Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  I printed out my list, looked at it, tore it up, and threw the pieces out. Then I logged on to the Galaxy and played a few hands. I crept back into bed with my wife, who was curled up and sound asleep and had no idea that her husband was now five hundred dollars richer.

  3

  Big Slick

  Where else but on the Galaxy could I find camaraderie at any hour of the day or night? Where else could I find a place where failure was not only expected, but was hoped for? For when you’re sitting around an online poker table, you’re joined by at least one other and possibly nine other likeminded souls and, though they are out to take your money, you are, for a short time, willfully and inextricably bound to them. If you stick around long enough, you will witness them fail miserably and they will be courteous enough to return the favor.

  The first friend I made online turned out to be my best: Second Gunman, a hotel receptionist in Blackpool, England. For the first few days I played, I was so nervous that I refrained from any online chatting. I’d noticed the chat going on (there’s a small oval box where players talk to one another) but I wanted to concentrate on the cards and make sure I made the right moves: it was one thing to channel Doyle Brunson, another to channel me, but I wasn’t ready to do both at the same time. It wasn’t until my sixth day playing that I noticed I was often playing with the same people.

  “Chip,” Second Gunman said to me one day, “how are ya?”

  I panicked but only mildly. I had been playing in the shadows, an unseen puppeteer pulling the strings of my poker-playing bulldog. When I’d win hands, players would say “NH” (nice hand) or “VNH” (very nice hand); I should have sent them a “TY” (thank you) but was too locked into the game to do that.

  I IM’ed back, “Hi, Second Gunman,” and he quickly responded: “Talking today, I see. The other day the cat had your tongue.” I wrote back: “Well, the cat coughed it back up.”

  This conversation took place while the cards were shuffled and dealt, while we players examined our pocket cards (I had two 4s, usually the start of a go-nowhere hand) and while the flop was revealed. I had to mentally toggle between checking, raising, and possibly folding, and typing the next sentence and reading his words to me.

  “I had a feckin cat once,” he said. He raised five dollars and I called.

  “I don’t really like cats,” I told him. “More of a dog man really.”

  “I LOVE cats!” someone at the table, appropriately named Feline Lucky 2Nite, said.

  “Well, neither do I, Chip,” Second said to me, “but I also don’t like mice and that’s why I had a cat once. That cat took care of the mice asap.”

  The turn card was a 3 and everybody passed. There was only the river card left.

  “So the cat killed the mice,” I said, “but then you’re stuck with the cat.”

  The river card came up a 4. I now had three of them and won sixty bucks. Not bad for four minutes’ work. There was a break in the action while the program shuffled the cards, the blinds were automatically paid, and the next hole cards were dealt.

  “I made fluffy slippers out of it,” Second told me. “Dyed ’em pink. Very comfy.”

  I had an Ace and a King, unsuited. Big Slick, they call it, probably because it promises more than it delivers and more often than not you end up slipping and sliding.

  “That cat was either,” I replied, “very big or you have awfully small feet, Second.”

  The flop came up Ace-King-2, giving me a strong two pair. Money was bet and the pot went over $100 after the flop.

  “So what cards do you have, Chip?” Second Gunman asked me . . . as if I would tell him!

  “I’ve got Big Slick,” I told him.

  The turn card was a 5. No help to me. But what if someone had pocket 5s? My Aces and Kings would go down, like Brazil losing to Lichtenstein in soccer. But I had to stick with them and I kept checking. Gradually, day by day and hand by hand, I was developing a system.

  “Big Slick?” Second Gunman said. “Don’t get it.”

  A player named Gloomy Gus 17 dropped out . . . maybe he knew what Big Slick meant.

  The river card came up a Jack. Second Gunman passed, I raised, and Feline Lucky folded. It was just me and Second now. He saw the raise.

  It was time to show the cards. I had the Aces and the Kings . . . but Second had pocket Jacks: the river Jack had given him three of a kind. He won . . . and Big Slick, that arrogant, strutting cock of the walk, had fallen on his face once again.

  “NH,” I grunted to my new Anglo-Irish friend.

