Some folks asked for more stories about the time when I was spending about a fourth of my life in Las Vegas. This was mostly back in the nineties when I was (a) playing a lot of Blackjack, (b) sometimes seeing a showgirl there, (c) getting away from L.A. so I could get writing done…and I guess there was also a (d). I knew or met a lot of Vegas performers so I could get backstage easily and I had a certain fascination with how that corner of show business worked.
I usually stayed on The Strip because I had a lot of comps for free rooms and sometimes meals at hotels there. I stayed in most of them at one time or another but most often at the Imperial Palace, The Hacienda, The Maxim, Harrah's and Bally's. Of these, the first three are gone and Bally's has recently been renamed The Horseshoe. Although I played a fair amount of Blackjack downtown, the casinos there were stingy with comps for players so I only stayed downtown twice — once at the Golden Nugget and once at what is now called The Plaza but which was then called The Union Plaza.
It was called that because it adjoined the station for the Union Pacific railroad. Years after there stopped being rail service to Vegas and that station was gone, the hotel became Jackie Gaughan's Plaza and after Mr. Gaughan sold his interest in it, it became The Plaza. By any name, it's located at 1 Main Street and when it opened in 1971, it had 500 rooms and was billed as the largest hotel in the world.
These days, 500 rooms is like a large motel. The MGM Grand now has more than ten times that number.
When I stayed at the Plaza in the eighties, it didn't seem to have been cleaned much since its opening. Even though the room was free, I briefly considered switching to somewhere else where I'd have to pay…but I didn't. I don't care much about fancy in a hotel room when it's just me. Gimme a bed, a toilet, a sink, a shower and a desk on which I can work on my laptop and I'm fine. My room at the Plaza met those requirements…barely.
I got there one afternoon and spent the day alternating writing in my room with sessions at Blackjack tables, mainly in a downtown casino called Benny Binion's Horseshoe. Benny Binion's Horseshoe is still there but a few years ago, it lost the "Horseshoe" part of its name to the folks who own Bally's and as it says above, what was Bally's over on The Strip is now The Horseshoe. I made a little money at the tables, earned a little more writing and somehow went to bed without having eaten anything since breakfast.
Around 5:15 AM, I awoke with a desperate need to eat…almost anything. Well, I thought, I'm lucky I'm in Las Vegas where something is always open. I got dressed, went downstairs, didn't find any appealing options within the Plaza and ventured out onto Fremont Street in downtown Vegas.
It was still dark but not too dark with all that neon everywhere. It was also spooky at that hour. The street had very few people on it and they all looked somewhat homeless and sad, shuffling along without making eye contact with anyone. There was also a steady cold drizzle falling. It hit me intermittently as I passed under one marquee after another, looking around, finding no particularly inviting places to get chow.
And in the midst of this dank mood and damp weather, I suddenly saw a completely outta-place oasis. It was a very old casino — not a hotel-casino, just a casino — called The Golden Goose.
The Golden Goose, I later found out, opened in 1974. A sister club next door opened soon after — then called Glitter Gulch, at other times called by other names. Both were slot joints, filled with one-armed bandits which, it was said, paid off at roughly the same frequency at which Halley's Comet reappears in our skies. That would be once every 75-79 years. If you had a bag of coins and wanted to make sure you got rid of them once and for all and never saw them again, there was no surer way than to put them in a Golden Goose slot machine.
To lure you in to forfeit that money, the place offered all sorts of free stuff. In the photo above from I-don't-know-what-year, they offer a free LCD digital watch, free ice cold drinks, a chance to win a "golden egg" every 30 minutes and you could also get a "colossal shrimp & crab cocktail" for 99 cents. I remember on that drizzly morning, they offered a free 3-minute phone call to anywhere in the United States.
How did you get all this free stuff? You had to go to the Prize Center, which was located in the back of the casino. The back.
You had to walk past all those slot machines…then wait a few minutes next to other slot machines…then apply for your free popcorn or your free LCD digital watch (one such request per hour)…then come back in thirty minutes to get it. Which of course meant hanging around or walking several times past all those slot machines. I had seen one of those LCD watches once on a previous visit. If while waiting for yours to be ready, you dropped just one dollar into one of those slot machines, they made about 60 cents profit right there.
The same principle is at work every time you go to a Costco. You are almost certain to want one or more of these three things: Paper towels, toilet paper or a rotisserie chicken. Where are they located? In the back of the store.
I became rather fascinated with the place. You see scams and swindles often in this world but you rarely see them that naked and obvious. Every time I saw the Golden Goose, I thought of a politician who begins his speech by saying, "Before I begin, I just want to alert you that pretty much everything I say will be an outright deliberate lie, operating on the assumption that you're all so friggin' stupid that you'll believe every word of it!" We've gotten very close to elected officials or those who wish to be elected actually saying that.
