Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage Page B

further and further apart as the night wore on. In between the short times I was up, I fell into the hole, and as the night wore on, the holes kept getting deeper and deeper. I was up $200; then I was down $500. Then I was up $100; then I was down $1,000. Then I crawled back up to around $2,700; then I started falling, falling, falling. When I got down to $1,000, I thought maybe I should quit. Then the money was all gone.
    I walked back over the bridge to downtown Dubuque. I had to force myself to keep walking, remembering not to turn around. Turning around and looking back at the Diamond Jo wouldn’t turn me into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife. It would, however, pull me back in. I knew that if I turned my head to look, my body would turn with it, and then my feet would carry me back to the casino. I felt as if I were turning inside out, like I was walking through thin sheets of acid, as if each step that took me closer to the empty Julien Inn peeled off a layer of my skin. My heart was pounding. I was raw and I felt exposed and violated and . . . and . . . completely . . . desperately . . . alive.
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    B ack at the Julien Inn, skinned alive but safe in my room, I sat next to the window and looked at the Diamond Jo. Every once in a while, a car went over the bridge, carrying some other sucker down to the boat. I suddenly remembered that woman playing War in Las Vegas, the woman who burst into tears when she lost her last chip. She took a risk, she lost, she cried. She felt something specific and painful—and something personal, since it was her pain. She wasn’t living vicariously through Nicole Brown-Simpson or Princess Di or New York City firefighters or an unhappy couple hashing things out on Oprah with Dr. Phil. Something happened to her. She had a sensation, something sharp and specific and personal. We live in a culture that celebrates and elevates the victim, so perhaps that woman secretly enjoyed her safe, packaged, consensual victimization at the hands of that casino. She sat in a plush room, on a padded chair, had a complimentary cocktail, and wagered her way to victimhood. And when it was all over, she got to have a good cry—for herself, not for Diana or Nicole or New York City.
    I’d been victimized, too—by my own greed and my own inability to get up and leave the casino when it was clear the cards weren’t falling my way. Three thousand dollars is a lot of money, but sitting in my room, the lights and TV off, looking out over the Diamond Jo and the Mississippi River, I had to admit that I didn’t regret the gambling, even after losing so much money. The feelings I had walking back over that bridge the night I won $410 and the night I lost $3,000 were intense and, I had to admit, worth it.
    We know the house always wins—the house even tells us so. Shit, the house rubs our noses in it. They give us free cocktails, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we can afford to give booze away.” They build billion-dollar hotels and resorts and rent us rooms at less than it costs to have our room cleaned every day, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we can run the hotel part of this business at a total loss and still make millions.” They fill their casinos with brass and glass and marble and gold and carpets and chandeliers, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we have to sit up nights thinking of new shit to blow it on.” The casinos make money because once we’re in Las Vegas or on the boat or at the Indian casino in the middle of nowhere, they know we’re going to gamble, and when we gamble, we lose. We know we’re going to lose, because they told us so, and yet we gamble anyway. So I don’t think greed is the reason people gamble—greedy people own casinos; they don’t visit them. People gamble because they want to feel what I felt the night I lost three