Of Dice and Friends: Bonding With Lady Luck

What has long been common behavior in male friendships--escaping, for example, for a weekend of fishing, politically incorrect jokes and unseemly beard growth--since the ‘80s has been referred to as “male bonding.”

Most women, meanwhile, have continued to communicate and recreate with each other as usual, bereft of sociologically meaningful descriptions of their activities.

Females have been bonded since prehistory, and this primal behavior, I submit, is rooted in the instinct to survive. When the guy has the clicker and Eastwood is just about to make his day, or there are 12 seconds left in the fourth quarter and his team’s down by four, distaff members of the family would have more luck bonding with the guy who cashes checks at Pavilion’s.

My friends and I don’t “bond”--we gamble. We go to Las Vegas. Certainly, we enjoy one another’s company, but Mary, J.M., Ann, Rae and I have found the warmth of mutual affection sometimes overwhelmed by our absolute adoration for a pair of hot dice.

Utterly unhip friends like to joke about our need to sow wild oats. Hardly. In Vegas, we are women who, in search of the perfect hand or the longest roll, generally keep our distance from husbands, boyfriends, children, pets and other mammalian distractions. (Occasionally we have brought the men along, only to find ourselves behaving oddly--attending stage shows, rubbernecking at Hoover Dam, eating balanced meals . . .)

Even among Las Vegans, who should know better, there’s a residual mistrust of women unleashed. On one Vegas sojourn we sat down to play blackjack, with Mary sporting a black eye she’d earned a few days prior in a heated basketball game. The dealer kissed the green felt with her cards and casually inquired if Mary’s boyfriend were responsible. Such comments no longer funny (like they ever were!), Mary seethingly replied, “No, it was another woman.”

The dealer was rattled, but the deck was not. We lost 20 bucks in five minutes. J.M., Ann and Rae were bonding nicely with Lady Luck, but Mary and I, clearly estranged, left them to their good fortune and returned to our hotel for a nap.

The hotel’s casino was jammed with delegates to a Soldier of Fortune magazine convention. We fought, uh, elbowed our way through a battalion of fatigue-clad, square-jawed soldiers selling “God, Guts, Guns” T-shirts. A healthy contingent of soldier women wore blue eye shadow and fingered the knives lashed to their ammo belts.

Convention delegates were notably adept in their mission to search and destroy an afternoon’s repose. Once inside our room, Mary and I fell asleep only to be awakened shortly by an enormous explosion.

We sat upright in bed, clutching the sheets, terrified that Las Vegas was in the grip of a pathologically bad loser. We peeked outside and saw two soldiers engaged in hand-to-hand combat on a specially constructed walkway over the pool. With what looked like padded broomsticks, they tried to whack each other into the deep end they presumably wished was infested with crocodiles.

Another warrior was loading a bazooka. I braced for another blast while Mary dialed the front desk to complain about the noise. The assistant manager apologized and assured her that “no live ammunition is being used at all.”

Except for Rae, who likes machines that clink and beep, we prefer to play games that involve more than dumb luck. Look for us hunkered down over a craps table. That Las Vegas is the planetary capital of dice manufacture (really--I looked it up) is hardly surprising. That more of them don’t roll my way should be.

On one trip we stayed at the Imperial Palace and found good luck shooting dice. We would have slept on the craps table if they’d let us, which would have spared us the commute to our room, whose five-digit number was indicative of its location halfway between the casino and the Arizona state line.

We visit the IP a lot. One night we merrily rolled along for hours, yelling stuff like, “Yo, eleven, come to mama,” and “Four the hard way for the boys.”

Craps is the most exciting and complex game in town. If only I’d studied algebra with a fraction of the concentration I have devoted to computing the odds in craps. My tutor in this regard is J.M., a superior student of the game.

She can tell you, for example, that casino dice measure three-fourths of an inch on a side and are accurate to within 1/10,000th of an inch--the same as a head hair split 20 times. I think J.M. financed her house with her winnings, but I am not sure about this. I do know that she and Ann, co-owners of a mortgage brokerage, fill idle moments of their workday shooting dice in the back office.

Craps is also a game of ultimate humanity. Nothing better demonstrates your love of mankind. Where else but a craps table would you bet money on the abilities of an open-shirted, gold-chained, cigar-smoking loudmouth you would otherwise cross the street to avoid?

We also like to play blackjack. J.M demonstrates consistent aplomb here as well, except when her tablemates insist on splitting 10s, in which case she seeks more enlightened company. When the cards don’t fall for Ann, she gravitates to the slots, for which I have no patience, standing there trying to align pictures of produce in the little window of a noisy, coin-gulping electronic shill.

But Ann has been known to establish a close relationship-- bond, even--with these cheerful friends. Once I found her dropping dollars into their hungry little mouths with alarming alacrity. She seemed to be ahead by a hundred or so, and I queried her strategy.

“I pick only machines,” she said, “whose fruit is out of season.”

These days, with its theme parks and highest-of-tech arcade diversions, there’s more to Las Vegas than gambling. But we don’t care. We come to play. That we don’t always win just isn’t the point. To the semi-bonded men in our lives, the point is that we have managed to pay our hotel bill and stay out of jail.