Fifteen Minutes: Reservation for One: One man, one hundred dollars and 15 hours at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun

Interstate 10, bound east to west, is a nonstop train of dreamers. Barreling through the desert, they come in search of the cheap thrill, the easy score, the fast women, the sugar daddies. On their final approach, they can already begin to make out the pale halo of the city's lights--lights that can be seen from outer orbit, against the dark face of a planet couched in the shadow of night. They make their way down to the strip and all around the city. They're greeted by a madman's dreamscape: castles made of sand, built with bags of mob money and later rebuilt with the bounties of multinational entertainment cartels. The scene is almost as hot as the desert itself. The Beautiful People congregate nightly at The Beach and Club Rio. If that doesn't work out, there are always the cheap whores walking the street down by Circus Circus. If that doesn't work out, there's always a cheap room and $1 blackjack waiting back at the Western. This is Vegas--a tiny slice of hell just where it ought to be.

But I'm not in Vegas. I'm in Connecticut--heading toward Uncasville, home of the Mohegan Tribal Nation, to be exact. The pale halo I see is the reflection of my own headlights in the enveloping fog. It is 12:45 a.m. on Sunday morning. I have been driving since 10:30 p.m. Saturday. I turn off of I-95, onto Route 2A, southeastern Connecticut's very own boulevard of broken dreams, and then onto Mohegan Sun Boulevard, pipeline to the gaming phenomenon known as Mohegan Sun. After three tries driving up and down the strip, I finally find where I should be, the Winter Parking Lot. I leave the lot, step off the sidewalk and out onto the pavement, well in front of a white stretch limo. The driver stops beside me and shouts from his window, "Was that a smart fucking idea?" At first I can't decide whether his question is rhetorical, but it seems as though he wants an answer. I muster an "I'm sorry, man," retake the sidewalk and follow the signs to the casino.

The casino's Winter Entrance, adjacent, strangely, to the Winter Parking Lot, is by far the grandest of the casino's four inputs (one for each of the seasons). Escalators and mammoth staircases sweep players down onto the casino's floor. The casino, cut into a hill on the rez, the familiar name for the reservation, which, ironically, I am now technically on, aims to recreate within what has been paved over without. A canopy of faux-foliage presides over the action on the casino floor. Animatronic gray wolves greet visitors to the Wolf Den, a small performing arts venue at the very center of the complex. The brown hues and the lighting are subdued throughout the complex, redolent with Indian summer.

I had hoped that the casino might be starting to clear out. This would mean blackjack with a low minimum bet. But instead there's a packed house. The lowest minimum is $25 (too rich for FM's blood), and would-be players are crowding the tables, jonesing for a chance to get in the game. For the moment, I'll have to be content to watch and wait.

A place opens at the blackjack table I'm watching. A man in his 30s, dark and unshaven and clad entirely in light blue denim, breaks off from his friends at the next table and slips into place. He takes out his roll, which at first seems a big one. As he peels bills away, however, twenties give way to tens, fives and ones. He pulls off all the twenties and most of tens and places them on the felt. Thumbing through the bills, he finds a fifty at the center of the roll and adds it to the pile as an afterthought. Cynthia, the dealer, straightens and sorts the bills, then counts out 10 $25 chips. "Change $250," she says. Ellen, the pit boss, nods in acknowledgement. "Good luck," Cynthia says. The game proceeds.

The man lays down a $25 bet on the first hand. Cynthia shows a nine up and he has 15. He takes a hit and busts. It seems as though he's going to try the martingale strategy, doubling his bet every time he loses, a risky proposition given the size of his bankroll. He lays down $50 and loses again. Here, he abandons the martingale for good and returns to betting the minimum. He lays down another $25 and loses again. After 10 minutes of winning some hands but losing most, his old lady comes by the table to bitch him out. A brief but subdued argument between the two, conducted in Portuguese, follows. It's unclear if either won the argument or if either could under the circumstances. With $150 down the drain, he takes a break for the bathroom. He'll be back in about five, he says, leaving his Player's Club card and a pack of Marlboro Lights to emphasize his intention to return. Cynthia places a marker down at his spot. The man is back in about six and resumes his place. His dour expression seems eased, somehow, but his luck only gets worse.

He has $100 left and manages to lose it all in four consecutive hands. He gets up from the table and returns to his friends, still assembled at the next table. Again in Portuguese, they commiserate with one another.

