Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  My full boat won, and I took the next hand with a pair of lousy 4s.

  I made, on the average, about $250 a day at that job. But in less than ten minutes I’d won over $1,600. I played for another ten minutes and not only did I make up for most of Saturday’s losses, but I easily tripled what I usually earned in one week at work.

  I liked my job. It was enjoyable, satisfying, and lucrative enough, and I treasured the company of my coworkers. It was a dream job and I was lucky to have it.

  But that morning I wondered aloud: What the hell am I still doing here?

  4

  Start Your Engine

  It took me two years to write Plague Boy but not for one second did I ever think it would get published.1 This was because by then I’d already written about twenty plays, thirty screenplays, hundreds of atrocious poems, and five other novels, and nothing had happened to them. Failure was my Siamese twin, a writhing, unctuous viper joined to my hip who plotted against me in my sleep on those rare nights he was kind enough to let me sleep.

  My scheme—in terms of audacity and cunning, the plan was positively von Schlieffenish—was to publish three minor novels, then publish my American Nightmare Trilogy, which I felt would be my one true bright, shining masterpiece.

  Plague Boy had gotten, with the exception of The New York Times and Time and The Boston Globe, mostly favorable reviews. (According to the U.K.’s Observer, the book was “coruscating and blistering . . . masterfully ugly and unsettling . . . almost brilliantly upsetting.”) Cynthia lovingly scrapbooked the good reviews but she needn’t have: I admit that I’ve memorized them all and can rattle them off whenever anyone asks. (Nobody ever does.)

  And then, after Love: A Horror Story, my second book, died its quick and quiet death, along came the idea for Dead on Arrival, an idea so obvious that I was afraid to write the book just in case it had already been written. The story: suburban married man bored to numbness, into fantasy football; moribund relationship with wife; one day the wife purposely drives her car, with both kids in the back, off a cliff. Hilarity and high jinks ensue. The man gets a plump check from the insurance company, goes on a senseless, euphoric spree of debauchery (sex—including sleeping with his dead wife’s sister—booze, drugs, gambling, the works), then the sad truth of the matter finally settles in. Slow fade to black.

  (“This sure is some grim and gloomy stuff,” my buddy Lonnie Beale said to me after he read the first twenty pages.)

  How Nick Hornby hadn’t already written a book like DOA was beyond me. It seemed like the sort of thing he would do. For all I know, he still might.

  Well, this was finally going to be it for me. I was already a forgotten author, but when I typed the final period of Dead on Arrival, my career would be reborn. In my beleaguered soul, it was Monday morning in America! The Times would have to review DOA. . . . They might love it or hate it (probably hate it, as the book doesn’t begin with a sentence like “In the small village in which my grandmother was born, the giant men flew down from the violet mountain mists after every monsoon season to take our women away.”), but they’d have to give it notice. Perhaps I’d even be invited back on NPR’s Fresh Air, as I’d been for Plague Boy but wasn’t for Love: A Horror Story. All the newspapers and magazines that had admired my first two novels would note the “sudden maturity” in my work and—easy marks that they are—have to start taking me seriously.

  There would be other rewards.

  I’d be invited to join PEN, and I’d attend their gatherings and make statements against harsh totalitarian regimes that didn’t really bother me or that I didn’t know existed. The Times Book Review would offer me money to write reviews and I’d politely refuse. (They may think I’m suddenly qualified to review another author’s work; me, I know I’m not. ) The New Yorker would offer me top dollar to write pithy 1,500-word essays about my favorite album for their Music Issue, the best meal I ever had for their Food Issue, and the most mind-blowing socks I ever had for their Style Issue. My Sally Field moment was close at hand: They would like me, they would really, really like me!

  And I’d nail the most prized reward of all, something every writer covets more than a big contract, a movie deal, or a gorgeous second wife: Freedom. This is why writers write. Freedom from having to work in an office, from being told what to do by people they smugly regard as their intellectual inferiors. Freedom from having to teach creative writing to kids who can barely compose text messages. A has-been writer once told me he was moved to write “by my demons,” but Demon Number One for every writer is having a job and having bosses. (Can you possibly imagine Jonathan David Safran Franzlethchabeggars working in an office?) William Carlos Williams may have been blissfully content teaching Jersey Girls how to breastfeed, but the last place any writer wants to be is at a desk taking orders from The Man.

