BY Lux Alptraum
May 29, 2008
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4 Comments

SUBMITTED BY XORN SMITH: Despite having spent significant portions of my life in the Garden State, I’ve only actually been to Atlantic City twice. The first time was about ten years ago for a friend’s bachelor party. We went to Caesar’s and I remember having the distinct impression of being given a vision of what the mall is like in Hell. Lot’s of people scrambling through expensive-looking hallways, intent on spending money, with absolutely no hint of joy or pleasure in their eyes.

I actually think that’s why there were so many old people there. They figured they were going to die soon and wanted to get a glimpse of the worst-case scenario for the afterlife. And, if your life’s going to end, why not lose the rest of your money anyway? Fuck the grandkids.

The bachelor party inevitably wound up in a strip club, which was pretty much like every other strip club I’d been in New Jersey: the type of place where you aren’t too quick to touch the salt shakers. In other words, it was not that nice, but with some fairly attractive dancers, who mostly looked bored.

At least they didn’t look quite as miserable as the cocktail waitresses at Caesar’s, who wore these slave-girl-like togas and generally looked like, well, slaves. In many ways, the Caesar slave girls were representative of Atlantic City’s take on sex: it was like something they thought they should have (like a non-smoking section) but didn’t really want.

For a city that is as close as the Eastern Seaboard comes to Vegas, it’s surprising how unsexy (and unsexual) Atlantic City is. This was only reaffirmed on my most recent trip to AC, my second and hopefully last.

Despite having inflicted significant pain on each other already, my long-distance girlfriend and I decided to make one more go of our relationship and picked Atlantic City as a median meeting point. We were motivated by a deal she got on a room at the Borgata, which is supposedly the nicest hotel in AC and bills itself informally as the hotel to go to if you’re not the type of person who normally goes to Atlantic City. My verdict: the Borgata is pretty much like every other hotel in Atlantic City, just with nicer marble.

Granted, it does look pretty cool from the outside: forty-something stories of golden-bronze glass rising up against the Atlantic. But once you set foot inside, it’s a lot less like an Italian villa and a lot more like Newark Airport. Maybe it was just our bad luck to arrive behind two tour buses, but the check-in process seemed about as glamorous – and as painstaking – as getting on a flight to Tucson. Actually, that’s not really fair: I’ve gotten on flights to Tucson faster and it didn’t require the double-dip line-waiting of first getting your “My Borgata” card and then having to register at check-in.

We decided to try to wait out the lines by wandering around the casino, hoping to get sucked up in the energy and electricity of legalized gambling. Instead, we both wanted to take a bolt-rifle to our temples after about five minutes.

Here’s the thing: old people aren’t inherently unsexy or unattractive. Old people who teach, who debate, who impart wisdom, who remain physically active, who take a constructive role in their kids and grandkids’ lives? They’re hot. Genuinely hot. And inspiring.

Old people who lurch toward slot machines with their walkers and wheel chairs as if they’re late to hand over their bucket of quarters to the Ferryman on the River Styx? Unattractive and depressing. And that was about half the Borgata’s clientele. Seriously, I saw, not one, but two people toting oxygen tanks around the slot machines and, yes, they were both in the smoking section.

So after completing our check-in in more time than it takes to get on a flight to London, we went up to our nice but unremarkable room. Like most people, the first thing I do upon entering a new hotel room is to check out what porn is available. Here, I have to admit, the Borgata excelled. Kind of. There were 27 different porn movies each for the low, low price of $15.99 (plus tax). I didn’t see any explicitly billed as ATM, but otherwise, most other tastes and fetishes seemed to be accommodated.

The problem was the in-room entertainment system kept winking out on us. We tried watching an episode of Showtime’s The Tudors (which is some solid historical soft porn in itself) and it kept stopping after ten minutes. And since the The Tudors cost $5.99 (plus tax) I had to call down to the front desk and haggle to get it taken off our room bill. I didn’t want to have to repeat the process for Tight Holes or She’s My Mom, so we skipped the porn.

My friend eventually goes off to explore the Borgata’s spa, leaving me to try my hand at the daily poker tournament. Because how can poker not be erotic, right? I mean, it’s poker – as in “strip,” Casino Royale, and Shannon Elizabeth wearing big sunglasses. They can’t make poker unattractive, can they?

Let me preface what’s to come by saying I’m not a small guy. (I mean that in terms of shoulder-width and overall physical size, not metaphysically.) I also realize that there’s a national obesity problem. Its epicenter, I can now confirm, is the poker room at the Borgata, which I entered and suddenly felt amazingly svelte.

After paying my tournament entrée fee to an elderly African-American woman who looked at me like I might as well be putting my money in a shredder, I took my place at a table with some of the beefiest men I had ever hoped to encounter this side of Green Bay. When a waitress came over and asked if she could get anyone anything, I expected half the table to reply, “Lipitor.”

There were ten of us seated around the table and we constituted no less than a ton and a half of manflesh by my conservative estimate. The gentleman seated to my immediate left wasn’t drinking yet had somehow managed to replicate exactly the precise smell of stale Heineken. Like if somebody left about a centimeter of Heineken in a glass overnight and it dried out and you, for whatever reason, put your face in the glass and inhaled – that’s what he smelled like. Not a single one of our group had a derangement of the tear ducts that caused him to cry blood.

For the first half hour, the meatiness of my fellow players drifted into the background. I have to admit, playing live poker in a casino was pretty damn electric and when I bluffed another player into folding his hand on a big pot while only holding a pair of tens myself, I felt quite like quitting MI6 to fuck Eva Green for the rest of eternity.

And then the cards kept coming. And coming. And the Guy Who Smelled like Stale Heineken started talking to the Guy Who Worked in Insurance about the tax rates in Somerset county, and about zoning, and about property values. Neither of them spoke with an Albanian accent. And pretty much, the electric, heart-pounding poker game became two hours of fleshy men looking at their cards and folding or betting and discussing the fiscal challenges of being a land-owner in New Jersey. In short, it felt a bit like hell.

There were cocktail waitresses and they were sort of hot. But not really. It’s not that the women were unattractive. They actually looked marginally happier and engaged than the slave girls I remembered from Caesar’s a decade ago. It’s just…the cocktail waitresses at the Borgata felt a bit like a Hooter’s at Disneyland. It’s the veneer of sexuality but it’s not really sexual. It’s a nice pair of tits for the old women to poke the old men in the ribs and giggle at. It’s sex as window dressing, not sex as something attractive, vibrant, engaging.

After about two hours I busted out of the poker tournament going all-in on a measly pair of Jacks. I remember feeling not anger nor regret, but an overwhelming sense of relief – that I could stop listening to people complain about property taxes and that I could get back to someone who smelled considerably better than stale Heineken.

So my fellow students of Boinkology…is there something I’m missing? Does anyone have a tale for ribald adventure and steam-raising exploits built around Atlantic City? Or am not the only one who finds the East Coast’s sin city surprisingly asexual?

[Photo by lostvegas]