GenePool Humor

You don't end up staying married for fifteen years by accident. No, friends, it takes a lot of work and a lot of patience and a lot of alcohol. But more than those three things, takes learning how to work around your differences.

Please note I did not say "work out" your differences, because that is a very different thing.
Let's say you like your coffee strong and dark, and your spouse prefers decaf. You could debate this, each of you making an effort to bring the other over to their side, "working out" the difference in a way that will likely result in your screeching about how decaf is inherently evil, while your spouse uses the screeching as an example of why you need to cut back on your caffeine. Or, you could "work around" the problem by buying two brands of coffee. Or two coffee machines, if necessary.

Now of course there are examples where work-arounds don't really take care of the problem. For instance, perhaps one of you likes taking long walks on the beach while the other prefers to fuck waitresses. This is slightly less tenable, and if this is the kind of problem you deal with in your marriage, I recommend not attempting to remain together for fifteen years.

I mention the work-around because my wife likes to gamble, whereas I prefer to keep my money. In the past we have resolved this by my letting her go off with her mother to Vegas periodically, after first handing her the money she can safely spend and then liquidating all of our accounts and taking away her debit card. This had been working just fine up until this year, when a perfect storm of events conspired to create a problem. Those events were A: the tax money came in and we had no significant bills to pay with it, B: our fifteenth anniversary arrived with us still officially married, and C: the children got older and therefore were less likely to set the house on fire or flush one of the pets if left unattended. Which is how I ended up with Deb asking me to take her to Mohegan Sun for the weekend, and me having no excuses left to not do so.

Mohegan Sun is an Indian tribe casino in southeastern Connecticut that is approximately 140 miles away from our home and-- perhaps of lesser relevance-- roughly 2 miles away from where Deb grew up. So in order to get this done-- because I wasn't going to just truck on down there and then truck right on back again without sleeping somewhere-- I had to find a hotel with a vacancy that was closer to the 2 than the 140, and that didn't cost the rent money to book. (Booking at the casino itself was not a viable option, because while there were rooms available for Saturday, the cost was: the rent money, two arms, a leg, and a kidney.) To that end I secured two nights at a Comfort Suites Inn eight miles away for a reasonable rate. The hotel bragged of a swimming pool, exercise facilities, a shuttle to the casino, and a free continental breakfast, so I had happy visions of us spending a couple of leisurely hours at Mohegan then going back to the hotel, having a swim, relaxing in our room, and not going back to Mohegan again because, gosh, we were having such a nice time at the hotel.

I was obviously putting far too much faith in the hotel's ability to advertise itself honestly. Either that or I was missing the proper secret decoder ring to translate "pool" into "large, unheated hot tub", "exercise room" into "three retired cardio machines in a windowless basement storage room next to the washer/dryer", and "free continental breakfast" into "we have no room service".

We checked into the hotel after Midnight, having left home sometime after 10:30 on friday night. This was because we had both worked all day and had neglected to pack before friday, and Deb ended up having to work past 8 because the people at her work hate her or something. I'm not clear on those details.

Thus my first introduction to Mohegan Sun was around 1 AM early on saturday morning. I was half-starved and thoroughly exhausted after working a full day and driving for nearly two hours. In other words, put a beer in my hand and I was exactly the sort of person a casino owner loves to see walk through the door.

And what a big door it was. As I tried to explain to Deb in between the gawking and the staring and the pointing, my two experiences involving casinos were: a small one we visited in Aruba for long enough to lose $100 (twenty minutes) and the ones on television shows like CSI and Vegas. Mohegan had been described to me as smaller than Foxwoods (the other Connecticut casino) and Foxwoods as smaller than the typical Vegas casino, so I was expecting something of the seedy Aruba variety. Or maybe just one as small as the casino in Vegas, whose entire security force consists of James Caan. Silly me: this place was huge. It took us more than half an hour to find (on a map) and walk to food, and during that time I was bombarded by a spectacle of lights and noises and smells and ugly people, and pretty people, and pretty ugly people, and while I did not have a seizure because of all of this I was expecting to, and I was looking forward to it.

Anyway, once we figured out which mile marker to turn off of to reach the restaurants, we sat down at an all-night place called Fidelia's. While waiting, Deb tried to give me good solid advice on how to play the slots, which she herself expected to be ignoring by the end of the weekend. ("Don't stay on a machine if it doesn't hit on anything after four pulls" was a particularly well-ignored maxim.) Then we ate. Then we played the slots. And all I can say is thank God we agreed to spend no more than $50 apiece beforehand, because I really don't remember what happened on those machines, except that I couldn't win one one of them to save my life and if I didn't have a limit I would have probably kept right on going.

