A writer and an attorney embark on an unholy mission to lay bets in each of Arizona’s 26 casinos over a single, sleep-deprived weekend. 1,600 miles driven. Hard truths revealed. Busts galore.
It’s hour 36 of this idiotic quest.
We’re strung out on fatigue and Adderall, on the losing side of the bankroll, and rounding another interminable bend in this highway following the Gila River downstream. We’re waiting for the lights of Winkelman.
Next to me in the driver’s seat is the semi-famous Valley attorney who anonymously tweets as “Clue Heywood” on Twitter. I met him not long ago because he professed to like a book I wrote, and I met him for a beer at a dive bar. We somehow talked each other into a ludicrous mission to place a bet at each of Arizona’s 26 tribal gaming emporiums within a 48-hour period. And now here we are, bombing through the Pinal Mountains toward our fourth to last stop, the Apache Sky Casino, that has a street address in this old mining town south of Globe. We’re shaky and frenetic.
“I want a beer in my mouth and cards in my hand,” Heywood demands, his face looking like a half-moon in the dashboard glow. “I never wanted to be in Winkelman so bad in my life, man. I’m going to take a big dopamine hit from Winkelman. It’ll be euphoric.”
There was no rational basis for this self-designed, casino-centric Gumball Rally of 1,637 miles, only that it seemed like, as Heywood put it, “a perfect combo of dirtbag and stupid.” The rules were simple. I would bring a stack of $100 bills – one for each of the 26 licensed tribal casinos of Arizona – for a single hand of blackjack or a high-limit slot spin at each spot. Win or lose, we would then walk away, out the door, shambling down the road to the next casino. We would experience the whole spectrum of Arizona Indian gaming in 48 frenzied hours, from the glitzy Scottsdale palaces with floors polished like mirrors to the lonesome gas station slot parlors at the edge of nowhere.
Heywood portrays himself as a sloppy drunk on social media, but that’s not how you keep a thriving law practice; he’s more responsible in real life. If we didn’t get caught up in too much conversation with fellow gamblers, or drink too much, or sleep longer than four hours each night, we had a chance of making it to the last casino on our itinerary, Desert Diamond West Valley, by the arbitrarydeadline.
And now Winkelman beckons. Its name shimmers like an El Dorado, a Gran Quivira, an Emerald City. Our conversation turns mystical.
“This is all fate, with a splash of free will,” Heywood says as we pass Precambrian granite hills more than a billion years old. “The house is always going to win, but when you sit down, you’re hoping to buck the model. The luck element of gambling is just being in the right place hoping you’re going to be there at the right time.”
We round a bend in the darkness, and there they sparkle: the promised lights of Winkelman. All 10 of them. This is the smallest incorporated town in the state, population 297, a dice-toss of houses clustered at the base of a copper smelter, with a Speedway gas station the only business open at night.
“Where is this casino?” Heywood fumes. He glances at GPS and finds the Apache Sky farther down the road, technically in Dudleyville, where we find a pathetic strand of electric blue lights draped over a saguaro and a building resembling a junior high school gym.
“I sort of envisioned light pouring down from the sky and a choir of angels…” he mutters. But it will have to do. We coax a dealer out from the break room to play a hand of blackjack. I lay down a $100 bill, hit on a 14 and bust.
As certain as gravity, a beer had zipped from somewhere into Heywood’s fist, and he punches slot buttons with one eye toward the exit. He has no particular ambition for winning – once I busted, he’s ready to run out the door.
We’re done with the charms of Winkelman. The Apache Gold in Globe is calling, stop No. 24, and its voice cannot be silenced.
We had started the clock on this safari of stupid the previous morning at the birthplace of Arizona Indian gaming: the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, where on May 12, 1992, defiant tribal members used pickup trucks and a human wall to prevent federal agents from confiscating the slot machines from their bingo parlor. The standoff turned into a ceremonial pow-wow that lasted three weeks, forcing then-Governor Fife Symington to negotiate deals that would allow the state’s tribes to operate their own casinos.
