Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Second and I went out that night for dinner: hamburgers, fries, and beer at the indomitable Corner Bistro. I told him about New York. I explained the layout of the city, how addresses flowed west and east from Fifth Avenue, I told him how to get around, what to see, where to go and not go. We could also go to a museum tomorrow, I told him, go to a great restaurant tomorrow night. If he wanted to see Ground Zero I would suck it up and take him and I’d take him across the river to Newark, where my mother and father grew up, or I’d show him Teaneck and the neighborhood I grew up in. I proudly told him about the history of the city—a city whose mere outline on a map sometimes reduces me to sentimental tears—and about Peter Minuit and the Great Fire of 1835 and George Washington at Fraunces’ Tavern and how the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge had engendered the great city as we know it today.

  I told him all these things and was so proud to live here that I got all choked up and my voice cracked, and when I was done he asked me, “So how far away is Atlantic City?”

  “This is where you steal my money?” Second Gunman said when I showed him my study after dinner.

  He sussed out the operation, the computer on the desk, the books on the shelves, the view out the window. When Cynthia came in to say she was going to sleep—her plane to West Virginia left early next morning—Second asked me, “So what’s this a picture of?”

  “You know,” Cynthia said, “I always wanted to know that too.”

  “It’s just a pear in a bowl,” I told them. “That’s all.”

  “And that?” he asked. “Who’s that?”

  “Just some guy. Just some guy in Paris, okay?”

  “Is he always so touchy?” my visitor asked my lovely wife.

  “I’m going to sleep,” she said.

  A few seconds after she left, Second asked me how an ugly blumper like me could marry a pretty flinny like that. This wasn’t the exact slang he used, but it was something to that effect. I told him that years ago I was thinner and had a lot more promise.

  “So these are your books, huh?”

  He was looking at the shelf with the foreign editions of my two books.

  Second told me he wanted to get a few hands in before sleep, and he got on my computer and logged in under his name. He played five hands and stopped when he was up $200, then I logged in under my name and played. During the second hand I saw that Plague had slipped 10,000 places on Amazon. Between the second hand and the third an article on Nexis revealed to me that a Frank Dixon who worked for Boeing had been promoted to vice-president. During the third hand Toll House Cookie, playing as the ten-gallon-hatted Cowboy, came to the table.

  Chip Zero: Hey, Hoss!

  Toll House Cookie: Yo, Chip.

  Chip Zero: You’ll never guess who’s here.

  Toll House Cookie: You, me, two other nobodies. Why?

  Chip Zero: No, I mean HERE. In my apartment. In real life. Second is!

  Toll House Cookie: The hell he is.

  I explained that Second Gunman was standing only few inches away, then Second played as me for a few seconds (and won me $300 with two 7s). It took about four minutes before the occasionally ornery Cookie finally believed I wasn’t playing a prank on him.

  Second asked him about going to Atlantic City and while THC was typing, I told the Blackpooler: “Look, you really don’t want to go there. It’s a void . . . it’s a first-class shit hole.”

  Cookie, via IM, agreed.

  Toll House Cookie: Nah, don’t go there, man. Try Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to go there either. They weren’t voids or first-class shit holes per se but they just weren’t for me.

  Toll House Cookie: Or just go to Vegas.

  I told Johnny that Vegas would have to wait until his next trip, but even though he seemed like a nice guy, hadn’t been untoward, had indeed been quite civil and hadn’t groped my wife, I didn’t want there to be any second trip. Still, I had to be nice.

  Toll House Cookie: Why don’t you try to get into a few local games in NYC?

  Chip Zero: Nah. We’re okay.

  Second Gunman, standing over my chair, poked my shoulder blade and said, “Yeah, get an address from THC. We’ll play. You could break your real-life poker cherry, you gobshite.”

  I looked up at him, at his mischievous eyes and reddish mustache, and it dawned upon me: these next few days might not be so easy. I disliked having visitors stay over even if they were absolute saints, which this one wasn’t.

  Cookie IM’ed me the address of a poker joint on the Upper East Side. It was just off Lexington Avenue, in the eighties, not far from the posh apartment building Cynthia grew up in.

  Toll House Cookie: It’s underneath a bodega. Walk in and go to the cash register and say to the guy, “Dónde está Big Lou?” You got that? “Dónde está Big Lou?” That’s the password.

  Chip Zero: Dónde está Big Lou. Right. But wait . . . what if there is a guy named Big Lou there?

  Toll House Cookie: There is, dude! That’s why I just told you to ask for him! He’s downstairs running the show. Lou’s cool. Drives through my toll lane nearly every day. Tell him Cookie sent you.

  Chip Zero: Okay, but what if the cops come while we’re there?

