Deadwood on Five Dollars a Minute

(This was written thirty-some years ago and first published by my pal Babs, in her BORDERLINE magazine.)  

             I live on a windy knoll in the Salmon River mountains, seven miles up a gravel road from Donnelly, Idaho,      “The City of Helping Hands,”  population 247, but I grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota, and my folks still live there, in the Black Hills. On October 1, 1989, casino gambling, with certain limitations, became legal in Deadwood. What follows is my set of notes from a weekend trip to Deadwood in March 1991.

Day One

At five in the morning I kiss Caty and Baby-in-Belly, (working title: Little Luna) scrape windshield ice from Bic, the disposable Chrysler station wagon, then shimmy down Highway 55 in the Payette River canyon toward the nearest stoplight, 93 miles south, in Boise.

Boise airport security rent-a-cops operate as though the holy jihad is being launched from right here in spud central. I have a Zippo, a small crescent wrench, five bucks worth of quarters,and a Leatherman do-anything tool in my pockets. I am wearing a Harley Davidson,“Forged in America” belt buckle, and I have a biker's wallet with a chain on it, so I am pretty much nude by the time the magnetometer stops squealing and the senior citizen gives me permission to proceed to the boarding area.

At the gate is Billy the Kid Graham , carrying what could be an exploding bible, wearing the industrial carpet thin, pacing at the windows like a kenneled dog, sweating on his polyester. He sits across the aisle from me on the DC 1o. When we taxi out for takeoff, he comes

              unglued, unsnaps his seatbelt, runs up to the first class  

              attendant, and tells her that God says that the flight is going down and he wants off. She presses a secret button and out of the cockpit comes Mr. United Airlines, who leads Billy back to his seat, tells him to calm down and buckle up because he is going with us, then recites the meaty parts of the federal statute that forbids crying bomb, wolf. or fiery furnace on an airplane. I try to bet the kida dollar that I won't die on this particular hop to Denver, but he just gives me the burn-in-hell-motherfucker smile, opens his bible, and retreats into Leviticus. The United shuttlebus in Denver delivers me into a roomful of eco-yuppies bound for Aspen. I sit on a pew next to a person wearing a fluffy parka, a cowpoke bonnet, and shiny, shiny needlenose boots. He is from Shaker Heights, heading out for a St. Pat's ski party in the Rockies. He asks me if I have ever been to Aspen. I tell him not since Hunter Thompson snitched on the Hell's Angels. I ask him what his coat is made from, and he tells me that it is not really wolf at all, but made from wolfite, a miracle fabric, and what a shame it is to kill all those furry creatures just to make clothing, I tell him that his hat is made out of Easter bunnies ad his boots used to give milk. The plane for Rapid City is a flying culvert. Fifteen of us hunch down, .wondering if the pilot is old enough to be fooling around with such complicated looking levers. The navigator fidgets in his seat as though he too ,forgot to pee in Denver. From the air the northern Colorado, centerpivot irrigated, circle fields look like God dropped his poker chips .Rapid City is home to Ellsworth Air Force Base, half a dozen concrete statues of dinosaurs, and Reptile Gardens, where my sister Eleanor once wrestled alligators. ("It's easy. Flip them on their backs and they pass out, then you try to make it look good."). My folks and Veronica meet me at the airport and we cruise the forty miles to Deadwood, clipping coupons as we go: i1 bucks worth of quarters for ten dollars at the Eagle Bar, ,twelve for ten at the First Gold.  They have it figured out so we can make ten dollars without betting.

We park in Deadwood Gulch, just in time for the St. Patrick's Day parade, which amounts to the mayor in a 57 T-Bird,the Deadwood High School Jazz Ensemble on the back of a flatbed Chevy playing "Its a grand old shillelagh me father brought from Ireland,"two tow trucks with “O'Dick's O'Towing" signs on the doors,three pickups full of the local saloon girls, (graduate students in can-can skirts,) and a couple of mountain-man types on horseback,tossing taffy to kids along the route. Gambling has been good to Deadwood. The old buildings have been nicely restored, and the maximum height ordinance has been retained. A ten-year-old can still throw a ball onto any roof in town.On the front door of Ayres' Hardware is a sign:"This Building Is Not For Sale. Don't Even Bother To Ask.”

My Mom and Veronica are eager to strike it big, so we drive into one of the joints. The establishments are Mom and Pop video arcades. City law limits gaming to slots, blackjack, and draw poker. The biggest bet you can make in this town is five dollars, which takes away the double-up-till-you-win blackjack strategy. After I figure out that I can lose five bucks a minute at blackjack, I start poking silver dollars into the slits in slots, but am bothered by the noise that is generated while the little plums and cherries spin past. I eventually realize that this gurgly tootle which the manufacturers have designed to be a happy, gameshow background, sounds like the boxful of electronic crickets that I hear just before nitrous oxide steals my soul.

None of us are getting rich, so I poop out early. My folks take me back home and feed me.I watch a bit of the telly, then curl up in bed with James Clifton's “The Invented Indian”. I dream of an orange waterfall.

Day Two 

As an experiment I give fifty dollars each to my mother and Veronica and instruct them to win the family fortune while Shari ,Veronica's daughter, and I wander around town. Shari works in one of the joints and knows the ropes.

From her I learn that every store except the Safeway is now a casino. You can't buy a pair of pants in this town. Shari shows me that by looking down into the bowels of a slot machine , between the right-hand rotating drum and the glass,you can see the readout totalizers for that particular machine, and tell the number of plays it has had, how many jackpots it has paid. I can't decide whether to play one that has paid a lot of jackpots and is all played out or one that hasn't paid and probably won't while I am in town. She tells me that about the only gaming crimes in Deadwood are usually between a dealer and a friend who wins a little too often. At five bucks maximum bet, there aren't many real sharks with midnight tans in town.

     Three hours later Mom and Veronica each give me back fifty one dollars, a two percent per day accrual, and we head out to Veronica's for sloppy joes and four-handed cribbage. That night I learn from James Clifton that by the time Kevin Costner was dancing with wolves and was supposedly the first whitey the Sioux had seen, the Sioux nation had negotiated thirteen treaties with the United States government and the chiefs had developed a real taste for Chesapeake Bay oysters.

Day Three

Peach pie for breakfast then the airport.

Rapid City to Denver in the same culvert, different crew. The backhoe operator from Sioux Falls asks me where I am from:

“Idaho”

“Lotta elk there , huh?”

“Some”

“I heard they are selling those shed horns to China. How come?”

“As an aphrodisiac.”

“Afrowhat?”

“Aphrodisiac, Spanish fly, Love Potion Number Nine.”

"Well, by God it must work. Sure are lot of Chinese in this world."

        In Stapelton airport, Denver, the regulations put us smokers with the drinkers. I haven't had a nip since last August, and boy,. the beer smells good, but I make it another day.

Denver to Boise, my seatmate is a commodities expert from Boston headed into intermountain west to sell realtime computer uplinks to the hicks. I ask him whether it is true that this Arabic oil everyone is killing each other about is the only kind of oil that makes good plastic. He says he will have to get back to me on that one.

In Boise I walk around a corner and smack dab into a banner that reads WELCO HOME OPERATION DESERT STORM TROOPERS. Rommel drives deep into the near east.  I'm glad I'm not wearing cammo.

A hundred miles on slick, dark, winding roads and I am back in bed with Caty and  Luna, two hundred bucks lighter, but very glad to be living way out here in the boonies, where the hoot owls keep the chicken eggs fertile and the coyotes worry the pounds off my cow dogs.