Saturday night at the casino. Hot women in cocktail dresses. Dudes dressed like Clooney, trying to impress hot women in cocktail dresses. High rollers, big earrings, a little too much exposed skin. Young-just-out-of-college kids with too much time and money and their hands getting excitable in the poker room . Older wealthy couples with too much time on their hands sitting at the blackjack tables. Single retirees who invested well spinning the high-stakes slots. Everywhere, the smell of perfume, money and good cigar smoke.
Uh, no.
The most attractive thing I saw while dealing this Saturday night was a mid-30s guy who looked a lot like Matt LeBlanc, circa Friends, Season 1. Even sported the horrible leather vest and the weird asymmetrical haircut. The next most attractive thing I saw was a fake blonde whose face looked like 45 years of dive bars nights. Lines that would make Pacino’s grill jealous. Neck-down, it appeared as if she’d won 10 grand on some Cincinnati scratch-off and got a nice new set of boobs and a decent dress from Macy’s to show them off. Scoping her from the table-up went something like this: Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-GOO!
Most Saturday nights at my place of employ are decent as far as clientele goes. A good mix of trying-a-little-too-hard older Milfs, tight-jeaned college girls and their metrosexual boyfriends with the popped collars, stoic older gentlemen with sausage-fingers, big rings and creepy KGB accents. An interesting, not un-attractive mix, for the most part. Not so this past week. This Saturday night looked an awful lot like a Wednesday night. And let me tell you about the casino on a Wednesday night.
If you’re at the casino on a Wednesday night/Thursday morning, you are one of these people: The older Asian lady in a winter hat floating between 12 blackjack tables, trying to find a hot one and managing to lose 1200 bucks in the process. The grizzled old grinder trying to break even in the last three hours before he has to get back to painting those houses. The fat lady in quad-focals who stuffs her sweatpant cuffs into her socks before sprawling out across three stools to hit the button on a single video slot for seven hours. The dude with the permanent squint in one eye who keeps getting dealt 20 and slamming the table when the dealer slow-rolls a six-card 21. The young ugly girl with no apparent handicap who buzzes around in her Rascal, three Styrofoam cups of complimentary Mountain Dew sloshing in the basket. Oh yeah, I can’t forget the classic chain smoker dragging around the oxygen tank.
These aren’t specific examples. These are archetypes. I see multiple versions of every one of these examples all week long. Saturday is supposed to belong to the pretty and moneyed. Maybe we need to hire a doorman.
