Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light

by Helen Ellis

  In Vegas: “Ma’am, do you always smile at people when you screw ’em?”

  Me: “Don’t you like being smiled at while you’re being screwed?”

  In Biloxi: “Ma’am, are you a mom?”

  Me: “No.”

  Him: “Dang, I thought you might have some Kleenex in your purse.”

  If I did have Kleenex in my purse, I wouldn’t share it. To take people’s money, I need every edge.

  Here’s what’s in my poker purse: four peppermints; two Advil; ten one-dollar bills to tip cocktail waitress; Aquaphor for my cuticles; lipstick, lip gloss, and compact; driver’s license, Amex, and casino player’s card; two bullets (slang for entry fee and a reentry fee); and two OB tampons for when I’m menstruating.

  Poker flashback: once I was so focused on a tournament clock, I pulled an OB tampon from my purse and unwrapped it like a peppermint. I don’t think anybody noticed. I realized my mistake before I put it in my mouth.

  * * *

  ————

  I started going to casinos with Papa on my twenty-first birthday. Before I got up the nerve to sit at a poker table myself, I sat behind him for hours like a stenographer, upright with my hands in my lap, my chair at an angle so I could see his cards. Sometimes, other players would look at my face instead of Papa’s to tell if he was bluffing, but I was as unreadable as a boiled braille Bible.

  For close to thirty years of playing cards, I’ve worn constrictive clothes so I can’t slouch: shirt dresses and skirts, button-downs and boatnecks, cigarette pants and heels. I wore quadruple clip bras and lace panties because my underwear is my armor. I wore all black because I myself am a pop of color.

  I wore pearls. A single bracelet on my betting arm because I liked the way it looked on my wrist, my hand like a mannequin’s tipped with red nails. I liked the way those pearls rolled against my skin with each action. Pearls made folding feel good. They gave me a sense of composure. I was prim. And in that primness, I was powerful. I looked like a 1950s TV housewife who’d crawled Ring-style out of an episode of Father Knows Best.

  Poker is still very much a man’s world. Only 4 percent of players are women. And most of those women look like they’re trying to look like one of the boys, because if they look like one of the boys, they’ll be treated like one of the boys.

  My friend Patti says, “Helen, you like to play with the boys, but you’ve never been one of the boys.”

  I blame it on the bowl cut I had through the fourth grade. Ever since I got my first perm, I knew there was strength in that little bit of extra effort. That’s right, gentlemen, scoot over and watch your language, there’s a lady at the poker table.

  Some women eat, pray, love. I bet, raise, shove.

  Only one person wasn’t fooled by my housewife persona.

  Poker flashback: at my first World Series of Poker, I won my entry fee into a field of mostly pros. I wore a magenta Diane von Furstenberg dress and madras plaid espadrilles. The Rio casino was so cold my nipples could cut the cards. A Japanese pro, who did not speak English, offered me his coat, which I thanked him for and draped over my shoulders. Then I called down a queen-high board with jacks and value bet ace-king when there was a possible boat.

  On a break, World Poker Tour winner Kevin “BeLOWaBOVe” Saul asked, “Lady, who are you?”

  I said, “I’m a housewife.”

  And he said, “Bullshit!”

  We have been friendly ever since. He calls me his favorite housewife, and because he continues to cheer me on and help me with my game, I call him my Poker Yoda.

  Poker rooms are filled with men who look like they’ve spent a weekend watching a Star Wars marathon. The look is very Chuck E. Cheese lost-and-found box: sweatshirts, flip-flops, cargo shorts, baggy jeans. You’ll see more crack in a poker room than in an attic full of porcelain dolls.

  Here’s how to spot a poker pro: hoodie and a backpack. Want to know what’s in that backpack? Energy bars, Red Bull, phone charger, and cash.

  Poker flashback: at a WSOP, my husband saw a guy open his backpack and transfer $100,000 into the backpack of another player. Nobody batted an eye. Those 5K bricks might as well have been Altoids. On second thought, Altoids would have pulled focus. Who needs twenty tins of breath mints? A degenerate, that’s who.

