Pocket Kings (5 page)

A month into my Galaxy citizenship, I found myself one evening at a table with someone from Illinois called Grouchy Old Man. It was just the two of us. I'd played with this
altacocker
once or twice before but didn't know much about him. I was in my small study and the lights were out.

“
Th
is crazy thing happened to me a few days ago,” he said to me during a game. I looked at the grimy buildings across the street and asked him: “Here? Or in the real world?”

“
Th
e real world,” he said. “Out there.”

I clicked the
SIT OUT
button so he could talk, and he sat out, too. We were two people only halfway there. In the ether of the ether, twice removed from all things earthbound.

“My wife, she's got Alzheimer's disease,” he said. “Had it for years now. She's in a nursing home a few miles away.”

I told him I was sorry and looked more closely at the avatar he'd assumed. It was an old man in a tattered argyle cardigan with thick glasses and a furrowed brow. Gramps.

“I visit her a few times a week . . . sometimes she recognizes me, sometimes I can't tell.”

Th
e site sounded a bell: we had to play a game or else click out and then click back in. Both of us clicked back in, cards were dealt and he continued. “So I'm there yesterday and she's in the lounge sitting on a couch and I'm sitting next to her. She says to me, ‘Remember the time we went to Lake Michigan?
Th
e motel?' ”

I had pocket Jacks and bet and Grouchy saw it.

“I say to her,” he said, “ ‘
Th
e one in New Buffalo?
Th
at wasn't a motel, that was a hotel.' She says, ‘No, George, the motel! In Saugatuck!' ”

Th
e flop was a 3, a 7, another 3. Confident with my two Jacks, I bet again and he called.

“She's calling me George, see?” Grouchy Old Man said.

“Yeah? So?”

“My name is Len!”

Th
e turn card was another 7, giving me Jacks and 7s.

“She says to me,” he went on, “ ‘
Th
e week that Len was away, George, in New York at the stationery convention and you stayed.'
Th
en I realized, Chip, she was talking about George, who was my business partner. For thirty years. We sold stationery in the Chicago area.”

Th
e river card was an uneventful 5. I bet, he called.

“I says to her, ‘Yes, honey! I remember now!
Th
e motel in Saugatuck, right on the lake. For a week. I remember.' See, Chip, now I'm pretending to be George, who's dead fifteen years, that bastard. Pardon my French.”

We showed our cards and the program's mute ever-present “narrator” informed us:

Chip Zero shows two Jacks and two 7s and wins $300.

We clicked out. Back into the ether. He continued:

“
Th
e upshot was, Lynn had been having an affair with George for thirty years. I had no idea.
Th
ey did it in my bed, they did it in my living room, they did it in his bed, they did it on the desk in my office. For thirty years this went on. I had no goddam idea.”

I waited a bit. I didn't know what to say. Finally, I asked: “What about George's wife?”

“He never married,” Grouch told me. “A real Lothario type guy. And guess what? Everyone at the company knew it but me. I found this out. Everyone.
Th
ey all kept the secret, those momsers.”

We clicked back in and didn't say a word to each other than “NH” and “TY” and “VNH.”

We were soon joined by Irma La Deuce in Hartford and Cali Wondergal in Yorba Linda and someone named Bjorn 2 Win from Gothenburg, Sweden.
Th
en two more people came in.
Th
en another three. Grouch kept playing, winning, losing, folding, and hanging in there, and I, sitting alone in my hushed, dark den, realized that all these people at this table, on this site, in this world . . .
are real.

One Monday morning it was a slow day at work.
Th
e previous Saturday I'd spent about six hours online playing poker, winning, then losing. I was still on the plus side but had taken a serious bath. I'd begun the day five thousand dollars in the black but by evening I'd sunk. It's amazing to me how you can do everything right, make every play by the book, and still lose. Al Gore must know the feeling.

It was early and nobody was around. I wanted to see just how much money I'd made in three weeks and I logged on. It was the first time I'd ever visited the site at work. Near the words
CHIP ZERO
, it said: $5,421.
Th
at was a nice bundle, sure, just for deciding when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, but the $7,476 I'd had two days before was a hell of a lot nicer.