This is why I don't like slots: they're utterly random, and they trick you into thinking you've won something when you haven't. (Because most of the time the credits gained don't outweigh the initial bet.) If my wife were writing this part-- or her mother, from whom much of this wisdom originated-- she would tell you all about not playing machines that are near the tables, knowing when to double your bet in anticipation of an impending hot streak that is probably all in your mind, getting next to people who are winning in case there's a "frenzy", and so on. For me, you put money in the machine, you push the button, and it pays or it doesn't pay, and then you go on with your life. Sure, if it pays you can argue that it was paying because you happened to be leaning on your right butt cheek, or you were "due", or you paused just long enough, or you happened to be thinking about what Hitler looked like without the cheesy moustache. But you're probably fooling yourself.

That said, Deb turned her $50 into $172 in two hours. I turned my $50 into $5 and a gnawing ennui.

We left at 4:30 in the morning. I had no idea how to get back to the hotel, so while we were on the road and pointed in approximately the correct direction, I asked Deb where to go at a certain juncture, and she said "how should I know?"

"Because you have the directions," I pointed out.

"Oh. They're in the trunk."

She proceeded to make suggestions based on what town the hotel was in, which might be good if one knew roughly where in the town the hotel was located and what the name of the hotel was, and we had neither. Had I not turned around and restarted from the casino after seeing signs for towns that I think might be imaginary, I'm fairly positive my wife's directions would have gotten us to her childhood home before we went anywhere near the hotel.

The next day was a bit better, but not as much as one might think. For starters, I never ever sleep my first night in a hotel, no matter how tired I happen to be. This is something I need to print on a card and stick in my wallet because I always forget it until it's time to actually sleep, and then it's too late to plan properly. Still I was less tired when we got back to the casino, and thus prepared to play the tables.

"Don't play the tables," I've been told, by many many people. "You'll lose all your money." The thing is, I had already experienced the joy of losing all my money at the slots, so I didn't see any problem with losing all of it at blackjack instead. And besides, in slots the strategy consists of "push the button when the machine tells you it's ready, and then watch your balance shrink". There's slightly more going on in cards.

Actually, a lot more. What I knew about blackjack was: don't go over 21 but do beat the dealer's hand; the dealer has to take a card on a 16 or lower and stop at 17 or higher; aces can be 1 or 11. Here's what I didn't know: you can split a pair, but it's not a good idea to do it unless you have two low cards and the dealer is showing a low card or unless you have two aces; you should double your bet if you have an 11 or an ace and a low card if the dealer is showing a low card, unless the woman next to you is telling you to, because she's been wrong all night; don't touch the cards; you should stay on anything over 11 if the dealer is showing a low card and hit on anything up to 16 if the dealer is showing a 7 or higher; seriously, don't TOUCH the cards; do not talk on your cell phone at the table; if the whole table plays using the same basic strategy everybody wins or nobody wins, but by Christ we're in this together either way; fear sixes; pee during shuffles, preferably in the nearest bathroom; get the hell off the table when it goes cold before you lose the money you started with rather than after, because "this has got to turn around eventually" is just as illogical as leaning on the proper butt cheek at the slot machine.

And I didn't learn all there is to learn. For instance, there's something called "insurance" for when the dealer is showing an ace. I still have no idea what it is.

I was at a ten dollar table. I'd spent the better part of the afternoon looking for a table with a reasonable minimum so that when I completely fucked up-- and I expected to completely fuck up-- I did not do it in under ten minutes. It turns out that at certain times of the day most of the tables start low and then grow over the course of the evening, with the existing bettors grandfathered. By the end of the night I was still betting ten dollars a hand while everyone else had to throw down twenty-five.

So starting with $60, I managed to lose everything in about an hour. Not ready to give up, I did what I absolutely should not have done and bought in with another $20. I lost the first ten on the next hand, won the hand after that, and, in another hour had earned back the total of $80 and doubled it. I'm as surprised as you are. An hour after that I had another $20 and I was thinking I was some kind of savant.

Oh yeah, that's another rule I forgot to mention: I am not a savant.

There were four of us playing: me, a very tired Asian fellow, and a husband and wife. The husband owned a car dealership but, as his wife explained "does this (meaning gamble) for a living." He had about three grand in chips in front of him, having earned most of it at our table. And we were all doing just fine until the tired Asian said he really had to quit. Then the table went cold. The couple realized it first and got out, leaving just me to continue with the dealer, who was clearly trying to get rid of me by going faster than my brain could factor. And self-evidently, everyone else in the room could smell the cold table, because nobody joined in. I finally stopped when I realized I only had a total of $120 in chips in front of me, and $80 of it was my seed money.

There is something rather important I neglected to mention about this weekend: there was a snowstorm coming. A massive Nor'Easter was bearing down on the region, and was supposed to hit hard early sunday morning. As news of this storm did not reach us until after we'd made the reservations, there was no way we were backing out. It just meant the drive home was going to be slightly more difficult was all. Little snow, little wind, whatever. I grew up driving in this kind of crap; we'd be fine.

