Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 129

Las Vegas, Las Vegas

125

And all of this money is not coming directly from the corporations that
run the casinos. Vegas is a tip culture. For many workers in the city, their paycheck
is just a fraction of their income; without tips they’d never survive. The dealers
and the waitstaff benefit the most (never mind the strippers), but bellhops, house
keepers, and taxi drivers often feel the effect as well. Though some would say it is
only a small step from spinning around the brass pole at the Cheetah Lounge, a
bethonged Rio cocktail waitress can make $100,000 a year. Old-timers, of
course, have stories to tell about memorable tips they received from the rat-pack
ers or rat-pack wannabes. And anyone who spends any time at a baccarat table in
the larger casinos can see a hundred dollar chip left as a tip with some regularity.
In Nevada’s nearly libertarian culture, the taxes are low. This is, after all,
the center of the vice world. Prostitution is legal in a dozen counties, gambling is
legal everywhere. And there is no corporate, inheritance, estate, gift, or income
tax. There is, however, a special federal tax on tips imposed by the IRS, whose
agents visit every casino individually in order to establish a figure for the average
amount of tips earned per shift. In a questionably egalitarian move, the IRS then
taxes the worker based on the assumption that he or she has earned that amount
o f tips regularly throughout the year. And ju st to keep things honest,
Nevada residents are audited at a rate 2.5 times that of the national average.9
Some workers, however, claim that they have never received a tip
and therefore shouldn’t be taxed. “There are no tips in a Vegas casino,” they explain,
“only tokes.” “Tokes” is an old-time word meant to indicate a gaming chip — or
token — left as a tip. Through the years, any gratuity has come to be known as a
toke. It’s part of the hep way one is supposed to speak here: it’s “thanks for the
toke,” not for the “tip”; “gambling” is more properly called “gaming”; suspected
cheaters are encouraged to “take their action to another casino”; those in the know
ask to get “comped” free food, shows, and rooms; big spenders are never “high
rollers,” they are ’’whales”; lucky low-rollers are said to “win a lumberyard with
a toothpick”; and every martini is ordered “shaken, not stirred” — or at least this is
how you feel like ordering them.
Without resorting to a nominalistic metaphysics, we might admit that such
a way of speaking does create a different reality in Las Vegas. A few years ago this
is just what casino workers argued to the Feds: tokes really are different from tips.
The line of reasoning was straightforward: a tip is a bonus one gives for providing
some special service or treatment over and above what is expected and what is
already covered in the service provider’s salary. But a dealer cannot offer anyone
special treatment. This not only goes against casino policy, it is impossible
(without cheating) in the gaming world: the next card belongs to the next
player; even if a dealer wants to be nice, she ca n ’t offer him a better
card. Consequently, a toke must be a gift, not a supplement to salary offered