MARIO ruzo, who loves Las Vegas, thinks that three days is the ideal time to spend in the town. If you get lucky sooner, get out on the next plane, since the casinos make their two-billion-dollar annual profit out of one simple certainty: nobody stays lucky.
Puzo plays casino games in Vegas - baccarat, roulette, craps, blackjack - where the house's edge, the 2 to 16 percent permanently in its favor, will always eat up the gambler in the long run. Poker, even in Las Vegas, is a less one-sided struggle. Although the casinos either charge an hourly rate for one's seat or cut a small sum from each pot, the real money changes hands between the players. That is why most of the poker rooms are off to one side, away from the main action; the managements do what they can to discourage high rollers from losing their thousands to a poker player instead of throwing it off at craps or roulette. That is also why the poker professionals are the only gamblers who seem to survive the town, provided they can avoid the temptation to destroy their winnings in other, less predictable forms of gambling.
Most of them, incidentally, are banned from the blackjack tables; the casinos assume that if they can play poker at the highest level, they either must have a photographic memory for cards or can easily master one of the count- ing systems by which the blackjack player is able to beat the odds. Eric Drache, for instance, was barred the first time he tried to play the game. He knew nothing about it but was betting heavily, because that's how he always bets. He had lost $5000 in less than an hour, and then the shift changed. The new pit boss recognized him and immediately stopped the game. 'This man gambles for a living,' he said. 'He can't play here.'
'He didn't know I knew nothing about the game and had no chance of winning,' Drache told me. 'But that was fine by me. It gave me the opportunity to ask myself what I was doing there anyway. I've never played blackjack since.'
The poker professionals also survive because they spend so much time in Vegas that they are impervious to seductions that outsiders find hard to handle: the seduction of the action that never stops, and surrounds you wherever you go (there are girls in miniskirts and plunging decolletages selling keno tickets in the restaurants while you eat and at the poolside while you sunbathe, and, in fact, everywhere except on the tennis courts and the golf courses); the seduction of the moviestar image that the casinos project onto their guests (the suites of rooms with vast, draped beds, sunken baths of fake marble, twin dressing tables, his and hers, with lights all round the mirrors, just like the makeup rooms in a Hollywood studio); above all, the seductive fantasies of power, stoked high by the fantasies of money and chance.
An example: Joel first arrived in Las Vegas four years ago. It was also his first visit to America, and he was there - like thousands of other Englishmen in that brief interlude when the pound was strong and the dollar weak - because America had unexpectedly become the ideal place for a cheap family holiday. So Joel, his wife, and their children did the grand tour: they admired the view from the top of the Empire State Building and the imperial glories of Washington; they drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, visited Disneyland and Universal City and Marineland; they spent a weekend in Las Vegas; they gawked at the Grand Canyon; and then they homed with relief onto the Fontainebleau in Miami. In Vegas, they stayed at Caesars Palace, and while his wife and children swam, Joel played a little blackjack, a little poker. Since he also played regularly and competently in London, he got out of town without having done himself much harm.
Joel had one peculiarity: at home in the evenings, he never read, he never talked, he never even watched television; he just sat, staring at nothing in particular, puffing a Groucho Marx cigar. 'Maybe he was plotting how to sell another dress,' said a friend. 'For a chap in such a small way of business, he did O.K.' Perhaps. But more probably he was letting his fantasies spin, for Joel was cursed with a childish imagination and the inability to distinguish its workings from reality. To anyone who would listen, he invariably reported large poker losses as small wins, small wins as fortunes. He lived in a world of make-believe, presumably because the real world gave him so little to boast about. Since his teens, he had worked in the garment trade for a domineering father who had forced him, at the age of twenty-one, into an old-fashioned arranged marriage with the daughter of a business acquaintance. A year before the American holiday, Joel had finally broken free and set himself up in a small business of his own. The holiday, in fact, was to celebrate the first anniversary of his successful independence.
A childish imagination in a middle-aged body is the ideal formula for what John Gregory Dunne called that 'idiot Disneyland with lights' - Las Vegas. Over the years, in London, the only time Joel ever went to the theater was when Frank Sinatra was in town to give one of his special performances. He booked months in advance and took his wife, both of them dressed to kill, in the dutiful spirit in which he went to synagogue for the High Holidays. He always had a couple of spare tickets to sell, at a modest profit, over the poker table. Sinatra was singing at the Palace during Joel's weekend in Vegas, and Joel, his wife, and children sat there enthralled two nights in a row. It seemed to him an obscure sign, a portent: 'Las Vegas, Las Vegas, you're my kind of town.' Like was calling to like, and continued to call irresistibly during the months of married wrangling after Joel and his family returned to their dreary London suburb. He had raised a little capital for his new business, using his home as collateral, so, for the first time in his life, money was not a problem. He even began to do well in the London poker games, at which he had for years been one of the 'providers.' The siren call of Vegas became stronger. In November, he returned.
