Pocket Kings (25 page)

“I haven't called him back. I don't think I'm going to.”

“I better go back.”

She spun around and headed back, nearly knocking over a table of Addiction and Recovery books.

Twenty minutes later we were outside Big Lou's bodega. It looked ordinary, rundown, anonymous. Second went inside and bought two quarts of Bud and then we sat on a stoop across the street and drank and watched the place. Everything seemed normal until a limousine pulled up and three well-dressed people got out, went inside, and didn't come out.

“Do you think we should call Cookie?” my guest asked. “He could meet us here.”

“Nah, he's on his tollbooth shift,” I said. “Doesn't get off work until like three a.m.”

Second nudged me in the shoulder and said, “Well?”

Online, there was no doubt that I was a damned good poker player. I could analyze the situation at hand as well as anyone, and my decisions were swift, smart, and sane. It was the only thing I was good at, but for months now I'd been wondering if I'd be any good in person. I was like a singer who could belt out “
Th
e Star Spangled Banner” and raise my own goosebumps in the shower . . . but could I do it before the Super Bowl in front of a billion people?

“Dónde está Big Lou?” I said to the guy behind the counter, eyes darting east and west.

He pointed to a curtain near the Progresso and Goya cans and said,
“Abajo.”

Second and I walked behind the curtain.
Th
e light on the stairway was murky and I had to feel around the walls blindly as we descended.
Th
e stairs were narrow; twenty more pounds and I wouldn't have fit. By the time we made it to the landing below there was hardly any light at all.
Th
ere were no knobs, no sliding window panels—it wasn't like the Speakeasy-Swordfish scene in whichever Marx Brothers movie. “Forget this, Second,” I whispered. “Let's go back up.”

Suddenly one of the walls slid open onto a small antechamber and the landing was flooded with light and noise. I heard music, I heard voices—a lot of voices—and liquor glasses and chips. Real honest-to-God chips, not a tinny reproduction playing out of my computer speakers.

“Who are you here to see?” an acne-scarred, off-duty cop wearing black pants, black shoes, and a black turtleneck asked me.

“Dónde está Big Lou?” Second and I said nervously at the same time.

He looked us up and down, asked us to turn around and put our hands on the wall of the antechamber. As we were packing only cash and no heat, he allowed us to turn back around and directed us into the large room. (For his troubles, I handed him a twenty.)

Th
e subterranean casino was the size of a small high school gym . . . which at one time it might have been.
Th
ere were no windows, no clocks, just lots of buzzing fluorescent light, cigarette and cigar smoke, and lots of men. Men at Let It Ride and Pai Gow tables, men at craps and blackjack tables, men walking around, men with women at roulette tables. “Rio” by Duran Duran was playing when we walked in; although the music wasn't throbbing, it was just loud enough to be annoying.
Th
ere was a fully stocked makeshift bar and two bartenders in dull golden brown tuxes at the far end of the room, and Second and I headed over and surveyed the scene as we walked. Against the wall near the cashier window were rows of slot machines, but only one woman, about thirty, was playing (if you choose to call losing your money in slot machines playing). Second and I quickly downed our drinks—they weren't free—and he said he was itching to play. I could see that. He was scratching the lining on his jacket as though the suede was a bad case of hives.

“You've got all kinds of Hold'em games here?” Second asked one of the bartenders, probably also an off-duty cop. We got another round. I had a very nice buzz on.

“All kinds,” the bartender said. I know cops are underpaid, I know most of them have families and lead dangerous, stress-filled lives, but not for any amount of money, I reflected, would I wear a tuxedo the color of Gulden's Mustard.

While they chatted I walked over to one of the two dice tables.
Th
is one was a ten-dollar minimum table, the other was fifty. All the casino workers were dressed as though this was a legitimate but low-budget operation: burgundy sharkskin suits with a few stains here and there, loose black bow ties, white shirts with ruffles and imitation pearl buttons.
Th
e blackjack dealers were mostly Asian women, and no more than 20 percent of the gamblers were women. I threw in fifty bucks and got some chips—they were real, made of clay and not plastic—and played for ten minutes, all the time keeping an eye on Johnny Tyronne/Second Gunman, who was still conversing with the bartender. After ten minutes I was up sixty bucks and I brought my modest winnings back to the bar.

