Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  “Where are you going?” I asked him.

  “I’m leaving.” His eyes darted side to side.

  “You can’t do that.”

  It was just past 1:30.

  He opened the front door and took a step out and I grabbed him by his arm and tried to pull him back in. But he was big and strong and I couldn’t get him back in.

  “Don’t your dare touch me, fucker!” he snarled, his whole aspect changing in a flash.

  He sounded different, he looked different. It wasn’t his voice anymore, it wasn’t his voice or his accent and usual cadence. It wasn’t him . . . he transformed before my eyes and passed from the person I’d thought he was—from what he’d made me think he was and from what I’d wanted him to be—into the person he truly was. Whoever that person is.

  “You’re not really Second Gunman,” I said. “There is no such person.”

  He said nothing and tried to leave again. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back. He was on one side of the threshold, I was on the other. Bjorn 2 Win should have been there already. Three minutes ago. The air in the room was fizzing rapidly and I felt weak.

  “You’re Bjorn 2 Win.” My voice sounded like I was lost and needed directions.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “No,” I said. “You’re not. There is no such . . .”

  Then a few words passed over my lips that I didn’t even intend to utter: “You’re Gerald Waverly? You are . . .”

  He looked at me. There was no pity, no feeling, no joy, or sorrow. Just ice and vapor. I realized my arm was still on his. I was grabbing onto him, my fingers were clutching the sleeve of his cashmere coat as hard as they could. But it didn’t matter.

  He slipped away.

  Epilogue: I Could Write a Book . . .

  And now this shrill whine, this sickening saga of self-pity, this overlong grating lamentation, this interminable jeremiad, has come full circle.

  Everything a writer says is true. Why? Because a writer said it and no writer is ever wrong about anything. Right?

  So when George S. Kaufman claimed that satire is what closes on Saturday night, he was correct—he was a writer so he must have been right. Yet how do you explain the success of The Producers or Scary Movie 31 or The Office or the Marx Brothers? A hundred essayists a year will be shamelessly unoriginal enough to remind you that Thoreau once wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. And because a writer said it, it must be true. Yet you have to look no further than the memoir in your hands to see that at least one man’s desperation is deafeningly not quiet. (Next time you look at Munch’s The Scream, imagine every word herein shrieked out of that gaping maw.) A recent Times/CBS poll found that of the 68.8 percent of men who did lead lives of desperation, an overwhelming 83.9 percent were very loud about it. If Thoreau is right, then men are also going to the grave with their songs still in them. Speaking for most men, I can tell you that by the time we’re dead, we’re all completely songed out—there isn’t a lyric left in our lungs. So Thoreau (and all those who quote him) had no idea what he was talking about.

  Do good fences really make good neighbors? What Robert Frost wrote may look good in your Norton Anthology and in a thousand op-ed pieces a year about geopolitics and defense spending, but just the other day a Reno woman climbed over her white picket fence and shot her neighbor six times in the head. “The bitch,” the killer claimed, “had it coming”—she’d been having an affair with her assassin’s husband for five years. (Perhaps Frost should have said that tall, electrified barbed-wire fences make good neighbors.) The past is never dead, Faulkner (and thousands after him) told us, it’s not even past. Never dead? WRONG! The past is often deader than a doornail. That money I lost . . . it’s gone, it’s past, it’s really incredibly dead. (The past is also supposed to be another country. And what’s past, we’re told, is also prologue. The upshot is none of these writer geniuses had any idea what the past is.)

  There are no second acts in American lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many generations of hacks since have informed us. But it would only take one person to disprove that, and I submit: Richard Nixon. And if that doesn’t do it for you, how about Muhammad Ali, John Travolta, Bill Clinton or . . . F. Scott Fitzgerald? If an H-bomb had been dropped on Oxford, Mississippi, would Faulkner still have guaranteed us that Man will not merely endure he will prevail, and does anybody really still believe T. S. Eliot’s assertion that the world will end with a whimper and not a bang? Happy families are all alike, Tolstoy (and millions since) said, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But my own family became much unhappier when we found out we were unhappy in the exact same way as the family across the street from us, and there was this very happy family next door to them who was happy in an entirely different way than the happy family immediately across the street, and this made both families even happier.