I went to my office door, looked down the hallway in both directions. Nobody.

I sat back down and within a few seconds I was at a table.
Th
ere were four other players there, including Wolverine Mommy, whom I'd only recently met.

“Hey Chip!” she greeted me.

(In the Galaxy, people are sometimes deliriously happy to see you. “Hey, you!” they'll say. Or: “Hi! How are ya, buddy?!” It's flattering, reassuring, and a bit exhilarating.)

I told Wolve I was at work and couldn't stay too long and that my stack had shriveled badly. She told me she couldn't stay on long either: “Baby very colicky today.”

After folding three hands I was met with my new nemesis: pocket Aces. (
Th
ey just never seem to prevail.)
Th
e Kiss of Death. Right away I assumed I was in trouble and I groaned aloud.

After the first round of betting the pot was up over two hundred bucks.

Th
e flop showed two 4s and another Ace. I had a full boat.
Th
ere was no way anyone was going to beat me. Money in the bank.

Th
e betting resumed and someone—Bjorn 2 Win again—raised.
I called, did not raise.

Th
e turn card was a 3. Someone checked, then Wolverine Mommy checked, then it was my turn: I raised. A few people called and Wolverine Mommy folded.

“So where is the baby right now, Wolve?” I asked.

“Bouncing on my lap,” she said. “Crying his little lungs out.”

She was in Michigan playing poker and her baby was on her lap, probably looking at the screen, at the chips and baize and the Big Man, whose body and loud yellow Hawaiian shirt I was occupying. I wondered how much worse playing poker with a kid on your lap was than smoking cigarettes with kids in the house. But I didn't wonder too long. Besides, the kid had to learn some time, right?

Th
e river card was a 9.
Th
e betting began again and I raised and everyone called. A player from Utrecht called Hands Brinker raised again. Which gave me the chance to re-raise.

My full boat won, and I took the next hand with a pair of
lousy 4s.

I made, on the average, about $250 a day at that job. But in less than ten minutes I'd won over $1,600. I played for another ten minutes and not only did I make up for most of Saturday's losses, but I easily tripled what I usually earned in one week at work.

I liked my job. It was enjoyable, satisfying, and lucrative enough, and I treasured the company of my coworkers. It was a dream job and I was lucky to have it.

But that morning I wondered aloud:
What the hell am I still doing here?

4

Start Your Engine

I
t took me two years to write
Plague Boy
but not for one second did I ever think it would get published.
1
Th
is was because by then I'd already written about twenty plays, thirty screenplays, hundreds of atrocious poems, and five other novels, and nothing had happened to them. Failure was my Siamese twin, a writhing, unctuous viper joined to my hip who plotted against me in my sleep on those rare nights he was kind enough to let me sleep.

My scheme—in terms of audacity and cunning, the plan was positively von Schlieffenish—was to publish three minor novels, then publish my
American Nightmare
Trilogy,
which I felt would be my one true bright, shining masterpiece.

Plague Boy
had gotten, with the exception of
Th
e
New York
Times
and
Time
and
Th
e
Boston Globe,
mostly favorable reviews. (According to the U.K.'s
Observer,
the book was “coruscating and blistering . . . masterfully ugly and unsettling . . . almost brilliantly upsetting.”) Cynthia lovingly scrapbooked the good reviews but she needn't have: I admit that I've memorized them all and can rattle them off whenever anyone asks. (Nobody ever does.)

And then, after
Love: A Horror Story,
my second book, died its quick and quiet death, along came the idea for
Dead on Arrival,
an idea so obvious that I was afraid to write the book just in case it had already been written.
Th
e story: suburban married man bored to numbness, into fantasy football; moribund relationship with wife; one day the wife purposely drives her car, with both kids in the back, off a cliff. Hilarity and high jinks ensue.
Th
e man gets a plump check from the insurance company, goes on a senseless, euphoric spree of debauchery (sex—including sleeping with his dead wife's sister—booze, drugs, gambling, the works), then the sad truth of the matter finally settles in. Slow fade to black.

(“
Th
is sure is some grim and gloomy stuff,” my buddy Lonnie Beale said to me after he read the first twenty pages.)

