The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  Damn. We turned our hands over: He had a pair of 3s. What the hell was that about? But that’s how he got to be big stack: He played aggro, and from the glum faces around me, it was paying off.

  Neither of us made a set. I won with my 10s, and Mr. Sinister said, “That’s been happening to me all day.”

  Doubled up. I was at $40K, thereabouts, 19M. Out of the danger zone. Level 7 had harrowed me as I waited to shove my chips in. The first half hour of Level 8 had wrung me out, but it was time to get out of what Coach called “small-stack mentality.” I no longer had to play like I was trying to escape the space station before it self-destructed, as the chirpy computer voice counted down my M. I knew what it was to be an animal. Time was, when I read about the Donner party or a plane going down in the Andes, I was sickened by tales of survivors eating the dead. Now I knew I’d be all “Pass the hot sauce?” on Day 4. But I was back. I wasn’t a fucking animal anymore.

  It was an hour and fifteen minutes until dinner. I could do that. Then I got a pair of Aces.

  On a rush. Cool. I wasn’t going to go All In, I thought, because I could play normal again. I bet $2,200, the table standard for this level. I was going to make some chips. There were mucks, and then the guy in Seat 7 raised me $8,000. I hadn’t seen his face yet. I saw his hands. I saw his chips. He had me matched. Should I go All In? I called his bet, and we saw the flop.

  A Queen, an 8, and a 3. No straight, no flush. I was the first to act. He didn’t have pocket queens. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. The gift of fear. I bet $10K. He’s going to fold, I thought. Instead, he went All In.

  I said, “Okay.”

  “You’re All In?” the dealer asked. You had to say it.

  “Call.”

  He had KK. I showed my hand. The table groaned. “I didn’t put him on Aces,” Mr. Sinister said, with a touch of confusion in his voice.

  “I thought maybe he had Ace-Queen,” someone else said. They were already consoling Seat 7, down at the other end of the table. “Damn, dude.”

  The next card was a Jack. For a second I thought, Is he going to get a straight? I was being silly, that was impossible. Three double ups before dinner, just like Coach told me. I had it. He needed two cards to save him, the remaining kings. I was 94 percent favorite to win. But you know how ’70s sports movies end.

  He got his K.

  I was out.

  “Aww, man.

  “Damn.”

  “That’s a bad beat.”

  “I didn’t think he had Aces,” Mr. Sinister repeated, like a fucking idiot. I was starting to think he wasn’t a poker maestro, just some guy who’d been getting some good cards, which happened from time to time.

  Seat 7 was a portly twenty-something guy with an Australian accent. He came over and shook my hand. “You played that really well,” he said. “I didn’t think you had Aces.”

  No, no one knew I had Aces. I could have gone All In before the flop, or after the flop. Then they would have known something was up. Not that he would have folded KK, but still. Betting aside, I think you and I know why they didn’t see Aces coming. Why I was unreadable, why they could only guess at my hand.

  I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.

  The World Series of Poker’s official count of the nations represented at this year’s Main Event was ninety-eight. The number had always been off by one. Now the figure was correct. I grabbed my track jacket, jabbed the pink flip-flop in the pocket, and staggered out of the Pavilion. Absent of dignity, full of shame.

  Like I said, after the heist, all that’s left is the disappointing postscript. Normal life. Coach was surprised that I was calling her in the middle of the level. “It’s dinner?” I told her the whole thing, what I could remember.

  “He Rivered you! On the River!” I reviewed the betting—was there something I should have done differently? “There was no way he was getting away from Kings.” Just as I wasn’t going to get away from Aces. “There was no way you weren’t going to get all your money in that pot.” I still think about it, of course. But everybody has hands like that. The failures that stick.

  Husband Lex had just gotten home from work. Coach gave the rundown. “I told him it was a good way to go out,” she told Lex. As in, better than being washed away by the Wave of Mutilation.

  Lex spoke. “Lex just said, ‘That’s a terrible way to go out.’ ”

  I carried out Coach’s last order. I finally got to the seafood place and ordered the swordfish. Búzios, it was called. The bartender asked how I was doing. I told him.

