Stories, Thoughts and Snippets
I think I'm a decent gambler, I don't always win, but I know enough to know when to drop out, and when to put it all in, and more often than not it pays off. I figure I could have made a pretty comfortable living playing cards, but I know one thing that most people, even people who can play cards, don't know. But it seems so obvious I can only think they choose to ignore it. If you look at your average casino, it's pretty hard not to notice the amount of fucking money that has been dumped into the place, a few hundred million dollars in most cases. These places get built by people who believe they can make a lot of money, and they don't stay open unless they do make a lot of money, which means that more people, a lot more people, have to walk out those doors with a lot less money in their pocket than when they came in. This doesn't mean only drawing in suckers, it also means keeping out sharks, guys like me that know the score.
This isn't hard because casinos, like most establishments, reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. So you keep your head down, try not to flash around what you do win, play games the casino has no stake in, games where the casino just rakes a share of the pot, but when you play those games you wind up playing with people who know what they're doing, and when you sit down with eight other guys who can play as well as you can the odds aren't in your favor of coming out on top.
Besides, I like blackjack and you have to play that with the casino. I hate all of these guys who think they're so damn sharp and only play Texas Hold 'em, calling it the only real poker game. Horse shit. 10 years ago none of these bastards had even heard of the game, then they saw Rounders and some asshole convinced ESPN that poker is a sport and now its fucking everywhere. What a crock of shit. You don't see ESPN hanging out around the craps table, or the roulette wheel. Anymore you mention a game of stud poker, or straight up old fashioned draw five, and people look at you like you just suggested a rousing game of go fish.
Anyway, I go to Vegas, and usually I win enough to pay for my room, not always but usually, and I do some drinking and I watch all the skin that the rulers of this town parade around to try to distract people while their wallets bleed. I used to have a little thing going on with a showgirl, she didn't make very much as a showgirl, none of them do, so she did some stripping on the side, that was where I met her. Mind you I'm not particularly proud of that, I'm not one of those guys that rolls into town, gets a few hundred dollars in singles and plops down in a titty bar, I can get a girl on my own. I just happened to be in a club on a particular evening doing a little business and she happened to pick me as her mark for the evening. I was pretty happy about how business had been going so I wanted to celebrate, and she was willing to arrange a little extra-curricular entertainment for me when she got off her shift.
I still don't recommend strip-clubs, they're depressing places for the most part. Old fat guys that can't get any action, or are too afraid to try. I don't recommend strippers either, Sheila was a decent enough girl all around, and she gave me my money's worth, but a woman that sells herself looks at the whole arrangement a little bit differently. Once you start out as a John, you don't shake that easily, you're paying for her time, and it isn't going to be easy to convince her that you're worth knowing even if you don't bring her a present every time you come to see her. That wasn't what got me and Sheila though, we were pretty steady for a few years, every few weeks I'd run some Mexicans over the border, and then I'd come and hide with her for a few more weeks, and it worked out pretty well. Problem was, she was still working, and a guy is just expected to accept that a strippers job is their job, either you support her so she doesn't have to do that stuff, or she keeps doing that stuff. Which is fair enough, a jobs a job. Except a job isn't always a job, especially when your job is making other men believe that you want them and them to want you back badly enough to pay for your attention. Half of what strippers are doing is trying to find regulars who will support them, these guys are essentially mini-boyfriends who pay for their relationships, and sometimes if the stripper does her job well enough, she gets one of these guys to agree to the most expensive contract possible. This is particularly true with older strippers, the girls who are starting to realize their dancing days are numbered and they don't have much else going for them.