Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  I decided to stalk his sartorially perfect ass again.

  I had just sat down at my usual Dunkin’ Donuts stool across the street from his office and thrown back three Munchkins when I saw him strutting down the street. I hadn’t really thought about what I’d do if I saw him (I wasn’t armed), but I got up, grabbed the box of doughnuts, and trotted toward him, intending to pretend that this was a casual run-in.

  “Hey, Clint!” I called out with a friendly Hey-Look-Who’s-Here wave from the other side of the street. It was 9 a.m. and blustery out, but his ponytail didn’t whip in the wind. He probably spent an hour shellacking it every morning before he left the house.

  “Yes?” he called back with a squint, not really seeing me getting closer.

  “Clint . . . it’s me . . . Frank Dixon!”

  We stood a foot apart. As usual, he was dressed impeccably. His tie not only always matches his shirt but also the affected faint freckles dotting the bridge of his nose.

  “Aahhh!” he said. “You must want Clint.”

  “You’re Clint,” I said. “Right?”

  “No . . . I’m Vance.” His identical twin brother. His business partner. Who works in L.A. and who seldom comes to New York.

  “You are?” I asked.

  “Heh. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Or to Clint.”

  “You’re really Vance Reno?” Now I was the squinter and he was the squintee and I was clutching the Munchkins so tight that the box was starting to crack.

  “Clint happens to be in London now on business.”

  I could have asked Vance what he was doing in New York, I could have asked him why he now wore his hair in a ponytail just as his brother did, I could have asked him, “So since when did you start wearing suits?” since the two times I’d met him he’d worn jeans and a T-shirt, and I could have asked him since when did his tie and shirt match so perfectly, but I opted not to. If it was Clint trying to avoid me and pass himself off as his twin, then I couldn’t bring myself to humiliate him (Clint) by telling him that I knew he wasn’t really him (Vance). If it was Vance, then I didn’t want to confront him (Vance) either, since he wasn’t really him (Clint).

  But I did gather up enough courage to say: “Wow, it’s amazing how much you look like him now, Vance,” my words not dripping with as much sarcasm as I would have liked.

  “Yes,” he said, just about to enter the building to escape me, “I’m quite often mistaken for myself.”

  I politely asked him if he could, once he was upstairs, do some quick digging around and find out to which publishers Clint had sent Dead on Arrival. Why do you want that information? he asked. Not letting on about Ross F. Carpenter, I said: “Because I just do.”

  He told me he’d get right on it and hurried inside.

  All the Munchkins were on the ground at my feet. The box had broken.

  “How much more of this abject misery can one human being take?” the fed-up Time Magazine reviewer had remarked about Plague Boy. Life was giving me a brutal pasting and I was just taking it. It felt like all ten billion other people in the world were kicking, punching, and biting me and would rather abuse me, shame me, and cause me tremendous anguish than eat, breathe, drink, and have sex amongst themselves. It was their idea of a good time.

  (Once when I was about nine, my Uncle Ray and I boxed in his Elizabeth, New Jersey, living room. He broke my nose with a right jab. The blood poured out and I began to cry at the top of my lungs. “Why didn’t you put your guard up?” Uncle Ray asked me. “Why didn’t you punch back?” As he plugged both my nostrils with tissue and tried to comfort me, I whimpered, “Because I didn’t want to hurt you.”)

  In Las Vegas I had vowed to do something. It was now time to make more vows.

  No longer would I let people kick me around. I had to fight back. I had to wriggle free from the Whipping Post of the World and whip back.

  I logged on to the Galaxy, opened up a page in Word, and started playing poker and making my vows at the same time.

  At the top of the page I wrote “What Would Herman Melville Do?”

  Herman Melville wrote Typee (his Plague Boy) and then Omoo (his Love: A Horror Story). A scrappy sonuvabitch, that New York-born and -bred fighter kept fighting back. Moby Dick was his un­doing, but still he never gave up. They kept knocking him down but he kept getting back up.

  #1: I will call Clint Reno. I will demand the list of names I need. No e-mails. No messages. No snail mail. Voice-to-ear contact. Live, as it happens. He will comply.

