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Authors: Mark Joseph

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One Monday evening in the spring of 1962, seventy-six-year-old Benny Goldman, Alex's grandfather, laid out his best clothes as he did every week, polished and buffed his nails, trimmed his mustache, and slicked back his thick white hair with Brylcreem. Whistling, relishing the ritual, he pressed his one remaining tailored shirt, fastened the sleeves with a pair of gold cufflinks, and slipped on a Sulka tie, diamond stickpin, and blue pinstriped suit. Preening in the mirror he winked and pronounced, “Not bad for a geezer, not bad at all.” Thin and compact, no more than five foot five, dressing up made him feel like a giant. He blew on his fingers and rubbed the tips against his lapel. Not for luck. Luck was for suckers.
Benny's room in the Laguna Honda Home for the Aged was scrupulously devoid of sentiment. He didn't need mementos; instead, he had living memories conveniently edited to forget the bad times and remember the good. Long gone were a Bronze Star from the first world war and a winning ticket from the 1949 Kentucky Derby, yet those days stood out like bright stars in the sky of his mind. The medal had represented a day in France in 1918 that Benny would have preferred to forget. Lance Corporal Benny Goldman had endured a frontal assault on a German machine gun position, and when it was over he was the only one in his company still breathing. The Derby was a more pleasant memory. The 1949 Derby had been a lock—that Citation was a hell of a horse, but his winnings from that race and the rest of the money he'd ever won or earned had vanished. Women, booze, cards, horses. Benny didn't go to the track anymore. He was broke except for a small annuity that was doled out by the Home as walking around money. Two hundred a month
was nowhere near sufficient for a stake in a real game, but it was more than enough for Monday nights.
Laguna Honda was the penultimate address for many San Franciscans before they moved permanently to Colma, city of the dead, a suburb of cemeteries whose most notorious inhabitant was Wyatt Earp. Life in the Home was stultifyingly dull, and so, to relieve the tedium, every Monday night a party of old men assembled in the lounge for a poker game. A few minutes before seven an attendant covered a large, round table with felt, distributed ashtrays, and arranged Benny's red, white, and blue clay chips neatly into stacks of ten. The game had six or seven regular players and an equal number of kibitzers who occasionally sat in for a few hands.
The game began when Benny took his seat, broke open a new deck, shuffled, and flipped a card face up to each player in turn until the first jack appeared, signifying the dealer of the first hand. Unless he dealt himself the jack, Benny would push the deck across the table and bark, “I'm not ready to play with Wyatt yet, boys, so I ain't plannin' on losin'. Ante up and roll 'em.”
The game had strict rules—no sandbagging and no wild cards—and the stakes were low, but the old men took their poker seriously. Benny was a stickler for rules and etiquette. Any player who bet out of turn or dealt a hole card face up had to toss a white chip into the pot. Benny presented a figure so elegant and intimidating that no one dared contradict his edicts.
On this balmy spring night Benny won the first three pots in a row. This was no surprise. None of the other players could shuffle properly, and the cards stuck together from one hand to the next. As often as not, Benny was able to guess the sequence before the cards were dealt. Furthermore, since octogenarians Tom Wilson and George Schilling flashed almost every card they dealt, he could instantaneously verify the accuracy of his guesses. The Monday night game was no challenge for an old hustler like Benny, but he never failed to approach the table with all the dignity due the honorable game of poker. Poker was not about cards, Benny often lectured the codgers. It wasn't even about money. It was about drama, risk, courage,
foolhardiness, character, life itself. It was about the essence of being a man.
On the fourth hand of the evening Tom Wilson dealt a game of seven card stud. As was his custom, Benny glanced at his hole cards, gave them a gentle tap, and then carefully watched his opponents for tells that gave away their hands. George Schilling had an ace showing and bet the minimum, a nickel. Everyone stayed in. On the next card George got another ace and bet a dime. Everyone stayed again. By the time the final card was dealt, Benny could read every hidden card on the table.
George's pair of aces were the high cards showing. When George had a good hand, he tugged at his ear and pretended to waffle. “I dunno,” he said, reaching for his earlobe. “A pair isn't that good. The bet's a dime.” He tossed a red chip into the pot.
Benny had a king and a pair of sevens showing. He figured George for three aces, a pretty good hand.
“See your dime and raise a quarter,” Benny promptly replied.
Everyone else folded. George smiled and asked, “What's the maximum?”
“It hasn't changed in five years, George,” Benny said. “Fifty cents.”
“That's all? Okay, I see the raise and raise fifty cents.”
Benny hardly paid attention. For some reason his mind had drifted back to 1918, to a smoking hole in the ground that smelled like a slaughter house. It was raining. The lieutenant was staring at his arm which ended in a bloody stump just below the elbow. Blood was spurting from a severed artery, and the officer bled to death before Lance Corporal Goldman could get a tourniquet on him.
