Gambling on Gaming

On my first day at the American Gaming Academy, Nancie Levey calls me over, circling both arms overhead as if waving in aircraft. I sit next to her at a blackjack table with plastic chips, pastel paper money and a student dealer. Nancie, 44, former PTA president and self-described “quintessential Jewish mom,” had never bet a hand of cards until she signed up for this 6-month-old Palm Springs gaming school, where $1,150 tuition and 100 hours of classroom time will net you a blackjack dealer’s certificate.

When she was a child, Nancie must have been the one the teacher tapped to show the new kids around. She rattles off bios on other students scattered around the school’s six card tables: Monsie, a cocktail waitress, is a single mom with 18-month-old twins. Lita and Baby are sisters from the Philippines. Baby’s trying to make enough money to bring her husband to this country. Lita is very intuitive; she may be psychic. That’s Bob, he’s a single dad, a good father. Nam--isn’t she tiny?--is a waitress at a Thai restaurant--you know, the one downtown with a patio? And don’t be fooled by the owner’s gruff way, really, he’s just the sweetest marshmallow of a teddy bear. I manage to interject a question about how Nancie came to be at dealer school. “I wanted a job where I wasn’t the only one doing the talking,” she says. She had been a dental hygienist.

The school is in a quiet strip mall with palm trees and a Del Taco. Its plate-glass windows face west, with a view of Mt. San Jacinto raising straight up behind a neighborhood of swimming pools and bougainvillea hedges. “This town is just like Las Vegas was in the beginning,” says Monsie Nuzzo, the mother of twins. “It’s going to explode. Think about it, Las Vegas was just empty desert. We already have hotels and golf courses.” Other students nod: yes, yes. I gaze out the window at a traffic signal with only one car waiting for the green light and the mountain whose outline I know by heart, and try not to think of faux volcanoes and obsidian pyramids. I came to the school as a journalist, but the more I hear about the cash the casinos will bring to town, the more I practice shuffling and wonder . . . .

Ron Ramsey, the gravel-voiced owner, insists all of his students will be making good money in no time. A handsome silver-haired man of 68 who favors silk shirts and gold watches, he has been married five or six times depending on how you count the wife he married twice. He worked as a pit boss and dealer back in the days when the mob ran Vegas and dealers--cocky men with a taste for action--had their own back-room games where they wagered mountains of cash.

Ramsey and his partner, Inki Kim, a dealer at the Spa Resort Casino in downtown Palm Springs, may be to Indian gaming what Levi Strauss was to the gold rush. Miners needed rugged pants. People hoping to mine the mother lode of Indian gambling need the skills dealer schools sell. And every day, it seems, there’s a new one in the classifieds boasting “JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!”

*

PROPOSITION 1A, WHICH CHANGED THE CALIFORNIA constitution to allow Indian gambling, passed March 7. The Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, which owns the Spa Resort Casino, announced a second casino six days later. It’s being built on a barren stretch of land off Interstate 10 near Rancho Mirage. When the wind blows, a curtain of sand rises along the freeway. The massive $80-million casino is going up so fast it’s as if the wind-whipped dust settles back down in the form of walls.

There will be 100 new dealer jobs when the casino opens. Three other casinos in the area are expanding. All are open 24 hours a day. Ramsey tells his students that 300 to 400 new dealer jobs will blossom in the next year alone.

Before a hand of blackjack is dealt, the dealer waves her hand over the table and says “all bets down.” The feeling around the desert is like the anticipation gamblers feel before that call. Players are scrambling to get their bets down. At my favorite lunch spot, a local cafe tucked into a courtyard, the owner says that when the casino opens he’s selling the 15-year-old restaurant his parents started. He has a business idea. Nothing he can talk about yet. But now’s the time, he says. You act now or kick yourself in five years.

Perhaps I should go to the bookstore and look through the entrepreneur section for a glittering future. But I never made the switch to writing for dot-coms. I didn’t even buy a bunch of Razor scooters to resell. So now, while others are readying for the Indian gaming boom, I’m worrying that I’ll never find another lunch place where the mom makes the desserts and the father shows favored patrons folk dance moves.

For me, dealer school is a way to get inside and try to understand what’s happening, what’s going to happen to this desert town. Besides, as a friend points out, it can never hurt to have pai gow to fall back on.

