Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Nah. I let her have it.

  Chip Zero: JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, I AM REALLY HERE! I AM IN LONDON RIGHT NOW BITCH AND I THOUGHT YOU WERE REALLY COMING TO BE WITH ME GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Artsy Painter Gal: No! Oh God.

  Chip Zero: YES!

  Artsy Painter Gal: I’m sorry. Oh I’m so sorry. I feel terrible. Are you really there?

  Chip Zero: Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Artsy Painter Gal: :) :) :) :)

  Yes, a great big misunderstanding.

  I took three pills, ate some more candy, and took the tube to the River Café and told the maître d’ when I checked in that I’d be only one that night.

  I moved back into the cheaper single room and stayed two more weeks, just as I’d planned, and never went to the library or wrote another word. But I did return, two times, to the hospital to renew the prescription, and it occurs to me now that the happiest times in my life weren’t when I was happy at all but was when I was just too fucked up to be sad.

  I rarely left the room except to eat . . . and I ate huge portions and drank well. I stuck to the story: to every nosy maître d’ who asked me why I was one and not two, I replied, “Because my party died.”

  Monday night, the day after I realized I’d been stood up, I fell asleep but woke up in the middle of the night. Someone or something—Wifey, a tarantula, a Moors Murderer, a large rat, Artsy—was in the room with me. Whatever it was, it occupied the chair against the wall. I was too afraid to turn the lights on to look. It was breathing, pulsing, emitting heat, it was alive, and in the darkness the thing kept getting bigger and was taking over the room . . . it was like the apple in the Magritte painting and was going to overwhelm me or eat me alive.

  It was the new laptop.

  I began playing poker again. Morning, afternoon, night. I didn’t stop except to eat or shower and I wasn’t, I confess, doing too much showering. I had obscenely good luck . . . it bordered on cruelty what I was doing to other players, but I kept at it. And I relished it.

  If I was logged on, Artsy Painter Gal didn’t come on. Of course not. She was as horrified as I was. Albeit for completely disparate reasons.

  After a week of playing and winning tons and tons of money, I logged on one day as the Suburban Mimetic. I didn’t want APG to know I was around. Sure enough, there she was, at a table in Medium. Calm, cool, collected. I played a few hands with her. The next day I won over five grand from her with three Aces, which I played with slow-cooked, sadistic perfection. “Nice hand, Suburban!” she said to me, “but not so nice.” I waited a second and said, “thnx.”

  The next day I discovered her at a table with Cali Wondergal, History Babe, Toll House Cookie and a few others. Wolverine Mommy showed up and . . .

  Wolverine Mommy: Hey, guys!

  Toll House Cookie: Hey, Wolve.

  Wolverine Mommy: Anyone seen Chip Zero around?

  History Babe: No, not for a while. APG?

  Arty Painter Gal: I think he may have gone away for a while.

  I had only two days left in London and couldn’t wait to go home. After an enormous meal in Mayfair I came back to the room with some take-away curry and fish and chips from across the street and logged on again as the Suburban Mimetic. I found APG in Medium and played with her and six other people. I didn’t say a word. Kiss My Ace joined the table, said hello to Artsy and played a few hands. I won $700 with Kings and 5s. Kiss My Ace asked APG, “Hey, is Chip around?” “No,” she answered, “haven’t seen him.” The cards were dealt, then she asked him, “Where’s Boca?” He answered: “At work right now. No computer access.” She shot him back a :).

  After the next hand Artsy Painter Gal suddenly vanished, followed, a second later, by Kiss My Ace.

  A minute later they were at a private table and were all over each other.

  1. “Great job, Frank. Really, just a great job.”

  2. “Great job. Seriously, man, congratulations.”

