Pocket Kings Read online

  The prospect of buckling down and writing again was bracing and exciting. I couldn’t wait to get started.

  On my last day there was no going-away party; a manila envelope did not travel desk to desk and no present was bought for me. I had no exit interview with Human Resources and thus could not complain about the thousand imagined injustices inflicted upon me by all my coworkers. I simply tossed my company key-card into the trash and left.

  After much deliberation—okay, not that much deliberation—I decided to wait before telling Wifey about this gigantic move of mine. I would simply lay low.

  The day after the Saucier party, I sent an e-mail to Clint Reno. It was one thing for him to ignore me, but what he was doing was systematically nullifying my existence.

  CR:

  Last night I was struck by a Drakes Cake truck.

  I suffered a broken tibia, a bruised vistula, a fractured fibula, a partially separated tiber, two broken metatarsals, several 2nd degree lacerations on the skull, 3rd degree abrasions on both knees. I’ve lost 2 important teeth. My right tympanic membrane is just about shot and it’s going to be a while before I hear anything out of that ear again. I have a temporary patch over one eye now and my leg is in a cast.

  I’m e-mailing from the hospital now. But I’ll be okay. As for the man in the next bed, he wasn’t so lucky. Last night he suffered his third aneurism in as many days, reeled over to my bed and died on top of me, not before soiling most of my blanket. It took 7 hours before a nurse showed up to remove the deceased and his excrement from my person.

  Clint, have you heard anything from anybody about Dead on Arrival? Could you please tell me who’s read it?

  You know, I ran into Bev Martin at a book party and all she did was rave about how “fantastic and coruscating” DOA is. “It’s really your masterpiece, Frank,” she said, “your chef d’oeuvre.” And Jill Conway, whose novel (ironically about chefs and hors d’oeuvres!) was being feted, told me she was and I quote, “slobbering in anticipation of reading it.” Plague Boy is her favorite book of all time, did you know that, Clint?

  So please let me know what’s up.

  FD

  Surely even Hardhearted Callous Clint would reply to that!

  He didn’t.

  I had weekdays completely free now, so one Monday morning I went to the corner of Spring and Lafayette Streets, where the Reno Brothers Literary Agency is located. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street and I sat on a stool near the window. It was 8 a.m. I waited from 8 to 10 o’clock, drank four coffees and ate a box of Munchkins, and stared out, keeping my gaze fixed on the building entrance and looking for any sign of my agent. He’d be hard to miss: six foot four and slender, a full mane of carrot-colored hair always kept in a ponytail, clad always in unwrinkled bespoke Savile Row suits. I saw his three partners go in, at 8:43, 9:18, and 9:48. But there was no sign of Clint Reno.

  Am I really stalking someone? I asked myself. Yes, you are, I answered.

  I waited another hour, drank more coffee, ate another box of Munchkins. Nothing.

  After returning home, playing some poker and eavesdropping on an unbearably torrid session between History Babe and some seventeen-year-old named Royal Flash 89 (“I’m licking your warm cum off my hard nipples,” she purred), I e-mailed my would-be agent Ross F. Carpenter:

  Hey, Ross. Just wondering if you’ve gotten a chance to read Dead on Arrival. If so, hope you like it. Pls let me know if you can.

  Ross wrote me back within ten minutes:

  Not yet, Frank. Did you get that list from the Reno Bros. yet?

  Was at the Saucier party last night. (Jill is one of my authors.) As I understand it, so were you. Too bad hour [sic] paths didn’t cross.

  The e-mail blurred to a steamy highway mirage, then came back to me.

  At least Ross, unlike Clint, had responded to my e-mail. That was a positive sign.

  I went back to the Dunkin’ Donuts and stalked Clint every morning of the second week of my new full-time freedom. By Friday the women working there knew I wanted a box of Munchkins. . . . I didn’t even have to ask for it; they just saw me and started loading them up.

  I never saw Clint or his ponytail.

  That Friday I called up the Reno Brothers. It was now six-plus months since I’d handed over the DOA manuscript. A half a year of waiting and virtual silence.

