The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  “I’m terrible at the Final Table when it’s Heads-Up,” I complained to Coach at the end of our first meeting. Dealing one-on-one with another person, in primal communication, it fed my psychological defects. My shrink thought this was a suitable line of inquiry, and perhaps we’d get to it once we dealt with all that other crap.

  “You won’t be playing Heads-Up,” Helen said. In the WSOP, like all tournaments, when people get knocked out the guys on the floor fill the seats with other players, but once the Main Event is reduced to nine guys, they adjourn until November. To maximize TV ratings. In the unlikely event al-Qaeda gunned down everyone in the tournament except for me and a Robotron, I’d have plenty of time to learn about proper Heads-Up play.

  The study problems in Phil Gordon’s books gave me grief, I told her. “Phil Gordon’s always like, ‘I was at this table playing 8-6 offsuit’—”

  “Forget that. You’re too you to play that way. Play your game.”

  I was too me. Precisely.

  EXERCISE: Floss. It’s difficult not to think about decay in a casino. How all our hopes and dreams are but insubstantial creatures, prey to chance and human frailty. The winnowing of hope, the evanescence of desire. Those horror-show pants we bought that one time. One can’t help but contemplate decay when confronted with such a constant parade of monstrous dentition in casinoland. That’s what I got for playing the cheapo games, but still, take care of yourselves, people.

  I threw myself into my training. My game was improving, even if I had yet to repeat the success of my first tournament. It was nice to have a diversion from how I usually spent my days, which was basically me attempting to quantify, to the highest degree of accuracy, the true magnitude of my failures—their mass, volume, and specific gravity. It passed the time in the absence of hobbies. Sure, I worked on my nagging sense of incompleteness a lot, when I had a spare moment, but that was more of a calling than a hobby.

  On to the second area of training, PHYSICAL:

  The vessel of my body—this fragile sack of blood, “essence” (see above), and melancholy humors—had to get up to competition-grade performance. I’d long aspired to the laid-back lifestyle of exhibits at Madame Tussaud’s. There are cool perks. You don’t have to move around that much or waste energy on fake smiles, and every now and then someone shows up to give you a good dusting. Over time I had indeed become the wax-dummy version of myself, but that wouldn’t cut it at the Main Event.

  Throughout the ages, much has been written about the interrelatedness of the mind and the body. Suburban moms who lift Volkswagens off pinned toddlers, for example. I’d be a fool to ignore the holistic reality. In Vegas, I’d be lifting metaphorical Kias and Hyundais left and right.

  To the outside observer, it seems like poker involves a lot of reclining in chairs, but you’re still burning fuel. “Lex and I lost five pounds!” Helen informed me, referring to their last trip. The Main Event at the World Series of Poker ran seven days, each one a twelve-hour series of jungle engagements. You had to be vigilant. You grab a bite when you can, the caloric intake going to power your game, your all-important table image, the mask of your poker identity: alternately representing strength and weakness, riding herd over tells, manufacturing ersatz tells, placing bait for traps, stealing and thieving blinds. Picking up chips. Putting down chips. It adds up.

  Could someone gimme a hand in my new self-improvement scheme? Up until now, my idea of “making a new start” was not importing my bookmarks to a new browser. My torpor had stretch marks.

  Finally I got a recommendation from an old girlfriend who’d become a physical trainer. I think she and I are in agreement that we were a crappy couple, both of us subprime dating quality, even by the low, low standards of early-’90s High Slackitude. It had been a terrible relationship, but I was grateful, for it prepared me for terrible relationships to come, so that I would not be surprised. The Matrix sequels, for example. In later years, she became a physical trainer and left the state. She was very helpful and gave me a local name: Kim Albano.

  Kim was a licensed physical trainer and patient soul. A Long Island native, she moved to the city in ’99 and entered the biz because she simply loves inspiring people to be healthy. She called her practice “Conscious Intermodel Fitness,” specializing in posture and core strengthening, Vinyasa yoga with a little Iyengar thrown in. Alexander Technique. I had been given yoga mats over the years as gifts, but the phrase “loose-fitting clothing” had always confounded me, conjuring visions of tunics or otherwise Jawa-type vestments, neither of which I owned. I ultimately opted for dad-style cargo shorts, whose multiple pockets I increasingly relied on to spare me the indignity of carrying a fanny pack or man bag.

