The name of the next casino eludes me, though it doesn't really matter. One is no different from the other. As we stumbled around the city, the names became meaningless. We only recalled the casinos as 'the one with endless free drinks' or 'the one where we were carded.' In the end, the former became our dive of choice. The drinks were hardly finished before the next was served, all for free as long as we kept plugging in nickel after nickel into the dingy video poker machines. The music was atrocious, the game was mind-dulling and the smoke left us teary eyed, but we loved it.
	We ran out of cigarettes early on, leading to the first real tragedy of the night. My associate went out for the next pack, stumbling over to the ever-present coin-op machines. In a drunken haze he reached out, pushing the Camel button as some vestige of a phallic camel's nose pushed its way to the forefront of his consciousness. Then, with a resounding kerchunk, the machine revealed his brutal error — he had inadvertently selected the unfiltered Camel death sticks that RJR-Nabisco puts out to help with the population problem. Reno is not a town where you throw away money, leaving us with no choice but to char our lungs with the potent buzz of raw nicotine. After all, we had come here to experience the town, and Reno is incomplete without chain smoking. Nowhere else in the world can you smoke in restaurants, bathrooms, supermarkets, airports and taxicabs. Even the secondary smoke would kill a cow, but we dove in head first. Soon the seemingly endless stream of nickles flowing from my pocket into the maw of the friendly neon poker machine dried up, followed by the flow of drinks with reflexes that would make a kickboxer proud. Free is a relative term, and the casinos are not in the business of making paupers drunk. Or so they thought. After we left the nickel poker den, we happened upon a sign and a plan. Circus Circus had a policy where you buy ten bucks in quarters and they give you a drink for free. So we bought our change, banged back the booze and headed over to the next booth to turn in our supposed winnings. Stupefied by the simplicity and high rewards of our plan, we wandered over to the nearby Clown Bar to give it another whirl. The money-sucking nature of gambling had become all too apparent, so the prospect of a continued stupor was the only hope left in this town of broken dreams. The barkeep eyed us warily, handing over the screwdrivers and the change, and then he hit us with the hard facts. It was hard to understand exactly what had happened. Something about video cameras and our plan, but the point was as clear as the night sky above the mountain city. Big Brother, it seems, had been watching us and this time we had to play our money right there or pay for the drinks. Naturally we agreed to play the game, and watched him retreat a few feet. I halfheartedly plunked in a few coins while finishing my drink, and he seemed mollified. Then I turned to my partner in this horrendous con game, who whispered the fact that we had most of the money in our grubby hands and the drink in our livers, leaving a hole in Circus Circus' net big enough for us to escape with the cheapest screwdrivers we had ever guzzled. With an overly obvious and somewhat slurred "Hey, wanna play some of the games over there," we made a break for the exit.