Discovering Confidence Road Trippin’ to Reno
What’s your favorite childhood vacation? This meeting icebreaker always leaves me struggling with what to share. Sometimes I lie, making up a fake family excursion to a national park or a camping trip filled with swimming and ‘smores. Anything to make me fit in, not having to divulge clues to my childhood devoid of happy family vacations. I used to envy my peers who came from stable two-parent homes with an annual summer getaway via plane, train, or station wagon.
As I have gotten older and wiser, I’ve come to appreciate past life experiences that have shaped who I am today. Reflecting on the one partial family vacation I did have, the one never shared with co-workers, I see it in a new light now. An experience that set-in motion learned behavior and a certain mindset, helping this insecure middle child find her way into adulthood.
The year was 1981; big, feathered hair, cropped tops, and full-on puberty for me. My parents were recently divorced. Besides the release of Jessie’s Girl and the introduction of Rick Springfield into my schoolgirl crushes, it was the best thing that happened that year. My father, Harry, was rarely home. When he was, he was usually camped out in front of the tv, on his faux leather recliner, remote in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He only played with me on his terms, which usually meant poker. When I entered kindergarten, I remember being excited for playtime but shocked when I could not find a deck of playing cards, and none of my classmates knew how to play Texas Holdem’.
Harry surprised us that summer by planning his version of a family road trip with the first stop in Reno. Knowing my mom would never let my younger brother go, he pitched the idea of taking my older sister and me. Why? I can only speculate. He did not need to take us and somehow convinced my mom that he could be a responsible parent. People are complex, and as much as we may want, they don’t fit neatly into the box we set aside for them. Perhaps he fantasized about being the kind of engaged dad he never had, hoping to heal the pain from his childhood and ease the regret of becoming the same invisible father. Or perhaps it was sheer laziness, wanting somebody to fetch snacks and pop open his next RC cola bottle on the long drive. I will never know. Ironically, he died on Father’s Day, the year my daughter was born.
I was anxious and excited to experience life beyond my home state. Every good road trip needs a vessel, and ours was a doozy. A classic 1970’s brown van that I dubbed Shaggy, with swivel seats, wall-to-wall shag carpet, disco track lights, and a bench seat that converted to a bed. It had it all… sans the popular but usually inappropriate bumper sticker “if the van is a-rockin', don’t come knockin’.”
Shaggy made the ten-hour drive quite comfortable, free to move about the cabin. Heck, who worried about seatbelts back then? New surroundings and plenty of Hostess Ding Dongs, Doritos, and Pez kept us entertained, along with the occasional game of Slug -a Bug. Every time you see a VW Bug, you yell out the color and hit your sibling as hard as you can in the arm. Jon Fogerty's vocals drowned out my screams of pain. Harry controlled the music, and Harry loved Credence Clearwater Revival. It was an all-CCR 8-track party - their lyrics forever ingrained in my brain.
One big continuous party. That was my impression rolling into the Reno strip. I was in awe of the glitzy casinos, hordes of people, and the smell of money. It was not a good or bad smell but a stench of eagerness for those who wanted it and smugness for those who had it. I felt like I had entered a whole new world with a different set of social rules. I felt the tug of its lure and saw how it changed people’s behavior. Everything was louder, smellier, bigger, brighter, closer. In my eyes, it was rich beyond anything my small hometown had to offer. I did not yet know that Reno was the cheaper sidekick to Vegas. And I did not know Harry was about to disappear for the next 48 hours.
Harry was a gambler if you have not figured it out. He was not the Kenny Rogers type of gambler who knows when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em and walks away before losing his pants. Nah, he was the determined, addicted gambler, confident his luck would change at any moment. Back home, he could rattle off the names of his downtown poker room buddies faster than those of his children.
“Here’s some money, now stay out of trouble,” Harry’s parting instructions on his way out the hotel room door. I will give him some credit - we stayed at the Circus Circus Hotel, which featured a whole floor devoted to carnival midway games and circus acts. That first day, we played them all and saw them all. My favorite game was Fascination, where you continuously roll a small rubber ball into holes, trying to get five in a row to win a stuffy. Not the cheap little stuffy you might get at a pop-up fair in the local shopping mall parking lot, but a plush, enormous stuffy that declared I AM A CHAMPION.
Looking around, you saw no indication that it was already well past midnight. Feeling high on luck and full of all the tasty fried food and ice cream we could eat, we made it back to the empty room, exhausted, with no sign of Harry.
Day 2 started as a repeat of our first-day highlights. But by evening, we had been 86-ed from Fascination for having won too many stuffies. I think the carny just got tired of babysitting us. Back in the room, we discover dirty clothes on the floor, an empty bottle of RC, $200 sitting near our stuffy stash, and a Circus Circus ashtray with a friendly clown logo encircled with used cigarette butts. Harry was alive and winning.
Bored, feeling rich, and with the lure of Reno calling, I devised a plan. Let’s go collect ashtrays from other casinos. I wiped the clown ashtray clean and stuck it in my bag. I wanted more. Too naïve to know the risk, we departed on our next late-night adventure.
Walking into the first neighboring casino, I tried to move quickly as the nervous sweat started dripping from my face. We got busted not twenty feet from the lobby between a few slot machines looking for clean ashtrays. No kids allowed, we kindly heard as we were escorted to the exit. It only made me more determined.
Entering the next casino, we tried a different approach; steady and sneaky, hiding behind serious gamblers camped out at their machine with buckets full of change, ducking in between slots and wet bars. We must have tried too hard, making us more conspicuous. This time we were caught by a good Samaritan granny wearing culottes, arthritic socks, and sandals, offering us a granola bar as she tipped off the security guard.
Thoughts of giving up were creeping in with every failed attempt.
By lucky chance, I had to pee badly. Time was of the essence. We entered the next casino on a mission to find the bathroom. Bold and determined, we marched straight to the bathroom – heads held high, eyes laser-focused ahead, just in time. What we found was incredible. The women’s restroom was a luxurious lounge with plush, pampered chairs, complimentary mints, and ashtrays galore! Jackpot!
I cracked the code. All we had to do, was pretend to know what we were doing, head straight to the restroom, and collect the prize. Every new ashtray put a little more mojo in my step: no more nervous sweat, no more fumbling moves. By the tenth ashtray mission, I bravely made direct eye contact, smiling at the security guards and motioning to the restroom as I headed past them to capture one more treasure.
We continued into the wee hours in a town that did not sleep. Finally declaring enough, we found our way back to the room and defiantly went to bed.
Harry eventually came back to the room sometime before sunrise. Lucky for us, he was up money and stayed in a good mood. Soon we were on the road again, waving goodbye to Reno and hello to Tijuana and then Knotts Berry Farm before Shaggy took us home. The other places were forgettable, with no lasting memories surviving the decades. Reno had been special.
Throughout my middle and high school years, I held onto the collection of stuffies and ashtrays, prominently displaying them on my bedroom shelf. I was too young and inexperienced to connect the dots at the time entirely, but they made me feel like I had a superpower, that nothing could hold me back. I learned a memorable formula that trip that I would repeat over and over; experiment, act with attitude, and stay laser-focused on my goal.
I had discovered confidence—my ace in the hole.