  I met Kim at a space she sometimes used on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. She’d offered me a group lesson in Prospect Park with some of her regulars. Too public, I thought. I preferred to work out like I eat beef jerky: making vulgar grunting noises sans witnesses. Needless to say, I was a tad let down when the storefront studio allowed passersby to observe my lesson. Another exhibit in the bizarre sideshow that is a New York street. Per usual.

  I described my assignment before we met, and she was amenable. “I have to become a Living Poker Weapon in six weeks,” I said.

  “You mentioned ‘Rocky-style’ in your e-mail,” she said.

  “This might be a bit conceptual.”

  Kim did my intake, quizzing me about my exercise history (mere vapor), ailments (psychosomatic in the main), and hydration regimen (“You have to keep drinking water”). Was I under stress? I had just finished a book, I explained, so I was less stressed than I had been. Any injuries she should be aware of? The only big thing was this formidable crick in my neck, which had only lately disappeared. My magnificent ergonomic chair, the steadfast galleon I had sailed through books and books, had finally sprung a leak. After ten years, the webbing of the seat had given way, so I stuffed a throw pillow in there when I had to work. I sat in there half sunk, arms grotesquely angled, and over the weeks a stupendous crick took up residence around my left shoulder blade. The pain was exacerbated by my habit of crawling to the living-room couch when I had insomnia. The 5:00 a.m. traffic reports on the bleary, early-bird news shows often returned me to sleep—in my aforementioned license-less state, the reports of blocked interstates and impenetrable bridges were a lulling white noise to me, abstractions stripped of meaning. I was sleeping on the couch so much it was as if I were married again. “But it’s mostly gone away,” I told Kim.

  I described an average day at the tournament, the importance of keeping your shit together as you trudged through bad beats and dead cards, resisting the lure of going “on tilt”—a species of berserker rage that destroyed one’s game play. She taught me how to sit. She taught me how to breathe according to the basic principles of the nineteenth-century health guru F. M. Alexander, and reintroduced me to my neglected spine, which I had long treated as a kind of hat rack for my sundry, shabby articles of self.

  We ran through elementary yoga poses—cat, cow, downward dog. I mentioned that we got twenty-minute breaks every two hours. What could I do to stay loose and limber? She said, “Cat, cow, downward dog.” I said, “I can’t do that in a casino.” My table image would suffer. We proceeded. I liked the sitting and the breathing, the glancing moments of “proprioception.”

  “Bring it into you,” she said, “make it yours, and then you can bring it into your poker.”

  As I walked out into the glare and early-summer heat of Fourth Avenue, I felt a peculiar sense of well-being, which I quickly banished by sheer force of will, as I didn’t want to ruin my streak. Assimilating this knowledge would take time, but I felt that soon I would be a lean, mean sitting machine.

  EXERCISE: Sunglasses. Like most people, I’d spent my whole life looking for a socially acceptable situation in which I could wear sunglasses indoors, and here it was. They made for good TV, most definitely, the sunglasses guys and their imposing, unreadable faces, their lenses reflect
ing back your own dumb face. Mirrored, wraparound, robin’s-egg-tinted. Sunglass Hut did not stock what I required. I needed the exactly just-so pair, some sort of Vulcan smithy-god to forge them in the very bowels of the earth, a set of glowing, molten intimidation shades in a scene drawn by Walt Simonson. Well, I tried, but despite my efforts I couldn’t bring myself to wear sunglasses during my practice runs. The social taboos were too strong, or my inner douche-bag monitor set too high, I dunno. I’d have to make do with my naturally half-dead mug.

  Playing cards, making friends. Before one break, the elderly gent next to me told me, “You’re a good player.”

  “Thanks.”

