Keno in Reno

By Ed SJC Park

Keno in Reno is a story about a San Francisco college grad stuck in the 90’s California Recession who decides to move to Reno, Nevada looking for work. He finds work, but he also encounters a whole menagerie of wild, crazy experiences involving casinos, bars, booze, guns, drugs, strippers, prostitutes, Burners, ballroom dancers, Christians, addicts, Polish cocktail waitresses, roller derby girls, a rave, a riot, prison, fights, suicide, homicide, bar crawls, and costume parties. This is a firsthand account of Reno’s “Golden Years” of partying until the Great Recession, its Roaring 00’s, synaptic sparks of blacked out bliss, intrigue, sex, lust, violence, and mayhem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781300123057

Book preview

Keno in Reno

Keno in Reno

By Ed SJC Park

Copyright © 2012 by Ed Park

All rights reserved.

No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: 2012

ISBN 978-1-300-12305-7

Acknowledgements

Robert H, Laura F, Jason G, Eric L, Tom C, Karolina, Kristen S, Tyra C, Stacey S, Dennis F, Jeri, Brad D, Carey J, Rachel, Kevin, Jay, Eric H

Introduction

As you may have already noticed by the chapter headings, this is a book about a dude who does a lot of crazy shit in Reno. Keep in mind this is a work of fiction based on real events.  These are not my memoirs.  The events that may portray me as heroic and honorable (e.g., saving someone's life) are possibly faithful reproductions of the truth while the events that may portray me as a total douchebag and criminal are contrived byproducts of my hyperactive imagination and represent absolutely no facet of reality whatsoever, and I'm pretty sure the statutes of limitations have passed on most of them anyway.  The locations of events and scenes of debauchery and crimes are all real places in Reno.  I am not saying that if you move to Reno, you'll encounter the same amount of craziness, lasciviousness, and mayhem, but if you're the type of freak to look for it, you can certainly find it in a town like Reno, and if you want to avoid all that shit, you can certainly enjoy a quiet outdoorsy family life here unencumbered by the crazed lunatic, psychopathic, fiends of the night like me.  With that said, I never liked the old saying, Truth is stranger than fiction.  I like my saying, Truth is more morally ambiguous, nonjudgmental, and less self-aware than fiction.  Truth is just what happens.  Fiction is trying to make sense of it, but sometimes it is fiction that is total nonsense.

The chapters go back and forth over a several year period for a reason.  If this annoys you, simply read all the chapters starting with A Few Years Ago and then go back and read all the chapters starting with A Few Years Later.

Part I: Paradise Lost - in Reno

Weekly Motel, Gambling, and Pawn Shop – in Reno

You never forget the first few days you move to a new city.  It’s like an amazing wonderland where you have no idea where anything is, and every street could possibly go on for infinity.  It’s like you’re in a dream.  You’re stuck in a localized reality that grows every day.  I sometimes wonder if reality is like an Excel spreadsheet where you know if you scroll down or to the right, the cells aren’t really there all along, but they only come into existence when you call them into existence but it gives you the illusion that they’re always there whether they’re on your screen or not.  It’s a very efficient way of creating a spreadsheet of unimaginable size to only create blank cells when you need them.  If reality is efficient, and evolution seems to indicate that efficiency often trumps inefficiency, then why shouldn’t reality only exist when you need it?  But isn’t that sort of juvenile like the kid who closes his eyes and thinks the lights go out for everyone else?

Whenever I travel, I remember the first morning or the first night I get off the plane and take a taxi or train to my hotel.  I remember the first few things I feel, sense, smell, see, and hear.  After a few days, everything settles down back to normal.  Wouldn’t it be cool to be disoriented for life?

I remember the empty, dry, openness of Reno.  There aren’t many trees along the roads, so you can see roads go on for quite some time.  4th Street, having once been a highway, is a long, straight street that goes on forever.  From outside my hotel, you can see a mile all the way to downtown Reno and a mile in the other direction towards Sparks.  In downtown San Francisco, buildings and hills obscure everything.  You can barely see several blocks in any direction.  Reno is a flat desert 45 hundred feet high in the mountains.  It’s weird to imagine that if Reno was transposed above San Francisco, you’d be looking 45 hundred feet straight down.  I imagine if you dropped a penny from that height, it would go flying down and penetrate some unsuspecting dude’s skull and cut right through, down to his anus.  In all probability, it would be a panhandler asking a tourist for change, ironically, or a tourist giving a panhandler change and thoroughly deserving death by penny from above.

