Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Well, at least in his version, I did at one time crack the best-seller list.

  So who is Gerald Waverly? And who is Bjorn 2 Win?

  “What I like to do,” Waverly tells us in Chapter 3 (“How To Be a Nefarious Scoundrel”), “is present myself not just as a friend but as a hero. It was easy to do if I also manufactured a villain. It was easy being Luke Skywalker if I was also Darth Vader; it was easy being Churchill when I was also Adolph Hitler. It never failed.”

  Gamblers are paranoid by profession and should be. The odds are stacked against you and everybody truly is out to get you.

  When Second came to New York, when we drove to Vegas and flew back, I never once saw his ID. Nor did I ask to, for why in the world should I have? “Gerald Waverly,” the author tells us, is a nom de plume anyway. Was Johnny Tyronne his real name? He told me he worked at a hotel in Blackpool called the Four Swans. The day I lost all the money and decked Clint Reno, I Googled the Four Swans and learned that there did exist such a hotel . . . until five years ago, when it burned to the ground. I called Blackpool directory assistance: there was no Johnny, John, or J. Tyronne or any other Tyronne. Further digging uncovered five other hotels in England called the Four Swans. No Johnny Tyronne had recently worked at any of them. My best mate was the shadow of a phantom.1

  There was no Bjorn 2 Win either. The day after I lost all that money, B2W disappeared from the site. He was the Darth/Adolph to Second Gunman’s Luke/Winston. I tried to recall all the times that I’d played against the Baltic Butcher: not once had Second Gunman, despite having told me how pathetic a player the Swede was, ever been at the same table. Many was the time, moreover, that Second had sent me to play Bjorn. “He’s dead money,” Second often told me. (And I recall now how conspicuously agitated Johnny/ Second/Gerald got in Las Vegas when I recommended we play Bjorn 2 Win for a few easy thousand. “It’s not a good idea,” he’d snapped. He even told me how sorry he felt for him. That bastard. And he, with his First in Physics at Cambridge, had also quoted Einstein to me—momentarily slipping out of character—about how God does not throw dice. That cold-blooded rat bastard.) For eleven months Bjorn lost to me, then he began threatening me.

  Winston feckin Churchill to the rescue.

  There was no Bjorn 2 Win, there was no Second Gunman.

  All his feckins and bloodys and gobshites and mates. Summoned right up from Central Casting, he was. He wasn’t even an original fake! And I fell for it.

  I think I can pinpoint the exact moment when he decided to make me his next mark. It was when I told him my real name and he checked out my lousy Amazon rankings. That’s when he knew I was a soft target and could be had. Yes, that was it.

  At Shining Path, while I held sweaty hands with my fellow addicts and lip-synched the Serenity Prayer, I could not stop myself from wondering: were the cards real? Were the games I played with Gerald Waverly on the afternoon of my downfall “honest” games? When we played with real cards, I won the first two hands, then he killed me the next three. (I was so whacked in the head that day that I didn’t even cancel the check I wrote him.) Maybe he had stacked the deck, maybe he was pulling cards from his sleeve, a pants’ pocket, or his asshole. But what I really think is that when we played online, when I sat on the floor under my self-portrait and he was at my desk . . . I am convinced he had rigged the games. The way the hands played out, card by card, bet by bet . . . it all played out perfectly like a script he had written. I was unwittingly starring in his movie, the movie of my own tragic downfall.

  Second Gunman hasn’t been on the site since that day. He’s gone.

  Show me a writer who isn’t paranoid and I’ll show you a deceased writer. Every year 200,000 new books come out, which means at least 199,999 other writers are hoping you fail. Critics lie in wait poised to tear you down. The odds are stacked against you.

  In Nuts Waverly claims he occasionally uses other people as foils and shills. So then, was Artsy Painter Gal in on the scheme, too? Think about it. She formed a long-distance romantic connection with me, we conversed daily, she stood me up and vanished. And then—when I was vulnerable and wallowing in this nadir—Second Gunman, her possible accomplice, moved in for the kill. Yes, I did see APG in the flesh on Empyrean Island, I saw her husband and kids . . . but maybe they weren’t really her husband and kids and were itinerant farm workers or out-of-work L.A. actors. Perhaps Gerald/Johnny/Second/Whoever paid Artsy and her “family” to go to that resort. Not only did they get a lovely weekend on Empyrean Island out of it but also an additional ten grand. That would be a drop in the bucket for Gerald Waverly when he finally cleaned me out.