  “Frankly,” I said, “it was pretty exhausting.”

  “Yeah, these guys come in here, they say, ‘I just busted out.’ Then they go, ‘Thank God, it’s over.’ ”

  Coach e-mailed me the next day to say she was heading to the Borgata w/Lex to play the 100k guarantee tourney. Before I left for Vegas, she’d told me that she was off gambling until September. After her disappointing visit in the early stages of the WSOP, she was taking a break. But being my coach, running scenarios, had put her back in the game. In the fall she pursued the circuit more intensely, even when Lex couldn’t make it. That was new. At that December Harrah’s event I described earlier, she met Matt. And Matt started coaching Coach.

  “When you busted out,” she said, “I was horrified. But my first thought was, Good, now I can go to AC!” There’s a poker player for you.

  I am not Will Smith. Or Michael Clarke Duncan. I cannot heal your limp, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. Just because. But I like to think I helped Coach out a little, like she’d helped me. Perhaps Doug Henning had rubbed off on me after all. Magic Doug Henning, who maybe had some Negro blood, I think. Have you seen his hair?

  As for me, it was time to go back to Anhedonia. Since busting out, I’d felt my poker knowledge slipping away, “Flowers for Algernon”–style. That too-brief vision of the secret poker world losing resolution, dead pixels blooming. I had been changed, and I did not want to return to who I had been. I needed to hold on to it.

  Stay with me, please.

  So I did what one does in these situations. In the airport I stopped at Hudson News and bought a souvenir mug, a refrigerator magnet shaped like a flip-flop, and a bottle opener that said “Win Lose or Draw.” I’m the sentimental type.

  I heard a song, they were playing it in the store, a slow piano tune. There was a TV screen on the wall above the T-shirts, and I saw they were running a loop of the Bellagio dancing water, shot from a helicopter at night, and the music was “Clair de Lune.” Courtesy of the Las Vegas Board of Tourism, I imagine.

  “Clair” was a cheap date it turned out, the movie now part of the town’s mythology. I didn’t mind that my private notion had never been mine at all but a popular romance. I couldn’t own it. What would Johnny Moss, the first champion of the World Series of Poker, think of how his game had changed over the decades, as it transformed from an intimate competition among buddy-rivals into a multimillion-dollar international event, bigger than any single individual. If Johnny Moss walked into the Pavilion today and saw the thousands of players worrying their stacks, the tables upon tables of hopeful souls, heard the symphony of crickets, I think he’d say, Deal me in. It’s not mine, but it’s cards.

  “Clair de Lune” in a Hudson News franchise was nice exit music from Vegas. It made me feel, how do I put this, good.

  There’s always next year, right? What the heck, I’ll play the circuit, win some tournaments, and come back. Palm Beach. New Orleans. Tunica. Never heard of Tunica, and maybe that’s a good thing. Return to Vegas. Make it to Day 3 this time, make it into the money, it will all work out. Maybe I’ll win, and they’ll play the national anthem of the Republic of Anhedonia in the Pavilion. I’ll stand on the stage in my track jacket, which is now decked out in rhinestones and flapping Vegas Gold fringes, place my hand over my heart (it would take some time to find it), and the speakers in the great hall will broadcast my homeland’s song, loud and clear so that everyo
ne can hear it: “NYUH-GUH-UH! UH-GUUHH! NYUH-UGH UGH OH GOD NO NOT AGAIN SSSIIIGGGHHH!”

  Try again. It was a very Bad News Bears thing to say. Scrappy. Inspiring.

  Actually, fuck it.

  I learned a lot of things during my long, bizarre trip. About myself and the ways of the world. One, do not hope for change, or the possibility of transcending your everyday existence, because you will fail. Two, if people put their faith in you, you will let them down. And three, everything is a disaster. In short, nothing I hadn’t known since childhood, but sometimes you can forget these things when engulfed by a rogue swell of optimism, which happens, if infrequently.

  There was a fourth item, but I’ll save it for the kid, for when she’s older.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, Sag Harbor, and Zone One. He has also written a collection of essays called The Colossus of New York. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, Grantland, and The New Yorker. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in New York City.