On Mohegan Sun

♠

It felt like the last day of summer. A crisp wind stole in under our shirts and danced across the skin. As the earth tipped over and spilled the colors of the day into darkness, the evening swept in wearing the deeper robes of autumn, which should have reminded us that times were changing, that it was time for reflection and melancholy. Above the placid lake and the darkening clumps of trees, the last of the sun’s rays accumulated into a gold band that stretched across the horizon, as if the world was preparing for sleep and glimpsing a last chink of light before its eyelids closed.

But there would be no sleep for us. We were driving and drinking hard. As we sped out into the country, everything about us blared: engine, stereo, droogs’ laughter. We accelerated into a long curve, and suddenly, rising from the land like Lady Liberty, the sleek monument of our dreams came into vision, and we together hailed this heavenly body on earth: Mohegan Sun.

This is what we mean by the land of the free: it is a place where we can indulge all our appetites. A place where you can smoke wherever you like, liquor flows freely, and women lose their inhibitions. It is a place where the same soft music is heard everywhere, falling evenly like gentle rain on the lobby, hallways, restaurants, elevators and bathrooms alike, murmuring in your ear like celestial harps in the courtyards of the gods. The ambient temperature is just right, so whether you choose to wear a jacket or only a shirt, you will never feel a bead of sweat on your brow nor the slightest shiver. The light is dim and grainy and suggestive of whorehouses, the casino from a distance glitters and beckons like a city skyline, and man-made trees sprout from the marble floor of the lobby toward the ceiling. It is as capacious as a medieval church, as multifaceted as a theme park, as maze-like as the catacombs. You can not only enjoy the plashing, mesmeric sounds of a waterfall, but find a comfortable chair right next to it from where you can play the slots. It is a place where there is no night, or perhaps only night. Who can tell? Nature cannot constrain us here. And everything is as it should be.

This is not cynicism. We were a party of fifteen or so celebrating a friend’s last days as a bachelor. We had reserved a large room at the casino, and after we filled the bathtub with ice and beer and liquor, broke open pouches of drugs, and lit a stream of cigarettes until the room grew hazy, we were in a state of euphoria, and truly thankful for the bounty we were about to consume. Those were the drugs talking, and that is meant in the best possible sense.

These men are all good young men, Connecticut men, a strange mixed breed of patrician and thug. Their faces shine with milk-fed health, their hair, almost uniformly, is cut close to the head and gelled up in the front, their shirts are pressed and of the finest cotton. Half of them are married, engaged, or living with their girlfriends, they drive to each other’s houses with dogs in tow, and they play golf on Saturdays with their fathers. They are successful dentists, insurance men, and real estate agents, though some still live off their wealthy parents. They talk endlessly of baseball and football, and their speech is bullet-ridden with references to movies, late-night comedy, and gangster rap. Every piece of conversation is meant to be viewed in the light of laughter, and there is no cow sacred enough to be pardoned from the slaughter. The stories they tell are of inebriated nights, nights fueled by liquor, weed and coke: nights where one paid $300 for a hand job from a hooker with a face like a horse; nights where another vomited into a woman’s purse and walked away without telling her; nights where another walked across the hoods of cars in a parking lot, denting all of them, to get to the bar. They tell these stories of men behaving badly with glee, and they tell them over and again in the way any family, any country for that matter, tells and retells the stories that form its mythical foundations, strengthen its bonds, and seal it off from the rest of the world.

I am a foreigner among these men. But it is not at all difficult to adapt to the new surroundings. If we find ourselves enjoying the company of men we would normally disdain it is not because we lack conviction or integrity of character, but rather because we are never simply one thing or the other. Like a vegetarian who, on a trip to Italy, decides he must sample some of the local sausage before going home, another side of myself awoke in this new environment, and wanted to play like the others and laugh at lines like these: “Remember that time you fucked that girl when she was on her period? And you had to take her tampon out with a fork? Hilarious!” Quite. You had to be there, and what we mean when we say such things is more precisely, “You had to be someone else.”