  All APG really had to do was pretend to like me for a little while.

  Was History Babe in on it? Something about their relationship didn’t seem right. Maybe Gerald flew her into Colorado so that we could pick her up. Maybe they’re really husband and wife and it was some sort of perverted role play. Or maybe they’re brother and sister.

  The only one I trust is Toll House Cookie. But maybe I shouldn’t even trust him.

  Is it possible that the Times, Time magazine, and The Boston Globe were also in on the caper? They purposely gave my books bad reviews so that publishers wouldn’t publish me anymore so that I would then take up playing poker and I’d believe it was the only thing in the world I was good at. And then Gerald Waverly would strike.

  Maybe Hollywood was aiding and abetting, too, when they didn’t make a movie out of Plague Boy.

  Maybe you were in on it when you didn’t buy my first two books?

  No, there was no Second Gunman. And Toll House Cookie, History Babe, Artsy Painter Gal, Wolverine Mommy, and Grouchy Old Man didn’t really exist either. Because neither did Chip Zero. Cartoon characters all.

  There’s another possibility that chills me. In the dead of night I shoot up in my bed and think about it until it makes me sick. Was Cynthia in on it, too?

  How convenient was it: I go to London to hook up with a mistress I barely know, the mistress doesn’t show up, I return home, Wifey throws me out, I lose $550K?

  Is it possible that she and Johnny fell in love with each other the first time he visited? And that, while I was penning this book in Michigan and New Jersey, they were conducting a torrid affair with each other? Supposedly Second returned to Blackpool and the Four Swans after Las Vegas . . . but I have no proof that he ever was in Blackpool. Maybe while I was busy not getting laid in London at the Royal Brompton Hotel, he was getting busy with my wife in New York on Sixteenth Street and Eighth Avenue.

  “I enjoy tormenting my marks,” Waverly tells us in Chapter 5 (“I, Scumbag”), “after I distance them from their money.” He leaves “calling cards” for his victims, he says, objects he knows will strike a raw nerve. After he bilked the Minneapolis real estate man, he left a chef’s hat in the man’s underwear drawer; after he took the bipolar Palm Beach art dealer for a ride, he left a Welsh dictionary in his medicine cabinet.

  Those mysterious cold cuts in my refrigerator . . . was that Swedish horsemeat?

  I’ll never know.

  It was about three o’clock when I got home from decking Clint Reno.

  I knew I had to be out of the house by the time Wifey returned. If she saw me—she had already imparted this to me a few times—she might get a restraining order, and a restraining order, I knew, would be a serious hindrance to us ever getting back together.

  I gathered clothing into a suitcase for a possible long haul. In the living room I started hurling books onto the floor. Ulysses was the first to go, and with sadistic relish, I tore The Waste Land and Other Poems to shreds. Next was Anna Karenina, which I’d never even finished, and Gravity’s Rainbow, which I knew I was supposed to think was a masterpiece but had never liked. I tossed out Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid and chucked Chuck Palahniuk and Chuck Klosterman and dispatched Dispatches and sent Lolita, Augie March, and both Lord and Lucky Jims to their Maker. I showed no mercy. The last book I threw out was Dr. James’s Olde Insomn
ia Elixir: The Golden Bowl. It was like Fahrenheit 451—which I also tossed out—when all the books go up in flames, except that’s supposed to be sad and this wasn’t. I was glad to be rid of them. I dragged four large Hefty bags filled with books down into the building’s basement. They’d never be read, skimmed, or seen again. Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Farewell, My Lovely, Goodbye, Columbus, Bonjour Tristesse and Fuck You, Charlie.