Suddenly, over the din of the still, sad music of the slot machinery, I hear what I think is my name being called over the public address system. "Robert Coolbrith, please dial extension blah-blah-gargle-blah." I find an official-looking man wearing a cerulean blue coat and an earpiece, and ask him for some assistance. He leads me to a house phone. I speak with an operator and discover that I have not been paged. The blue-coated man asks me how things went on the phone, and I must report to him that I was not in fact paged, but instead that I possess a remarkable sense of self-importance. He looks at me dimly, and says, "Stay off the sauce, buddy. I know the drinks are free, but you'll play better."

Away from the tables for once, I take an opportunity to check out the complex's other attractions. Among other things, Mohegan Sun offers three full-service restaurants, two performance venues, an arcade and play-place for children and an elderly woman trying to get some sleep on a bench near the Summer Entrance. The restaurants are overpriced and close by 2 a.m. The performance venues are similarly dead at this time of night. It is nice of the casino to provide entertainment for children while their parents piss away the their college funds. The elderly woman looks very uncomfortable.

After exploring for over an hour, I make my way back onto the casino floor to the high stakes area. Here, the dealers are dressed up all pretty in suits and such. The minimums are higher, but at least it's easy to find a place to sit. There's also a difference in the foreign languages spoken. Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese replace the Spanish, Portuguese, Khmer and Vietnamese spoken on the rest of the casino floor.

I wander to the race book and bingo rooms of the casino. Both are dead, but they won't stay that way for long. Sunday will be a big day for high stakes bingo in Connecticut, just as it has been ever since Foxwoods, just down the road in Ledyard, opened its first bingo game in 1986. Which reminds me, I'm going to Foxwoods. And I'd better be on my way.

I retrace my steps to the car, and then retrace my path to Route 2A. The road between Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods is both treacherous and well-traveled at 3:40 am. Fog masks the curves in the road, which I can only presume are quite sharp in places. Those who haven't left the casinos by this time of morning have only one reason to be on the road: to get to the other casino. Trying not to tempt the road rage of the either drunk or disgruntled drivers behind me on the two-lane road, I keep the speedo pegged on 70, despite the fact that I've never driven the road and cannot see 30 yards beyond my face. On more than one occasion, it seems this mild adventure will end in notice of my death, not my published account of 15 hours wasted on Connecticut casinos.

Now, at 4:06 am, I arrive safely at Foxwoods, set on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation. The first thing one notices coming down the drive is that there is no parking, save that almost a mile away from the casino entrance. A shuttle bus driver watches me park my car and kindly waits for me to come aboard. But I'd rather walk. Despite the indecent hour and the fundamental indecency of gaming, there are some decent things about the Connecticut casino experience. The people who work for the casinos are the first to come to mind.

I enter the casino, trying to find a table with blackjack and a low minimum bet. This means a trip to the smoke-free area inside "Rainmaker Casino" (how tasteful), Foxwoods's primary venue for table games. I find one table with a $10 minimum and wait for a spot. Within 15 minutes of play, enough people who were in front of me have themselves sat down and been cleaned out that I now have a shot.

I'm down right away. I have $50 in cash in my pocket which Tony, the elderly Asian man dealing at the table, changes into chips during a break between hands. This amount soon dwindles, becoming nothing at all within 15 minutes. I ask Tony to place a marker for me and I get up to hit the restroom, the ATM and the smoking section of the casino floor. Gone for less than five minutes, I return to find Tony replaced by Annie, a shuffle of the 8-deck shoe in progress and the largest white man I have ever seen sitting in my spot. My marker is gone and in its place is $10 worth of his money. At first, I shoot my new friend a mean look. But, from beneath his Fubu ski cap, he shoots me a meaner one. I demur. He's gone after two hands and I resume my place.

Having already been to Foxwoods a handful of times, I know that I will lose $100 tonight, as I do every time I come here. Invariably though, other people do seem to win. The young Cambodian man sitting next to me at blackjack was, during the course of one hand, dealt the seven of clubs three times in a row, making him $5,000 richer, thanks to a $1 side bet. However, he tells us he's been dropping money into the casino every weekend for the past three years. He was probably due.