  “Hi, I’d like to speak to Clint please?” I, voice cracking nervously, said to Courtney.

  “Clint is in California now,” she said. “May I put you through to his voicemail?”

  Fifteen boxes of Munchkins, about forty cups of coffee, a few low-fat muffins here and there . . . and Clint had been 3,000 miles away the entire time.

  “You . . . you have voicemail now?”

  “Is this Frank Dixon?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” I stammered. I was being reduced to jelly by a grad student (probably) who answered phones and filed paperwork and mailed back unsolicited, unread manuscripts and got coffee. The lowest entity on the publishing food chain was causing me to stammer, perspire and tremble.

  Make that the second lowest entity on the food chain.

  “Clint wanted me to relay something to you,” she began. “He said that when the movie of your book gets made and if the book was ever reissued . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “He wanted to ask if his name could be removed from the acknowledgments page . . .”

  “Okay. Sure. I could do that. Yeah. Definitely.”

  When we hung up, an alpine fog wafted into the apartment. But the fog swiftly scattered because I realized . . .

  She’d said when the movie gets made! She hadn’t said if. She’d said “when.” Was that why Clint was in California? His identical twin brother, the ponytail-less Vance Reno, handled the movie end of their business, but since I was Clint’s fair-haired boy perhaps Clint had gone out to L.A. to iron things out and finalize everything. The movie gets made, Plague gets reissued in paperback with Leo and Brad and Scarlett on the cover and hits the best-seller list; the all-pro shitheel who rejected DOA and called me a Master of the Suburban Mimetic calls Clint and begs to publish it. Please, Clint, please! I’m sorry what I said about the mimetic! Please, Clint! I take it all back! I’m on my knees now, Clint. Tell Frank I’m sorry about the mimetic! Please, Clint, please!

  There was still hope.

  I continued to win and continued to not write. But I swore that once my stack hit $100K I would start writing again.

  Sure, there were times when the Poker Fates were not smiling at me, when Lady Luck was so furious at me for not believing in her that she kept plunging ice pick after ice pick into my heart, when everything wrong that could happen did happen . . . but those times were few. The biggest loss I incurred was three weeks after I quit working: I’d been on a mini-losing streak and Second Gunman told me that Bjorn 2 Win was sitting alone at a table in High, waiting to drop a ton of cash. I quickly found the Offensive Swede. We folded a few garbage hands but then, with a full house, 3s full of Queens, I kept raising and reraising. But the Butcher of the Baltic had Queens full of 3s. I lost over $4K. If you’ve ever seen a boxer get punched so many times that he has no idea who he is, where he is, what day it is and that he is even partaking in a boxing match, then you have some idea of how I felt.

  Flabbergasted and wounded I sucked it up and said, “NH, Swede.”

  “You do not even means that. You are too hurt right now. This does gladden me.”

  He vanished before I had a chance to win it back.

  I lost $2,000 more dollars that day in a frantic effort to win the money back. I took a walk—it was June and New York was only just beginning to heat up—and went back upstairs. I was steaming, livid, dazed, and my stomach turned inside out. I wasn’t used to losing and didn’t like it at all. I had no job and my books had failed. Poker was all I had. If I wasn’t any good at this, there was no point in being. I went back online and dumped another grand.

  When Cynthia came
home I greeted her with the sort of grunt an overweight ruminant might offer up to its cud.

  She had no idea I wasn’t working. In the mornings we left the house together at 8:45, as we’d been doing for years, and walked to the subway. She’d stand on the platform for the downtown train, I’d stand on the platform for the uptown train. But now if her train came first, I simply left the platform and returned home. If mine came first, I boarded and took it two stops uptown, then walked back home.

  The night I lost all that money, I couldn’t fall asleep. Not for a second. I had to get that money back. I was still way ahead, but it was the thought of losing, of my possible newly emerging uninvincibility, that gnawed at my psyche. And there was this concern: what if that loss was the beginning of a long disastrous schneid? I had now made over sixty grand; maybe it was time to lose it all. When I first met Toll House Cookie, his stack was up over $100,000; lately, it was hovering around a paltry $45K.

