The Joe Bob Report

Joe Bob's Wild America
Atlantic City
by Joe Bob Briggs
January 2001

Atlantic City is the Extreme Sports of casino gambling.

Tell somebody you're going there and you get, "Oh, Atlantic City, it's just so depressing."

And that's exactly why we love it--"we" being the seriously dedicated slot jockeys, pokerheads and Blackjack Billies of the sport. There's always personal danger involved when you go to Atlantic City. You might get tailgated by mad Russian bus drivers on the Garden State Parkway. You might need to park in front of a place with iron bars on the windows and a sign that says "Cash For Gold." If you tell the blackjack dealer to hit you too many times and screw up somebody's hand on third base, major cocktail- slinging could result. There are no pirate ships or erupting volcanoes in Atlantic City. There are no Venetian canals or Emeril Lagasse restaurants. In this casino-infested nation of ours, Atlantic City may be the last true haven for pure-dee by-God gamblers who don't even care that their complimentary cocktails are delivered by a 55-year-old Lipstick Lizard with attitude. Just deal the cards and raise the limit, because the Greyhound back to Scranton leaves in an hour.

I'm such a hardcore Atlantic City mutant that I like to assault the Jersey shore in the dead of winter, when the bitter wind off the ocean cuts through the empty timeshare high-rises like a stiletto and the dealers seem even more surly than usual. And even then it's a struggle to find a room. After 23 years of wide-open gambling, the city still hasn't built enough hotel rooms to handle the weekend business, which means there are thousands of buses dropping people off for six-hour and eight- hour sessions of frantic wagering, most of it on slot machines that have so much computer animation they've started to resemble cyborgs.

This year I decided to go whole hog and revisit the place where it all started--Resorts International, the oldest casino, the one that changed American gambling forever, the place that back in the late seventies and early eighties was the favorite non-stop party of every Damon Runyon character from Boston to Newport News. And if you're going to Resorts, you've gotta do it right and show up at the place where the party begins--the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

One block from Times Square, Port Authority is the busiest bus terminal in the world, but when you walk inside you get the impression that ALL bus schedules lead to Atlantic City. There are billboards for every kind of charter service on the East Coast, offering coupons, discounts, free chips and direct-to-the- casino-door dropoffs. Atlantic City expresses leave every five minutes during the peak hours, and my departure gate is crowded with people sporting Bally's Park Place coupon books. We're 126 miles from our destination, but already the fever has started. A middle-aged Polish woman gets yelled at by a Greyhound official when she tries to jump the line, and she feints left and right to get around him, nervously flailing her Bally's coupon and looking around with wild eyes. You can see the panic in her eyes: I might not make it to the slots tonight. She keeps trying to get on the bus, but the driver blocks her with his arm and sends her back to the Greyhound supervisor for a lecture on manners. The fracas goes on for ten minutes and ends with her refusal to speak at all to the boiling pudgy junior officer with the bulging veins in his forehead. When she finally lands safely on the third row, she says, "You'd think I was a criminal."

But, of course, we are criminals. We're all going to Atlantic City on a blustery winter night when normal people are ordering hot toddies at a cigar bar. As a group, we look like the people at Ellis Island who got sent back for additional inoculations. Nobody dresses for Alantic City; a thermal jogging suit and a hat with ear flaps will do just fine. There's a little conversation and then most of us doze off, resting up for the main event. Exactly two hours and 20 minutes later, the lights of the boardwalk hotels loom on the horizon and everyone stirs in their seats. From three miles away, for about 20 seconds, Atlantic City almost looks glamorous. Then you get to the end of the expressway, a wasteland of gutted blocks and weird-shaped buildings that resemble a quaint New England village that got carpet-bombed by B-52s. The driver expertly cuts down impossibly narrow side streets and pulls into the Bally's parking garage. "Everybody with coupons gets off here," says the driver. "Bus back leaves at 3:50 a.m."

A few minutes later I'm the only guy left on the bus. The driver looks askance--some guy actually going to the bus terminal because he was too dumb to get a coupon book--and drops me there five minutes later. It's a short cab ride to my room at the Quality Inn, where I've landed one of the last cheesy rooms in town just three Beirut blocks from my goal. The cab ride is part of the overall experience, though. Atlantic City taxis have meters that spin at the rate of a Space Shuttle gyroscope-- something like 40 cents every half a block--so that it's eight bucks plus tip just to go from one hotel to the next. I pay the guy, stow my bags in a room smelling of stale cigarettes, and start to feel that Atlantic City rush as I head out into a drizzly night, chill factor in the negative triple digits, passing rooming houses, boarded-up buildings, a topless bar hidden behind what appears to be an auto body shop, and a lot of odd little crooked buildings that have been left behind like vestigial organs, sawed in pieces like the House of Seven Gables after six gables were knocked down in a hurricane.