Another friend who has seen my checkbook bets $50 I can’t learn to deal, pointing out that I can’t add. At least without using my fingers.

*

BLACKJACK IS ALL ABOUT ADDING. The object is to get closer to 21 than the dealer without going over. I start adding everything. License plate numbers. Dates. In the grocery story choosing marinara sauce, I think “Paul Newman’s $2.16-- hmm, 9 he’ll hit. Classico $2.99, 20--hold. As for the pasta, that four-cheese ravioli at $4.99 is bust.”

Other students, such as Laura Rosillo, 29, a mom and cocktail waitress, and Jesse Rayos, a 21-year-old Marine Reserve college student with an easy grin, are human calculators. They can give sums as quickly as I can recognize colors. Freaky.

Financially, Nancie probably needs the job less than the other students--her husband owns online traffic schools and California’s careless drivers support their family nicely. But emotionally she sees a casino job as a quest, often coming to both day and evening classes. It may be a fruitless quest. She can’t add quickly either. Her husband finds her counting in her dreams. “I don’t understand,” she wails. “I have a bachelor of science. I can cross-section muscles. But nine plus three plus four, God save me.”

The first lesson is the shuffle. “You can’t press too hard. Let the cards just float softly down the way they want to,” instructor John McClurkin, 53, tells me, sounding like a meditation guru. Coming back from the Vietnam War, McClurkin stopped in Reno to see a Marine buddy. He’d never gambled, but he walked by a craps table where the croupier, another pal, said to get in the game, bet whatever he had. McClurkin put down $4--the only money in his pocket--and turned it into $2,700 in a half hour. He spent the next five years--and he won’t say how much money--unsuccessfully trying to repeat that experience. He hasn’t gambled in 20 years.

This is a play-as-you-go school. When you’re not the dealer, you’re the player. During endless games of blackjack and pai gow (a card and dice game popular with Asians) the stories of riches get told: the Spa dealer who made $6,000 in one night off a George (a good tipper) on a hot streak. The cousin who pulls in $80,000 a year at a local casino. Lolita “Lita” Arugay and her sister, Baby, have a brother and sister who are both dealers. One of their co-workers had been working as a registered nurse but turned to dealing because it pays better.

Unlike Las Vegas, where employees pool tips, dealers at most California casinos keep the money they make. While the actual salary is usually minimum wage, many players tip by putting down a bet for the dealer, so a dealer’s income rides on the cards.

Next to the stories about how much money you can make, the stories that get told most often at dealer school are about how much you can lose. One student intimates hearing that some dealers missed their shift on a recent night. “They were at another casino, $10,000 under, and couldn’t leave until they made it back,” she says, blue eyes wide. She knows the sickening feeling of realizing you made three trips to the ATM and threw $1,500 away when you weren’t even planning to stop by the casino. She’s decided that when she’s a dealer she’ll stop playing locally and only gamble when she visits Las Vegas.

She’s very pretty. A smile of dazzling white, dimples and blond hair. There are diamonds in her ears and a Rolex watch on her slender wrist. I heard one person reckon that she wants to be a dealer to meet a rich man who’ll take care of her. Not the case. She already lives with a well-to-do fiance. She’s going to dealer school because she wants to do something with her life, she says--something that makes her more independent.

I thought putting down cards by rote for hours in dim, smoke-filled casinos was a job you do only because you need the money. I’ve discovered it’s an aspiration. In the break room, amid swirling cigarette smoke, students tell each other their motives for being here. Everyone at some point utters the sentence “I’m a people person!”

Some see dealers as akin to rock stars--the objects of constant sexual attention. Dealer husbands, it is reported, come home with phone numbers in their pockets. Women call. Late.

For one student, a wife and mom, the casinos are “adult Disneylands,” and she can’t wait to escape the house to work amid such fun.

Raul Camarena, 54, is a philosophical man with a dignified manner. He drives to class three times a week from Hesperia, two hours away. The other days he goes to GED classes, since to be hired by an Indian casino you must have a high school diploma or the equivalent. A window washer, he hasn’t been to school since he left Mexico as a child. He says he is going to dealer school because he wants to “move on and have fun, because this is the point of life, no?” It’s also for his three grown sons. He wants to show them what you can accomplish if you work hard.