“Benny?”
The rain stopped and the sun shone through the clouds. Citation was the last horse into the starting gate. Churchill Downs glistened in the sheen of rainwater. Benny remembered the taste of whiskey and crushed mint, the flutter of ladies' hats in the breeze, the smell of the track. The smell reminded him of the mud in France. A lot of horses had died in the war.
Something happened. The players were all looking at him, and he knew it was his turn to bet, but his mind went red, then blank. Benny suffered a stroke, fell out of his chair and broke his neck.
It was a mercifully sudden and quick death. Lying on the floor, a freshly minted corpse, Benny clutched his final hole card close to his stylish vest, a seven of spades that gave him a full house, the winning hand.
 
Benny was buried in Colma in the Jewish cemetery a few dozen yards from where Wyatt Earp rested in peace. Later that afternoon Benny's son David sat down in his living room on Alvarado Street for a man-to-man chat with his eldest son Alex, seventeen, uncomfortable in his new suit and upset by the solemn rituals of funeral parlor and cemetery. All Alex really wanted at that moment was to escape the family and mourn his grandfather in his own way, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes with his buddies.
Oblivious to the mood, Alex's little brothers and sisters ran around the house making a racket. No one shushed them. Women bustled in the kitchen, preparing food for guests who would be arriving soon.
“You all right?” David asked his son.
Alex shrugged. He'd worshipped his grandfather and needed time to reconcile his loss.
“Do you know why your grandfather lived at Laguna Honda?” David asked.
“Because he was old.”
“Yes,” David agreed, “but Laguna Honda is a place for people who can't afford something better. Your grandfather would've been a rich man if he hadn't been a gambler.”
“I thought he always won,” Alex protested. “He was a great poker player. He said poker isn't gambling, it's science.”
“He was a great bullshitter,” David said with a wan smile. “The players at the old folks' home were fish, and he could beat them, no sweat. The problem was, he thought he was better than he was. When I was your age, he'd go to Reno once a month and lose his shirt.”
“Like you do now?”
Alex's eyes darkened and he stared at his father with undisguised hostility. Losing his grandfather was bad enough; losing his illusions was almost too much too bear.
“This was his,” David said, taking from his jacket pocket a small leather-bound book filled with tiny, precise writing. “He said you were the only one who could understand it, and he wanted you to have it.”
He leaned over and handed the book to his son. Alex was a star science student who'd long since surpassed the abilities of his high school teachers. Poker, he thought, was a game of odds and probabilities with a dash of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. He thumbed through the little book, opened to a page at random, and discovered it was written in code.
“Can you read this?” Alex asked his father.
David shook his head. “I don't want to,” he said. “I never tried to figure out the cipher.”
“It's probably a simple transposition.”
It was David's turn to shrug.
“Can I go?” Alex asked.
“There's something else.”
David left the room and returned with a cardboard box that contained the old man's personal effects from Laguna Honda. Inside were two unopened packs of playing cards and a polished chip carousel made of beautiful laminated teak and filled with two hundred red, white, and blue handmade ceramic poker chips.
“Maybe you'll do better than we did,” David said. “Maybe you can win it all back.”
Some months after his arrival in Vietnam, Bobby started thinking of himself as a psychic fragmentation grenade exploding in slow motion. Boom! Shrapnel! Whistling birds of death, white-hot chunks of rage expanding from his center, ripping mind and nerve, inflicting wounds. By 1995 the shrapnel had burned through three wives, two children, four bankruptcies, and a really nice Porsche. He'd run out of ways to kill himself slowly and gave up trying to do it quick. Only one thing had remained constant, and that was poker. He played cards, and if he wasn't in a self-destructive mood, he almost always won. When he was on the downside of a manicdepressive run through the brambles of his past, he lost. It was a cycle, but that's overstating the obvious.
At the moment of his detonation, before Vietnam, before anything, really, his life had been of a piece, on track, in the groove, daddy-o. He was on his way to Berkeley, and then all at once everything went awry and he started blowing up in slow motion. He'd been eighteen when it happened, and by now, after thirty-two years, the shrapnel had expanded to the limit and was losing momentum. Gravity and friction are implacable.
Hands in pockets, shoes scuffing the sidewalk, shoulders hunched like James Dean, Bobby walked the Tenderloin, the soft underbelly of urban decay that lay just below fashionable Union Square. Massage parlors, bars and cars, downtrodden human dregs skulking around grungy liquor stores. In three blocks seven whores asked him for a date, and an equal number of panhandlers demanded spare change. The girls got a smile and a wisecrack, “Haven't I seen you on Virginia Street in Reno?” and each beggar elicited a “Howdy, pardner” and a buck. The Tenderloin suited his mood. In spirit and
decrepitude the district hadn't changed since Bobby had last seen it in 1963.
