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an arcade filled with shooting galleries and chances to toss coins into the jar and win a huge stuffed teddy bear for your sweetheart. Today, still, the boardwalk hoists hookers and seagulls, but the scavenging is done for jewelry or coins and with battery-operated metal detectors and a wild eyed look of desperation known only to those who have lost something precious too long ago to ever hope to find it now, be it their money, jewelry, or their innocence. They wear the eyes of fear, the lips of cigarettes forgotten, ash grown long and precarious, pinched between wrinkled lips. The shooting galleries no longer move slowly like a line of rubber yellow ducks, but are found in used syringes tossed haphazardly beneath the boardwalk. Paraphernalia litters the beach like horseshoe crabs washed ashore throughout the night. Social pleasantries are uncommon along today's Vegas Strip or Atlantic City's cracked wooden boardwalk. The pain is raw, abundant, and even contagious. The fear is gripping in its hopeless pervasiveness. If you wonder how anyone could be so stupid, so lost, so broken, you know not the jaws of addiction. You have not been bitten by the alligator addiction that, like a vampire, forever changes your measure of wealth, your language of prayer (the prayers of the gambler are called fox trench prayers, like those muttered in indescribable volleys of warfare in countries far removed from home: "God, get me out of this and I will.")

If you paid attention in Sunday school you will in these moments remember lines and parables that appear to fill your immediate need for intervention from above right this minute at this place. You will recall that if, in the name of Christ you ask for something, He promised to go to the Father in your behalf and grant your request. So, "in the name of Christ Jesus, my Lord and Savior, shepherd of the lost, I beseech you Father to grant me three of a kind or a full house. I'll play the hard eight for 9 to 1 odds because my faith is so large right now as I blow on these dice six quick puffs of air and besides all that, baby needs some new blue suede shoes." The prayers are tossed off casually, as are the dice, often bouncing off the table, lost momentarily upon the bright carpet, changing the luck of the shooter, causing many of the superstitious to pull down their bets that follow such a prayer. This is crap(s), you think, irate with the swing mood of the table working at cross-purposes when moments ago you were making them

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