Skipping Towards Gomorrah (6 page)

Iowa and I have a rather unpleasant history. During the 2000 presidential primaries, I went undercover as a volunteer for Gary Bauer's campaign while I had the flu (where I may or may not have licked Bauer's doorknobs, staplers, and officer supplies in an attempt to give him the flu), but more problematically, I may or may not have broken the law when I participated in Iowa's presidential caucuses. People don't actually vote in Iowa's caucuses, they “express a preference” in an informal balloting. When I found out that you didn't need a state ID or proof of residency to “express a preference” in Iowa's caucuses, I thought that was pretty fucked up. What was to stop out-of-state campaign staffers and activists who flood the state during the caucuses from showing up at caucus sites and expressing their preferences? A wealthy candidate like, say, Steve Forbes could flood caucus sites with paid supporters. (Forbes, in fact, placed a rather mysterious second in the 2000 Iowa caucuses.)

I pointed all of this out in my story, imagining myself to be something like a reporter who goes downtown, buys drugs, and then writes about how easy it is to buy drugs downtown. No one arrests those reporters, do they? There was much yowling from conservatives about the doorknob licking, and the Drudge Report, the
New York Post,
and
Free Republic
came after me in a big way. A few weeks after the piece appeared on
Salon.com
, I was charged with felony vote fraud, and Iowa tried to put me away for six years. I signed a confidentiality agreement with the state of Iowa and Gary Bauer that prevents me from commenting any further. But please see these footnotes, which will hopefully explain everything on my behalf.
¹
,
²

The particular ATM with the antigambling message sat in the lobby of a three-story brick building that housed a restaurant, buffet, and the Iowa Welcome Center. The building also served as the entrance to the
Diamond Jo,
a riverboat casino moored in the muddy stretch of the Mississippi River that flows past Dubuque, Iowa. There was also a small rack on top of the ATM filled with information about gambling addiction. It was kind of like going to a crack house and finding a picture of Nancy Reagan and her JUST SAY NO slogan hanging on the door.

Dubuque had the first riverboat casino in the United States, but the
Dubuque Diamond Jo Casino
—this particular boat—was actually the second riverboat casino moored at Dubuque. The first, “the majestic Casino Belle,” according to Dubuque's daily paper, the
Telegraph Herald,
was replaced by the “spartan Diamond Jo,” after the owners of the
Casino Belle
moved their boat to Alabama. I didn't find that out until after my first visit to the
Diamond Jo,
but even so, I knew something wasn't right about the
Diamond Jo
the first time I laid eyes on it. The three-story brick building that serves as the casino's entrance literally towers over the
Diamond Jo
. The scale is all wrong. Sitting next to the building built to complement the larger and more “majestic”
Casino Belle,
the
Diamond Jo
looks like a Honda Civic parked in front of Tony Soprano's four-car garage.

Staying in downtown Dubuque can be a very lonely experience. The streets were empty, and the downtown retail core felt abandoned. When I checked into the Dubuque's “historic” Julien Inn in late October 2001, I was the only person in the lobby besides the clerk. Once a fine, old Victorian hotel, the Julien had been remod- eled in 1965 to look like the lair of some minor-league villain, the kind of evil subgenius Sean Connery disposed of in the first reel, and it doesn't seem to attract many paying guests these days. In fact, the clerk seemed genuinely startled when I walked in and asked for a room. She quickly transitioned to vaguely suspicious when I made it clear that I was serious, and after I asked for one of the hotel's one-bedroom apartments (a steal at $225 a week), she idled on hostile for the rest of our time together. I rode the elevator up to my room on the eighth floor of the hotel all by myself; I ate dinner in the hotel's German-themed restaurant, the Alte Glocke, all by myself; I had a beer in the hotel's deserted bar all by myself. The only time I saw anyone else on the eighth floor was when an older man in a motorized wheelchair left his room for his weekly trip to the nearby pharmacy that stocked a small selection of groceries.

“Dubuque was founded in 1788 by French-Canadian fur trader Julien Dubuque,” reads the historic marker in front of Dubuque's red-and-white county courthouse, an impressive wedding cake of a building constructed in 1981.“[Dubuque] joined with the Mesquake [sic] Indians to exploit the rich lead mines of the area. In 1833, [the area] was opened for American settlement, and the resulting lead ruch created a boomtown”. I know enough about American history to be deeply mistrustful of historic markers, especially ones in lily white parts of the country that speak of whites “joining with” local Indian tribes. While Julien Dubuque may have been a nice guy who was soliticious of the Mesquake Indians in the extreme, I didn't see a lot of white people, though, and no one seemed to know what had happened to the Mesquakes. And who the hell ever heard of a lead ruch?