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep unless I got that money back.

  I went into my study at about 2 a.m. and turned on the computer. Nothing but tighty-whiteys on, my belly (those hundreds of Munchkins hadn’t helped matters any) jiggling in the darkness lit dimly to turquoise by the flickering hues of Pokergalaxy.com. On the wall over the desk was a still-life—after Derain—of a pear in a bowl; on the opposite wall, a portrait—after Cezanne’s Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk—of a hungry, homesick, and ridiculously optimistic young man suffering a throbbing headache. (These two works, executed in Paris, of course, were the closest I ever came to being any good at painting.) I went to a table with $100-$200 blinds. Lots of Aussies were playing, lots of South Africans, a few people in California and Seattle. I lost a few hundred more. I wasn’t going to let this happen . . . I had to win it back! Then I won a few hands, moved to a table with bigger blinds. More Aussies, a few Japanese, Indians and Pakistanis. Melbourne Loser. Osaka 2 Me. Never Can Say Mumbai. Was it tomorrow on that side of the world or was it yesterday? In one game I smelled weakness and won $800 with two 4s. The next hand I won a grand with a diamond flush. Chip Zero was on a serious roll; where my brain should have been, a juicy porterhouse was sizzling on a hot grill. The next hand I got dealt pocket Kings. I raised and other players checked or folded . . . but to my right I heard a rustling and saw the silhouette of naked Mrs. Chip Zero coming toward me in the darkness. A Paul Delvaux painting come to life, on Eighth Avenue and Sixteenth Street.

  “What are you doing? It’s four-thirty, honey.”

  “Writing my book,” I told her. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  I still had those two Kings. I didn’t want to lose the hand.

  “But it’s late.”

  “Uh-huh. I just got hit by a serious bolt of inspiration. You know . . . the Muses, right?”

  “Must they sing so late? Just come to bed . . .”

  A woman named Lahore With A Heart of Gold raised and I checked. A nice slow-play could net me a lot of money here. I had to get that money back!

  “When they sing,” I told Cynthia, “I have to listen.” Now in the past, when I was a writer, it wasn’t unusual for me to pen my novels at ungodly hours . . . but this was odd, especially since she hadn’t seen me writing for many months.

  The river card was another King. I had three of those magnificent monarchs now, three of them! The doomed Pakistani raised and I re-raised. Then I inadvertently let slip the nickname for a hand of three Kings and said: “George Clooney.”

  “Huh?” Cynthia asked with a yawn.

  “Um . . .” I covered up, “Barbara Bennett e-mailed me from Hollywood tonight.” Barbara was with Egregious Motion Pictures in L.A. and was spearheading the Plague movie. “George Clooney is interested now. The Plague flick.”

  “And what is it you’re writing again now?” Scratching her sleepy head.

  Was it Book I or Book II she thought I was writing? At this hour I couldn’t remember, and neither would she. So I said, “You know, that trilogy deal.” If she ever asked to see it I could just go to the Chelsea storage facility where it was rotting in airless silent oblivion. (If I could remember where the hell the key was.) Though she then might ask why something so piping hot off my printer was so yellow and caked with dust.

  Chip Zero wins $4,800 with three Kings.

  I let out a maniacal giggle, sounding like a cross between an old dot-matrix printer and David Hedison at the end of The Fly.

  “You okay?” she asked me.

  “Oh, very much so!”

  She went back to bed. Five minutes later she was joined by her loving, content, supersnugglicious husband, who slept like a baby, knowing how incredibly lucky he was.

