by Molly Bloom
I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to talk to my mom. I wanted to tell her about some of the amazing things that were happening.
“Hi, honey,” she said, answering the phone warmly.
“Hi, Mom, how are you?”
“I’m well, sweetheart. How are you? How is L.A.?”
“It’s amazing, Mom, totally amazing. I’m really making it work. I’m making great money and meeting really important, powerful people, huge celebrities, and having so much fun,” I gushed.
“That’s great, honey, how’s Blair?”
“Fine, the same,” I said. “But, Mom, listen! This guy just offered to fly me to his polo match in Santa Barbara on his own helicopter.”
“That sounds exciting. How’s Christopher? Did he finish his chemo?” she asked, referring to one of the kids from the hospital.
“Um, I don’t know. I took last week off,” I lied.
“Well, you’ll find out next week and let me know,” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
The delicious lightness I felt a moment ago became a heavy feeling of guilt.
Meanwhile, Todd Phillips was calling me on the other line, probably wondering where his share of Pierre’s money was.
“I have to go, Mom,” I said.
“Honey, are you okay? You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Everything’s great. I just have to go.”
The distance between us broadened.
“Love you,” she said.
“Me too,” I said.
And I clicked over to Phillips.
THAT EVENING, I changed out of my jeans and sweater into my new black dress, along with my strappy Louboutins.
“Wow,” Blair said. “Where did you get that dress?”
“Hand-me-down from one of Reardon’s girlfriends.” Wow, that lie came quick and easy, I thought. I felt compelled to downplay everything now, every detail, so that I wouldn’t have to answer questions about what I was doing for money.
What I wanted to say was, “I BOUGHT IT MYSELF, ALL IN CASH! . . . And I text with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, and I have twenty thousand dollars in my closet!”
But I couldn’t.
WHEN WE ARRIVED AT THE party, stars were posing on the red carpet and paparazzi were swarming. The moment we walked into the house, Blair found Brian.
“Mol, I’ll be right back. Brian wants to show me the view from the roof.” She giggled and winked at me.
I smiled and nodded weakly.
Really, BLAIR?
I sighed and grabbed a glass of champagne off of a silver tray. I waited for Blair for a bit and self-consciously pretended to be texting on my cell. After a while, Blair was still missing, so I wandered around the house, which was enormous, cold, and full of A-listers—statuesque models and buxom Playmate types. Outside, on the deck, I sipped my drink and admired the way the city sparkled below.
I thought being here would feel different in a new dress and proper shoes, but Hollywood was a lot grander than a new pair of shoes. The biggest stars in the world orbited this planet, and coexisting with them was a daunting proposition. I was used to the sensation of inferiority, having grown up with my superhero brothers. I just wanted something that was all mine. There were two men chatting on the patio, and I must have been as invisible as I suspected because they didn’t even acknowledge that I was there. One was a big director that I recognized easily, and the other was the well-known head of a talent agency.
“Will he do it?” the director wanted to know.
“He’s already agreed to the number.”
“How do you know?”
“My boy played with him in the Hollywood game.”
“What game?”
“The Secret Poker game.”
My ears perked up.
“It’s superexclusive. You need a personal invite and a password.”
I giggled at the password exaggeration.
“Are you serious?”
“Nobody knows where they play. Nobody who plays will talk about it. But everybody knows about it. And everybody wants in.”
“Who runs it, how can we get in?”
“Some girl. She controls the list.”
And then it struck me that I could have everything that I wanted. There was no reason to feel sorry for myself, to feel inferior anymore—I ultimate access. Business deals, movies, takeovers, mergers . . . the sky was the limit. I just needed to continue feeding it new, rich blood; and to be strategic about how to fill those ten precious seats. Recruitment for this game was crucial, and though I didn’t really control the list, it was the illusion that I did that mattered. From my hundreds of hours of watching the guys play, I felt confident in my ability to bluff. I downed my champagne and approached the two men.
“I couldn’t help but overhear you,” I started.
They both blinked at me, trying to decide if I was a mere peasant or someone they should be nice to.
“I’m Molly Bloom and I run the game you were referring to. If you give me your cards, I can get in touch if a seat opens up.” Suddenly these two powerful men were fumbling like mad to produce a card.
They started asking me a barrage of questions.
“Who plays? Where do you play? When’s the next game?”
I stayed quiet and coy. “I’ll be in touch, I promise.” I shook their hands and sauntered off. I could feel them watching me walk away.
Chapter 11
Christmas rolled around, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t been home in two years. My schedule was incredibly demanding, between Reardon’s ever-increasing needs and the game. I sensed that the looming housing crisis was taking a toll on the real-estate business. Reardon was even more stressed out and difficult than usual. I was at his side every day, and I often felt like his punching bag. I had become accustomed to the constant stress, minimal sleep, and basically living in a constant state of fear that I would lose everything. There was nothing stable about my life; I was completely beholden to Reardons whims. I knew that if he decided the game wasn’t serving him anymore, he could end it. I had spent the last year carefully inserting myself into the players’ lives, becoming a one-stop concierge for all their needs, in and outside the game. It was like having fifteen Reardons in my life, but I didn’t mind. After the Oscar party, I had overcome my shyness around people who were successful, famous, or any of the other attributes that made them a good addition at the table.