  “Uh oh,” he said. “Arsehole hotel manager coming. Gotta go!”

  By the end of the first seven days—I took Sundays off—not only had I made over $1,000 but also a new friend who worked at the Four Swans, “the second best hotel in Blackpool, England.” (“You ever need a place to stay in B-pool, just tell me,” he said. “Wow! I could stay at the hotel for free?!” I asked him. “No,” he answered, “but I know a nice alleyway nearby.”)

  I was still working then and was only playing a few hours a day. And not writing a word.

  If I was going to play poker for real money, then I had to concentrate, get totally locked in, locked in to the Zone. I had to be like a batter at the plate tuning out all the crowd noise, empty seats, John 3:16 signs, and the white sky or silver dome above and beyond the pitcher. If Kim Kardashian were descending naked by parachute onto my face, I had to ignore her: There was only the ball. I had to tune out the world and weigh my own hand against what others might have and pay attention to their wagering and decide how to act.

  When I told Wifey/Cynthia, at the end of the first week, how much money I’d won, she didn’t believe me. I logged on to the site and showed her I wasn’t pulling her leg.

  “So does this mean,” she asked me, “that I won’t owe you my half of the rent this month?”

  I thought about it. The $1,000 seed money had been my stake; it had been my idea to play for real dough, it was my poker skills and luck that had reaped this largesse. She had no more to do with it than I had to do with her earning her weekly nut from her footwear trade mag. This was all my doing! (Did Mrs. Isaac Newton ever once ask for a share of her hubby’s gravity proceeds?)

  “Okay,” I told her. “I’ll pay it all this month.”

  At first I reserved my poker playing for between eight and eleven p.m., which is when I used to write. By playing at the same time each day, I discovered, I would see the same players.

  One day, in the second week of this new avocation, I was at a table with three other people. My hands still got cold, my pulse still quickened. Second Gunman was present but wasn’t saying much. I was having a run of tremendous luck when a Texan named Amarillo Slim-Fast said to me: “Hey, Chip, what’s the deal? Stop winning!”

  There was a 4, 6 and 8 on the table. I had a 5 and a 10.

  The turn card was a 7. I had an 8-high straight now. So, too, might anyone else.

  “Slim?” I said, as I raised, “I have an 8-high straight. So if you wanna bail, bail now.”

  Slim-Fast checked. Neither he nor anyone else believed me. This ultimately became one of my trademark moves: bluff by telling the truth. It may seem cruel but in that crush-or-be-crushed world, it’s what I had to do, although it still brings me pangs of guilt to think about it.

  “Hey, I got a straight too,” announced a player named Toll House Cookie, making the first appearance of what would be many in my life.

  Miraculously the river card was a 9 and now I had a 10-high straight. I told everyone present, “Hey! Correction! Full disclosure! I now have a 10-high straight!” I raised again.

  Again, nobody believed me. All the others, including the slightly gullible Cookie, called. I took the pot (which by then was over 400 bucks) and left everybody chomping on their fingertips.

  “Dang,” said Amarillo Slim-Fast. “You was tellin’ the truth.”

  I won six of the next eight hands. Over 1,200 bucks in thirty minutes.

  I knew t
o quit while I was ahead. So much of this was luck: I’d been playing as the Hawaiian-shirted, champagne-blond-haired Big Man; it was his seat and body that I’d chosen to occupy. Had I chosen any other seat at the table, I would not have gotten the same cards. Cartoon character was destiny.

  “Last hand, guys,” I told everyone. “And then you can all start winning again.”

  “We appreciate that,” Cookie said.

  I drew pocket Kings and there was another King on the flop. Pure magic.

  Slim-Fast asked me, “Whattaya got?” and I told him, “This one I’ll keep to myself ’cause if you knew I had 3 Ks, you’d fold, right?”

  Someone new, whom I’d barely noticed, a player named Artsy Painter Gal spoke up. “Sharing is caring, Chip. Do tell. I insist.”

  The turn card was a 2. With the 2 on the flop and this one, I now had a full house. Fortunately, nobody at the pixilated poker table could hear me chortling at my desk like a madman.