  Highly unimaginative essayists remind us fifty times a year that Philip Larkin wrote that sexual intercourse began in 1963 between the end of the ban on publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Beatles first LP. (I’ve read that quote, which wasn’t even that clever to begin with, so many times that the words now put me to sleep even while I’m cringing.) But if this is true, then how were the Beatles and Philip Larkin and D. H. Lawrence all conceived?

  Every word in these pages is true. It all really happened. I found out about online poker at a dice table at the Luxor in Las Vegas. I started with a mere $1,000 and in less than a year worked it up to over half a million and then lost $549,000 of it in one afternoon. Undone by two 2s. I really did go to London and got stood up. My books went out of print, Pacer Burton never did make a film of Plague Boy, and my wife gave me the boot.

  And I really did check into the Shining Path Clinic just to get her back.

  What is past is prologue. But the past isn’t dead. So is the past . . . epilogue?

  I have to write in order to keep from playing. It’s a simple formula. If I play I lose even if I win. If I write I win even if I lose.

  Whom gods destroy they first make mad. Well, maybe some of them. The others the gods just make lucky.

  The money was gone. I’d been had. To say that I felt used and hollow would only skim the surface. I was destroyed. The man who stood in the doorway for five minutes staring into dead space was not the same man who, only an hour before, had eagerly opened the door to let his “best mate,” his “personal cavalry,” into his apartment. This was the new me. Shattered, null, void, ruined. Emptiness on legs.

  After Second Gunman left, I recovered my breath (it took some doing) and logged on to the Galaxy. Bjorn wasn’t on. I went to his profile on the site and there was hardly any information there. He lived in Sweden, it said, and was a butcher. No birth date, no photo. He had last played, it told me, two days ago at 7:15 GMT. I went to Second Gunman’s page. He worked in a hotel in Blackpool, it said. No birth date, no photo. He had last played two days ago at 7:20 GMT.

  Drying out in the boutique hotel, I had wanted to murder someone but didn’t know precisely who it should be. Now I had a pretty good idea.

  I took a taxi downtown. Spring Street was crowded with people shopping and coming back from lunch. I walked past my old Dunkin’ Donuts perch, then crossed the street. RENO BROTHERS LITERARY AGENCY, the label on the downstairs buzzer said. The antechamber was dusty, but the afternoon light beamed in and made the grime dance. I rang and a second later a female voice said, “Yes?” I said, “Buzz me in.” “Who’s this?” I was asked. “It’s Thomas Pynchon,” I mumbled and sure enough the door buzzed and I was allowed in.

  I walked up to the third floor and headed toward my elusive Prague Castle, the Fortress of Rejectitude, the Stronghold of My Ontological Insecurity. I didn’t know what I was going to do if Clint was there, nor did I care. I was running on autopilot and the pilot in question that day wanted to maim, cut, and kill. I rang the office doorbell and was buzzed inside.

  “May I help you?” the pretty young receptionist said to me.r />
  “I’d like to see Clint,” I said. She looked vaguely familiar.

  “And you are again?”

  “You’re Courtney Bellkamp. You were reading Plague Boy on the subway a few years ago. You’re the only person I ever saw reading one of my books in public.”

  Realizing her mistake, she put her hand over her mouth.

  I looked over her head and saw that Clint’s door was open just a crack. The light was on. A few years ago I’d signed the Plague Boy contracts in there and had to stop myself from shedding tears of joy when Clint said to me, You’re gonna finally get published, man! That was one of the happiest days of my life.

  I started walking toward his office and Courtney said, “You can’t go in!”

  I heard a voice from inside Clint’s office and could tell he was on the phone.

  I had just lost over a half a mill to two 2s—why wouldn’t I cave his skull all the way in?

  I pushed the door open and saw my nemesis. Not one hair straying out of his ponytail, not one wrinkle in his suit. Tie puckered to perfection. He saw me and widened his eyes for a second, then raised a finger as if to say, I’ll be right with you. But bloodthirsty Capt. Autopilot pulled the phone out of his hand and slammed it down. (The Captain was doing a much better job than I would have.)

