Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  ALSO BY TED HELLER

  Slab Rat

  Funnymen

  Pocket Kings

  a novel by

  Ted Heller

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2012

  PART I

  Hole

  (The first fifty-thousand)

  1

  Welcome to Purgatory

  It is a cold and harrowing morning in the life of a man the day he wakes up, looks at himself in the mirror, and finally realizes that he is not, has never been, nor will ever be George Clooney. A magnificent, eternal ideal had been floating out there; it was a paragon of the perfect human being this man had wanted to become. He wanted to look like him, act like him, talk and think like him. He wanted to be him and shed the creaky body, cranky soul, and unexciting past of the man he was. And now he realizes: it isn’t happening and it’s not going to—Damn it, I am just going to go on being me.

  Perfection will not only forever elude this broken man; it won’t even get close enough to tickle his bald spot, pinch his love handles, or tug on his double chin. If he were as much as half-perfect, he wouldn’t be here; he wouldn’t be looking at his reflection in his smudged bathroom mirror, wishing with all his might that he were someone else. And it’s too late: it won’t ever happen. He knows it now. Excellence, courage, wit, grace, confidence . . . they’ve all slipped away. The luminous spirit of the ideal man has fled the scene and isn’t coming back. It’s all over now, Baby Blue. James Bond is long gone, my friend. You will never play centerfield for the Yankees, you will never be Tiger Woods or Spider-Man, you won’t win an Oscar and own a large yacht and sleep with famous women. The closest you’ll ever get to being Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen is playing Guitar Hero. You’ve always been you and will always be you and now there’s nothing left to do but ride Life’s Moving Sidewalk Unto Death.

  In these harsh terrible seconds, the truth slowly twists into him like a corkscrew, and in the mirror he sees the lights going out, one by one, on his future.

  I have been that man, looking into the mirror. I have heard the strains of “Taps” tooting mournfully out of the bathroom faucet. And in short, I was terrified.

  The lights were going out and I had to do something—I had to find something, anything, no matter what—to prevent everything from going dark.

  Then I found poker, fortune, glory, and for the first time in my life, self-confidence, and suddenly the world was bright again.

  I want to go home. Where it’s warm and cozy and where I am, I hope, still loved.

  But I can’t. I’m no longer welcome there even though I, of course, was the one who sprang for the fuzzy welcome mat. (How cruel is that?) So here I am in Purgatory.

  It has finally stopped snowing, but it’s still freezing out, and if the furniture inside the Purgatory Inn had teeth, they would be chattering. In all my life I’ve never seen so much snow. White as far as the eye can see. Snow covering hills, trees, roads, fields, and whatever the hell else out there that it’s covering. Underneath that rolling furry blanket of white and silver are many more sheets of it.

  This motel has ten rooms but right now I’m the only guest, so mine is the only light on. From the dark, empty road outside, my one light might make it look as if something nefarious is going on, but inside there’s nothing more sinister than a humming laptop, a moldy carpet, a lot of faded plaid, and sitting on the rickety night table alongside a plastic glass (“Sanitized for Your Protection”) of Scotch, two autographed paperback books, both written by Frank W. Dixon.

  Any minute now Wolverine Mommy, my cherished long-distance friend, will be joining me here. She and I have never met. Not in the flesh at least. She had no idea I was coming out to her frosty Michigan oblivion, but here I am.

  I want to go home. I miss my wife and it’s killing me and I want her back. With all my heart and soul I do.

  This is what all my newfound self-confidence has wrought?

  The motel TV is on and I’m flipping between March Madness and the usual catastrophes on CNN and paying no attention to any of it. In two or three days I am planning to drive back down to the Detroit airport, if my rented Hyundai Cilantro doesn’t crumble on me, and return to my normal life, which has shattered into, yes . . . A Million Little Pieces. Where I’ll go from here, nobody has any idea.

  It’s past six-thirty. Wolve told me she’d be here at six. Her husband teaches history at the local high school and loves to hunt and hopefully he won’t pop in on us with an Elmer Fudd cap and a 12-gauge Winchester over/under. (I assume she hasn’t told him I’m here.) She has three young boys and sometimes, when I’m playing poker with her on-line, I swear I can hear them running, yowling and knocking over things in the background.

