LAS VEGAS — The small casino is ringed with a fence topped with barbed wire. Its beige walls have browned from the punishing desert sun. Its bulbous canopies are torn, and the marquee is missing vowels. The front door is padlocked.
Before sunrise on a recent Thursday, a few workers open a side door to the ghostly building, near the County Jail in an unkempt pocket of downtown.
They crowd into a room that reeks of cigarette smoke. They fire up a generator, plug in a boom box and two air-conditioning units, and wheel in 16 video poker machines.
The Queen of Hearts opens -- beckoning gamblers once again.
The building's maintenance man tests his luck on the machines. He loses $5. For the next five hours, no one else walks in. Slot foreman Bob Bright slouches on a red vinyl bar stool, sips his Lipton iced tea and stares at the doorway. He drums his fingers on the white Formica bar, $20 in his pocket in case anyone wins.
"This is what I do," he says, shrugging. "I watch these slot machines."
Las Vegas casino openings typically demand red carpets, cocktail parties, celebrity guest lists and fireworks. But not so at the Queen of Hearts -- it's a one-day casino.
This spartan, eight-hour event is everything the Strip is not: small, unpretentious and quiet, with no crowds or drunks, no cocktail waitresses or high-rolling "whales," and no Midwestern tourists. It's common, and perfectly OK, for no gamblers to show up.
One-day casinos -- mandated by law for a handful of places that are closed but want to hang onto their gaming rights -- are governed by the same rules as high-end resorts with thousands of machines. They're the gambling industry's equivalent of a solar eclipse. They unfold a few times each year. They typically get some press, and people who stumble upon them are often befuddled but intrigued.
This morning at Queen of Hearts, the boom box plays Aretha Franklin. The air-conditioning units are struggling against 111-degree heat. Bright looks wilted -- and bored. He waits for someone, anyone, to dump money into a Gamblers Choice or 4-Way Double Bonus Poker machine.
At 11 a.m., a taxi driver named Michael Whiteley pokes his head in. He rents unit No. 3 of the attached Daisy Apartments. A neighbor had mentioned that something was happening at the casino, which has been closed for several years.