He found his way by feel from Market Street, not sure where he was headed until he chanced upon Original Joe's Italian Food, steaks and chops, the real thing on squalid Taylor Street. The once elegant Florentine steakhouse was dying just as the neighborhood around it had died long ago. The façade was untouched, last updated in the '50s. Red neon, swinging glass doors, cozy leather booths, an open kitchen with cooks in toques and checkered pants, ancient waiters in seedy tuxedos, and broad-stroked caricatures of long-forgotten dandies on the walls.
Eating a New York medium rare, Bobby was in a time warp. This was where his father brought him after ball games, the swanky place he and Nelson and the rest of them took high school dates for a fancy downtown dinner. The place stank of sentiment and old times and perfectly broiled steaks. Not a single item of California cuisine was on the menu.
“Ah, God,” Bobby said, sipping ice water and starting a conversation with himself. “Joe's.”
“Do you remember the time that Nelson … ?” he started to say.
“Remember?” he interrupted himself. “I was there. Charlie was there. Dean was there. The time in chemistry class when Nelson swiped an ounce of metallic sodium and dropped it in the biology teacher's fish tank. Boom! Instant chum. The night Dean wrecked his Impala in Mel's parking lot. There were seven of us in the damn car, Dean was playing his sax and driving at the same time and he had this flask of gin …”
“I remember,” Bobby said, savoring the beef. “I remember lots of nights at Mel's and Juanita's in Sausalito and here at Joe's, too. You want cheesecake?”
“I wanna be eighteen again, that's what I want,” Bobby said. “Before anything happened.”
“Fuck that, man. Don't start that.”
“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do? I hate getting old.”
“Finish your dinner. You're getting older sitting here.”
“Ah, God,” Bobby sighed. “What a drag.”
Pouring coffee, the seventy-year-old waiter laughed, a sharp bark that caught in his throat and died. Bobby stared at the slice of cheesecake, wedge shaped, creamy, sweet and firm, vulva-like in its richness. A shudder passed through his body, so violent it rattled the table.
“You all right?” the waiter asked. “You're talking to yourself.”
“What's it to you?”
“It bothers the other customers.”
Bobby looked around the restaurant. “There are no other customers. One guy at the counter, that's it.”
The waiter held his hand to his forehead like an Apache scout and scanned the room. “Gol darned if you aren't right. I must be mistaken. You go right on ahead and talk to yourself.”
“Hey,” Bobby said. “Sorry.”
“That's all right. Where you from, son?”
“Reno, but I used to live here, come in here when I was a kid. That was a long time ago.”
“Steak good?”
“Still the best.”
“You got family here in the city?”
“You're an inquisitive sort. You must be bored.”
“Well, you were talking to yourself, so I figured you could pretend to talk to me and no one would notice. I don't mean to pry.”
“It's okay. Nah, family's long gone. Everything is gone. All the joints I used to go to, they're all gone except this one. They still got naked women up on Broadway?”
“A few, a couple a places but most a them disappeared like the hippies and the beatniks. I seen ‘em all and outlasted 'em all, too.”
“Oh, yeah? What's your secret?”
“Joe's steak and a bottle of dago red every day, man. Whaddya think?”
Bobby had to laugh at that.
“More coffee?”
“Just a check, thanks.”
Bobby glanced at the bill and left the fifty he took from the monte dealer on the table. Outside, standing on the sidewalk, rocking on
his heels, smoking, watching the traffic and the hustlers and pimps, he had the momentary illusion that it was still 1963 and nothing had happened. He blinked and the cruel deception faded.
He walked down Taylor to Market and up Market to Seventh. He knew where he was going now. He walked faster, picking up speed, taking himself quickly to one of the good places.
It was gone. Lyle Tuttle's tattoo parlor on Seventh Street between Mission and Market had vanished. The building that had housed Lyle Tuttle's was a hole in the ground and the Greyhound bus station next door was gone, too, part of the same high-rise development-to-be. Bobby pressed against the Cyclone fence in front of the construction site and laughed. Holy Moley, Lyle Tuttle, king of the tattoo artists. That was a hell of a night. He remembered …
 
“I got an idea,” Nelson said.
“Since when does a fuckin' Chinaman have ideas, hey?” Bobby teased.
“What?” Charlie squawked. “What's your idea?”
“Hey, Alex,” Nelson said, leaning over the back of the front seat of Dean's Impala. “What's the highest hand in poker?”
“A royal flush.”
“And what is that?”
“Well, the highest hand really is a straight flush, five cards in sequence of the same suit, and a royal flush is the highest straight flush, the highest five cards of any suit.”
“And they are?”
“The ten, jack, queen, king, and ace.”
