Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage

exploiting problem gamblers—or creating them.
    So that was the plan: Fly to Iowa, bet five bucks, and, hey, look at me! I’m uh . . . Christ, I’m Larry Flynt. Blech.
    The Diamond Jo was small, and compared with the casinos I’d been to in Las Vegas (my only reference point), it was spartan—but, hey, compared to some of the newer casinos in Las Vegas, Vatican City is pretty spartan. And unlike the casinos in Las Vegas, the Diamond Jo was kind of cozy and intimate, something like what I’d imagined the private rooms for whales in Las Vegas to be. Unfortunately, the Diamond Jo was doing well enough to commission and produce its own jingle, which it plays over and over and over again, for hours on end, all day and all night: “The Diamond Jo Casino ! Where the river runs wild! The Diamond Jo Casino ! Where the cards run wild! The Diamond Jo Casino ! Where the river runs wild!”
    After getting my bearings, I sat down at an empty blackjack table. The dealer—a middle-aged man with a hangdog face and the skin of a lifelong smoker—seemed friendly and approachable, unlike some of the other dealers, who looked miserable. (Or were they just wearing their poker faces? Or perhaps that jingle was getting on their nerves?) Most important to me, there was no one at his table. Part of what makes card games so intimidating for the inexperienced gambler is the fear of making a fool of yourself in front of card players who know what they’re doing. I was happy to be alone at his table—not that I was winning. I wasn’t; I was losing, but I was losing in peace and quiet. I was losing five dollars at a time, one little red chip per hand, but that wasn’t the maximum bet anymore. The sign on the table said, MINIMUM BET: $5/MAXIMUM BET $500. Five hundred dollars! My dreams of being a whale in Iowa were dashed.
    Curious about what had happened to the five-dollar minimum bet, I contacted the business reporter of Dubuque’s daily newspaper, the Telegraph Herald .
    â€œThis is a state and a community that has overwhelmingly supported gaming,” said Matt Kittle, who covers the casinos for his paper. “Every eight years the voters in any county with gambling get to vote on whether or not gambling will continue to be allowed in their county. The last time we voted, about 70 percent of the voters were in favor of gambling continuing.”
    Gambling came to Iowa in 1984, when the state legalized “paramutual” gambling, that is, betting on dog and horse races. Any company that wanted to open a dog track would have to win a referendum in the county it wanted to build in. A referendum was quickly organized in Dubuque County, it passed, and the state’s first dog track—The Dubuque Greyhound Park—opened in 1985. “You have to bear in mind that, while this is a conservative town, it’s also overwhelmingly Catholic. Bingo primed the pump in Dubuque.” (Eighty percent of Catholics gamble compared with 43 percent of Baptists.)
    But a state allowing just a little bit of gambling is like a woman claiming she’s just a little bit pregnant—it’s a pretense that’s difficult to keep up. So with dog tracks up and running, the Iowa state legislature soon passed a similar riverboat casino bill, and Iowa is now home to three dog tracks and ten riverboat casinos.
    â€œSome of our ‘riverboats’ aren’t even in rivers,” said Kittle. “They’re floating in ponds that were dug just for the casinos. It complies with the letter of the law, but the Lakeside Casino Resort in Osceola isn’t near a river. It’s a boat in a moat.”
    Kittle is sometimes surprised by just how thoroughly gambling has been woven into the fabric of corn-growin’, pig-farmin’, Godfearin’ Iowa.
    â€œFirst we had betting on dog races on dry land,” said Kittle. “Then we had dog races on dry land, with slots, craps, and