If you keep your resolution in order, everything else is playing for gumballs

Last year at this time, I wrote in my Happy Trails that I didn’t believe in resolutions. I should amend that. It’s not that I don’t believe in resolutions. I just don’t agree with them starting at the New Year, because a real resolution can start at any time. Of course, it’s hard to deny the power of a new year. Starting clean. Putting the past behind and beginning fresh. Change is a powerful fulcrum. As Nina Simone sings, “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me, and I’m feeling good.”

I’ve made and stuck with resolutions plenty in my life. But the new year presents too much pressure. The other day I was standing in line at Jewel, watching the mini casts that run on their TV displays. An enthusiastic interviewer (because aren’t we all) was asking celebrities about their New Year’s resolutions. I liked Ellen Burstyn’s answer the best: “Oh, the same ones I’ve been making for the last 40 years.”

But for all my talk about not making New Year’s resolutions, one was forced upon me once. And it happened to be exactly on New Year’s Eve.

When I was in college, my two best friends and I decided to forgo the night of extreme debauchery our entire group of friends had planned around someone who knew someone that worked in a hotel and had secured two adjoining rooms for everyone to go wild and crazy in. I think that night ended in three cases of alcohol poisoning, a combined total of 27 stitches, and the improper use of a hot tub (that’s putting it mildly). Why we decided to shy away from that, I have no idea. We were very young. But we did. And it turned out, we, or I should say I, was no less in danger. Worse, I was putting myself in the kind of danger that could really follow a guy, if he lets it take hold.

My two best friends and I decided to go gambling.

This was years ago now, so Rosemont didn’t have its gaming license and either Grand Victoria in Elgin wasn’t there or we didn’t know about it, because we opted for the two-and-a-half hour drive to Ho-Chunk Casino in Wisconsin instead. An adventure!

We arrived there shortly before midnight, and by the time midnight came and went, I was still myself enough to notice that when the clock hit 12:00 there was no toast, no celebration, no singing, just a bunch of diehards dropping coins, pulling arms, hypnotizing themselves into a big win. I thought it was sad. Until I won $50 dollars. Suddenly these people had the right idea: Keep pulling at something, and eventually it pays off!

Each of my friends and I had about $200 dollars with us, and we promised ourselves when our money ran dry, we would leave. I won the $50 quickly and lost the $250 even quicker. I think by 12:15 a.m. I was almost out of money, and we hadn’t even been there an hour. My friends were in better shape, and I was jealous. My only experience with casinos to this point was when my parents took me and my sister and her husband to Vegas when I was 13. My age proved to be an unlucky number indeed because there was squat to do there for me, and if I stood still on the gaming floor as I walked through, someone was there immediately to usher me along because I wasn’t old enough to gamble. At Ho-Chunck, though, I was of age, and instead of being told to “Move along, young man,” I was told to sit, stay, have a drink served by a waitress who was wearing the cocktail napkin and not much else.

I had to turn my luck around.

Somehow, I managed to turn the few dollars I had left into about $20, which kept me in the game and my new-found addiction growing. I was obsessed with losing my money and winning it back, mesmerized by spinning things everywhere that decided my fortune.

Once, after I used up my chances at one slot machine, one of my friends asked me what the girl sitting next to me was talking to me about.

“Girl?” I asked. “What girl?”

“The cute one who was clearly interested in you,” he said. “The one trying to talk to you for about 20 minutes.”

Barely paying attention to him, I looked in my cup at the meager layer of coins left in there and said back to my friend, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cute girl. Can I borrow a dollar?”

In about another 20 minutes, I was entirely out of money and cursed myself for not having a credit card on me, because there were plenty of machines at the ready to loan me money, if I just had my credit card.

My friends wouldn’t loan me anything, and after digging in my pockets (like I hadn’t tried that already) and coming up empty, I ran out to my car and started ripping it apart like a police team searching for drugs. I just need a quarter, I told myself. Just a quarter! I scraped together about $.75 in crusty coins and went back in for a comeback, which ended before the tumblers on the first slot machine I found finished rolling when a hand slammed down on my shoulder.

“What’s that you’re playing with in your hand?” someone said behind me.

I looked over my shoulder into the face of a very displeased pit boss or security guard or angel, depending on how you look at it.

“What?” I asked him, which seemed to be the only real words I could manage all night.

“In your hand. The knife.”

I looked down, and apparently I’d been fiddling with the pocket knife on my key ring.

“This?” I said. “My dad gave it to me.”

He didn’t care and grabbed my arm and started me for the door.

My friends, who I’d entirely forgotten about, came around the corner just in time to see me shoved out the front door and not too lightly.

They asked me what happened once we were all outside, and I told them I think I just got kicked out for caring a weapon. At first, I was infuriated. The knife was barely the size of my pinky. It wasn’t like I was carrying Crocodile Dundee’s bone-handled Buck knife strapped to my back.

We drove home after that, and every mile we got away from that casino, the more normal I felt.

Based on that night alone, the only wager I’ve placed is a gentleman’s bet, and the only coins I’ve dropped in slots were to retrieve a gumball. For everything else, I keep my money in my pocket, where it belongs.

I’ll note one last thing. I sort of lied at the beginning of this Happy Trails. I did make one New Year’s resolution: to check my home phone’s voicemail more often. I mean, why would I ever want to miss “You may be a winner of…”

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