He Played for His Wife and Other Stories

by Anthony Holden

  There’s a break while they redraw for seats at the final two tables. Sitting off to the side by myself, I slide another nitro pill under my tongue. They work faster if you lean forward, inhale, and bear down like you’re passing an XXL turd. Boom! Nothing like sucking an explosive to get your blood flowing again.

  But now that I’m breathing easier, my brain is shouting, ‘Call 911!’ Maybe I could persuade the EMT guys to carry me on a stretcher the sixty yards to the john, insert the balloon on the way back, then stand by till play ends tonight. My bladder is yelping, along with everything else, but I don’t feel quite up to the stroll. I barely have the energy to open Jennifer’s text: right fingers pressed against her cleavage, focus on the three-diamond ring I bought her out here sixteen years ago. Can’t wait to c u on Wednesday, i.e., don’t be bad in the meantime. As if.

  If this were a cash game, I’d Uber to the nearest ER. I have no idea where that is, but I do know that once the docs get their hands on you, they can practically bring you back from the dead. Whether they kept me in the hospital for an hour or a week, my chips would be waiting for me when I got back. Whereas all a tournament player has is equity in the prize pool. The whole time I was gone the dealers would be taking 150K in blinds every round, plus 15K in antes per hand. But. Do I want to risk dying here, surrounded by poker degens, eighteen hundred miles from my girls? I sure as hell don’t want to prematurely exit my favourite, my better-than-sex, situation: sitting behind a big stack late in a bracelet event. I’d rather die as a chip leader than live in a tangle of IVs, EKGs, beeping monitors. Once they start tying you off with those rubber strips, stabbing the crook of your elbow and the back of your hand, they’ve got you. Plus I’ve never been able to not watch my thick, yellowish blood slowly filling up the glass vials.

  If Lee or Jennifer were here, they’d’ve already called 911, even though Lee likes to say, ‘Hospitals make you sick. The trick is to stay the hell out of them.’ Jennifer would simply ask what I thought our girls would want me to do.

  The monitor I prefer, the one right above me, shows fifty-two seconds left in the break, between twin scrolls of prize money.

  1

  $1,065,304

  2

  $807,402

  3

  $612,419

  4

  $366,787

  5

  $276,632

  6

  $210,121

  7

  $160,734

  8

  $123,831

  9

  $96,082

  10–12

  $75,119

  13–15

  $59,136

  16–18

  $46,909

  I hoist myself out of the chair and walk as unlike a dying old man as I can twenty steps over to my new table. Seat seven, between Eric Chobani and Viv Pontchartrain. We’re still playing 50/100/15. With 3.685 million, I’m basically tied for third with four other players, including Viv, who I’m lucky to have on my right. Tulsa’s at the table behind me.

  My stack does not suck. Nine twenty-chip towers of orange support five towers of dark green 25,000s. The two pretty lavenders on top, with grey-on-grey chevrons daubed onto their sides, are each worth 100,000. NO CASH VALUE indeed. The whole thing is fun to caress. I washed my hands before dinner, but there’s already greenish-black schmutz under my right middle fingernail, from riffling short stacks together. Time to run it up and ship this damn thing, then write Positively First Place hopefully with a less obvious title by the time I turn it in.

  Black tens is the first hand I open with, attracting two callers, neither a player I recognise. I lead into the 3-Q-7 flop. When the Middle Eastern dude in seat one says, ‘All in,’ my chest pain spikes high enough to make me literally piss in my pants. I try to look normal while folding. There was 900K in that pot I might’ve won by bristling up or getting lucky, but so now . . .

  I must’ve blacked out. My arms thrum with current, and I can’t turn my head. If I could, I’d sneak another Nitrostat under my tongue. No, no, not sneak! Who cares now who’s watching? I try to text luv ya to Bridget but knock my phone off the cushion and onto the floor. Bending over that far wouldn’t end well. Too dizzy, for one thing. Ask Viv to, or Eric? No way. Even funnier, I’m still pretending to be A-OK.

  A card spins into my knuckle.