  Hell, Michigan, would have been a better name for this desolate place, but that was already taken. Only a person in transit from one nowhere to another would ever find out that such a town even existed. I had to leave New York quickly, and it is a measure of how far America’s 711,653rd most popular novelist has fallen that the Purgatory Inn is the best I can do for refuge. But there wasn’t anywhere else to go except to a clinic. And I’m not ready for that.

  The problem isn’t that I’ve hit rock bottom. The problem is that I haven’t.

  A few hours ago I turned on my laptop and played poker for about an hour and a half. Thanks to four miracle 3s, I finished ahead. (It was terrific: a cocky guy named Element Lad thought he had a sure winner with a club flush; while he gloated, I quietly showed him my quad 3s . . . he was crushed.) Then I saw Wolverine Mommy log on and joined her at her table. “Guess where I am?” I IM’ed her. “Where?” she said. “In Purgatory,” I told her, knowing she wouldn’t believe me, “just a few miles away at the Purgatory Inn!” She said, “No way . . . you’re kidding me,” and I said: “Wolve, I swear to God I’m really, really here. Any way you could come over soon?” She won $300 with two Jacks and, after I swore on my parents’ graves I was actually here, she told me: “Okay, I think I can be there at 6 but this better not be a prank.”

  There’s a knock on the door now . . . it could either be the good-natured Sikh proprietor, who has suddenly remembered he owns and operates a motel, or Norman Bates. Or it could be . . .

  “It’s Wolve!” I hear from outside.

  I turn off the TV, get up, open the door. I see that she has bright red shoulder-length hair and is wearing a navy goose-down parka and Timberland boots. She’s about thirty pounds overweight, and, no, she’s not Miss Upper Peninsula but then I’m no Mr. Teaneck, New Jersey, either.

  “I can’t believe this!” she says, shaking her head of all its disbelief and snow. “You’re really you?”

  After I assure her that I can’t help but be me, I bid her in with a gentlemanly wave of my arm.

  She dances a little jig to shake loose the snow from her shoes and pants, and I close the door. Hours and hours online chatting to each other, of winning and losing money to each other, and finally we meet.

  “I can’t believe this, Chip!”

  “Me neither.”

  After a minute of nice-to-finally-meet you pleasantries she sits on the bed and I ask, “So, did you tell your husband you were visiting me?”

  “Uh, no. He wouldn’t understand.”

  It isn’t hard to see that she also doesn’t understand. And I don’t know if I do either.

  “He doesn’t,” she says, “get our whole world. He just likes it that I win sometimes.”

  I tell her that Wifey has thrown me out of the house, although I don’t tell her why, and that I had no place to go and so I came here. To no place.

  She looks at me and I look away. What am I doing here, she’s probably thinking. I know for a fact that I didn’t come all the way here to be a cad, and I’m pretty sure she hasn’
t come to the motel tonight to be an adulteress and has come only as a friend. But still, it’s awfully cold out there.

  The wind wails and the motel’s walls and floorboards shudder when I hand her my two novels, Plague Boy and Love: A Horror Story, neither of which I am able to think about without being overwhelmed with pride, despair, bewilderment, and rage.

  She examines the books, reads my brief inscriptions to her, and starts to cry—I’ve had some negative reactions to my work, but nothing quite like this—then dabs at her eyes with her huge purple faux-shearling mittens.

  “I’m really miserable, Chip Zero,” she whimpers. “You have no idea.”

  “But I’m here,” I tell her.

  She looks up at me . . . her big blue eyes are her best feature, other than her chest. Many times over the course of the last year she’s told me how lonely she is, and right now, in the same way that some statues are meant to personify Perfect Beauty, Total Victory, or Absolute Piety, this woman represents Abject Loneliness.

  “Are you going to leave soon? Any idea how long you’ll stay?”

  I tell her I have no return ticket and no plans to either go or stay. “Right now I may be the world’s wealthiest homeless person,” I say.

  I join her on the edge of the bed, which sags, exhales, and nearly gives way when I sit. You’d think that beds in motels and hotels in the American Heartland would better tolerate the heft of large people.