  Back upstairs packing my laptop, I espied the dog-eared copy of DOA that Cynthia had never finished. I tore it up, ten pages at a time. Then I went onto my desktop computer and found DOA, trashed it and emptied the trash. As of that second, it no longer existed anywhere in the known world (Clint had probably purged his copy a long time ago; Deke Rivers was massacring his). I went into a file cabinet and found a few short stories and outlines and first chapters of books I’d started. I destroyed them. EVERYTHING MUST GO. I went back to the desktop computer and dragged more of my writing into the trash. I ripped Still-Life With Pear off the wall and broke it in two across my leg, then cut it to pieces. I ripped Self-Portrait With Headache off the wall and broke it over my leg, but as I did so something behind the painting fell to the ground with a clank.

  It was a key.

  I left a note telling Cynthia I’d dropped by to pick up a few things, that I was going to seek professional help and make her proud of me. I took a taxi over to the storage facility in the twenties; the facility is one square block of twelve stories of wall-to-wall dust overlooking the Hudson. I showed my key and ID and a few minutes later I stood in an eight-by-twelve unit, where a low dangling lightbulb barely lit up my dozen or so cartons. The boxes on the bottom were starting to give way. Poems, short stories, watercolors, gouaches, oil paintings, plays, screenplays, everything. My entire creative output, my oeuvre, the issue of my spirit. Tens of thousands of pages. How many weeks, months, and years of my life had I wasted trying to make something out of myself? If someone were to tell me the exact number in hours and minutes it would stop my heart for good. I dragged a box out into the corridor, then another. Wheezing from the effort and the dust, I created three stacks of cartons in the narrow gray hallway. I grabbed a fistful of paper from a carton on top. It was a play I had written or co­written long ago. This box was filled with plays I once thought would make me rich, famous, and honored. They hadn’t. I reached into the next box down and pulled a page out and saw it was a lousy love poem (John Donne meets William Carlos Williams) I’d written for Cynthia when she and I had just started dating . . . when I saw that I toppled over the whole stack with a kick. I reached into the top carton of another stack and pulled out a thick manila envelope. I tore it open and pulled out the yellow clutter of paper within and looked at the front page and read it.

  “Things were very bad then but still we carried on.”

  I left it all in the hallway and when I went back downstairs I told the two men working behind the desk to throw it all out.

  This is exactly where a flashier, more competent writer would have begun this story. At the end.

  I spent another week at the Tunnel Motel in New Jersey, trying to track down Second Gunman and my money. I had once worked my original thousand-buck stake up to 550 times that . . . and I knew I could do it again. But I couldn’t. Hanging out at the Low tables I got my remaining $1,000 up to $1,400 and moved up to Medium, but before I knew it I was down to $250. With her stack up over $140,000 Wolverine Mommy visited me at a table in Low—it was humiliating for me to be seen there—and asked me, “What are you doing down here?!” I dropped fifteen bucks to her two 9s and left without answering.

  Never telling Cynthia about what Gerald/Johnny/Second/Bjorn had done to me—or what I’d allowed to be done to myself— I left her an urgent-sounding message saying she had to call me, that my life was at stake. She called me back and I told her I was checking into the Shining Path Clinic. Even though she made no promise to take me back, she told me she was rooting for me and instantly I knew I’d made a smart move not telling her about dumping all of my dough.

  Finally I was doing the right thing.

  I flew here to the Southwest—I charged the flight—and checked myself in. Shining Path, one of the best treatment centers of its kind, stands on fifty acres (five of which are parking lots) and abuts a magnificent golf course; looming over an Olympic-sized pool is the center itself, a prismatic glass and steel building that looks like a swiftly rejected design for a World Trade Center replacement, only set on its side. The grounds are completely flat, not even a pimple, and the lawns are perfectly kept; the white gravel roads cross each other neatly and there are trees here and there, all exactly the same height. The whole place resembles a small architectural model of itself and when you stand or sit on the grounds you feel like a tiny plastic figure frozen in your tracks.

  The ten-page form I signed upon checking in asked me what I did for a living. Having not been published for years, I wrote: “Unemployed writer.” The center’s Assistant Director admitted me; he was friendly at first but flatly refused to call me Chip.

  It is a twenty-eight-day program. Individual therapy, group therapy, making your own bed (and lying in it—how fitting), cleaning your room, group and individual prayer. They put me in the Non-Substance Wing, which makes it sound as if it either is going to melt under the sun or float off with the first breeze. The patients in there are kept away from the junkies and alcoholics in the other wing, for the same good reason that in prison shoplifters should be kept away from murderers. In my section were sex addicts, hard-core masochists (there was a guy who loved to have cigars put out on his arms and legs), shopaholics, gamblers, video-game fiends. If there was a thing in the world that you could get hooked on, this is where you went to get unhooked on it.

