Who cares if the ATM charges $4.00 for a transaction when you can use that money to win a cool hundred in ten minutes? Money ebbs and flows everywhere, but the atmosphere is far from rich.

A fifty year old woman with teased bleach-blond hair and gobs of eyeliner flirts with the blackjack dealer and orders another $5.25 white russian. The dealer’s fingers dance over the cards and chips with a magician’s skill, performing a myriad of miniscule tricks, flips, taps, scratches and jumps.

A man playing slots raises his finger majestically in the air to press each button on his machine with the dignified grace of a conductor waving his wand in a grand orchestra.

Slots appeal to the baby-boomer crowd with themed machines appealing to casino patrons’ nostalgia for TV shows and celebrity icons from a bygone era. “The Munsters,” “Marilyn Monroe” and “Bewitched” are a few of the offerings.

Perhaps in thirty years, “The OC” and Jennifer Lopez will be immortalized in slot machine form.

Although gambling may yet be considered a hobby of dubious merit, the frivolity of this adults-only arcade seems surprisingly innocent, even childlike. It is quite possible that the sexy, trendy young couple appearing on Viejas billboards was photoshopped to the point that they actually looked like Viejas patrons. The reality? An elderly lady with a tight white perm sits at a Playboy slot machine clutching her purse in her lap, placidly watching black bunnies scroll by.

At the $2 video blackjack table, a blank-eyed, animated dealer appears on screen. With enormous breasts shrink-wrapped into a Baywatch-style red swimsuit, she deals virtual cards to a sixty-something woman with a punk haircut, a man wearing a cowboy hat and a “Thanks for making me look so good” T-shirt, and a petite Asian woman sipping coffee.

The most interesting room in the casino is the one with the least artifice: the poker room. It is what it is, with flourescent lighting, white boards, and high rate of male pattern baldness per table. This crowded area contains a curious mix of senior citizens sporting neon '80’s windbreakers and frat boys wearing their caps backwards.

“A lot of younger guys are playing poker,” observes Daniel Robinson, a veteran Viejas dealer. “Texas hold-em is a huge trend. When I started, a lot of older guys were playing, now there’s all these kids.”

While the blackjack tables offer an environment conducive to making easy conversation with strangers, no one’s talking to their neighbor in the poker room.

Despite the abundance of booze and receding hairlines at Viejas, there is something genuinely innocent about the clientele. As they sit gambling, a mother and son share a cigarette, passing it back and forth between adjacent Game King slot machines.

In a time where so many rely on Lakers season tickets or aromatherapy bio-lift facials to feel alive, who’s to look down on the woman shamelessly hitting on a blackjack dealer half her age, cackling between sips of her white russian as she rakes in the jackpot. She’s probably having the better time.

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