Dusty Dreams, Tawdry Town

You are soaking in the whirlpool tub at the Comfort Inn, Atlantic City, New Jersey. You are reading Soloviev's monograph on Plato, on the five varieties of Eros, including divine androgyny and the "satanic abyss." Soloviev reveals that even Plato ended terribly. It is time to gamble. In the next room is your traveling companion, a man of some six and a half feet, of a jocular girth, and with a shock of red hair that glistens like Louisiana pepper sauce and moonlight. You will remember his name: M. B., Destroyer of Restrooms. Rarely does he see the same john twice.

You find yourself in another's body, gentle reader: you are enjoying the present author's recent two-day sleaze vacation. It is the Trump Taj Mahal, three o'clock on a Monday morning. Two South Jersey frat boys join you at the blackjack table. Soon your dealer is a gnarled Italian named Isidoro. "Call me Eaz-ee," he says, like sandpaper. The frat boys are erudite frat boys. They're going to Montreal if they can get up $600. Eaz-ee offers to deal in French. One of the frat boys keeps ordering hot cocoas with whipped cream and a cherry. The cherry is hardly real, nor the décolletagerie of the cocktail waitresses. They're decked out as French maids with upper torsos alfresco, suggestive of horizon lines and injection molding. You're staring at the cocoa again.

One reverie is succeeded by another: a new fetish appears: you are now in Bally's, and there is a cocktail girl, fine bones, mid-forties, whose outfit of clashing pastels has been coordinated by the Hugh Hefner of East Germany. She is, moreover, wearing reading glasses, which render her unforgettable. Perhaps, you dream, you'll run into her in night classes sometime. Atlantic Cape Community College offers them at the Casino Career Institute, with a burgeoning slot technician program. "Experts predict there will [soon] be a casino within a three-hour radius of any city in the U.S."

In the room the grandmas come and go staring at slots and keno.

There are ghosts on Pacific Avenue in the dead hours, when the streets hum with neon letters: PAWN, CASH FOR GOLD. Cordial pimps glide by on mountain bikes, eyeing their franchised girls -- convivial types, whiling away a slow weekday morning in conversation, profession semaphored by short shorts. In your motel the television plays continuous ads for the "Girls Gone Wild" series of videotapes. Dawn approaches, the time when AC regulars try to win enough to get a room for their girlfriends to go to sleep. Destroyer of Restrooms is tall and Irish, and he's up $800 at cards. You're short and puckish, and you're down $20 on roulette (bets on threes and sevens, in deference to Christian numerology.) Now you're ready for some sun. You're dressed for the boardwalk: forest green checkered button-up short-sleeved shirt, Van Heusen label, "Made In Ukraine" label, $15 at Macy's, atop red, yellow, and green Guyana flag tee, emblazoned "GUYANA," gift of that guy who slept on your floor once, $3 in Chinatown. You leave Destroyer of Restrooms to the tables and go for a stroll.

Half an hour later Destroyer catches up. He's wiped out, back where he started. It's time to head home. When you reach Newark, Delaware and stop for gas and Jamaican takeout and a leak behind a liquor store, you can't find the right highway exit again. You drive the minivan in lazy circles shouting execrations till you do. Then there's a traffic jam, then a flat tire, then the Maryland State Courtesy Patrol arrives to help with the flat because they want to help with the traffic jam. They don't need you, but they need the shoulder. North of Baltimore, on high bridges between embankments of industrial dust, there is a sandstorm. You enter the Harbor Tunnel, and find on exiting that south of Baltimore there is a rainstorm. You return, at last, to the bosom of hearth and family, and swear to love them better.

So what was Atlantic City about -- for you, anyway? What is the meaning of hypnotized retirees, sallying through the night that they might loot kingdoms of change? Are they representatives of poor, probable, uninteresting American life? Or are they part of the diverse and mighty diapason of our national experience, like the drive-through gun shop, the Virginia Reel, and the truck stop buffet? How does it bode for our nation that throngs go to a slum by the sea to throw away their savings, with little faith for the rewards of work, thrift, and progressive taxation? Why didn't you go visit the Steel Pier? How could you miss the Diving Horse, famous since 1924?

These are open questions, and Atlantic City, it need not be said, is a testing ground of speculative and practical judgment. She may reduce you to beggary or make you a Croesus. She may test you with privation or grant you moments for beneficence. She inverts king and pauper. Carnival without respite, tragedy without end, Atlantic City will break you and administer the last rites: the complimentary buffet after you lose a thousand, when your forehead shall be anointed with the oil of three-score helpings of macaroni and cheese. These purpled hotel-casinos, this sceptered shithole, only a few hours' bus from Manhattan: here is that rare wilderness of moral choice that has also an adequate beachfront.