by Martin Amis
The Rio’s poker wing is a conference center, and the theme, for now, is Texas Hold ’em. “Your day job could be a distant memory,” say the posters. “Chris Moneymaker—Accountant. Joe Hachem—Chiropractor. Greg Raymer—Patent Attorney.” And there is a billboard with the three champs glowering out at you, as in a boxing or wrestling head-to-head. But these men are just middle-class chubsters: accountant, chiropractor, patent attorney. And perhaps that’s the point. There are opposed longings in the contemporary psyche: on the one hand, the need for enclosed anonymity within a clearly defined peer group; and, on the other, a sweltering lust for celebrity. To be quite ordinary and yet wholly exceptional: nobody combines these conditions more seamlessly than the poker star—than Chris Moneymaker, the World Series accountant from Tennessee.
Like darts in the 1980s, poker is trying to clean up its image. Why, then, does it showcase itself in Las Vegas? And why does the trade-fair area have continuous bikini-babe footage on the plasma screens, and why are there dozens of chicks in general-issue satin hot pants, and why, at the Media Tournament later in the day, are the guest stars the soft-core Shannon Elizabeth (American Pie) and the hard-core Ron Jeremy (by acclamation the grossest performer in the San Fernando Valley)? The master rule would seem to be that if you have a product to sell, then put some female flesh next to it. Besides, in glandular terms, poker is inseparable from the carnal energies: it is all heartbeat and hot palms. I am now old enough to inspect the attendant girls with an anthropologist’s eye: astonishingly, the average set of vital statistics would go something like 38E-28–26. These top-heavy buttless wonders, incidentally, wouldn’t turn any heads in the real Rio, where most of the surgical ballooning takes place below the waist.
It may seem perverse to take Las Vegas as the setting for a complaint about diminutive posteriors—Vegas, the holiday home of the truly astronomical rear end. Patent attorney Greg Raymer is no drink of water, but there is a woman in his autograph queue (“My husband’s a great fan. You’ve inspired him, big-time”) who has munched herself into a wheelchair: arms like legs, legs like torsos, and a torso like an exhausted orgy. A male two-wheeler, in the forecourt beyond, succeeds in “falling” from his vehicle even while it is stationary; passersby shovel and bail him back into it, but his body is more liquid than solid, and it is simply seeking the lowest level, like a domestic flood coming down a staircase. Al Qaeda remains silent on the question of obesity. But even the nonbeliever can contemplate such human forms with a sorrow that is almost religious. They are unbounded, infinity-tending, like a single-handed push for globalization.
* * *
*
I faux-nonchalantly compete in the Media Poker Tournament, and am undiscouraged by my early exit. If money is “the language of poker,” and it is, then this session is dumb show. The winnings are destined for charity. And what good is that to anyone?
On the eve of my first day at the WSOP (winning it will take a whole week) I dine with Anthony Holden and James McManus—two of the top writer-players in pokerdom. Holden has of course picked up a title or two; and McManus, here in Vegas in 2000, made it all the way to the final table. My intention, as we know, is to do a little bit better than that.
“Be ultraconservative while you get your bearings,” they tell me. “It’s ten players per table, so be prepared for more high stuff than you’re used to. There are 169 possible opening hands. Only about a dozen are worth playing. Fold on everything except pocket jacks and up, A-K, or high-suited connectors. Later on, if you’re behind the button [that is, to the right of the rotating dealer position], don’t always wait for premium cards. You can go with K-J or pocket eights. By then it’s better to be too loose than too tight. Loose-strong. Avoid what Al did [Al Alvarez]. Avoid tight-weak.”
As the evening comes to an end, generous McManus clutches my arm. “Don’t be intimidated, man! Remember—you’re Martin fucking Amis!”
* * *
*
Back in the Bellagio I continue with McManus’s classic book about his classic run, Positively Fifth Street. And I am slightly concerned to discover how perpetually and implacably and worldbeatingly brave you have to be if you want to exist for ten minutes in No Limit, where every hand might be your last. Brave, and cool, too: brave-cool. The other books haven’t even mentioned this, because they take brave-cool for granted. Which is not to dismiss the more or less reliable intrepidity and calm that have served me pretty well, over the years, in various stressful kitchens in North London, where scores of pounds regularly change hands. Still, McManus’s book also reminds me that after the first day I will be competing exclusively against passionate professionals in the poker equivalent of the Super Bowl.
