i am not a slot jockey (vegas, baby ii)

we learned two things in vegas i never knew…

1. it’s never too early to bathe yourself in axe body spray and pollute an elevator
2. it’s never too early to fuck up gambling

but this was a good fuck up…sorta.

the hard rock casino is loaded with killer memorabilia. one of the things i found really inspirational, albeit from a band i enjoy but they’re far from one of my faves, was the original foot triggers for one-armed drummer rick allen’s kit from def leppard, along with the kit, obviously. it was inspirational – keep in mind he lost his after their pyromania album, which was big, but not nearly the juggernaut that hysteria was, which was recorded AFTER he lost his arm. the drummer loses an arm, and they come back to the biggest album sales of their career with worldwide sales exceeding 25,000,000 partially due to this:

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as i took my pic, and touched ’em, i said to myself, “see, anything is possible”. and turned to walk away only to find myself right next to the “high roller” room, so i said fuck it, and walked in. i normally just play slots, so i walked over to the row of five dollar ones, pulled the last bill out of my money clip (a fifty i’d saved for dinner back in lockhart that night) and dropped it in. pulled the lever once, and hit – fifteen credits! i’m no slouch at basic math, so i know “15 x $5 = $75”. i made myself a deal:

pull the lever four more times – if you win, you’re still capped at four pulls. if you lose, that drops you to eleven credits, which is fifty-five bucks…still more than you put in. cash out then, walk away, and you can always brag you won your last day in vegas!

so i pulled the lever four more times, lost all four, cashed out and walked away with a ticket to turn into paper spendy money…but on my way to the bank i looked down at it and saw it said “$275”.

i froze.

i went back and looked at the machine to see the last machine on the row of five dollar slots was a TWENTY-five dollar slot machine…so those fifteen credits didn’t take me up to seventy-five dollars, they had taken me to THREE HUNDRED and seventy-five dollars…er go, the four pulls i’d just done didn’t kill twenty bucks, but a hundred.

that sucked.

but i still walked with $275, which is more than i gambled the entire trip, so i came out ahead not just for the day but for the whole shebang. i have no complaints!

(but realizing you lost a hundy when you thought you lost a twenty still stings!)

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