  Toll House Cookie: They’ll already be there. They’re the security guards.

  A minute later I said good-bye and logged off.

  “Is this,” I asked Second Gunman, “really what you want to do in New York?”

  I reminded him of New York City’s amazingly diverse culture, about the incredible restaurants, the finest shopping in the world, the subtle tints of pink and violet over the Hudson River at sunset, the hot dogs and iconic roller coaster on Coney Island, the Rembrandts at the Met and Matisses at MOMA.

  “Let’s go play poker,” he said.

  “Johnny, when did you think you were going to do this?”

  “Wifey’s asleep. C’mon, Chip. Why not right now?”

  I told him no.

  Yes, this is what he really wanted to do in New York.

  The next morning Cynthia woke me up before she left. DOA, I saw, was in her carry-on Furla bag. As soon as she was out the door, it felt like it always did when I knew we were going to be apart for a while: as though all the warmth, goodness, and comfort had been sucked out of me in a flash and that I was living in a cold and lonely vacuum.

  Second had a weird list of things he wanted to see in New York. He didn’t want to visit any museums but did want to see the no-longer-extant Belmore Cafeteria, where a scene in Taxi Driver was filmed. He didn’t want to see the Statue of Liberty but did want to see the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid killed Nancy. No Empire State Building, but the subway station where a scene in Ghost was filmed. As I’ve never seen the movie I wasn’t sure where that was, so I just took him to any old station and he fell for it.

  At one point in the middle of the afternoon I went to my bank and got out $7,000 in cash. Second Gunman didn’t have to; he had brought about $20,000 (stuffed into the ripped lining of his suede jacket) with him to New York. We were going to play.

  Walking along Union Square in the early evening to get a taxi to go to Big Lou’s bodega casino, I noticed there was a reading at the Barnes & Noble. The book, I saw from the window display, was a memoir called Lost and Found by Charlie L. Something. The reading would begin at eight. I looked at my watch and saw that eight was only five minutes away.

  “Hey, Second,” I said. He was still in his suede jacket, even though it was in the forties out and windy, and was wearing baggy jeans and a blue chamois shirt. “Let’s go inside.”

  “What a weird time to decide you wanna buy a book.”

  “I don’t.”

  We went inside, wove our way through and around the stacks and tables to where the reading was. Truth be told, Second and I had enjoyed a long lunch together and had drunk a bottle of wine; we’d just had dinner and another two bottles. At the end of both meals I was speaking with an unconvincing Irish brogue and a
n even less convincing burr. We were primed.

  We took seats toward the rear. There were only about fifteen people there but one of them looked familiar, even from the back. It was Beverly Martin, I was pretty sure.

  Charlie L. Something adjusted the mike to a smattering of applause and coughing, thanked us for showing up and began to read. He resembled a lesser-known president—Polk, Arthur, or Garfield— but without the wig, muttonchops, or beard. His book was about his privileged childhood and preppy adolescence, his descent into drug abuse (including siphoning off his dying father’s morphine drip) and living on the street, and subsequent recovery at the Shining Path Clinic in the Southwest and conversion from Presbyterianism to Episcopalism (which for me was like relocating from Park Avenue to Fifth Avenue). I’d read Lost and Found’s reviews and, as usual with books of this type, from St. Augustine to Malcolm X to the present, the early screwed-up nasty parts were way more interesting than the later recovery parts. Presently he was going on about how the refulgent façade of Shining Path glittered in the sun “like some splendid, otherworldly cathedral on some lonely, lofty hill, built all of stained glass and drenched in God’s great golden light.”

  “Zzzzzzzzzz,” Second whispered.

  “Could you say that louder please?” I asked. He didn’t get it so I whispered: “Snore louder! So everyone can hear it? Come on. I’m giving you a free place to stay!”

  “Bollocks! You don’t . . . What’s this fribblin’ kranswaggle ever done to you?”

  “Had a book published within the last two years!”

  Charlie L. Something droned on and the only person who seemed as though she might be paying attention was the woman who might be Bev . . . so now I knew it was her.

  “Get on with it!” Second called out to Charlie. “Get on with it, gobshite!”

  Charlie stopped reading for a second, then resumed. I slid down in my metal chair.

  A few sentences later Second called out: “Is this really the best you can do? This is like takin’ foiv Ambien CR’s!”

  People turned around to look at Johnny, and Beverly Martin was surprised to see me at the reading but even more surprised to see me sitting next to the rambunctious boor who was disrupting it.

  Charlie resumed but after a few more sentences Second stood up and yelled: “FREEBIRD!”

  A Barnes & Noble employee came over and asked us to please leave. We got up and were making our way out when I heard Bev call my name. We stopped—we were deep in the shadowy thick of the Self-Help section—and she approached us.