But Joel had not spent all those years of hard graft in the rag trade for nothing. He wanted to go back in style, and he also wanted to go back with the least possible expense to himself. So he arranged a twenty-thousanddollar line of credit with Caesars Palace. 'Not to gamble,' he said. 'Just to play poker. But in that town you've got to have status.' Naturally, the hotel treated him as it treats any customer who indicates that he has a respectable amount to lose: like a king. He was provided, free of charge, with an elegant suite - a circular bed, sunken bath, drinks on the sideboard in the sitting room, a bird's-eye view of the swimming pool. He was bowed to, smiled at, coddled and flattered, wined and dined with the compliments of the management, and provided, also courtesy of the management, with an obliging lady friend. This was a man who had spent his whole adult life with a woman with whom he had scarcely exchanged a civil word, let alone a civil touch, and who was still too terrified of his father ever to risk being caught out in an affair. No matter that the Las Vegas woman was large and rawboned, with peroxide hair and spangles on her glasses, the fifth of eight children of a security guard from Texarkana; she treated him as regally as everyone else at Caesars Palace did, feigned enthusiasm, and knew how to make him feel manly after a lifetime of subjugation and worthlessness. Belatedly, he discovered the pleasures of sex. He went around in a daze, watching her greedily and with wonder, as if she had just invented the wheel. His fantasies spun more dizzily than ever. At the age of forty-six, he had finally, he decided, fallen in love, but with the desperation of middle age, knowing this might be his last chance. He bought her a hideous gold bracelet and a blue Pontiac Firebird and asked her to marry him. She refused, of course, but in such a way as to leave the door ajar, since a good mark is hard to find, particularly in Las Vegas. Worse still, the confidence she gave him rubbed off at the poker table; he came out winning a few hundred dollars, he claimed, and that meant he did not lose much.
And it finished him. He went back to London, left his wife, and set himself up in an apartment he could not afford. He telephoned the girl in Las Vegas every day and sent her $500 a week, so that she would not need to work. She shared the money with her pimp and continued to do business as usual. Two months later, Joel returned, hoping to make money at the tables. He lost. Once again, he asked her to marry him; once again, she refused. 'At least change your job,' he pleaded. 'Go to dealers' school. I'll pay.' His doggedness exasperated her, but she was not a bad-hearted girl. 'Joel,' she said, patting his thin hair gently, 'you peddle schmattes, I peddle pussy. That's my job.'
Joel flew back to London, sold what was left of his business, returned to Las Vegas, found another blonde hooker - this one from Lubbock, Texas - and went through the whole performance again. He also kept on losing, although all he could talk about was his broken heart. It was pure Vegas magic: in less than a year Joel had been transformed from a walk-on uncle in Goodbye, Columbus into a tormented Dostoevskian, weeping helplessly on the sofa while his whore tore up bank notes and threw them on the fire. He seemed curiously elated by the role, high on his own disasters. He embraced Vegas as the early Christian martyrs embraced their gridirons: it was his fate, his justification, his fantasy of fantasies. Back in London again, he boasted about his misfortune, claiming he had been set up by the mob: when they heard of his credit at Caesars, he claimed, they sent the girls after him and took a hefty percentage of the money and presents he showered them with. When the girls held back, he added, they were given cement overcoats and dumped in Lake Mead.
Then Joel himself disappeared, trailing bad debts, including an unpaid bill for £750 for telephone calls from London to Las Vegas. Nobody thought to blame the mob. He is rumored to be in Johannesburg, but his wife, who has remarried, is not convinced.
