by H. T. Night
“Get up. Leave!” said a voice right in my ear, a female voice, but I didn’t do that. I wondered if they had some electronic device that was almost subliminal to make people vacate the premises at their whim.
I had taken money from just about every guy at the table, beating them with my supreme hands. Poker was a funny game. I wouldn’t see a card bigger than a six for an hour and then I would have a hot streak. The key was knowing when to leave the table in your hot streak. I looked at my stack of chips. I wanted that stack to be doubled.
Everything had been going my way for hours. I needed to sucker one of these guys to go all when they thought I was bluffing.
I decided to show a couple of bluffs and barely play any hands for the next hour and then wait for a great hand and everyone would think I was steaming and bluffing.
After the hour was over, I waited for an awesome hand. It only took twenty minutes for me to be dealt my favorite hand: ace-king of hearts. I could barely maintain my serious poker face.
Was this fate giving me a gift because of all the shit I’d gone through? I had the dealer button in front of me so I was in the premium position to act at the table.
Blinds were out and there were three calls before me. Mr. I Tell My Hand with My Betting Pattern and Wildman Lucky were still in the hand. Around a $900 pot. I wanted to bump up the pot, but not too much. I wanted to see a flop. So, I raised it three times… the blinds to $600.
Everyone called. I wasn’t sure if I liked having so many players in the hand.
The dealer dealt the flop. The community cards were ace of diamonds, ace of spades, four of clubs. I flopped trips with a rainbow. Meaning someone needed runner-runner for a flush. I had a king kicker. Damn, I was in good shape.
To my surprise, the first person to act raised $18,000. Next guy called. Then there was Lucky. He, of course, called.
It was $18,000 for a single bet?
I had to call the bet. I was both petrified and excited.
I felt lightheaded as I waited for the ‘Turn’ card.
Eight of diamonds.
Didn’t help my hand.
But I couldn’t imagine that card helping anyone except for the person possibly holding pocket 8’s. If that was the case, I would need a king on the river. Drunk or not, I was praying. I had too much money in the pot. The first two guys checked. Then it was Lucky’s turn. He looked at me and winked.
“I’m going to raise,” Lucky said.
Holy shit. He’s going to shoot off his own foot. There’s no hand he can have that is better than mine.
“I’ll raise it $50,000,” Lucky said and there were groans at the table. Everyone folded, all the way down to me.
I had to call. My hand was awesome.
“This is an interesting turn of events,” Lucky said. “It seems both of us are in love with our hands.”
He was trying to get a tell like he had earlier by talking to me.
I looked straight down and stared at the table. The table was spinning, but these stakes were so high that even in my highly drunken state, I was pretty cognitive. I wasn’t going to give Lucky anything. I wanted him to keep betting.
The dealer burned the card and dealt the River.
It was the 5 of spades.
I looked Lucky in the eye and I said, “Will this be where you live up to that name?”
Lucky nodded at the table and stood up and looked at me smiling. “I don’t think you have anything. I’m all in.”
Lucky’s ‘all in’ had my chips covered. I wanted to double up. Well, here it was. Lucky was counting on two things. One, if I’m bluffing. I am now folding so the jig was up. Or he was betting big because he had the nuts. The nuts was the best hand possible. There was no way he’d stick around with such a gross hand. The pot was way too big.
I stepped up to the big boy table. It was time to see if I belonged here. All my chips were in the middle of the table.
I called his bet. So, he had to show his cards first.
He was milking it. I didn’t know if he was milking it because he knew he was beat or if he was milking it because he had the nuts.
Crap. What did my read say? My read was this guy was betting weird and acting odd because he was bluffing and he thought if I had a lesser hand, I would have folded once he went all in.
I waited to see Lucky’s hand. The motherfucker slow-rolled me. A slow roll was when you had a great hand and you took a long time to show it. It’s frowned upon in the poker world. But this fucker let me have it. He pulled over the seven and six spades.
He had a straight. His hand beat mine. He was bluffing in the beginning and then got ‘lucky’ and caught the nuts on the river. I’d just lost $300,000. It actually felt like $600,000 because I was sure I’d won that hand. I felt lightheaded. I needed to get to a bathroom.
I stood up from the table and my ass sobered up pretty damn quickly. I was numb. It didn’t feel real to me. Just like the day Maya had died. It was like things were going in slow motion. I made my way to the casino restroom, went into the handicap stall and I just fell to my knees.
I began throwing up. I had zero food in my system, just a shit load of alcohol. I threw up until I dry-heaved. I did that a couple of times. Then, I rolled around and sat on my butt on the bathroom stall floor.
I sat there and I’d never felt more pathetic in my life. I’d just won and lost $300,000 in a day. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what a loss this felt like. It didn’t compare to the pain I’d received, having Maya dying in my arms. But in the real world, this was it. Bar none. What was I doing? Why was I here? Why was I even alive? I’d never felt that emotion before. But it was coming from an honest place.
I still had a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. I needed to get out of Las Vegas. It would soon be the third night of the full moon. I went back to Caesar’s Palace and picked up my bike and headed back to San Bernardino.