  All the rooms are small and identical and supposedly there are no special privileges: even if you were Prince Charles or Bill Gates, they’d stick you in a room with a plumber or truck driver. Or with someone like me. My roommate was Jared; he was from Tyler, Texas, and was only seventeen years old. Jared had what I thought at first was a savage purple rash around his neck. But, he told me, he was a “space cowboy”: he was addicted to “the Choking Game,” aka Space Monkey, American Dream, Knock Out, Hawaiian High, and about thirty other wonderful monikers. He and his buddies choked themselves until they almost passed out or did pass out. The rush as you lapsed into unconsciousness, Jared told me, was super awesome. Whatever, I wondered, happened to good ol’ circle jerks and the Soggy Biscuit Pro-Am?!

  Shining Path doesn’t allow card playing. Computers and laptops are verboten. (Too many gambling, video-game, porn, Zappos, and eBay addicts trying to get cured.) The good part for me was this meant no playing; the bad part was it meant no writing.

  Every day it was sunny, warm, zero humidity, no wind. The sprinklers always came on at the same time, to the second, and did the exact same water dance for the same amount of time. Even the grass takes part in the clockwork.

  I attended two lectures—or confessionals—on my first full day. (Attendance is mandatory.) The first speaker was a sex addict named Tom. He really should have chosen a different poison for himself: Tom wasn’t attractive or rich and was lumpy around the middle . . . it could not have been too easy for him being a sex addict. “I tried to kill myself five times,” he told us as he nervously jingled the change in his pockets. The second lecturer was addicted to betting on the horses. “I tried to kill myself seven times,” he said. At the next confessional the following morning, a woman told us about her addiction to self-mutilation, but there was a slight downtick: she had only four suicide attempts under her belt. Their stories moved many in the audience, myself included, to tears, but I also wondered how a person can possibly fail to commit suicide, given all those whacks at it.

  I mentioned that to my counselor, a lanky social worker with the lamentable name (considering she was treating a card player) of Jackie King, and she threw me out of her office and told me to see her the same time tomorrow. The next day she told me that despite
what I may have read about how winning releases certain pleasure-inducing chemicals in the brain, gamblers gamble not to win but to lose. When I told her that I didn’t lose, she didn’t believe me. You’ve hit rock bottom, she said, that’s why you’re here. With what Second/Johnny/Gerald had done to me in mind, I corrected her: “No. Rock bottom hit me.” When I told her how wonderfully refreshing an ice cold beer tastes in August and opined that the single worst part of being an alcoholic is that, after you’ve kicked the habit, you’re not allowed to ever have another drink, she threw me out again.

  There were a few hot female patients there and there were rumors among the men that one or two of them were nymphomaniacs, but I missed Cynthia and wanted her back. I wanted to move back into my apartment, forget about cards and the $550K I’d been robbed of, and write an unlikely happy ending to this story.

  I hadn’t noticed it the first two days—everything was so new— but there were copies of A Million Little Pieces everywhere. There were plenty of Bibles, too, but Frey’s mendacious masterwork was definitely Good Book No. 1. People not only believed the book, they believed in it. They were like pilgrims flocking from thousands of miles away to gaze at the Virgin Mary’s tear-streaked face in an Egg McMuffin.

  The library was filled with other substance-abuse and addiction and self-help memoirs, books with such lurid titles as Hammered and Wasted and Cracked and Hammered and Wasted and Cracked and Drunk and Disorderly and Rich Coke Slut and Smacked-Out and Dead and Madison Avenue Meth Mama. They made me cringe. Someone should just cut them up, throw two-thirds of them out, and randomly paste what’s left into one book and call it How I Grew Up in a Fucked-Up Family and Endured a Screwed-Up Childhood and Started Getting Stoned as a Kid and Then Totally Got Wasted with Booze and/or Drugs For Years and Lost Everything I Had but Somehow Lived to Whine About It to You for Profit, Catharsis and Fame.