Casino

I worked so hard for my money, those years of dairying. I knew every cost and every savings in a 30-mile radius, whether for diapers or diesel fuel, ketchup or cattle feed, veterinarian supplies or Valentine's Day cards for little kids' school parties. I stretched dimes into dollars and squeezed credit accounts till they cried for mercy.

As soon as I stopped throwing money at cows, I had money to spend. Money to burn, literally: on the cold April day when I cleaned up the dooryard of my house for the final sale, I stacked old fenceposts and slabwood and half-rotted sheds into a pyre.  I doused the heap with old chainsaw fuel and then I twisted a $1, a $5, and a $10 bill into a spill, I borrowed a smoking friend's lighter, and I lit the dollars in defiance of God, cows, low milk prices, high divorce rate, and the endless cold sifting snow. I touched off the burnpile. The flames soared and roared, searing my eyebrows, cauterizing my bleeding heart, and melting all the snow in a half-acre radius.

Years later I still have trouble spending money freely. I'm off public assistance now, I have degrees and a good steady job, but I still get queasy when I do a big grocery shopping or when I balance the checkbook. I thought the feeling of fiscal trauma would never pass.

Then friends took me to a casino for the first and last time, to try to cure me of the shakes.

I brought $200 in twenties: 10 units in which to teach myself what slot machines were all about. The first bill turned into $30 then evaporated fast. Second one went towards the suppertime buffet - no sugar/no flour, though, because that's the strict rule I must follow right now - and then the third and subsequent twenties ebbed and flowed into the dazzling altars of chance until by 1:00am I was as broke as if I were still farming.

My friends stood me to a scotch and soda at the central circular bar. I watched flecks of light fall from the disco ball into my liquor and I thought about fire and ice. I watched a gay couple dirty dancing to the DJ's thumping tunes, and I saw how they were immune to the lure of the slots for as long as they gazed at each other.

I looked out across the rows and rows of glowing slots, each hungry machine being fed and coaxed by a shadowy hunched-over figure - and then I saw the slot machines were the same as cows, and the players were the same as dairymen, and the cash fed into the machines was a no-hope bargain just the same as milking cows, because when the machine printed a voucher or the cow gave milk, the cost of production would always exceed the value of the product.

Gambling is the name for what happens at casinos, and what happens on farms. Farming, especially dairying, is addicting in its power to lure strong people to folly, its numbing mindless repetitive endeavors, its seductive promise of better times ahead, its teasing and tormenting intermittent payoffs, and its cumulative erosive effect on budgets and families.

I was one of the lucky ones. I escaped with enough of my soul, with enough years left, and with enough friends to see me through the reconstruction.