front of a roulette screen, so crook-backed and malnourished that I’d essentially solidified into an emaciated gargoyle, feeding hundred-dollar bills into a soulless machine, sucking on a cigarette while my oxygen machine hummed in the background, shouting obscenities at the game host whose rolling technique I found suspect, refusing to discuss my loses. 
We, too, almost missed the ball drop: I heard a commotion behind us and turned to see it happening on a television hanging over the bar. A young man, a kid really, in a backwards hat with “RIZZLER” stitched on the side was mashing faces with a girl who looked like an Instagram influencer. 
The only problem was that everyone more or less looked the same sitting at a slot machine: slumped over and exhausted and vaguely lizard-like, and they were all wearing bowler hats. 
Another man approached the Camry: he wore an untucked postal worker shirt and was also smoking a cigarette. The heavyset man grinned and handed the paddle to the disheveled postal worker, who ran a finger over the smooth wood and grinned approvingly. 
The system is rigged against us. The wealth did not trickle down; in fact, it’s getting worse. Billionaires waste grotesque amounts of money planning the colonization of Mars, or launching rockets into space for an ego orgasm, while the rest of us are down here in the pit, trying to figure out how we’re going to afford childcare and the mortgage this month, while also paying for ever-more-costly groceries and student loan debt, and God forbid if someone in the family has a medical emergency…there goes the little bit of money set aside for a college fund or a down payment on a slightly less-small house. 
My left eye was twitching even worse than the previous day, my neurons were shot to hell from sensory overload. My throat was dry and sticky from second-hand smoke.
Note: This piece is a parody of/ode to the Gonzo style of writing popularized by Hunter S. Thompson, most notably in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. All of the events actually happened, but some details and the writing style in general were exaggerated to enhance the Gonzo effect.
Note 2: All images were created using Google Gemini.
Ourland 
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