  ‘You solid, man?’ says Eric, with pesto on his breath.

  ‘Clearly not,’ says the guy to his left. ‘Are you kidding me?’

  A second card pings off my thumb. My hands just don’t work well enough to block out Viv’s or Eric’s view as I thumb up the corners. Red kings.

  A guy to Viv’s right opens, I can’t see for how much. The awl through my ventricles scrapes away what was left of my will as the dealer, Allah, shifts his gaze: action on me. I had him yesterday in Pavilion, but I can’t remember if I lost or won any big pots. Same round face and wide smile, same black wire frames, dark wrists still too slender for his glowing white cuffs. If only I could write about this! All I can do is knock some lavenders and greens off my stack, not on purpose. One is still rolling past the pot when someone says, ‘Call.’ Allah tosses the all-in disc towards that player.

  ‘So Jim’s all in too?’

  I’m doubled over, paralysed in a hug of the white-hot bolt being screwed into my thorax. Desperate to breathe, I’m coughing and gagging instead.

  Carpet grit burns my left cheek. Glasses half-off. Slender ankle, grey sock.

  ‘He’s choking, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘No Heimlich, man, unless you wanna kill him. Here comes the stretcher.’

  ‘They’ve been letting him play?’

  ‘Sir, can you hear me?’

  Huge bearded face above mine. Dark pupils, kind. Doing my best to make eye contact, to tell him he has my permission to take me away from the table and please tell my four girls I love them so much, trying to name them as he pulls away, repositions himself. To do what?

  Miles above us, Tulsa looms over me.

  ‘Wow. Talk about a bad beat.’

  Thumbs yank my mouth open, slimy teeth clack against mine. Can’t see but can’t shut my eyes. Compared to this latest sledge jolt to my heart, beard hairs across my bulging eyeballs are a kind of relief. But not really.

  Can’t even scream now as chip crickets click in the darkness.

  Five Tables

  by D.B.C. Pierre

  Everything has its DNA, and poker must have its DNA, but it’s harder to decode when there’s a gun pointing over the table. Who knows if the code is in the cash or the cards, the coiling smoke or the crocodile faces. You’d expect the gun if this were a movie but it’s not, it’s your common-or-garden Friday night with pizza that also found the flair to mix a .38 Special revolver in a scene with alcohol, weed, testosterone and poker. To top it off, the owner cheats and still has worse cards than you.

  If I played chess there would be no revolver. If I played bingo – still a game for money – there would be no revolver. If I played backgammon, bowling or darts, even for money, for cars and houses, against cheaters – no revolver.

  So what the fuck is it with poker? Where did this gangsta gene come from? The reason we don’t take a gun bowling, for instance, apart from the chance that we might use it, is that we don’t want to put anyone off their stride. Once a gun comes out there’s no unseeing it, the shadow stays cast and speaks for itself.

  ‘Shall I fix some more dip?’

  ‘Thanks, I have a revolver.’

  ‘Little refill there?’

  ‘Thanks, I have a revolver.’

  ‘I just saw you palm that king off the table.’

  ‘Bang.’

  Did Western movies cast this long a shadow or was revolver DNA there all along? Let’s say this guy routinely packs a gun: why pull it out for poker and not for Happy Families? Come to that, where are all the gun-slinging heroes of rummy and bingo?

  I look back to try to break the code.

  My favourite aunt introd
uced me to poker on a dark wood Victorian dining table. She did it without a revolver because she was the revolver and her range was all your life long. No one ever tested it, you knew by looking down the barrel. She played with a couple comprising an Italian and a Spaniard who could scream at each other just for being an Italian and a Spaniard. On top of that they played hard. My uncle was also at the table smoking cigars and keeping things honest. At a certain point a lock of silver hair would fall over his face and he would be funny for the rest of the night, although he was generally a solemn man. I was at the table. Nine, ten years old. This aunt was the kind who bullied and usurped your parents till you found yourself living it up past two in the morning. God-sent favourite aunt, we played for money and tasted wine and yelled in broken English to make the foreigners understand through lianas of smoke trying to coil up to the light between our flailing hands.