What was then a semi-illicit reservation pastime now rakes in more than $5 billion a year (the exact numbers are guarded), and Fort McDowell has graduated from a shabby bingo hall to a slick operation called We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort that beckons motorists off the Beeline Highway with a giant electric sign.
Betting anything more than $20 makes me nervous – must be that Protestant guilt kicking in. But I tried to fake a blasé countenance, casually moneyed, as I pulled out the first $100 bill and asked for a single chip. “Black out,” called the dealer to the pit boss, setting a lonely black chip down on the felt. Heywood checked his watch: 8:51 a.m. We were off. I drew a 10-9 and stayed. The dealer turned over 18. A nice start.
“You know this has been good for the tribes and good for jobs,” said Heywood as we drove toward our second stop, Talking Stick Resort. “But I’m not blind to the ills.”
Gambling has become normalized in American society in a way that might have astonished the first resisters at Fort McDowell. Following a landmark 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a federal ban on state-authorized sports betting, wagering money on phones has become as easy as sending a text. The NFL used to be allergic to gambling; now it holds Super Bowls in Las Vegas. Poker tournaments have never been more popular, and today you see billboards for Indian casinos all over the Valley, depicting good-looking and well-dressed young people of the sort that you rarely see inside an actual casino.
At the edge of Scottsdale, we entered Talking Stick to a blast of “Life is a Highway” coming from the speaker. Ochre-colored clay pots sat behind glass in the lobby. They had no explanation or taxonomy attached. For all we know, they were purchased at World Market. Scanning the quarter-million-square-foot gaming floor beyond, I was not struck by anything that looked tribal-related. “Black out,” called the dealer, perhaps a metaphor for my own willful blacking-out as I tried to forget the rent money on the felt. I stood on 13 and won.
Fifteen minutes later, we passed scraggly fields of mesquite and some rundown institutional housing on the back road to Talking Stick’s nearby sister property, Casino Arizona, where we were met by Judy Ferreira, the head of the Arizona Indian Gaming Association, who we’d told ahead of time about the 48-hour quest.
“I’ve talked to some of our tribal chairmen about this,” she said, smiling a little. “They all think you’re not going to make it.”
Heywood and I shrug off this blatant negativity. I inquire whether Indian gaming has been good for Arizona.
“I like to ask people: What if this wasn’t here?” she said. “This is distributing benefits to the community. And this also creates community.” Ferreira gestured to the lapel pin on the blackjack dealer signifying his employment status and his clearance by the state gaming department. “This is our tribe,” she said. “This is our family.”
On the way out, passing the Moon Pies and shirts with dollar signs in the gift shop, I asked another dealer whether the kiva-shaped dome above us represents the personality of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa people. “I have no idea, man,” he said. “I’m from New Mexico.”
Retaining walls festooned with vaguely Native designs rushed by us as we drove down the Loop 101 toward a cluster of casinos run by the Gila River Indian Community just south of Ahwatukee. At Lone Butte Casino, I stood on 17 and unwillingly donated $100 to the tribe. The floor was packed tight with machines offering various come-ons: Buffalo Chief, Pop N Pay, Prosperity Link, Samurai 888, Double Blessings, Goldfish Feeding Time. In the sports book, a faraway NBA game aired on the overhead screens to nobody.
By contrast, Gila River’s new Santan Mountain casino looked like a Danish airport, with high walls of reinforced glass and lots of natural light. We were told it was meant to resemble a traditional brush arbor of mesquite logs. It would take an act of great willpower to see this. The dealer busted, and I walked away with another black chip.
Heywood and I continued to debate whether “this” is a good idea. Not the 48-hour challenge itself, as it clearly is not. Rather, whether Indian gaming is really a healthy thing in the long run for Arizona. Defenders like to point out that Native people themselves have a long tradition of playing hoop-and-stick games for material rewards and this is but a lavish extension.