Still, I get all choked up when I look up at the facade of Resorts. Resorts International is a wedding-cake building, white with black trim, that was pieced together from the old Chalfonte- Haddon Hall, a resort that dates to 1868 but took its current shape in the 1920s, when Atlantic City was still a high-ticket summer destination. By the time James Crosby bought it in 1977, it was an aging hulk in the middle of a slum. Crosby was the mogul at Mary Carter Paints who managed to be the first guy to get licensed and open for business after New Jersey legalized gambling, and on May 26, 1978, there were so many people lined up to get in that, by the next day, Las Vegas casino executives were flying in to take a look. So much money poured into Resorts in its early days that they had special duffel bags to hold it all, and for a time the Vegas casinos really thought their days were numbered. Resorts cash flow was at a level never seen before, and by the end of that first year there were two more casinos open-- the Sands and the Claridge, which are both still there and both still open but both, ominously enough, now in bankruptcy.

Crosby sold out to Merv Griffin in 1988, and many people still think of it as Merv's place, but Merv has been out of the picture since 1996, having been pretty much beaten into submission by Donald Trump's billion-dollar Taj Mahal, which opened right next door in 1990. There were still some old-timers who refused to gamble anywhere except Resorts, but the new owners--Sun International--didn't really make them happy. Sun is best known for its Atlantis casino in the Bahamas, on an island also bought from Merv, but their attempt to revive Resorts pretty much wrecked their stock price (from 50 down to 17). For the past four years the daily take has steadily gone down, even after they spent $50 million in 1999 in a last-ditch effort to reclaim the glory. By the time I talked to them, they didn't even want me to visit. "We're sold," said the terse spokesman. "You don't want to come now. Come after the new owners take over."

But I have Atlantic City fever, I tell them. I have to come now. Eventually they forked over a little promo information, including the big appearance by Paul Hornung, the Green Bay Packers Hall-of-Famer who was booked into the hotel's Club Eleven33 for autograph signing and analysis of the week's NFL lineup and . . . Wait a minute! Paul Hornung? The guy who was suspended from the pros for gambling? Getting paid to appear at a casino and talk about point spreads in a state where sports betting is illegal? I love this hotel!

And they have spruced it up. The main casino used to have this ratty paper-thin carpet that looked like Leroy Neiman threw up on it, but that's been replaced with a thick pile that has a little Air Jordan bounce to it. The theme is . . . well, there is no theme at Resorts, which is another thing I always liked about it, but there's a lot of marble and mirrors and glass left over from the Merv days, and the casino is full of these giant red- and-gold King Cole crowns that hover over the tables. And they must be doing some business because when I arrive in the middle of the Friday night rush, the blackjack minimums are 25 bucks, which is the highest I've ever seen. Even the Bellagio in Vegas has a few $15 tables on the weekends.

Two of the hotel's "gourmet" restaurants (they use the term loosely in Atlantic City) are closed for renovations, but I find a table at Capriccio, which is tricked out like a Venetian cathedral and serves lobster flown in from South Africa, for some reason. When it turns out to be a little on the rubbery side, the maitre d' takes it off the check and I start thinking, "South Africa? South Africa?" I call the guy back and ask him who actually runs Sun International, and he tells me it's Sol Kerzner. Solomon Kerzner? The guy who made Sun City into the a casino resort so cool that it was the only casino where Frank Sinatra would work outside the states, even when he had to defy apartheid boycotts. That Sol Kerzner?

I love this hotel!

I decide to hold off on gambling, though, till the tables clear and the minimums go down, which would normally be around 4 a.m. when that last bus leaves for Altoona, but I've forgotten the first principle of being in Atlantic City: there IS nothing else to do. I consider a show, but the "headliner" choices are Misty Rowe (of "Hee Haw" fame), Susan Anton (of long-ago Sly Stallone girlfriend fame), Blood Sweat & Tears (I think both Sweat and Tears both left the band 20 years ago), Jerry Vale (197 years old), Alan King (still talking about how his luggage got lost), Hootie & the Blowfish (yes, that's what I said), and the biggest Atlantic City name of them all, Regis Philbin.

