Word: casino
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...Needles, California, and the sad stories pour forth. There's the fireman who fled his eastern Washington home when his wife started sleeping with his fire-station colleagues. He moved to Alaska, worked security on the pipeline, then drifted south, where he gambles away his earnings as a casino janitor. There's the Michigan supermarket checker whose husband left when she told him she had breast cancer. Eight operations and a nervous breakdown later, she is worried about losing her new lover, a gas-station attendant. There's the Chicago doctor whose divorce and emergency-room stress...
...Sidney Gibson, quietly fries hamburger on a hot plate. A 27-year-old Native American, he traveled to Bullhead City from Oakland, California, with his brother, who "painted a beautiful picture of good work and higher pay. I should have known it was bull." Across the river is the casino boomtown of Laughlin, Nevada, and his brother, a gambler, landed in jail for a bad check, Gibson says. Now Gibson, who spent his teenage years in an Oregon correction facility, works in a Kingman plastics factory. But he dreams of heading to Northern California to pan for gold. "Nothing...
...Indians who are buying up local motels. Paul Coyle, a 59-year-old retired welder with a long white beard and trembling hands, lives on Social Security and drinks a bottle of 151-proof Bacardi a day. He moved into the motel three months ago, after living in a casino parking lot for two years in his 1967 Cadillac. When his wife left him in 1986, Coyle had the names of his 16 children tattooed in a heart on his back; on his chest another tattoo reads I LOVE MY FAMILY. MARRIED OCT. 12, 1958, CITY TEMPLE, GRANITE CITY...
...bear names of Ms. Monroe's films. Julian wants to take his money and his girl and be on his way, but there are, as Harry points out, two major problems with that plan. The first is that Lucille has taken up with Tuerto (James Belushi), a ball-scratching casino-owner and thug. The second is that "the money the weirdness is gone." And here is where the weirdness starts...
Vegas is the perfect setting for a story of destiny and magic. Day and night are indistinguishable inside a casino, and after a certain point, magic (in the form of luck) is the only way to win at gambling. Johnny (big-D) Destiny is, as Harry puts it, a "small-g, god" of luck, and is therefore the small-g, god of Las Vegas. Not only does he controls who enters and who leaves, and all they do while they stay there. We never see anyone come or go who is not driven in by Destiny or transported...