The rise of tribal casinos has fueled a gambling boom in Arizona, made even more lucrative – or painful – by the ease of sports betting on smart phones run by non-tribal companies. According to neuroscientists, the rush of winning, the little shiver of anticipatory pleasure, releases chemicals like norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine that resemble the brief euphoria of cocaine or alcohol.
About a quarter of state residents are making a bet of some kind at least once a week, according to a 2023 report commissioned by the Arizona Department of Gaming. More alarming, about a fifth of state residents age 21 and older is said to be at moderate or severe risk of developing a problem with it.
“You’re taking some of the worst parts of American culture – addiction and greed – and shoving them onto the reservation,” Heywood mused. “It’s like they’re going wet again” – that is, dealing in booze, which many tribal governments banned in the name of public health many decades ago.
But then again, I countered, these are sophisticated governments who know the needs of their own constituents, right? People should be competent enough to make their own decisions.
What I didn’t say: I’m also a believer in the power of context. Put enough neon lights around a vice, make it seem glamorous, give it an allure it doesn’t really deserve, and there’s a fine pavement for the road to hell.
We keep taking opposite sides in this running road discussion about whether Indian gaming has been good for Arizona, adjusting our positions like chips on a roulette felt before the ball drops. “What else is going to bring people out to the rez to spend money?” asked Heywood, quite reasonably. “You’re not going to feed your people selling tax-free cigarettes.”
The argument took us all the way to Harrah’s Ak Chin in Maricopa, where yet another of my precious black chips disappears. Heywood only shrugs. I’m beginning to absorb his insouciance, though it is not in my nature. He and I make a bit of an unlikely pair. I’m quieter, for one thing, with a personality like a librarian. He’s acerbic and charismatic. But we understand each other. Our grandmothers went to Phoenix Union High School together during the Great Depression. We both know the dive bars in just about every Arizona town on the map. And we both have a hard time sitting still, in need of constant stimulation.
Outside Tucson, eight casinos deep into our odyssey, we learn that somebody hacked into the Pasqua Yaqui tribe’s computer system, meaning that payouts on the slot machines at Casino of the Sun must be given out by hand, which could take up to an hour. And they don’t have any blackjack tables. “You can play,” said an attendant, “but we won’t be able to pay you.”
“Most honest casino ever,” said Heywood out of her earshot. They didn’t need to worry about paying us, either, as I quickly lost four $25 spins in a row. We screeched out fast, and minutes later, at the nearby sister property, Casino del Sol, Heywood pointed out the bench where he once sat in a drunken stupor as a law school student in the midst of a vigorous booze-and-gaming bender.
I drew an A-7 to the dealer’s 4-5-6-6. Brutal. While idling by the cage, I asked a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation if the customers can get a sense of the tribe’s personality from visiting their casino.
“Only if you stop to talk to us,” she said.
Unfortunately, chit-chat time was not part of our budgeting for this adventure, and we heed the call of the road. In the long shadows of late afternoon, we rocketed west through the gorgeous Tohono O’odham Nation past clusters of saguaros once ceremonially harvested for fruit. At the crossroads hamlet of Why, about 25 miles north of the Mexican border, in a slot room that was more Circle K than Vegas Strip, I played a slot called Lock it Link and watched eagles, bears, foxes, flowers and acorns line up in ways not favorable to me. I was left holding a redemption ticket for two cents that I didn’t bother to cash. “You cannot win here,” said an elderly woman at the next seat. “But try betting the 400 credits. Not 800. That sometimes works.”
I asked her why she came here if losing was a certainty. “I have PTSD in my family,” she said. “People died in Vietnam. A sibling was murdered… When I come here, I forget all about it. And when I walk back out, it all hits me in the chest.”