  (If anyone doubts the veracity of this assertion, submitted for your approval, the words of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses: “Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning work.”)

  I handed DOA to Clint Reno on a blustery morning two Decembers ago. I was dead certain this was a life-changing moment and that within days Clint would be telling me of publishers on their knees pleading and offering top dollar for my work. For weeks the words “bidding war” floated in front of me like the wobbly lettering on a toy Magic 8 Ball. I’d eat meals with Wifey and see in my asparagus the words “a darkly comic masterpiece . . . the best American novel I have read in quite some time.” Every day and night I would write reviews—I’d write new ones, repeat the old ones, tweak them into perfection—as well as my defiant statement refusing the National Book Award. William Faulkner would rise from the grave to hand me the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Richards Price and Ford and Don DeLillo would number me in their illustrious company (writers who don’t write great books but who are treated and paid as though they do).

  I have not heard a word over the phone from Clint Reno since then.

  By the end of April, after one month playing poker online, I was up $15,000.

  One warm evening in my study I logged on to the Galaxy and sat down, for the first time, at a High table. Here the blinds were $500 and $1,000. This was not quite the Upper Stratosphere—there were Ultra-High tables beyond that—but it was close. At this point I was up nine grand and, as far as I was concerned, every penny over my original one thousand dollar stake was the house’s money. There, sitting alone at a table, was Bjorn 2 Win. It was 6 p.m. on a Saturday in New York; it must have been midnight in Gothenburg, his hometown. I told myself, Okay, I’ll play one hand at these high stakes, see what happens, then get out.

  Bjorn, whom I knew from his terse profile page was a horse butcher, was playing as the old man with the wrinkled brow, and I played as the Big Man, who had become my regular go-to avatar. Bjorn, I was soon to find out, is one of the most obnoxious fuckers ever to stare at a poker hand, online or off. He constantly criticizes other players’ playing styles even as he dumps hundreds of dollars to them, and if he is aware a player has a personal tic or physical defect, if he knows something about their past, he won’t stop harping on it. Sometimes when he shows up at a table, players say, “Oh no” or “Ugh” or “I can’t stand this guy” and leave immediately. In the Galaxy there are no insta-plebescites to eject rude players, the chairs are not ejector seats, and thus you are stuck with these scolds, scourges, and irritants.

  I was dealt a King and a 3 of hearts. There was no pre-flop raise, which, at these prices, I dreaded. The Butcher of the Baltic kept mum. The flop showed two more hearts, a 5 and a 2. And a King of clubs. So I now was four cards into a flush and, failing that, I had two Kings. I just needed a heart on the turn or the river to ice it. I raised, he called. My hands got so clammy that it took a while before the cursor budged.

  The turn card was another King. Now I had three of them and I raised and Bjorn called. The pot was over two grand now; this was the most I’d ever played for in one hand with only one other person. I was squirming in my swivel chair. The r
iver card came up a 3 of clubs. I had no King-high flush but still, I had the three sovereigns, the hand they call the George Clooney (Three Kings). The pot rose and rose. Even though it was the house’s money, it now dawned upon me: Wait . . . I am the house! I didn’t want to lose one cent of it.

  I didn’t. He never folded. I won $2,300 in about one minute and forty seconds.

  I clicked out but Bjorn stayed on. (“That Swedish bloke,” Second Gunman had told me, “may be detestable but he is dead money. Whenever you need a few quid, play him.”) Understandably, he wanted another shot at me. . . . I could almost see him salivating.

  “You’re leaving?” he asked me. I felt a chilly gust of Scandinavian incredulity sweep over me. (Was he at work, I wondered, surrounded by hundreds of reeking horse carcasses?)

  “Gotta go, Swede.” I did have to go: Cynthia and I were going out for dinner.

  “That’s not right. You cannot just go.”

  I said, “Watch me, Sven,” clicked on the word LEAVE and was gone.

  Sometimes I did feel bad for the people I beat (but not the Swede). They all seemed like nice people. But I’d finally found something I was good at and this was the way it had to be.