  “Artsy, let’s just say I have this hand all sewn up,” I said.

  Artsy Painter Gal’s avatar was the cool, curvy blonde with the Godiva-length hair falling all the way to the floor. That was not all that was plunging: her tight gold-lamé dress barely contained an enormous bosom. The dress was the one Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang “Happy birthday, Mr. President,” but the explosive rack belonged to Jayne Mansfield.

  “Oh,” she said, “you like sewing, do you, Big Blond Boy?”

  The river card was a meaningless 5. I’d been slow-playing this last hand; that is, I’d been letting others do the raising, letting them think they had me. And when they did raise, I’d wait a few seconds before I called, making them think I was mulling over the decision to stay in or not.

  “No,” I confessed, “I can barely thread a needle.”

  “Too bad,” she said, “’cause there’s a rip in this gown. And I’m sitting on it.”

  The pot was now over six hundred. A third of my rent, or my cable bill for four months, or one-half of a large HDTV, or round-trip airfare to somewhere possibly very pleasant. When my full boat was revealed, I was met with a chorus of grrrrs and “VNH”s, another “dang” from Amarillo Slim-Fast, and a “Do you have any idea how much I loathe you at this very moment?!” from the fetching Artsy Painter Gal.

  I clicked the SIT OUT box, which meant I was still at the table but couldn’t play. Artsy Painter Gal, having dropped $200 in one hand, was gone with the wind and her chair was empty, leaving neither a dimple in the cushion nor a stray long blonde hair to be seen.

  “I think she liked you, Chip,” Second Gunman said. “She had spunk,” Cookie said. To which I replied: “I hate spunk.”

  When Wifey came home that night she could tell right away that something marvelous had happened. Though our marriage was now fairly routine, we still could pick up each other’s signals, no matter how faint, and still loved each other very much.

  Limpid green eyes glimmering, she asked me, “Did they renew the rights to the movie?”

  She meant the rights to Plague Boy. Every few months a check would come for me from an outfit in California called Egregious Motion Pictures. That was always a sweet windfall, but if the movie ever got made life would have been a lot sweeter and windier. (But forget about the money. My hope, my prayer, my pipedream, was that the movie would start a Frank W. Dixon Revival. Magazines and newspapers would write articles about my books, which would be reissued with new, lustrous, star-studded covers. And, yes, there was the money too.)

  “No . . . I won some more money.”

  She waited a long second before smiling.

  I wound up paying for all the electricity, phone, and cable bills that month, too.

  A month into my Galaxy citizenship, I found myself one evening at a table with someone from Illinois called Grouchy Old Man. It was just the two of us. I’d played with this altacocker once or twice before but didn’t know much about him. I was in my small study and the lights were out.

  “This crazy thing happened to me a few days ago,” he said to me during a game. I looked at the grimy buildings across the street and asked him: “Here? Or in the real world?”

  “The real world,” he said. “Out there.”

  I clicked the SIT OUT button so he could talk, and he sat out, too. We were two people only halfway there. In the ether of the ether, twice removed from all things earthbound.

  “My wife, she’s got Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “Had it for years now. She’s in a nursing home a few miles away.”

  I told him I was sorry and looked more closely at the avatar he’d assumed. It was an old man in a tattered argyle cardigan with thick glasses and a furrowed brow. Gramps.

  “I visit her a few times a week . . . sometimes she recognizes me, sometimes I can’t tell.”

  The site sounded a bell: we had to play a game or else click out and then click back in. Both of us clicked back in, cards were dealt and he continued. “So I’m there yesterday and she’s in the lounge sitting on a couch and I’m sitting next to her. She says to me, ‘Remember the time we went to Lake Michigan? The motel?’ ”

  I had pocket Jacks and bet and Grouchy saw it.

  “I say to her,” he said, “ ‘The one in New Buffalo? That wasn’t a motel, that was a hotel.’ She says, ‘No, George, the motel! In Saugatuck!’ ”

  The flop was a 3, a 7, another 3. Confident with my two Jacks, I bet again and he called.

  “She’s calling me George, see?” Grouchy Old Man said.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “My name is Len!”

