Flat Stanley & the Praying Mantis
Illustration by Kat Morgan I knew I was middle-aged when I started to like smooth jazz. I hum along, slide $100 into a Caveman Keno machine, and sit with my legs crossed, exposing my hairy thighs like an embarrassing dad. I’m just 35, and childless, but aging parents and grandparents appear to be the casino’s target demographic. A few rounds in, I look to my left and see a little girl and her mother at a Video Poker unit.
Kids aren’t allowed to hang out in casinos. The actual law forbids it. I guess Binion’s quit enforcing that one, so the rest of us have to pretend this depressing atmosphere didn’t get even sadder. The woman pokes the touchscreen, selecting hold cards and slapping the “DEAL” button, while her daughter unzips a backpack and takes out a folder, worksheet and a pencil with a big, brain-shaped eraser. They must live in Vegas too. Now, along with her schoolwork, the child will absorb lessons on chasing four-of-a-kinds and royal flushes while lighting one cigarette with the tip of another.
I sip my drink. The perfume the casino pumps in fails to mask drifting odors of smoke, farts, and sweat. The plinky drone of bloops and beeps from the machines almost stifles the little girl’s loud reading from her schoolwork. I know casinos can’t be trusted with something as important as babysitting, but there ought to be a place kids can go study while their parents scratch their gambling itch.
I was about 10—maybe the same age as the girl—when I first watched my Auntie Carla play slot machines on a family trip to Las Vegas. I got the insane urge to play too, so I grabbed a quarter from her tray, plunked it into the next machine, and yanked the lever, immediately feeling that same rush I feel now as bells, cherries, and 7s spun in the machine’s gold-painted windows. “Mijo!” my auntie gasped. Knowing what I’d done was totally illegal made it all the more thrilling. But by the time the symbols stopped, a security guard arrived to chide my aunt: “Kids can’t touch the machines!” I’d lost, anyway.
To the little girl’s credit, she doesn’t seem tempted to imitate her mom’s habit so much as she seems ready to drag her out. The kid glares every time the woman talks to the machine: “I need an eight …. One more heart…. Why couldn’t I get this jack the last time?”
Where I teach, at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, most students grew up in the area and it’s not uncommon for them to write essays about a mom or dad whose gambling habit was so crippling, the other parent took the kids and moved out. Once, I received a poem from a creative writing student about a child who rescues his mom from a castle that sounds an awful lot like the Excalibur Hotel & Casino, where she’s held captive by a monster that flashes and jingles like a slot machine. Those students told me they’ll never gamble, and not for fear of inheriting the addiction but rather to spite an industry that devastated their early lives.
A flurry of automated applause, followed by the simulated noise of coins clattering into a metal tray, cling cling cling, signals that the mom won. She’ll probably cling to that