  After giving Clint Reno my manuscript, the weeks turned colder and the days shorter. A massive cold front from the North moved in on my life. Why begin a new book, I reasoned, I might as well give myself a little time off. Three books in seven years . . . I deserved a break.

  In the middle of January, I sent an e-mail to Clint:

  I know it’s been only a month and that no work gets done in publishing in December but I was wondering if you’ve heard anything re Dead on Arrival?

  (And what type of business is publishing, that no work gets done in December? In every other job I’ve heard of, save baseball and lifeguarding, work gets done in December. Do they all go to St. Bart’s together to shred manuscripts, toss up the confetti, and pretend it’s snow?!)

  A day went by without an answer, then another day, then a few more. I checked my e-mail the way I used to check the Amazon rankings of my first two books: every few minutes. At times, every few seconds. After two weeks of silence, I sent Clint another e-mail:

  I wrote you a few weeks ago re DOA. Can you tell me who you sent it to? And if you’ve heard anything? Thnx.

  I wasn’t worrying yet. Somewhere in the Hamptons, I assumed, a man in dungarees was painting my name onto a mailbox. The book was what a gambler would call a gimme or a lock. Even though my best friend and former cowriter Harry Carver (he gave up writing and is now a real estate lawyer in Beverly Hills) had read half of it and told me it was so dark that he could barely make the letters out against the paper (“What font is this in?” he asked. “Death, 5-point?”), I was certain this baby was going to get published. The typical male reader, publishers would assume, would love the book and laugh along with it because it would remind him of how truly contemptible he was, and the average woman, publishers would assume, would lap it up because she only suspects how truly contemptible the average man is; this novel would confirm it. DOA was as blatant a chick-pleaser as were the words LOSE 40 POUNDS IN 10 DAYS on a magazine cover.

  When Clint still didn’t reply, I began to fret for his health or for the fate of the tiny literary agency he ran with his identical twin, Vance. They didn’t handle any of the Big Boys (the Jonathans, Davids, Richards or Shteyngarts); they only handled struggling mediocrities-with-mostly-good-reviews-but-poor-sales such as myself. (I often thought that when the Reno Bros. took on Plague Boy they presumed they were getting the next David Sedaris and didn’t realize that not only could I not stand David Sedaris, I wanted nothing to do with people who could. ) I Googled “Clint Reno” and “Vance Reno” and “Reno Brothers Literary Agency” to see if the three of them were still alive. Perhaps a chopper carrying their entire staff to an off-site retreat had gone down a few weeks ago. Perhaps they’d been purchased wholesale by a large Shanghai conglomerate interested in cornering the market of middling American literature, or maybe it had dawned upon them that in ten years all novels will be written in 3D text-message form. There was no news of the sort. It seemed Clint was still alive and kicking and so was Vance (he works in L.A. and handles the movie and TV end) and that the Little Agency that Could (but wouldn’t) was still around.

  The eight-cylinder engine of my Joseph K. nightmare was only getting warmed up.

  Lacking the onions to call—and also thinking that being Mr. Nice Novelist and not bothering my agent would somehow be to my benefit—I sent another e-mail.

  Hey, is everything okay? Hope it is. Did you get my last couple of e-mails? Any news on DOA?

  There had to be news, for when I was writing DOA I didn’t feel like I was a novelist or an “artist” so much as a cat burglar sneaking into the jewelry box of a much better novelist and pocketing a priceless gem. I hadn’t ever done anything to deserve such a good idea.

  Clint didn’t answer my e-mail. There was no news, and when you’re trying to make something of yourself, no news is never good news and is a lot worse than even bad news.

  After winning the first fifteen grand, I didn’t get so nervous playing anymore. I usually played for about ten minutes for fake money before moving into the real-money rooms, where I’d work my way up the tables, going from Low to Medium to High. I was Spider-Man crawling up a building, moving from the cheaper lower floors to the posh penthouse apartments.

  Slowly, I began making friends in the Galaxy.