On sunday morning I turned to the Weather Channel while we packed up and prepared to check out, and learned that everyone on the station had completely lost their minds. This is something you kind of have to get used to when watching the Weather Channel and there's a storm that's actually dropping snow in New York City. Somehow, this makes it a much bigger deal. They kept cutting to different on-the-scene reporters, so the collective news went something like this:

Connecticut: "I'm in downtown New Haven and it's snowing, but things are pretty calm because we're in a bit of a lull right now, so please go to someone else because this isn't scary enough."

Massachusetts: "I'm standing next to the ocean in Gloucester. The wind is unbelievable, the snow is blinding, my nose is about to fall off from frostbite, I'm on my second cameraman because the first one was blown into a light pole a minute ago, and I'm frightened and alone, because nobody else with half a brain would be standing next to the ocean during a friggin' Nor'Easter. I'm going to keep talking and pretend that conditions all over the state are exactly the same as they are standing next to the ocean, even though most of the state is nowhere near the ocean."

Pennsylvania: "I'm... somewhere in Pennsylvania. Don't know where, but we just saw a barn, if that helps. It's snowing pretty hard here, but we don't have an ocean to stand next to, so to look more pitifully cold on camera I'm going to remove my pants."

New York: "AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!"

My conclusion was that yeah, it was snowing, but it really wasn't that bad and we should be fine if we just stayed the hell out of Gloucester.

Well, as long as the donut held up.

Here's something else kind of important that I neglected to mention. When we left the hotel on saturday morning, we discovered the car's right rear tire was flat. (It could have been worse. Had it gone flat when we left the casino the night before, for instance, I think we would have just slept in the car.) We replaced it with the donut-- the little spare tire that is only supposed to get you to the nearest gas station-- and after debating whether to spend the afternoon looking for someone to fix it or to just head to Mohegan, we decided on the latter.

I'm sure many of you-- like my mother, for example, who just said a loud curse word and picked up the phone to yell at me-- are thinking this was a foolish decision. But here was our reasoning:

Point 1: the reason you are not supposed to drive for long on the donut is that, being smaller, the air inside is under siginificantly greater pressure, and when air is under greater pressure it heats more efficiently. Ergo, a donut on the highway is much more likely to melt and/or explode than a standard tire.

Point 2: however, we would be driving it in a Nor'Easter, meaning significant quantities of snow, high winds, and sub-zero temperatures. What better conditions could there possibly be to compensate for an overheating donut?

Point 3: we had slept through the complimentary breakfast, and were very hungry.

And as I learned at the table on saturday and again on sunday, everyone has a donut story about how they, or their father, or their friend, drove great distances on the donut, sometimes for years. I grant that this could be because everyone with a story about how the donut exploded on them and sent their car careering out of control into an oak tree is also dead, but it was still reassuring.

Oh yes: we didn't head straight home from the hotel; we went back to the casino. Again, there is solid reasoning behind this. With a check-out time of 11 AM, we couldn't wait out the storm in the hotel room, and once we got on the road and discovered that every time the wind blew the road completely disappeared, it only made sense to get the hell off the road again. Plus, Deb was feeling lucky. And so was I.

Yet another rule: I am not lucky, and neither is my wife.

At blackjack, I started out with another $60, doubled it, watched the table go cold and did not get up before I lost what I started with, then I lost what I started with, threw in another $20, lost that-- which is why I should not have done it the night before-- and fled the table in shame. The whole thing took about ninety minutes. Deb, meanwhile, had managed to win $50 on a penny slot machine while the guy next to her won $200. She then went to a $.50 machine and blew all of the $50. I started playing slots with my customary results-- now fearing the tables-- as Deb tried a few other machines to turn her luck around, and before we knew it, we were in the hole over $200.

And it was 3:30 in the afternoon, and we hadn't eaten yet. I'd wanted to get back on the road by 2 so as to not have to worry about nightfall, but that obviously was not happening. So we ate quickly at a buffet-- we'd spent the whole weekend looking for their buffet area before finally finding it, which is sort of a shame because while the restaurants were nice, we ended up spending more on food than on anything else-- and got out onto the road.

Two-and-a-half hours of unadulterated terror later we made it home alive, which was frankly amazing under the circumstances. Never mind the donut, I also didn't have any windshield wiper fluid in my well-- the jug was in the trunk next to the directions for the hotel-- so I was half blind the whole drive (put down the phone, mom.) And naturally, the driveway was under between fourteen and twenty inches of snow that we had to shovel through just to get the car off the road.

All told, it wasn't a bad weekend, really, especially if one decides to pretend sunday never existed, as I shall be doing as soon as I finish writing this. Design-wise, Mohegan Sun looks like what might happen if the Cheesecake Factory and the Rainforest Cafe had a child with a gland problem. But it's clean, the people are friendly, and, while we did lose most of the money we brought with us, that didn't happen right away, so we got to enjoy the illusion of success for a little while.

This does not mean I have changed my opinion on gambling. But since the biggest gamble we took the whole weekend involved the drive home, having the dealer hit 21 with five cards against my two tens doesn't seem like that big a deal in the larger perspective.

Not that I won't be just as pissed to lose on that hand next time.

© 2006, Gene Doucette

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