  #2: No, I won’t call. I’ll push my way into his office. If he gives me a dirty look, if he threatens to call the police, I will yell so loud that I’ll see his eardrums turn to powder and sift out of his ears.

  I won $850 with three 5s at the Medium tables and it put me above $232,000. The next hand, I won $600 with two 8s.

  #3: I will call Martin Tilford and ask him, “Hey, remember me? The seared peppercorn tuna at Café Quelquechose? So, Martin, I was wondering . . . have you made it to the second sentence of my book yet?”

  Two 10s and two 5s at the High tables. $1,450. Two Aces the next hand: $900.

  Herman Melville was a steel-tough, sea-tested, iron-nail-chewin’ battler but wound up working for U.S. Customs. It wasn’t going to go that way for me. Why not? Because I had poker to fall back on. No dumb uniform for me other than pajamas or sweatpants. I had to be resilient. The more they knocked me down, the tougher I’d get, until their own fists were bloodied and broken and they couldn’t knock me down anymore. This was war! I would become a raging pest, the Mother of All Nuisances, the Annoying Hyper­active Little Brother to everyone who had ever mistreated me; I’d be the bane of the publishing world’s existence and Publishers Weekly would put me on their cover, my newly peroxided and bespectacled kisser inside a circle with a red X through it. I would be the Fly in the Lit World’s Ointment, and my mug shot would be pinned to the walls in PEN offices around the world (if there are such offices). You rejected me? You snubbed me? Well, guess what. It’s clobberin’ time!

  A 10-high straight in High: $1,600. Two Queens, two 9s: $1,300.

  #4: I will buy a Writer’s Market and deluge agents and editors and I will be published again! I do have two books under my belt and it’s not like I’ll be coming at these book peoples from nowhere. Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads . . . here is a man who would not take it anymore. Here is a man who stood up. A man could stand up! I won’t be ignored! Attention must be paid. I can coruscate, blister, and unsettle like nobody’s business. I can lick any man alive and give him the kind of spiritual rash to end all kinds of spiritual rashes!

  Three 10s in Ultra-High. $3,100. What did some ten-year-old bully once say to me while he was beating me up after a basketball game: “You fuck with me, you fuck with the best. You fuck with me, you die like the rest.”

  Back down to Medium. Two Jacks. $500. Two hands later, a club flush: $700. Van Morrison once sang, “Listen to the lion in your soul.” I was listening to mine with the volume cranked, and the lion was roaring so loud the neighbors would soon be banging on the wall.

  #5: I will track down this “actress” who had only two speaking lines in a play I once cowrote that was workshopped in Minneapolis but who went off on her own one day and wrote a five-page monologue for herself. I’ll track her down at whatever restaurant she’s slinging hash in or office she’s temping at and ask her: “So, uh, how’s the whole acting thing working out for you?”

  Back up to High. Leopold Gloom, Sam Spades, Bjorn 2 Win. Full house, 8s full of 3s. $3,800. In the real world I was a deuce or a lowly 4, but here I was a face card, a puissant, swaggering, omni­potent King barely noticing his subjects as he trampled them. Maybe it really was better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, especially since Hell paid so much better.

  If you ever cut me down, if you ever ignored me, if you ever disrespected me, then, pal, I am about to become the worst hemorrhoid you will ever have! You die like the rest.

&nb
sp; I took a breather. For ten seconds. I reread my vows. It was becoming a manifesto!

  #6: I will call and e-mail editors in the U.K. and they will publish my book over there and I will win the Man Booker Prize and then I will have Deke Rivers publish my book here and will thus be able to keep 90 percent of the profits and share not one cent of it with all the American publishers who rejected me. If they reject me in England, then I will visit upon them something so wicked and so downright irritating, that they’ll wish it was just the Black Plague coming around again and not me.

  Two Queens. $2,400. Back to Medium. Two 9s, two 7s. $450. The world was full of ants and I was a size 18EEE shoe. It was Hiroshima and I was the Enola Gay.

  #7: When I see writers on the street I won’t let them just walk by. Oh no. If some priss like Julian Barnes or the doughy has-been Salman Rushdie should cross my path, I will get right in his face and tell him, “You should have stopped writing twenty years ago. What’s it like to do nothing but read and write all day long?” “Hey, you! Joyce Carol Oates! I could take you!” “Hey, Richard Ford! How my ass taste?”

