What if they put up similar signs in restaurants? "Eating Too Much? Call 1-800-GET-HELP." Isn't that going to hurt business?
But I keep playing, moving from machine to machine. Penny slots, nickel slots, right up to the big boys at five bucks. I'm trying to understand what people get out of this.
I ask a woman playing a 2-cents slot called Nurse Follies: "Are you having fun?"
"Oh, yes," she says, smiling brightly.
"What's your secret?" I say. "How can you possibly enjoy this?"
The woman's name, it turns out, is Phyllis Lunsford. She's from Staunton, Va. She's here with her husband, Mark, celebrating their 42nd wedding anniversary.
Except Mark had the good sense to wander off to the simulcast area, where you can bet on horse races from tracks all over the country.
The day before, she says, she played the slots from 4 in the afternoon until 1 in the morning. Won $406 at a machine called Hoot!, too.
"My brother gave me the nickname 'Hoot' when I was a kid," she says, "so I had to play that machine."
Really? I think. My mother gave me a nickname when I was a kid, too: Useless. Wonder if there's a machine with that name.
"This is entertaining. That's what it is to me," Lunsford continues. "It's not gambling. I'm not here to win money. But it's nice when I do. You either like this stuff or you don't."
Put me down for Door No. 2, I say.
I go back to playing the one-armed bandits. Except some of them don't even have an "arm" to pull down anymore. All you do is hit that wussy little spin button.
Anyway, I keep playing and playing and losing and losing. I'm ready to leave this joint and go back to the Free State, where there are much better ways to lose your money, like Lotto and Knights of Columbus raffles.
Then it happens. I'm on a 25-cent machine called Double Spin, Double Diamond, down to my last two plays.
I hit the spin button.
When the Double Jackpots stop spinning, I've won 82 bucks. Hey, not too bad at all!
Walking over to the cashier with my ticket, I wonder whether I've been too hard on slots. Maybe they're not so boring after all.
Maybe you just have to give them a chance.
