Neither of us are the ideal people to write about casinos. We hate them. Alexa and I both think casinos do nothing but attract the sleaziest elements, separating the gullible from their money to the point of addiction while at the same time heralding the culture of conspicuous consumption for America’s jet-set. This one won’t be pretty.
I grew up in Seymour, Indiana. It is the “small town”
that John Mellencamp, the poor man’s Springsteen, rhapsodized about, but only
after he had made his first million and gotten the Hell out. For many locals,
this is still a sore subject – he abandoned his flock, he got too big for the
“little people,” he forgot his roots…by moving to Bloomington. Bloomington –
the hip, liberal college town, the only spot in Indiana that doesn’t deserve a
napalm strike. For moving two counties over, just 50 miles away, the man is a
sell-out, a Judas.
If I were him, I would have thought that even Bloomington
was too close to that depressing track-mark, the land where religious diversity
means Catholics, Lutherans, and Presbyterians are breaking bread over the same
buffet of casseroles and mayonnaise-based “salads.” It is a land that offers
nothing but complacency, conformism, and being criticized in the rare case that
you are even just a little different. I was happy to leave and have never
looked back, not even missing Bloomington but for those fleeting moments of
dumb nostalgia – yearning for an idealized past that never really existed, but
one still envisions “those days” as being uncomplicated – and finally reminding
myself that even Bloomington is only so much limestone and mortar.
Beginning with my adolescence, I knew Indiana was a state
with no future. What a bleak thing to think, but only those who have seen it
firsthand, with the right kind of eyes, will know what I mean.
I am singling Indiana out here, but the same can be said
for a bulk of the Midwest. It has no future.
“Look at all the people,
Well they all look the same,
They’re going to the factories,
In their cloth caps and trilbies.”
- The Kinks, “Scrapheap City”
It is all about homogeneity. The sameness. The same
houses. The same American-made trucks. The same haircuts. The same religious,
political, and social views. And it has been meticulously crafted by the powers
that be – all them liberal queer-lovers can stay out on the East Coast, or in
California, because the Midwest has no place for them here. Putting a boot in
one’s ass, according to popular lore, is the American way.
Fuck that song.
Perhaps more tragic than having no future is when a place
has no idea what – if anything – to do with its past. Again, this is not just
Indiana I am talking about. In fact, I’ll begin with an example from Indiana’s
somehow even more depressing neighbor, Ohio. When we visited a friend in
Columbus, she recounted to us that the birthplace of Rutherford B. Hayes and
the first-ever Wendy’s had both been bulldozed. A White Castle now sits atop
the latter.
I have talked a lot in my writings about my grandfather and his influence on me – loving history, my infatuation with the early days of the space program, leaving room for nature – but now is as good a time as any to mention his son, my dad, and what he brought to my upbringing. Besides music and movies, Dad has a love of architecture. Anything from the Victorian era up through Art Deco is right up his alley – he helped save a historic home near the Freeman Field airport from demolition – and he even lives in a house constructed in the mission-style, from 1912. This is something he has imparted onto all three of his kids. My older brother even considered architecture when he started college.
Way back when our family just had the one computer, Dad
had as the desktop background a picture of the famous resort in West Baden,
with its massive domed atrium. Dad told me all about it, and that one day,
“when they finally get around to restoring it,” we would see it. West Baden
shares a municipal border with French Lick, the unfortunately named hometown of
Larry Bird. French Lick is also home to another famous old resort hotel, known
for its sulfur-scented hot springs. Because the water induced diarrhea or
something, it was bottled and sold for its curative properties as Pluto Water –
“if nature can’t do it, Pluto will!”
The location of the resort may seem like a bit of a
head-scratcher, smack in the middle of south-west central Indiana, but it was
its proximity to Chicago along Highway 41 (just far enough to be a getaway)
that made it a favorite place for businesspeople, gangsters, and film stars.
Long story short, the place fell in and out of disrepair (along with the West Baden Springs Hotel, which for a period became a Jesuit seminary), changing ownership every few years with loads of empty promises about restoring the place to its former glory. When I visited French Lick with my family in 2004, we actually stayed at the famed hotel. The lobby was in great shape, but the corridors and rooms definitely had a Shining feel to it. Maybe it had something to do with Indiana being a depressing shade of grey from November through April, but it had its share of charm. At the time, the West Baden Springs only offered tours of its grand lobby, with the scuttlebutt of the time being that Donald Trump had plans to revitalize both French Lick and West Baden.
