Pocket Kings (9 page)

Bubbly British Bird:
still rubbing self w/bristles. getting close, baby. u feel so good 2 me. go slow, go slow. want 2 feel u deep inside me. mmmmmm. o yeah. o yeah.

Second Gunman:
Th
is is getting too hot, Chipper. I may sneak off for a wank in one of the hotel's linen closets. GLO btw.

Bubbly British Bird wins the hand with three 3s.

Bubbly British Bird:
ohhh baby i'm so close now. so close. o yeah o yeah o yeah. yes. yes. your [sic] getting close. cum w/me, lover. cum w/me!

Hoss and the Dragon Lady stayed still.
Th
ey didn't bet, fold, or say anything. Other than some loud panting I stayed silent.
Th
e silence lasted a minute. It was like a scene out of Ovid: almighty Zeus and some supple demigoddess were going at it deep in the woods of Arcadia, and all the mortals and fauns in the world had stopped what they were doing to peep in on it from behind the bushes.

Pest Control, you must act or you will be disconnected. Either call, raise or fold. You have 30 seconds!

Pest Control:
oh god. i just came. whew. jesus. wow.

Bubbly British Bird:
me 2, lover.
:)
w/my toothbrush. LOL.

Pest Control:
really? you really did? promise?

Bubbly British Bird:
yes, phil. promise.

Pest Control/Phil hadn't really had sex with Bubbly Brit Bird/Georgette, yet he was worrying if she was faking her orgasm or not. Perhaps he sensed that a fake orgasm for fake sexual intercourse while playing for fake money was a fitting climax.

Second Gunman:
I just noticed something. She won about three hands in a row while she and Tex were doing it. Pest couldn't concentrate. You know what I should do? I should get a female nick and start playing for RM [real money]. Talk dirty to the men players and steal all their quid while they choke their chickens.

Th
at struck me as a cunning, strange, and possibly extremely sick idea . . . but also as a pretty good one.

Th
e lovers' pixilated afterglow was now interrupted.

Pest Control:
wife just got home, bubb! c u later?

Of course he would.
Th
ere never was a second when she wasn't logged on.

Bubbly British Bird:
yes. hope so. luv u!
:)
bye!

Like an actual man getting actual action from an actual mistress, Pest had had his fun and now it was time for a swift exit. Who knew if his wife really just did come home? But who knew if he—or Bubbly British Bird—had really been toying with their own body parts? Maybe in reality not only was Bubbly not holding her toothbrush, maybe she didn't even have a toothbrush because she had no teeth or arms at all.

Eavesdropping on private conversations became a regular part of my life. It was just as sneaky, forbidden, and reprehensible as an extramarital affair and probably just as much fun. I would do it for about an hour a day, fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, sometimes only a minute at a time. I still played poker the same amount of time, though. So the eavesdropping time ate up more time when I could have been writing.

But there was nothing to write and nobody to write for.

When
Plague Boy
came out, in February of 2000, I was booked to do a reading at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. I couldn't wait. By the time of the reading,
Plague
had only officially been out a week, and so far, everything was going well.
Th
e reviews were good, and though the sales were modest, with a few more good reviews, they might pick up.
Th
e rotating fan that was my literary career had yet to be hit.

In about half of the reviews, however, I had been referred to as “reclusive.” One or two reviewers made comments such as, “Dixon, who guards his privacy jealously . . .” and “
Th
e publicity-shy novelist . . .”

Th
ere was only one reason for this:
Th
ere was no photo of me on the book jacket. Because of that and that alone, it was construed that I probably was either a shotgun-toting long-bearded maniac who wrote his little books on an old typewriter deep beneath the ground in a Wyoming bunker, or that I was a vampire whose face did not show up in mirrors and photographs.
Th
e simple but embarrassing truth was that ever since
Th
e New York
Times
Style editors airbrushed me out of my wedding announcement picture, I have been pathologically camera shy. No photograph, to my knowledge, has been taken of me ever since.

Abigail Prentice,
1
the chief publicist at my publisher, and Toby Kwimper kept insisting that a photo of me appear on the dust jacket, and Abigail told me their art department would hire a sympathetic photographer who would make it easier for me. Toby advised me, “It'll look really weird without a picture. I promise you.” He asked me to think about it—and I did—but the more I thought about it the more I resolved not to go through with it.
Th
ey were getting close to shipping the art to the printer and I still hadn't made a decision. “Well?” Toby asked me, the deadline only hours away. “Well,” I said to him, “I . . . I just don't know.”
Th
e deadline passed and there was no picture and that is how I became, for a few weeks, “the reclusive author.”

My reading at Barnes & Noble, I felt, and all future readings would put an end to such talk. I didn't live in a bunker, I used a computer and not a typewriter, and I owned no shotguns and didn't suck blood out of peoples' necks.

Th
e
Plague
reading was scheduled for a Monday evening at eight o'clock. I asked Abigail how many people might attend, and Abigail, whose job as publicist, after all, was to always spread the good word (in other words, to tell bald-faced lies about everything to everyone), told me that the room would be filled and that the joint would be quaking with laughter and applause. It would be, she said, a smashing success.