So there is no cynicism here, no ironical take on our gaudy surroundings. Mohegan Sun is merely a concentrated version of the way these men view their own existence. They are here on this earth to drink and gamble and watch TV. They are here to laugh so hard that their sides hurt. Never mind that this casino was built on the backs of Indians, that it is their consolation prize for years of suffering—we won’t forget, we will simply break it down with irreverence, and its significance will melt under the bright light of laughter.

(To turn history into a joke is another privilege of freedom, because when you are free history cannot touch you, it means nothing. At best it is of passing interest, an intellectual pursuit. It is only the enslaved at heart, the poor and the downtrodden, who truly remember history, who feel its current in their bones, who need to point to somewhere along the line where things turned for the worse.)

Some years ago I would have described these men as having limited ambitions. I would have said they did nothing to give their life meaning, that they ascribed to nothing that was higher than the small pleasures that can be accrued from everyday living. But though they live like spoiled children grown giant, the fact is that they are humble. For they are ordinary Americans and willing to embrace that identity. They have no daunting conviction of their own consequence, as Richard Ford put it. To disdain such men, we would have to assume that beneath their laughter there is a spiritual emptiness that gnaws at them, fear that flows through their veins, and a willful ignorance that blinds their hearts. It is not these young men who are quelling the incessant whispers of another self, the one that asks vainly for something more; it is the disdaining man who is afraid of these things, spends his life wrestling with them, and projects his anxieties onto others. It is the disdainer who looks at those around him and says, “Unlike them, at least I am trying…” To do what? Write a novel? Win political office? Change the world? Become immortal? Perhaps this is an uglier, less noble way to live. As Montaigne says, “I find nothing so lowly and mortal in the life of Alexander as his fancies about becoming an immortal… The man who knows how to enjoy his existence as he ought, has attained to an absolute perfection, like that of the gods.”

So like gods we descended to the casino floor and dispersed among the people. We went to faux Irish bars, talked endlessly of “The Bourne Supremacy,” denigrated women, and called each other faggots. But there was one difference between me and them that I could not control. I wasn’t in the habit of blowing coke and smoking weed. All my senses were blurred. The numbers at the craps table never gathered round themselves the aspect of meaning; they remained vague symbols that my mind struggled to penetrate. I was assailed on all sides by the pinging of machines, the spinning of the roulette, and the shouts of gamblers winning and losing. My throat was parched and my brow was beaded with sweat. The flashing lights wheeled and traced a patina of gold across my vision.

My final memory of that night was of me crawling into the bed of the room we had reserved, and falling asleep to the sounds of men boozing. The men eventually stayed awake until sunrise, or what would have been sunrise if Mohegan Sun let in any natural light. I found out later what I had missed, from a cell phone video sent to my email account on Monday morning. The video begins in one of the hallways of the hotel. A member of the group had stolen one of the motorized carts that the old and the obese used to get around the casino. He was giggling uncontrollably as he drove down the hallway and bumped into the doors of other people’s hotel rooms. Finally, he turned, the cameraman followed behind him, and he slowly drove straight into our room, receiving a king’s welcome from the laughing crowd.

I awoke the next day to find a man next to me in the bed. I looked around: the members of the group lay like fallen soldiers across the floor of the room. I got up, put on my shoes, tiptoed around the bodies, and went to the bathroom: passed out on the floor was another fallen soldier. The ice in the bathtub had melted and a flotsam of unopened beer cans drifted on the top. A feeling of despair seemed to take hold of me, so I left the room, grabbing one of the newspapers left outside by the maids. As the elevator descended toward the lobby, I fervently wished for one second that they would stop the song playing on the casino speakers. It was “With or Without You” by U2.

But as I sat in one of the casino restaurants my spirits revived. There is no feeling as calming as having all the time in the world to drink coffee, eat breakfast and read the newspaper. When I paid the bill, it was still early in the morning, so I grabbed another coffee to go and hit the casino floors. I sat in front of a slot machine, lit a cigarette, and for the first time since I had arrived at Mohegan Sun, gambled. As I smoked and drank coffee and pulled the lever, with my stomach filled up on eggs and bacon, I felt content and utterly free. Free from hunger, burden, and worry. Free from my conscience and so-called convictions. Free, for one moment, from myself.

—RS

ESSAIS