  The turn card was another 7, giving me Jacks and 7s.

  “She says to me,” he went on, “ ‘The week that Len was away, George, in New York at the stationery convention and you stayed.’ Then I realized, Chip, she was talking about George, who was my business partner. For thirty years. We sold stationery in the Chicago area.”

  The river card was an uneventful 5. I bet, he called.

  “I says to her, ‘Yes, honey! I remember now! The motel in Saugatuck, right on the lake. For a week. I remember.’ See, Chip, now I’m pretending to be George, who’s dead fifteen years, that bastard. Pardon my French.”

  We showed our cards and the program’s mute ever-present “narrator” informed us:

  Chip Zero shows two Jacks and two 7s and wins $300.

  We clicked out. Back into the ether. He continued:

  “The upshot was, Lynn had been having an affair with George for thirty years. I had no idea. They did it in my bed, they did it in my living room, they did it in his bed, they did it on the desk in my office. For thirty years this went on. I had no goddam idea.”

  I waited a bit. I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I asked: “What about George’s wife?”

  “He never married,” Grouch told me. “A real Lothario type guy. And guess what? Everyone at the company knew it but me. I found this out. Everyone. They all kept the secret, those momsers.”

  We clicked back in and didn’t say a word to each other than “NH” and “TY” and “VNH.”

  We were soon joined by Irma La Deuce in Hartford and Cali Wondergal in Yorba Linda and someone named Bjorn 2 Win from Gothenburg, Sweden. Then two more people came in. Then another three. Grouch kept playing, winning, losing, folding, and hanging in there, and I, sitting alone in my hushed, dark den, realized that all these people at this table, on this site, in this world . . . are real.

  One Monday morning it was a slow day at work. The previous Saturday I’d spent about six hours online playing poker, winning, then losing. I was still on the plus side but had taken a serious bath. I’d begun the day five thousand dollars in the black but by evening I’d sunk. It’s amazing to me how you can do everything right, make every play by the book, and still lose. Al Gore must know the feeling.

  It was early and nobody was around. I wanted to see just how much money I’d made in three weeks and I logged on. It was the first time I’d ever visited the site at work. Near the words CHIP ZERO, it said: $5,421. That
was a nice bundle, sure, just for deciding when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em, but the $7,476 I’d had two days before was a hell of a lot nicer.

  I went to my office door, looked down the hallway in both directions. Nobody.

  I sat back down and within a few seconds I was at a table. There were four other players there, including Wolverine Mommy, whom I’d only recently met.

  “Hey Chip!” she greeted me.

  (In the Galaxy, people are sometimes deliriously happy to see you. “Hey, you!” they’ll say. Or: “Hi! How are ya, buddy?!” It’s flattering, reassuring, and a bit exhilarating.)

  I told Wolve I was at work and couldn’t stay too long and that my stack had shriveled badly. She told me she couldn’t stay on long either: “Baby very colicky today.”

  After folding three hands I was met with my new nemesis: pocket Aces. (They just never seem to prevail.) The Kiss of Death. Right away I assumed I was in trouble and I groaned aloud.

  After the first round of betting the pot was up over two hundred bucks.

  The flop showed two 4s and another Ace. I had a full boat. There was no way anyone was going to beat me. Money in the bank.

  The betting resumed and someone—Bjorn 2 Win again—raised. I called, did not raise.

  The turn card was a 3. Someone checked, then Wolverine Mommy checked, then it was my turn: I raised. A few people called and Wolverine Mommy folded.

  “So where is the baby right now, Wolve?” I asked.

  “Bouncing on my lap,” she said. “Crying his little lungs out.”

  She was in Michigan playing poker and her baby was on her lap, probably looking at the screen, at the chips and baize and the Big Man, whose body and loud yellow Hawaiian shirt I was occupying. I wondered how much worse playing poker with a kid on your lap was than smoking cigarettes with kids in the house. But I didn’t wonder too long. Besides, the kid had to learn some time, right?

  The river card was a 9. The betting began again and I raised and everyone called. A player from Utrecht called Hands Brinker raised again. Which gave me the chance to re-raise.