I moved in July, and I remember the brilliant sun.  Without trees or tall buildings, you get more sun and the sky becomes vast, from horizon to horizon.  There’s a story of some Brazilian Indian who lived in the rainforest all his life.  He rarely sees things for more than a few hundred feet.  For whatever reason, he leaves and for the first time in his life, he sees a wide, open meadow, and he sees a cow in the distance.  But to him, he thinks it’s a small ant.  He has no concept of long distances and becomes shocked as the cow becomes larger and larger and larger.  At some point, he shits himself and goes crazy and returns to his rainforest tribe which is not too pleased about the whole thing as he's now a drooling moron eating his own poop muttering about ants that turn into giant monsters.

From my second floor motel room, from the bedroom window, I could see 4th Street and across the street an art store and a cowboy gear store.  I guess there was no mistaking that I was in Reno and not San Francisco.  On the other side, out of my kitchen window, there was an alleyway, a bank across the alley, and Holiday Inn with Diamond’s Casino attached to it.  I considered robbing the bank across the alley, renting a first floor motel room and simply throwing the money in through my first floor kitchen window and then walking around the front and sauntering into my motel room.  I asked myself, am I afraid of actually performing the act or am I afraid of getting caught and going to prison?  I considered using an unloaded pistol.  I wasn’t going to kill anyone by accident.  Of course, these days, all you have to do is write a little post-it that you’re holding up the bank and you have a gun in your pocket, and the tellers will hand over something.  Of course, common sense prevailed, and while I got a little excited imagining the act, I realized I had better options for making money.  Also, the idea of getting butt raped in prison was a great deterrence.  I’m pretty sure that 99% of people who do not commit crimes are deterred by the butt raping aspect of prison rather than the loss of freedom or the death penalty.  Even though most people would rather die than speak in public, I imagine most people would rather die while speaking in public than get butt raped.  Of course, the worst possible scenario would be getting butt raped to death while speaking in public.

I was almost broke so to remedy that situation, I started out taking temp office jobs.  My first task was getting to the temp offices.  That meant taking the bus, since I had sold my car to pay for rent which isn’t cheap in San Francisco.  Unless you live in Europe or New York City, it feels undignified taking the bus.  The bus stop outside of Lucky Motel was wooden planks on concrete legs with an old, faded advertisement for the back rest.  You’re actually lucky to live on East 4th Street, because there are four routes that go between Lucky Motel and downtown: Routes 5, 11, 13 and 15.  Route 11 runs the most frequently and latest and connects downtown Reno with downtown Sparks.  Since Route 11 runs up and down the motel line, the old Highway 40 corridor, you get a lot of people like me: dirt poor living in weekly motels.  But I dressed better, but I’m not sure that really says much.  It just made me stand out more, sitting on the bus in nice dress slacks, nice polished wingtips, and a dress shirt, like who the fuck is this fool?  Most every other guy was in a dirty t-shirt with faded blue jeans, some smelling like they either woke up and drank cheap booze or just never slept and drank all night.  What the fuck was I?  An office monkey who got a DUI?  An office monkey who had a crack addiction and couldn’t pay the car bills?  An office monkey with emotional problems and abusive parents who couldn’t get his shit together and wound up living in a weekly motel taking the fucking bus to a temp office job, because he was smart and had a college degree but a total fucking waste of $200K of college, because he couldn’t exploit his skills and get a good job or maybe he got a great job but totally fucked it up because he just couldn’t deal with his past or something?  Maybe being clever and really pretentious only conceals really a totally insecure, asshole nature.

One thing you immediately notice in Reno is that the high desert seems to turn everyone white.  San Francisco is a real melting pot of whites, Asians, blacks, Latinos, and transvestites.  Reno is mostly white with a large Latino population and a rather conspicuously small black and Asian population.  I’m used to black and Latino bus drivers in San Francisco, and in Reno they’re almost all white.  I hate to say it, but in large metropolitan cities, the service industry is dominated by minorities with the exception of coffee shops, bars and restaurants where young, white emo hipsters work to pay for their tattoos, nose rings,  hair dye, and obscure Midwest, 1930’s blue grass LP’s.  So why don’t they become doctors, lawyers, corporate financiers?  Dreams.  Dreams, man.  They want to be in a band, become actors, become famous, become painters and dancers.  Find me a white waiter, barista, or bartender, and I’ll find you an aspiring white actor, singer, dancer, writer, or painter.  In Reno, however, they aspire to be waiters, baristas, and bartenders in a big city.  You ask them, Why are you in Reno? and they will look at you with contempt and remorse and say, Man, I’m stuck in Reno waiting for my dreams to come true.  It’s all about the passive voice.

