Lettin' It Ride

Finally, after a couple of weeks of just horrendous tokes, we finally seem to be making better money again. We have about 30 brand-new dealers now, and damn near every one of them came from some crummy place with bad money, and to a person they've all said something asinine like 'Well, anything over a hundred bucks a day is great to me!'

Newsflash here, kiddies, if you're satisfied with just a hundred bucks a day, then I don't want you in my casino. Don't float along just happy to be here and drag my tokes down with you--step up, hustle, smile, tell jokes, and be nice to people. And do your damndest to not be satisfied unless you're happy making closer to two hundred a day. Otherwise, go back to your break-in joints and grind out a living there. I work too frickin' hard being nice to people to roll into work on a Friday night and find out that I busted my ass for only $125 the night before.

Anyhow, I was either dead wrong a few posts back, or the bosses have been reading my blog, because on Monday night I was exiled to Let It Ride for four of the longest hours of my life. I swear I'd rather be getting dental work done for four straight hours while Kevin Federline's latest cd played on an endless loop in the background than have to do that again. Seriously, I'd rather deal a quarter dice game in a leper colony than be on the Let It Ride string. I'm a firm believer that people who play Let It Ride for hours on end are those not quite swift enough to have mastered the whole 'pick a number' concept of difficult games like Roulette.

Can you tell that I hate that game?

As soon as I learned of my fate, I ran over and signed my name on the Early Out list, since it was my Friday night anyways. But when 2 am rolled around and the guy ahead of me on the list was still pitching cards, I figured I'd be doing the whole shift. Once they moved me to dice for the last couple of hours, I told the floor manager to just take me off of the E.O. list and I would be perfectly happy at the craps table for the balance of the evening.

Once the clock struck 3:40, I was lucky enough to get away from the table and empty the toke boxes for a few minutes before heading home. Once I clocked out and headed for the garage, I was taking a shortcut through the lobby outside of the bowling alley when I saw my friend Cindy sitting at a penny machine giggling away at the video bonus screen. So instead of going home, I sat down with her and put a buck in the machine on top of her credits. Since we were the only players in the area (at 4am on a Tuesday morning), and the waitress knew we were dealers, she was Johnny-on-the-spot with the cocktails, knowing she'd make a couple of bucks every few minutes instead of wandering around in a mostly-empty section getting stiffed by the random chain-smoking degenerates still up pounding the slot machines at that hour.

I honestly have no idea what constitutes a win on those damn penny machines--losing screens look just like the winning ones to me, so I was content to just sit there yukking in up with Cindy and enjoying my bottomless glass of Captain and Seven. After a few bucks were sucked up, we moved over to the giant UFO-sized Wheel of Fortune machine outside of the movie theatre and dropped $20 apiece in, hoping to spin the big wheel.

I was shocked, shocked I tell you, when the machine ate our entire forty bucks without giving us a single spin. Pat and Vanna can kiss my hairy white ass. I heard it was a fun machine, but my experience indicates otherwise.

After that quick prison-shower-scene at the hands of the WOF penny machine, we were off to find another machine that might give us our money back. We didn't want to wander too far and knock the cocktail waitress off our scent, so just a few feet away we camped out at the Pay Dirt penny machine. For those of you unfamiliar with Pay Dirt, it's theme is old-west gold rush. But after about five minutes, we discovered another feature of the machine that was more fun than spinning the wheels and coming up empty while staring at a screen full of cartoonish gold miners, pick axes, and dynamite.

There were five buttons to choose from to select the amount of lines you wanted to play; either 1, 3, 5, 9, or 15 lines. But the cool thing we discovered that whenever you pressed one of those buttons, it played a unique musical note. Once that feature revealed itself, it took me all of about thirty seconds to figure out how to play Ode to Joy on the slot machine. After a few shots of vodka (for Cindy), and a couple of glasses of the Captain for me, there was seriously nothing on earth more entertaining than sitting there pretending I was a lounge performer asking random people if they had any requests.

Due to having only five notes to choose from, my repertoire was somewhat limited. But I thought Cindy might pee her pants when I figured out the intro to Ring of Fire, and insisted on playing it before every spin.

Of course we didn't win a dime--we lost another $40, but damn, did we ever get our share of laughs. While I was sitting there being the Amadeus of the penny machines, I couldn't help but giggle to myself and think how much more fun it would be if Angy and Andrea were there too.

Cindy is a lot of fun, but her buffoonery threshold is almost as limited as my musical talent.

After the money ran out, we decided to call it a night (isn't that how most nights end in Vegas?). I came home and went to bed, glad that my night that had started out so shiatty had ended on a positive note (or five).

Mikey