Where I met my beloved; where there is no income tax; where I first sat down at a 7-stud Casino table thirty years ago and learned how to not lose my week’s paycheck while drinking tequila and playing cards. It’s not gambling. It’s the only game in town where you’re not playing against the house. A little math, a little time, a little discipline, and come to Papa.
It’s not a guarantee, on any given night, though. Gambling is not viewed with distance or indifference by the Hawks. They’re into it.
RW has many tales of reckless nights, big ups, big downs, dawn bringing jittery decision
time, with no mental resources left. The stakes are high, and so am I, got me a rock and roll band, it’s a free for all.*
PL is up about $300 in sum total, he figures, from his twenty or so ventures into the city where what happens here stays here and on the big screen TV. PL’s natural lack of faith in his own financial acumen sets a limit of $60 nursing cards at a $5 minimum table. It can
be done.
Cooler heads have prevailed in this desert oven environ, and we gas up and get out of east Las Vegas, a brief swing through the glittering lights, and we’re back on the I-15, now shrouded in darkness. We still might stake PM to a poker game in Mesquite, before entering the north Arizona quadrant, where small towns are run by Latter Day patriarchs with 20 young wives, and the law is God’s alone. *Ted Nugent’s “Free For All” 1971