  “Frank!” she said.

  I introduced her to my buddy Johnny Tyronne.

  “You were heckling Charles,” she said to him. “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “Well, it wasn’t very nice of him to be so boring,” Second said to her.

  “I didn’t think he was boring.”

  Of course she didn’t. For her if it was in print it was fascinating and sacred. She probably regarded Chinese take-out menus as classic texts.

  “Well, I guess we’re just not going to be mates then. Pity, that.”

  “Deke Rivers called me,” I said to her.

  “Oh yes . . . I gave him your number. How did that work out?”

  I thought she got a kick out of siccing a vanity press editor on me and that she enjoyed the feeling of being a bar bouncer stamping an ultraviolet LOSER on my hand for the night.

  “I haven’t called him back. I don’t think I’m going to.”

  “I better go back.”

  She spun around and headed back, nearly knocking over a table of Addiction and Recovery books.

  Twenty minutes later we were outside Big Lou’s bodega. It looked ordinary, rundown, anonymous. Second went inside and bought two quarts of Bud and then we sat on a stoop across the street and drank and watched the place. Everything seemed normal until a limousine pulled up and three well-dressed people got out, went inside, and didn’t come out.

  “Do you think we should call Cookie?” my guest asked. “He could meet us here.”

  “Nah, he’s on his tollbooth shift,” I said. “Doesn’t get off work until like three a.m.”

  Second nudged me in the shoulder and said, “Well?”

  Online, there was no doubt that I was a damned good poker player. I could analyze the situation at hand as well as anyone, and my decisions were swift, smart, and sane. It was the only thing I was good at, but for months now I’d been wondering if I’d be any good in person. I was like a singer who could belt out “The Star Spangled Banner” and raise my own goosebumps in the shower . . . but could I do it before the Super Bowl in front of a billion people?

  “Dónde está Big Lou?” I said to the guy behind the counter, eyes darting east and west.

  He pointed to a curtain near the Progresso and Goya cans and said, “Abajo.”

  Second and I walked behind the curtain. The light on the stairway was murky and I had to feel around the walls blindly as we descended. The stairs were narrow; twenty more pounds and I wouldn’t have fit. By the time we made it to the landing below there was hardly any light at all. There were no knobs, no sliding window panels—it wasn’t like the Speakeasy-Swordfish scene in whichever Marx Brothers movie. “Forget this, Second,” I whispered. “Let’s go back up.”

  Suddenly one of the walls slid open onto a small antechamber and the landing was flooded with light and noise. I heard music, I heard voices—a lot of voices—and liquor glasses and chips. Real honest-to-God chips, not a tinny reproduction playing out of my computer speakers.

  “Who are you here to see?” an acne-scarred, off-duty cop wearing black pants, black shoes, and a black turtleneck asked me.

  “Dónde está Big Lou?” Second and I said nervously at the same time.

  He looked us up and down, asked us to turn around and put our hands on the wall of the antechamber. As we were packing only cash and no heat, he allowed us to turn back around and directed us into the large room. (For his troubles, I handed him a twenty.)

  The subterranean casino was the size of a small high school gym . . . which at one time it might have been. There were no windows, no clocks, just lots of buzzing fluorescent light, cigarette and cigar smoke, and lots of men. Men at Let It Ride and Pai Gow tables, men at craps and blackjack tables, men walking around, men with women at roulette tables. “Rio” by Duran Duran was playing when we walked in; although the music wasn’t throbbing, it was just loud enough to be annoying. There was a fully stocked makeshift bar and two bartenders in dull golden brown tuxes at the far end of the room, and Second and I headed over and surveyed the scene as we walked. Against the wall near the cashier window were rows of slot machines, but only one woman, about thirty, was playing (if you choose to call losing your money in slot machines playing). Second and I quickly downed our drinks—they weren’t free—and he said he was itching to play. I could see that. He was scratching the lining on his jacket as though the suede was a bad case of hives.

  “You’ve got all kinds of Hold’em games here?” Second asked one of the bartenders, probably also an off-duty cop. We got another round. I had a very nice buzz on.

  “All kinds,” the bartender said. I know cops are underpaid, I know most of them have families and lead dangerous, stress-filled lives, but not for any amount of money, I reflected, would I wear a tuxedo the color of Gulden’s Mustard.

  While they chatted I walked over to one of the two dice tables. This one was a ten-dollar minimum table, the other was fifty. All the casino workers were dressed as though this was a legitimate but low-budget operation: burgundy sharkskin suits with a few stains here and there, loose black bow ties, white shirts with ruffles and imitation pearl buttons. The blackjack dealers were mostly Asian women, and no more than 20 percent of the gamblers were women. I threw in fifty bucks and got some chips—they were real, made of clay and not plastic—and played for ten minutes, all the time keeping an eye on Johnny Tyronne/Second Gunman, who was still conversing with the bartender. After ten minutes I was up
sixty bucks and I brought my modest winnings back to the bar.