  Four 7s in High. I repeat: four 7s. $2,250. I was Ralph Kramden and everybody else was Alice and I was going ballistic all over her apron. “Get something in your head, Alice! I’m the king here! Remember that! This house is my castle! I’m the king! Remember that! King, king, king! You are nothing! A peasant! This is my house! My castle! I’m the king!”

  My next vow was that when I went over $300,000, I would stop playing poker and work on the American Nightmare Trilogy. That amount would certainly be enough to tide me over. If I couldn’t stop playing poker, I also vowed, if I found I was hooked, then I would seek treatment. I Googled the words “gambling treatment addiction facility,” and among the thirty pages of results, the first and foremost was the Shining Path Clinic. I went to their site, which was sophisticated and well designed, and looked at the photos of their perfectly manicured grounds in the arid Southwest, of patients talking to therapists and to each other and playing Ping-Pong, I looked at the ads for Atavan and Paxil, and then went back to my Declaration of Principles and returned to #7, which was becoming my personal favorite.

  If I ever see Calvin Trillin I will say to him to “Do you honestly believe that that novel you wrote about a guy and his New York parking space would ever have gotten published if you with your fancy New Yorker pedigree hadn’t written it?! Joe Blow writes that book, it don’t get published. A guy and his parking space?? Fuck you . . . Bud!”

  An Ace-high heart flush in High. $1,500. Was this a dream? Was some other poker player dreaming me? Now I knew what it was like to be Mike Tyson when Mike Tyson was still Mike Tyson, before he became . . . Mike Tyson.

  If I ever see Dan Brown on an airplane I will follow him into the restroom and I’ll barge in on him just when he’s closing the door and yell, “Do you realize that you’re not any good and that you’re just lucky?” I will stalk Mitch Albom and lunge at him and when I’ve got him down on the sidewalk I’ll say, “Hey, you know how you always write books about dying or dead people? Well, guess what? Your next book can be about yourself!’Cause as of now you’re dead!” I will fear nobody. “Hey, Cody Marshall, you gave away my ending once? Well, it’s payback time and now I am ending you.” I will drop a 90-pound television on Jonathan Franzen’s already swelled head from ten flights up and yell down: “Hey, Franzen! Guess you finally got a TV now, huh?”

  Ultra-High. A table for three with Ante Maim and SaniFlush, the baddest player on the site. I had squadoosh. The Big Doughnut. But I kept raising and raising. They finally folded. $3,600. Fireworks were going off and “Ode to Joy” was blasting and millions of people were on their feet applauding. To echo Rusty Wells in mid-puke: “It don’t get any better ’n this.”

  I logged off at 4 a.m. and, according to Wifey, I giggled in my sleep all night long.

  Two weeks later I logged on, as usual, at eight in the morning and a mostly blank page came on my screen and told me that Pokergalaxy.com was closed for repairs but would be back up soon. Soon? When is “soon”? Is “soon” five minutes, five hours, or five weeks?

  How could they do that to me?

  I checked every few minutes to see if it was back. Sometimes I just clicked on the refresh button so I suppose I was, from time to time, checking every few seconds. I went to the kitchen, opened a box of Froot Loops, checked the site, went back and got the milk out, checked the site, went back to the kitchen and poured the milk over the cereal, checked the site, then brought the bowl into my study and kept checking with every spoonful. Two hours later I interrupted a pee halfway through, checked to see if the site was back up, and then went back into the bathroom to finish. It still wasn’t up at two, so I brought my laptop to a restaurant near my apartment that I knew got wifi. But it never did come back up that day.

  When Cynthia came home from work I was a pale, shaking ruin and I told her I wasn’t feeling well, which was not a lie.

  The next morning the site was back up.

  There were e-mails from my Poker Buddies. They had all, they told me, gone through a similarly rough twenty-four hours. Kiss My Ace told me that his one day without any contact with Boca Barbie was the worst twenty-four hours of his life. “And i once did,” he added, “this marine corps training in the desert when we had no food or water and had to eat these scorpion things we hunted down.”

  Artsy Painter Gal: I don’t ever want to go a day without you ever, ever again!

