Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  “You’re lying! You betrayed me.”

  “I maybe was going to but she never showed up!”

  “She didn’t show up?”

  “No! I swear to God . . . she stood me up! And probably nothing would have happened anyway.”

  She smiled. The fact that I’d traveled all that distance and spent all that money to cheat but wasn’t able to . . . she was loving it.

  “Well, I still want you out of here.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do!”

  I wasn’t expecting this. I had been planning on a hot romantic two-week tryst that nobody would ever have found out about; now I was being thrown out of my own apartment for an affair that hadn’t even happened.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” I said.

  “I’m giving you ten minutes. Pack your stuff. Get out.”

  She didn’t smile or scowl, and in a weird way her face looked like the high school yearbook picture of some girl that nobody else in the book remembered at all.

  I began packing, slowly at first, but then sped things up when she said, “Eight minutes.” Jamming underwear into a suitcase I told her, “Look, I’m a loser,” hoping that she’d say to me, “No, you’re not!” Instead she said: “Yes, I know.” “No,” I said, still hoping again that she’d contradict me, “I really am.” She said, “Yes, you are. You have accomplished nothing in your entire life.” I put a few socks into the suitcase and said, “Hey, I did get those two books published,” and she said, “But they didn’t sell. Six minutes.” “So you really think,” I asked, “that I’m a loser?” and she said, “You always tell me you are! And yes, I see now that you’re right.” A few shirts fell out of the suitcase and I said, “Look at me, I can’t even pack. I can’t do anything,” and she said, “You’re right. You’re lousy at every single thing you do. And you have five minutes. And I can’t stand your new hair, by the way.” Incensed, I said, “Hold on . . . you really think that I’m not good at anything?” It was hurtful to me that my wife was finally agreeing with me. “Yes, I do!” she insisted. “You’re not good at anything.” “Oh yes I am!” I said. “Oh, and what’s that?” she sniffed. “Poker!” I said.

  Four minutes after the echoes of her little snort died down, I was gone.

  I moved into a ten-room, $850-a-night très charmant hotel on the Upper East Side and stayed there four or five days. Without my laptop. The plan was to purge myself cold turkey of all the pills, booze, gambling, lousy food, and wicked fun. I wanted to see if I could go a few days without playing poker. And I could. But after I checked in I began vomiting and trembling wildly; I had chills and sweated nonstop and wept on and off, and my body was wrenched and twisted and a lifetime supply of mucus kept flowing out of me. I lost track of time and the world, and time and the world lost track of me. I refused housekeeping: every time there was a knock at the door, I called out, “Please just leave me alone!” There were all sorts of fancy shampoos and conditioners that I repeatedly tried to shatter before realizing—it took two days—that the bottles were plastic. I barely made it to the bathroom when I had to go. Until then I didn’t think it was physically possible to shit, pee, throw up, sweat, cough, be wide awake yet also be asleep and dreaming, to feel pain and relief all at the same time, but now I know it is.

  I called Wifey but she wouldn’t pick up. In my mind I wrote gorgeous Faerie Queene–length love poems for her but then tore them up and burned the scraps.

  I wanted to murder someone but didn’t know precisely whom to kill.

  Stone cold sober, I urinated my initials on the wall. I also urinated a cross, a swastika, a star of David, and finally a smiley face on the floor near the window. I shouted curses and cruel insults at passersby outside the window and carved my misery into the faux–King Louis the Whicheverth armoire with my fingernails and teeth.

  Curled up on the floor and shivering, I believe I may have called Deke Rivers to shoot the breeze. He had read the rest of DOA, he told me, and would publish it for a fee to be named later, but he still thought I should “nine-eleven it the hell up” and reverse the genders. I said something about all agents nowadays being interested only in money and not art and how the literary world has changed for the worse, and he said, “It’s true, Chip, and it’s just a goddamned shame, isn’t it?” “Twenty out of twenty agents,” I lamented to him, “would rather handle The Da Vinci Code than the Blood Meridians of this world, wouldn’t they, Deke?” “You’re darn tootin’ they would, buddy! Frank, they handle The Da Vinci Code, these agents’ll tell you, so they can afford to handle the Blood Meridians of the world, but uh-uh . . . they handle The Da Vinci Code so they can afford their summer homes.” He cleared his throat and a quivering jellybean of phlegm oozed out of my phone. “The world, Deke,” I said, “has become a bad place.” “It’s commerce taking over art, that’s what it is,” he told me. “Just a sad commentary on our times.” I thanked Deke for hearing me out and he said, “Any time, Frankie, any time.”

