Fetish Objects

Las Vegas autofiction

I’ve read this piece before. Written by various insiders, imitators and midwits who think they are Hunter S. Thompson. Losing what’s left of their minds thinking the cacti are talking to them or that the show girls really do like them. Not me. I’ve been teetering on sobriety. Cigs inside, four-dollar pints, and Slack messages at the Santa Fe station. 

I am surrounded by fetish objects. Walking around in my fading out pajama suit. I am the youngest person here. Also, the cutest, but I knew that before I came. I am simply drowning in excess, but there is no decadence to be found in this casino. Here are some slots machines I saw that include the words buffalo, dragon, panda and wolf.

Buffalo

Buffalo deluxe

Buffalo gold

Buffalo accession

Buffalo link

Buffalo rush

Buffalo chief

Dragon link

Dragon link golden century

Dragon link autumn moon

Dragon feature

Dragon cash

Dragon drums

Dragon drums explosion

Dragon Jin long Jin bao

Dragon spell

Forbidden Dragons

Triple wild dragon

Fu dai dragon

Dragons vs pandas

Fu dai panda

Wolf run

Wolf dun Keno

Timber wolf gold

Wolf run gold

Wild wolf

Only two had panda themed slots. I learned on my drive here that China is taking back the pandas that have been on loan to zoo’s across America. Unbelievable what is happening here. Ball hawking low rollers that’s what I am gonna do tonight. I would have taken pictures, but I would have needed four by five camera and a flash jockey next to me. Some very small man who holds the light and yells surprise as I snap a picture of gamblers masturbating with their slot machine of choice. Smells like latex and lubricant in here. Usually people are ashamed when you catch them masturbating, not doubling down into a ritualistic pattern of sexual gratification virtualized through a mix of random chance, explosive colors, and multipaneled screens that mediate engagement with a sex object.

Bleached skin Chinese girls watch you grip the lever. You’re bigger in comparison to what they are used to. A dragon just flew past her you’ll get lucky tonight, her eyes glow just for you. But the Gong doesn’t hit. You’re down five bucks. Then another five. As you think about getting up. The girl from prosperity link named CAI YUN DENG TONG, urges you to put another five in. You’ll make it back you say. Just another few rounds. I am almost ready. Seven to thirteen seconds, the average roll of a slot machine. Anything can happen in that time. The levers getting warm now, harder than before, sweaty and lubricated you’ve been beating it raw all night; no hit. A slot a few down from you alerts the casino floor, ‘I just came.’ Someone’s excited, but it’s not you. Everyone around is filled with a disgust and aspiration. I’m due. No, I’m due. A hot streak is brewing. More alarms, more flashes. More body heat. More taps. Taps. Taps….

Take an animal that’s perceived as lucky, add a girl with big naturals, throw on a matching background. This is every slot machine. Take any female archetype and reduce it to mush before reshaping them into something wholly unhuman. The subconscious play is not to arouse you to sexual stimulation, but remind you of your perception. You wouldn’t quit in front of a pretty lady. You even get to choose who you want to see you commit for the night. To prove something to someone. Ginger, Blonde, Chinese, make eye contact with her and not your wife drinking a Starbucks to DD you home. Let everything fade away. Get hypnotized.

There’s something for everybody in North Vegas. The less traditionally lucky the Keno wolf slot based on the all-over graphic tee from a Tullahoma gas station. Every possible object of resonance is reduced and repackaged into a gambling site. Its value, a memory that you no longer have to remember to feel the effect of. Something similar is in front of you now. You and only you. Sit in the corner and resonate while feeling for your vape. Nostalgia would be shared, this is symbolic fetishism and you don’t want it to end. The temporal space of the roll is infinite. Time slows, the frame pivots 45degrees into slow motion as black bars appear on the side to keep everything lined up for conscious projection. A world of expectations, life in the world of when. When you win the jack pot, when your moment happens, when temporalities match your own expectation and your lack is finally closed. But it will never close, continue embracing the algorithmic ecstasy of your inability to express agency. Anything can happen when you’re not in control. It numbs the pain and removes the feeling of regret, but it forecloses any feeling of pride. Simulated spinning wheels, maybe we all need something more real.