Instead I take a walk on the Boardwalk. All my appendages instantly freeze into tweed popsicles, so I take refuge in one of those reverse-rickshaw pushcarts. The pusherman throws a piece of clear polyethylene over the front of it, like I'm a baby in stroller, and within five minutes I feel too ridiculous to continue. I get out by the famous Steel Pier, where there are no longer diving horses, John Phillip Sousa bands or arcades. In fact, everything is boarded up except for one carnie concession where a fat guy is pitching a basketball toss to win stuffed animals. Again and again he swishes it, to show you how easy it is, but that's the advantage of having nothing to do for the past 25 years except practice nailing a free throw into a rim nailed so tight that anything touching it will carom into the Atlantic Ocean. I fall for it, of course, miss three in a row, then take refuge in the nearest warm building.

And that turns out to be the best decision I make, because I end up at the entrance to Donald Trump's Club Casbah. I will find many other places for vodka fortification over the next two days- -one that I highly recommend is Sands lounge, where a thunder- thigh platinum blonde in silver lame pants does Top 40 covers-- but I won't find another place with this much sexual charge. Partly it's the caged club dancers--gorgeous, as all Donald Trump babes tend to be--but the club also gets a healthy mix of both New York and Philadelphia late-night party fiends. (You can tell the difference by the Piercing-to-Tattoo Quotient. New Yorkers tend to go for that Dennis Rodman Effect, while Philadelphians still have to show up at The Gap on Monday morning.) The place goes till 6 a.m., and nobody wants to leave. The only disadvantage of the place is they don't sell cigars, so you have to go on these occasional odysseys into the wilds of the dreaded Showboat, where those damn marionettes can scare the bejeezus out of you if you're drinking. Once you find the humidor in the overpriced gift shop, you're likely to settle for a Te Amo. New York and Atlantic City may be the only two places in the world where the most popular cigar is made in Mexico, but there are times, in the depths of a three-day Atlantic City binge, when a Te Amo is exactly what you need. It's sort of the same principle as ordering two bottles of expensive Bordeaux, but not wanting to spend more than six-fifty for that third bottle. After a certain point, it all tastes the same.

At any rate, people in Atlantic City in the winter do love to party, so I didn't really sit down at the tables till a good 36 hours later. By that time they had ten-dollar tables open, so I was able to use the famous Joe Bob Briggs Basic Strategy With Variations System, which involves counting cards when I remember to count cards and when it's easy to see the cards. One thing you've got to give Resorts credit for: they deal about 90 per cent of the shoe. In a three-hour session, the only awkward moment came when a little old lady started to split three's against a dealer's seven and the Jersey City Blackjack Expert to my right started yelling at her: "No! Don't do that! Don't split threes!" The lady seemed confused and started to take her money back, so I said, "Splitting threes is the correct play." The guy stared at me like I'd just vomited a rat onto the table. "Not against a seventeen," he says. "Well, the books say otherwise," I answer. "Yeah, those books are all written by the CASINOS!" At this point I retreat into a surly silence, the old lady decides to pick up her second bet, and the game continues in an awkward standoff. The old lady pushes, but Jersey City watches all the cards and says, "See! She would have lost twice!" I say, "That doesn't mean it was the right play." The guy says, "Oh, I guess LOSING is the right play." Fortunately, he decided he couldn't stand my aura and left five minutes later, and the table returned to joviality and Esprit de Shore. Result: $130 for me.

I was hoping to have time to go see Princess Diana's dresses at the Tropicana--because, I mean, how tacky is that?--but it was time for the Big Grey Dog back to the city. The ride back was uneventful except for a traffic jam in Weehawken that had several of the ladies in front demanding that the driver get off the freeway and go the "secret back way" to the Lincoln Tunnel. So powerful is the moral authority of the slot-playing Atlantic City woman that the driver did it, having no idea where he was going, and after five minutes of dodging down narrow Weehawken side streets, we emerged at the tunnel and sailed back into New York. I had picked up one of those so-called newspapers they give away in Atlantic City--the kind that leave your hands black with newsprint for seven days after you read them--and I notice a little item about the Atlantic City Police, New Jersey State Police and Atlantic County Prosecutor concluding their four-month undercover drug operation by arrested 67 people and issuing warrants for 13 more. They had been out there making drug buys-- Ecstasy, Ketamine and GBL--at Atlantic City dance clubs, including . . . Club Casbah.

There I was, right in the heart of such depravity that New Jersey state troopers are skulking around the restrooms, trying to score X. But of course they are. I just love this city.