Pocket Kings (2 page)

2

A Long Out

T
h
is journey of starts, stops, victory, loss, and reshuffles began innocently enough last March in Las Vegas at the Luxor hotel. Had I not been exactly where I was when I was, doing exactly what I was doing, perhaps I would not be here in lonely, frigid Purgatory, one year later.

I was with Wifey, our bellies full of mediocre, overpriced Vegas food—cooked by a famed New York chef who wasn't anywhere within two thousand miles of the place—leaning over a ten-buck-minimum craps table. To my left stood Wifey—Second Gunman, my poker buddy, was the first to call Cynthia that—ever so slightly spilling out of a tight red silk cheongsam.
Th
e dress, bought only hours before on a whim, featured a long trickle of gold dahlias falling gracefully down the right side.

Th
e stranger immediately to my right, a male about thirty years old, said, “Hey, you know who you look a lot like?”

Is there a chance,
I wondered for an instant,
that this guy actually recognizes me from the black and white portrait on the backs of my two novels?
Th
at would be impossible for three reasons: hardly anyone remembers author photos, hardly anyone bought my two novels, and there were no author photos to begin with.

“I have no idea,” I answered. “Who?”

But he was talking to Cynthia, not me. He elbowed his buddy, who stood on his right, and said, “Richie, who's she look like to you?”

Richie examined, unlecherously, Wifey's long, wavy black hair, tight Asian garment, and hint of sun-bronzed cleavage and said, “No idea. Who?”

“
Th
e Dragon Lady on the Poker Galaxy site!”

“You're right,” Richie told him.

Cynthia and I looked at each other and shrugged. I had no idea what they were talking about.

“Who?” I asked as the dice came up a 7. “What Dragon Lady?”

Th
ere was a collective groan, chips were gathered, the dice changed hands, and I plunked a few red chips from my stack onto the pass line. I was still up over $300.

Th
e two men—salesmen of some sort, most likely—told me there was a site called Pokergalaxy.com (aka the Galaxy) and on this site there were “characters” (or avatars): you logged on, went to a poker table, and became a character for the duration of the game, until you left or changed avatars. One of the characters, Richie said, was a foxy Asian woman in a red silk dress.

“People play for real money on this site?” I asked them. So innocent.

“Oh, it's real all right,” the one to my right said. “Believe me, it's real.”

“You can check it out,” Wifey chimed in to me, “back in the hotel room.”

Th
at would be easy to do. I'd brought a laptop to write a book on, I'd brought a pad and pens and index cards to make notes for this book. I'd brought everything but a successful career, any trace of a readership, an idea for another book, or the will to ever write another one. (One thing gamblers, writers, aging athletes, and repeat victims of adultery must be able to admit to themselves:
I know when I'm licked.
) So for the last few days, while Wifey was working at the Convention Center at the Venetian (she's head of ad sales at
Soles,
a footwear trade publication), I'd been relaxing by one of the Bellagio pools, drinking Coronas, eating lousy hot dogs, watching women jiggle in swimsuits, and cursing: cursing my (possibly former) agent Clint Reno; cursing my (definitely) former publisher; cursing the
Times
and
Time
magazine and
Th
e Boston
Globe
and readers the world over, except for England, where I am, for some reason, understood and appreciated. (Yeah, I know: so are Benny Hill, Robbie Williams, and cricket.) It was an unusually torrid March, even for the Nevada desert, and, after three Coronas and gazing at women in bikinis rubbing SPF 2 all over themselves, it begged the question: Is global warming really so bad? Every day I'd log on to my e-mail, hoping there would be a message from the Reno Brothers Literary Agency—I hadn't heard a peep out of Clint for three months—telling me he'd sold
Dead on Arrival,
the book I'd turned over to him the previous December, to a publisher.

Th
ere was no such e-mail.

When Cynthia and I returned to our hotel room from the Luxor, I immediately went to Pokergalaxy.com. Having never been there before, it took a few minutes to navigate the site. I had to register and do this and that and, in a way, it was like becoming a citizen of a new country. But finally I made it to a poker table and saw . . .

“
Th
is must be her,” I said to Wifey. “Take a look.”

I was sitting on the corner of the bed and she peered over my shoulder, her long earring tickling the hair on the back of my neck.

“I guess,” Cynthia said, “you could say she looks like me.”

Sure enough, a sultry Asian woman in a tight red cheongsam was sitting at a table and playing cards. Although my wife is not remotely Asian, there was a resemblance. But my gaze drifted to the player sitting next to her: a portly dude in a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt with a peroxide-blond Caesar haircut and a pair of round sunglasses tinted a very hip rose pink. I watched this character, the Big Man, as he confidently made his moves, his actions controlled by some stranger in Dubai or Dublin or Durbin or Des Moines. It was No-Limit Texas Hold'em and the Big Man just sat there coolly. . . .
Th
ere was no movement other than crude jump cuts and no sound other than the clacking of chips and the crisp snap of playing cards.

He won seven hundred dollars with two 2s. Real money.

From out of my mouth there slipped an elongated curious
Hmmm . . .

Th
e day after Wifey and I got back to New York from Las Vegas, I went into my study and logged on to the Poker Galaxy again and nosed my way around cautiously.
Th
ere were dozens of places on the site to go to and, I saw, 30,000 other people were logged on at the same time I was. Alongside their handles or nicks (their online nicknames) you could see where they were calling in from: Sydney, Singapore, Cairo, Paris, Kiev, Baghdad, Seattle, Quito. Time zones didn't matter here. It was midnight in Manhattan but some burly yobbo waking up late in Perth and chugging a Fosters for breakfast could get a few hands in against a tea-sipping spinster in Surrey who was just trying to win a few quid before hitting the hay.

In Vegas I had created my nick: Chip Zero. It was the first thing that came to me.

Now I went to a play-money table. Although there were no instructions on how to raise, check, fold, etc., it was easier than putting a round peg in a round hole. You simply had to move the cursor to the correct box and click—a four-year-old could have figured it out.
Th
e dollar amount rose when you clicked
RAISE
, your avatar (I chose the Big Man) folded when you clicked
FOLD
. It was easy, all too easy.

Th
e game was Pot Limit Hold'em and I watched from the sideline, not taking part. After a while I clicked
PLAY
and there I was, wired in to all corners of the gambling globe.

Th
e low blind, I got a 6 and a King for my pocket cards. Not good, not terrible.
Th
ere were three others at the table, and the flop came up 10, Jack, Queen.
Th
e betting began and, even though it wasn't real money, my hands quickly got clammy. After a raise and a few calls, the pot rose. I stayed in with nothing but a possible straight.
Th
e turn came up another 6, giving me a weak pair. Everyone was passing—they didn't have much either, it was easy to surmise. Or they might be bluffing; someone might have the straight or two or three Jacks or Queens and be slow-playing me, sucking me in. But what did I care?: It was play-dough, not even as tangible as Monopoly money.

Th
e river card was a 6. I had 6-6-6.

I raised. One person folded, the other called. One of them reraised and I saw it.
Th
e thought that there were two pocket Queens lying in wait for me flashed across my mind and my hands got colder, clammier.
Th
en it was time to show the cards.

I won. Some man (I assume it was a man . . . online, you can never really tell anything) from Topeka named Topeka Tim had two Queens. But my devilish trips had bettered him.

I won over seven hundred bucks in that first hand.

Th
e money was fake, but the pride, shock and 5,000-volt thrill were not.

“
Th
at was just too damn easy,” I said to Wifey sometime later that day.

Other than poker, I've never excelled at anything. And it's not for lack of trying.

I wanted to be professional athlete.
Th
at was Plan A. If that didn't work, then I would, I thought, become a great artist.
Th
at was Plan B.

But I was never good at sports. To observe me playing basketball is to watch a great unforgivable insult to the game itself, and generations of Naismiths have spun in their graves whenever I lofted up an air ball from three feet, dribbled the ball off a shin (my own or an opponent's), or jammed an elbow into the temple of the man I was putatively guarding. I am still a Teaneck playground legend of sorts for not being good at it but for never giving up. Five on five games, three on three, one on one—I played them all, and I've shot hoops by myself a thousand times. I tried so hard but never got good, and it became as common a sight in the neighborhood as the Mr. Softee truck rolling down the street in summer, me slumping my way home from basketball courts and playgrounds, baffled, sweaty, and thoroughly distraught.

I was a third-string wide receiver on my high school football team but never got into a game and quit the team in my senior year to dedicate myself to smoking pot and chasing stoner skirt. In my twenties I played on a Garment Center softball team and once hit a ball high over the left field fence . . . but I stood at home plate too long admiring my majestic wallop and was called out at second base. It ended up just being a long out. At summer camp I was on the B team in soccer and swimming. I was lousy at golf, tennis, and ice-skating and have never won one single game of chess. I was like a clumsy third baseman who lets the ball go between his legs every time it's hit to him, in that I never picked up the signals that the Gods of Success were sending me: some people, no matter how hard they want something and no matter how much they work at it, will forever be relegated to life's B team. Where we belong.

A perennial mediocre student, as early as my teens I found myself staring at the ceiling and wondering:
Is it really asking so much to be good at something? At anything?

When I finally came to accept that I wasn't ever going to be a professional athlete I switched over to Plan B. My major in college had been Art History.
Th
e tests were easy, most of the students in the classes were girls, and I loved what I was studying.

So two years after graduating I flew to Paris with all my savings and found a run-down apartment in a seedy section of town and moved in. Never having studied drawing or painting, I was going to teach myself from the ground up. I would be a
naïf
. If I led a miserably Spartan life, which I did, I had enough money to live there for a year.
Th
ere'd be no numbered ducks at Tour Argent for me, nor any Le Big Macs; my lone extravagance would be the
International Herald Tribune
every day and a whore on Rue St. Denis once every two months.

I needed to go to a place where I knew no one, had not one distraction, could barely get by with the language.
Th
e starving Artist-in-Paris fantasy may seem hackneyed, but perhaps there is something to that fantasy after all, which is how it became so hackneyed. To make matters even more stereotypical, I was fleeing a scarring breakup with Diane, my college girlfriend, whom I'd caught in bed one day snatching away my little brother's virginity. I had to go someplace far away and immerse myself in something so I'd stop thinking about her.