Ration Reality

My wife has never met a slot machine that she didn’t like. Sadly, her love is very nearly always unrequited.

Her love does, however, occasionally get us free shit. It’s been a while - 8 or 9 months - since we’d been to Tachi Palace, as it’s quite a drive to get there for us, and because quite frankly it sucks. But, the other day we received a voucher in the mail for free tickets to see the Bruce Willis Blues Band perform live. There would be complimentary beverages and food offered, so that was quite a selling point.

Doors opened at 18:30, with the show starting at 20:30. Now, Tachi has been advertising this show for months, so the only thing we can figure is that they hadn’t sold quite enough tickets yet, and wanted to fill the place up. We arrived at about 19:15, and picked up our tickets at the will-call booth. Looking at the tickets it became quite obvious why they hadn’t sold very many: the price printed on the ticket was $100.00.

There’s only a couple things to say about the performance. The opening act was Ron Thompson. The guy kicks ass, absolutely. ‘Nuff said.

Bruce himself, well … his singing is not exceptional, but it’s also not bad. I’d call it upper-level karaoke quality. He’s a fucking genius with a harmonica, though. Absolute genius. Really good. He surrounded himself with talented musicians, as well. All in all, it was a very enjoyable performance. They started about fifteen minutes early, actually, which is a first in all the shows I’ve attended. I’ve never seen one start even on time. (Perhaps the worst offender on this score was Type O Negative. I love them, but I’ve never been to a show where they started less than a full thirty minutes late, and sometimes up to an hour and a half late.)

Bruce introduced the band as ‘those yippy-ki-yay motherfuckers from New Jersey,’ and they launched into about an hour and a half set of some seriously hard-driving blues-rock. They stuck mostly with old standards, including ‘Who Do You Love?’ and ‘When the Levee Breaks.’

Well, that’s really about all I have to say about the performance. Now, we’re going to talk about the venue.

Tachi Palace Resort & Casino is a relatively new Indian Casino, located on the Santa Rosa Rancheria in Lemoore, California. This is the reservation for the Tachi Yokut tribe. The tribe’s website says it best:

In 1934, the Santa Rosa Rancheria was established on about 40 acres of desolate farmland in Lemoore, California. Forty people lived on the reservation below poverty level, many living in tule huts, tin houses, old cars and chicken coops. The average education on the reservation was 3rd grade level, with field labor as the primary source of income.

Today, the only thing that appears to have changed is an increase in population, and the primary source of income is the casino. All around the outside of the borders of the ‘Rancheria’ you find well-tended fields, prosperous dairy farms, beautiful houses, etc. Inside the reservation, you still see tarpaper shacks, run-down trailers, unmowed lawns, fields lying fallow. The only real upgrade is that, instead of having rusted out 1960’s-1970’s Buicks and Fords on blocks in their front yards, you’re going to find brand new Escalades and Avalanches on blocks in their front yards.

Outwardly, the casino is absolutely beautiful. It truly is a luxurious establishment. I’ve spent a (fortunately free) weekend at their hotel before, and it was astoundingly wonderful. I’ve never stayed in a nicer suite. Even the gaming floor is fantastic, even though the slot machines are tighter than Bagel’s asshole.

It’s the policies and the service that suck.

You can’t drink on the gaming floor. You’ll get thrown out if you take a drink out of the bar.

You can’t smoke in the poker room.

But worst of all is the food.

The restaurants at Tachi Palace suck. If you fed the shit they pass off as food - expensive food at that - to fucking pigs, you’d have PETA crawling up your ass. The buffet is filthy. Absolutely filthy. It looks to be just about as well-cared-for as the expensive cars sitting on blocks in front of the trailers on the reservation. The main restaurant, on the first floor near the entrance, has the absolutely worst service of anyplace I’ve ever been. Last time I ate there, I waited for eleven minutes (I timed it!) at the maitre d’s station while the manager talked on her cell phone, ignoring us, before finally getting seated … in a nearly empty restaurant. You couldn’t pay me enough to go there again.

But silly me: I figured that maybe, just maybe, since this concert was a catered event, it would be to a higher standard. Oh, how wrong I was.

If I had actually paid the $100.00 face value of that ticket, I would probably have cut loose with a shooting spree at the end of the night, no matter how much I enjoyed the performance by the band.

Like I said, we got there at about 19:15 or so. And we discovered that there was one station for food, and two - count ‘em - TWO, bars, each with one bartender. There were probably between eight and nine hundred people in the room. Being served free drinks by TWO bartenders. (One of the bars was quite well concealed behind a curtain, which became an advantage later!) I got in line for the (easily visible) bar straightaway. At this point, the line was about seventy-five people long. No shit - it was long enough that I couldn’t even SEE the bar, and I had to take it on faith that there was a bar there.

Being at the tail of the line offered some amusement value, though. There was a table reserved there, with a hand-scribbled sign (no shit, this is what the sign said): ‘RESARVED FOR TRIBBLE TRIBEL TRIBAL ELDERS.’ Remember what I said about the apparent education level before?

Any road, after forty minutes we had moved not ten feet in that line. I decided, well, fuck this, and my wife and I got in the food line instead. Or rather, she got in the food line. I got in the line for the other bar, which I had noticed off hidden in the corner. Fortunately, very few other people had seen it, though. I made it through that line pretty quickly, and came away with five bottles of Miller Lite. (Bastards had already run out of Coors and Budweiser.) I gave one bottle to my wife, and I settled in on the other four. By the time those four beers were finished, we still hadn’t gotten to the actual food yet, so I went back for more, and this time waited in line at the hidden bar for a Jack and Coke. (I would have probably had Gin & Tonic, but they were out of tonic water also.) To Tachi’s credit, they were using good brands of liquor: they were in fact using Jack Daniels’, Skyy, Sauza, etc. No well brands!

By the time I made it back to my wife in the food line, we were just barely up to the spot where we’d pick up plates … and we discovered that they had actually run out of everything except for some nicely warmed up cubes of what looked and tasted like government cheese, some mediocre spinach dip, and crumbs of very greasy tortilla chips. There was a row of about ten chafing dishes - all empty - and one lonely shrimp in a barren wasteland of ice cubes, down at the very end, which someone grabbed just before my wife made it there. (I won’t eat the spider-looking motherfuckers, but she loves ‘em.)

All in all, I say FUCK YOU, TACHI PALACE. You have absolutely the worst service and worst food in the known fucking universe. Your only saving grace is that your overpriced hotel rooms are very nice … but even then, all morning long, all you can smell is shit, even in the room.  I’m not sure if it’s from the dairy farms nearby, or if it’s from the open cesspits and outhouses that are no doubt tucked away behind the trailers across the street. There is not a single thing worth doing, visiting, or seeing at your establishment.  Even for free.