  Chip Zero: I thought the site would never come back up, that you were gone from me forever.

  Arty Painter Gal: I thought the very same. I was really panicking! I can’t bear the thought of losing this! It would kill me.

  Chip Zero: Look at us. We’re just as sickeningly sweet as Kiss My Ace and Barbie. We must be making people throw up if they’re spying on us.

  Artsy Painter Gal: OMG, you’re right. Look what you’ve done to me! You’ve made me GOOEY!

  The next day things got even more serious between us.

  Artsy Painter Gal: Chip, what I said to you at the Nirvana I meant. I would like to see you again.

  Artsy Painter Gal wins $300 with two 9s.

  Artsy Painter Gal: I know it’s completely insane and we don’t even know each other but I know what I want, ok?

  Chip Zero: I don’t think we don’t know each other. We do this so often. I tell you everything.

  Artsy Painter Gal: Name a time and a place. Where and when? And make it soon.

  Chip Zero: I don’t know. I’ll give it some thought, I promise you.

  Where and when? Those words stayed with me for days, for weeks. They floated off my computer screen and hung in the air and followed me around. They loomed over me as I sat at readings in Barnes & Noble and asked writers annoying questions afterwards (“So what made you write this book, how much did you get for it, and what did you do with all the dough?”). Where and when? I would be eating with Cynthia in a restaurant and the words undulated over my calamari, onion rings, or sushi. In ghostly hues the letters shimmied and shimmered morning, noon, and night, like the weird lettering of “Come to the City” in Murnau’s Sunrise. It was the same situation, too: a woman, not my wife, from a faraway place was using all her wiles to lure me away from my loving, devoted wife. If anyone said the word “where” in the course of a sentence, I saw “and when?” appear, wobble, and then slowly disintegrate.

  I was true to my word to Victoria. Not only did I give it some thought, I saw it and heard it and dreamt about it and couldn’t shake it.

  Ever since coming back from Empyrean Island, my sleep had gotten even stranger. Lately it was a rare event when a real flesh-and-blood human being even made an appearance. Mostly animated poker-playing figures populated my dreams. I, of course, was the Big Guy, the big lug in the Hawaiian shirt. Cynthia always showed up as the dark, sultry Dragon Lady in the red silk dress, and Artsy Painter Gal was the buxom Lady Godiva Blonde. Sometimes we sat around a poker table, sometimes we stood on the str
eet around a poker table, sometimes we sat up in bed playing cards and dunking poker chips in onion dip. When I dreamt about Harry Carver, he was the Leathery Cowboy; Lonnie was the Black Pimpin’ Dude with the monster ’fro, and my mother was always the Blowsy Housewife. And there was little or no talking . . . now it was mostly instant messaging. The nonsense-speak of dreamlife had been replaced by chat and emoticons. Nobody laughed—they LOLed.

  Real life was little different. Or was it that my dreamlife and the doings on the Galaxy and in the real world were mixing into one confused tricolore pasta? When I handed over money to real people in the real world, I felt like I was the Big Guy losing a hand and shoving over my chips. When I turned over things, such as mail, magazines, or a bill at a restaurant, I felt like I was turning over playing cards, and it was disorienting to see “$90.00” looking back up at me instead of a 9 of spades. When I heard numbers in real life, or on television (“And Bryant hits another three-pointer” or “The S and P rose five points today”), I always associated them with cards (for an instant I envisioned Kobe Bryant hoisting up a 3 of diamonds from twenty feet) and if someone told me that her father had just had heart surgery, I envisioned a team of doctors in an operating room removing from a gaping, blood-soaked chest cavity an 8 of hearts.

  No longer could I say that I was haunted by poker. The Galaxy was now the world I lived in.

  A week before Thanksgiving my first book was down to 711,762 on Amazon but my second was holding steady around 768,000. Soon the two books would meet up in a place called Nope. I e-mailed Harry and asked what had become of his movie idea; he e-mailed me back a few days later telling me he’d get back to me soon. Ads were now appearing in the papers and on TV for Breakthrough, which wasn’t just called Breakthrough but was “Pacer Burton’s Breakthrough.” He had gone from being hot to very hot to being hot shit.