  “Chipper,” Second said to me, “I think I loov your coontry.”

  “Yeah, what with places like this, we’re a real light unto the world, Johnny-Boy.”

  We sidled over to a spot near the cashier’s window, and “Heart of Glass” came on.

  Second Gunman explained to me the baffling setup of real-life poker at Big Lou’s and, as we’d already drunk a lot that day and as we were still drinking that very moment, it wasn’t easy to follow. The upshot was there were all varieties of poker games going on, tournaments, freerolls, sit and go’s, etc. (I had no idea what he was talking about.) There was No-Limit, there was Pot-limit, there was Omaha, there was a lot I’d never heard of. As he was explaining all of it to me I noticed, to my amazement, Scott Heyward—Toby Kwimper’s successor at my former publisher, whom I’d met at the Saucier book party—take a seat at a table and reach into his wallet. (That wallet couldn’t have been too full since he worked in publishing.) Could I possibly, I wondered, not only win a few grand here but also sell Dead on Arrival to Scott? That seemed an impossible stunt to pull off: if I was winning, it would be his money I was pocketing and he might not be so anxious to buy my book in that case. I decided I didn’t want to play with Scott Heyward, I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t even want him to see me.

  “So you should sit there then . . .” I heard Second say to me.

  “Huh? Where?”

  He pointed to Scott Heyward’s table.

  “When?” I asked, feeling all the hundred-dollar bills in my pockets shriveling like a scrotum in cold weather.

  “Now! Hurry.”

  He told me he had to go to another table very quickly to play No-Limit.

  At this point, Evening Two with my new mustachioed Blackpudlian buddy begins to get fuzzy and very dark gray. We had been drinking since lunchtime and by no means was it Second Gunman’s fault: it really was a folie à deux, sort of like how neither Perry nor Dick acting alone could have murdered the Family Clutter but had to be together on the fateful Kansas night that at once cemented and ended Truman Capote’s career. When I sat down at that poker table, drinks kept coming, one after the other, then three after the other. It turned out the drinks were free, once you were sitting and playing, and they were brought to you by off-duty cops, who, other than making sure you weren’t going to get in any brawls if you lost lots of money, were there to keep you as drunk as possible and make sure you lost lots of money. Another reason for my gray-out was simply this: fear. Fear of playing with real people. Real people were at my table, on both sides of me, across from me; real people were all around. Things got very blurry, voices blended into each other. Cards were shuffled and dealt in slow motion and in fast motion at the same time. I believe that Scott Heyward recognized me . . . or maybe I just thought he did, or he didn’t and I foolishly reintroduced myself to him. After that—I’m almost certain of it but not sure—he kept bringing up the subject of Jerome Selby to me. So you’re the one who drove Jerry Selby to commit suicide, he said. And he kept at it. (I think.) Forty years Jerome Selby is at the company, there’s no sign of trouble, he gets your manuscript and wouldn’t you know it, two days later he blows his brains out. Hand after hand Scott kept this up. I had been used to online tomfoolery but this was something else and it wasn’t fun. Toby Kwimper didn’t want to edit your book—what was the name of it: Love Horror, was it, or Plague Love?—’cause he knew it was a definite go-nowhere career-killer, so what does he do? He gives it to poor Jerry, a legend in the business and a man who never could ever say no to anybody. You happy, Frank? Does this make you proud, you untalented, increasingly pudgy fuck? Your book, which sold—what was it, like fifty copies?—ended Jerome Selby’s life. Some book! Then the other players, strangers to me all, joined in . . . and they were saying things like Wow, you really did this? and You must be a real piece of shit, Frank. This Jerry Selby sounds like decent people, like a regular standup guy, and you just go and make him kill himself and also That must have been one lousy book to make a guy commit suicide. At one point a player to my right told me he could write a book about his life, and at another point the player immediately to my left said to one of the off-duty cops, Hey, Al, this guy here once killed a guy named Jerry Selby by suicide. Homicide should look into that, doncha think? Then another player, I’m fairly sure, asked me, So what the hell was Fenton Hardy really like and did you really have a boat called the Sleuth? So there was the booze, there was Scott Heyward’s cruel bullying, there was the spliff I’d smoked with Second outside on the stoop before we walked in that I only just now told you about, there were the humiliation and guffaws, and, ultimately, there was also the fact that I lost all seven thousand bucks by 2:15 a.m., which made me feel as if every ounce of blood in my body had been replaced by flat club soda.