  15

  Just a Game

  The human brain, the most splendid, obvious proof there is that Charles Darwin might have been on to something, isn’t born wanting, needing, or knowing about gambling, cocaine, alcohol, or cigarettes, but let it lose a hundred bucks in a slot machine, or lay out a few lines on a mirror, etc., and soon it won’t think of anything else. Work, children, health, food, sex, and responsibility all take a distant back seat. The unknowable, intricate, gray tripartite wonder that came up with the wheel, King Lear, pizza, the lightbulb, the Little Black Dress, the Infield Fly Rule, North by Northwest, and “A Day in the Life” is reduced to three pounds of useless mashed potatoes. Soon you will be robbing your mother, defrauding your father, selling your wife, and emptying your kid’s piggy bank. The addicted Homo sapiens is the only animal who realizes it is an addict and would ever make an attempt to recover—would any self-respecting coke-snorting rhesus monkey ever check its hairy ass into rehab?—and thus these brilliant noble creatures are the only animals who fail at it. We think we’re kings of the jungle but aren’t really such bad-asses after all. It doesn’t take much to bring us down to rhesus-monkey size: a hit of Vicodin, a glass of fermented barley, a chocolate bar, a skim latte, a pair of expensive shoes, or a round of Mortal Kombat or golf.

  I can either gamble and not write or I can write and not gamble. Even though when I gamble I win and when I write I lose.

  At least I know I have a problem. That’s half the game, isn’t it?

  I returned from London on a Monday afternoon, jet-lagged out of my wits. I called Cynthia at work, but her voicemail kept picking up. When she didn’t come home that night, I called her cell and left her a message (“I’m baaaaaack”), but she didn’t call. My e-mails went unanswered too. I kept checking but was too out of it to think straight.

  The only message that showed up came from Susan Jessup. “Hey you, Frank Dixon!” her e-mail began. “Attached please find MY VERY OWN FIRST NOVEL! Woohoo!” She told me how important my first book was to her (she had even, she said, read my second); I wrote back telling her I’d look at hers. I skimmed the first chapter and read the second and—unbelievably—it was pretty good.

  I’ll do what I can to help, I wrote her. Just give me some time.

  I fell asleep thinking that Cynthia would slink into the bed in the middle of the night and fill me with the comfy warmth that any exhausted traveler needs upon his return. When I woke up at about 3 a.m. and she wasn’t there, I panicked and thought of calling the police. But I fell back asleep.

  I woke up and played poker, and right after the sun rose, I did something I thought I’d never do: I e-mailed Deke Rivers at Last Resort Press. I thought he would wait a few days to get back to me and that we’d make an appointment to meet in a week, but he got back to me a few minutes later and said I could swing by his office at two that day. He told me to send him Dead on Arrival right away. “I’ll hop all over that puppy, Frank,” he wrote. This for me was scraping the brackish depths of a sewer with a butter knife, and I felt like a two-star general who became a bellhop just because he liked wearing epaulettes.

  I took a long, hot shower and imagined myself as a low-level Mafia guy in a dead-end alley somewhere in New Jersey. We were just outside the DeLillo Sausage Factory at midnight and the stench of offal was rife, and ten other mafiosi were walking slowly toward me carrying baseball bats . . . they wore violet Adidas tracksuits and were going to beat my brains out: Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Jonathans and Davids and Brett Jay McEllisses were coming for me . . . they were going to feed me half-alive into the meat grinder and turn me into sausage. “Don’t do it, guys, please,” I begged. They came closer and I cried: “You can’t do this to me! I’m a made guy!” Fitzgerald and Safranzeneggerthemgart weren’t impressed so I reminded them, “I’ve had two books published!” The sausage grinder started up behind the brick wall and they raised their bats and I yelled out, “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME! MY FIRST BOOK GOT A B-MINUS IN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY!!! IT WAS ONE OF TH
E DES MOINES REGISTER’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR. YOU CAN’T! GUYS, I’M CORUSCATIN’!!!” It didn’t matter . . . they were taking their Louisville Sluggers to my head and kicking my ribs in, and inside the factory the grinder was spinning and humming for me.

  There was no sign of Wifey. I phoned her father’s office, but he was, his secretary told me, out of town; I tried her mother in West Virginia, but she wasn’t home. Worried now, I headed out for the meeting at one thirty. As soon as the meeting was over I would make every phone call possible to find her and, if need be, go to the police. It was possible, I knew, she’d had to go out of town on business, or maybe her mother had needed her suddenly.

