They wear diapers, you know, someone told me once. This is so they don’t have to get up and leave the seat in case things suddenly turn and the machine pays out. They didn’t have to tell me that part.

The first time I went, the distance between what I imagined it might be and what it was almost comical; here, no showgirls, no headliner, just row after row of people pushing the button again and again. My own mother feeding hundred dollar bills into it, the American kind (the American kind! and my heart sank) where you have to get right close to see just how big they were. Flattening them between her palms so they’d take, saying come on, come on. Standing beside her saying come on, enough, please.

Easy to look at them under the low smoke ceiling and think jesus christ how can anyone be that stupid, that reckless, how do you not realize that the payout only comes often enough to keep the rest of you losing. How can anyone — but remember church in childhood, those prayers?

Or me, on my knees that time, do you remember, thinking: I believe, help thou my unbelief.