  Also beware retirees in windbreakers with WSOP circuit rings. They smell like Old Spice but bite like a bottle of hot sauce with a label of a gator on the toilet.

  Poker flashback: eight of nine old men at a Tunica poker table lifted their shirts to show me their “zippers”—aka open-heart-surgery scalpel scars that they claimed ran from their necks to their nuts.

  Papa wears ornate belt buckles, turquoise rings, and tinted bifocals. My husband wears a cardigan. Our friend Douglas wears funny T-shirts. He has one that reads same shirt, different day and one that reads i love bullfights on acid, which is a line from Caddyshack.

  Douglas says, “I had one that said today is the greatest day ever, but I lost so much money wearing it I literally ripped it up and threw it in the garbage.”

  This I totally get because, yes, there is such a thing as a cursed Tory Burch sweater.

  * * *

  ————

  I’ve been trying out a new look because I’m not a housewife anymore. I’m a writer. There, I said it. This will be my third book published in six years. When I went on a book tour last year, I hired a housekeeper. With age comes a letting go. Of lifelong rules and regulations. I’m unbridled, I tell you. You know, less June Cleaver corseted in her kitchen, more Carole King on a windowsill on her Tapestry album.

  I’m not as prim as I used to be. And it shows.

  I dubbed the 2019 WSOP “My Summer of Balloon Sleeves.” I have so many peasant blouses you’d think I was trading my Upper East Side two-bedroom apartment for a van to follow the Grateful Dead. When I walk into a poker room, I billow. Nothing says card sharp like delicate embroidery.

  I wear Papa’s leather belt from the 1960s that I took from his last garage sale. The belt is brown and etched with floral vines. Thanks to the return of high waists, it fits. It makes me feel hippie without being dippy.

  I wear color now. I came in eleventh out of three hundred entries at my last no-limit hold’em event, the “Little Monster” at the Beau Rivage Million Dollar Heater, wearing a sweater as yellow as a 25K tournament chip.

  A floor manager said, “Ma’am, that is your color. Not everyone can wear that color. My mama was into auras and all that. People tell me if I ever quit this job I could run a department store.”

  I said, “Or be a personal stylist.”

  I bought a pair of jeans with torn knees and a faded rainbow on the butt. I bought beaded gemstone stretch bracelets in a metaphysical shop in New Orleans. It took an hour to pick them out because the quartz means different things. One’s pink, one’s purple, one’s marbled. Creativity, Strength, Lack of Inhibition. Or are they Gratitude, Passion, and Mindful Tidiness? I do not know. I can’t remember what they’re supposed to draw out of me. Same goes for my plastic mood ring that my friend Paige gave me on one of our grown-ass ladies trips. I lost the chart for what means what, but I feel like a sorceress when that stone turns the same bright green as the poker table felt.

  But not everyone appreciates my new table image.

  Poker flashback: In Biloxi, a dealer said, “Somebody stinks. And I mean, it’s awful.”

  I was sitting in the one-seat, directly to the left of the dealer, and thought, Is it me? Because I’ve always thought Is it me? ever since my eighth-grade gym teacher dismissed us after a personal hygiene lecture, at which she’d drilled it home that it was perfectly fine to sit on public toilet seats unless we had open wounds on our thighs or butt cheeks, and if we did have open wounds on our thighs or butt cheeks we shouldn’t be spreading our business on public toilet s
eats to begin with.

  The gym teacher shouted, “Change out! And while you’re at it, somebody needs to change her sanitary napkin because it stinks!”

  I wasn’t even on my period, but I thought, Is it me?

  It’s never me.

  But that day at that poker table it was.

  The dealer leaned into my personal space. And he sniffed.

  Now, hold up in your reading for a second. Let me repeat and expound: a man I had never met before, a professional doing his job at his place of work in front of nine male players, leaned in and took a full Silence of the Lambs Anthony-Hopkins-through-the-psych-ward-looking-glass whiff of me.

  He said, “Jesus Christ, I thought it was the Pakistani in the ten-seat, but it’s you.”

  Oh yes, that is exactly what he said.