Within a year, that rotten, racist son of a bitch had
pulled out for “various reasons.” Instead, the Cook Company from Bloomington
pledged their money, and by the time I left Indiana for good in 2009, French
Lick’s grand hotel had become a resort and casino once again, with West Baden
soon to follow.( Of course, some laws had to be rewritten so as to allow for
the legalization of gambling first, but given the millions granted to the
hotels, I’m sure a check or two made its way to Indianapolis.)
In our travels, and even when we still lived in New York City, the oft-proposed solution to money woes for a given town that inevitably floats to the surface like a turd in a swimming pool is, “I know! Let’s build a casino!” And the town is never the same. We have seen it everywhere there is a casino – panhandlers begging for money for a bus ticket, a gallon of gas, a phone call, that one last drink, plus that overall grimy and vulnerable feeling one gets upon realizing that they kissed personal safety goodbye twenty minutes ago – but that has not stopped local lawmakers from buying into the great lie that casinos create jobs and stimulate the economy.
The French Lick Springs Hotel, now dubbed The French Lick Resort Casino, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has been dubbed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the Historic Hotels of America. These coveted distinctions were not enough to keep an entirely new wing from being added on to the original building, with the pressurized air from the connecting hallway blasting down the corridor.
That lobby I praised? Gone. It has been gutted out, renovated to look like an ugly modern hotel. A plastic bimbo hawking seats for a timeshare presentation in Group Meeting Room C was offering free cookies. Looking around at the clientele, she probably also should have been offering insulin shots. None of the original charm was intact – people addicted to penny slots don’t give a splatter of vomit about interior design, they just want to win big. But hey, at least they kept the tile floor.
Sitting on the large covered porch – another feature I was shocked to see left intact – were affluent vacationers, all reading the same shitty inspirational Christian fiction, looking like they just strutted out of a Ralph Lauren catalog. The men all play golf and the women treat themselves to oily rubdowns in the spa. A hundred years ago, they would have played croquet at lawn parties, sipping lemonade, advocating for temperance, and deriding gambling as the devil’s game. Now they sit above it – both architecturally and metaphorically – while the same groveling minions they slowly work to death during the week blow their wages below.
Throughout the historic hotel are signs indicating that no smoking is allowed. Hell, you now can’t even smoke within thirty feet of the entrance – but those rules don’t apply in the casino. The moment you cross over into the new addition, there is a faint aroma of tobacco smoke. At the escalators, the aroma becomes first a smell, then a full-blown stench, as you descend into the abyss. After you get past security, you are surrounded by winos, seniors connected to oxygen tanks, obese vacationers, and even more obese people who use motorized carts to get from one machine to the next.
You are inside the belly of a windowless, charmless, monitored-from-all-angles beast. All around you are blinking lights, loud synthesized notes as the tumblers spin inside the slot machines, and every few minutes an artificial bell ringing because someone just won three bucks on a nickel game. No machine makes any noises when you lose, and why should it? Keep the customers happy; anyone from our generation who played them can remember the crushing agony of the countdown after getting a game over at the arcade.
Maybe it is a bit cruel to make this observation, but I
have already conceded my faith in Jesus as the son of God, so by these people’s
standards, I’m already going to Hell: Alexa and I noticed that the people
playing the machines were, in some part, machines themselves. Some of them need
a mechanized apparatus to breathe. Others needed a machine to get around.
Others still, while having nothing obviously wrong with them externally, pumped
in change and pulled levers like they were automated, occasionally taking a
drag off of their Marlboros.
This whole notion of machines playing with machines was
compounded when we saw the serious players who weren’t using cups o’ change.
That is for the amateurs, apparently. No, these high rollers had little cards with their name, rank, and gambling habits go into the machines – and just how many of these people are frightened of
the Affordable Care Act? – which all of the players had attached to their
wrists. It was like a little umbilical cord, connecting them to the machine that
is the opposite of a womb: it depletes their money, rarely providing anything
beyond sensory overload, and ultimately only brings them closer to the
inevitable.
We left, horrified and disgusted.