It is perfectly true that I am Martin fucking Amis. But what about Chris fucking Moneymaker and Mike the fucking Mouth Matusow and Chris fucking “Jesus” Ferguson—and, for that matter, what about Kathy fucking Liebert and Annie fucking Duke?
Vast serenity and a consciousness of simple heroism escort me into the Amazon Room just before noon the next day. My nostrils flare to the elegant scene: it is like the dining room of an ocean liner after an invasion by unusually pitiless pirates. About two thousand cardsharps are jinking their chips (and there are another six thousand where they came from)—the sound of cicadas and rattlesnakes. This won’t be a jokey works outing, like the media game. There’ll be an edge; oh yes, there’ll be some shit, what with the press tag and the English accent. I locate my seat and fine-tune my table presence.
We are nine, for now, and, disappointingly, all-male. I give my immediate neighbors a soldierly glance. The others, stretching away over the kidney-shaped baize, are an unsociable blur of speckle and bumfluff in mirror shades and sleeveless T-shirts, under baseball caps wedged into place by headphones the size of car clamps.
“Hi,” says the sweet-faced, olive-skinned thirty-year-old to my right. “I’m Josh. With a J.”
“Eccentric parents,” says the droll dealer, who is labeled Dan.
“They were hippies,” says Josh. “What d’you expect?”
At this point, comforted by Josh, I relax enough to look around and beyond. Approximately one butter mountain per table, with his rump slobbering all over his stool; and the same proportion of snazzy-looking women—and twelve-year-old boys, who have apparently mistaken the Amazon Room for a family destination. I reflect that the kids must in fact be over twenty-one, or their presence in a casino would give rise to their arrest. Still, the age profile of poker is heading steadily down. These are the owls of the Internet. Poker isn’t about cards, says Doyle Brunson (the game’s premier sage and gent): it’s about people. But the Web rats never meet any people. For them, poker isn’t about people. It’s about mathematics. They do the reverse implied pot odds on every pip.
Dan knocks on the table. “Gentlemen? Cards in the air.”
* * *
*
I am now obliged to spend a long time describing the first deal—for mortifying reasons that will duly emerge. I peek: Ajax, A-J, unsuited. A trouble hand. My position is optimal, so when nobody raises I, too, call the big blind, or mandatory opener, of fifty dollars, along with four opponents. The flop comes up Q-10-K. And my epic calm and simple heroism flee with such a shriek that I immediately break the rules. I jerk back from the table with the cards held to my chest.
“Sir? Cards stay on the table!” says Dan. “Really I should cancel your hand.”
Oh, don’t do that, I almost yell—it’s a high straight! I am all contrition and my cards are suffered to stand. Everyone checks to me. Then I find myself troubled by what in Las Vegas is a most unhelpful inhibition: puritan guilt (because my hand, strictly speaking, is null and void). So instead of transforming myself into a burp gun of power raises, I check, too—unforgivably. Fourth Street, the turn card, is a 3, and the board is a rainbow: no possible flush. Once again everyone checks and it is for me to speak. I now see the true meaning of those four flat calls and eight consecutive checks (a phenomenon that wo
uld not recur): there was practically nothing in the pot. We had two cards to come, and my best bet would have been a slow-play raise of a hundred, or maybe two or three to make it look like a positional steal. But it is my intention to scare off all the two-pairs and threes-of-a-kind I imagine are ranged around me; so I bet a thousand, and everybody folds.
It seems to me that I now have a couple of alternatives. I can celebrate my win of two hundred dollars by standing on my chair and pumping my fist until the TV camera comes over and makes me famous. Or I can utter a four-letter word. In recent years, during the televised sequences, the players’ transmitted conversations sounded like Morse code, so often was the bleeper needed (“Then the bleep makes his bleeping straight with a bleeping trey on the bleeping river”). So audible obscenities, now, earn you a ten-minute ban. A ten-minute ban is exactly what I want: time for a stabilizing cigarette and some fresh air in the forecourt, where it is forty-four degrees centigrade.
Instead I go on tilt. For a whole round I am in the thick of it, eerily combining a trance of fear and a panic of greed with a boss pair (losing to trips), a boss double pair (losing to trips), and a postflop ace-high four-flush, which, embitteringly, stayed that way on streets four and five. My game is all solecism: I bet out of sequence; I sit for a full minute, waiting, when it is my turn to say; and I fold when I could check. I am, in brief, a psychological ruin, and down $3,500—just over a third of my complimentary stake.