The gong doesn’t hit. You were one roll shy.

.... . -.-- / --. .. .-. .-..

He’s tapping in his own rhythm. The slot machine works to the beat of his own drum.

Gliding fingers down the curved and long side of the machine, tapping every few beats, hitting all the right places. The area next to the play again button. Alternating moments of pressure. Until the combo is complete and you pull the lever. The lever is now just a signal, another node that explains to the processors it’s time to move up one in the algorithm. You didn’t hit.

Desensitized by habitual use any old way won’t do. It is a special touch, a flick of the wrist, to capitalize on a specific moment, an individual clip when you align with what you are watching. You watch a slot machine, you don’t play because it is not random. A game is denoted by a player, their action within it (play), and the confines of rules. A slot machine misses the second qualification. Interaction is not play because it is not active. It is a simulation of activity, hence its divorce from agency; your control over your destiny. There is no wiggle room in the binary of activating the slot machine, but this binary is unacceptable to the consumer. They need some form of influence to justify their interaction with something built to drain them and their wallets. The psychological process of control exertion especially by desperate people (yea I’m talking about you trying finger fuck the slot machine in front of me bozo) is pretty linear. A lack of control in the person’s life, such as a large fantasy or deep seeded neurosis requires a practiced psychological distancing to cope with the difference between expectation and reality. The comfort of, when I win the lottery I will buy my mom a house. But you don’t even take her out to dinner once a month. You don’t even see her on her birthday because you are here. Playing with yourself again. This compounding shame conditions a greater and deeper psychological retreat, making your material reality even harder to occupy. Raising the stakes, raising the panic, you want to let go, to leave everything up to simulation, to chance, expect in your heart you know you need to do something. Moments where you think that not everything is over, but your psyche is so pornsick you simulate even your own agency. Reducing it to a predetermined pattern of fantastic projection. Just to get a half chubby for a few seconds before you are washed over in guilt and shame again.

Everything in a casino is sexualized, but nothing is sexual. It couldn’t be more sterile. No passion, no risk. No hot breath in the morning or supple skin, no longing and surprised eyes. All of this is replaced by a distillation and distancing of presentation.  Algorithmically castrated for the purpose of profiteering and spiritual piracy. The object of desire is not physical, but virtualized. Not bound by temporality, not bound to people places or things, only to a backup generator in the desert. Stirring you along a series of temporal moments seven seconds at a time so you don’t feel all alone. If the casino was a temporal black hole before, now it is timeless. Algorithmically run machines don’t take cigarette breaks in the employee cabana. There is no skill expression along the lines of a card table with employees and human error. They have cut out the middle man, replaced them with an algorithm with only one purpose, to drain your life essence to the point of simulative retreat. Where pharmaceutical intervention is necessary, a retirement home for the broken and forgotten.

You aren’t ready to leave yet. Your wife is begging you to go, but you’re in the hole and you have a strategy. Just 10 more minutes, one more hour, a few more drinks. The tight shirt of the beer maiden in front of you has you feeling some type of way. This is your work wife. Your real wife left. You haven’t noticed yet. She walked out upset. Michael Kors dupe in hand.

I should have followed her to the exit, but my eyes were caught. Something real was now in front of me. 

Tucked away in the corner of the casino there are the machines with a physical slot. They work based on the pressure exerted onto a lever. Not something algorithmically derived, though I am sure there is a barebones mechanism to manipulate the odds in those as well. There are no bright lights or look-alikes of your choice to stare down at you while you tap a screen again and again. Cold mechanical levers. The old fashion way. Just you, a machine, and servers feeding you watered down tequila sodas sealed with a kiss of bright red lipstick. These players aren’t tapping. The tactility of a real pull alleviates the urge to manipulate it through hyperstitional practice. You can determine how fast the slot moves, there are no combos to make you think you won. No multiplier. It’s all odds. They aren’t tapping because there is no need to reassert of agency. You do control it. The sound of the slot actually rolling. A moment of authenticity. A daughter sits between her parents. She has a nose ring and a Juul. Her parents are happy playing nickel slots. Even penny slots have been absorbed by inflation. She looks happy to share something with them, behind her SSRI cloudy eyes there is an acceptance that this can be her avenue to engagement with her parents. At least they aren’t the husks in the room over. We smile at each other. My moment of intimacy was shattered by the sound of more tapping from across the casino. The bell of a winner slot. I have to see who won. It was anybody who won.