  What had he seen in his life? A world war, a cold war. Dude walks on the moon, and another invents the internet. After the civil rights movement, the arrival of the first black president, perhaps the early twenty-first-century wonder that is a poker table in a hypermodern casino, and my presence there, reminded him of how much the world had changed in his lifetime.

  “But you know what?” he added.

  “What?”

  “You talk too much!” Cackling.

  I kept my mouth shut, it was true. Poker was the perfect game for me, as I didn’t have to speak. It was like Disneyland for hermits. I had found the place where I could go out among the humans, elbow to elbow for hours, and not say a fucking word. It brought me back to the old days, when I first started to write, and I’d spend whole days shut up in my apartment and the only thing I’d say to another living being was “… and a pack of Winston Lights.”

  Quite a few things about poker reminded me of the writing life. Like, you sat on your ass all day. That was a huge one. Big plus. And we were all making up stories, weaving narratives. Pros will talk about “the story you’re telling with your hand.” A hand possesses a narrative arc with a setup, rising action, denouement. Each time you throw money into the pot you’re telling a story, from the opening call to the River re-reraise. As Saint Harrington put it, “A player is nothing more than the sum of his betting patterns.” After years of experience, you recognize plots: He must have trips, and that guy’s representing a flush by raising the pot on that third heart. You must fake out their reads, misdirect through the red herring of a half-pot bet or a bluff, spinning a story through hours of tells, betting patterns, your poker persona. Until the endgame, when the psychology of the characters catches up with everybody. Always on the lookout for that M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end when you discover you were dead the whole time.

  The day-to-day horror of writing gave me a notion of tournament time. Writing novels is tedious. When will this book be finished, when will it reveal its bright and shining true self? It takes freakin’ years. At the poker table, you’re only playing a fraction of the hands, waiting, ever waiting for your shot. If you keep your wits, can keep from flying apart while those around you are self-destructing, devouring each other, you’re halfway there. The poseurs yakety-yaking about the Fitzgeraldian flourishes of their latest novella, the puffed-up middle-managers droning on about how they knew you had 10s—they never make it to the Final Table. Let them flame out while you develop a new relationship to time, and they drift away from the table.

  Poker players and writers are always inside the game and also outside the game observing it. When I whipped out my notebook, no one blinked. I could have been recording bad beats, misplayed hands, or assembling a dossier on other players. No one cared what I scribbled. Like when you write a book.

  EXERCISE: Purify the spirit. I had to improve my diet in Vegas, start eating a proper breakfast in order to make it through each day’s marathon. “Do you eat meat?” Helen asked. I did. “Good.” It was a long time to the dinner break, and that’s when some players start drinking, and drinking led to errors. No more ruining my body with noxious substances, poisoning my mind with various toxins. I was doing well with the cigarettes, had been off them for nine months, although it helped that the disappointment of not having a post-dinner cigarette, or a just-stepped-outside cigarette, or a just-woke-up cigarette was dwarfed by the newer, state-of-the-art disappointments the world threw my way. I was saved by scale.

  Why stop with cigarettes? I could renounce more things, like (1) cut back on my microbrews and (2) most reality television. Get behind me, master brewers of Brooklyn, Portland, and Chapel Hill, you hipster hopsters and your newfangled brands of incipient, yuppified alcoholism. My reality-TV purge—America’s Got Schlubs, Keep Trying to Outwit Death You Stupid Monkeys—meant everything save the competitive weight-loss shows, whose contestants, I recognized, were on a parallel journey to my own. The Biggest Loser: exactly so. My failures possessed a weight, I carried them around, and before poker I sought the proper instrument of their measure. These reality-TV pilgrims had already learned how to calculate their weakness, for its substance possessed an actual mass determinable before a live TV audience. Those shows made me more teary than Pixar movies, the unalloyed pleasure these guys and gals displayed over their new mastery of self, the erasure of decades of daily, mounting mistakes. Just look at the pants they used to wear. This one guy lost a hundred and fifty pounds and said, “I was carrying another man around.” They had found themselves: It had been hiding in their skins all this time, waiting. That better, biding self. I could do it. More fiber, for starters.

