Pocket Kings Read online

  It was 9 a.m. and she’d been gone for fifteen minutes. I was so absorbed with an absurdly positive book review that day that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I read the review over and over again. Everything that they loved about the book—a slow-moving, elegant, and empty novel about post-9/11 New York—was everything that I would hate about it, if I ever read it, which someone would have to pay me good money to do. The book would do well, I knew, and so would the author’s next book and the ten after that; it didn’t even matter if they were any good (and they wouldn’t be). The author was set for life and he had Osama Bin Laden to thank for it. After the fifth reading, the review faded to a rectangular blotch and then suddenly from nowhere, and from everywhere, I heard a voice asking me what I was doing there.

  It was Cynthia. Right in front of me. A foot away. Looking at me, at the book review, at the poker on my laptop. She’d had to go back home, she eventually told me, to take a quick pee and, her bladder now emptied, she thought she’d get some coffee for the road.

  A hundred lies, fifty of which were fairly plausible (and of those fifty lies, thirty of which she would have believed), occurred to me all at once and as I was weighing them out I heard my voice say: “I don’t work anymore. I quit. A while ago. Sorry.”

  Telling the truth, I thought, was an even more brilliant strategy than telling any of the lies I’d so swiftly concocted.

  She snatched the newspaper out of my hand and slammed shut my computer. I thought of Gloria Graham throwing boiling coffee into Lee Marvin’s face in The Big Heat but realized that Cynthia was drinking an iced latte; if she decided to go all Fritz Lang on my ass, it wouldn’t have been so bad.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” she hissed.

  I told her that I looked forward to the discussion and that it would be like being rid of a tremendous burden, her knowing the truth I’d been hiding from her all these months.

  As she headed for the door, I reminded her that I was writing, not just playing.

  She believed me but didn’t seem to care.

  But at least I wasn’t cheating on her.

  Although I was. Sort of.

  Artsy Painter Gal and I would e-mail soft-core fantasies to each other—always worded in the present tense (“I’m slowly pulling off my panties while you . . .”)—and, in hers, she carefully avoided the elephant in the room: what I looked like.

  Courtesy of Google Images I was able to find two pictures of Victoria Landreth, her real name. APG had told me that she once looked like a young Joan Collins and I could see it: she had the same cheeks and black hair, the same lustrous eyes and lips. I don’t look like that anymore, she informed me. (But who among us didn’t look better fifteen years ago unless we’ve had plastic surgery since?) Every time she told me she didn’t care at all what I looked like, I told her that if she knew what I looked like she might start caring. I informed her I had gained some weight since discovering online poker, though I kept the numbers vague. “Don’t you think,” I asked her, “that if I looked like George Clooney my wife would be keeping a much shorter rein on me?” She said, “If you looked like George Clooney, you wouldn’t have gotten married!”

  “True, very true.”

  “Labor Day weekend. The Nirvana on Empyrean Island. We’ll be in Tower 1, the hubby, the kids, and me. Why don’t you take a few days off and we’ll meet. You’ll have fun. Maybe you’ll get a nice suntan or even—dare I say—start writing again?”

  “I’ll start doing that when you start painting, okay?”

  “Sorry. You’re right. But I’d love to meet you.”

  After that conversation I had trouble concentrating on the tasks at hand: winning money, obliterating the competition, being King of Hold’em Hill. Gambling was now my full-time profession. It was what I did for a living. I was a pokerizer.

  But that afternoon, a week after our Starbucks encounter, as I pondered telling Cynthia I was thinking of taking a few days off to go to the Caribbean, I dropped around $18K. It was an ugly onslaught of lousy cards and dumbass moves. Or maybe I wasn’t concentrating because I was daydreaming about a lazy river pool and ice-cold Coronas and finally meeting my e-mistress, or I was thinking about heading out to Vegas to work with Harry on his script. When Second Gunman saw my diminished stack the next day he said, “Bloody hell! What happened to you?!” While I was recounting with blow-by-blow detail my run of bad hands, I lost an additional $1,800 to him.

