Today I went into Pahrump with my son.  He went to a couple of the casinos looking for work.  I sat down at a 5c keno machine for about an hour while I waited for him to fill out an application and take it back.  It was strange.  I used to play keno machines every day.  Way back when the Mirage first opened, I went every night after work and played – the frequency became less and less.  Now it’s been about 4 times in 3 years – and I have no desire.  That’s the whole answer to the perplexity of gambling MOI thinks…desire.  The sickness of addiction is what pushes the desire and makes it so paramount that you have to do it.  Literally, some people HAVE to do it.  I’m not sure what drove me at the time, but it left a long time ago.

Of course I lost the $20 to the machine, that’s how they build and remodel casinos and they offer all those freebies.  When my son went to the next casino, I went to the pawn shop that’s in the same parking lot…what a handy deal. What a great opportunity, lose your money at the casino, take your goods to the pawn shop, go back to the casino.  I’ve never gone in and cruised a pawn shop before.  The sign said they had guns.  They didn’t.  They do take them in, buy or pawn, and when unclaimed, they are sent into Las Vegas where they get sold at an online auction.    When I walked into the pawn shop, eyeing the shelves and cases filled with electronics, tools, jewelry, game cds, and other things, the first thing that hit me was despair.  It was written on everything in there.

Thinking about despair took me back to the bar at the Oxford.  What was left for most of those people?  Like Chubby?  I met Karl.  Rather I should say, I served him a mug of beer that he nursed for two hours before he ordered the next one.  We didn’t speak.  I was quite a good looking chick in those days, but he wasn’t interested in a piece of tail or being charming, he came to drink.  He stared at the wall behind the bar, never looking to either side or trying to strike up conversation with anyone.  I heard from some of the old timers that Karl used to be an accountant at the pulp mill.  He just quit, is what the word was.  He chose to sit at the bar instead.  Somewhere, there had to be a reason behind his being there, but no one I know of ever found out why.

I wanted to puke when Karl came in.  He always wore a dress coat – gray.  He had shoulder length, straight, gray hair, and piles of it on the shoulders and back of his jacket – it looked like something a rat would build a nest out of and he had horrible dandruff.  Either he never took the coat off and slept sitting up, or he took it off, put it over the back of a chair, and put it back on the following day without disturbing the rat’s nest.  Then it got much worse for me when I watched him pick up the stemmed mug, take a sip of beer, set the mug down, rub his fingers up over his chin and lips towards his nose, repeat a few times, and pick up the mug for his next sip a moment later.  The glass had a thick slime on it.  I found myself taking a bar towel to pick up the old glass with when I brought him a fresh one.

Another gent named Frank was a wino and loved to have a Kazoony of Mogan David or something that was ridiculously cheap.  He liked to talk and didn’t sit like Chubby and Karl, he would come in and shoot down a few glasses of wine and then hit the door.  I remember him particularly because Sundays were my 10 hour shit and I was close to the end of it one day, exhausted after having worked until 2 a.m. the night before and back at 8 a.m. to open the bar.  It was a busy day and I ran a lot of beer and shots across the bar and just before my relief came in, it got quiet.  I walked around the end of the bar and climbed onto a stool, putting my back to the bar, I leaned back into it.  It felt like heaven after bending over the sinks, pushing drinks, and on my feet all day.

Frank magically appeared from nowhere.  He jumped right in front of me, putting his hands on each side of me on the bar so he was fully positioned in my face, and excitedly started to tell me something.  He spit chew all over my face.  FUCK!  I jumped up to his apologizing and went back behind the bar, looking into the smoke stained mirror on the wall, picking pieces of chew off of my face and wiping up with a damp cloth.  Double FUCK!  One day he came in and as soon as the boards were down, he ordered wine.  I watched him try to navigate the glass to his mouth, his hands were shaking so badly he spilled half of it before he got the first sip.

The Indians used to come in off the reservation – I know this sounds like I’m prejudice, but I’m not – they did come in and bought bottles, usually of Thunderbird wine because it was cheap.  Sometimes the same two or three would come back in a number of times in one day and buy another bottle.  We sold hard liquor and cheap wine at the OX.

I really didn’t realize the prejudice against Indians or anyone else for most of my life, I still don’t get it, but I got an eye-opener behind the bar one day.  A nicely dressed woman came in, somewhere around 40 is my guess (remember I was much younger in those days) and the bar was quiet so we ended up visiting.

Some people I can tell their nationality, others and mixes, I couldn’t tell you jack and I never spent much time thinking anyone was different than me.  This woman was just another woman at the bar as far as I could tell.  Although I always found it odd that a woman would go to a bar and drink alone in those days but what the hell do I know.  She started talking about Indians and the injustice they’d received and went on and on about it until I finally said something that went like this, “Well, my mom and dad were born and raised in America and no one ever gave them any land or government paycheck.  They worked all their life for what they have.  What happened a 100 years ago can’t be changed and we didn’t do it to the Indians.”

OMG!  You’d have thought I stuck a fork in her eye.  She was pissed.  She informed me that she was Indian and that I had no idea what it was like to walk down the street and have to step off the sidewalk because a white person was coming toward you.  She’s right.  I don’t.  I let her rant.  Nothing I could say or do would change it and nothing I could say or do would change the injustice done to the Indians.

I still have issues with the fact that something that happened in history should have to be revisited every day and we should feel obligated to cure the idiocy of our forefathers.

Then there were the freaks.

One came in one day and sat at the bar close to the cooler and the sinks down on the end by the food counter.  He was the only one there most of the day.  I didn’t like the way he looked at me and I found it to be an overall disgusting feeling of being raped without someone touching you.  Every time he ordered a drink he tried to engage me in conversation.  I steered as far away as possible.  Around 4 p.m. the cook that could toss an egg 20 feet up to the greasy ceiling and crack it, catch it on the way down and break it onto the griddle without missing a beat, Paul, came in to work.  Paul was quite a character but I fell in love with that character on this day.

The freak ordered another drink and was licking my vagina with his eyes when he bluntly asked me to go home with him when I got off work.

I said, “NO!”

He couldn’t leave it alone, “Come on!  I’ve already got off on you five times.  Why not?”

Feeling like I had to puke on him, I replied, “I’m going home to my husband.”

He got too smart, “Oh Yeah?  Who’s your husband?”

Paul danced right out of the opening between the kitchen counter and the bar with a big frigging knife in his hand held up chest high.  “I AM!”

The freak never even finished his drink.

“I love you Paul!”