The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  And perhaps most important of all: Potty Rules. At break, you got hundreds of dudes stampeding to take a piss at the same time. The queues for the women’s were no biggie—the one perk of low female participation—but the men’s was ludicrous. Duck out during the levels to use the john, or else “you’ll be spending your break time in line.” Plus, I added to myself, it would give me more time to survey my anxieties between play.

  I wrote it all down, feeling like a jerk. Staked to play in the Main Event, here I was picking the brain of someone so obviously in love with the game—the rushes, the science, the sheer dynamism of it—and she isn’t going to be there. She’d dipped into the circuit for nine months, flown out for the WSOP, but hadn’t made it into the Big Game.

  Per the racial-harmony movie script, I was supposed to give something back. What kind of Magic Negro was I? Sheesh. I had, as a child, thought Doug Henning to be a “cool dresser” and “kind of a badass,” but digging an eccentric magician’s clothes sense and metaphysical je ne sais quoi was not enough to make you Will Smith or Michael Clarke Duncan in an Oscar-bait film, melanin aside. I should have been delivering homilies, sucking out sickness by laying on my healing hands, helping some catatonic little white kid come out of his shell, whatever the fuck, and all I could do was take notes.

  I was playing for Methy Mike and Big Mitch and the other home-game slobs, but of course I was also playing for Helen now. I recorded her wisdom and pledged to play according to the teachings of my sensei, and try not to mess it up too much.

  “Get into your spine,” Kim said. “Get into your body.” I was getting into my spine, I was getting into my body. Per instructions, I imagined a string that traveled through my head into my spinal column, and that the rest of my body dangled off it: the Marionette, they called it. “I want you to feel supported, and unsupported.” It was easy to relate to being a puppet, under the sway of some malevolent and capricious puppet master: This was already a close approximation of my relationship with my deity. In Kim’s studio—as the fan almost covered the noise from the playground across the street and the ambulance hustling by—I pictured myself floating through the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, past the rows and rows of the barking slots and the creatures who clawed their hands through big, white chum buckets of coins, deep breath in, past the crowd huddled around the craps table as they cheered on some lucky devil’s rush, deep breath out, past the cheapo blackjack tables and the high-stakes blackjack tables and the cordoned-off rooms of the super high rollers, which were always empty save for the eerily patient dealer, and into the Pavilion, the chamber as large as a football field where the tournament unfolded, the numbers and color codes hanging from the ceiling on wires, where my first seat of the tourney awaited my rebuilt posture. Shuffle up and deal.

  “Did you get what you wanted out of it?” Kim asked. It was our last training session. Yes, I had. I could use this. Nowadays, whenever I watched James Bond fly across the world to Shanghai to karate chop a mad genius, I couldn’t help but think, “But what about the jet lag? Isn’t he pooped out from the jet lag?” Under Kim’s tutelage, I felt younger, de-harrowed, as if time were reversing itself. Even my gray hair had disappeared. Or so I thought. My ex-wife and I had owned white-haired cats, and it turned out I’d only washed the remnants of their hair out of my dreadlocks.

  “I bet you have a good poker face,” Kim said. “You’re hard to read. Most people, you can tell if they’re having an easy time or if something is painful. With you, you can’t really tell—”

  “My blank face—”

  “It’s hard to tell.”

  There it was again. For years and years, people had told me I had a good poker face. When they heard I was going to play cards at a friend’s on Friday night, or I ran into them on the subway while carrying my suitcase of monogrammed chips, which was a gift from a college buddy after I was a groomsman in his wedding, they’d say: “I bet you have a good poker face.” They don’t know a set of trips from a royal flush, but they know this fact. What they’re really saying is: You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing normal human expressions. You are a throwback to a Neanderthal state of raw, uncomplicated emotions, or a harbinger of our cold, passionless future, but either way, I don’t know what’s going on in your head.

  Perhaps I am projecting.