So why not just cruise up to Portland or Seattle?  Hell, be adventurous, go to Vancouver BC.

I don’t gots a passport man, he replies.

Okay, fine, scratch Vancouver BC.  Vancouver, Washington.

I’m waiting until the summer.

What happens then?

My girlfriend graduates from UNR.  Then I’ll be free.

So you waited until she graduated.  But where is she going?

She’s going to Brazil.

Why don’t you join her?

It’s not like that man.  We’re not getting married.  I can’t speak Spanish.  She’ll go off and do her thing.  If she returns to me, she returns to me.

If you’re not getting married, why did you wait for her to graduate?

Her ass.

Okay, so this summer, you’re going to Portland?

No man, I got a job lined up, working with kids this summer.

Look, screw that job, just go to Portland.  I’m sure you’ll find a great job there.

No.  I got to waits and sees.

And wait, and wait, and wait, and he’s still waiting, and his girlfriend never came back to Reno.  In fact, she married some douchebag from Argentina.

I’ve visited downtown Reno before when I lived in San Francisco.  It’s rather weird living in a town where you once partied and living on the other side.  Um, kind of like sleeping where you just took a shit.  Living in San Francisco, Reno is just another weekend option and a change of pace.  It’s a mini-Vegas, and you get that certain wild, gambling town, party feel.  There’s certainly more lights in downtown Reno than downtown San Francisco.  A lot of Asian cities are lit up at night making it feel more lively and exciting.  Outside of Union Square and North Beach, at night time San Francisco looks like a ghost town.  North Beach gets old after a while full of drunken tourists and sleazy strip clubs.  As a local, you figure out the hidden night spots like MOMA or SOMA or Hipsterville at 16th and Valencia and avoid the tourists unless you want to fuck one, in which case, you hang out near Union Square and North Beach.

They say that you are where you belong.  Well, tell that to the political protester who winds up in jail all his life.  Tell that to George W Bush, the coke fiend with no brain who wound up President.  Tell that to the innocent Jaycee Dugard who gets kidnapped for 18 fucking years and molested and raped all her youth.  NO, you don’t EVER wind up where you fucking belong!  Sometimes, shit just fucking happens, and you find yourself in a pile of shit, and you just don’t really belong there, and who the fuck is a loving, compassionate God to tell you that there’s a reason you live in your own pile of shit, or Jaycee Dugard deserved that?  As a lesson in bravery and perseverance for the rest of us?  I’m sure she’s going, well, fuck you very much God, but perhaps you could have just given me a fucking normal childhood instead and given me a fucking self-help book on bravery and perseverance?  I sure as shit didn't need some fucking crazed lunatic fuckbag impregnating me and keeping me and our kids out in the backyard all my youth while some fucking lucky dickhead publishes a nudie magazine and gets to fuck chicks a quarter his age.  Life is not fair folks; and fuck the people who say we're all one, because the fuck I'll ever wrap my head around being such a fuckwad like the dude who kidnapped and raped Jaycee Dugard.

When I got up early to go to my first temp job in Reno, I was standing at the bus stop.  I was standing there just pissed off at the world.  I wish I had a car.  I wish I wasn’t living in a motel, at least in Reno.  The bed headrest had congealed, dark red stains.  I imagined some dude must have blown his fucking brains out in bed, and they simply didn’t clean it all up.  The motel wasn’t exactly lucky for him.  Why the fuck would you blow your brains out in a motel called Lucky?  That’s what I don’t get.  It must have been a hipster.

I looked at the bus stop bench wooden backrest, and I wanted to do a spinning back kick and break it in half.  The impulse just came over me.  I looked down the street each way.  There were hardly any cars.  When you take the bus, you have to add like an hour of travel time.  When you have nothing, I guess you get this impulse to destroy everyone else’s shit to even the playing field.  Who cares that the bus system would have to pay to get the back rest replaced, because some dumbfuck was angry and kicked it in half?  I took a half-assed kick at it just to see how hard it would be.  I realized it was pretty thick wood.  I realized I might hurt myself if I tried.  That back rest was lucky that morning.  It was a fleeting fuck-the-world impulse.  I spotted a bus coming down the road. 