It still wasn’t easy to find the right players for the game, despite my having overcome my fears. First, I had to be discreet. Second, I had to make sure the player actually had the money he claimed to have (if you knew how many people in L.A. drove Ferraris and wore diamond-encrusted watches but had no cash or assets, you’d be shocked). Third, I had to make sure they weren’t very good players, and finally I had to make sure all of the very opinionated, critical elitists of the core group would approve of them. In the beginning, I managed to recruit lots of “fish,” or bad players, in poker parlance. The first night they played I was stressed to the max hoping my fish would lose, be amicable, and the other guys would like him. And then, if he did lose, I was stressed again hoping he would pay. The core guys all really liked me, treated me with respect, and allowed me to be in charge of their money. I couldn’t do anything to betray their trust.
Reardon, on the other hand, was harder to win over, even though I had been at it longer with him. I still felt like I had to prove myself to him every day. He was hard on me, even though deep down he believed in me. I had avoided going home because I knew he would see my missing my family as a sign of weakness, and I knew very well what Reardon thought of weakness. But this year, I decided to take a chance. Reardon said he was fine with it. I knew he wasn’t, but I chose to believe him—I felt I had earned a break.
I flew out on Christmas Eve and my mom picked me up at the airport and took me straight to the Denver Rescue Mission. It was a family tradition to serve dinner to the homeless on holidays.
I felt different this year. I still felt terrible for the folks at the shelter, but I also felt a bit detached. I spent the whole night checking my phone.
“Honey, why don’t you put that thing away for a while?” my mom eventually said. She was right. I put my phone in the car and tried to be present. It was the first time I had walked away from my phone for more than a minute since I started working for Reardon. I literally slept with the thing on my chest.
When we got back to the car, I had five missed calls and several new text messages. My stomach lurched and the familiar anxiety returned. It was Reardon, fuming about everything. The television didn’t work. I hadn’t set it up properly. There were a million things to do in the office and I hadn’t gotten them all done. He needed dinner reservations and he needed me to get in touch with one of the construction teams and why the hell wasn’t I answering my phone? I called Comcast and confirmed that they were having some issues, and the whole area was without cable. I called Reardon back and communicated the message. But he didn’t want to hear a reasonable explanation. He wanted to punish somebody. So he yelled and ranted while I sat in the car with my mom and my brothers. They could all hear his tirade. I was beyond embarrassed.
“This will be another fine!”
Reardon had recently taken to fining me when I didn’t do things “correctly.” The worst part was that he wasn’t even paying me through the company anymore. First my salary had decreased once we started the game, even while my hours increased. As my tips from the game grew, my salary had been completely abandoned. Now my tips were my only source of income, so being fined by Reardon didn’t mean having my pay docked, it meant digging into my own pocket.
Reardon had recently moved into a new house and he had kept me working until midnight every night before my trip home packing and unpacking boxes. Apparently I hadn’t done a good job packing a marble shelving unit that the previous owner had wanted to keep.
“YOU don’t care because it’s not yours; this shit would cost me a lot of money if it broke. You just half-ass it. Well, now you’re going to care. I’m fining you a thousand dollars. Now get back over here and do it correctly.”
Every time I protested a fine, or pushed back at all, he would threaten to take the game. I just accepted this as part of the fabric of my new life, like having to pay the troll to cross the bridge.
“I can’t control your local cable networks, Reardon,” I said.
He screamed louder: “You suck at everything these days, you don’t care, and you don’t give a shit.”
“Reardon, I do care, I go above and beyond, but I am with my family and I can’t talk about this right now. I have to go,” I said.
And for the first time since I started working for him, I hung up before he did.
MY BEDROOM WAS JUST AS I’d left it two years ago when I drove to L.A., maybe a little cleaner. It seemed like a lifetime ago that I had gone, but here were all of my things, as familiar as if I had never left. I sat at my desk and looked around, taking it all in. When the phone started to ring, I didn’t want to answer, but I was more afraid of the drama that would ensue if I ignored Reardon than the tirade I would hear when I picked up.
“Hi, Reardon,” I said.
“You’re fired,” he said.
“What?”
“No more game.”
“Are you serious?” I said. “You’re firing me on Christmas Eve? Because Comcast is having service problems?”
“Let me phrase it so that you can understand me,” he said. “You’re fired. Merry Christmas.”
And then I heard a dial tone.
Reardon had fired me before, sometimes on a daily basis, but this was a whole new level of cruel. I spent the whole evening feeling distracted and stressed. My stomach was tied in a million knots. I had so wanted to show up in my fancy new clothes, regale everyone with interesting stories from my new life, maybe even pick up the tab for dinner and then dash back to the airport leaving them all with no doubt in their minds that I was successful and happy. But instead, here I was, being ordered around, demeaned, and screamed at for my whole family to hear.