Like many of the dying river cities along the Mississippi, Dubuque's civic boosters hope to lure visitors to the city with its many fine examples of Victorian architecture. (“Dubuque: Master-piece on the Mississippi,” is the city's official tourist slogan.) But an earlier generation of Dubuque's civic boosters went on an urban renewal binge in the late 1950s and 1960s, tearing down everything in sight—including block after block of Victorian buildings in downtown Dubuque. Nothing much besides parking lots was ever built to replace these buildings lost to “urban renewal.” In the right light, Dubuque looks like a tintype of a smiling Victorian woman who had half her teeth knocked out. Worse yet for Dubuque, other nearby cities didn't tear down any of their older buildings in the 1950s, leaving them with more charming—and hence more touristed—Victorian city centers. Even today Dubuque's architectural heritage can't seem to catch a break: a row of Victorian buildings in the downtown area was evacuated during my stay in Dubuque when a parking lot being constructed directly behind the buildings destabilized their foundations. The buildings will probably have to be torn down. Adding insult to injury, downtown Dubuque needs another parking lot like Jerry Falwell needs another chin.

There was another reason I decided to leave Las Vegas and head to Dubuque: I wanted to feel like a whale. In gamble-speak, a high-roller is someone willing to lose a hundred thousand dollars on a trip to Vegas; a whale is someone willing to lose up to a million dollars or more. The average bet for a whale is ten thousand; 70 percent of whales are Asian men. At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the maximum bet is a closely guarded secret, falling somewhere between twenty and forty thousand dollars. Maximum bets can be higher in the exclusive and intimate gaming rooms Las Vegas casinos have been building to attract “superwhales” like
Hustler
magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who is famous for betting ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on a single hand. I'd never made more than a five-dollar bet in Las Vegas—not only wasn't I a whale in Vegas, I wasn't even a sea monkey. I probably wasn't plankton.

I could be a whale in Iowa, though. The state legalized gambling on riverboat casinos in 1989, and at that time the maximum bet in Iowa was five dollars; the most money any one gambler was allowed to lose in a twenty-four-hour period was two hundred dollars. I remembered reading about Iowa's prim betting and loss limits at the time the riverboat casino opened in Dubuque. The same lawmakers in Iowa who wanted to haul in the tourists and create new tax revenues and hundreds of jobs didn't want to be accused of exploiting problem gamblers—or creating them.

So that was the plan: Fly to Iowa, bet five bucks, and, hey, look at me! I'm uh . . . Christ, I'm Larry Flynt. Blech.

The
Diamond Jo
was small, and compared with the casinos I'd been to in Las Vegas (my only reference point), it was spartan—but, hey, compared to some of the newer casinos in Las Vegas, Vatican City is pretty spartan. And unlike the casinos in Las Vegas, the
Diamond Jo
was kind of cozy and intimate, something like what I'd imagined the private rooms for whales in Las Vegas to be. Unfortunately, the
Diamond Jo
was doing well enough to commission and produce its own jingle, which it plays over and over and over again, for hours on end, all day and all night: “The
Diamond Jo Casino
! Where the river runs wild! The
Diamond Jo Casino
! Where the cards run wild! The
Diamond Jo Casino
! Where the river runs wild!”

After getting my bearings, I sat down at an empty blackjack table. The dealer—a middle-aged man with a hangdog face and the skin of a lifelong smoker—seemed friendly and approachable, unlike some of the other dealers, who looked miserable. (Or were they just wearing their poker faces? Or perhaps that jingle was getting on their nerves?) Most important to me, there was no one at his table. Part of what makes card games so intimidating for the inexperienced gambler is the fear of making a fool of yourself in front of card players who know what they're doing. I was happy to be alone at his table—not that I was winning. I wasn't; I was losing, but I was losing in peace and quiet. I was losing five dollars at a time, one little red chip per hand, but that wasn't the maximum bet anymore. The sign on the table said, MINIMUM BET: $5/MAXIMUM BET $500. Five hundred dollars! My dreams of being a whale in Iowa were dashed.

Curious about what had happened to the five-dollar minimum bet, I contacted the business reporter of Dubuque's daily newspaper, the
Telegraph Herald
.

“This is a state and a community that has overwhelmingly supported gaming,” said Matt Kittle, who covers the casinos for his paper. “Every eight years the voters in any county with gambling get to vote on whether or not gambling will continue to be allowed in their county. The last time we voted, about 70 percent of the voters were in favor of gambling continuing.”

Gambling came to Iowa in 1984, when the state legalized “paramutual” gambling, that is, betting on dog and horse races. Any company that wanted to open a dog track would have to win a referendum in the county it wanted to build in. A referendum was quickly organized in Dubuque County, it passed, and the state's first dog track—The Dubuque Greyhound Park—opened in 1985. “You have to bear in mind that, while this is a conservative town, it's also overwhelmingly Catholic. Bingo primed the pump in Dubuque.” (Eighty percent of Catholics gamble compared with 43 percent of Baptists.)

But a state allowing just a little bit of gambling is like a woman claiming she's just a little bit pregnant—it's a pretense that's difficult to keep up. So with dog tracks up and running, the Iowa state legislature soon passed a similar riverboat casino bill, and Iowa is now home to three dog tracks and ten riverboat casinos.

“Some of our ‘riverboats' aren't even
in
rivers,” said Kittle. “They're floating in ponds that were dug just for the casinos. It complies with the letter of the law, but the
Lakeside Casino Resort
in Osceola isn't near a river. It's a boat in a moat.”

Kittle is sometimes surprised by just how thoroughly gambling has been woven into the fabric of corn-growin', pig-farmin', Godfearin' Iowa.

“First we had betting on dog races on dry land,” said Kittle. “Then we had dog races on dry land, with slots, craps, and blackjack on boats so long as they were in the middle of the river.” Iowa's riverboats were packed with tourists—busloads would come in every day from surrounding states. Then the state of Illinois introduced riverboat casinos on its side of the Mississippi, and other states legalized casino gambling, and Native American tribes opened their own casinos. Other states didn't require gamblers to float around the Mississippi while they gambled, and there were no limits on bets or losses. Pretty soon Iowa's boats were empty.

“Hearing the sounds of slot machines while you're stuck in the middle of the river is a circle in hell,” said Kittle. “People would come to Iowa, lose their two hundred dollars in a half an hour, and they had nowhere to go and nothing to do for four more hours, while the boat cruised around. They had to sit there listening to the dings and chirps of the slot machines for hours and hours. It was a nightmare.

“So the state legislature passed a law doing away with the five-dollar maximum bet and the two-hundred-dollar loss limit, and changed the law so that the boats only had to ‘cruise' one hundred days a year,” said Kittle, “and our boats filled back up. Now we've got slots at the dog tracks and boats that are more or less permanently moored to their docks.” And the law that requires riverboats to “cruise” the Mississippi at least one hundred times a year? The
Diamond Jo
meets this requirement by cruising on weekdays only during the summer between the hours of 5 and 7 A.M. The boat is usually empty when it goes out.

“Now Illinois is debating whether or not to allow video gambling in bars,” said Kittle. “If they do that, we'll probably have to do that, too, to stay ‘competitive,' just like we had to do away with the five-dollar maximum bet and the two-hundred-dollar daily loss limit.”

You can't be a little bit pregnant.

“No, you can't.” Kittle nodded. “You would think farm people would've known that all along.”

 

B
lackjack for beginners: You place a chip on the small circle on the felt in front of you. The dealer deals one card faceup to everyone at the table and then gives himself a card facedown. Then he deals a second card faceup to everyone at the table, before giving himself one card faceup. If the dealer has an ace up, he checks to see if he has blackjack; if he does, he wins. If he doesn't, the players can ask for more cards, to get as close as they can to twenty-one. Hopefully you won't take too many cards and bust your hand. When all the players have either busted or decided to hold, the dealer turns over his facedown card. The dealer draws more cards until he has seventeen or higher, and then he holds. If your hand is better than the dealer's hand—closer to twenty-one without going over—you win. If you bet five dollars, you win five dollars. If you bet five hundred dollars, you win five hundred dollars. If the dealer's hand is better than your hand, you lose five dollars. Or five hundred dollars.