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Memories of Dumb Luck — UNLV pg80
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
During the skinny years of college when I wasn’t old enough to work in casinos, I figured out how to make money while studying. A favorite trick was the Dept. of Motor Vehicles line. Las Vegas was so transient, it was the only city in the US that published two phone books every year. You think the line is slow with modern computers? DMV had one facility that served thousands a day. It was an enormous room of folding chairs, a long wall of counters and one ‘Take a Number’ machine under a ‘Now Serving’ readout at the entrance. There were always a hundred people in line ahead. I would stop by with a book, get a number and study for two hours. Close to the time, I would go out to watch the parking lot for a Cadillac or Lincoln pulling in. Any guy wearing loud pants and gold jewelry was happy to buy my number for twenty bucks once he looked at the NOW SERVING readout. — From Chapter 3
The cherries finally lined up during my senior year of college. Money clanked out of the machine after I landed a lucky part time job selling flowers in a casino. Lordy but I miss those days of tactile, mechanical slot machines… of yanking a handle and hearing the noise of coins filling a metal tray when the plums, bells, bars and cherries on spinning wheels stopped in a line. I remember the…