When you’re visiting a gambling town, you can get carried away with gambling, but when you start considering taking out a cash advance on your credit card and paying exorbitant fees and sometimes double the interest rate, you back down.  You have just enough money to eat and get a few drinks and return home with your tail between your legs, but once you’re home, you’re safe.  In Reno, there’s no safe, and I’m not sure how many thousands of people have fallen into the gambling trap and realized the only solution was leaving this town.  In that sense, in that natural selection evolutionary sense, you would imagine that the majority of people in Reno just have better impulse control, self-restraint, some greater ability to resist the urge to gamble all their savings away.  There’s luck and then there’s predestination.  Far from being a town of impulsive, irresponsible sinners, perhaps you need to be either a total straight lace to survive in a sin town or at least have more self-control.  But I also imagine, there’s a continual stream of people who move here, fuck up their lives, and leave, and that population at any given time remains constant in the weekly motels throughout the city. 

After getting my first paycheck, I did the responsible thing and cashed it at a casino, had a few drinks, and promptly went to the tables to gamble.  I lost a hundred bucks, and for the whole week at work, waiting for my next paycheck, I obsessed about going back and trying to break even.  I worked out a blackjack system, and I studied the craps table.  I figured there was a way to cheat the system.  I figured that casinos made their money off tourists who had no system, who just went out to have a good time throwing their money away.  I figured, as a local, I could work the numbers, keep doubling my bets after losing and bet on probability.  I could count cards.  I became obsessed, and it was easy, because I had nothing else to think about.  I didn’t have to think about friends, because I had none.  I didn’t have to think about family, because I had none.  I didn’t have to think about work, because it was mindless and only eight hours a day.  I didn’t have to think about money, because I didn’t have any.  The idle mind is the devil’s casino.  I had nothing else to entertain my mind, except perhaps the incredible and excruciating thoughts of self-loathing, self-pity, failure, and a smattering of self-hatred and hunger for vinegary hot wings and fries.  Ironically, obsessing about gambling was a great way to stop obsessing about being a loser which is exactly what obsessing about gambling would make me.

The pain and anger I had from losing another hundred convinced me that gambling was just not for me.  From then on, I just put five bucks in one of those outrageously large progressive jackpot slot machines like Megabucks or Wheel of Fortune.  Losing a hundred bucks meant a lot to me back then.  It meant eating shit convenience store burritos for a week instead of going to a restaurant.  It meant staying in Friday night watching TV instead of hanging out at a bar.  It meant pawning my gun and camera.  Going to a pawn shop is also as embarrassing as taking the bus.  There are two places you hope nobody sees you: waiting for the bus and entering a pawn shop.  Actually, three I guess, entering a blood plasma clinic.  Okay four, entering a dirty video store.  Okay five, entering a brothel, entering a Justin Bieber concert.  Okay there are probably a lot of places you don’t want to be seen. 

It’s only natural that there’s a huge pawn shop outside a casino.  Palace Pawn is a strange place.  The building is really nice, like a casino or really nice restaurant.  Inside, however, it looks like a garage sale with garbage for sale: old DVD’s, old tools, old bicycles, old knives, old guns, old jewelry.  I always imagined a pawn shop would have a lot of newer items, at least in the same decade.  I wondered how anyone could possibly pawn an Eddie Murphy DVD.  What, do you get 10 cents for it?  Then they try to sell it for $3, and while that may be a tidy profit, who the fuck is going to buy an Eddie Murphy DVD for $3?  Palace Pawn would become infamous a few years later when its owner Darren Mack killed his wife - someone said he cut out her breast implants.  He then took a rifle and took a shot at the court judge who presided over his divorce from across the river in a parking garage.  Ironically, for a pawn shop dealer who should know something about rifles, had he used a larger caliber rifle like a 308, he probably would have killed the judge.  Reno was a lucky town for Darren Mack before he decided to go ape shit nuts.  The judge was lucky he didn't know shit about the rifles he pawned.

A Few Years Later

Ceol – in Reno

Tyson had started hanging out at Ceol instead of Foley’s so now I started meeting him there at Ceol on Friday.  Ceol is more of an authentic Irish bar than Foley’s.  It has live Irish music performances, and it really packs it in until about 11 PM.  Around then, the older folk go home, and then I guess the younger folk think the bar’s dying, so they leave too.  But it has a good mixed crowd with a sufficient number of rather hot women.  It certainly had more hot, single, young women than Foley’s unless you count the Foley’s staff.  There’s a stage in back and tables around it.  The place is actually pretty long.  The bar is in the middle.  There are no TV’s or video poker machines, so it has a real old bar feel.  In front, there’s a long table and darts.  It would be a perfect bar if you put couches in front, replaced the old Irish music with a DJ, had a small dance floor, and added a dozen hot women.

