Casino Connection

           I don’t tell many people this, but I work for a casino. You see, I don’t gamble. I don’t even buy lottery tickets or donate money to charities which offer an opportunity to get a car I could barely afford to have repaired. And I don’t understand why people gamble – the odds are against them – basic math. The whole thing seems somewhat Darwinian to me.

           My job at the casino is to repair slot machines and other devices that separated people from their money. Over use and abuse made that a busy job. It is not how I started my career. I just transferred my skills and knowledge of similarly-run devices, and took a job that paid better than others I had worked at before.

           There are a lot of stories that I can tell about what I see and hear at my job, all of them a little bizarre. Sometimes when a machine is broken and I am called into to repair it I am faced by a look of separation and despair from the person who had been using it. There is a close relationship between person and machine. Times when someone decides to ‘try my luck with another machine’ seem fairly rare to me-

           One recent example comes to mind right away. The look on the old guy’s face was one that I would associate with a man watching someone take his old dog away from him. It was that sad. Actually, I think that the word ‘forlorn’ would be more than appropriate than simply sad in this guy’s particular case.

           Then he spoke to me as I put my box of tools down on the floor. ‘You will be able to fix my Dainty Dora, won’t you?’ That was the name on the slot machine, written just above a picture of a very large woman with a big smile. When he uttered his words, my mind returned immediately to the image of an old man and his equally aged dog, with the former asking, ‘Will you be able to cure him?’

           My mind conjured up the nasty words, ‘No, she is a done Dora now’. My pride in my work wouldn’t let me say that. So I replied with the words ‘I am a professional, sir. There is no slot machine ever made that I can’t fix and make as good as new. Dora will be daintily dancing once more when I am done with her.”

           I received what I would call a semi-smile. But at least he had graduated from forlorn. When I was finished, I told him, “She is all yours buddy. Good luck with her.”

           I’m an early morning person, and so each morning I come in for work at about seven o’clock. It took a while for the boss to get used to it, but he is happy with it now. Seven o’clock is when the little casino restaurant opens. I know that the coffee I am getting is fresh. When I first started work there I wondered why the place opened so early, my foolishly thinking that no customers would be in then. But there was always a few of them feeding their slot machines there when I walked through that part of the casino. All of those customers were old. I wanted to say to them, ‘Shouldn’t you be saving your money to spend on your grandchildren, instead of blowing it on money-draining machines?’ But I knew they wouldn’t be listening, maybe not even hearing me above the ringing sounds of their particular machine, or their ear focus on the possibility of it ringing victory.

           I would see Forlorn Freddie (as I called him, not knowing his name) there too. I’d wave to him on my way to coffee. The first few times he would give me what I interpreted as a ‘go-away wave’ in return. Later it seemed more genuinely a gesture of recognition of my having fixed his darling Dora.

           After seeing and waving to him every weekday morning now for a couple of weeks, I was beginning to think that he looked somehow familiar to me At first I didn’t know why, then I did. He reminded me of my dad, now dead for 10 years. There was something about his face that brought a picture of my father to my mind’s eye. I couldn’t think what. Maybe it was because I would love so much to see my father again, and this guy was about the same age that dad would have been. It must have been a case of wishful familiarity on my part.

           My father’s story was a sad one. He was separated from his birth family at three years of age, and was never completely happy about that. When he was an adult he tried to discover his birth surname, but with no luck. He also searched and searched, and but never found the family members that he was separated from and wanted so badly to find.

           Then one day Dainty Dora’s devotee waved to me before I even raised my arm. That caused me to walk over in his direction, and asked him whether he would like to have me get him a coffee. He agreed, and very much to my surprise, he asked me whether I would mind if we sat down together to drink our coffees. I, of course, agreed right away.

           He got up and followed me to the restaurant. I had never seen him more than a few feet away from slot machine before, but there appeared to be no signs of separation anxiety. We talked, or more accurately he talked and I listened. He spoke about ‘losing his family’ when he was a child. They had died in a car accident, and he had survived, being strapped in car seat. He never married, and, after working until age 68, he was forced to retire from his job as accountant (you would think that he knew enough about numbers not to take risks with slot machines)

           Ralph (his name wasn’t Freddie after all), wanting to keep on talking, but I had to get

to work, even though the bosses didn’t show up until nine.

           On inspiration, I asked him whether he would like to come over for dinner tonight. He said, “yes, yes’. I had ulterior motive. My kids needed a grandfather.

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