Lita, 48, was in a car accident a year ago and almost died. She spent seven months in a wheelchair. What they say about almost dying is true, she says. It makes you more alive. She notices every color of every flower. She remembers every loving gesture her husband made when she was helpless. Somehow for Lita, who was a hairstylist and before that an LVN, this awareness of life has translated into a desire to be a casino dealer.

*

ON THE MEDIAN OUTSIDE OF THE Spa Resort Casino is what I call the “You Go Girl” sculpture, a bronze of two Indian women gathering acorns in Cahuilla baskets. It makes me think of the Generals, a nickname for three Agua Caliente sisters who had a behind-the-scenes power in the tribe. In the 1950s, it wasn’t so behind the scenes. A five-member all-female tribal council successfully lobbied Congress to give the tribe 99-year leasing rights instead of the five-year leases that made even their downtown Palm Springs land commercially worthless. It was a time when being Indian meant facing great prejudice and being a woman meant that you weren’t going to be a voice in national politics. But they donned their ladylike white gloves and went in fighting. It was the determining event in the Agua Caliente becoming a wealthy tribe, and it was the wealth of such tribes that paid for the $100-million political campaigns to legalize Indian gaming.

Already the casinos are redistributing Southern California’s wealth. Inside I watch an older woman with the taut skin of an expensive face-lift lose a $100 chip. The dealer, I see, is fast, smooth, showing his hands casually to the eye-in-the-sky camera just as our teachers have instructed. In five hands, five minutes, he makes $40.

For Thanksgiving we have a potluck. People offer Nam congratulations when she arrives. She shyly tells me she won a car. The Spa Resort Casino put the names of all those who won a video jackpot in a drawing. Nam’s name was pulled for a burgundy Mercedes Z240. I’m still having trouble with numbers. I can now add every possible combination to 21, but how to figure relative values when you can lose $1,500 dropping by the casino for a little relaxation or win a Mercedes by pumping change into a machine?

*

THE MOOD IN THE SCHOOL changes as students get nearer the goal. There’s less laughing and chattering. Shuffling and counting chips were kindergarten; now it’s about precision and speed. Every move is scripted down to which hand to use when placing a card at a certain position. If someone makes a mistake while dealing they call out “Floor!” and must explain to one of the teachers what they did wrong.

Nancie can count now. She’s been practicing with her 11-year- old son, who plays blackjack on his computer. Lita can shuffle with such grace that everyone stops to watch. Ramsey and McClurkin become an improvisational act, pretending to be drunk, belligerent, cheating, flirting customers. One morning word goes around that a former student has frozen at two auditions, flunking badly. For days there’s a pall around the school and lips tighten in determination. Even those who have finished the required 100 hours continue to come in and practice. Then we get word: Fantasy Springs Casino in Indio needs more dealers immediately.

Ramsey is sending three students who’ve completed the hours and passed the exams. Lita gets the message at home a couple of hours before the audition. She returns the lunch she was preparing to the refrigerator and puts on the new tuxedo shirt she bought weeks ago in anticipation of such an event. Nancie finds out at school that morning. She’s so nervous that she goes home, eats a bagel and throws up. She and Laura decide to drive to the audition together for moral support.

On the casino floor, each taps into a live game--replacing a dealer by rapping on the dealer’s shoulder. All three go through the moves they have been practicing up to eight hours a day. At Laura’s table, the players go bust in three hands and leave, muttering that Laura is bad luck. Her audition is over in less than five minutes. All three are offered part-time jobs on the spot, pending the results of a drug test and background check. Laura has to rush to her other job. But Nancie, Lita and I go out to celebrate their employment. Their eyes are shining; they’re giggly and distracted--students who just got accepted to med school, real estate agents who closed that mansion sale, writers who landed book deals. They have arrived at the moment they think will change their lives.

I think about the casino we just left. All those cars in the parking lot on a nice afternoon. The blinking, pinging slot machines. The sea of neon light on one side of the freeway and, on the other, wild desert painted rose by the setting sun. Lita says she will feel bad if she has to watch people lose who can’t afford it. Nancie says she has no qualms. “None. I’m just going to feel lucky that I’m on this side of the table.”

We raise our glasses. They drink to excitement. Prosperity. I make the only toast I can think of: “May the cards run lucky.”