The sickly sweet stench of menthol cigarette smoke hits me as soon as I walk into the dimly-lit casino. The smell, combined with the bass-thumping house music and flashing lights and bells of the video machines, makes me lightheaded and nauseous.

I walk past the human fixtures planted in cushioned stools facing the slot machines, hypnotized by the symbols spinning behind the screens in front of them.

A waitress approaches me with a tray of dirty cocktail glasses lined with melting mini ice cubes and lipstick-smeared cigarette butts. She wears a short tight black lycra miniskirt that looks saran-wrapped around her rear with a sparkling gold halter-top corset laced tightly across her midriff to spill her cleavage out over the top. Her face is lined and dried out, barely concealed by a thick layer of cheap makeup.

“Drink?” she asks me while glancing over at a slot player feeding another crisp twenty into his hungry machine.

“Serve a lot of alcohol this early?” I ask.

She smirks, revealing yellow teeth behind bright red glossed lips. “Of course. All day, every day – beer, wine and liquor.”

I look at my watch. It’s 1:17 p.m. On a Tuesday. I’m already depressed.

I politely decline the drink and continue my sojourn deeper into the abyss of the casino floor, walking past a line of denizens waiting desperately to use the ATM. An old woman with a heavily-wrinkled face and died red hair clenches her debit card with a death grip while shaking her head and glaring impatiently at the younger woman using the machine.

The back wall is lined with a dozen sports-betting kiosks that allow wagers on every type of sporting event imaginable – from NFL football to Arctic badminton. I take the only unoccupied kiosk.

An intense guy wearing an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt and backwards visor cap stands next to me swearing at a live baseball game that plays out on his kiosk screen. “Fuckin’ Yankees can’t hit for shit today! Chisholm you suck! Overpaid fuckin’ joke!”

I wonder why he’s watching the game on a small kiosk screen rather than one of the big screens perched over the blackjack tables just twenty feet away. I fight the urge to mind my own business but, once again, curiosity overpowers and subdues my better judgment. I ask him.

The guy replies without shifting his laser-focused gaze from his kiosk screen. “I’m in-game prop betting each inning’s run total. So I have to stay here for the whole game.”

“Oh cool,” I reply, and wish him good luck.

I don’t think he hears me while his attention remains fixed on the kiosk screen. “C’mon Stanton, hit one out and make me some scratch, baby!”

I turn and stroll over to the double rows of blackjack tables. Their solid dark brown wood frames and green felt-covered tabletops look comforting and inviting, like Christmas morning. Players sit in chairs around each table facing a dealer who stands before them like a demagogue in the enclave of the semi-circle shaped table. No one smiles, not even after winning a hand. All eyes are glued to the table, expressionless but anxious.

I stand about five feet away from a blackjack table, watching the same routine repeat itself over and over again with the speed and efficiency of a factory assembly line; cards shuffled, bets placed, cards dealt, wins and losses tallied, chips given and taken away, table cleared, rinse and repeat.

A morbidly obese woman stands slowly up from her seat, with the help of her cane, at a neighboring blackjack table. She shakes her head and mutters something inaudible to herself while she sticks her player’s card into her purse. After a short rest to catch her breath, she hobbles toward the ATM line which appears to have doubled in length. I hurry over to take the woman’s seat before another bystander can beat me to it.

The dealer – a middle-aged Asian woman with hooded eyes and a blank face so devoid of emotion it looks carved from stone – stares at me expectantly after I sit down. None of the other four players sitting at the table acknowledge me. I reach into my wallet and remove a folded hundred, then place it onto the table in front of me.

The dealer nods at me, then quickly takes my bill while replacing it with two even piles of five-dollar betting chips in what seems like a single motion practiced thousands of times. She blurts something unintelligible to the pit boss standing behind her while she slides my bill into a slot on the table.

“Good luck,” she says to me in a flat robotic voice.

The dealer repeats her routine over several rounds with a speed and dexterity that mesmerizes the entire table. She’s flawless, a perfectly calibrated cash-sucking machine; like The Terminator, sizing up mere mortals in her path with deadly precision then striking before they even know what hit them. A professional killer, a stone-cold assassin.

I feel hollowed out by this place, unable to even harvest, let alone process, any cognizable emotion. I’m not happy, not sad, not nervous, not anxious, not frightened. Just empty.

I scoop up the three five-dollar chips that remain from the pile of twenty I began with about ten minutes ago, then stand up to leave the table. No other player notices me while all eyes remain fixed on the cards being dealt. The dealer continues her routine without pause or hesitation, not even a quick nod or glance at me. Like I was never even there.

I want to leave but I’m disoriented from the dizzying sounds and dazzling lights that surround and engulf me. I look around but I can’t see the doors where I’d walked in from the parking lot.

I find a security guard standing sentry in front of a baccarat table and ask him where I can find the exit.

“It’s tough to explain but walk that way and you’ll find it eventually,” he replies, pointing toward an endless labyrinth of gaming tables and slot machines spread across the casino floor.

I thank him.

“Good luck, bro.” He smiles at me.

About an hour later in my car, I get a call from my business partner.

“You go yet?” he asks.

“Yep,” I reply.

“So how was it?” he asks.

“The most depressing fucking place I’ve ever been to, like a halfway house to the suicide ward,” I tell him candidly.

“Doesn’t sound too good,” he replies after a brief pause.

“Actually it’s perfect. Let’s make an offer today.”

***

Nate Mancuso is a Florida-based attorney and fiction writer. Nate’s work has appeared in numerous literary magazines including PULP, Disturb the Universe, Synchronized Chaos, miniMAG, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Mobius Blvd and Black Sheep. Nate is currently working on his first collection of short stories and an historical fiction novel.