When he won his five grand, the table gave him a rousing ovation. Some players even stood to applaud him for doing little more than putting $16 on some green felt in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut. As he leaves the table, he tips Tony heavily and also gives $25 to everyone playing at the table, including me. This sort of camaraderie is one of the other moderately decent things about the Connecticut gaming experience. Everyone feels bad for everyone else. The dealers who owe their lot in life to the casinos clearly feel bad for the players too. What doubtless keeps them from seeing the gaming public as a mass of self-defeating trash is that many of them play the same games they deal on their own free time. When asked if she ever plays, Annie, middle-aged with Clairol red hair, responds in hushed tones, "What the fuck else would I be doing here?" How demure.

Despite this camaraderie, no sober player really wants to make a new friend. People will generally tell you in appropriately vague terms how much they are up or, more typically, down. But no one wants you to ask him personal questions. The regulars, those who manage to get here and drop some cash on a weekly basis, have what some might consider to be a serious gambling problem. Others may be here cheating on their wives or girlfriends, despite the fact that Connecticut is a much less suitable locale than Vegas to make that sort of play. No, that fetching woman playing the slots by herself isn't a prostitute. She's more likely your grandmother.

I'm now playing third base (the last spot dealt before the dealer) at Tony's table, and everyman's grandmother has claimed the spot next to me. She, unlike the others, is all too willing to talk:

Framingham. I was a schoolteacher for 30 years, but I'm retired now. Oh, really, my brother went there. For college and law school. He was the smart one in the family. I'm down, but my husband's up, which is why I'm still here after all this time. What time is it now? 6:30? I've been here since one in the afternoon yesterday. We come about twice a month. No, honey, you shouldn't hit that...

I appreciate the advice and the company. But soon I've messed everything up. The dealer is showing a 6 up, my new grandmother has got 11 and I've got 14. This is textbook. She doubles down, doubling her wager and taking only one more card from Tony. Other players at the table have split and/or doubled down repeatedly. By the time the dealer gets to me, there's a shitload of money on the table. Everyone knows what I'm supposed to do. Stay. Odds are the dealer has a 10 or face card underneath his six. This will give him 16, which he'll have to hit, according to house rules. He'll bust and we'll all win some money. But somehow the situation isn't quite so clear to me. It's 7 a.m. now and I'm in a fog as thick as the one I drove through to get here. I take a hit. The table collectively asks me what the fuck I'm doing, but before I catch on, I've already caught a 10 from Tony. I've busted. He flips a 10 from under his six and grabs a card from the shoe. It's a four, giving him 20. Everyone's lost a lot of money now, including my new grandmother, and it's all my fault. "Fucking cocksucker. You took his bust card. What the fuck did you do that for?" asks Grandma. She proceeds to ask me a number of other pointed questions regarding my ancestry and sexual preferences. I am, justifiably I think, a bit embarrassed. Everyone glares at me. Granny and two Asian gentlemen get up and leave. They're replaced by a guy who looks like Arthur Miller and another who bears a startling resemblance to a very depressed Papa Ernest Hemingway. Clearly, I need some fresh air.

I go outside and find some. The freshest thing outside, however, is not the crisp Connecticut air, but Larry, my new Mashantucket Pequot friend. Sitting on a bench, taking some notes, I hear a phone ring at a valet station. Larry hears it too:

Larry: If that's my wife, I'm not fucking here.

Me: (Idiotic smile)

Larry: Hey kid, you lose money tonight?

Me: Yeah, down about a hundred so far.

Larry: Jesus, get the fuck out of here. And never come back. I've been here the last two days, and I'm never coming back to this fucking hole.

Me: Did you lose a lot?

Larry: No, I'm Mashantucket Pequot. I'm not allowed to gamble here.

Me: Really?

Larry: No, but I've been here partying the last two days, on the 8th floor and the 21st floor, but I'm never coming back.

Me: Why?

Larry: I get sick of it. I can't gamble. There's a lot of money in there, though. I'm elderly. I get money six months out of the year from this place. But I get sick of it. You're in the bar, you want to buy a girl a drink. But all the fucking drinks here are free. And besides, the chicks in here, all they want to talk about is slot machines. I want to talk about pussy.

Me: (Giggle)

Larry: No, up on the 8th floor and the 21st floor, they got $20 glasses of wine, and shrimp, all kinds of fucking food. But I get sick of it...

Me: How big is the rez anyway?

Larry: 22 acres.

Me: 22 acres? (Somehow this seems wrong.)

Larry: No, 22,000 acres.

