Monday... Finally!

Damn, it's been a looooong week for your humble correspondent. Being Super Bowl weekend, it was extremely busy in the casino this weekend--I worked my sizable white ass off! And on a happy note, it turns out that Saturday's tokes broke the $200 barrier for the first time in over a year. Yep, that's right--in the entire calendar year of 2007, we didn't have a single day where tokes were over $200. We had one day that came close, just a few cents short, but it's been a long time since we've had a good day like that. I'm hoping yesterday was just as good, but I could tell we weren't quite as busy.

Also, I was stuck dealing mostly blackjack all weekend, and that just wears a brotha out, especially if you're doing it for three or four hours straight. Ugh.

The worst part was when I got into work on Thursday night, my first table of the week was an hour on that crappy-assed $5 Pai Gow table that everyone hates. Talk about your flea circus! Every hour on that table is an hour-long prison sentence. I was stuck over there last night too, the table was completely full for over four hours, and I didn't drop the first toke into the box until 10:30! Yep, one lone five-dollar chip hit the bottom of the box with a clang from a dude who I happened to deal four full-houses to in a row, so he georged me up with a fiver. Thinking that the box sounded a little hollow, I lifted the lid to take a look and saw that lonely chip sitting there all by itself. At that point I felt absolutely no remorse for just crushing everyone at the table over the course of the next half hour or so. Heh.

Anyhow, one of the biggest fleas in the casino (we call him 'Alvin') plays that $5 game every night, and just annoys the hell out of everyone. He's one of those guys who has to play everybody else's hand, never shuts up, and overuses the dealers name, while generally being a stiff. I swear, if I took a shot of whiskey every time I heard the name 'Mikey' when I was dealing to him, I'd be dead from alcohol poisoning inside of half an hour.

So there he was during my first hour of my workweek, just sitting there in seat 2, next to me, being an annoying little troll. The lady in seat 7, next to me on the other side, was chain-smoking her cigarettes and just letting them sit in the ashtray and burn non-stop for hours on end, creating a nasty blue haze around the table that couldn't be avoided, no matter how many times I tried to blow it back towards her.

At one point, I was riffling the cards before putting them in the Shufflemaster, and I was damn near overcome with second-hand smoke. So I started coughing loudly and uncontrollably for a few seconds. Well, at that very instant, I accidentally busted out the rankest, nastiest fart you could possibly imagine. But since I was coughing so much, combined with all of the other extraneous casino noise, nobody heard it.

A few seconds later, the foul stench started to creep across the table, damn near making my eyes water. So what did I do?

I made a full-on disgusted face and said Jesus Al, did you do that?!?!? That's just frickin' gross, man!

Of course, he was like, Huh? What?, and then about five seconds later everyone else caught a whiff and started going off on him, telling him he was a nasty freak and to have better manners and such. I totally blamed him for it and it totally stuck.

Heh.

And it was even more fun because he kept denying it and it just made him look more and more like he was guilty. I could barely contain myself, because a couple of the people at the table put their shirts up over their noses and wouldn't let it die--they just kept ripping on the guy for being so foul. He finally got so embarrassed that he left.

Highlight of the night!

Another night I was dealing Deuces Wild to this dirty old foreign guy who kept grabbing at the waitress's asses every time they'd come to the table. I swear, he was 80 years old if he was a day, and he had one of those extremely long and droopy faces that reminded me of a cross between a British senior citizen and a Bassett hound. He looked like his name would be something like Jeeves or Alistair or something like that, and was drunk on Scotch.

He kept saying stuff like Give me a jackpot hand, Mikey--I wanna go to the whorehouse tonight! much to everyone else's delight who happened to be at the table at the same time. One of the waitresses stopped by and dropped off another drink for him, and he gave her a $10 bill. She leaned down to ask him if he wanted change, and he reached over and grabbed her directly on the ass, telling her to do whatever she wanted. Of course she jumped back, kept the ten-spot, and never delivered another drink to the table.

When I was coming back from break a bit later, I saw my favorite waitress, who now had that same section. I flagged her down and pointed him out and said to avoid him. She told me that she was already aware of him and that he'd already tried to grab her earlier, so she delivered his drinks using the beer-man-in-the-stadium method, standing at the end of the table and having everyone pass it down. But she also told me that he'd already propositioned her, asking her to drive him home. When she said she didn't have a car, he said That's ok, I have a room here! and then started flicking his tongue at her... Needless to say, she was rather disgusted.

Anyhow, he sat there for hours, and I had to deal to him again. I told him that if he put a paw on "my" waitress, I'd come across this table like a spider monkey! But by that time he was so drunk and oblivious that he didn't realize that all the other players at the table were making fun of him. He kept saying he wanted to go to the whorehouse, and one of the other old guys said Dude--they're gonna make you pay double if you go!

Why's that? said 'Alistair'

Because at your age, the chick's gonna have to stand on her head in the corner so you can drop it in!

Hell, I even laughed at that one. But he finally lost enough money and drank enough Scotch that he called it a night and shuffled off to his room, alone. I never saw him again for the rest of the weekend, but I sure hope he found a nice lonely old lady and got some satisfaction.

The rest of the weekend was just a blur of drunken fools and an endless parade of cards and chips. As hard as I worked these past few days, I'm glad that tonight will be a little slower. And I saw on the road map that I'm scheduled back on my favorite string of tables in Chinatown tonight, so it'll be a nice easy way to slide into my weekend.

But I've been home for almost five hours now, and still haven't gone to bed, so I'm going to try and get a few hours worth of sleep before I head back to the cul-de-sac of broken dreams.

Peace out, y'all.

Mikey