Choctaw Bingo is a sort of Canterbury Tales for the 21st century. It documents the many visitors arriving for a family reunion up at Uncle Slayton’s place. Over eight-plus minutes, it rides a biting rootsy rock guitar riff through a highly disconcerting eight-minute trek into the heart of the “North Texas-Southern Oklahoma Crystal Methamphetamine Industry.”
Slayton himself is an old distiller who has turned to making crystal meth now that the market for bathtub whiskey has dried up, who cuts up plots of land and sells them to those desperate for a little piece of the world to call their own. All because he knows that they’ll never be able to make the payments, so he’ll be able to take it all right back. Then there’s Roscoe, Slayton’s son, who drives a semi truck and tries (but not very hard) to avoid flattening a car that runs a red light in front of him. There’s Bob, who coaches high school football, and who loads up on heavy weaponry on his way into town. And we can’t forget Ruth Anne and Lynn – the narrator’s second cousins about whom he’s had some detailed fantasies that he’s more than willing to share.
It’s a song about addiction – to drugs, to money, to guns, to sex, to football, to whatever can take the edge off a life that seems to have passed you by – and the way it feels to ride the wave of the crash. It’s a testament to the power of the patriarch, the queasy sense of disgust and fascination that he provokes. It’s a reminder of just how deep our guilt runs, and just how blind to it we make ourselves, just how careless we insist on being, because to look it square in the face, even for one second, would bring everything crashing down.
It’s only there in the margins, in the way ‘Choctaw bingo’ shows up twice in the eight-minute narrative. To remind us of what Oklahoma actually is: a barren patch of land carved out for the ‘relocation’ of Indian tribes. Which now contains the clashing cultures of Uncle Slayton, his Asian bride, his hard-partying and hard-fighting family, and the Indian tribe that claws back one-millionth of the debt owed to them, by drawing them all into their casinos.
There is no redemption here, no joy. There is just the bare margins that everyone can scrape off one another, and the recognition that we are all deeply compromised.