  Getting off the elevator, I felt like I was doing the shabbiest thing I’d ever done . . . it was like a coed in the 1950s going to get a back-alley abortion or a forty-five-year-old perv meeting a twelve-year-old he’d been having online sex with. Last Resort Press was comprised of four small offices and a reception area. It could have been a dental suite at one point; all the other offices on the floor belonged to dentists, orthodontists, endodontists, or other mouth-based people. I checked in with the receptionist and sat down next to a slender woman with large black eyes and eyelashes, black leather everything and long, straight metallic black hair. It was obvious she was an eccentric, self-obsessed poetess, and I went through all sorts of yogic contortions in my seat to let her know I didn’t want to talk.

  Deke came out and we shook hands. (His grip was reassuring, All-American, and frightening.) Square head, an overgrown, graying crew cut, ruddy complexion, a tobacco-brown suit. He could have been the head of about six hundred different small-town chambers of commerce.

  “I’ve already knocked off a hundred and sixty pages,” he told me when I sat down in his cluttered office. Deke spoke with a gruff voice and had to clear his throat every ten words.

  “Then you’ve come to the—” I began.

  “The part when the wife and kids die? Oh yes. This is solid stuff.”

  Was he going to ask me why had I come to him, why I couldn’t get it published elsewhere, and how much I was willing to pay to have it published? How did this vanity press business work?

  “This is professional grade, Frank,” he said. His feet were on top of three manuscripts on his desk and there was a speckled wad of gum on the sole of one of his Wallabies. By imagining myself in a large vise I was able to keep from squirming. “I’d really love to publish this. It’s just A-one, top-drawer material.”

  “Thanks.” The vise tightened and my shoulders were starting to crimp.

  I wanted to know what Last Resort would not publish. There were book covers on the walls: The Reasons for My Suicide by Ginny Pierson, A Middletown Childhood by Victor Blumberg, Destroying Planet Earth by Zarbakon-VI, and a book I wouldn’t have minded reading called The 152 Chicks I Did and the 12 I Didn’t and Why by Vinnie G. If a Park Avenue society matron got her poodle a computer and the dog hammered out gobbledygook for three years, would Last Resort publish it? Did they ever actually edit anything, suggest changes, cut something? If a ranting psychotic came in off the street with all his ravings on 10,500 single-spaced, drool-drenched pages, would they print all twenty volumes as is? On the other hand, though, maybe this was every single novelist’s wet dream. No suggestions, no cuts, no interference. Total tamper-proof, uncontaminated, free-range fiction.

  “I’d like,” Deke said, “to recommend a few changes though, Frank.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “For instance, how would you feel about maybe nine-elevening it up?”

  Right away I knew what he meant. And I wasn’t shocked. For months, from editors and publishers, I had expected this suggestion. Simple nonclever stories about human beings and their travails weren’t enough anymore. If it was going to click, it had to be written by an exotic multicultural woman or a Harvard-educated, snarky male media darling or a silver-tongued, dagger-witted, snaggletoothed, Johnny Depp–cheeked, Oxbridge-educated Brit; or it had to be about 9/11, or about immigrants assimilating in the U.S. and struggling charmingly with American things like shopping malls, cable TV, ATMs, and Jell-O, or about ex-pats hitting it big in the Moscow underworld, or about rich blondes exfoliating at Bergdorf’s, or about a girl’s sexual relationship with her father or growing up in a zany New England family or meeting the lovable transgender lifesaving dogs of dead sportswriters in Heaven, or about being raised by crack-smoking truckstop wolf whores and Bloods and Crips in order to escape Nazis.

  “You want, I take it,” I said (and already he was nodding), “the wife to die, not in a car crash as I have it now, but to die on September Eleventh, is that it?”

  “Think about it. It’d really grab the critics that way.”

  “So the wife is in the Twin Towers. She’s at work, she gets killed, the husband gets the call or he sees it on TV. But everything after that . . . it stays the same?”