  “Where’s Clint, Vance?” I asked him, making him believe he actually had an out.

  “Clint is in Los . . .” Clint started to say, but he saw through it and I shut the door behind me with my foot.

  “So, uh, what’s up with DOA?”

  “With what? Look, Frank, we could have set up a mee—”

  “No, we couldn’t have set up anything. I know exactly how many e-mails I’ve sent you! I know exactly how many times you didn’t answer me. Do you? Do you know the number? And you really don’t know what DOA is?!”

  He looked at me. Does this nut have a gun? he was wondering.

  “Two hundred and twelve e-mails! That’s how many. I counted them!” I hadn’t counted and the number could not possibly have been that high, but it was a good bluff. “Two hundred and twelve unanswered e-mails.”

  I could see one or two orange hairs wriggling free now from his rubber band.

  “DOA . . . that’s my book . . . Dead on Arrival. Remember it now? I gave it to you and I even paid for the breakfast that day! And you know what else? I went to a book party and got hit by a Drakes Cakes truck when I left! I was in the hospital and had a patch on my eye and my leg was broken and you couldn’t even e-mail or call?!” Even though every word was untrue I was working myself into the lather I wanted to be in.

  “Frank . . . I’m sorry I let you down. I know I did. And I’m sorry for that. But there was nothing to tell you.”

  I had come here to wring his neck, to yank him by that ponytail and shake the freckles off his nose. But suddenly a fleeting sob escaped my throat.

  “Sit down,” Clint said softly. “Please.”

  I sat down. My sweater and coat were still on and it felt like I had a fever.

  “Do you want some water?” he asked me.

  Pouting, eyes welling up, I shook my head no.

  He sat down, too, on his desk, a foot away from me. He could tell that I wasn’t carrying a gun and wasn’t going to hurt him and that I was crumbling.

  “All right . . .” he began with some very agent-ish hemming and hawing, “I, uh . . . I don’t know how to say this but . . . maybe, well, I’d say our business relationship at this point is . . . it’s done. It’s over. Right, Frank? You agree with me?”

  I nodded and wiped away a tear.

  “So do what you want with your book. You can shop it around. It’s yours.”

  I didn’t tell him I’d already done that and that there were no takers.

  “But the other thing,” he continued, “I want to tell you is this . . .” I waited while he looked me over, gauged my mood, and saw that my fury had turned into self-pity. “I’m a literary agent. This is a business. I’m not a brother or a father or a friend. Okay? I’ll say that again: I am not your friend.” With every word he got louder. “Is any of this sinking in?” Still pouting, I nodded. “You take this whole thing too seriously and that’s not the way to go about it. So what if you don’t ever get published again. Big deal! Every day a million bad books are written that the writers think are masterpieces and they don’t get published. Join the club.” He blinked his eyes a few times and continued: “Just . . . stop . . . writing! Stop it! Forget about it. You’re not going to be successful. You don’t have what it takes. Now come to terms with that, will you?!”

  “Yes I do.” I sounded like a five-year-old. “I do have what it takes.”

  “You don’t! You’re just . . . you’re just not that good.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said between whimpers, “that I’m not as good as . . .” I mentioned the usual suspects: Franz­foer­them- ­shtey­negg­­chabon.

  “No. You’re not. They’re a lot better than you. You’re not even close.”

  “Okay.” More tears were falling. “I see.”

  “You know what you should do? Get a hobby. Some kind of hobby. Play tennis or something. Or you want to be creative? Is that it? You think you’re some kind of creative artist? Then, Frank, why not take up something like—I don’t know—painting!”

  Of all the possible hobbies, pastimes, or crafts, he had to mention painting. It couldn’t have been quilting, scrapbooking, batik or macramé. Clint had no idea about my time in Paris a long ago . . . but still it was a very low blow.

  I stood up and looked at him and grabbed his tie.

  Reader, I decked him. One sock to the jaw. A vicious right cross.

  I knocked him hard to the floor—his head rebounded frighteningly off the radiator—and thanked him for his advice and left.

