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Casino buffets are taken very seriously by older folks especially. They fill their plates with shellfish and suck the shrimp and the mussels, discarding the skins aside with their chomped corn cobs. I treat it as a farce – eat and sample everything I can for $17.95. Hot coffee, orange juice, iced water, corn beef hash, French toast with candied pecans and spinach salad with baby tomatoes and cucumbers and red onion marinated in olive oil and vinegar and soft serve ice cream with walnuts and vanilla sauce; fresh turkey with gravy and eggs and teriyaki green beans and cheeze blintzes, biscuits and white gravy. I sample, leaving food on my plates wantonly before surveying the other stations.
We danced at The Scorpion nightclub after resting our jackets in a booth we weren’t allowed to sit in because they were reserved for the bald 40-year olds who bought huge containers of sectioned mixed Grey Goose drinks, like a giant slurpee, with orange juice on one side and coke on the other, all in order to attract the heel-wearing, black-dressed, attractive, bored, Italian-looking girls.
It (the casino) is like an amusement park for adults. Middle-aged women ran to escalators; we smoked freely and openly ashed on the carpets; the roulette table encouraged rapid betting and when the ball fell on 8 black, hundreds of chips were collected and a stack of six – the winning six- remained. The dealer ushered the stacks in a wash into the chip hole and with the sound of cicadas clicking they filtered into an underground chip-sorting room (so I like to imagine).
Daniel the Writer 