Rhythmic meters are taken in order to align singularity. It is really fucking annoying. I know it’s not even working for them.  A knock on the door to the playroom. LET ME. I want to feel something new today. Not for high rollers. The guy pulling out a hundred-dollar bill to buy a Heineken from a girl that looks like a brunette Kendra Sutherland. The high roller room is an enclosed glass box illumined by white LED lights to keep you at your most awake you silver fox. He doesn’t tap. He just lets it ride out while staring out into the distance. Worked a lot in your life just to wear a Lacoste pastel orange polo tonight, didn’t you? A hundred-dollar tip just to make a woman visually uncomfortable. I’m sure she’s playing hard to get. You should go back next weekend and ask for her.

The guy next to me at the bar just got cut off. He’s been drinking red wine all night. He might have been the source of the banging.

Don’t fucking cut me off man. Don’t cut me off man. Come on man.

It wasn’t a man. It was an older Cantonese woman in a Buccaneers Tom Brady jersey who has no sympathy for a guy explaining to her what an Uber is and why that means he can black out at what, 10 pm drinking bottom shelf pinot noir across the bar from a wall of 82 TVs. Next to him is the only guy that spoke to me the whole night. Commenting on the bartender attempting to upsell me on some nice gin. I switched to gin and tonics at this point. She doesn’t know the sleuth she is talking to, huh? No justice in this world, she fucked up his beer pour and you can see the disappointment through his light grey puffer unzipped to allow his gut to protrude. He shouldn’t be drinking an IPA anyway.

The spiritually imbued land of degenerated iconography is concreted over in a five-level parking structure that sits outside of this casino. Leveling a brothel to build something equally sexual, but with no flesh. No imaginary. Bricked up at the slot machine. I feel alone. Embedded phallic imagery psyoping all of us into becoming variable degrees of femboy. Gripping a large stick, stroking it to get lucky. And your still being homophobic? Still looking at my tight jammies. You like how I fill it out faggot?  This is a sickophiles world we are just living in it. Some of us aren’t. I guess it is a Friday night. I mean, I am here too. I feel so much. There is a deep uncomfortability. A degeneracy I find so sickening and yet it is still not enough. Excess is contained, refusing to spill over the side of the glass to make a mess. It is so contained and polished. Something so acceptable that it loses any staying power, but continues to crash waves of nausea over me. Everything you do in the casino is a fetish.

Is the casino a third place? Can I come here to give up and die? The sounds have become overwhelming and I haven’t brushed my teeth today. I close my eyes.

Whores in tassels strutting the stained carpet. Croupiers beating patrons. Ashing onto your server as she offers you another line. It’s all on the house. Everyone is for purchase. A corner of twinks here, but twunks anywhere else sucking and fucking in a glass room. As we stand outside to watch. Who cum first, I bet 13. It was the guy next to him. At least that’s some real to grasp on. As the pot winner gets to take the bottom back to his hotel room. One where they don’t bother to clean the sheet or repackage dollar store body wash into faux ceramic dispensers on the shower walls. I want to be somewhere real. With my nose bleeding instead of my ears ringing. An upfront acknowledgment of the stains of ecstasy.

I am surrounded by fetish objects, but I can’t get hard. I am drowning in excess, but I can still breathe. Everyone else is swimming, floating or waiting to swallow all the water before they realize it will never drown them either. Symbols keep you afloat, the water isn’t dense enough and you will always have a seat at the table. You are secure here, safe within the confines of acceptability. Your sins have been rendered, mapped onto the gird of intelligibility and washed away through transparency. You don’t understand. You’re at a slot machine and not a dog fight.  

I am waiting for the elevator. Tapping the button.

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