“Chipper,” Second said to me, “I think I loov your coontry.”

“Yeah, what with places like this, we're a real light unto the world, Johnny-Boy.”

We sidled over to a spot near the cashier's window, and “Heart of Glass” came on.

Second Gunman explained to me the baffling setup of real-life poker at Big Lou's and, as we'd already drunk a lot that day and as we were still drinking that very moment, it wasn't easy to follow.
Th
e upshot was there were all varieties of poker games going on, tournaments, freerolls, sit and go's, etc. (I had no idea what he was talking about.)
Th
ere was No-Limit, there was Pot-limit, there was Omaha, there was a lot I'd never heard of. As he was explaining all of it to me I noticed, to my amazement, Scott Heyward—Toby Kwimper's successor at my former publisher, whom I'd met at the
Saucier
book party—take a seat at a table and reach into his wallet. (
Th
at wallet couldn't have been too full since he worked in publishing.) Could I possibly, I wondered, not only win a few grand here but also sell
Dead on Arrival
to Scott?
Th
at seemed an impossible stunt to pull off: if I was winning, it would be his money I was pocketing and he might not be so anxious to buy my book in that case. I decided I didn't want to play with Scott Heyward, I didn't want to talk to him, I didn't even want him to see me.

“So you should sit there then . . .” I heard Second say to me.

“Huh? Where?”

He pointed to Scott Heyward's table.

“When?” I asked, feeling all the hundred-dollar bills in my pockets shriveling like a scrotum in cold weather.

“Now! Hurry.”

He told me he had to go to another table very quickly to play No-Limit.

At this point, Evening Two with my new mustachioed Blackpudlian buddy begins to get fuzzy and very dark gray. We had been drinking since lunchtime and by no means was it Second Gunman's fault: it really was a folie à deux, sort of like how neither Perry nor Dick acting alone could have murdered the Family Clutter but had to be together on the fateful Kansas night that at once cemented and ended Truman Capote's career. When I sat down at that poker table, drinks kept coming, one after the other, then three after the other. It turned out the drinks
were
free, once you were sitting and playing, and they were brought to you by off-duty cops, who, other than making sure you weren't going to get in any brawls if you lost lots of money, were there to keep you as drunk as possible and make sure you lost lots of money. Another reason for my gray-out was simply this: fear. Fear of playing with real people. Real people were at my table, on both sides of me, across from me; real people were all around.
Th
ings got very blurry, voices blended into each other. Cards were shuffled and dealt in slow motion and in fast motion at the same time. I believe that Scott Heyward recognized me . . . or maybe I just thought he did, or he didn't and I foolishly reintroduced myself to him. After that—I'm almost certain of it but not sure—he kept bringing up the subject of Jerome Selby to me.
So you're the one who drove Jerry Selby to commit suicide,
he said. And he kept at it. (I think.)
Forty years Jerome Selby is at the company, there's no sign of trouble, he gets
your
manuscript and wouldn't you know it, two days later he blows his brain
s out.
Hand after hand Scott kept this up. I had been used to online tomfoolery but this was something else and it wasn't fun.
Toby Kwimper didn't want to edit your book—what was the name of it:
Love Horror,
was it, or
Plague Love?—
'cause he knew it was a definite go-nowhere career-killer, so what does he do? He gives it to poor Jerry, a legend in the business and a man who never could ever say no to anybody. You happy, Frank? Does this make you proud, you untalented, increasingly pudgy fuck? Your book, which sold—what was it, like fifty copies?—ended Jerome Selby's life. Some book!
Th
en the other players, strangers to me all, joined in . . . and they were saying things like
Wow, you really did this?
and
You must be a real piece of shit, Frank.
Th
is Jerry Selby sounds like decent people, like a regular standup guy, and you just go and make him kill himself
and also
Th
at must have been one lousy book to make a guy commit suicide.
At one point a player to my right told me he could write a book about his life, and at another point the player immediately to my left said to one of the off-duty cops,
Hey, Al, this guy here once killed a guy named Jerry Selby by suicide. Homicide should look into that, doncha think?
Th
en another player, I'm fairly sure, asked me,
So what the hell was Fenton Hardy
really
like and did you really have a boat called the
Sleuth? So there was the booze, there was Scott Heyward's cruel bullying, there was the spliff I'd smoked with Second outside on the stoop before we walked in that I only just now told you about, there were the humiliation and guffaws, and, ultimately, there was also the fact that I lost all seven thousand bucks by 2:15 a.m., which made me feel as if every ounce of blood in my body had been replaced by flat club soda.