Me: 22,000 acres? (Somehow this also seems wrong.)

Larry: No, 2,200 acres.

Me: Okay. So, how has life on the rez changed?

Larry: Shit, when I was a kid, I used to hunt and fish here. No more of that. Shit, I'd been gone a long time, though. Where you from, kid?

Me: Cambridge, near Boston.

Larry: Shit, I used to box up there. There and in Scollay Square. Shit, long time ago. Then I did two tours in the Marines, then some other shit. But now I'm back. I live just down the road now, like two miles away. But I'm never fucking coming back. I just called my friend. An Italian guy, lives down the road in Ledyard. He's gonna come pick me up. Shit, I'm never coming back. Fuck.

At this point, Larry's friend drives up in a white Chevy Nova. Larry and I shake hands and bid each other goodbye. The car whisks him to his home down the road. Apparently, he's not coming back.

By the time Larry leaves, it's already 7:45 in the morning. I re-enter the Rainmaker and take a look at the action at Tony's table. Arthur Miller's pile of red $5 chips has turned into an equally large pile of green $25 chips. Papa Hemingway seems in considerably higher spirits as well. Perhaps he'll postpone his date with destiny for one more day. The others at the table also seem to be up. Apparently, I stepped away from the table at just the wrong time. There are smiles all around, as Tony jokes with the players about their good luck. The only person not smiling is the pit boss, Ray, who has hinted that he's ready to change the shoe. Apparently, the house believes in luck just as much as the players do, and Ray seems intent on breaking the players' winning streak. There's no need, however. As soon as I begin watching the action, people begin losing again. The playwright knows when to walk away, but Hemingway stays in. Macho till the very end.

I walk off the casino floor and out into Rainmaker Square, the complex's main concourse. At three past eight in the morning, the only thing longer than the line for the buffet is the line for buffet reservations. Despite the crush, some seem relatively uninterested. Among them is a young blonde man, clad in light blue jeans, a sweatshirt and a pair of construction boots, sitting with his head in his hands. He doesn't seem the high-roller type, nor does it seem that his luck has been all that good. Sitting by himself on a set of steps behind a red velvet cordon, he shouldn't be where he is. For the moment, though, no one's making any effort to move him. Things all around me are getting decidedly ugly. It's time to return to Mohegan Sun.

I cash in my remaining $50 in chips. It's within the realm of conception that I could have won that much, or played even with the house, but Terry, the friendly cashier, must see through me. She looks a little sorry for me. She seems to know I'm down. Cashing out is perhaps the best thing I've done all night, aside from my conversation with Larry.

On the way back down Route 2A, I find that my fear at driving through the fog in the early morning hours was at least partly justified. The curves in the road are extremely sharp, and even in daylight, the way between the two casinos is poorly marked and often confusing. Back on Mohegan Sun Boulevard, I take my first real look at the complex's exterior. The place is a monstrosity. The efforts taken in appointing the interior have clearly been spared on the casino's outside. Again I find myself at the end of the Sun's strip. I turn into the Winter Parking Lot and walk back to the casino. I expect a nearly empty house and low betting minimums, just what I had hoped for last night. But I find neither. The place is packed again. Betting minimums are still at $25. I feel almost glad in a way, though. I won't be able to play, but I'll at least leave myself with gas money for the ride back to Cambridge.

The race book and bingo rooms of the complex, empty last night, are beginning to fill up. Two hours before the big noon game, the bingo hall is easily half full, and a mob of senior citizens is lining up to buy their way in. Bingo is what started it all, but it all started down the road in Ledyard. I get back in the car and make my way back to Foxwoods for the last time.

Upon my return to Rainmaker Casino, I find the casino floor jam-packed with players. Families replace the Swingers wannabes from last night, but the end result is the same: high minimum bets and a long wait for a place to play. I make my way through Rainmaker Square, past the buffet hordes and to the high-stakes bingo game. It's a capacity crowd and a serious one inside. Despite the simplicity of the game, the players make of it both art and science. Watching multiple cards while smoking, eating, drinking a cup of coffee, the players eschew idle chitchat. I'd like to start a conversation, get inside some of those heads and find out what's going on. But all points of entry are denied. After a few minutes, I conclude that I'm wasting my time here. The remarkable renaissance of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe may have its roots in bingo, but the tribe has a story that reaches far beyond that, or so I presume.