  Did I want to meet Artsy? Yes, desperately. Did I want to get out of New York City for a spell? Certainly. Did I want Artsy to see my new wider, plumper self? Hell no. (Maybe, it occurred to me, I could send Lonnie Beale down there to fill in for me!) Did I want to see Artsy’s husband? Nope. He was the robust, outdoorsy L.L. Bean type and not only was he capable of doing many of the things that I wasn’t, but he actually enjoyed doing them: wearing a tool belt, camping out, running marathons, making money. When women in showers all around the country fantasized about anonymous, faceless firemen and handymen and brought themselves to orgasm, it was him they were picturing.

  “I’m thinking of taking a few days off,” I told Cynthia over pizza in SoHo that night.

  “From what?”

  “From New York . . . I haven’t been out of town for a while. Not since . . .”

  “Since Las Vegas, right?”

  Right. The dice table at the Luxor. I told her that I had the Nirvana Hotel on Empyrean Island in mind. Massages. Tropical drinks. Total relaxation. Chillin’ like a villain.

  “You know,” I reminded her, “I am working on a book. And I’m exhausted.”

  (A year ago I would not have been able to pull this off with such aplomb and without even a telltale swallow or momentary look askance. Before this I had really only mastered the white lie, saying things like, “Okay, pork chops are fine,” when I really wanted chicken. How had I become so good at subterfuge, deception, at outright lying? Why was I able to pull it off without any slight twinge in my conscience? The answer is easy: poker. Poker had taught me to bluff guilt-free.)

  I told her the Trilogy was truly groundbreaking stuff. For the hell of it I pinched some twaddle from Hemingway and told her that what Cezanne had done with painting and landscapes, I was doing with literature. To my tremendous relief and great disappointment, she bought it.

  “So,” I told her, “I need a break from that. And from the poker. Or I could bring the laptop and just work on the book by the pool.”

  (We’d had our talk. I nearly cried when I said how sorry I was for not having told her I’d quit my job. I told her I was miserable and that all I wanted to do was write. I’d been living a lie. She was still mad. The next day she wasn’t quite as mad. The day after that she was only mildly sore. And now . . .)

  “Instead of the laptop,” she offered, “you could bring me.”

  “I was just about to ask if you wanted to go,” I lied. “You didn’t give me the chance.”

  As soon as we got home, I booked the trip. I went back online, spent five hours playing and won back four thousand. Shaken by disturbing dreams of Joan Collins and Gerard Depardieu, I woke up at four to take a leak and then played some more. I played until Wifey woke up at the usual time, and by that afternoon not only had I won back all the money I’d lost but also enough for our little end-of-summer fling.

  No longer did I have to go through the ruse of pretending to take the subway to work, so that morning I walked Cynthia to the subway station. As she was about to descend I said, “Hey . . . I have these for you.”

  I told her I was sorry for everything and handed her the Elsa Peretti necklace and earrings. Even though it was ninety degrees out and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, this was that rainy day.

  “You don’t need to do this,” she said.

  “I know.”

  We kissed on the lips, she took the jewelry anyway, and we parted.

  (Some shameless, no-longer-relevant author once received a shitload of money for plugging Bvlgari in a novel. I am getting nothing
from Tiffany for mentioning them in this memoir but if they wish to contribute, they know where to find me.)

  The jewelry was originally meant to be so glittery that it would blind her to any amount of deception and treachery. But we were past that now. For the most part.

  It’s one thing to be a pariah in the literary world, where I never belonged, but to be a piranha in my own fish tank—Pokergalaxy.com— would be too much to bear. The Galaxy is not only my refuge, it is the Patusan to my Lord Jim, the streets of Persepolis to my Tamburlaine. There the world is a Sunday best-seller list and every weekend I am Mitch Albom. In August I made it past the $150,000 earnings mark. There was no confetti, no streamers, no dancing girls; CNN, FOX News, and Gawker did not report it. Were I the blogging or tweeting kind, I would have given it nary a mention. But the amount was, in six months of work, more than what my first two books had brought me. The problem now, though, was that as I went to this table or that table to play, some players, when they saw the intimidating size of my stack, would leave right away.