Heywood couldn’t figure out the Bluetooth in the rented Audi, so he kept the FM radio on 93.3/KDKB out of Phoenix, and here in the hinterland, the corporate programmed rock faded and gave way to other voices, in other languages. By the time we made it to Somerton south of Yuma, the peaks of the Gila Mountains looked like the bones of the earth shining in the moon, the stench of agribusiness hung in the atmosphere, and a mysterious bank of white lights lit up the pavement that led down to Mexico. Illumination for the border wall? A state or federal prison? It turned out to be the Cocopah Speedway, ravenous with engines on a Friday night showdown.
Inside the neighboring Cocopah Casino and Resort, I went down standing on 12, and then wandered over to the bar where a karaoke version of “I Will Survive” had several couples out on the small floor. A chocolate cake with red frosted flowers sat on a cocktail table nearby. This was the 23rd wedding anniversary party for Mario and Carmen, who were both wearing powder blue for the occasion. Tipsy with Champagne and happiness, Mario gave me a bear hug, leaving a trace of cologne on my sweater. There is joy here, too, inside these places.
But no time to eat cake. Heywood steered us over the 1915 Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge in Yuma toward the Paradise Casino run by the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe. “Decline Ahead,” a sign announced. “I want to steal that,” Heywood jibed. “Perfect for a middle-aged gambler. When you hit your fourteenth Arizona casino in a day, the decline is right here, all around you.”
I shelled out another hundie to losing effect. Cruising north, we saw crews picking crops by night in the fields before landing at BlueWater Casino in Parker, where the grinding sounds of bad country music drowned out all conversation. A woman next to us tapped out keno bets on a console with frightening speed. I paid for a black chip and played it. Another loss. We checked into a room overlooking the Colorado River, unseen in the dark, for three hours of unconsciousness courtesy of Coors and cold medicine. Failure is an option, I told myself. Maybe we should rethink this?
In the predawn, Clue the Cruel frog-marched me toward the Audi and pointed us toward Spirit Mountain, another bare-bones dive casino lacking a blackjack table. I played the slots, busted and chatted up an attendant who told me the Fort Mojave tribe fights a running battle with the jet-skiers and boaters in the Colorado River who leave trash behind. “Water is sacred to our people,” she said.
By the time we hit Prescott, it felt as though I’d been living in a casino for the past dozen years. Though Arizona’s Indian tribes all have distinct languages, foodways, cosmologies and artistic tastes, these gaming parlors have a depressing monotony about them, as if they were all designed by the same consultant. Such is the nature of gambling itself – a series of wholly unpredictable outcomes that must be held in a predictable container. I won $100 at Bucky’s and promptly threw it away on a spin of the electronic roulette wheel at Yavapai Casino down the hill.
At Cliff Castle outside Camp Verde, they were holding a pan-tribal celebration with dancers in a circle on the field. There I talked briefly with Manuel Cooley, an Apache medicine man invited to casinos around the state to give them a traditional blessing and song. “You try to be a judge about it,” he told me. “Gambling has a bad side, but it does benefit the people. And they believe all kinds of things. I’m not just giving a blessing for business success. I’m blessing the people.”
Nearby is Tanya Lewis, the chair of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, which was able to expand its territory by more than double, thanks to gaming revenue. “We will never let our people go hungry,” she said. “We will never let our children starve.”
Under the compacts signed after the Fort McDowell standoff, and after a renegotiation in 2002, the gaming tribes contribute a portion of their profits to Arizona’s state government and keep the rest for their own governments. Some tribes pay direct per capita payments to each enrolled member in the form of an annual check, which is usually enough for groceries but not much else. The exact data is closely held, hard to get and anecdotal. I’ve heard Salt River Pima used to pay $15,000 to members per year, but again, that’s anecdotal.
Gaming isn’t universally embraced on Indigenous land. The Navajo, for example, were slow to embrace the gold rush. But when they did, they did it with style. Twin Arrows Navajo Casino Resort outside Flagstaff is probably the most tasteful in the state, with an effort to do more than put clay pots in a display case. An electronic sign in the lobby says, in part: “The traditional Navajo home, the hogan, displayed atop the progressive slot machines throughout the casino are a reminder of the first home built upon entering the glittering world.”