“Have a White Russian,” Josh tenderly counsels. “Have two—but not three. It’ll smooth you out.”
But now I smooth out the hard and nauseous way, with successive hands (after a while I started writing them down) of 7-2, 8-3, J-4, 3-2, 5-4, 10-3, 7-3, 9-4, 8-2, Q-2, 9-3, 10-4, 3-2, J-5, 4-3, 10-2, 8-3, Q-2, 9-3, 10-2, and so on, for ten or eleven rounds. Then I cop 9-9, play it from a weak position, make a set, and tremulously prevail. This is to be my second and last win at the WSOP.
Until now, the seat on my left has remained empty (its stack fractionally eroded by subtracted blinds). And the table, it seems, lacks a “flair” personality. But here he comes, two hours late, gangly, punk-pretty, and fresh from Essex, England, with iPod, shades, and pink bandanna beanie, and calling himself Gar, with a G. And it seems that Gar’s seat may remain unwarmed: still standing after his first flop, Gar is already going all-in.
“Here, Dave, I’m all-in!” hollers Gar to his friend four tables away. “Dave! Dave! I’m all-in! That’s the way I am,” he tells me. “Tight-weak. Internet donkey!”
“Call,” says Josh, very still. And he pushes in his $9,500 to match Gar’s.
The board reads A-4-J. There will be no more betting, so the players show their cards. Josh holds 4-4; Gar holds A-K. The turn is a 10. “See you later, lads,” says Gar, backing away. But the river is a Q, and Gar shrugs, takes his seat, and starts stacking and riffling and pinging his chips. Josh staggers on, looking sick to his stomach, for two more hands. Then, after husky farewells, he is gone. Gar doesn’t notice. He is going all-in again. He says: “How much you got there? Ballpark.” Ballpark is Garspeak for “approximately.” The table has found its flair.
After the lunch break, sucking his fingertips and shouting for a napkin, Gar comes back with a reeking paper plateful of medium-raw hamburger. And Josh’s gentle gaze has been supplanted by the pocked scowl of Mike Woo. Wait. Isn’t that Mike Woo as in Mike fucking Woo? Mike’s a name, a face. And he is soon having a series of ferocious battles with Gar and with anyone else who dares come near him. By now I am dreading the sight of pocket aces—I’m that brave-cool. But it never happens. I play A-K, the Big Slick, twice, losing on both. And soon I am looking for something, anything, to go all-in on before my stack hits three figures.
J-2, 3-2, 8-3, 5-4, 9-3. Gar is gone, his pocket jacks hitting three overcards on the flop. Mike Woo is gone, his king flush succumbing to the case ace. 5-2, 8-6, 7-3, 5-4, 6-5. It is dawning on me that my best hand was my first: I didn’t have the lock, the cinch, the stone-cold nuts—but I did have a straight. And since then? Three 9s. Only once in my life have I had a session where God hated me as much as this, and I almost broke even; but today his wrath has No Limit. At last I get 5-5 and go all in. My lone adversary is showing 6-6. The flop is 5-J-6. I have 5-5-5. Fourth Street is a Q. Fifth Street is a 6. He has the mark of the beast: 6-6-6. He has the boss set.
“It sucks so bad,” said the man steering the fridge back to the Bellagio. “Like a kick in the gut. I sympathize. Me, I went out yesterday on a megabad beat. I’m flying American Airlines [A-A] and I’m all-in. Guy calls with 5-5! Flop comes up A-4–2. The turn’s another ass [A]! Four aces! But he’s got four connected clubs! Then the prick makes the fucking steel wheel with the fucking blue trey on the fucking river. That was my bad beat. What was yours?…I’m sorry. You don’t want to talk, right? That’s it, that’s it. Let yourself go pale for a spell. Bleed it all out. Would you like some music?”
* * *
*
The nicest hotel in Las Vegas stands hard by the nastiest hotel in Las Vegas, on the northern extremity of the Strip. You can actually walk from one to the other without your destination eternally receding as you approach, and without finding, at the last moment, that you have to sprint across a twelve-lane highway. The nicest hotel is called the Wynn, after its owner, Steve (another matter-of-fact Vegas surname), and it is themeless: no Eiffel Tower or St. Mark’s Square, no medieval jousts or rubberized rain forests, no white tigers or shark tanks, no volcanoes or talking statues. At the Wynn, even the exterior is air-conditioned: an alfresco fridge the size of two football fields. The swimming pools are lined with cabanas, like ritzy beach huts—masterful lairs of toupee and pedicure and minibar. All around there are tables for massage and baccarat. The Wynn is a monument to what physicists call “negative entropy.” Enormous outlays of power and expense create order and comfort, before dispersing themselves in chaos and waste.