  Whenever you hear a man complaining how gullible, guileless, and oblivious his wife is, keep in mind that this man is secretly grateful. My own suspicion-impaired wife believed I was still going to work every day and still receiving a weekly paycheck. Further covering my mendacious ass, I went to Tiffany one day and purchased an Elsa Peretti necklace for her. This bauble wasn’t cheap, but I figured I could win the money it cost in an hour of solid play. I was wrong about that: it took me only twenty minutes. I went home, stashed the ice in a sock drawer and logged on. I won $600 with two 6s and two Queens, then moved to a higher table; I turned that $600 into $1,500 with three 10s. I took that $1,500 into Ultra-High where I found Foldin’ Caulfield, getting in a few hands right before performing some surgery, playing with two others. I played three hands and not only did I have enough for the necklace but I had the money for matching earrings and the taxies to and from Tiffany as well. (I was glad I wasn’t the patient whose shoulder Foldin’ was about to dismantle.)

  Wifey didn’t see the jewelry right away, though; I was saving it for a rainy day.

  There was another problem. In the middle of June—by then I was up to eighty grand—the company I’d worked for always began its “summer hours.” I had to be at work—or so Cynthia thought—at eight thirty, not nine. But Wifey’s hours were the same: she still always left the house at eight forty-five to get to work by nine. I had to maintain the ruse.

  For the first few weeks, I left before she did, went down into the subway, boarded and took it uptown two stops before I got off and headed back home. But it was hot and humid and there are few places more unpleasant to be in the summer than on a New York subway car, especially if you don’t really have to be. So I began a new routine. The hell with the subway . . . I’ll just take the Times to the Starbucks across the street and kill the time till Wifey leaves.

  And that is what I did. Every weekday morning I’d get dressed for work, head across the street and park myself on a stool, where I’d nurse an iced latte and attempt the crossword, all the time keeping one eye on the entrance of my apartment building. Like clockwork, every day at eight forty-five Cynthia would leave the building, striding with that long purposeful gait of hers, a Fendi handbag swinging from her right shoulder. She’d walk two blocks, make a left turn, head for the subway. By this time I’d given up on the crossword and switched to reading the daily book review. Every other sentence I’d glance back up, just to make sure Cynthia wasn’t on her way back, having forgotten her cell or needing to take an emergency pee. The coast clear, it was back to the book reviews. By the time the iced latte was finished, the paper was a crumpled, mottled mess, especially if the book of the day had gotten a thumbs up. If I saw the words “brilliant,” “searing,” “hysterical,” “amusing,” or “reasonably compelling,” a shot of corrosive coffee-scented stomach acid would surge back up into my gullet.

  After that, I’d go back upstairs and start playing again. The system was safe: she and I only called each other’s cell phones and when we e-mailed we used our Yahoo accounts. For all she knew, I was on Pluto.

  (Our new 60-inch plasma TV, a brand new laptop, the new coffee table, her iPad, and our pride and joy, the $1,000 Sleep Number Mattress—we’d even shopped for these items together, but never once did she ask me, “So where’s the money coming from for all t
his?” Had she done so, I would’ve responded, “Poker.” After all, poker had gotten her her magnificent new chinchilla coat, presently being boarded for the summer at a fur kennel. She knew poker was a source of income; she just had no idea it was my only source.)

  One day toward the end of June, Wifey woke up with a fever and a sore throat.

  “I’m going to have to take a sick day,” she told me.

  I’d been dreading the possibility of such an event and denying it so much that I’d never fully developed a contingency plan. I kindly offered to take the day off to stay home and take care of her, but she said no, it wasn’t necessary, that I should just go to work.

  One of these days, I thought, I’m going to find that key and get the Trilogy in case she asks to see if it really exists.

  “I’d really, really like to stay though. You don’t look well.”

  Fifteen thousand poker players were waiting for me to play with them; Artsy Painter Gal was waiting for me in Los Angeles; all my Poker Buddies were waiting.

  “No, really. I’ll be okay.”

  I kissed her forehead good-bye and headed out.

  After fueling up on an iced latte I walked around. It was already 90 degrees out and by the time I got to the Barnes and Noble on Union Square I was gasping for breath. I had little interest in literature anymore but usually stopped in once a month there to check up on Plague and Love. Plague was often on the ground floor, in a stack of ten or so, on the Urban Fiction table; Love usually was wasting away upstairs in the fiction section. My usual routine was to sign the books, then have someone there slap a SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR sticker on the cover—anything, anything at all, for a sale.