  ‘Look the jet pork.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look the money in the jet pork.’

  ‘Ah – jackpot!’

  ‘Ha ha ha.’

  ‘Ha ha ha ha!’

  The Italian made authentic pizza and it was deep-fried, not baked. Handful of tomato and herbs, plus parmesan from the days when it still reeked of vomit. All this could happen at midnight. It was the life for me, oh yes. Both couples took the game seriously enough to end up yelling at each other, you’d feel the tension rise and rise till one of them found something hilarious and the air would collapse in bricks. They were always yelling and always finding something hilarious. It acted as a bellows that fanned you till you popped. I’m sure the poker was merely a Ouija board for it, one strand in the gene for something bigger and probably dinosaur-shaped. French doors to the living room were shut, which only happened for poker. The door to the kitchen was also shut, which sealed us in a crucible. Glasses clinked, faces grew edgy and cash morphed around like a splattered amoeba, blobs of it attached by invisible stalks to your brow that met and writhed over the table. Five-card draw was our game, no jokers. Life or death once the deck was shuffled. Then:

  ‘Jet pork.’

  ‘Ha ha ha!’

  The first night popped my brain for good. After that the endorphins didn’t even need a game to take place, I got a rising buzz just waiting for the right conditions to gather, like a puppy waiting for a leash to rattle. The phone rings: could be the Italian. Glass of wine: could lead to two. Two could lead to poker. The phone rings: Spaniard, could lead to Italian. Good mood could lead to wine, wine could lead to poker. Occasionally the stars would line up, right mood, right wine, ring ring, Italian. Then the table sloughed its salt and pepper and cloth to become a vortex, a court of miracles where the laws of maths spun dust-devils up through your hands. I didn’t know at the time how unlikely it is in the history of the world that a deck of cards has ever shuffled into the same order twice, nor how remote the chance is that it ever will; but you could feel that maths swirling. It was a voltage. And there was violence in it. Play-violence, but violence, until laughter broke through like a bomb in a vase. Even the laughter was violent.

  Everything was lit up so high, that’s the thing.

  The light stayed with me till years down the line when friends who’d also felt the buzz joined me in magical thinking about it, and we tried to invoke it from scratch. We hunted that DNA as a surfer hunts waves, finally doing what the surfer would do if he was made president: drop a bus in the sand two hundred yards offshore to cause the right nature of waves. Our method was to invest the table with the sanctity of a shrine, a monument to the maths and the light and somehow even the yelling. We created a table of miracles before the fact, a real court of miracles by simply calling it one and wishing on it, although in another life it was the kitchen diner of a bungalow in the suburbs where the wood-effect Formica was more accustomed to children. Still it seemed to work, we bent the laws of probability with poker and other games, but it was impossible to say how much of it came from the game and how much from our worship. Not that it pretty much mattered at the time: the cards were a doorway to the sacred in everything, and it wasn’t long before we were celebrating the absent dead from the table by reciting obituaries with our first drink upraised, Steady Teddy, Doris Elliot, Billy No-Legs, Mr King, fifty souls in the end, and some of their dogs.

  It also showed that the buzz could survive without violence. At this level the DNA was like a toy piano, you could make it go plink but you couldn’t play a tune. We just plinked and partied and built a church for the thing.