  I’ve heard that there are some porno actors who are so freakishly endowed that a few actresses refuse to work with them. This was as close to that as I’d ever get.

  I understood what was going on and a few times purposely lost the first hand or folded the first couple of hands. That way the other players present would think I was on a bad schneid and would stick around to move in for the kill. Once in a while I’d declare falsely that I’d already dumped $15,000 that day and was showing no signs of turning it around. When I did that, it was unbelievable how popular I quickly became. All the world, it seems, loves a loser.

  The more I won, the more I had to wager and the more confident I felt, and it was difficult to believe that only a few months ago my hands were clammy when I bet $10 of play money. Now I mostly shuttled back and forth between the High and Ultra-High tables. If I was on a real losing skid, I rode it out, gnashed my teeth and shook my legs so much that the floorboards began to splinter. When my luck changed, when I was winning again and all the gears were meshing, I felt confident and moved back up to the Big Boys.

  There were people on the site who had won a lot more money than I did, such as the incredible, inscrutable SaniFlush. Usually lurking silently in Ultra-High tables or at the No-Limit tables (where I rarely tread), by August he had won over a million bucks. I have played against him a few times but prefer not to. Watching him operate is like watching Rembrandt paint although probably a lot more exciting. His avatar is always the Psycho Killer with the Aviator Frames and the Hooded Sweatshirt, and he plays among the super-elite on the site; SaniFlush is frighteningly unpredictable, is a rampant pre-flop raiser and a maniacal bluffer (he may have been born with an extra testicle or two) and those are three things I avoid. He rarely says a word, and Second Gunman calls him the Prince of Poker Darkness. One time I saw SaniFlush foolishly draw to an inside straight and win $15,000. Even though they were disconsolate and must have hated his guts that second, Babe Ruthless and The Great Chatsby, his opponents that game, tossed him a NH and a VNH. SaniFlush didn’t even say TY. For all I know he’s a real poker superstar such as Jesus Ferguson, Daniel Negreanu, or Phil Ivey and he’s just sneaking in a few online games to warm up for in-the-flesh games with real people and real cards.

  As I won more money and wagered more money, I often found myself conversing and joking around less. I was spending less and less time with my usual crew.

  Because it wasn’t just a game anymore. Now it was business.

  Grouchy Old Man: We don’t see you that much anymore, Chip.

  Chip Zero: Hey, I’m here now, aren’t I?

  History Babe: Yeah, but we know you’re just slumming with us small potatoes. So tell me, what’s it like up there, Mr. Zero, huh? Is it true that they serve caviar and Cristal and that when a player wins a hand he gets a bj underneath the table from a stripper?

  Amarillio Slim-Fast: Just go, Chip. Quit your slumming. Our feelings won’t be hurt. You don’t wanna be down here with the poor folk.

  One time I won $7,500 in one hand—it was quad 7s beating a full house, Queens full of 7s—and I didn’t get one NH for it. I was flabbergasted and I missed my old buddies who, every time I took their hard-earned money, always had the good manners to compliment me.

  The weird thing was that for me to lose fifteen grand in one day with a stack of $150K was dreadful and would torment me until I won it back, but it felt not one iota worse than when I used to lose $15 when my stack was $1,500. It meant the same amount, to the second, of teeth-grinding; it meant the same amount, to the decibel, of cursing aloud (“DAMN it! God DAMN it!”); the empty soda can I hurled against the wall traveled to the wall at the same velocity; it meant the same amount of lost sleep. It might take ten or one hundred hands or four or forty hours of up and down play for me to win that $15K back, but it also might take one off-the-wall lucky hand . . . and the same was true with the fifteen dollars.

  The thrill of victory was no different either. I can only pump my fist so hard so many times or jump up so high off the floor and I can only yell, “YEAH BABY! YEAH BABY!” so loud. If there were such an instrument as a Pleasureometer, I believe it would record that the amount of joy a kid feels when winning the Little League World Series is exactly the same as he feels when, twenty years later, he wins his first World Series.

  I was now playing twelve hours a day on the average.

