Before last week, I had a grand total of two gambling/casino experiences to my name, and they were both embarrassing and terrible. There was the time when I completely screwed up a free-money loophole on a betting app and had to sweat out a bunch of stupid college basketball games, and there was the time I went to a wedding in Aurora, Ill. and smashed a beer bottle during a too-enthusiastic swing on a Golden Tee machine.
So when I first heard that Defector was going to Atlantic City for its fall meetings, I was nervous and determined to spend my leisure money only on candy and pinball. I had confidence that I wouldn't be tempted to gamble, but I knew casinos and their ilk were dens of trickery, structured to trap you into semi-consciously giving them whole wads of cash. I didn't love our odds as a company of surviving the week.
But as the dates got closer, a new mindset emerged. I talked myself into an idea of Atlantic City that was a little campy, a little pretty, and most of all, unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. I wondered if a mysterious stranger might teach me the rules of craps, or if I could perhaps smoke a joint while gazing at a beautiful ocean view. I packed clothing that made me feel nice and approached the trip with a cautious sincerity.
Results were mixed. My co-workers, miraculously, remain some of my absolute favorite people to hang out with, and AC offered no shortage of magic: luxurious bathrooms, New Jersey's only rotating bar, frolicking dolphins, a Rutgers football VIP room. I got Patrick to teach me the rhythm, if not quite the rules, of craps, while Barry and Jasper patiently answered my dumb blackjack questions. But Atlantic City is not entirely a city of romance. The slot machines that dominate the casino floors are tacky. The view out my window was a giant patch of dirt. The mysterious strangers remained mysterious, hypnotically locked into their little games, unheeding the tall brunette in the cute dress wandering the eccentrically designed carpet behind them. On the whole, I was satisfied if not enthralled.
But there is one lingering aspect of the experience that has kept me off-balance well into this week of recovery: the goddamn music. I knew, going in, that casinos played peppy pop bangers at all hours to encourage risk-taking behavior and a total disregard of time. What I did not know, however, was how specifically targeted the music would be. I was figuring on some generic, slightly outdated radio mix of, like, Katy Perry and Kings of Leon and Jason Derulo—a Millennial flashback when Millennials have lost the cultural aux cord. What I got instead was the 1980s, almost 24/7. From the moment I stood in line to check in and clocked what sounded like an especially gothic deep cut from The Cure to my Friday morning exit soundtracked by pre–Joshua Tree U2, the casino speakers up and down the boardwalk stayed exhaustingly on message toward its presumed target audience: You there, in your 50s and 60s! Remember your youth! You have nothing to lose! YOLO!
The music followed me everywhere, never getting older than Kool & The Gang and never getting newer than, in one rare outlier moment, Backstreet Boys. Blondie was in the arcade and Toto was outside by the water and Depeche Mode was at the food court. This dominated everywhere one could possibly go—including the conference rooms, until you turned down the volume with an unmarked doohickey on the wall so you could start your company meeting. On my first night, working my way through the casino to get to my bed, I heard an abrasive recorded carnival barker voice—This casino just had a jackpot winner, and we bet YOU will be next!—give way to "Everybody Wants to Rule The World," and I had the unsettling sensation that I was a character in a dream someone else was having.
I am someone who cannot let music fade into the background, who quickly identifies every diegetic note I hear, so I could not mentally mute this omnipresent playlist. But the irony is that these pop-rock '80s hits are basically my favorite genre. The prototype for a band I enjoy is Talking Heads—something that encourages you to move around and dance while still being kind of weird—and that era of music was owned by that kind of artist. At any given point in my day, that's exactly what I want—energy and rhythm with a little quirk. As much as I get annoyed with the seemingly never-ending '80s and '90s nostalgia that dominates pop culture, and the music industry's shifted focus on juicing old hits instead of breaking new ones, I still opt for Siouxsie Sioux and Sparks more regularly than I do singers from my own generation. I rarely go to arena shows, but my most recent was Pet Shop Boys with New Order, and I loved it.
But now I might be broken; there are lingering burns on my hypothalamus. I realized this when I was messing with the radio in Justin's car on the ride home. I flinched, like I was touching a hot stove, when I landed suddenly on "Uptown Girl." I was not safe even back in New York: My knees almost buckled when Hall and Oates barged through the speakers at a bookstore on Saturday. I came near something like healing with the song "Drive" by The Cars, which is mellow and sad enough to be unwelcome on a casino floor, but I threw off my headphones as soon as I heard the first few staccato guitar notes of "Just What I Needed." I went back to Tears for Fears today, just to check, and it made my tummy hurt. Even Whitney Houston cannot save me now. I feel like I'm 19 years old and just drank way too much rum at a party; the mere smell of it makes me queasy.
The lesson, as always: Don't even get close to gambling. They have ways to get you.