In one area, “European-style” sunbathing is permitted, but it is a freedom that goes unembraced. Locally, toplessness is considered menial: in Las Vegas, people get a wage for showing their breasts. I briefly regret this, because here we see the human form as nature might have conceivably intended: lean, toned, and bronzed, and expensively maintained. The humans are enjoying the neg entropy—warmed pool water, cooled air, iced drinks; and they are blessed with wealth and youth. I am not at home, here at the Wynn.
The nastiest hotel in (uptown) Las Vegas isn’t called the Looze. It is called the Frontier. And as I deflatedly approach it, Martin Moneymaker transmutes into Martin Moneyloser or Martin Asshole (and to hell with Martin fucking Amis). This is more like it: SHRIMP AND STEAK $8.95, says the neon sign. FAJITAS FEAST FOR TWO WITH 2 FREE RITAS $19.95. COLD BEER DIRTY GIRLS. LIVE MUD WRESTLING. BIKINI BUCKING BRONCO GIRLS. In the parking lot there is a white coupe suffering from spontaneous combustion: it has blown its hood. Under the withered hedge, two witchlike pigeons are pecking away at a handful of discarded Cheez-Its.
The Frontier once had a theme (the frontier), still detectable in the Tex-Mex snack bar and, I suppose, in the dusty plastic statuary of the Flintstones bingo nook. Now the theme is TraveLodge or Indian-reservation HoJo. Dumpster-size human shapes move around in the desperate murk of the cocktail lounge; there is a viscous gloom, moist and sooty to the senses. Its polities never had much luck with the notion, admittedly, but we all recall the primacy, in Islam, of the ideal of equality and justice. After the Wynn, the Frontier is a reminder that money and success, winning and losing, et cetera, are zero-sum. There is not enough to go around, and what is gained by one is lost by the other.
* * *
*
It is in the Frontier that I finally resolve to turn full-time pro. I have the skills, clearly enough. All I need is the cards: American Airlines or suited Big Slick at least every other hand. My wife and daughters would be happy enough living with me here at the Frontier (and the Assholes, perhaps, would be given a preferential family rate).
I can see myself a
t the bar, enjoying a second skull-chilling margarita, plus a fajita and a gordita (but where is my enchilada?) before I head off to work. Some outfit called the D-Cup Divas would be warming up on the trampoline. And I’d tell anyone who’d listen about the time I sat down at a World Series that was mine for the taking, and caught that bad beat with the three 5s.
The Sunday Times 2006
Travolta’s Second Act
He opened the door himself—so you walked straight into the icon. It was January 1995, and that morning he had begun work on Get Shorty, a major production (costarring Gene Hackman, Rene Russo, and Danny DeVito) based on Elmore Leonard’s satirical thriller about Hollywood. A big book, a big film, and a big day. Thus I was naturally expecting a big wait—or a cancellation; or a bodyguard and a body search and, eventually (maybe), a big entrance in some Spanish-style den infested with the star’s “people”…
But no. Here was John Travolta removing my coat from my shoulders and personally sliding it onto a hanger, and turning to me with the close-set deep-blue eyes that remind you of the phrase “undivided attention.” Actors’ eyes don’t blink unless the actor tells them to; and Travolta’s eyes don’t blink. For me, it was like stepping into a Warhol poster—a Mao, an Elvis. It was like bumping into James Dean or Jimi Hendrix. You feel John Travolta is so iconic that he ought to be dead. And he isn’t: not anymore.
In his early twenties Travolta was, by many magnitudes, the brightest star in the firmament: everyone wanted him in everything. “It could be a role for an eighty-year-old woman,” his ex-girlfriend Marilu Henner has said, “and John would be offered it.” By his mid-thirties, Travolta was simply a human vacuum, lost in Hollywood’s interstellar void. (And travolta, we may be unsurprised to learn, means “overturned,” “shook up,” “knocked down.”) Now he is forty, and his career has done something that the industry can barely find words for. Comeback doesn’t begin to cover it; nor does renaissance or revival. This product is flying direct from zero temperature to dignity.