As I rode back to San Bernardino, I knew I was risking it. It was going to be dark within the next four hours. It was a crazy, painful, mind-altering couple of hours of being on the road. When I hit the city of Hesperia, I decided to turn left and go deep into the desert once again. I was a good twenty miles out again and figured I would do the same thing.
It was seven p.m. and I knew I had around 45 minutes till the full moon. I closed my eyes and imagined Maya. I imagined her looking at me. Loving me. I would hold her tenderly in my arms. Tears dripped as I thought about her and her parents. Anger built when I thought about the money I’d lost this afternoon. Anger at myself.
I lay next to my bike and watched the sun go down.
Chapter Twenty
Time passed and I woke up with my face in the sand. I spit off the sand that had made it to my lips. I looked around. Crap! I was nowhere near my bike! God knew where I was. I was in the middle of fucking nowhere! That’s where I was!
I scrambled to my feet. I had a huge headache, and I was glad this run of being a werewolf was over. My head was killing me, but I used my keen sense of smell to figure out the direction of my bike. It took me around four hours to find my bike. During that time, I kept busting myself up over what had happened in the high-stakes poker room.
I would never have been there if Maya was alive!
At first, it was easy to blame my gambling and drinking bender on losing Maya, but as losses mounted, it was getting harder to use losing her for an excuse for everything bad I had been doing.
In misery, I jumped on my bike and I took off home to San Bernardino.
When I pulled up to the house, I noticed the house seemed dark. Josiah liked lights on in the house. Especially now, ever since he’d lost his family.
I wondered where he might be. He must have been out all night.
I went inside the house and went to my room. I turned on the air conditioner and fan and I was out like a light. I just ignored all my pain.
Eight hours later, I woke up feeling even more hollow inside than a guy who had ruined his own life. I tried to supp
ress my emotions, but I couldn’t. Losing Maya and all that freaking money was making me more than a little nuts at the present moment.
I heard my Mustang pull in the driveway. Josiah was back from wherever he had been.
I hid in my bed and tried to calm myself. I couldn’t. I needed a drink. I wasn’t up for one minute until I had to have a drink. I wasn’t going to worry if I was becoming an alcoholic. I thought that had ship sailed days ago. I was one.
Josiah knocked on my door. I was naked, so I said, “Come in.”
Josiah entered and said, “Dude, put on some clothes before you say come in. Don’t you have any sense of self-respect?”
“No. That’s gone, too.” But I wrapped my blanket around my naked body to appease him. Josiah sat at the foot of my bed. He had never done that, ever.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Last night was pretty epic for me.” Josiah gave me a goofy smile.
“It was? How?” I asked, interested.
“Let’s just say, I’m no longer a virgin,” Josiah said in a proud, pathetic way.
“You were still a virgin?” I asked.
“Yes. You didn’t know that?”
“You never talk about sex so I figured you weren’t ready yet. Were you? Ready?”
“Probably not.” Josiah gave me a sincere stare. “But who is? It happened and I own up to it. I own my decisions,” he said. “I live with them.”
“Don’t we all?” I said, inwardly cringing. I looked at Josiah and he was dying to tell me more. I loved the fact there was something giving him temporary happiness after all the pain he had been through. But that was my problem, too. Pain. I listened to Josiah, and tears began to drip from my eyes.
All this crying needs to stop!
Josiah noticed I was misty-eyed. “Are you okay? Tommy?”
“I’m good, man. I’m just happy for you. Well, quit leaving me in suspense, who was it?”
“A woman. I met her just hours earlier,” Josiah answered.
“A woman? Really? Good for you, Josiah,” I teased.
“Shut up. I’m trying to share my life and you always make fun of me.”
“Sorry. It’s part of my allure. Continue, bro, on your tawdry tale of tail won.”
“She wasn’t tail. She was something.”
“How old was this woman?” I could tell she was older by the way Josiah worded it.
“She’s twenty-nine.”
“Wow, first time with an experienced woman and she’s eleven years older than you. Nice. Was she hot?”
“One of the prettiest women I have ever seen. She was about eight inches shorter than me. She had light brown hair and the most alluring eyes.”
I looked at Josiah. “Where did you meet such an ‘alluring’ creature?”
“I met her at a bar.”
“A bar? Great. No, not great. I take that back. You can meet any kind of woman at a bar. Even that kind.”
“Don’t. Not like her,” Josiah said.
“You don’t have an ID, so how did you get in?”
“I wasn’t exactly in the bar. I was at the liquor store next to it, buying Red Bulls. The bar was lit in blue neon lights. I thought it might be a strip club. I had never been to one before. I was feeling a little rambunctious.”
“You wanted to go to a strip club?” That surprised me. Josiah often takes the high road on these kinds of things.
“No, I wanted to see if it was a strip club,” Josiah said, correcting me.
“You just wanted to see inside?”
“Maybe take a quick look at a girl pole dancing and get the hell out of there, but that wasn’t what happened.”
“What did happen?”