In search of that story, I leave the casino and visit the nearby Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a structure that might be best described as architectural non-sequitor. It has been clear, thus far, that Foxwoods is at best a poor reflection of and upon Mashantucket Pequot culture. Calling the main casino "Rainmaker" or the frequent player's program "the Wampum Club" seems in exceptionally poor taste. However, I've been assuming that this can somehow be attributed to the general milieu of tackiness of the early `90s, when the casino was first opened, not to any failure on the part of the Mashantucket Pequots to understand or properly appreciate their own culture.

At the museum, though, I begin to question myself and the Mashantucket Pequots. The museum seems to make even less sense in the context of its surroundings than the nearby casino and hotel complex. Designed by New York's Paul Jacob Parkers, who reveals himself here to be the poor man's Frank Gehry, the building makes little attempt externally to interact with its environment, strange given the emphasis one would expect to be placed on such a dialogue here on the rez. Things get both better and worse on the museum's inside. A spiral ramp draws the visitor artfully from the large atrium that dominates the entrance level of the structure down into the main exhibition spaces. Here, however, the museum's displays and those who view them almost manage to defeat the museum's entire enterprise.

The first exhibition hall is one dedicated to the current way of life on the reservation. According to the museum's very first display, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation is a "newly-revitalized community--one that has been realized by years of planning, hoping and hard work." Certainly, the will of the Mashantucket Pequots to revitalize the rez is undeniable. But what gets short shrift here is the largely contingent nature of this revitalization, what with it being based upon the gaming industry and all.

However, at the end of the first exhibit hall, gaming does get some of its due. A brief series of panels on a wall describes the gaming operation and its impact upon the community. Next to these, a mocked-up slot machine stands as a model of what has brokered the reservation's transformation. As I read one of the panels, the whitest man I have ever seen, complete with massive gut, Boston accent and wife in tow, passes in front of me, headed for the slot machine. He looks around nervously and surreptitiously removes his wallet from his back pocket. He opens it and takes out a $1 bill, which he repeatedly attempts to feed into the machine. Looking back at his wife, he seems highly disappointed. "Helen, there's something wrong with it. Maybe it's not turned on."

Elsewhere in the museum, I find white people taking a collective dump all over various other facets of Mashantucket Pequot culture. I hear a number of snide remarks and much repressed laughter during my tour through the museum. While I might ordinarily find such behavior highly reprehensible, here nothing manages to rouse my ire. This is because, in some very important ways, the Mashantucket Pequot's claim of a distinct cultural identity seems somewhat tenuous. The Mashantucket Pequots lack a distinct native language. The representations of modern indigenous language and culture within the museum are largely facsimiles or bastardizations of the culture of other indigenous tribes.

In the last exhibit space of the museum, there is a gallery of portraits of current members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, with quotes from many of them. All of these photographs depict people whom I would visually identify as either white or black, not Indian. Below the photograph of Regina Kirchner, whom I would identify as white, reads the following: "My mother never talked about being Pequot, so it's hard for me to have this feeling about being Indian. I really feel I'm living between two worlds, you might say. I'm trying to get back some of that culture and feeling about being Indian."

One wonders, though, what the motivation is for recapturing indigenous identity, and how this motivation might be different without the presence of the gaming industry on the rez. It would be highly disingenous, no doubt, to say that Mashantucket Pequot identity is premised solely upon economic incentive. But at the same time, for many of those who have moved back to the reservation after years away or for those, like Regina Kirchner, who have little direct knowledge of their indigenous heritage, it is hard to posit much in terms of their motivation aside from enlarged economic opportunity.

Perhaps one should embrace Foxwoods as an agent for the reestablishment of a cultural identity and applaud it as such. It would be easy to do this if this cultural renaissance didn't come at a price. There is a price, though, and it's paid by the Asian immigrants from Massachusetts, the working class Portuguese from Connecticut and the retirees from all over New England who come out on weekends and drop a few hundred dollars at a time into the casino. For them, it does not seem to be such a winning proposition.

Robert J. Coolbrith '86-'02 is the author of nine books, including his latest, Memoirs of a Homewrecker, a narrative of the Nixon years. When not gambling, R.J. enjoys bringing hot cash money A-game, despite any appearance to the contrary. A joint concentrator in English and mathematics, R.J. would like to thank God for giving him the chance to write this scrutiny and his Honda for the gift of creation.