  Then he said, “What are you wearing?”

  I said, “Lavender.”

  To be specific it was a blend of essential oils, called something like Weeping Warrior, that I’d bought from an Instagram herbalist: lavender, sage, bergamot, and other essentials that a lady like Ruth Gordon grows on her kitchen windowsill in Rosemary’s Baby and then rings round her neck to harness the power of Satan. Or in my case, PMS. The blend was supposed to provide a soothing effect during a woman’s menstrual cycle. The blend was not doing its job.

  The dealer pulled his uniform shirt collar up over his nose.

  I said, “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  He said, “Well, you stink.”

  I was so humiliated, I wanted to cry. But unless you’re Matt Affleck losing with aces to jacks, and thereby your shot at the final table of the 2010 World Series of Poker, and then being hounded by ESPN cameras all the way to the men’s room on national TV, there’s no crying in poker.

  I kept playing.

  And when my aces were cracked by eight-ten off-suit, I said, “Nice hand.”

  Side note: Nice hand is the poker player’s equivalent to a southern lady’s Bless your heart. It can mean anything from “You played your cards well” to what I meant then: “Sir, you’ve got a lucky horseshoe so far up yer ass, you couldn’t find it with a search warrant.”

  There’s a saying at the poker table: If you can’t figure out who the worst player is in the first thirty minutes, it’s you.

  But it’s never me. Don’t let the pearls or patchouli fool you.

  I Feel

  Better About

  My Neck

  Two years ago, my friend Dani asked me to go with her to get Botox. Dani is a woman of means, and by “means” I mean she throws a lot of parties at which there are Mylar balloons, so I assumed that we’d be going to a dermatologist who could pump up her face in a quality environment with the ease and assurance of a clown who inflates and creates helium poodles. You know, a professional. A doctor in a lab coat with diplomas and a poster with a woman smiling between her Ball Park Frank cheeks above a tagline that reads: “Lift it. Smooth it. Plump it. juvéderm® it! Everyone will notice, no one will know.”

  I judge a doctor’s office by the decor.

  My gynecologist’s waiting room is wallpapered in Laura Ashley with matching fabric-backed chairs, which means that women have been scooting all the way to the edge for her since the 1980s, so why wouldn’t I? My GP has framed prints of museum exhibitions, so we have something to talk about before we talk about my vitamin D deficiency. My shrink’s looks like a Scandinavian ski lodge. My dentist has a fish tank. My dermatologist’s office is pristine with a white leather couch. Bowls of sample-size moisturizers, sunscreens, and nonfoaming liquid cleansers are laid out on every surface like potpourri.

  I love my dermatologist because she tells me that I have done such a good job of protecting my skin from the sun, I have the ears of a five-year-old. She’s never told me to get Botox. And she never rushes me when I tell her for the umpteenth time that I feel bad about my neck.

  Dani feels bad about her forehead and that spot between her eyebrows. I don’t know why. She is a beautiful woman. Petite and mischievous. Tickled as if she’s thinking of the punch line before she tells you the joke.

  So much of her personality revolves around her eyes, I worried what twenty units of mad cow would do to her face. I asked her, “Can’t you just be happy that I will always be fatter and four years older than you?”

  “Yes,” Dani said, “thank you. But I’m doing it, come with me.”

  I met Dani on Seventy-Ninth Street and Madison, and we walked east toward Park Avenue, where dermatologists and plastic surgeons are so expensive, I can’t afford to look at my reflection in their brass placards.

  But then we kept walking. Past Lex, past Third. Then north. We stopped in front of an apartment building straight out of a police procedural. Tall, gray, and shadowed by scaffolding. I peered through the dirty glass door, past the dirty glass interior security door. Rows of metal mailboxes lined a wall. At the far end of the hallway was a mop abandoned in a janitorial push bucket.

  I asked, “Your dermatologist is here?”

  Dani rang one of fifty apartment buttons. She said, “She’s not a dermatologist.”

  The lock buzzed, and Dani pushed our way in.

  “What do you mean she’s not a dermatologist?”

