Worse, it had been so long since I last gambled that everything about how a casino worked had changed.

Inside, there was nothing Oz-like about the YBR at all. Is it fair to call it a prank if he never hoped for a gotcha moment? If he hoped we’d believe in him forever? The thing my grandad Ed Joyce loved most was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and when I was a child he perpetrated an obvious but persuasive prank upon my little sister and me in which he convinced us, methodically, and across multiple media, that the Land of Oz was real. Instead of simply handing out the ice cream, he gave us each a dollar, so we could feel the power of exchanging the currency ourselves. On grandparents’ visiting day in the third grade, he promised every child at my lunch table a strawberry-shortcake ice cream bar, against the wishes of their parents. He loved: hand buzzers, trick horses, fake vomit, squirting daisies, cowboy truisms, knock-knock jokes, and scatological humor. In any given room, my grandfather would find the smartest, strangest child and put himself in league with them against the adults. I had my eye on the casino because, when the wizard died, he left me short on a kind of magic I’ve been looking for ever since.

You’ll think this was naïve of me, but I was hopeful because I used to know the Wizard of Oz. I was hoping that, inside, the YBR would have a little bit of Oz-y magic to it. Above the awning, the Yellow Brick Road’s sign of neon bricks blink in a spiral. It is painted emerald green and has a wide yellow awning. I had been driving by this casino in Chittenango, N.Y., for almost two years.

We set ourselves a $20 budget because we did not trust ourselves with more. We were not optimistic about this, but we thought it might be a laugh. My friend and I went to the Yellow Brick Road Casino, looking for a good time. “There’s lots of magic in all Nature, and you may see it as well in the United States, where you and I once lived.” L.

“All the magic isn’t in fairyland,” he said gravely.

Yellow brick road casino owner