  This was at a table one Wednesday night: I saw that Bjorn 2 Win, Wolverine Mommy, Y. A. Spittle, History Babe (who was new to me), and a few others were present, so I joined in, this time playing as the suave James Bond character, a tuxedoed Clive Owen look-alike with a sleek gold cigarette case frozen for all cartoon eternity in his hand. I folded crap the first two hands but won $900 the next one with only a pair of 6s.

  Bjorn 2 Win: Can I get my money back, Chip?

  Chip Zero: Huh? From just now? I won that fair and square, Swede.

  Wolverine Mommy: So History, what do you do for a living?

  Bjorn 2 Win: No, from the other day. You think you’re a good poker player, you’re not.

  History Babe: I just got a certificate for teaching but haven’t found a job yet.

  I had a 4 and 5 of clubs and the flop showed two more clubs, a 7 and a Jack. Of all the dilemmas in Hold’em, for me the biggest is getting two pocket cards of the same suit. I always stay in and have probably lost more than I’ve won vying for the flush. (Which would prove what I’ve always suspected: hope and enthusiasm usually get you in trouble.) And sometimes, of course, even when you get the flush, you can still lose to a higher flush or a full house. If you’ve ever lost a with a King-high flush to an Ace-high flush, you know the feeling of there being no justice in this world.

  Wolverine Mommy: My husband teaches history!

  Chip Zero: [trying to avoid Bjorn] Oh yeah, Wolve? Then when was the Battle of Hastings?

  Wolverine Mommy: History is the hubby’s thing, not mine.

  Bjorn 2 Win: You play predictable, Chip. Also, you think you’re funny, you’re not funny.

  History Babe: 1066. Awww, that’s an easy one. That’s the pi=3.14 of history. Toss me something tougher than that.

  Bjorn 2 Win: How many more childs will you have, Wolverine? You should have stopped at 1. I cannot believe your husband even desires to make more childrens with you.

  Wolverine Mommy: GFY!

  The site informed us:

  Dealing the turn card: an Ace of Hearts.

  The Ace didn’t help my flush at all but I still had four clubs. As soon as he saw the Ace, Bjorn 2 Win raised two hundred bucks, and a few others folded.

  History Babe: When was the Diet of Worms, Chip?

  Chip Zero: Diet of Worms? No thanks, I’ll stick to Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

  Dealing the river card: an Ace of Clubs.

  I had my flush. There were three clubs in the community (the five cards on the table
) so it was possible that someone else would have a flush. But there were two Aces and Bjorn leapt in again, raising two hundred. I figured he had three Aces, but kept in mind his best-case scenario and my worst: he might have a full house, Aces full of something. But I had an Ace-high flush and would be a moron to surrender it.

  History Babe: C’mon, Chip, take a guess. If you’re wrong I won’t spank you.

  Chip Zero: This had something to do with Martin Luther right? Or was it Lex Luthor?

  Fifth Beetle: History, I think he might want you to spank him.

  Chip Zero: Well, I wouldn’t turn it down, no.

  Bjorn 2 Win: It’s just not right to leave so quickly after winning, Chip.

  I raised. Fifth Beetle (he’s an entomologist) folded, so it was just me and the Horse Slaughterer of the North. The pot was approaching two grand.

  History Babe: Martin Luther, yes. I don’t think Lex was involved.

  Y.A. Spittle: Was this before or after he nailed his forty feces to the door?

  Wolverine Mommy: He so did not do that!

  Chip Zero: Yes, Lex Luthor did that. He was mad at Superman for making him bald so he nailed his feces to the little door on the Fortress of Solitude.

  Grouchy Old Man is waiting to enter the game.

  Bjorn reraised. Maybe he did have a full boat. It would be me being force-fed my just deserts if he did. But I called.

  Chip Zero wins $2,600 with an Ace-high club flush.

  Wolverine Mommy: NH!

  Fifth Beetle: VNH, Chip.

  Chip Zero: Thnx. No props from you, Bjorn? Where’s my dap at, Ingemar?

  Bjorn 2 Win has left the table.

  (I pictured him taking a cleaver and cutting off the scrotum of a dead horse and then hurling each grapefruit-sized nut as far as he could into the Scandinavian snow.)

  I stayed at that table for an hour and added a cool six grand to my stack. Players came and went, but the history chatter did not.

  History Babe: So Chip, who’s your favorite character from history?