“And what's the highest suit?”
“Suits don't count in poker. They're all equal.”
“Well, which one is the best?”
“What the fuck is the matter with you, Nelson? There is no best. They're equal.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “like a Chinaman is equal to a white man.”
“Hey, Kimosabe,” Nelson howled. “Fuck you.”
“C'mon, Nelson,” Charlie prodded, “What's your idea?”
“A royal flush, right? Five guys, five cards, we each get one card tattooed on our arm and we're a royal flush.”
“Oh, Jesus, and what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Bobby said.
“Whatever you want it to mean. If it don't mean nothin' to you, then fuck you.”
“Oh. So that's what it means.”
“Yeah.”
They went downtown, parked the car, and stood in a cluster on the sidewalk in front of the bus station. Lyle Tuttle's was next door. Sailors came from all over the world for a Lyle Tuttle tattoo because he was the best. He was an artist.
“I dunno,” Dean said. “My dad'll kill me.”
“If he sees it.”
“What'm I gonna do, water-ski with my jacket on?”
“So what if he sees it?” Nelson objected. “Is he gonna carve it off your arm? Kick you out of the house? I don't think so.”
“It's forever,” Alex said. “You know that.”
“This is for us,” Nelson said. “It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.”
“Anyone got a beer?” Dean asked.
“I heard it hurts,” Charlie said.
“Sure it hurts,” Alex said. “That's part of the deal.”
“You got to hold still, though. You can't jiggle around.”
“Like a sissy.”
“Like a wimp.”
“Like a Chinaman.”
“Oh, fuck you. Who do you think invented tattoos?”
“Actually,” Alex said. “It was the Polynesians.”
“You're fulla shit. They got tattoos in China, in Japan, in Africa, everywhere. The Iroquois had tattoos, and they didn't know jack from Polynesia.”
“Well?”
“Well?”
Alex grinned. “Are we gonna stand here on the sidewalk and piss in our pants, or are we gonna go in?”
It hurt. Dean said it hurt the way it must hurt a girl to lose her cherry, and Lyle Tuttle smiled like he'd heard that one before. They picked the suit by asking Lyle Tuttle to cut a deck of cards—Alex had one handy—and it came up diamonds and that was that. Alex spread a royal flush in diamonds face down on the counter over the tigers and wounded hearts and naked women and each picked one. Bobby got the ace.
“You Italian?” Lyle Tuttle asked Bobby.
“No. Irish. Why?”
“Some people believe the ace of diamonds is cursed because a famous mobster named Joe the Boss Masseria was killed playing pinochle with that card in his hand.”
“I don't care. We're poker players. As long as it's not aces and eights, it's okay.”
It took ninety minutes for each tattoo and they emerged onto Seventh Street at six in the morning. Each of the five young men wore a bandage on his left triceps. The tattoos would be scabs for a day or two …
 
Bobby's hand went to his shoulder. The ace was still there, of course, still cursed, his only tattoo, the high card in the royal flush. After two or three days the scabs fell away and the five young men full of braggadocio and teenage cool paraded their new tattoos through Mel's drive-in and the Doggie Diner on Van Ness. Ah, man, everything was set up. They were going to be buddies for life, bound together with blood and ink, and then Shanghai Bend, the fragmentation grenade, and monstrous, barely controllable rage.
He'd loved her. It was simple, really, and sudden, like a falling star, and in the next instant, they'd taken her away.
He walked a few yards to the corner of Market and hailed a cab. “Airport,” he said, sliding into the back seat.
“Airport it is,” the driver replied, making conversation. “Where you flying tonight?”
“Reno.”
“I coulda guessed. No luggage.”
The cab turned right on Sixth and headed for the freeway. The
driver was a woman about thirty, trim, dark-haired, with a hardened, citywise gleam in her eye. She glanced at the passenger in the rearview mirror and saw a good-looking man, a little older, no kid, with a pale complexion, dark eyes, and the aura of a guy with something on his mind. He was looking back at her in the mirror, and she thought, Uh oh, here it comes. Wanna fuck me? Wanna have the time of your life, baby?
“It's like a confessional back here, you know?” Bobby said. “Dark and secure, and all I can see is the back of your head and your eyes in the mirror.”
“And you're a chainsaw murderer and you want to confess, right?”
Bobby chuckled, his voice dark and hollow. “You'd be surprised.”
“You Catholic?”
“Retired,” Bobby said.
“Well, you're right,” she said. “People like to get things off their chest, and they talk, especially if they never expect to see me again. They say things to a perfect stranger they wouldn't dare say to anyone else. I've been drivin' this cab for eight years, and I've heard sob stories, tragedies, injustice, sex and drugs and rock and roll. It's fifteen minutes to the airport, mister. You can talk all you want.”

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