  I trailed Dani into an elevator.

  “She’s cheaper than a dermatologist. Three hundred cash instead of twenty-six hundred.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “I don’t know, everybody’s using her. She gets it for wholesale or from another country or steals it from her boss or something.” We rode the elevator to a high floor, and Dani waved me out. “Be cool. I can’t pass up a bargain like this.”

  I followed her to an apartment. The door was cracked open.

  I said, “This is creepy. My hackles are up. We need a safe word. You say it, and I drag you out.”

  “Fine. Pineapple.”

  A woman in a Gucci track suit and emerald-cut diamond ring shouldered past us. Fekkai highlights, sunglasses like an executioner’s mask, linebacker’s jawline. She was as well preserved as a mason jar of peaches. Her ripeness sealed behind a hard surface and slick with syrup.

  I whispered, “Was that the actress who plays that lawyer on that show?”

  Dani nodded, and I was grateful for the testimonial.

  As soon as we entered, my confidence was lost.

  It was a studio littered with toddler toys. A cageful of very vocal birds sat on a kitchen island. Dani and I sat on a futon. To our right was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that blocked two-thirds of a makeshift exam room; but I suspected calling it an exam room was like calling a pool noodle a yacht. And question: Is a bookcase really a bookcase if it doesn’t hold books? Whatever you call it, from behind it came whimpering.

  And then another patient with a rock on her finger, a brand on her butt, and gauze to her forehead scurried from behind the bookcase and out the front door.

  I thought, Is Botox the new back-alley abortion?

  I said, “Pineapple?”

  Dani said, “No.”

  We waited to be summoned.

  A cat lady with a syringe stepped into view.

  I call her a cat lady because this is what women who’ve had too much plastic surgery are called. Her face was peeled and pulled so tight, her eyes looked like gills. She had duck lips. And kangaroo pouches for cheeks. I can’t remember anything about her from the neck down, because I couldn’t look away from what she’d done to her face. I flashed back to Alabama State Fair freak shows starring the likes of Little Miss Horse and Pony and Johnny Iguana. She was all the animal crackers.

  Dani hopped onto what I think was a massage table.

  The cat lady asked me, “Is this your daughter?”

  Dani gasped.

  And I felt my face harden naturally. It happens from
time to time. When someone insults me, I go gargoyle.

  Dani said, “We’re the same age.”

  The cat lady stammered. She apologized. She stammered and apologized until she realized that she would get nothing from me. I was a rock. And if she didn’t stop chiseling, she’d lose three hundred bucks. She aimed her syringe at my friend.

  Dani said, “Do the least! Do the least amount!”

  The cat lady told her, “You want more than you think you do.”

  “No I don’t, do the least!”

  “I’ll do more. You’ll be happy I do more.”

  And then the cat lady was upon her. She shot Dani with who-the-hell-knows-for-sure-what right between her eyes, and I said to myself (as I’ve said to myself in other situations when my friends are stuck with needles): Don’t faint. Don’t you dare faint.

  But I was too insulted to faint.

  Fifteen minutes later Dani and I ate lunch. She already had a headache and a bruise in the center of her forehead like a sniper’s infrared dot. Apart from that, she had a lump between her eyes that the cat lady had told her would eventually dissolve.

  I said, “You can’t go to her again. Botox is not where you save money. You save money on a sweater. You pay top dollar for what you put in your face.”

  Dani said, “You’re right, you’re right. I know you’re right. But I’ll try anything once.”

  This is true. Last year Dani went through a haunted house where she had to sign a personal injury waiver, put a bag over her head, go through all by herself, and be subjected to simulated torture and nekkid people. The only way to get out was to say the safe word, which was: safety.

  At one point, a cast member pulled a tampon out of her pants and said, “Suck it or safety!”

  Dani did not say “safety.”

  But she did get herself a licensed plastic surgeon and has not gone back to the cat lady since.

  Dani has never told the story about someone saying she looks young enough to be my daughter. It is a story that makes Dani look very good and me look very bad. She has kept it to herself because she is a very good friend. And very good friends don’t get off on making their friends look bad.