  I hung up—but maybe that phone call never really happened.

  Sometimes that hotel room was spinning slowly one way and I was spinning a lot quicker the other way. At night I thought the patterns on the Egyptian cotton sheets and on the comforter were hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs. Cards were whispering into my ear unspeakably horrific things. The 3 of Diamonds, for example, cackled to me: “Tonight your asshole is going to suck you up and swallow you alive.”

  My cell phone rang on day three or four and I was so sure it was Wifey calling that I picked up. But it turned out to be Susan Jessup and she sounded liked she was ten and was trying to sell me Girl Scout cookies. So, she said, didja really read my book? I told her I had and that I’d liked it a lot. While I clutched the night table, she asked me if I wanted to meet for a coffee and I said, Okay, sure. She told me she was in New York and it turned out she was only ten blocks away.

  We met at a Starbucks and I hadn’t done anything to fix my appearance. My stained, sweaty dress shirt was mostly dangling out of my pants, my breath reeked, my skin was a dull, undiscovered color, and if a tick or a louse or cockroach fell out of my hair nobody in Starbucks would have been shocked. Susan was twenty-three years old, the daughter of two teachers, had shoulder-length blonde hair; everything she wore was probably from Express or H&M, and I could tell that the very sight of me in this condition was causing her tremendous discomfort. She squinted and tried to get me in focus, but it didn’t happen.

  I sounded like I was drunk and hadn’t slept in a week, but she never asked me if anything was wrong. Maybe she thought I always was in this shape. Was this for her like me thinking I was going to meet John Lennon but instead having Charles Manson show up?

  “So,” she said when we sat down, “you really, really liked it?”

  “You want to write books? This is what you want to do?”

  When she nodded I thought: Wow, if this sweet young girl were my daughter I would be the luckiest, most delighted father alive.

  “You’re sure about this, Susan? This is the course you’re setting for yourself?”

  “Yes. This is what I want to do. So? My book? How can I make it—”

  “I read some of it, yeah,” I mumbled. “But not the whole thing because I don’t read books anymore. There’s better ways to waste my time. So I guess I lied. And I’m sorry. I liked what I read, but the thing is I’m not going to read it. It’s not—it has nothing to do with you, I promise. I’m probably not going to read anything ever again. Now here’s my advice.” I paused for a deep breath. “Don’t . . . listen . . . to me. And this isn’t against you personally because you seem very nice and very intelligent. For your own sake, just toss it out. Stop writing. Stop reading. Every word you read is a lie. Writers are liars. Pathetic, whiny, uninteresting, self-obsessed, lazy liars. Nobody means what they say anymore except for me right now. Nobody! They’re worse than politicians. All just a bunch of whores! If you’re an honest, sincere person, you won’t do this. Please don’t do th
is to yourself! Find something else . . . do charity work . . . build huts for lepers or plant trees or answer phones for PBS or Jerry Lewis! But really, you should just give it up. There’s no hope! And that is my advice.”

  I tried to stand up but tumbled to the floor. I looked up and saw she was in tears. I was in tears, too. Oh God, I said looking up at her, I’m so sorry! I was trembling again, head to toe. I told her I’d been going through a rough time lately, that my wife had tossed me out of my home, and she grabbed my hand and helped me up and out onto the street.

  If not for her I would have fainted, or something worse might have happened, and when we parted two minutes later we were both still sniffling. I promised her I’d be okay.

  The next day I checked out of the hotel and left $1,000 for the poor chambermaid, whose supercharged Dyson vac and bottle of Windex would be no match for the fetid havoc that awaited her. I got a Times for the taxi ride downtown and read that the movie rights to a book written by a pseudonymous British author had been optioned for $900,000 by Pacer Burton’s production company. The book would soon be published in the U.S.A. and was called Nuts.