As a fantasist transfixed on his own imagination, Joel was doomed from the start both by the town and by the game. 'There can be no self-deception for a poker player,' Mickey Appleman said. 'You have to be a realist to be successful. You can't think you've played well if you lose consistently. Unless you can judge how well you play relative to the others, you have no chance.' Another reason Joel had no chance was that he was unable to disentangle his gambling from his sex life. This is not a muddle that the professional players ever allow themselves. Nearly all are married to women who, with varying degrees of difficulty, have made their peace with the problems of living with an addict: the vacillation between feast and famine, the long absences while their husbands are on the road, 'driving the white line' from game to game, or the different, more complex absence of someone who is physically present while his whole attention is elsewhere. 'It takes a special sort of woman to handle marriage to a professional poker player,' Bobby Baldwin said. 'She has to know she can't change him. She marries him the way he is, with certain habits, certain things he's accustomed to, and she has to learn to live with them.' Baldwin is usually as sensitive and delicate as a young girl in his attitude toward people, scrupulously polite, scrupulously modest, but on this topic his voice was as steely as it was at the poker table, without a flicker of apology. 'As I see it, if a man is not allowed to live his life the way he sees fit, then he's with the wrong person. You can't sacrifice your life just because someone gives you a me-or-it ultimatum. And that cuts both ways, of course. I've been married twice. I loved my first wife very much, but she just couldn't cope with the lifestyle of a gambler. Shirley, my second wife, seems to like it. I was very lucky to find her.'
Shirley Baldwin is a small-town version of Jacqueline Onassis: bouffant hair, round face, small features, a diamond as big as the Ritz. Like the other wives, she sometimes watches her husband play in important games, sitting glumly through the long hours of monotony and stilted conversation, ready to smile encouragement or respond to a private joke when something like that is required, as patient as a nun and as devoted. But more often the wives keep away from the casinos, carrying on with their lives and their families as if poker were just a profession like any other. Virgie Moss and Louise Brunson keep an eye on the family investments and the day-to-day finances, worry about the children, make sure their husbands have clean laundry and proper meals, and never ask about wins or losses but know how to be appreciative or sympathetic, as the situation demands. Some of the younger wives are, predictably, less bound by the traditional domestic role; Jane Drache, for instance, is studying for a B.A. at Columbia, and her husband has seen to it that she is financially secure in her own right. 'I want our marriage to be based on our relationship, not on money,' he said. 'She can leave me any time she wants, and it won't be a monetary decision.' But the Draches are New Yorkers among the Texans, exceptions in a world of old-fashioned male bravado. 'Women's all right,' said Amarillo Slim. 'Only place in the world you can beat one and not get thrown in jail is at the poker table.'
Whatever part the wives play, they provide their husbands with a base, a stable point in a notoriously shifting world. 'Family and wife and kids give you a foundation,' Bobby Baldwin said. 'They give you the motivation to be strong and solid, to have backbone, heart, fortitude, or whatever you want to call it. They give you a purpose in life. Without that, it would be hard to control yourself in this business, because if you had no responsibilities, what would it matter if you won or lost? I myself get a big kick out of spoiling my wife and family - and that includes my parents, my grandmother, my brothers. Some of the guys out here know nothing but the gambling world. Well, that's all right, except I think they miss out on the best part of life. Me, I stop to smell the roses.'
Mickey Appleman, too, stops to smell the roses, New York style; that is, he reads a great deal, practices meditation, thinks hard about his life and what he is doing with it. On the subject of family, he agrees with Baldwin, but wistfully and from the other side of the fence. 'A lot of the guys have someone to go back to,' he says. 'That security is a source of strength in poker; it helps them win. Me, I'm single. When I finish playing, I go up to my room and, like, I'm alone with myself. So, in a way, it's harder.'
Yet Appleman is alone by choice, since, as even Joel discovered, there is no shortage of friendly women in Vegas. The high-stakes poker games always have their groupies loitering at the edges, attracted by the aphrodisiacs of big money and risk. But the atmosphere at Binion's during the poker tournament, despite all the din and razzle-dazzle and tough talking, is strangely sexless. For five weeks each year, the place becomes a world of men without women. Or, rather, the women are there but - except for the few who sit down to play the men on equal terms - only as color in the background, like the voice of the hotel operator over the intercom or the rattle of chips. There is no trace at all of the sensual charge that usually bristles in the air of a holiday resort. The women who do connect seem to spend most of the time listening morosely to passionate but obscure accounts of how some freak tried to run a bluff with a pair of sixes: 'I mean, what's two lousy sixes?' The women smile and nod and glance furtively around for relief.