How Nick Hornby hadn't already written a book like
DOA
was beyond me. It seemed like the sort of thing he would do. For all I know, he still might.

Well, this was finally going to be it for me. I was already a forgotten author, but when I typed the final period of
Dead on Arrival,
my career would be reborn. In my beleaguered soul, it was Monday morning in America!
Th
e
Times
would
have
to review
DOA
. . . .
Th
ey might love it or hate it (probably hate it, as the book doesn't begin with a sentence like “In the small village in which my grandmother was born, the giant men flew down from the violet mountain mists after every monsoon season to take our women away.”), but they'd have to give it notice. Perhaps I'd even be invited back on NPR's
Fresh Air,
as I'd been for
Plague Boy
but wasn't for
Love: A Horror Story.
All the newspapers and magazines that had admired my first two novels would note the “sudden maturity” in my work and—easy marks that they are—have to start taking me seriously.

Th
ere would be other rewards.

I'd be invited to join PEN, and I'd attend their gatherings and make statements against harsh totalitarian regimes that didn't really bother me or that I didn't know existed.
Th
e
Times Book Review
would offer me money to write reviews and I'd politely refuse. (
Th
ey
may think I'm suddenly qualified to review another author's work; me, I know I'm not. )
Th
e
New Yorker
would offer me top dollar to write pithy 1,500-word essays about my favorite album for their Music Issue, the best meal I ever had for their Food Issue, and the most mind-blowing socks I ever had for their Style Issue. My Sally Field moment was close at hand:
Th
ey would like me, they would really, really like me!

And I'd nail the most prized reward of all, something every writer covets more than a big contract, a movie deal, or a gorgeous second wife:
Freedom.
Th
is
is why writers write. Freedom from having to work in an office, from being told what to do by people they smugly regard as their intellectual inferiors. Freedom from having to teach creative writing to kids who can barely compose text messages. A has-been writer once told me he was moved to write “by my demons,” but Demon Number One for every writer is having a job and having bosses. (Can you possibly imagine Jonathan David Safran Franzlethchabeggars working in an office?) William Carlos Williams may have been blissfully content teaching Jersey Girls how to breastfeed, but the last place any writer wants to be is at a desk taking orders from
Th
e Man.

(If anyone doubts the veracity of this assertion, submitted for your approval, the words of Stephen Dedalus in
Ulysses:
“Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning work.”)

I handed
DOA
to Clint Reno on a blustery morning two Decembers ago. I was dead certain this was a life-changing moment and that within days Clint would be telling me of publishers on their knees pleading and offering top dollar for my work. For weeks the words “bidding war” floated in front of me like the wobbly
lettering on a toy Magic 8 Ball. I'd eat meals with Wifey and see in my asparagus the words “a darkly comic masterpiece . . . the best American novel I have read in quite some time.” Every day and night I would write reviews—I'd write new ones, repeat the old ones, tweak them into perfection—as well as my defiant statement refusing the National Book Award. William Faulkner would rise from the grave to hand me the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Richards Price and Ford and Don DeLillo would number me in their illustrious company (writers who don't write great books but who are treated and paid as though they do).

I have not heard a word over the phone from Clint Reno since then.

By the end of April, after one month playing poker online, I was up $15,000.

One warm evening in my study I logged on to the Galaxy and sat down, for the first time, at a High table. Here the blinds were $500 and $1,000.
Th
is was not quite the Upper Stratosphere—there were Ultra-High tables beyond that—but it was close. At this point I was up nine grand and, as far as I was concerned, every penny over my original one thousand dollar stake was the house's money.
Th
ere, sitting alone at a table, was Bjorn 2 Win. It was 6 p.m. on a Saturday in New York; it must have been midnight in Gothenburg, his hometown. I told myself,
Okay, I'll play
one
hand at these high stakes, see what happens, then get out.