  Worlds away at a rescued office table in another time above a mechanic’s shop on the seamier outskirts of a town, I rode the court of miracles again. All the old strands were there, the barking, the laughter, but the wine was now rum and the pizza was baked and delivered by any place we could find that would still service that address. Two Vietnam veterans ran the table, having practised in the jungles where they also grew their what-the-fuck smiles. They were physically half a generation older than me but something in their lives made them younger by that much and ten years more. They had ungrown-up at a certain point. Ungrown-up or maybe given up. However it was, they had come back with a taste for mellower times than choppers and napalm. Occasionally they borrowed my belt to try and spawn mellow times in a vein. It meant there was no gun at this table. There was no violence in the buzz, but there was still a buzz; it crackled at a lower voltage with drawled punctuations of ‘Shii-it’ from one of us who slept under cardboard sheets on the street after having disgraced himself at the Salvation Army hostel. We didn’t know how he’d done it exactly. Probably didn’t take much, he seemed affable enough under his whiskers. One of the table’s jobs for the night was to see that he left with enough small change to take a bottle of Thunderbird back to bed, although after the first hand we often had to stake his kitty anyway, sometimes stake the whole night and still advance him the Thunderbird. We worked it out among six of us. Again the violence/DNA theory took a hit at this mellow table, but here’s the interesting thing about it compared to other tables: everybody cheated. Everybody cheated and everyone knew that everybody cheated. Which is a different game.

  Cheating was accepted by a consensus of crocodile smiles and dirty chuckling. It was accepted that cheating was fun and could still be honourable. Deceit was already in poker’s DNA, went the logic, so this was no quantum leap as far as the table was concerned. As I watched and learned, it occurred to me that maybe they had invented an anti-gun. If you bring a gun to a table to guard against cheating, then endorsing cheating not only removes the gun but the need. There was nothing to guard against, and the table did rejoice. If you got busted you just forfeited the hand.

  Cheating, I saw, is as much an art as poker, probably the bigger of the two. Perhaps in the hunt for mellow times these boys still needed something in the sound of choppers, an edge, because cheating is hard work and the effort doesn’t run concurrent to the game but on top of it. You bend the laws of maths for the poker then bend them again to cheat. After three drinks the main game is the cheating and not the cards, invisible partnerships start to form under the table which then drag politics and management into play on top of everything. It’s a slippery slope. Before long, antes and stakes are complex deals with hedges and each-ways and interest on credit. Then after that, as with any free market, the poker soon isn’t a big enough platform. I was present at the first free-market Monopoly game some time later. A Dadaist spiral to nothingness where someone soon made a deal to buy Go and dock wages, someone bought Jail and ran protection rackets, another bought Chance and Community Chest and finally the bank, at which they sat out the game to become a loan shark, and then quickly won.

  Not violence but abandon was the strand in play.

  As luck would have it, abandon wasn’t a problem for me at the time. Although I never played that table again, it wasn’t because I wouldn’t have. It was like not only watching Rome burn but burning it down yourself with a Zippo. I moved on armed with three strands of DNA so far – violence, sanctity a
nd abandon – without knowing that this gunmetal grey table would be the last court of miracles I’d ever see around poker. DNA is just a code, of course. The trick is how it expresses.

  Far south there was a table that expressed it all worse. It seemed to tick some of the boxes, with weed, with rum and beer and tequila and a dog. No women, but there was mighty talk of them; you either get one or the other, and oftentimes the talk treats you better. But everything else seemed wrong. For starters the place was like your rich grandmother’s house in Coral Gables or something, all white marble and palms, the only edgy thing was a cross on the wall. Even the dog was wrong, a white lap-dog right out of a calendar. It was Dr No meets Benji and Scarface, and the table was run by an acquaintance called Wilson who was a nice guy apart from being all wrong for poker. White-skinned and rich and scrubbed and trimmed, a tennis-playing King Arthur with cashmere over his shoulders and a good line in the kind of ultra-hospitality that’s used for agendas other than wanting you to accept what’s offered. Outrageous excesses like a Latin child’s, offering you their car if you can prove you really asked for rum and not beer, offering cars and houses and firstborn sons to other witnesses, until suddenly you have six people round a table who all heard you say, ‘I’ll take a rum,’ but none can admit it because the stakes are through the roof. So there was abandon there. Abandon and something else, personality politics or something. You sensed that some of the statements were short steps away from a gun. And in truth this was the first table that would have had a gun anywhere nearby. But there was no gun at the game, and it didn’t matter, the only telling thing about the game was how wrong it was, given how many boxes it ticked on the court of miracles menu. Rum, beer, smoke was there. Cards, ashtrays, people, a dog.