  Heading down the stairs, I thought: So should I send Clint my poker memoir when I’m finished? Who knows—maybe he’ll like it, all will be forgiven and he’ll shop it around!

  It’s true. I slugged Clint Reno. (That bitch had it coming, too.) He could have called the cops and had me arrested for assault and for impersonating a reclusive, successful, vastly overrated author, but he was probably too embarrassed. (If a headline were ever to read FAILED AUTHOR PUNCHES OUT LITERARY AGENT, nobody but another literary agent would ever take the agent’s side.) I imagine that a few minutes after I left, Courtney was either holding a bag of ice to his face or sitting on it.

  It’s all true. It all really happened.

  One memoir that isn’t all true rests on my institutional coffee table at this very moment: Nuts, by Gerald Waverly. Waverly, I admit, possesses a flair for a tale and, unlike this memoirist, keeps his story moving forward with every sentence, which is quite an impressive accomplishment considering he is an unfeeling, cutthroat sociopath. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was; Gerald Waverly robs people for the same reason but also because afterward people feel used, barren, and violated and banks do not.

  Particularly fascinating in Waverly’s 289-page rip-roaring memvel is when he states Americans make the best marks because they are “so trusting, so earnest, so desperate to be loved, so heartbreakingly gullible.” According to Nuts, two years ago, Waverly, in the guise of a three-star chef named Simon Barker, wormed his way into the life of a Minneapolis realtor: they became chums, took a long weekend in Puerto Rico together, picked up hot Latinas. Then he defrauded the poor guy out of 420 grand. A few months later, pretending to be a roguish Welsh poet named Ewan Llewellyn, he did the same to a bipolar art dealer in Palm Beach. Three Queens ruined him. (That score was for 800K . . . so maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad.)

  But as is the case with other pseudomemoirs, I just cannot tell where truth ends and fiction begins. Some of it seems all too real, some of it stinks like week-old haddock and chips. Because in the final chapter of the U.S. edition, Waverly, now passing himself off as Nigel Hatcher, comes to America, purposely loses ten grand in a makeshift New York City cas
ino (located beneath a hospital, not a bodega) run by colorful Brooklyn mafiosi (they even say “fuhgedd­aboutit” to him once, which is, for my taste, one time too many), then ends up driving to Las Vegas in a stolen red Mustang convertible (no mention of Abdul Salaam, thus robbing F. Murray Abraham of the plum movie role) with a self-loathing literary has-been named Chet Morton (who’d had his only book hit the best-seller list ten years before and who plays online under the name the Big Man), and picks up, along the way, a handsome streetwise New Jersey homicide cop named Delroy Johnson (poker handle: King of Spades) and a Pamela Anderson look-alike (poker handle: Astro Physics Chick). Exaggerations abound, embellishments bounce all over the place like Super Balls, and bald-faced whoppers spit in your eye. “I shagged Astro on the bonnet of the Mustang on Route 66 in broad daylight while the Big Man and King of Spades watched and cheered me on,” Waverly claims. Huh? Route 66? “The Homicide Cop bruthah and the Former Writer and I had a pissing contest to see who could piss the farthest across the Rio Grande,” he tells us. “I won.” “I’m going to write a book about you, I think,” the literary has-been slurs to Nigel Hatcher one night in an Amarillo honky-tonk. “Please don’t,” Waverly, knowing that a few months later he’ll cheat chubby Chet for almost every penny, requests. (Don’t worry, Nige, I won’t!) In Las Vegas, Waverly not only wins $80,000 from Astro Physics Chick at poker in their high-roller suite at the Bellagio but then dumps her for three strippers. He buys a Bentley and gets into a card game with the hunky homicide dick and takes him for sixty large. By the time he’s driven back to New York, not only has the washed-up writer developed a serious man crush on the dashing Brit (“He was even starting to talk like me,” Waverly writes. “That’s when I knew he’d be mine”) but so has his wife, Mrs. Big Man, who literally gets on her knees and begs him to whisk her away from her humdrum New York life and take her back to London, where Nigel supposedly manages a successful hedge fund.