“I don’t get it,” my brother Jeremy said confusedly. Jeremy the Olympian, Tommy Hilfiger model, golden boy. His athletic ability and marketable face had allowed him to skip out on unglamorous jobs in the real world.
“You’re better than this,” my other brother said.
It was hard to explain to them, but I had my vision of my life etched in my mind and Reardon’s temper tantrums were a necessary evil. They understandably did not appreciate what controlling this poker game could mean. Forget the money, which was great and life-changing, but the network, the information, the access. Poker was my Trojan horse, I could use it to penetrate and access any part of society I wanted. The art world, finance, politics, entertainment. The list was endless. I had realized that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t stupidly brilliant at one thing—I was great at recognizing opportunity. I had an entrepreneurial spirit and these games were a gold mine of opportunity. Not to mention I got to learn from some of the world’s masters of their trades. So maybe my parents, or my brothers, or Blair didn’t understand, but I did. I needed to smooth things over with Reardon, but I wanted to let him cool off.
I called him the next morning figuring he would act as if nothing happened like he usually did, and dole out new orders. But his voice was different, he sounded very serious.
“I am going to have a new girl run the game. She will be calling you today. If you get your shit together you can come back to work on Monday, but only as my assistant. No poker.”
“Reardon, that’s not fair, I come to the office at seven A.M, I leave when you tell me, sometimes around ten P.M. If I make mistakes they are small and insignificant. I run your life and I am the only one helping you run the company.”
“The choice is yours, you can have your job back if you want, but I’ve made my mind up about poker. This conversation is over.” He hung up.
How could he do this to me? My heart was pounding. I felt like I had ice water in my veins. “I’ll figure it out, I’ll fix this, he will come around,” I told myself.
My phone rang again, I didn’t recognize the number.
“Molly?” said a female voice.
“Yes,” I said.
“Hi!” It was the new girl. “Reardon asked me to call you to get the names and numbers of the poker players . . .”
My anxiety turned to white-hot anger. There was no way I was letting this happen.
“I’m going to have to call you back,” “I said through gritted teeth. This time I hung up.
I took a deep breath. I needed to think. I needed to be strategic. I had learned from watching the guys play that it was the calm, cool, unfettered heads that prevailed. Playing a hand or making decisions motivated by emotion rarely yielded a positive outcome.
The odds were clearly stacked against me. Reardon was part of the billionaire boys’ club. He gambled with the players, spoke their language, and many of them feared him. I, on the other hand, was the girl who served them drinks, laughed at their jokes, did favors for them—and was always nicely compensated. And in their minds, I belonged to Reardon. I needed an ally who was as powerful as, or more powerful than, Reardon and who would actually stick his neck out for me. The clear choice was Phillip Whitford. He had power, clout, integrity, and we had become very close friends. I called him and explained the situation.
“He can’t do that,” Phillip said, quietly but firmly. I wanted to stay composed but it was just so unfair, and explaining it to Phillip made me so angry at the injustice that I started to cry a little.
“Molly, don’t cry. We will fix this. Here is what we are going to do.”
Phillip proposed having the game at his house with all the players except Reardon. He would talk to the guys about what Reardon had done and he would try to convince them to let me officially take over the game.
It was a long shot, but it was my only shot.
�
�MOLLY, C’MON, WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG?” my brother Jordan shouted from downstairs. We had planned a day of skiing, just my two brothers and I. It had been a long time, maybe six or seven years, since that had happened. I was looking forward to it.
I WAS QUIET IN THE CAR on the way to the mountain.
“Mol, what’s up? You haven’t been yourself this whole trip.”
“Sorry, I’m just stressed with work and stuff,” I said, and forced myself to sound jovial.
We rode up the lift, fighting over whether or not to have the bar up or down as we had done so many times as kids. We decided to make our way to the run—Ambush—where we had all learned to do moguls. Standing on the top of the lip looking down at the steep field of bumps, I could almost see my dad there, in his red jacket, leaning on his poles and screaming at us to keep our knees together. I remembered the first time I had stood in this place after my surgery. It had been months since I had been out of bed, much less on the slopes. That had been the most meaningful run of my life. Everyone had counted me out, but I got back on my skis. I made the U.S. Ski Team, and I got to wear the jacket, and stand on the podium with a medal around my neck. I don’t know if any of that would have felt as good if I hadn’t had to work so hard, to defy odds to get there. I smiled to myself, and calmness washed over me. I had nothing to lose, and so much to gain. I felt free and alive.
I watched my brother Jordan go first; he was still an incredible skier. He had always been a major talent but he had given up skiing competitively a long time ago to follow his dream of going to medical school.
Jeremy went next. Jeremy was number one in the world and was currently on a winning streak that no other skier had matched. Watching him ski was mind-blowing. He was my little brother, but he was also the best skier in the world. He was also currently the star wide receiver at the University of Colorado. I was proud and inspired by my brothers because they hadn’t simply relied on their natural-born talent. They trained or studied harder than their competition, they treated failures as opportunities to get even better. I suddenly felt confident and inspired. I pushed off with my poles and pointed my skis fluidly through the deep rut line.