To Be In On The Action Is To Be More Alive
If you’ve seen ladies sitting in front of video slot machines, you know why they’d never stop playing, even after what happened to Herminia Rodriguez.
The ladies sit before the machines while light from video screens adds sparkle to their eyes and applies neon rouge to cheeks long drained of color.
They don’t often smile, but they’re happy, the way a happy-but-unsmiling man sits in front of a television set, switching from channel to channel with a remote control.
Finding a specific TV show isn’t that important to the man; winning money isn’t that important to the women.
Being there, in front of the screen, is important.
That’s why they came back, even after the owners of Harrah’s Ak-Chin Casino told Herminia Rodriguez they wouldn’t pay her the $330,152.13 she thought she’d won on a Quartermania machine.
Rodriguez had been playing the machine for an hour when she hit the jackpot, or believed she had. This was in October. The machine had problems, however. It had been serviced while she was sitting in front of it. She was allowed to continue to play, though, and won big. That should have been that.
It’s a gaming facility.
The patrons take chances. The owners take chances. Harrah’s gambled on its machine. The fact that it failed - according to them and a company they hired to investigate it - was a matter of chance, a crap shoot. They lost.
Or should have.
But machines come with warnings that say malfunctions will nullify jackpots. The state of Arizona can’t seem to do anything about the fact that Rodriguez isn’t getting the money.
The 15 casinos located on Indian land are more or less out of bounds. The busloads of people who roll into them every day run the risk that any one of them could end up like Rodriguez.
After the jackpot, she got a photograph of her with her husband, and some balloons. That’s it.
During the past week or so, the story of Rodriguez has been in all the local papers and on television. It’s been discussed on talk radio.
It’s not like the ladies and gentlemen who continue to play the slots don’t know about it. They do. They just don’t care.
They arrive in cars and vans and buses. They are winter visitors from Chicago, Minnesota and Canada. They’re people who have lived here all of their lives.
The odds of winning money are against them. They know it. They still go.
Rodriguez says she hasn’t been back to the casino since the day she thought she’d struck it rich. I asked her why she thought others return to the slots, even after they hear her story.
“I guess it’s because hope is the last thing to die,” she said. “You hope, even though you don’t expect it, that maybe you will hit big and then you will get out of what you’re in. Your poverty.”
This is what makes casino owners rich.
In front of slot machines are people who are more old than young, more poor than rich. There’s a temptation to look down on them, as if small-time gamblers are foolish or ignorant.
But they aren’t. Most of them pass their days doing the world’s real work so the rest of us won’t have to. At the end of a long, hard shift or of a long, hard career, this is how they choose to spend their spare time and their spare change.
Eventually, the casino may give in to public pressure and pay Rodriguez. Its owners and managers may figure out that $300,000 (or some percentage of it) isn’t much to shell out for good will and good publicity.
That’s what I hope.
But even if they don’t agree to a payoff, the cars, vans and buses will continue to make the 40-minute drive from downtown Phoenix to Harrah’s. They’ll continue to fill the parking lots of all the other casinos on other reservations.
Jackpots aren’t what a casino promises. Even Herminia Rodriguez says so. It’s not about money. It’s about hope.
You can bet your bottom dollar on it.
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