When Bernard Santamaria’s wife told him they were going to a bingo rave at the Cow Palace, he paused for a moment. Through his mind went two things: would there be alcohol (yes) and music (yes). Well then fuck it, he thought, why not?
“How high should I be?” the 48-year old asked his wife.
I met Bernard after he had taken a few sips off his dab pen, having just brought a bucket worth of beer and other liquor to the table where I sat with a few of his friends, one of whom was so hammered he was incapable of holding a conversation.
His group stood up and bopped around to every song, doing iconic moves such as “The Sprinkler,” “The Dougie,” and “The Soulja Boy.”
The rave wasn’t really a rave, Santamaria was quick to point out, since there weren’t hard drugs like he recalls in the ‘90s. But there were nevertheless all the staples of 21st century culture, not the least of which was that the music was exclusively from eras other than this one — from an EDM remix of “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey to “SexyBack” by Justin Timberlake.
We were playing Bingo Loco, an alternative version of regular bingo, by which I mean that it was 90% shenanigans other than bingo and 10% bingo. On the board were Bingo Loco’s representative motto and a warning: “Let’s Get Weird” and “No Dancing on Furniture.”
Sipping on my Black Cherry White Claw that cost me $15, I asked Santamaria why 8,000 people paid $70 to come here. In the end though, it’s still bingo, I said — isn’t that something you can just go play at your local senior center?
“People are bored,” he said. “They want to get out.”
By the end of the event, I would come to understand that no one there thought bingo was the main attraction. Instead, it was an excuse to be around people.
Bingo is uniquely positioned to take on such a role in our attention-deficient society. It’s a game of chance where you’re never really out of it, and you can track along with the people sitting next to you, who are hard not to befriend.
The only skill is the ability to keep your focus long enough to track all of the numbers that are called.
And in the case of Bingo Loco, that includes constant timeouts from the game to break out into twerk-offs, chug contests, or a slew of jokes about the number “69" when it was called. “I like to call it dinner for two,” the emcee said.
It also meant being sold on the Bingo Loco prizes, which included a 70-inch TV, an inflatable hot tub and a two-person trip to Hawaii.
Not all of the prizes were so desirable, though.
Betsy Johnson, a 70-year-old plant caretaker, won an XXL dildo (in honor of the XXL event, which claimed to be the biggest Bingo Loco ever), which was more like a statue than an actually useful sex toy.
To carry it back to her table, Betsy had to use her belt buckle to tie it up and swing it behind her back.
“I can’t use that,” Johnson recalls saying when she saw how big the dildo was.
Johnson, like Maria Villalon, a 30-year old engineer who sat next to me at my bingo table, heard about the event, which has come to 140 different locations around North America, including Canada and Mexico, on social media.
Villalon said if she had won the dildo she would’ve had to turn it down. She added that she was thrown off by the whole thing upon her arrival, and that it took her a while to settle in.
By the final hour of the three-hour event, she was ready to declare it “kind of lit.”