THE ENABLER
If you’ve had an itch to play Texas Hold ‘Em in an amateur dentist’s office, or needed to kill an hour while the repo man takes your futon, the Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens is your fix. It’s a calcified museum of human misery where the drinks are as cheap as the fluorescent lighting. The Enabler can’t recommend it per se, but as a vision of postindustrial psychic apocalypse, it’s nonpareil in Los Angeles.
The Bicycle’s motto is “Come for the Food, Stay for the Fun,” and its website claims the place sells more than 3,000 meals per day. These meals are served table-side on hospital gurneys, and consist of bloody cuts of roast beef, over-boiled whole carrots and fossilized chicken wings.
As the Enabler sat pensively sucking on a scotch and soda in the Player’s Club bar, this much-touted “fun” proved as elusive as a straight flush. A painted trollop spurned the advances of wolf-eyed men while a creaky grandma at a poker table held an unlighted cigarette aloft, perhaps out of sheer habit and perhaps in silent, indignant protest. Nobody seemed to be winning, but setting foot in the Bicycle gives you the feeling that on some level, you’ve already lost.
7301 Eastern Ave., Bell Gardens. (562) 806-4646.
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