  He took his feet off the desk, leaned forward and said: “Or there’s this. And it just struck me this instant. Now, believe me we do this a lot and, considering your famous Hardy Boys name, maybe it’d be a mistake. But we change your name. You write it . . . as a woman. You’re Felicity, you’re LaKeesha or Candy. Make up a last name. Berkowitz, Jackson, MacTavish. You wouldn’t believe how popular the name Felicity is among female readers—we focus-group these sorts of things and the numbers are through the roof. Or we go with something exotic like, say, Boompha Jalalabad. You know, you jump on that Jhumpa Lihiri–Azar Nafisi–Thrity Umrigar What I Talk About When Kite Running in Tehran bandwagon. And we could change all the genders around. It’s about a housewife whose husband gets killed on nine-eleven and she lives it up afterwards. She starts doing all the same things . . . you know, sleeping around, drinking, drugging, and gambling and everything.”

  “So instead of my male widower sleeping with his dead wife’s sister, now it’s a female widow sleeping with her dead husband’s brother and all his friends?”

  “You got it! Written by Felicity MacTavish or Boompha Jalalowitz.”

  Deke Rivers wanted it to be a chick book. Had he leaned forward close enough and had I leaned in, too, I would have seen Kate Hudson dancing in his eyeballs.

  “I’m telling you,” he said while I sat there numb and slack, “this is just what the doctor ordered. They’d eat it up, they really would.”

  I pictured the illustration on the cover: a thin but chesty, smartly dressed woman wearing all sorts of expensive pink clothing and overloaded with pink accessories—Kate Spade handbag, oversized Gucci shades, Jimmy Choos— blithely applies pink lipstick while the pink Twin Towers crumble harmlessly around her in a cloud of bubblegum-pink dust.

  Deke told me that he personally could go over the manuscript and change the names and genders and get it back to me; he said we could hire the best publicists and send copies everywhere once the book was printed. I was too stunned by all this to reply and was on the verge of an outer-body experience (just for relief, my soul was about to rove across the hallway to an endodontist’s office and get a root canal).

  Deke walked me out to the elevators. We shook hands, the elevator came, and he asked me to think about his suggestion.

  So I pay you, I wanted to say, and somehow I end up being the whore???

  Instead I told him I would think about it.

  When I got home Cynthia—to my relief—was sitting on the couch with her legs crossed and the latest copy of InStyle on her lap.

  “Where were you?” I asked her. “I’ve been really worried.”

  “Where do you think?”

  “I don’t know. At a work off-site? Your mom’s?”

  “So? Did you get a lot of work done on the Trilogy? When do I get a chance to read it?”

  “When I put it all together. I have to clean a few things up.”

  She flipped InStyle onto the coffee table and it made a loud clang.

  “So tell me . . .” she said. “How long have you and this Artsy Painter Gal been involved? And don’t tell m
e you’re not.”

  “We’re not.”

  All the air around us abruptly vacated the premises.

  “Oh, yes you are.”

  I took my coat off and sat down on the couch, whereupon she stood up and went to the dinner table and sat down there.

  “You snuck off to London with your poker mistress?!”

  “How did you know about this? And it’s ‘sneaked,’ not snuck. And she is not my mistress.”

  (I could have said “Poker is my mistress” but opted not to.)

  “What I know or the fact that I know doesn’t interest you . . . it’s how I found out that fascinates you, isn’t it?” I nodded and she went on. “When you asked me to send you whatever the hell that depressing, unreadable book is called, you gave me your password.”

  I don’t know what pissed me off more, my being foolish enough to trust her with my password or her calling my book unreadable. I think it was the former. (Quickly I wondered: Would Cynthia like Dead on Arrival as penned by Boompha Felicity Jalalowitz with the pink cover, expensive accessories and new 9/11 theme?)

  “I read some e-mails,” she said. “That’s what I did.”

  I resisted telling her how unethical that was because I knew there was no way I was going to win with that. She explained quickly to me that she had spent the previous night at a Tribeca hotel and was too angry to see me or talk to me.

  “I can’t believe you sometimes,” she said.

  “Neither can I. Listen . . . I went to London. That’s true. I really did plan to write, I swear. I don’t know what you read but I promise you: nothing happened.”