  Whether it was cold or mild that day or snowing or a hundred degrees out, I have no idea.

  When I got home it was four in the afternoon. I showered and hoped to God Cynthia would take me back and for an hour and a half I rehearsed a summation that Émile Zola, Clarence Darrow, and Johnnie Cochran would be proud of. Yet some part of me wanted her to walk into the apartment with some hunky revenge-fuck lover so I could stand up, point an indignant finger at her and say, “Aha! J’accuse!”

  When she walked in—alone—she wasn’t happy to see me.

  “This is difficult for me to say,” she said, “considering how much you mean to me, but out means out.”

  I fell to the floor, grabbed onto her calves, and she said, “It’s not going to work.”

  I stood up and asked her, “Okay, then what will?”

  She told me I looked terrible and she cooked me some bland pasta, but she wouldn’t sit at the table while I ate it. We stayed silent until the last noodle was down.

  “So you have to leave now,” she said.

  I told her I had nowhere to go, then said: “Give me ten minutes.”

  I checked into another hotel, then flew to Detroit the following night. (I tried to tell Wolverine Mommy I was coming to Michigan but couldn’t find her online.) It was obvious from the roiling sky lowering in on me that it was going to snow. After gorging on five Cinnabons at the airport, I rented a Hyundai Cilantro and drove north. The snow was falling but I made it to the Mackinac Bridge. I kept driving. WELCOME TO PURGATORY, the crooked sign said. I checked into the Purgatory Inn, and Wolve came to visit and that’s when I began writing this. This cathartic, redemptive, lifesaving memoir.

  Rarely leaving my motel room—where was there to go?—I wrote for several weeks in Purgatory. It was hard to tell when it was day or night. I also played poker. And won as usual. But winning wasn’t fun anymore. Even the sadistic thrill of crushing inferiors was gone.

  “So are you going to tell me,” Wolve asked me one night, “what happened with you and Artsy?”

  “Nothing did,” I told her. “It’s time to move on.”

  Artsy Painter Gal no longer existed as such. But Victoria G. Landreth was out there somewhere, playing under a new alias. I just knew it. I would spend hours watching players play and chat and see if I could discern who she was. Sometimes I was sure I’d found her but then I could tell—from a joke, phrase, a word, a raise, or a bluff—it wasn’t her. I would play at tables and sometimes when a new player like Ruthless in Seattle, Ickie Vickie, or Little Red Whorevette joined me, I thought it might be her. Maybe it was. But she didn’t mean anything to me anymore. She was like a case of the mumps I’d had when I was two. It was just something that happened. Or didn’t happen. The only thing I wanted was my old life back.

  Cynthia wasn’t taking my calls or answering my e-mails or text messages. Had I sent smoke signals, she would have ignored those, too.

  But I was writing again. That was a start. And it felt great. There was hope. And this time the hope didn’t involve landing a 6 on the river to complete a gutshot straight.

  “Cynthia,” I said in one desperate phone message to her, “I’m writing again! I swear I am. And guess what? It’s a memoir. About this whole mess! That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  For all I know she fast-forwarded through that message and never heard it.

  But one afternoon, perhaps five weeks into my Purgatory sojourn, my motel phone rang. It was Wifey. (Caller ID had tipped her off as to my phone number.) I was so excited to hear her voice I almost began to weep. But there was little joy in her voice.

  “So where are you exactly?” she asked.

  I told her where but left out the Wolverine Mommy part. I repeated that I was writing again but either she didn’t believe me or didn’t care. A few months ago when I told her that I was writing or had just won $500 playing poker, her face would have lit up. But now? Everything about her was not illuminated. And it was all my fault.

  “Look, the reason I’m calling is,” she said, “Second Gunman just called—”

  “Huh? Johnny? From England?”

  “Yes. Him. He called from Blackpool. He said you might be in trouble. Some Swedish man is in New York now, he said, and—”

  “What?! A Swedish man?”

  It was so pleasant hearing her voice that I was having trouble keeping track.

  “And he wants to kill you. That’s what Second said.”

