At the time, I never thought the trips my mother took me on were all that bad. In fact, most of them weren’t. Though her idea of a vacation differed from my childhood expectations of Disneyland and water parks, our frequent weekend excursions always managed to entertain me, and more often than not, ended up being educational as well. It’s hard to say that three days in Albany is anything a nine-year-old would want to brag about to his classmates after returning from Easter break, but I somehow always managed to overlook the slums, the dilapidation, the vagrancy and see, well, a bunch of pretty buildings in our state capital.
And then there were times we went to Atlantic City. To this day, I’m not too sure why my mom thought this would make a fun trip, let alone somewhat of an annual tradition (I recall at least three instances where we made the eight-hour voyage). I can’t say I have ever been to Las Vegas, but I imagine that if you took away all the booze, speed, Carrot Top matinees, sliced off a quarter of town and dumped it on the precious New Jersey coast, you might have something that comes close to resembling Atlantic City. You would need some taffy, too. A lot of taffy.
My mother doesn’t gamble, and being barely old enough to be trusted on my own, today I still question her choice in destination. Although I don’t think her intentions were unjust, I kind of wonder if she wanted me to see what a life of addiction can lead to; more accurately, what it leads to if you don’t do it right. If you ever have any true addiction, you can generally count on being dead before you’re 35. Not in Atlantic City. These were people who played their cards, lost their dough, and didn’t look back—very, very slowly. If spending your social security check has already become a cumbersome task, Atlantic City is where you go. Over-priced prime rib dinners, polluted beaches, gimmicky hotels, and of course, there’s the sub-par gambling. If Las Vegas is a town built on the gambling industry, then Atlantic City is constructed on the art of throwing your money straight down the toilet.
Though we kept coming back for the taffy and those always unpleasant strolls down the boardwalk, I had seen my fair share of casinos before puberty, and once you see a Chippendales’ reject in faux-Roman battle gear hawk souvenir photos in front of the other Caesar’s Palace, you’ve pretty much seen them all. By age fifteen, every image of a slot machine would just conjure up the repulsive remembrance of sand in my shoes, old, fat women in red ladybug dresses and piss-poor Oceanside pizza. Once I hit nineteen, the legal gambling age in Canada, my mother had already ruined gambling and New Jersey for me. Even Springsteen couldn’t redeem that state.
As my friends would make weekly excursions north of the border to get drunk and play poker, I stayed in. I couldn’t fathom spending any of my hard earned money on a risk. The thing with gambling is sometimes you lose your money. It’s a gamble. It never appealed to me. Why take the chance of doubling the measly fifteen dollars I had to my name when I could treat myself to Dairy Queen. Like, five times. I’d be fucking stupid to diss ol’ DQ.
What I’m trying to say isn’t that my unhealthy obsession with ice cream outshined the temptation of gambling. I know I built up to that, but I never said I was a good writer. Next time you think about blowing your paycheck on a risk, think about all the swell things money can buy you. Things other than more or less money: lapdances, drugs, 32-ounce steaks, whisky, or hey, a chance to see the world. Nothing will quite help you ruin your image of gambling like a week-long stay in scenic Atlantic City, New Jersey. Come for the salt-water taffy, stay for the ominous gray crowd that never leaves the sky, the third-rate street performers, the echoing ding-ding-ding of seniors cashing in on nickel slots, the hypo needle-rich sandy shore.
Or just blow it. This isn’t an intervention. Just remember what Wesley Snipes said in 1992’s Passenger 57, “Do you ever play roulette? Well, let me give you a little advice: Always bet on black.” Snipes for the win.