This is an explicit reference to the Navajo/Diné origin story.
By this point, I’d become dulled to the panic of putting down $100 on every bet. I drew a 6-5 and got to double down for the only time in the journey, taking a 10 on the felt with a design of Monument Valley on it, and walked out with $400 from the cage. But I was still down overall.
“People think they have a system – they don’t,” Philosopher Clue said, as we headed toward a dive bar he knows in Snowflake for a carefully timed beer break. “They don’t have any idea what they’re doing. Gambling is immaturity. You crave the action and the escape. Getting something you didn’t work for – and if you win, you think you outsmarted the game. It makes you delusional about your own abilities.”
The rest of that night on the Mogollon Rim passed in a blur of pine trees, dirty clumps of snow, cut-rate condos and out-of-season holiday lights glistening on roadside patios. Route 260 is urbanized for 15 miles out of Show Low, a town itself named for a hand of cards. Weird drunks at Hon-Dah Resort Casino in Pinetop gave us the creeps. “I am so wasted,” proclaimed a guy with tattoos of dice on his fingers. The dealer did her best to ignore everything in the shabby room except the hand motions to hit or stay. Elderly people who look like they can’t afford to lose wandered around the gaming floor like zombies.
“A rural Saturday night,” muttered Heywood, bent to the steering wheel. “Or maybe I’m the weirdo. Maybe it’s an Adderall on an empty stomach.” Our faces felt hot from the day’s vanished sun, and we started to babble to each other, telling half-forgotten jokes and pointless stories, arguing about fate, chance and God.
We dropped a bill at Mazatzal Hotel & Casino in Payson, barely listening to the ambient beeps and boops, and crossed the bridge at Roosevelt Lake on a glide path to Winkelman. “Why do people like gambling, anyway?” I asked. “Is it some sort of metaphor for the unpredictability of everything? You’ve got this riot of mathematics, but it’s inside a comfortable box. All these lights and colors. Designed to distract you from the essential emptiness. A cluster of mathematics in a carpet of darkness.”
“And music,” added Heywood. “Don’t forget the music. Fricking Bob Seger.” We had heard him incessantly over the various sound systems. He was like a patron saint of Arizona casinos. But these miles felt more like Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”
The Winkelman disappointment now behind us, we burn rubber to Apache Gold in Globe, where the fatigue and the losses and the hopeless ennui of casinos finally catch up with us. We arrive too late for blackjack: The tables are all covered with mourning cloth not long after midnight on a Saturday and a custodian vacuums around them for closing-time effect.
I really don’t want to play slots. I hate slots. And they hate me back, evidently, because the radiant machine I pick doesn’t accept my bill. I can’t figure out how to work it. Heywood looks over from his own terminal to find me pounding on the buttons like an insane ape, at the edge of bellowing.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he says. Heywood has been gambling on this trip, too, though with more success and with a $700 kitty now in his pocket. He steers me over to a nearby machine like a compliant puppy, and shows me how to make $10 bets. I lose 10 spins in a row.
The surroundings match my mood. Discarded Christmas decorations lay stacked haphazardly at the entrance. A broken-down GMC Envoy blocks the entrance crescent, hood up. Sticky floors in the bar. No security anywhere in sight. “This feels like a failing casino,” Heywood says. “You could rob this place with a finger gun.” Time to crash for two hours.
We’re awake again before dawn, with three hours left before deadline, holding our desperate-junkie eyes on the yellow highway lines as the sacred Apache site of Oak Flat whizzes past. Metro Phoenix blossoms around and soon envelops us. I have two more chances to claw back the $350 I’m down. Vee Quiva near South Mountain is no help. “Welp,” says the guy from Minnesota next to me as the dealer takes my black chip. “Sorry.” It is all he needs to say. The stained-glass ceiling strangles the Sunday morning sunlight, which is merciful.
