Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage Read Free Book Online Page B

had a beer in the hotel’s deserted bar all by myself. The only time I saw anyone else on the eighth floor was when an older man in a motorized wheelchair left his room for his weekly trip to the nearby pharmacy that stocked a small selection of groceries.
    â€œDubuque was founded in 1788 by French-Canadian fur trader Julien Dubuque,” reads the historic marker in front of Dubuque’s red-and-white county courthouse, an impressive wedding cake of a building constructed in 1981.“[Dubuque] joined with the Mesquake [sic] Indians to exploit the rich lead mines of the area. In 1833, [the area] was opened for American settlement, and the resulting lead ruch created a boomtown”. I know enough about American history to be deeply mistrustful of historic markers, especially ones in lily white parts of the country that speak of whites “joining with” local Indian tribes. While Julien Dubuque may have been a nice guy who was soliticious of the Mesquake Indians in the extreme, I didn’t see a lot of white people, though, and no one seemed to know what had happened to the Mesquakes. And who the hell ever heard of a lead ruch?
    Like many of the dying river cities along the Mississippi, Dubuque’s civic boosters hope to lure visitors to the city with its many fine examples of Victorian architecture. (“Dubuque: Master-piece on the Mississippi,” is the city’s official tourist slogan.) But an earlier generation of Dubuque’s civic boosters went on an urban renewal binge in the late 1950s and 1960s, tearing down everything in sight—including block after block of Victorian buildings in downtown Dubuque. Nothing much besides parking lots was ever built to replace these buildings lost to “urban renewal.” In the right light, Dubuque looks like a tintype of a smiling Victorian woman who had half her teeth knocked out. Worse yet for Dubuque, other nearby cities didn’t tear down any of their older buildings in the 1950s, leaving them with more charming—and hence more touristed—Victorian city centers. Even today Dubuque’s architectural heritage can’t seem to catch a break: a row of Victorian buildings in the downtown area was evacuated during my stay in Dubuque when a parking lot being constructed directly behind the buildings destabilized their foundations. The buildings will probably have to be torn down. Adding insult to injury, downtown Dubuque needs another parking lot like Jerry Falwell needs another chin.
    There was another reason I decided to leave Las Vegas and head to Dubuque: I wanted to feel like a whale. In gamble-speak, a high-roller is someone willing to lose a hundred thousand dollars on a trip to Vegas; a whale is someone willing to lose up to a million dollars or more. The average bet for a whale is ten thousand; 70 percent of whales are Asian men. At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the maximum bet is a closely guarded secret, falling somewhere between twenty and forty thousand dollars. Maximum bets can be higher in the exclusive and intimate gaming rooms Las Vegas casinos have been building to attract “superwhales” like Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who is famous for betting ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on a single hand. I’d never made more than a five-dollar bet in Las Vegas—not only wasn’t I a whale in Vegas, I wasn’t even a sea monkey. I probably wasn’t plankton.
    I could be a whale in Iowa, though. The state legalized gambling on riverboat casinos in 1989, and at that time the maximum bet in Iowa was five dollars; the most money any one gambler was allowed to lose in a twenty-four-hour period was two hundred dollars. I remembered reading about Iowa’s prim betting and loss limits at the time the riverboat casino opened in Dubuque. The same lawmakers in Iowa who wanted to haul in the tourists and create new tax revenues and hundreds of jobs didn’t want to be accused of