  Nonetheless, we have now definitely waded into the waters of training area numero three, EXISTENTIAL:

  I can’t help it if I understand that everything tends to ruin. Over our heads, Skylab is eternally falling down, I can see it all, the debris raining without cessation. I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom. By disposition, I was keyed into the entropic part of gambling, which says that, eventually, you will lose it all. The House always wins. Even for the most talented players, the cards fail for weeks or months or years, the beats are the baddest of the bad, you are blinded out of existence. Remember how I mentioned the blinds and how they escalate at intervals? If you don’t keep ahead of them by doubling up your stack, they’ll eliminate you. This is what I knew now: They are a Wave of Mutilation. You survive one wave of a Big Blind, then the half-size one of the Small Blind, diminished, and then the next wave starts gathering force down-table. I was in tune with decay, I had it down. What I needed to do was get in touch with decay’s opposing force, whatever that thing is that gets us out of bed each day and keeps us a few steps ahead of the wave: the hope of some good cards next hand.

  For the citizens of the Republic of Anhedonia, luck is merely the temporary state of outrunning your impending disasters. But sometimes my countrymen and I have to look beyond our native truths and pray. Even a temporary respite from the usual level of soul-snuffing drudgery is a blessing. Luck would have to do. You need skill in poker, but you also need the puppet master to be in a good mood every once in a while. I didn’t have much skill, but I’d prepared the best I could. I suppose I could have run simulations of previous World Series on the holodeck, but I didn’t have a holodeck, at least one I want to talk about. Luck would have to carry me where my training failed.

  I packed. Arranged my affairs. Was there anyone I’d forgotten to disappoint before I took off? It’d be a while before I returned, and I didn’t want to leave them hanging. On the morning of Friday, July 8, I hopped a plane to Vegas to play in the Main Event. Like one of my beautiful losers, I would step on the scale before a live studio audience and we’d all see how much bad stuff I had shed.

  I pity people who’ve never been to Vegas. Who dismiss the city without setting foot on its carpeted sidewalks. I’ll forgive the sanctimony in the question “But what do you do there?” The obnoxious self-regard. Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals. As a foreigner, I make a point never to judge the cultural norms of my adopted country.

  The pity remains, however. Frank Sinatra, the king of Rat Pack–era Vegas, once said, “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” The world is a disease you shake off in the desert. To delude yourself that you are a human being with thoughts and feelings, when your experience is but the shadow of truly living—it moves me to tears. Although I should note that in Anhedonian, the word tears means “to shrug in a distinctive ‘well, what are you gonna do?’ fashion,” and has nothing to do with lachrymal fluids produced by glands in the eye.

  I recognized myself in the town the first time I laid eyes on it, during a cross-country trip the summer after college. My friend Darren had a gig writing for Let’s Go, the student-run series of travel guides. Let’s Go USA, Let’s Go Europe, Let’s Go North Korea (they always lost a few freshmen putting that one together). The previous year his beat had been New York City. We spent the summer eating fifty-cent hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and “researching” dive bars like Downtown Beirut and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, which were beacons of pure, filthy truth in a city still years away
from its Big Cleanup. This summer he was assigned the Southwest. The subways didn’t run that far out, but his roommate Dan had a car, a brown ’83 Toyota Tercel, and the idea was we’d hit the open road and split the writing duties and money three ways.

  It was 1991. We’d just been diagnosed as “Generation X,” and certainly had all the symptoms, our designs and life plans as scrawny and undeveloped as our bodies. Sure, we had dreams. Dan had escaped college with a degree in visual arts, was a cartoonist en route to becoming an animator. Darren was an anthro major who’d turned to film, fancying himself a David Lynch–style auteur in those early days of the indie art-house wave. I considered myself a writer but hadn’t gotten much further than wearing black and smoking cigarettes. I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college’s creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep “Write What You Know”—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world’s indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

  First thing, Dan hooked up our ride with new speakers. We didn’t have money or prospects, but we had our priorities straight. No, I couldn’t drive, those days being the template of my passengerness. That spring, on schedule, I swore I’d get my license so I could contribute my fair share, but no. Look, I know how to drive, I’m just not legal. I took driver’s ed, but never got around to taking the road test. Never mind that I passed the class on false pretenses. I shot up half a foot junior year and had weird growing pains, like an excruciating stinging in my neck if I turned my head too fast. So every time the instructor led me into busy Broadway traffic, or told me to merge onto the West Side Highway, I faked it. I’d turn my head a little to simulate checking my blind spot and hope for the best. Everyone has blind spots. The magnitude of my self-sabotage was such that I willfully ignored all of mine. If you don’t look, you can pretend nothing is gaining on you.

