Pocket Kings Read online

  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.

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

  The lovers’ pixilated afterglow was now interrupted.

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

  Of course he would. There 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. The reviews were good, and though the sales were modest, with a few more good reviews, they might pick up. The 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 “The publicity-shy novelist . . .”

  There was only one reason for this: There 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. The simple but embarrassing truth was that ever since The 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. They 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.” The 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.

  The 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. The 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. The 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. There was blood on the floor, on my chest, over the tiles on the wall. There 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. The 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.

  I stopped going to the gym. Those six hours a week were now allotted to cards. Time was money, and running home with my fattening lunch was all the exercise I was getting.

  Now I could walk through the front door and be playing poker (and jamming fries down my maw) within ten seconds.

  The words addiction, gambling problem, obsessed, denial, and help hadn’t yet occurred to me.

  The company that I was (barely) working for had no idea I was winning more money on their dime than they were paying me. It was as if they were paying me to use their office space as my own office space. I felt guilty cashing their checks but still forced myself to do so.

  Bubbly Brit Bird and Pest Control kept up their affair, playing and joking around with others but heating it up at private tables. There were dozens of other trysts and flirtations going on (in some ways being on the site is like walking down a high school corridor between classes) and you could witness every sexual activity, from adult toys to group sex to armpits and toe-sucking, known to man. If an anti-American terrorist organization could read some of the sex chat on the site, they wouldn’t deem this country worth destroying.

  One time I stumbled upon Cali Wonder Gal entertaining a Seattle furniture salesman.

  Cali Wonder Gal: So how big, Eduardo?

  Fast Eddie G: How’s 11 1/2 inches sound to you, baby? Rock hard.

  Cali Wonder Gal: No way.

  Fast Eddie G: I no lie to you, sugar pie.

  Cali Wonder Gal: Oh yes you do.

  Fast Eddie G: Just sent you a foto.

  Cali clicked out while she downloaded Fast’s photo, and I didn’t believe Fast any more than she did. (Only a week before I’d overheard a player named 23rd Century Foxx telling a guy named Buff Stuff Bobby that she was hot. “How hot,” Buff had asked her. “Soooooo hot,” 23rd told him. “I’m a hi class escort, $3K an hour.” Whereupon two minutes later Buff was not only losing $500 to her three 9s but was ejaculating all over her 36D breasts. “I just jizzed,” he confessed to her, “all over your gorgeus [sic] boobs, baby.” But I clicked on 23rd Century Fox’s profile page [where players can, if they so choose, display personal information and a picture] and the truth in all its gory detail was revealed: The woman may indeed have had a 36D chest but the rest of her looked like a cross between Yoda and Teddy Kennedy.)

  Cali clicked back in.

  Cali Wonder Gal: Holy smokes, Fast, you no lie to me!

  Fast Eddie G: Did I not tell you, baby?

  Cali Wonder Gal: I’m surprised you could even take a picture of the whole thing!

  Fast Eddie G: Can you handle all that?

  Cali Wonder Gal: Honey, I can. But I just don’t know if you can handle me. I’m very hot.

  I happen to know that Cali Wonder Gal is not very hot. But this is one of the crucial things about this site: all the women are Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, Megan Fox, and Salma Hayek, and all the men are Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Robert Pattinson, and Johnny Depp. A pair of breasts smaller than a C cup doesn’t exist, nor does a female waistline larger than a size six or a men’s larger than a thirty-two. Hair is silky and wavy, legs are long, smooth, and slender. Baldness is eliminated, as are eyeglasses, limps, birthmarks, lisps, freckles, acne, and cellulite. All the guys are hung like giraffes and have butts that turn women’s heads. In this online utopia, Lane Bryant, Rochester Big & Tall, Rogaine, Pfizer, and plastic surgeons the world over would have gone out of business in a day.

  You cannot eavesdrop for two hours without seeing an exchange like this:

  Nash Gambler: So who do you look like?

  Dallas Alice: What do you mean?

  Nash Gambler: Like what celebrity?

  Dallas Alice: Well, my friends tell me I look like Giselle Bundchen.