  Sweden. Who in Sweden would want to kill me? Who in Sweden wanted to kill anyone? Other than Olof Palme, has anyone ever been killed in Sweden?!

  “Apparently,” she continued, “you won a lot of money from him?”

  Bjorn 2 Win. It had to be him, I knew. I’d beaten him for about fifteen grand all in all. He lost so easily to me that sometimes I actually felt sorry for him. It was like taking candy from a baby. For all I knew, he was a baby.

  “Is it Bjorn? Did Second say it was Bjorn 2 Win?”

  “Yes. That was his name.”

  (No wonder Second was warning me, I thought—he was the one who advised me to play Bjorn whenever I hit a serious losing skid. He feels responsible.)

  I didn’t know what to say. Just the fact that my wife was talking about people named Second Gunman and Bjorn 2 Win was a sign of the walking-talking catastrophe I’d become.

  “Well, at least I’m not home in case he finds me.”

  “But I am! What if he comes after me?”

  “You didn’t beat him at poker. I did.”

  (Yeah . . . but she was wearing the chinchilla coat that cost exactly sixteen grand, paid for with the money I had won off of Bjorn 2 Win and countless others.)

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “If he really wants to kill me, I’ll just give him his money back.”

  I could give it to Bjorn, I figured, then probably win most of it back from him once he returned home. It was my money after all! Even though it was his.

  The wind howled and shook my flimsy door and I asked Cynthia, “Hey, do you want to come out here? I’ll pay for the airfare and everything. It’s really nice.”

  There was only silence on the other end.

  Just as I begged, “Please take me back!”—right between “take” and “me”—she hung up.

  A few nights later Toll House Cookie found me online. He told me he had some news for me and my initial thought was, Uh-oh, his wife suspects that his nonexistent Cousin Cleon really didn’t die and I have to cover for him. But that wasn’t it. He asked me for my phone number and that’s when I knew it was serious. He logged off and called me and told me he’d heard on the Galaxy that Bjorn was in New York buzzing around for me.

  I didn’t know whether to stay hidden in the Upper Peninsula or return to New York.

  Marvis gave me a third option. There was a motel near his toll plaza. It was thus only a few yards away from the Holla
nd Tunnel and I would be close to my home, my former home.

  “Okay . . . sounds doable,” I said to THC. I told him I’d be in New Jersey within two days.

  When I hung up I pictured a lugubrious six-foot-eight Swede carrying a hatchet and lumbering around the streets of Manhattan at three in the morning. He was stopping strangers and asking them, “Do you know where is Frank Dixon?”

  On my last night in Michigan, Wolve baked me a seven-layer chocolate cake, which she and I ate in less than ten minutes. We kissed on the cheek and said our good-byes and she returned to her three young boys and to nurture the next generation of doctors, civic leaders, fry cooks, and crystal-meth dealers.

  The next morning I drove back down to Detroit and flew to Newark. By then—about a month ago—I had won over a half a million dollars. $650,000 in less than a year! A Queen-high straight on the river netted me $14K against the fearsome SaniFlush and put me over $600K. “You’re a damn good card player, Chip, you know that?” he told me.

  I took a taxi from the airport to the Tunnel Motel. It was a dreary place, right on the highway, the kind of place that millions of people, on their way from New Jersey into New York City, have driven past and gasped, “Oh god, who would ever stay in a place like that?” (The answer is: Me . . . I would.) The last time I had seen this nondescript joint was the previous September, when Second and I came to New Jersey to pick up Marvis to go to Las Vegas. I had no idea that night, of course, that in a few months I’d be holing up there. It had barely registered then, and it was like John F. Kennedy looking across the street and thinking, Hmm . . . that must be some sort of book depository over there and then forgetting about it a second later.

  I called Cynthia and told her where I was. She told me she hadn’t heard from Second, and I assumed the coast was clear and that the Swede was back in Gothenburg chopping up stallions and mares. When I called her again the following morning, she didn’t pick up the phone.

  On my first night in New Jersey, the traffic outside kept me awake. It sounded like a dying person’s wheeze, except the person never does completely die. Temporarily carless, I knew I could walk to the Holland Tunnel and into the city but I wasn’t sure if that’s permitted and I feared the way the Times might report it: