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