We cross the chopped-up bed of the Salt River toward the final stop, Desert Diamond West Valley in Glendale, an enterprise of the Tohono O’odham, who were able to open it on non-Native land only after a legal fight. Taking back lost territory one losing hand at a time. And like an apology kiss after a punch to the face, I hit blackjack for the second and final time on the journey. Heywood stops the game clock at 8:13 a.m. We made it, and I am only $200 poorer. Considering that the house is hardwired to win approximately 51 percent of the total hands in blackjack if the gambler plays perfectly, this is a reasonable statistical outcome. “Good luck,” the cashier tells me, the standard casino farewell.
“I’m not sure I feel anything,” says Heywood, while we drink Bloody Marys out of plastic cups in the food court at 9 a.m., as though time mattered anymore. “I know we accomplished something, but I’m not sure what. You want to keep going? Maybe take off like Thelma and Louise and just go flying off into the Grand Canyon?”
I’m also left with more questions than answers. Gambling has unquestionably brought Arizona’s tribes out of a state of desperate poverty and into something like a fighting chance. If you combined them into a single employer, they’d be the third biggest in the state, and they generate $6 billion in direct and knock-on money. The casinos, while monotonous, have given a broader section of Arizona a consistent reason to visit reservations and at least some nodding acquaintance with the first inhabitants. Maybe they might even have a conversation between slot spins.
But gambling has an empty heart. You must be prepared to accept that reality going in and be sure not to stay too long. If you do, it will almost certainly ruin you.
Casinos famously have no clocks: They don’t want you to know how late it’s getting. They’re also devoid of mirrors. They don’t want you to see yourself. But sometimes, you catch glimpses. And doesn’t it always seem like you’re looking at a stranger?
We climbed in the rented Audi and tried to leave, sailors at last home from the sea. But the parking garage was big and confusing. Heywood drove in circles several times, in a search for the exit.
Clue’s Casino Oscars
Going on your own casino road trip this summer? Consult this categorized best-of list from social media with Clue Haywood.
Best View
The San Francisco Peaks – sacred to both the Navajo and Hopi – shimmer out the west-facing windows of the Twin Arrows Navajo Casino and Resort. 22181 Resort Blvd., Flagstaff, twinarrows.com
Best Shabby-Chic Casino
The low-ceilinged, two-table card room at the Hon-Dah Casino near Pinetop looks like what you’d find in the back room of a mechanic’s garage in Brooklyn, the kind of place where you pay your debts and don’t ask too many questions. 777 AZ-260, Pinetop, hon-dah.com
Most Remote Casino
Only hardcore desert rats, U.S. Border Patrol agents, and Rocky Point habitués will be spending much time at the Desert Diamond Casino in Why, which is a glorified four-pump gas station with a slot parlor in a side room. No bar, but good coffee. Highway 86, Why, ddcaz.com/why
Most Forbidding Architecture
If you like the exterior designs of 1970s public libraries, but with slot machines in the conversation pit, the Desert Diamond Casino Sahuarita is for you. The excellent red chile burrito is a redeeming factor. 1100 W. Pima Mine Rd., Sahuarita, ddcaz.com/sahuarita
Most Dubious Use of Water
The BlueWater Resort and Casino in Parker laughs at megadroughts, with three indoor pools, a 15-foot waterfall and a two-story-high water slide in a large interior chamber that runs all night long. In case you don’t get the point, the overworked Colorado River is right outside behind a wall of plate glass. 11300 Resort Dr., Parker, bluewater-casino-resort.com
Best Throwback Casino
While almost all Arizona casinos either banned or sectioned off indoor smoking at the beginning of the pandemic, you can still smoke ‘em if you got ‘em at the Cocopah Casino and Resort in Somerton, and pretend you’re in a Howard Hawks movie. 15318 S. Avenue B, Somerton, cocopahresort.com
Smallest Tribal Land with a Casino
The Tonto Apache Tribe has the smallest land base in Arizona at 85 acres – about a quarter of which is occupied by the Mazatzal Hotel & Casino. SR 87 Mile Marker 251, Payson, mazatzalcasino.com
