First published in The Record, July 3, 2020

As Atlantic City reopens, gamblers run from covid dread.

Sparkling Roses is really quite a cheap slot machine. At 40 cents per play, it offers no fake crank handle, like the more expensive games have. Instead there’s just a slot in its face for money and, below the digital display, a yellow button that you press every time you want to bet.

Oh, but that digital display. For players of Sparkling Roses, this is the one true marvel. The display presents a bouquet of voluptuous red roses, sparkling with dew so intensely sparkly that it resembles diamonds, roses and diamonds floating before a kind of bonfire, and that bonfire is throwing off sparks that resemble money. The sparks are not money. They are money-like symbols, “5X!” and “AE!”, and they come in green and silver, the colors of money. So there you sit, the gambler, beholding this digital chimera of wealth and love and fire, and with 40 cents and a tap of the yellow button you can keep the bonfire dancing and the money sparks flying and the roses loving you. 

And then you realize: This is not just some cheap slot machine. This is high-test entertainment. This is the hard stuff. Sparkling Roses occupies some highly prime real estate on the gambling floor of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino precisely because it is a weapons-grade tool for separating gamblers from their money.

After months of closure due to the pandemic, Hard Rock was one of five casinos in Atlantic City to reopen Thursday under state rules limiting occupancy to 25% of capacity and closing indoor bars and restaurants. Two more casinos were scheduled to open Friday; only the Borgata will remain closed indefinitely.

The crowds who arrived early wanted access to the hard stuff. At a few minutes past 10 a.m. on Thursday, Suzanne Kosanke stood before the Sparkling Roses slot machine with a wide grin on her face. Kosanke is a nursing home nurse. For the past three months, she has watched her patients die of COVID-19. After work she drove home to her husband and two children, terrified she might pass the virus on to them.

“I was numb for most of it. For three months I felt like a robot,” said Kosanke, 42, from Manchester, New Jersey. But at a casino, “I don’t have to think. It’s exciting. Lights! Action! People! It’s easy.”

Like most people arriving in Atlantic City to gamble this holiday weekend, Kosanke knew the rules. She didn’t expect big crowds. She knew the restaurants would be closed, and cocktails would not be allowed on the gambling floor. She accepted these limitations, along with the risk of sharing an elevator or a poker table with someone who has the virus. 

She accepted these things because, after months of living in dread, the guarantee of high-proof entertainment seemed worth the low-odds risk of death.

“For six months I felt like a robot. I was working all the time. We were losing people,” Kosanke said of her time in the nursing home. “This is my first day off in 90 days, and I knew I wanted to come here.”

“Casinos are dark,” said Richard Edward Smrkovsky, 65, from Tuckerton. “My life is serious. My son died in 2004. My wife committed suicide eight months after that. I’m looking to re-start my life again. It’s hard. I came here because I wanted a little break.”

It happens that one of the most celebrated books of the last two decades concerns precisely this kind of bargain. "Infinite Jest," a novel written by David Foster Wallace, presents a near future in which Americans are so desperate to escape inner psychic pain, they’re willing to risk death just to be entertained. 

“In 'Infinite Jest,' he’s talking about people driven to escape internal emptiness, despair and pain, even when escape means real physical and psychic pain,” said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an English professor at Michigan State University who taught alongside Wallace when both were professors at Pomona College in California. “We’re seeing that now with COVID, that desperate demand for entertainment.”

“It’s a perfect metaphor,” said Samuel Cohen, an English professor at the University of Missouri and contributor to “The Legacy of David Foster Wallace,” which he also co-edited. “They’re gambling with their lives so they can go gamble with their money.”

In "Infinite Jest," the sense of doom is like a fog. The characters rarely can pinpoint what’s driving them to seek out increasingly dangerous forms of entertainment. In Atlantic City, the gamblers seem more self-aware. They know precisely what they're running from. They find escape in table games and slot machines. But the moment the games end, the pain returns.

In March, Kenneth Jones held his wife in his arms as she died of COVID-19. Now, Jones said, it seems his wife’s children, stepchildren and grandchildren are more interested in her money than her memory.

“I opened my house to them. I cooked for them Thanksgiving dinner,” said Jones, 71. “Now that she’s gone, they’re all about the money. I feel they only put up with me because they had to. Now they feel they don’t have to deal with me at all.”

To get away from all that, Jones and his brother Bradley drove to Atlantic City on Wednesday night. Bradley’s wife, daughter and two granddaughters are all healthy. And they all find him annoying. They don’t like his taste for cop shows or old Marvin Gaye records. They prefer talk shows. And when he sings, they can’t hear the television. 

So when Kenneth offered an Atlantic City escape, Bradley jumped at it. He walked into Hard Rock Casino on Thursday morning, bet $40 on the penny slots, and promptly lost it all. At noon he retreated to the boardwalk, where he could be found singing “I Can’t Help Myself” by the Four Tops, loudly and well. 

“It was scary being home so much with the wife!” said Jones, from Brooklyn. “We argue a lot. I lose every time. I had to get out.”

Even quiet dramas are enough to make a person feel like rolling the dice, risk of death be damned. Dorothy McCarthy motored around Ocean Casino and Resort on Thursday in an electric scooter. Back home in Hasbrouck Heights she spends every day cleaning the house and cooking for her husband, daughter and three elderly friends. 

“I worry about the people in my family getting the things they need,” McCarthy said. “They need a phone call every day, and they need a home-baked cake every day. It gets stressful.”

So on Thursday, McCarthy’s husband spent two hours on the Garden State Parkway, driving to Atlantic City. They dropped off McCarthy at Oceans, then they drove back home. She booked a room on the 42nd floor, with wonderful views of the ocean. Then she scootered back to the casino floor and started playing a Monopoly-themed slot machine.

The game’s display was plain. It contained no bejeweled roses. Its big lure was the top prize: $892,524.98. 

McCarthy accepted that she probably wouldn’t win. Winning wasn’t the point.

“At the casino, I don’t have to think about cooking or cleaning,” she said. “I lose myself here.”