Mommy vs. Marion at Slots (Love and Casinos III)

24 November 2024

By Frank Scoblete

From Frank: Two women, one my late mother (a truly sainted lady); the other a harridan of the worst sort, being a smoke-infused, a dried-up creature named Marion; each played slots in Atlantic City in the 1990s.

Somewhat before then and somewhat after then as I recollect. They were acquaintances and members of a somewhat large group that went to the casinos occasionally.

My mother took $20 and played for several hours at most. She played one coin and she either won by dinner time or she lost by dinner time but either way she was done for that day. She never rushed and she really didn’t think of herself as a slot player or a gambler of any kind. If everybody went to the casino, she went.

Shows, dinners, a little bit of playing; that was her trip. Rather simple I’d say.

[Please note: Those were the last days of the coin buckets for slot players. The age of credit slips was nudging its way into the casinos. The age of fake coins sounds being broadcast from the machines, on low sound no less, was almost here. This was the end of an age.]

My sainted mother had a very simple playing philosophy, “The casino wins because it is the casino.”

She had no idea about house edges or how the casinos ultimately beat the players. But she knew full well that the casinos won so she played a minimum amount and that was that.

There was no mystery for her in the whole casino concept. The casino won because it was the casino. Rather simple too since it was absolutely true over any extended period of time. She would repeat this phrase, “The casino won because it was the casino.”

Marion on the other hand, smoke exuding from every pore of her body, cackled in her hoarse voice that she “loved slot machines and I can play them all day and night! They are my mates!”

And she often did play them day and night. Many a time someone in our group would ask where Marion was and the answer was always, “Out there playing the slots.” Of course, where else would she be?

Marion would walk down the boardwalk and drop into each casino, one after another, and pour a lot of coins into the one-armed bandits. Yes, she did win on occasion but her days tended to be losers and her weekends never saw her bring home any loot. Marion was always out there playing the slots. Slots were – in some weird way – her dates.

She was divorced twice and she went through boyfriends the way she did cigarettes; some deep puffs, a few strong inhales, and they were gone – off into the day or night with her other boyfriends.

Still, many of these boyfriends helped to finance her slot play. Indeed, she would ask them for money to play and certainly in the beginnings of her relationships with them, they gave her the dough. I mean she would, they figured, give them a reciprocal type of reward. If not? Well, she dumped them.

Most men might have found her a somewhat pretty woman, maybe sensual in a low-class way, until the men got to know her. She dressed the part too. If this were the 1930’s I’d say she dressed “va va voom.”

She loved playing slots. She played them all the time. She went to Atlantic City weekly, yes weekly, with our group when we went or with a friend or mostly alone or with her current boyfriend. Smoking and slot play and the occasional heated boyfriend, that was her world.

She constantly chanted that she "loved the slots." Hmmm.

Did the machines lure her with their pheromones? Or did she lure herself with her own pheromones?

So, I asked Ralph:

Frank: What do you think Ralph? Do slot machines have pheromones?

Ralph: This is the one-off I am thinking about. The machines have no pheromones, none at all. They are just computerized contraptions, right?

But maybe the wild slot player like this Marion is sniffing in her own pheromones which makes her play the machines more and more and more.

It’s a thought.

Frank: It’s a self-pheromonizing situation.

Ralph: Could be.

Frank: All the best in and out of the casinos!

Frank Scoblete’s books are available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, e-books, libraries and book stores.