  One of the saddest sights is to witness a player all alone waiting for his or her date. Their forsaken animated avatars cannot even tap their fingers against the felt or order a drink from an off-screen bartender. They just have to sit and wait, sometimes for hours. It’s sad enough to see a person getting stood up outside a theater, at a bar, or in a restaurant in real life, but to see it happen to a person’s cartoon alter ego on a computer screen is even more heartbreaking.

  Friendships are forged too: it isn’t only about Ace-high flushes, bodily fluids, appendages, and mmmmm’s and ooooooh’s. Second Gunman and I, as the weeks and months progressed, spent hours griping to each other about our lives during and between games. Toll House Cookie, who’d confessed to me he stole money at his job (he works in a New Jersey tollbooth near the Lincoln Tunnel), sent me pictures of his twin daughters when they were born.

  I never asked Second his real name but he told me it was Johnny. For weeks I wouldn’t tell him my real name. “Just tell me your name for chrissake,” he’d plead. “My real name is Johnny Tyronne and I was born in Dublin but my family moved to England when I was four and I live in Blackpool and I work at the Four Swans Hotel and . . .” What I truly feared was my fellow card players finding out my Amazon rankings, for isn’t that the true measure of a man? I also feared them saying, once they knew I was (once) a writer: Hey, I’m writing a book! or I’ve thought about writing a book or, the absolute worst, I could write a book about my life/my family/this place.

  Second Gunman/Johnny (it must have been four a.m., his time) was telling me one night about his girlfriend woes and we must have IMed for two hours straight, occasionally playing a hand. Then he asked me my real name, for about the hundredth time. Finally I caved and told him. He told me to hold on. I held. “You still there?” he asked me a minute later. I told him I was. There was no reply. A minute later I asked him, “Are you still there?” No reply. He came back a minute after that and said: “331,871 on Amazon UK. Not too good, mate.”

  A lot of players have prearranged trysting times. For example, Kiss My Ace, a rugged contractor from Cleveland, would meet with Boca Barbie from one to two in the afternoon every weekday. Sometimes they’d allow others in, sometimes not.

  Kiss My Ace: You got my poem?

  Boca Barbie: Yes! It was so great. I read it over & over again.

  Kiss My Ace: :)

  Boca Barbie: I’ll send you back one when I get the cha
nce, Tim. Xoxoxo.

  Boca Barbie was a nurse and worked long shifts at a large assisted-“living” facility in Florida. Old men and women died on her regularly, and new ones would quickly fill their places, only to perish a few weeks or months later. A never-ending supply of the dying. Kiss was married, his oldest son suffered from severe autism, and his wife was on Zoloft; the Zoloft wasn’t working although it didn’t bother him that it killed any last trace of a sex drive she may still have had. Kiss My Ace/Tim and Boca Barbie/Barbara sent hundreds of love poems to each other, some cutesy and corny, others serious, lovely, and meaningful. “Do you know,” I once asked Kiss, “what Boca looks like?” The image of the 36D Yoda/Teddy Kennedy hi class escort was still fresh in my memory. “Honestly, Chip,” he said, “I don’t care what she looks like.”

  Boca mailed care packages to a Mailboxes Etc. account that Kiss had set up, though Mrs. Kiss My Ace sounded so zonked out on her meds that it wouldn’t have troubled her one bit had she ever opened a package containing Boca Barbie’s stained chartreuse panties. Boca would also send Kiss homemade brownies, stockings she’d worn, sexy underwear she wanted him to wear, her homemade macaroni and cheese (his favorite dish), and souvenirs from Disney World for his kids. He sent her cranberry scones, flowers, books, sexy underwear he wanted her to wear. It was intoxicatingly pleasant to be around them and be in love vicariously (a bit like when dieters force-feed their friends doughnuts, chocolate, and pizza while they watch). Even though, of course, I wasn’t really around them and they weren’t really around each other.

  Toll House Cookie: So are you two ever going to meet?

  Boca Barbie: Maybe some day. You never know.

  Chip Zero: Tell ya what. How about everyone at this table chips in from their winnings and we donate some $$ for Boca’s flight to Cleveland?

  Cali Wondergal: Put me down for $50 right now.

  Kiss My Ace: We’ll need to put Barb up at a hotel too, you know.

  Chip Zero: Cali, you’ve won 400 goddam k. All you’re putting in is $50? Have you no heart? Are you all dollars and sense? Have your winnings poisoned your soul?