Bjorn, whom I knew from his terse profile page was a horse butcher, was playing as the old man with the wrinkled brow, and I played as the Big Man, who had become my regular go-to avatar. Bjorn, I was soon to find out, is one of the most obnoxious fuckers ever to stare at a poker hand, online or off. He constantly criticizes other players' playing styles even as he dumps hundreds of dollars to them, and if he is aware a player has a personal tic or physical defect, if he knows something about their past, he won't stop harping on it. Sometimes when he shows up at a table, players say, “Oh no” or “Ugh” or “I can't stand this guy” and leave immediately. In the Galaxy there are no insta-plebescites to eject rude players, the chairs are not ejector seats, and thus you are stuck with these scolds, scourges, and irritants.

I was dealt a King and a 3 of hearts.
Th
ere was no pre-flop raise, which, at these prices, I dreaded.
Th
e Butcher of the Baltic kept mum.
Th
e flop showed two more hearts, a 5 and a 2. And a King of clubs. So I now was four cards into a flush and, failing that, I had two Kings. I just needed a heart on the turn or the river to ice it. I raised, he called. My hands got so clammy that it took a while before the cursor budged.

Th
e turn card was another King. Now I had three of them and I raised and Bjorn called.
Th
e pot was over two grand now; this was the most I'd ever played for in one hand with only one other person. I was squirming in my swivel chair.
Th
e river card came up a 3 of clubs. I had no King-high flush but still, I had the three sovereigns, the hand they call the George Clooney (
Th
ree Kings
).
Th
e pot rose and rose. Even though it was the house's money, it now dawned upon me: Wait . . . I
am
the house! I didn't want to lose one cent of it.

I didn't. He never folded. I won $2,300 in about one minute and forty seconds.

I clicked out but Bjorn stayed on. (“
Th
at Swedish bloke,” Second Gunman had told me, “may be detestable but he is dead money. Whenever you need a few quid, play him.”) Understandably, he wanted another shot at me. . . . I could almost see him salivating.

“You're leaving?” he asked me. I felt a chilly gust of Scandinavian incredulity sweep over me. (Was he at work, I wondered, surrounded by hundreds of reeking horse carcasses?)

“Gotta go, Swede.” I did have to go: Cynthia and I were going out for dinner.

“
Th
at's not right. You cannot just go.”

I said, “Watch me, Sven,” clicked on the word
LEAVE
and was gone.

Sometimes I did feel bad for the people I beat (but not the Swede).
Th
ey all seemed like nice people. But I'd finally found something I was good at and this was the way it had to be.

After giving Clint Reno my manuscript, the weeks turned colder and the days shorter. A massive cold front from the North moved in on my life.
Why begin a new book,
I reasoned,
I might as well give myself a little time off.
Th
ree books in seven years . . . I deserved a break.

In the middle of January, I sent an e-mail to Clint:

I know it's been only a month and that no work gets done in publishing in December but I was wondering if you've heard anything re
Dead on Arrival
?

(And what type of business is publishing, that no work gets done in December? In every other job I've heard of, save baseball and lifeguarding, work gets done in December. Do they all go to St. Bart's together to shred manuscripts, toss up the confetti, and pretend it's snow?!)

A day went by without an answer, then another day, then a few more. I checked my e-mail the way I used to check the Amazon rankings of my first two books: every few minutes. At times, every few seconds. After two weeks of silence, I sent Clint another e-mail:

I wrote you a few weeks ago re
DOA.
Can you tell me who you sent it to? And if you've heard anything?
Th
nx.

I wasn't worrying yet. Somewhere in the Hamptons, I assumed, a man in dungarees was painting my name onto a mailbox.
Th
e book was what a gambler would call a gimme or a lock. Even though my best friend and former cowriter Harry Carver (he gave up writing and is now a real estate lawyer in Beverly Hills) had read half of it and told me it was so dark that he could barely make the letters out against the paper (“What font is this in?” he asked. “Death, 5-point?”), I was certain this baby was going to get published.
Th
e typical male reader, publishers would assume, would love the book and laugh along with it because it would remind him of how truly contemptible he was, and the average woman, publishers would assume, would lap it up because she only suspects how truly contemptible the average man is; this novel would confirm it.
DOA
was as blatant a chick-pleaser as were the words
LOSE 40 POUNDS IN 10 DAYS
on a magazine cover.