Season of the Royal Flush
There is cold, and there is cold during a video poker losing
streak. Cold on a video poker machine is like being beaten with
cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising
cold. The casino's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and
whisk it away; caught in the cold rain of an October losing
streak, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like
shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I
expect to ultimately hit a Royal Flush with my cheeks and
forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just
the misery of nerves not designed for the long term.
Despite this, it's hard to give up my video poker machines in
the losing season and I rush to get Franklins in the bill
acceptor again the very next day; lapses of sanity like this are
common among video poker players. When you let the full pay
machines into your life you're changed forever. The words "ROYAL
FLUSH NO DEUCES" are stamped on your driver's license right next
to your sex and height as if advantage play was just another of
your characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.
But when the warm winning season finally does come around all
those cold snaps of losing and rainstorms of poverty are paid in
full because a video poker summer is worth any price. A video
poker machine is not just a slot machine; the difference between
playing a slot and playing a video poker machine is the
difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We
spend all our time sealed in boxes and slots are just the
rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-slot to
work-slot to store-slot and back, the whole time entombed in
stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling
of carpets.
At a video poker machine I know I'm alive. When I play, even the
familiar seems strange and glorious. The dealt cards have weight
and substance as I push through and feel the touch of the hold
buttons as intimately as a swimmer feels water. I feel the cool
wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of
sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a
sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than PanaVision
and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or floor.
Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom
telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the
pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises
acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But at a video poker
machine I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras,
women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by the "MAX
PLAY" button.
At speeds of nine hundred games per hour and up, smells become
uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and
flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a
great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so
strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air
around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time
machines to unlock it.
A Royal Flush on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous.
The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my
nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems
check for my soul.
It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed,
apathetic, numb, but now, on MY seat at MY winning video poker
machine, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my
face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.
Slot machines are only a secondary function. A video poker
machine is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal
bird, a randomized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and
dirty and warm and cold lapping all over each other; it's a
conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the
holy.
I still think of myself as a video poker amateur, but by now
I've had a handful of IRS signers over a half dozen years and
have slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one
second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to play
was one of the best things I've done.
Slot machines lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in
control. The cooling fans murmur empty assurances and whisper,
"Sleep, sleep." Video poker machines tell us a more useful
truth: we are small, exposed, and probably playing too fast for
our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of
the ride....