Let It Ride

When I was nineteen, my two second cousins and I took a road trip across America, from Chicago to California. It was the first time I had ever been more than a couple of hundred miles from Chicago. Our trip took us 2,100 miles down Route 66 to Los Angeles. We stopped at every roadside tourist attraction from a cheesy snake zoo in Texas to the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was a little bit more impressive than the snake zoo, and cheaper. When we got to Arizona, we decided to veer off old 66 for a side trip to Las Vegas.

At that time I was a naive kid who had never gambled in his life, unless you count buying those tickets at the carnival to win toys. When I walked into the first casino I had ever been in, Circus Circus, I was dumbstruck. While trapeze artists flew back and forth above, the loud din and gaudy lights of slot machines lured me further into the casino. I dropped my first nickel into a slot machine and a handful more came tumbling out of the bottom. 'Hey, this is great', I thought 'free money'. I loved it. The only problem was that I was under age, and before I could throw every last coin I had left into the slot machine, security zeroed in on me and kicked me out. It was probably a good thing, because I would have spent all my money and been stuck forever in Las Vegas.

I don't gamble much, and I haven't been back to Las Vegas since 1969. I do buy that suckers bet, the Lottery, every once in a while, but I never win more that a few dollars on that. Last week I took a small amount of my savings to try on-line gambling. I decided to try the biggest, riskiest on-line casino in the United States. The New York Stock Exchange. I could have just taken my money and set it on fire, or flushed it down the toilet, but what fun is that? It's more fun to watch your money disappear slowly. So far I'm down a couple of hundred dollars, but I figure the stock market has dropped so far, it has no where to go but up. It's not as glamorous as Las Vegas, but at least I can sit here and gamble in my underpants.