Fred Bruning: Perils in Las Vegas and Margaritaville

Too old for Vegas?

I just got back, exhausted. It was a business trip — a little reporting job — and not a pilgrimage to see Adele at Caesars or Donny Osmond at Harrah’s or repurpose the monthly mortgage payment.

Doesn’t matter — business, pleasure, you either dig Vegas or you don’t.

While I was away, my wife, Wink, mentioned the trip to a friend.

“Tell him to play the slots for me,” said the friend.

“Tell her I don’t know how,” I said to Wink.

This is true.

Slot machines no longer are the lovable, one-armed bandits I encountered years ago on a previous Vegas assignment. That time I ventured a quarter and pulled the lever. Wheels went round. I recall a gong and siren. The contraption shot 28 quarters into a metal dish.

“Seven bucks,” hollered Wink, who was with me. “Let’s quit while we’re ahead.”

We did.

Now, of course, the Vegas slots are digital.

Simply insert your grocery money into maybe Kung Fu Master or Dragon Link or Buffalo Strike or Planet Moolah. A screen the size of your suitcase explodes in psychedelic colors and fantastic images. (Uh-oh, you may think, it’s 1968, again.) There is a terrific racket — sounds not necessarily of this Earth. Winner? No. For all the pandemonium, looks like you lost, again.

Even if I could manage the high-tech weirdness of it all, even if I could figure how to work the odds, or cope with the bedlam, this was sensory overload. I spent off-hours watching CNN and, in desperation one night, the U.S. Open, despite having no more interest in tennis than quoits or skeet shooting.

Outside, it was 109 degrees. Inside, it was the casino floor. I was trapped.

No moral statements here, but gambling is a kind of odd enterprise.

“The sure way of getting nothing for something,” said the playwright Wilson Mizner 100 years ago when Las Vegas was little more than a railroad town in the Mojave Desert.

I once knew a couple who gambled often enough to be “comped” — free room, meals on the house, a few chips to get you started.

“So after all this time, are you ahead?” I asked.

“Ahead?” said my friends. “You making a joke?”

I was reminded of my intrepid pals while riding a hotel elevator. Why do older people come to Vegas, I wondered? I asked a 70-something couple drinking margaritas out of plastic containers the shape of ear trumpets.

They traveled from San Diego to celebrate their 43rd wedding anniversary.

“Why Las Vegas?” said the man, as though I had asked him to unravel the meaning of life. The door opened. His wife said a cheery good-bye. The man, drink in hand, kept silent, perhaps still working on an answer.

Occasionally when I was a kid my father would buy an Irish Sweepstakes ticket. When the big winners were announced, he would grunt because, of course, he wasn’t among the lucky few. He would not be quitting his job and sleeping in. Like always, he would be getting up at 5 a.m. to deliver Bond Bread in South Brooklyn.

“Big deal,” he’d say. “Only money.”

The Sweeps was the limit of Dad’s gambling habit. Mine isn’t much more audacious.

I’m probably not heading to Vegas again anytime soon — business or pleasure. The idea makes me tired.

One thing still to mention.

The hotel was next to a Jimmy Buffett restaurant, Margaritaville.

We saw Buffett years ago when he showed up at a little outdoor fair in Key West.

He sang all the familiar tunes, including “Fins,” one of my favorites.

It’s an upbeat, easygoing song warning, nevertheless, that danger lurks.

“Fins to the left,” Buffett cautioned. “Fins to the right.”

Buffett died a couple weeks ago at 76 of a rare skin cancer.

He was a good-time guy just as Vegas, for millions, is a good-time place.

To all the folks sitting at the slots or blackjack tables: Enjoy, have a ball, hope you land on Planet Moolah.

Keep the odds in mind, though, take it easy on the yard-long drinks, don’t stay too long in the sun.

Fins to the left, fins to the right, as anyone Buffett’s age — or mine — can testify.