  I promised to make it up to Dan and Darren by being a Faithful Navigator, wrestling with the Rand McNally and feeding the cassette deck with dub. Dub, Lee “Scratch” Perry, deep deep cuts off side six of Sandinista!—let these be indicators of the stoner underpinnings of our trip out West. As if our eccentric route were not enough. From New York down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to visit a college pal. He took me to my first mall. Even then, I had a weakness for those prefab palaces. “I asked Andy why there were no security guards around,” I wrote in my notebook. “He told me I had a New Yorker’s mentality.”

  Then hundreds of miles up to Chicago for a disappointing pilgrimage too complicated and inane to detail here. We bought two tiny replicas of the Sears Tower as consolation. Veered south, taking in the territory, cooking up plots. Inspiration: “discussing the plot of the movie Darren wants to write, about 7-Elevens that land in cornfields.” Down to New Orleans, where we slept in a frat house on mattresses still moldy and damp from the spring flood. One of Darren’s childhood friends belonged to the frat. His brothers wanted to know why he was “bringing niggers and Jews” into their chill-space. We sure were seeing a lot of America on this trip.

  Then west to tackle our Let’s Go assignment proper. Bull’s horns and turquoise rocks. We wrote up the Grand Canyon, which almost rivaled our Great Trouble Ditch back home, where on the vernal equinox we burn offerings to Saint Gus, who drove the smiles out of Anhedonia with nothing more than an electric zither and a list of proof. Hit Lake Mead, which also summoned pleasant memories of another homeland monument, the Puddle of Sorrows, where we held Senior Prom.

  Decided to keep driving so we could spend the night in Las Vegas, the camping thing not really taking. (“Hours of agony. Impossible to sleep. Bugs. A consistent feeling of itchiness.”) Miles and miles of black hills and winding roads and then at one crest it manifested, this smart white jellyfish flopping on the desert floor. We suited up in a cheap motel downtown. Anticipating all the sweaty, laundryless days and nights we’d spend in the Tercel, we’d hit Domsey’s, the famous Brooklyn thrift store, before we left NYC. We required proper gear for our Vegas debut. Dead men’s spats, ill-fitting acrylic slacks, and blazers with stiff fibers sticking out of the joints and seams. Roll up the sleeves of the sports jacket to find the brown stains from the previous owner’s track marks. We looked great.

  The whole trip out I’d maintained that I wasn’t going to gamble. Gambling was a weakness of the ignorant masses, the suckers inhabiting the Great American Middle we’d just driven through. I was an intellectual, see, could quote Beckett on the topic of the abyss, had a college degree and everything. Humming a few bars of the Slacker National Anthem here. I had a nickel in my pocket, though. I can’t remember the name of our hotel, the place is long demolished to make room for the Fremont Street Experience. It wasn’t a proper casino, just a grim box with rooms upstairs, but the first floor had rows of low-stakes gambling apparatus to keep the reception desk company. On our way to check-in, we passed the geriatric zombies in tracksuits installed at the slots, empty coin buckets overturned on their oxygen tanks. These gray-skinned doomed tugged on the levers, blinked, tugged again. Blink. Tug. Blink.

  Grisly. But I had a nickel. We were about to get our first glimpse of the hurly-burly of downtown Vegas. To stroll past Binion’s Horseshoe, in fact, where the twenty-second World Series of Poker had just wrapped up. Two hundred and fifteen people strong. The winner, Brad Daugherty, got a million bucks. Not that I knew that then. I was contemplating the nickel in my hand. Before we pushed open the glass doors, what the heck, I dropped it into a one-armed bandit and won two dollars.

