Reno, Nevada

It was five-thirty a.m. in Reno, Nevada. The biggest little Shithole on Earth. Lunkhead had played a show earlier and had wandered into this casino for the cheap breakfast buffet. We stopped to try our luck on the nickle slots (choice of the world-class loser) before the feast. My head was swimming and I felt like I was in slow motion. I hadn't slept in thirty-six hours and had lost my last dollar before the show in a vending machine. A city chock full of people losing their last dollars on flips of the cards, rolls of the dice, and pulls of the slot arm, and I lost mine to a crooked Pepsi machine. The house always wins.
Pete was as hot as you can get on a nickel slot and seemed to never lose. It went on and on, and I slumped down in the machine opposite him. There was a woman behind us, whom I was now facing, who was the living embodiment of the term 'slot jockey'. She was more than a slot jockey, though, she was a slot Goddess.
Manning THREE machines at once, she moved like an orangutan. Her long, puffy arms snaked around rythymically. Sliding back and forth, in and out, shifting and swaying, sliding in tokens and pulling back arms, she was a master at work. It was glorious, hundreds of pounds of loose flesh rolling to and fro beneath a flimsy housedress. She danced to a music that only she could hear, like a perpetual gambling machine.
I stared at her, getting more and more entranced. This woman had done something most of us could only dream of. She had found her ONE TRUE CALLING. Everyone seeks their true calling, everyone wants to find that one fucking thing that they do better than anyone else. And Slot Goddess had done just that, right here right now, amidst the neon lights, oxygen-enriched air and the tang of losing.
Suddenly, something went wrong. Drastically wrong. Slot Goddess stopped abruptly and leaned in to study one of the displays. She tapped it a couple timkes, then started punching it. Then she let out a howl, leapt to her feet, and began to slam her body into the machine. I stood up in disbelief as she rammed herself into the offending machine over and over like a defensive lineman hitting a two-man sled. By the time the men in suits were able to claw her off the stingy slot machine half the casino was watching this human tragedy unfold.
It took five huge mooks to finally drag the screaming, crying, shrieking Slot Goddess away. It was sad, I really felt for her. You can't just stifle a person's gift like that. She got hosed. She probably got hosed all the time, but this was different like taking away Picasso's brush, or Michaelangelo's chisels, or Ron Jeremy's cock.
We didn't really feel like being there any longer and decided to move on. Pete pocketed his winnings of eighty-five cents and we shuffled out into the electric blue dawn.