  “Please stay for a while, Frank,” she says. “It would be nice.”

  It surprises me for a second, her using my real name. Hardly anyone does anymore.

  I lie and say, “I don’t want to go,” and as soon as I hear myself say it, I realize it might not be a lie at all. Maybe, I think, I’ll stay here for a week or two. Or three. It’s barren, it’s freezing, it’s on the outer­most edge of nowhere, but it’s certainly endurable. And right now in my life, “endurable” doesn’t sound so bad. I also think: I hope Cynthia doesn’t ever find out about this!

  She takes off her mittens—one drops to the dismal mint-colored carpet—and holds out a hand and I take it. I expect it to be ice cold but it’s very warm.

  I can stay here in this frozen-over, snow-domed limbo and start writing again. Yes, that’s what I’ll do! I’ll write! And maybe, just maybe, my wife will take me back! There’s hope!

  She squeezes my hand and says, “NH.”

  “Huh?”

  “NH, Chip.”

  Ah. I get it now. Nice hand.

  I put my arm around her puffy North Face coat. She rests her head on my shoulder and I see a warped, dark gray reflection of us in the TV screen. What are we doing, I wonder, the four of us?

  “You have no idea,” she says, “how lonely I am. There’s no . . .” She stops to compose her thoughts. “I really love my husband, my kids are the most precious things to me in the world . . . but none of this is any fun.”

  I squeeze her shoulder tighter and tell her everything will be all right. More than anything I wish I were sitting next to my wife, on my couch, in my apartment.

  “Where does your husband think you are now?”

  “At the Kohl’s.”

  For a second, before I realize what she means, I imagine Wolverine Mommy warming her hands over a pile of glowing coals in the evening blizzard.

  She looks at her watch and says, “I need to be getting back” and then puts her purple mittens back on. They’re as big as lion paws. She really does have a nice face, sort of like Ellen Burstyn in her heyday but with a few extra pounds.

  She wraps her goose-down arms around my neck and we hug for a half a minute and when we separate her face is quite flushed. No, it can’t go any further than this. A hug or two. A kiss on the cheek. That’s it. Anything more would be nuts.

  I close the door and hear a car drive off, crunching through the choppy sea of snow.

  This trip to Michigan—the plane fare, the car rental, the gas, the motel—is costing me about nine hundred dollars. If I stay here for a week or so, I’ll be able to afford it. Easily.

  All I have to do is log on and play a few hands. That’ll take care of it.

  Because, despite all my recent losses, somehow I still have to believe I’m a winner.

  2

  A Long Out

  This journey of starts, stops, victory, loss, and reshuffles began innocently enough last March in Las Vegas at the Luxor hotel. Had I not been exactly where I was when I was, doing exactly what I was doing, perhaps I would not be here in lonely, frigid Purgatory, one year later.

  I was with Wifey, our bellies full of mediocre, overpriced Vegas food—cooked by a famed New York chef who wasn’t anywhere within two thousand miles of the place—leaning over a ten-buck-minimum craps table. To my left stood Wifey—Second Gunman, my poker buddy, was the first to call Cynthia that—ever so slightly spilling out of a tight red silk cheongsam. The dress, bought only hours before on a whim, featured a long trickle of gold dahlias falling gracefully down the right side.

  The stranger immediately to my right, a male about thirty years old, said, “Hey, you know who you look a lot like?”

  Is there a chance, I wondered for an instant, that this guy actually recognizes me from the black and white portrait on the backs of my two novels? That would be impossible for three reasons: hardly anyone remembers author photos, hardly anyone bought my two novels, and there were no author photos to begin with.

  “I have no idea,” I answered. “Who?”

  But he was talking to Cynthia, not me. He elbowed his buddy, who stood on his right, and said, “Richie, who’s she look like to you?”

  Richie examined, unlecherously, Wifey’s long, wavy black hair, tight Asian garment, and hint of sun-bronzed cleavage and said, “No idea. Who?”

  “The Dragon Lady on the Poker Galaxy site!”

  “You’re right,” Richie told him.