“You do this,” she threw in, “and in two weeks I'll get you on
Charlie Rose.
Who knows, if the book gets a great review in the
Times,
which I have no doubt it will, maybe we can even get you on
Oprah.
”

“Charlie Rose?”
I gulped.
“Oprah?”

Oh lord. Was I also television-camera-shy? I had no idea. It had never occurred to me I'd ever wind up on television and thus had no phobia prepared for it. It was as if someone was telling me I was going to be transported to another galaxy or appointed attorney-general of Burkina Faso. It just wasn't something I had ever thought about.

I picked the ten fastest and funniest pages of
Plague
and, for two weeks, rehearsed aloud for the reading. I imagined hot writer groupies melting the steel of their folding chairs as I slew them into submission. After I was finished, I merely had to point at one of them—or at two of them—and some Barnes & Noble lackey would usher the limp, damp, besotted writer-worshipper over to me.

It was six at night, two hours before the Big Event, and I was shaving. Cynthia had picked out a suit, shirt, and tie combination for me and laid it out neatly on our bed. All I had to do was shave and shower. She would tie my tie and dimple it perfectly, as she always did.

I rubbed hot water on my face, applied a thin layer of gel, put my razor under scalding hot water so that the blade was steaming.
Th
e radio, tuned to NPR, was on in the next room and I wasn't really listening to it, but then I heard these words: “. . .
Plague Boy
is perhaps one of the worst and most depressing American novels to be written in decades. Not one word rings true. How this unfunny, boring, lame novel ever got published is . . .”

At that very second the razor was making its second downward pass over facial terrain I'd already shaved and I cut myself so savagely that to this very day there is faint skin discoloration on that cheek in some spots.
Th
e reviewer continued and I continued shaving. He kept ripping my book and I kept ripping my skin. He even, maliciously, gave away the book's surprise ending; up to that moment I'd thought doing that was a criminal act. (I didn't yet know it actually was a tactic.)

Blood was all over the sink.
Th
ere was blood on the floor, on my chest, over the tiles on the wall.
Th
ere was blood on all the toothbrushes, and soon, as I began wiping it up while still trying to listen to the radio, there was blood on about four bathroom towels. I staggered into the bedroom and blood dripped onto the suit, shirt, and tie on the bed. Cynthia brought in a roll of paper towels and we used that and then had to use another one. “He gave away the ending!” I hissed as we soaked up the blood. I had not only torn off two and a half square inches of my cheek, I had nicked my earlobe—it required ten stitches later that night— and lips and cut a trail about six inches long into one side of my visage.
Th
e bleeding didn't stop. One side of my face was fine, the other looked like chunks of seared salmon.

Cynthia lovingly smeared about a pound of Neosporin on me as, still aghast, I again said, “He gave away the ending!” and then, while she mopped up the remains, I went off—my face now the color of crushed raspberries—to Barnes & Noble to read from my first novel.

“You can't get up there and do it,” the store manager said to me. “Not in this condition.”

Abigail was there and couldn't look at it, “it” being my throbbing, lacerated face.

“I can do it,” I mumbled. But it hurt me just to move my lips up and down.

Two dozen people were already seated . . . they were looking at me and praying I wasn't going to be the author who'd be facing them from only ten yards away.

“Yo, Frankie!” I turned around and saw Lonnie Beale, my good friend, who had come to see me read. “Holy shit!” he said. “Did you walk into a lawn mower?”

I told him that, yes, I sort of had and then I said, “Lonnie, can you do me a solid?”

It didn't take any nudging at all to convince him to do the reading for me. I tried to find Abigail to tell her I'd be employing a body double but, revolted by the sight of my twitching cheeks, chin and neck, all of which now resembled a melted candle, she had already fled.

Lonnie did a great job, I was told. (I rushed off to a hospital emergency room and couldn't stay for it.) Since there was no photo of me on the book, only a few friends of mine present knew what was up.

More than my face was killing me, though. It turned out the man tearing apart my book on the radio, a weakly-voiced, effete short-story writer named Cody Marshall, was the man who'd be reviewing
Plague Boy
for the
Times Book Review
the following Sunday. He gave away the surprise ending there, too. My ship had just struck its first iceberg and, after the review ran, Barnes & Noble never asked me to read again. Nor did any other bookstore.

“Charlie Rose,” Abigail told me, “isn't returning my calls. Sorry.”

She probably wasn't even calling him.

I was so eager to play poker and chat with my Poker Buddies when I got off work that I'd call up the coffee shop across the street before leaving my office so that the cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake would be waiting for me fifteen minutes later when I got off the subway. And when I did get off the subway I trotted as fast as I could go. I'd pick up the food from the counterman, have the exact amount of money ($9.75) ready, then huff and puff back to my building, where hopefully the elevator was on the first floor waiting for me. I always made sure to leave my desktop computer on when I left the house in the morning so that I didn't have to wait the two minutes and twenty seconds it took to turn the unit on, access the Internet, get to Pokergalaxy.com, and log in.