Reader, my whole life up to that point had been spent not being George Clooney . . . George Clooney, who had been put into this world to be the very exemplar of all the things I should be but never would. (My one saving grace might be: just as George Clooney was created to remind me that I was not successful, perhaps I had been created to remind him that he was.) Even in the dark, ignorant years when I didn't know that there existed in the world such a thing as a George Clooney, I, as mistake-prone as a person can possibly be, still had never come close—not even accidentally—to being anything remotely like him. A man can measure his life in many ways—how much money he makes, how he provides for his family and how his children turn out, how many women he's slept with—but my measuring stick is the Clooneyometer. So on the 100 Top UnClooneyest Moments of My Life Countdown, I would put fainting at the pool at the Nirvana somewhere around 11 or 12 and I'd put the seared peppercorn tuna around 13. If my lousy book reviews are numbers 7 and 8 and walking in on my brother with my girlfriend is number 1, then I put losing $7,000 playing poker that night at number 5.

Second Gunman fared even worse. He'd dumped almost ten grand, he told me, and for a few minutes hated my country about as much as your average Al-Qaeda recruit does. Outside, back on the stoop across the street, I sat on a dirty stone stair, bewildered and angry, and rested my head against the cold black iron banister.
What just happened to me,
I was trying to figure out,
did that really happen?
Second paced in a circle and muttered, using all sorts of slang and curse words. He must have walked the same circle fifty times, punched his palm about twenty times, and employed every possible variety of the F-word at least ten times each.

“Jaysus . . . Jaysus . . . Jaysus feckination Chroist.”

“I can't believe it.”

“Can you feckin' believe this, Chip?”

“Did I just not indicate to you that I couldn't?”

“Nine-feckin'-thousand eight-feckin-hundred-and seven-feckin'-teen dollars! Gone!”

It was, I confess, enlightening and reassuring to see someone as tormented by losing as I was. So
this
is what I was like to be with, eh? It was a pretty ugly spectacle but I couldn't not look at it.

Second stopped his pacing, put his hand on the iron banister, and asked me, “Well, what the bloody hell are we gonna do then?”

“
Th
ere's nothing we can do. We can just win it back online.”

“Bollocks. Takes too much bloody time, man!”

He was going to start pacing again, but I pulled the collar of his suede jacket to stop him. A few hundreds fell out and he picked them up and shoved them back in.

“So what do you suggest then, mate?” I asked.

“Where's this Mohegan Woods? We could—”

“Forget it. It's, like, literally right in the middle of a forest. It's an unnatural act against Nature to frequent a place like that.”

“Run by injuns, right? What kind? What tribe? Mohican? Cherokee?”

“Comanch! I dunno. Some made-up tribe.”

“Fuck it.” He waited, then said, “What about Atlantic City?”

I thought about it. We could rent a car, we could take a taxi, maybe even get a helicopter. We could afford it. But that car, taxi, or helicopter would wind up pulling up or settling down in Atlantic City, the Land that Steve Wynn Forgot. I didn't want to go.

He was pacing again. Hands in the pocket of his jacket. Muttering. I was muttering, too. Goddam Scott feckin' Heyward, I said.
Th
e brogue and burr were back and going in and out.