  Cynthia and I looked at each other and shrugged. I had no idea what they were talking about.

  “Who?” I asked as the dice came up a 7. “What Dragon Lady?”

  There was a collective groan, chips were gathered, the dice changed hands, and I plunked a few red chips from my stack onto the pass line. I was still up over $300.

  The two men—salesmen of some sort, most likely—told me there was a site called Pokergalaxy.com (aka the Galaxy) and on this site there were “characters” (or avatars): you logged on, went to a poker table, and became a character for the duration of the game, until you left or changed avatars. One of the characters, Richie said, was a foxy Asian woman in a red silk dress.

  “People play for real money on this site?” I asked them. So innocent.

  “Oh, it’s real all right,” the one to my right said. “Believe me, it’s real.”

  “You can check it out,” Wifey chimed in to me, “back in the hotel room.”

  That would be easy to do. I’d brought a laptop to write a book on, I’d brought a pad and pens and index cards to make notes for this book. I’d brought everything but a successful career, any trace of a readership, an idea for another book, or the will to ever write another one. (One thing gamblers, writers, aging athletes, and repeat victims of adultery must be able to admit to themselves: I know when I’m licked.) So for the last few days, while Wifey was working at the Convention Center at the Venetian (she’s head of ad sales at Soles, a footwear trade publication), I’d been relaxing by one of the Bellagio pools, drinking Coronas, eating lousy hot dogs, watching women jiggle in swimsuits, and cursing: cursing my (possibly former) agent Clint Reno; cursing my (definitely) former publisher; cursing the Times and Time magazine and The Boston Globe and readers the world over, except for England, where I am, for some reason, understood and appreciated. (Yeah, I know: so are Benny Hill, Robbie Williams, and cricket.) It was an unusually torrid March, even for the Nevada desert, and, after three Coronas and gazing at women in bikinis rubbing SPF 2 all over themselves, it begged the question: Is global warming really so bad? Every day I’d log on to my e-mail, hoping there
would be a message from the Reno Brothers Literary Agency—I hadn’t heard a peep out of Clint for three months—telling me he’d sold Dead on Arrival, the book I’d turned over to him the previous December, to a publisher.

  There was no such e-mail.

  When Cynthia and I returned to our hotel room from the Luxor, I immediately went to Pokergalaxy.com. Having never been there before, it took a few minutes to navigate the site. I had to register and do this and that and, in a way, it was like becoming a citizen of a new country. But finally I made it to a poker table and saw . . .

  “This must be her,” I said to Wifey. “Take a look.”

  I was sitting on the corner of the bed and she peered over my shoulder, her long earring tickling the hair on the back of my neck.

  “I guess,” Cynthia said, “you could say she looks like me.”

  Sure enough, a sultry Asian woman in a tight red cheongsam was sitting at a table and playing cards. Although my wife is not remotely Asian, there was a resemblance. But my gaze drifted to the player sitting next to her: a portly dude in a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt with a peroxide-blond Caesar haircut and a pair of round sunglasses tinted a very hip rose pink. I watched this character, the Big Man, as he confidently made his moves, his actions controlled by some stranger in Dubai or Dublin or Durbin or Des Moines. It was No-Limit Texas Hold’em and the Big Man just sat there coolly. . . . There was no movement other than crude jump cuts and no sound other than the clacking of chips and the crisp snap of playing cards.

  He won seven hundred dollars with two 2s. Real money.

  From out of my mouth there slipped an elongated curious Hmmm . . .

  The day after Wifey and I got back to New York from Las Vegas, I went into my study and logged on to the Poker Galaxy again and nosed my way around cautiously. There were dozens of places on the site to go to and, I saw, 30,000 other people were logged on at the same time I was. Alongside their handles or nicks (their online nicknames) you could see where they were calling in from: Sydney, Singapore, Cairo, Paris, Kiev, Baghdad, Seattle, Quito. Time zones didn’t matter here. It was midnight in Manhattan but some burly yobbo waking up late in Perth and chugging a Fosters for breakfast could get a few hands in against a tea-sipping spinster in Surrey who was just trying to win a few quid before hitting the hay.