“Well, it didn’t matter that it was a bar. It could have been a grocery store, if that makes the story less tawdry. But the most beautiful woman exited through the front door of Whiskey’s Bar. She stopped and lit a cigarette and made eye contact with me. I can’t tell you how hot she was. Then, she made eye contact with me again and gave me the look.”
“How does a virgin know about the look?” I asked.
“She stared at me longer than what is normal. I knew she was interested. That way.”
“Okay, then what happened?”
“We just started talking. She asked me if I knew the time and that’s all it took. I was at her house in one hour.”
“Her house? You dog! Tell me you were a dog!”
“What does that even mean?” Josiah asked.
“It just means did you get your freak on?”
“By freak, do you mean did we have sex? Yes, I got my freak on. I got my freak on… four times, to be exact.”
“Four times?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Impressive. That’s a lot for one night. I don’t care who you are. You’re a rock star in my book.”
Josiah became quiet and I could see him reflecting.
“Is there a problem?” I asked. “Was she weird when it was over?”
“No, she was amazing. I think she knew that it was my first time. I never told her that I was going to remember her for the rest of my life. I think it would have weirded her out.”
“I would have told her,” I said. “I would want her to feel like she mattered. She would feel almost obligated to your booty call for at least the next few months. Oh, the things you would learn.”
Josiah was quiet again.
“What?” I asked.
“I feel a little empty, ever since it has been over.” Josiah was a good guy. Honest as hell.
I gave him the only bit of wisdom I had. “It’s because you didn’t love her,” I said. “When you’re madly in love with the woman you’re making love with, it’s like both your bodies are electric. And you’re emotionally connected.”
Josiah knew I was talking about Maya, but he wasn’t going to be weird and point out the obvious. “Well, I’m going to see the woman again.”
“Josiah, be careful. You’re playing a dangerous game by dating an older woman.”
“Why is that?”
“They have their way of getting their claws into younger men and pretty much make them fall in love with them by using sensuality and passion.”
“Sounds like you know a lot about this subject,” Josiah said.
“There is a lot of mileage on a guy who has been on his own since he was seventeen. Let’s just say, before Maya, I spent a lot of time visiting Cougar Town.”
“You have me beat,” Josiah said.
“And the puns just keep coming,” I joked. I looked at Josiah and I grabbed him and put him in a playful headlock. “I would have you beat regardless because you have me. If I had me when I was your age, damn it, I could be anything right now. Anything.”
“What do you want to be?” Josiah said, near my waist where I still had his head in the headlock.
I let go of Josiah’s head and his hair was all messed up. He looked like Dennis the Menace.
I thought about what Josiah had asked me. After a moment, I said, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere but here. With you, Josiah. My life experiences define me. But luckily, my best friend, my MMA brother, redeems me.”
Josiah picked me up and gave me an incredibly hard bear hug from the back. I knew Josiah wouldn’t let me get away with putting him in a headlock. The boy had way too much pride. He was walking around, carrying me around the house. “So, what you’re saying,” Josiah said, “is I shouldn’t expect anything less than rock-star status.”
“Being a rock star is a state of mind,” I said.
“It’s not going out gambling and getting drunk every night?” he dared.
“Don’t judge me, Josiah. Let me deal with this in my own way.”
He looked disappointed.
“Look, Jo, I’m happy you finally got laid. Congratulations. May you get laid every day for the rest of your life.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” he said.
“But, just like you,” I said, “I wasn’t given
a handbook on how to move on after you lose the love of your life. I think I have some leeway granted to process this in a way where I can push through it.”
Josiah was hard-pressed to disagree with me, so he said, “Okay.”
With that, I grabbed my leather jacket and went outside to my bike. Josiah came out to me when I was still sitting on my motorcycle dusting off the mirrors with my bandana, which I put back in my jacket pocket.
“Tommy,” Josiah said. “I can’t lose you. I can’t lose you to alcohol and gambling. Most of all, I can’t lose you to the pain we share. I want you to know that there is someone still alive who believes in you and knows you can get back to being your old self. I miss that guy. I miss him so much it hurts. It’s like you died, too, and there’s this other guy in your body doing mad Jekyll and Hyde things, things that the Tommy who is my friend would never do.”
I nodded my head. I was broken inside. Everything about my life was dead. Even Josiah’s kind words rang hollow. I didn’t want this anymore. I needed to go get drunk.
“I’ll see you later,” I said gently.
“Stay, Tommy. We’ll watch the Kings play on TV and do steaks on the grill. Big ones.”
“Not tonight, bro. Thanks.”
I zoomed off and made my way to a local bar in town. I was going to drink. I was going to drink a lot. That’s what I did. I drank so much alcohol, I could barely breathe. The room was spinning and I completely passed out.
I woke up to what felt be an hour or two later. I was outside in the garbage bin.
Holy fuck. I wasn’t in that bar two hours and they dumped me out with the trash, literally.
I jumped out of the trash can and went to the front. I debated going in and cracking skulls, but no one would fess up to it.
I was only slightly buzzed. I found my bike in the parking lot and I decided to drive back up to San Bernardino Mountains on my hog.
It was two in the morning and I decided to go to Flatlands to reminisce. I drove by on my bike and the whole place was covered with Mani.