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After a very beneficial day's work, my work partner and I decided to travel to our new favorite casino hangout (I'm supposedly going to begin performing there this month but nothing's for real here until it happens -- 'show me the money," and all that -- but we still like the place and I go even though I don't gamble, don't drink, and am basically asocially-inclined) to change our one dollar bills into hundreds and gently flirt (albeit with no reproductively-advantageous end goal likely) with the cocktail waitresses we know there. I had $400 in dollar bills to change up, which was a first for me because I usually wait until I have a thousand because this casino will change that much and most I know of will not, having limits of $300-$500 per day. A little while ago I cashed in $2000 in singles, having my partner cash in half of it on my behalf....$2000 in dollar bills is remarkably heavy!
So we sidled on up to the cashiers' cage and were told, relayed from the manager on duty in the cage, that we could only change up $300 each. What the hell? We did it, but were a little peeved about being stuck with a hundred each in ones to carry around and, more to the point, I was peeved that my master plan to accumulate the more portable Benjamins was being foiled so completely and, I assumed, permanently. One reason I've had so many lots of $1000 to change up was that, until I started accompanying my partner to this place, I just couldn't be bothered heading out to a casino to change the money up and it just accumulated in a growing collection of cardboard boxes that were (literally) under my bed (note to burglars: if you find my new place and break in, you won't now find such predictable deposits sub-bed :P ). My bank will do it, but it takes them so much longer to count the bills on their machine than it does a casino, where they do it all day long. I pretty much live on the bigger bills I get as tips -- carry them in my wallet and deposit them in my bank to pay bills and Paypal -- and change up the ones and squirrel away the Benjies. I wasn't looking forward to going back to accumulating boxes filled with envelopes of a hundred ones and then chipping away at them as I slowly converted them into a more useful form of currency. Bleh.
An act of rebellion seemed appropriate. A minor act -- I am hardly the Rosa Parks of the casino industry -- but some kind of act, nevertheless. I sat down at a poker machine across from the cage and fed in every one of the remaining one dollar bills. I've never gambled a cent there, but there I was loading up the machine, bill by bill, until -- after quite a time investment -- it registered $100. Then I immediately hit the 'cash out' button, received my ticket, and took the ticket to the cage where -- in full view of the manager -- I redeemed it, telling the cashier who'd helped me before (we pretty much know them all and always tip them a few dollars for their effort) "I just got $100 out of the machine. It was amazing. Exactly $100. Wow. What a coincidence." :D
Nudge nudge...wink wink..
Nyeh-nyeh, cage manager.
Don't mess with the King, baby. :-) He'll sit there and patiently feed a thousand dollar bills into a machine (praying all the while that he doesn't somehow bet it all on one spin or hand) if he has to, to prove a point.
The bartenders knew what I was doing and I think one of the cocktail waitresses (one I have never seen before) must've known...she rushed by and dropped off a Diet Coke, unsolicited. I was busy pumping my dollar bills in but later I sought her out and gave her a five dollar tip -- way too much -- not just because now that I work a lot for tips I more than ever tip generously but because, for some reason, I had no dollar bills on me. :-)
A little while later, the casino manager came by to see us and my partner told him about the sudden "your money's no good here" thing and, after a few minutes of him going back and forth between the cage and us, it was no longer a problem. He's a nice dude, and all was again well with our new favorite casino. I even told him I put a hundred dollars in a machine....well, I did! :P
In the meantime, we were surrounded by cowboys. Real ones. These were most definitely not the Urban variety, but real cowboys from Kansas and Texas in there for a rodeo. Some were rodeo competitors and some were cattlemen. They all had handshakes like vice grips and most of them shared a really laconic sense of humor, a couple dropping ironic comments that would've flown over the heads of most Americans...I would not be surprised if half of them have Masters degrees, but they were still the real thing -- real cowboys -- all the same. One, with the same (relatively rare, in the US) first name as me, dropped the most hilarious oneliners in a flat, monotonic way that was belied by the permanent ironic grin on his face. We see a lot of cowboys and 'cowboys' during other, bigger rodeo events here, and it's pretty easy to pick the poseurs. You could tell these dudes were for real...for one thing, they all (without exception) had hats that were dirty and weathered...they actually wore those things out in the field. Their faces, too, had seen some weather. And those rough, strong hands. Yup. Cowboys, goddammit.
The cowboys, and their cowgirls, loved us. The really drunk ones were a riot, for sure. It got pretty insane, especially when my partner went back to his vehicle and returned with a box of 'Elvis' aviator shades and -- in his drunken spree of generosity -- began handing them out for free to anyone who wanted them. Before long, everywhere you looked in there you saw cowboy hats with Elvis glasses peeking out from beneath the brims. It was pretty cool. :-)
It was also pretty noisy. It even interfered with the shy flirtation I'd joined with the very pretty young lady seated next to us throughout all this, an interaction a little more odd than the usual in that her parents were sitting next to her. :o As it turned out, they knew my partner from an earlier visit, when he gave the father a pair of his glasses (that's what precipitated the whole cowboy Elvis makeover in the first place), and they apparently thought it was pretty cool that their daughter was talking with 'Elvis.' :D They were also retty hilarious people.
And they were nice people. So were the cowpersons. And the casino manager. Sometimes, in a town like this, it's refreshing to discover that there're good people about.
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