  In a dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More. Remembering it now, I hear a sizzling sound, like meat being thrown into a hot skillet. I didn’t do risk, generally. So I thought. But I see now I’d been testing the House Rules the last few years. I’d always been a goody-goody. Study hard, obey your parents, hut-hut-hut through the training exercises of Decent Society. Then in college, now that no one was around, I started to push the boundaries, a little more each semester. I was an empty seat in lecture halls, slept late in a depressive funk, handed in term papers later and later to see how much I could get away with before the House swatted me down.

  Push it some more. We go to casinos to tell the everyday world that we will not submit. There are rules and codes and institutions, yes, but for a few hours in this temple of pure chaos, of random cards and inscrutable dice, we are in control of our fates. My little gambles were a way of pretending that no one was the boss of me. I didn’t have time for driving lessons before our trip because I was too busy cramming a semester of work into exam period. It had been touch and go whether I’d graduate, as I’d barely shown up for my final semester’s Religion course. The last thing I wanted to hear about was some sucker notion of the Divine. There’s a man in the sky who watches over everything you do, as all-seeing as the thousands of security cameras embedded in casino ceilings. So what? Nothing escapes his attention, and nothing will move him to intervene.

  After a few phone calls, the administration released me into the world with a D-minus. What was it to them? My passive-aggressive rebellion against the system was meaningless. The House doesn’t care if you piss away your chances, are draining Loretta’s college fund, letting the plumber’s invoice slide until next month. Ruin yourself. The cameras above record it all, but you’re just another sap passing in the night.

  The nickels poured into the basin, sweet music. If it worked once, it will work again.

  We hit the street.

  Before we left town, we bought dozens of tiny plastic slot machines from a trinket shop. Pink, red, lime green. They joined the Museum of Where We’d Been. Everybody’s a walking Museum of Where They’ve Been, but we decided to make it literal. We had serious epoxy. Each place we stopped, we picked up souvenirs and glued them to the hood of our jalopy. Two Sears Towers sticking up over the engine, a
row of small turquoise stones on the roof just above the windshield, toy buffalo stampeding across the great brown plain over the engine. Bull’s horns from Arizona, in case we needed to gore someone at ramming speed, you never know, and four refrigerator magnets with Elvis’s face on the front grille, to repel ghosts. We dotted the hood with glue and stuck the slot machines on, to show everyone where we’d been, the polyethylene totems marking us as goofball heathens.

  Weeks later, we were in Berkeley, sleeping on a friend’s floor. The friend was cat-sitting for a drug dealer, weed mostly. I didn’t approve of the drug dealer’s lifestyle choices—for vacation, he went camping. We wrote up our time in the land of Circus Circus and El Cortez, the cheap steaks and watered-down drinks. Let’s Go’s previous correspondent had been a prissy little shit, filling his/her copy with snobby asides. “But what do you do there?” He/she wrote:

  Forget Hollywood images of Las Vegas glamour, the city at base is nothing but a desert Disneyland. As a small, small world of mild, middle-aged debauchery, Vegas simply replaces Minnie and Mickey with overbright, neon marquees, monolithic hotel/casinos, besequinned Zieg feldesque entertainers, quickly marrying them in rococo wedding chapels.

  Percy, where are my smelling salts? What’s wrong with Disneyland? It brings joy to millions and tutors children about the corporate, overbranded world they’ve been born into. “It’s a Small World” is a delightful ditty, an ode to that quality of everyday existence by which the soul is crushed, diminished, made entirely small. No need to denigrate it. Better to worry about the lack of a clear antecedent for them in that last sentence. I would protect Vegas. How about:

  The magic formula of mild, middle-aged debauchery—offer everything but the gambling cheaply, and if you gild it, they will come—was hit upon by Bugsy Siegel in the 1940s. Das Kapital is worshipped here, and sacrifices from all major credit cards are accepted.