  My dream states were crazed by poker, by cards, by players, by chips, all through the night. In the fuzzy half-life just before sleep, when people kick their myoclonic jerks (there is, I swear, a player named Myoclonic Jerk), there glimmered hardworking, soot-faced 3s of Clubs, overly optimistic 9s of Hearts, radioactive Pocket Rockets and the snooty, powdered faces of insolent Queens and Kings. As soon as I closed my eyes, this electric cardshow began. The shuffling of cards and the clattering of chips became the soundtrack of my dream life. Flops, turn, and river cards were being dealt from midnight until dawn. Even though I still had real dreams while asleep, ever distractingly present were cards, cards, chips, cards, players, cards, cards.

  Another strange aspect of my new profession: when I looked at possessions I not only saw the things themselves but also saw the hands that made them possible. And not just the hands, but the people I was playing against and the pots I’d won. Every Sunday night Cynthia and I made the bed; it was impossible for me to look at that new $3,000 made-in-Italy bedframe and not think: three Jacks, The Scarlet Bettor, Pearl S. Luck, $3,000. Instead of seeing our brand-new sixty-inch plasma TV and whatever show I was watching, I saw: King-high straight, Folda Meir, Ante Maim, Willie McTells, $3,500. When Wifey got dressed to go to work, if I wasn’t already in my study playing, I would look at the shoes she was putting on and think not of Jimmy Choo but of a Jack-high club flush, Derek Cheater, Ministry of Foam, Flush Gordon, $500. Not only did I see the hands, I saw them as they developed, card by card, raise by raise.

  I used to imagine playing golf to induce sleep. It was a trick my mind played on my body, and if you’re ever having a rough night, try picturing yourself as Phil Mickelson pitching out of the rough at Torrey Pines: you’ll be fast asleep in two minutes. But that no longer worked, for as I lay curled up on my Sleep Number mattress (three 3s, Foldilocks, Pest Control, Lindsay NoHand, $1,000) and as I saw myself driving the ball off the tee, the sky hanging over Pebble Beach transformed into a fluttery mobile of playing cards and the fairway before me became the baize and the sand traps were full of millions of infinitesimal chips, not sand.

  My dreams were no longer peopled by friends, family, and acquaintances, but by Poker Buddies and their cartoon avatars. In these dreams I was usually the Big Man with the round, rose pink sunglasses. I no longer dreamt on film or on tape. I had gone digital.

  There were days when, all told, I played poker for seventeen hours.

  Why was this happening to me? Why? Except for my alcoholic Uncle Ray, there is no history of addiction in my family, and never before in my life h
ad I ever evinced any symptoms of addiction or even the slightest hint of a propensity for any kind of addiction whatsoever—other than for alcohol, sex, and drugs.

  So why then? Why had playing cards taken over my life? I didn’t even watch poker tournaments on TV—Orange County housewives, Alaskan crab fishermen, and Shark Week were more captivating to me.

  When you wake up each morning, you are pretty sure how the day will go. If your life is managed right, there are few surprises in it . . . which is precisely the problem. When you see a movie you usually know within the first half-hour how it’s going to end, and usually you don’t even have to read the final twenty pages of a novel. But the course and outcome of a hand of poker is always a mystery, and even with only a dollar on the line, the suspense always kills me.

  The Chip Zero Super System involves folding a lot of hands, which makes for a lot of boredom. Sometimes I’ll wind up folding six hands in a row and when this happens there’s nothing to do but either watch the other players play and make note of their tactics and tendencies, or daydream. (Some days this new job of mine was just as boring as anyone else’s.) During one such lull I sent an e-mail to Toby Kwimper, asking my dear old editor if he was interested in Dead on Arrival. I thought that Toby would like the book, I knew he would like it; after all, he had liked my first two books and both he and I were still the same people. It would be great, wouldn’t it, if he wanted to publish it . . . then I would call Ross F. Carpenter and he’d arrange the deal with Toby’s new house, TriHo Books. The key thing was to screw Clint Reno over and make him regret treating me so shabbily. As I folded bad hands I repeatedly imagined Clint picking a copy of Publishers Weekly and reading: