Ames Progressive

A couple weekends back I head to Altoona’s Prairie Meadows — my first casino experience in Iowa — with a friend who’s just turned 21. I’m sitting at a blackjack table when a middle-aged woman who seems oddly familiar with the casino staff sits down. She digs through her purse looking for her club card, worried she’s lost it.

“Found it!” she finally exclaims, proudly displaying the credentials she’s just retrieved from her wallet.

But alas: “Oh, shit! That’s my Gamblers Anonymous card.”

Everyone had a good laugh about that. “Oh, that’s absolutely hilarious!” the dealer said with a grin that the woman returned in kind.

Not long after, I split a pair of aces and was graciously dealt face cards to complement each. A short while later, recalling my past errors of overeager impatience, I jumped ship.

As I navigated the maze of slot machines after cashing out my winnings, I focused on the place’s aura of tired desperation and mock excitement. It reminded me of a Cafe of Broken Dreams. With the occasional exception, glued to the video screens were the elderly, morbidly obese, handicapped, or just simply haggard — or some combination thereof — as often as not sucking down cigarette after cigarette in quick succession.

Without any windows or fresh air, the only real concessions were the free soda dispensers and all the bright, flashing lights. And the intermittent strokes of luck.

Although the Anonymous Gambler wasn’t elderly, obese, all that haggard, nor even disabled, I reached the (admittedly shallow) conclusion that she typified the Prairie Meadows gambler — down on her luck, not particularly well-off, aching for one of those strokes of luck.

The occasional exceptions I write about, unlike some of my past experiences, were themselves atypical. When I first sat down at the blackjack table, a presumably well-off middle-aged guy with a thick Jersey accent soon joined. He quickly blew about $200 worth of chips, then proceeded to all but give away a crisp Franklin.

He couldn’t stop talking about nothing in particular — his rich boss, his luck, how he didn’t really have an accent — and when he left for a moment to take a leak, the dealer told the rest of us, “At least he’s not like the last guy. I swear, if he’d called me Cutie one more time I would have punched him in the face.”

It would have all been a pretty depressing sight without the extra $40 padding my wallet.