Wednesday, November 8, 2017 // The Statement
6B
High Risk

creative non-fiction

E

dward meets me at the bus stop
on campus with our standard
greeting: smiling and clapping
his hands slowly, letting out

a whooping, “O-K, O-K.” He looks like he
always has, wide-eyed and enthusiastic but
stifling a perceptible weariness, in a hoodie,
skinny jeans and white Vans.

One of my best friends from back home,

Edward is a student at Cornell University. He
is, in many ways, exactly like me. We listen to
the same music, we are both obsessed with
basketball — playing and following — and
our sense of humor is eerily similar. In fact,
I’ve slowly realized that my still-tight-knit
group of friends from back home is made up
of, more or less, different racial variations
on the same person. Or maybe — and this is
most definitely true — everyone feels that
way about their first group of friends. Either
way, when you have spent a month and a
half overcome with work and pressure and
a poisonous sense of dejected alienation, you
must leave, in some ways, to reconnect with
a different, Ivy League version of yourself.

It’s comforting to see him, even if it has

only been less than two months since we
last hung out. It’s Fall Break, and rather
than spend more of my parents’ hard-
earned income on an insufficient trip back
home to the Bay Area, I’ve decided to spend
my own on a sabbatical to Ithaca, N.Y., the
world’s most popular tourist destination.
I initially figured it would be a standard
visit, but Edward has notified me that, for
some reason, we would be visiting a nearby
casino in the process. After dropping off my
baggage at his nearby apartment, we stop to
grab lunch at a small sandwich place.

“So what’s the deal with this casino stuff?”

I ask after we catch up on the necessary
subjects.

“Yeah, that’s going to be sketch,” Edward

laughs with a mouth full of Rueben. “It’s
my boy’s 21st birthday, but we’re going to
go to this random casino in the afternoon
tomorrow.”

“Who goes to a casino for their 21st

birthday? Isn’t that more of an 18th birthday
thing?”

“I think he’s having something later that

night with his main crew, but we’re just
doing this with our friends.”

The main crew. I always found it odd that

we demarcate our friends like this, as discrete
groups occupying different hierarchies.
It makes sense, I guess; commingling
between social groups is an unfortunately
uncomfortable experience. After a bit of
silence, I ask Edward the question that,
eventually, every guy asks their friend after
a prolonged era of separation.

“How’s it going with the ladies?” I smile

knowingly at him.

“Good one.” He lets out a big laugh, and

then looks down at his sandwich. This is a
running joke among our group of friends.
We ask one another this same question, and
we always laugh, providing some snarky
answer. We all know it’s mostly a joke, but
also, we all know that, buried somewhere,
there is an aching, pulsing sadness at the
heart of both the question and answer.
As emotionally immature, college-aged
men, we simply prefer to not address this
explicitly.

For guys our age, the barometer of success

in your reported life is often “how many girls
you’ve hooked up with.” I deeply despise this,
mostly in that “this is incredibly degrading
to women” way — someone give me a medal
for doing literally the least I possibly can for
feminism — but also in that “why is this a
thing?” sense.

***
On our way to this fabled casino, we stop

to pick up three of Edward’s friends from
their various fraternity houses. One by one,
they pile into the back of the Honda CR-V
Edward has borrowed: a long, lanky kid
from New Jersey named Nishanth, who has
an unfortunate tendency to talk about his
finance major and “recruiting for consulting
jobs”; a short guy in a “groutfit” named
Chris; and the birthday man himself, a tall
kid named John with a deep, lumbering
voice. Off we go, this group of college kids
in a CR-V, an hour and a half through rural,
farm-country upstate New York toward
Syracuse.

The casino itself is a curious entity. We

pull into the parking lot of an incongruously
modern building titled Turning Stone
Resort Casino situated in the middle of a
somewhat rural, antiquated community in
central New York. It’s painted in a blinding
white, and much of the exterior is made
up of glass windows. The main building
housing the casino reminds me of some kind
of extravagant Dubai hotel, an insidious
growth planted in the middle of a depressive
economy and agricultural blight.

Inside, we are treated to the sights and

sounds of your average gambling floor — or
so I’m told. This might be as good a time
as any to admit I’ve never actually been to
a casino. I grew up in a Muslim household,
went to Muslim Sunday school for 10 years
and even went on the Muslim pilgrimage to
Mecca during my junior year of high school.
I like to say I’m more culturally religious
than actually so — read: “not very” — but
nonetheless, there were many opportunities
I was denied as a child: dating, alcohol, pork

products (bacon! I know!) and gambling. My
family has been to Las Vegas, sure, but we
visited that unknowable city armed with the
same mentality with which Indian families
visit Lake Tahoe — not to ski, of course, but
to “see the lake!” I was never allowed to
witness the casinos that lurked underneath
the hotel rooms we stayed in; my sister and
I were always ushered past them quickly,
for absurd fear of our being whisked away
by the seductive whispers of the devil. And
so, the prestige and glamor of the Turning
Stone Resort Casino in Verona, N.Y., is
my first taste of the distinctly American
phenomenon of gambling.

What lingers, however, both then and now,

is the people. As one would expect in upstate
New York, they are overwhelmingly white,
and so there arrives the immediate, familiar
and admittedly irrational discomfort that
accompanies any racial minority. There are
old ladies in the standard costume of light-
khaki capris; thick, ungainly tennis shoes;
and oversized blue T-shirts; they slump
over the chairs at the slot machines, their
glasses lit up by the spinning numbers and
cash signs, with plastic cups in hand. There
are older men in “Members Only” jackets
hunched over at the blackjack tables, and the
dealers — of which there are noticeably more
minorities — do their monotonous job with
ruthless, robotic efficiency.

I begin to realize, though, that I, along

with my compatriots, am probably financially
better off than most of the patrons. I am a
part of this cadre of liberal, ivory tower
elitists, encroaching upon a world that is
not mine, so who am I to preemptively judge
its citizens? What gives me the right to look
down upon them, to try to decipher, as I
often cruelly do, who were the bigots I had
been taught to expect and who were simply
people whom the world had abandoned? I
resolve to spend my four hours here with as
open a mind as possible; understanding is
nothing more than a bridge to be crossed, by
two willing parties.

Chris decides he wants to stay at the

blackjack tables and put those probability
charts to good use, but the four of us,
intimidated by the process, leave in search
of the poker tables. Our search is initially
fruitless, but in our travels around the
floor, I am caught off-guard by the casually
surreal rows and rows of slot machines,
each one occupied by slight variations on the
same old, white archetype I have now seen
innumerable times.

“Dude, this is fucking creepy, man,” I

whisper to Edward.

“What is?”
“Like, look at these people on the slot

machines. Doesn’t this kind of freak you
out?”

“Oh, yeah, that shit’s weird. Like they’re

just in the zone.”

We turn to stare impolitely, just watching.
“Do you think they’re, like, gambling their

life savings?” I ask.

“No way, man,” Edward replies. “How do

you know they’re all, like, poor?”

“That’s true. Why do you think they do

this then?”

Edward is silent for a bit, searching. “I

don’t know, man. Probably just, like, they
know all the people here and it becomes a
thing.”

This kind of vague explanation is

characteristic of friends that can’t even
enumerate the sources of their own
unhappiness. We don’t know why, exactly,
people gamble, but we can make a guess.
And what surprises me is that his estimation
isn’t some kind of treatise on the adrenaline
rush that one endures, or the tricky allure of
taking money from other people — rather,
it’s simply a nebulous portrait of some web of
interconnectedness, an improperly defined
community in which people find themselves
in one another.

***
Of the few card games I know how to play,

poker is by far the one I’m most enthusiastic
about. A few summers ago, I experienced a
harmless online poker phase, a year before
my somewhat more socially damaging card
trick phase. But the environment I am about
to enter is completely new terrain: I have
never had so much personal investment
(money) in the games I’ve played. The
thought of losing my $80 is, to me, wholly
terrifying, and I realize this will be obvious
to anyone playing against me. So instead, I
compromise. I cash in $40 — a slightly less
demoralizing amount — for chips, and ask
the floor manager for an open spot.

The poker room is smaller than I expected.

It’s decorated like an old-fashioned salon of
sorts, with wood paneling lining the walls
and tables and chairs. The carpet is par-for-
the-course hotel flooring, complete with
the nonsensical loops and deep crimson
shade. In one corner is a small bar, and in
another is the cashier’s booth, where three
tellers stand behind vertical bars like a
prison, exchanging stacks of chips and cash
underneath. The room isn’t full, but a few
tables near the end are, populated by mostly
silent men with headphones on.

As it is, there are four spots open, but

they’re two to a table. We decide to split up
— me and Edward, John and Nishanth —
because each of us is too frightened to play
a game alone. Edward and I take our measly

by Nabeel Chollampat, Senior Arts Editor