That drizzly morn, I stopped out front of the Golden Goose and I could see people, none of whom looked like they could afford a room for the night, feverishly pumping coins into the machines. And out front, looking way too sunny and cheery for the moment, there was this young woman dressed like Mother Goose or maybe Little Bo Peep: Big hoop skirt, bonnet, a wig with pigtails…the works. She was standing next to a colorful dispensing machine filled with plastic eggs and she was displaying a smile that showed all 32 teeth and maybe a few more. After greeting me, she asked the only question that mattered at that moment…
"Would you like to play The Golden Goose Game?"
The sheer contrast — all that sunshine coming off that woman, all that light rain falling on my head — was stunning. I just stood there as she explained to me that all I had to do was pull the handle and an egg would come down the chute for me. Nothing to buy, nothing to sign. Absolutely free. And in that egg would be a coupon for a "valuable" prize that I could redeem at the Prize Center in, of course, the back of the casino.
"It might be a hundred dollars," she said.
I asked her how long she'd been doing this. She said about six months. I said, "In all that time, has it ever been a hundred dollars?" She said, "No…but there's a first time for everything."
I asked her, "What is it usually?" She looked around to make sure no one could hear and she said, "A personalized key ring with your initials on it." Then she checked again and whispered to me, "It's always a personalized key ring with your initials on it. Every egg in there has a coupon in it for a personalized key ring with your initials on it."
I asked, "Do I at least get to keep the plastic egg?" She said, "No. I have to get it back and reload it with another slip that says 'personalized key ring with your initials on it' and put it back in the machine."
Then — and I could sense she was just bursting to say this to somebody that morning — she added, "Listen…I don't run this thing. I came to Vegas to be a dancer and this was the best job I could get that didn't involve turning tricks or swinging on a pole. You think I like being out here at 6:00 in the morning in the rain dressed like this?"
There was no one else passing by so we stood there talking for maybe fifteen minutes. Her name was Audrey. She had a three-year-old daughter that her roommate was taking care of at the moment. Later in the day, the roommate would be serving drinks to gamblers at the Riviera and Audrey would be taking care of the roommate's five-year-old son. Both children were the result of short-term romances with guys who hadn't been seen for a long time.
She seemed smart. She seemed like she could achieve much in this world. But she was standing out on Fremont Street at 6 AM dressed like Mother Goose or maybe Little Bo Peep, trying to persuade mostly-drunk passers-by that they might win a hundred bucks but they'd actually get a key ring which might be worth…oh, I dunno…fifty cents maybe?
She couldn't resist telling me all the secrets of The Golden Goose Game. The reason the key ring was personalized with your initials was because, first of all, it made it seem more special. But the larger reason was that the personalization made it seem reasonable that you had to hang around for a half-hour waiting for it.
And the real truth was that they almost never had to make up a new key ring for you. They had a rack there with hundreds of pre-made key rings with every likely combo of initials. When you came back for yours, they just grabbed one off the rack and gave it to you, remarking on how unbelievably lucky you were at the moment. She said, "They're supposed to tell you, 'Gee, if I was on a lucky streak like that, I'd pick out one of those slot machines and cash in on it.'"
She asked me what my initials were and I told her, "Believe it or not, M.E."
She said, "They probably have fifty key rings already made with your initials but they'll still make you wait the half-hour. If your name was, like, Quincy Xavier, they might have to actually make one up fresh for you. But I'm not sure the lady at the booth at this hour even knows how to work the machine. You might have to come back later in the day for it."
I had to ask: "Would Quincy Xavier actually make another trip here for his free personalized key ring?" She replied in a "That's a stupid question" tone, "Of course. It might not be worth anything but it's free." We talked for a few more minutes but suddenly there were people strolling past and she had to do her job, trying to get them to play The Golden Goose Game.
So I walked on until I found a McDonald's and there, I ate my standard McDonald's breakfast order: A sausage biscuit with egg, that thing they call a hash-browned potato, and an orange juice. I took my time dining and a little while later, I passed the Golden Goose again on my way back to The Plaza. Audrey was all excited and she told me, "You should have played The Golden Goose Game! You should have played The Golden Goose Game!" I asked why.
She said, "I swear I didn't put it in there but someone else must have! This guy pulled the handle and in his egg, it said he'd won a hundred dollars! The manager said that he's worked here like five years and that's never happened!"
I said, "Your manager must have been upset. Are you in any trouble?"
She replied in that same "That's a stupid question" tone, "Of course not. They gave the guy a bucket of a hundred silver dollars and he yelled out, 'This is my lucky day!' and immediately started pumping them into slot machines! They had them all back in under six minutes."
COMING SOON TO THIS BLOG: Another Tale of the Golden Goose.