Tyson was talking to a woman at the bar named Kelly.  Kelly was hanging out with some guy, but apparently, the guy had just taken off to the bathroom and been there for quite some time.  I suggested that we all go to another bar and ditch her guy.  She suspected that he may have ditched her.  She was pretty distraught about it.

How do you know the guy? I asked.

It was a first date, she replied, slurring her words.

What you meet him online? I asked.

No, we knew through a mutual friend.

Hey, Tyson jumped in, why don’t you call your mutual friend, see if he told her anything.

No, she seemed so sad, it happens.  He’s a fucktard.

Maybe he fell into the toilet and couldn’t get out?  Maybe he’s constipated?  I threw out, Maybe he got so drunk he passed out?  Do you want me to check the restroom?

Let’s go somewhere else, she offered.

I was more than willing to ditch the dude, so we all just went to Divine which is an interesting night club.  There are two floors, and the upstairs is where the DJ and dance floor is.  When it opened, it was just dead.  I guess it may have just looked too nice and fancy for Reno.  There’s a bar named Imperial a couple blocks away that does a lot better, and it has exposed brick wall and an industrial sort of motif.  Divine is like an upscale Manhattan lounge.  I guess Reno is just not ready for it.  But then oddly enough, it gets crowded in spurts.  Recently, it’s gotten the dreaded ghetto tag and more recently and consequently, it closed. 

So Tyson, Kelly, and I headed over, and I guess I cock-blocked Tyson, but Tyson was married, so I had no remorse about that.  I started dancing with Kelly, and we started kissing.  I guess it was consolation for being dumped.  But then when I turned around she started kissing some other dude.  I then got her back and left.  I took her to 5 Star.  I figured, even if she kissed some guy there, I had nothing to worry about.  I had lost Tyson and texted him, telling him to meet me at 5 Star.  I then asked her if she wanted to go back to my place.  I wasn’t about to take advantage of her.  She was drunk, and I could have just led her to my car, but I asked, and she agreed.  The next day, Tyson asked me where I was.  He had gone to 5 Star after I left.  I guess it was payback for all the times he took me to gay bars.  At my place however, she just slumped on my bed and passed out. 

I slept next to her.  The next morning, she got up and threw up.  I got her some water.  Later I learned that she had thrown up a little on my bed too.  I then offered her a beer.  I got a beer, but when I started drinking it, it made me sick.  I guess I was still drunk a little.  We started kissing, and then we screwed.  I took a shower then and drove her home.  It was awkward.  I wasn’t sure if she was really interested in me, and I wasn’t so sure I was interested in her.  I dropped her off and said goodbye without getting her number. 

A Few Years Ago

Tattoos – in Reno

Without a gambling addiction, I eventually got my ridiculously oversized 10mm pistol back from Palace Pawn and some spending money.  I did the next responsible thing and got a tattoo.  Here are the businesses in downtown Reno: first and foremost are the casinos.  Then you have bars and convenience stores.  Then you have pawn shops and tattoo parlors.  Reno and the surrounding area, one time during the big silver mining days, was like sausageville.  People don’t realize today, but back then, Virginia City and Carson were larger than Reno.  You basically stick thousands of young men together and give them a ton of money, and you get nothing but businesses that cater to young men with fast money: casinos, bars, tattoo parlors, fancy horse dealers, and brothels.  No hair salons, no baby clothing shops, no sewing shops, no fabric stores, no candle stores, no corset shops.  Just horny, young men with money to burn and perhaps once in a while, gay sex here and there with a hairless, effeminate Chinese laundry boy named Hop Sing or something.

There used to be a time when the only people who had tattoos were sailors, bikers, and prison inmates.  You were one badass to have a tattoo.  It meant you could take the pain of a thousand pricks, and that meant something in prison and in the navy, because there are a thousand pricks in prison and in the navy (ba-dum-bum).  You didn’t care that your skin was forever marked.  Now we have young girls with tramp stamps, dolphins, flowers, fucking fairies riding dolphins with flowers in their hair.  You have skinny guys with no muscles, wearing their eight year-old sister’s jeans, with tat sleeves.  The bar has been raised, so now, you have to