One evening, I was in the elevator of the Golden Nugget with a tall middle-aged cowboy with the aquiline profile and fierce beard of a Spanish conquistador - a man who that afternoon, in true conquistador fashion, had been destroying the nonprofessional hold 'em event. I had seen him seated unmoving behind two gigantic towers, one of black hundred dollar chips, the other of gray five hundreds capped with three blacks. Each tower was over a foot high and perfectly symmetrical, rising from a base of three chips set side by side. They looked like giant space-age architectural fantasies built in Lego by a patient child - appropriately, patience being what the game is about. But the tournament was over for the day, and now the cowboy was ascending majestically to his room with an Anita Loos blonde in a low-cut pink dress and very high heels, who held a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She hummed 'Nowhere Man' to herself and smiled vaguely while the elevator rose and he analyzed for me a key hand I had watched him play. He seemed utterly unaware of her. 'When he raises in an early position,' he was saying, 'I have to read him for nothing better than ace-jack.' The elevator stopped, the doors slid apart. The blonde started forward, then hesitated. He raised his hand like a traffic cop, pressed the button to hold the doors open, and continued, 'Two aces, two kings, ace-king, he'd have sent it around in the hope of getting in a reraise.' Then he moved courteously aside, bowing slightly to the girl as she stepped out in front of him. As the doors closed again, he took her silently by the arm to guide her down the hall. A couple of hours later, when I came down after a nap, the girl was drinking alone at the bar of the Golden Nugget and he was playing poker again across the road at the Horseshoe.
The little old-fashioned courtesies (he was, after all, a man in his fifties), the silence, the firm, businesslike hand gripping the girl's elbow and guiding her to his room were all part of a formal exchange: sex without sensuality, without even much interest; sex bought as one might buy a drink - as a way of winding down after the tension and concentration of gambling, as a hunger to be assuaged, like other hungers, for a fixed price.
Brothels are legal in Nevada, and sexual hypocrisy is the one vice that Las Vegas has never aspired to. At the bus stops along the Strip, there are give-away newspapers offering every variety of playmates of both sexes. The bordellos and the call-girl agencies ('No need to leave your hotel room') take full-page spreads with blurred, stylized photographs, credit-card logos, and dreadful double-entendres: 'The perfect way to climax your stay in Las Vegas.' There are also columns of coy personal ads for freelancers with names like Sherri, Terri, Lori, and Desarya. A topless bar just off the Strip not only has dancing girls to cater to most tastes - one fat, one thin, one tough, one yielding - but also offers to customers who can no longer manage the four steps up from the parking lot to the bar a ramp for wheelchairs. There seems no end to the depression induced in the name of pleasure by the entrepreneurs of Clark County, Nevada, and it spreads outward, to professionals and nonprofessionals alike. 'I feel that the women here have been hardened,' Mickey Appleman said. 'They're not vulnerable, like the women back East. It's like they've had their insides stripped out. I guess it's tragic in its own way, but this town is hard on everybody. It strips away your spirituality. In order to be successful on a continual basis out here, you have to remain nonemotional. But when a gambler is nonemotional, then he becomes detached from the person he really is. That's the basic problem of living in Las Vegas: you become despiritualized.'
Despiritualized, depersonalized, one-dimensional: that is how life in any Disneyland must always be. But during the World Series of Poker the atmosphere at Binion's Horseshoe is as unwavering and concentrated as that of an Olympic training camp. I have never seen so many apparently healthy men gathered together in one place for so long with such single-mindedness: no sex, no drink, just the turn of the cards hour after hour and the little thrill of excitement and expectation at each new deal.
One afternoon when I was on the way back from my daily swim, two black hookers and their pimp got into the elevator with me at the Mint. The girls were big and exuberant, the man thin as a whippet, with quick, nervous gestures. All of them were festooned like Christmas trees with necklaces and bangles. One of the girls rubbed her shoulder against mine and asked, 'Care for a li'l fun, hon?' She was, I suppose, eighteen years old. I smiled and shook my head and said, 'I'm too old for fun.' She rolled her eyes at the others and winked meaningfully: 'Ah make you feel young again, man.' We all laughed, though probably at different jokes, the elevator doors opened on the casino, and the three of them strode off, chattering. Odd, I thought, not even to have been tempted.
But later, when I settled down to the evening's hold 'em session at the Nugget and picked up my first cards, my eyes felt fresh, my heart was beating sweetly, all my senses were alert. As the hooker would have said, I felt young again. Perhaps the Freudians are right, after all, when they talk of gambling as sublimation. In the words of another addict, 'Sex is good, but poker lasts longer.'