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Sensory bombardment can be fun, especially for high rollers like Lisa Wishnick, a vivacious platinum blond from New York City who recently persuaded her oil-executive husband to celebrate their 13th anniversary with a weekend in Atlantic City. The people who track the betting at Merv Griffin's Resorts Hotel and Casino estimate that the Wishnicks have access to a $50,000 line of credit, so everything but the gambling is complimentary: the 48-minute helicopter ride, the mauve suite, even the caviar. Never mind that just about everyone else in the casino is dressed for mowing the lawn, Wishnick slinks into an azure silk ensemble with a slit up the side, slips a new seven-carat ring on her finger, straps on a pair of silver slippers and sips champagne before setting off for a meal of lobster thermidor. Then it's "Woooooooooow. O.K., roll those babies! Come on! Numbers! Numbers! Numbers!" As Wishnick screams louder and starts to shake all over, the crowd begins chanting, "Eight! Eight! Eight!" At the end of the roll, she walks away from the craps table $5,000 richer.
The gambling floors are like giant pinball machines turned inside out: clangorous, noisy places where time is measured in chips remaining, where art can be Michelangelo's David in extra large, where employees are costumed as giant diamonds or Roman vestals in mini-togas. Amid all this, the ritual extraction of money produces shrieks, groans and -- sometimes -- incongruously grim determination. On his first night as a $25,000-a-year dealer, Larry Brown saw a gambler suffer a stroke. "What really shocked me is how the players reacted, how they continued making their bets, reaching over him and stuff," he says.
The spell is sustained by the tacit bargain between casinos and gamblers -- limitless consolation in the form of drinks and obsequiousness for money lost. "You don't see Rockefellers gambling down here," says Brown. "They have to feel like a big shot. When they walk in, we know their name, and that's the biggest thing we do for them." For most players, however, gambling is simply a thrilling adventure on the edge of willpower -- risk taking at its safest, with fantasy and freebies thrown in. "Atlantic City is a better break than Wall Street, and you can put the money in your pocket," says William A. Fountain, a food salesman who heads for Harrah's Marina Hotel Casino every Saturday.
At row after row of slot machines, women stand quietly in the aisles, holding plastic cups full of coins that blacken their hands, eating morsels buried in their purses and pulling levers hour after hour, as if at work in a stamping factory. Most are elderly, but their backs are straight, and their eyes are hypnotically fixed on the spinning fruit as the winning coins hit the metal troughs in twos and tens and -- rarely -- jackpot hemorrhages.