  Coming back at night was the worst of it. I’d briefly glory over some incremental improvement in my play, then remember I hadn’t won any money since my first Trop excursion. So much for aptitude. I was like a piece of meat, hacked from a carcass and heavily spice-rubbed, but still waiting to be smoked. Waiting to become what it was meant to be: a tough, cured, beautiful strand of jerky.

  Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on “motherfucker.” At the end of my AC working day, I’d hit the bus terminal, with its wee-hour convocation of squalor. The buses didn’t run as frequently at night—it was easier to get in than out. Roach Motel. Drunks, drug-addled denizens, and Those with Nowhere to Go shambled about, trapped in the depot. When the bus finally arrived, the ride back was quiet and dark, the powered-down Port Authority a maze of metal gates and closed-off corridors. The terminal was too sprawling and impossible to police otherwise. Rotten Old New York, the Ratso Rizzo New York was still here. I didn’t know what I was doing there. Anyone present at that hour was a clump of hair stuck in the American drain. I just wanted to get home and catch some sleep before I saw the kid.

  Then I ran out of time. Met with Coach for a final huddle. She’d just returned from the early stage of the WSOP, that land of abundant Omaha Hi-Low and H.O.R.S.E., Six Handed. Trying to scrape up a stake for the Main Event.

  “It was heaven. Heaven!” Pure joy in her voice at the thought of it. Although Helen cashed deep in the $1,500 No-Limit event, she didn’t win enough to pay her way into the Big Game. She was off gambling until September. “I had an agreement with myself,” she said. “That’s how we tell ourselves we’re not addicts.” Whatever works, I say. Since she’d returned east, she’d been too bummed to follow WSOP news. I tried to give her an update, what I had gleaned from her Twitter list of players to follow, but I was pretty useless.

  Coach gave me another poker seminar, and I scribbled bullet points. She briefed me on some new moves she hadn’t seen before—people in Vegas were breaking out their next-level shit all over the place. After listening to her talk of stealing blinds and short-stack mentality, I was freaking out. Told her so. She shared a new mantra she’d come up with for this last WSOP trip: “It’s okay to be scared, but don’t play scared.” When you’re scared, that means you’re paying attention. Don’t let it destroy you.

  I recalled the time my father abandoned me in the Dismal Forest in Northern Anhedonia when I was eight. He blindfolded me, put a crossbow in my hands, and said, “Don’t come back until you take down a twelve-point buck for supper.” Was I scared? Sure. But I did what he asked of me, and over the years I’d successfully convinced myself that I was a better man for it. (Never lost my hat
red of squirrels, however, the devious little fuckers.) Fear situates you in the moment. Focuses you. I knew that.

  “You’re gonna be targeted no matter what, ’cause you’re very pretty. You do not look like the typical player.”

  Pretty?

  “You know, you got the threads. I have never seen that at the poker table.”

  No, I did not look like the average player—i.e., I was not a paunchy middle-aged white guy. Dreads and threads. No apologies. I’m a dandy. When it came to raising the kid, my ex-wife and I split duties according to our strengths. She did morals and ethics. I did clothes. When I took this assignment I had no idea that my plumage was going to be held against me. First my deplorable lack of tournament acumen, now this.

  As a woman, an “other” at this Iron John weenie roast, Coach knew what she was talking about. “I have the same situation where you look different,” she said. “They’re not going to give you credit, and they’re going to come after you, and you have to wait for situations to take advantage of that.”

  So, watch out, Little Lord Fauntleroy, with your prancing and cavorting. On to other practical matters. Have a big breakfast. She was not a germophobe, she assured me, but she advised against getting a burger or whatever delivered to the table, as people do. “If that fell on the floor, I would probably eat it. But the poker chips is filth. It’s filthy.” She didn’t have to tell me. I end every excursion outside my front door with a Purell rubdown. Nook and cranny, baby. “That’s why I enjoy a banana or Snicker’s bar,” Coach confided. “Because it has its own wrapper, and you just hold the wrapper.”