Colson Whitehead - The Noble Hustle - Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

Helen said she liked “Six Handed.” I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. I nodded and chewed. In 2010 Helen made it through the first day of the $5,000 Six Handed No-Limit. When she got her draw for Day 2, the Powers that Be seated her at a Feature Table with the big guns. Feature as in TV cameras. They played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Helen looked for her seat. “Where is Table 116? There’s 114, there’s 118, where is it? Oh, it’s the Feature Table up on the platform with all the press, all the lights, and all that shit.”

Husband Lex snapped a picture of her playing against poker superstars Phil Ivey and James Akenhead. Ivey was one of the few big-time African American pros — actually, the only one I could name. For years now, I’d rooted for him on TV, whenever he popped up on the poker shows my DVR scooped from the deep a.m. darkness. Cool and inscrutable, he was our black heavyweight, our Leon Sphinx. Hadn’t heard of Akenhead. Turned out he was a British player, a young gun who’d made it to the Final Table in 2009. He came in ninth place, and pocketed a million dollars for his exertions.

“It’s, as they call it, the Table of Death.” She survived the cameras. She knocked Akenhead out of the game, and once Ivey busted, too, they broke the table. Show over. The next time Helen was in Vegas, she passed Akenhead in the hallways of the Rio. “It’s like if you had dinner with Obama. You would remember him, but he might not remember you.”

Helen came in forty-second place, winning twelve grand. It was her first pilgrimage to the World Series after stepping up her presence on the professional poker circuit the last few years. Poker and housewifery aside, she was also a writer. She left Tuscaloosa to come to New York to study fiction writing at NYU. I picked up her second book, The Turning , thinking it might provide insight into her poker persona. It’s about a teenage girl in NYC who discovers she has the power to turn into a cat, indeed belongs to a larger, secret community of people who can turn into cats. There was a gesture toward the poker subculture in that premise, and some riffing on transformation into one’s true self, the inner becoming the outer. Your daytime life is one reality, and at night, at a poker table, say, you become someone else. Someone with claws.

“I’ve been playing since I was twenty-one,” she said. “And I still have to gather my courage to go and sit down and be there. I like it because you can be anyone you want to be. I can be extremely aggressive. I can be very brave. I can behave in a way that I don’t normally behave. Other than writing, it’s the only place where I can lose time.”

There’s more poker in her first book, Eating the Cheshire Cat . It follows three young Southern girls who are also in the midst of violent transformation, this time into brutal adulthood. One climactic scene occurs at a poker play-off held at a sorority reunion. The middle-aged former Delta Delta Deltas are all set up for a nice afternoon of Seven Card Stud, unaware that Nicole Hicks, a next-generation Tri Delt, has penciled in her psychotic break for that afternoon. Her butcher knife comes down and “Within a split second, Mrs. Hicks lost her daughter, her nerve, and two-thirds of her right index finger … The blood pooled and lifted the Queen of Spades from the table. It slid to the edge, then fell, face first, splat on the beige, velvet-soft, steam-cleaned carpet.”

As in most of the poker tales that overwhelmed me during my training, there was a lesson there, but it would take some time for me to decipher it. For now, I went with: You better listen to Coach.

Helen was the perfect teacher, hipping me to the right books (Dan Harrington and Phil Gordon), dispensing the Poker Truths so that they finally penetrated my brain (“This is your mantra: Patience and Position”), and sharing basic tips about daily survival in Las Vegas’s Rio Hotel, home to the WSOP since 2005. “Stay on the Ipanema side — the rooms are better.” Following an afternoon at the tables, I was supposed to hit the seafood joint just outside the corridor to the convention hall. “Make a reservation,” she instructed, in the same tone she used for “Watch out for A-x in middle position.”

Those first weeks, when I was trying to supe up my game, she told me about where to play in AC. “The Borgata and Caesars. Yes, the Taj is in Rounders , but it is a dump.” More important, she kept me from freaking out at the enormity of the task ahead. “You should play some Sit-n-Go’s while you’re in Atlantic City. You can’t win a tournament if you can’t win a Sit-n-Go.” I nodded. I pretended to know what a Sit-n-Go was, mustering the same facial expression I used when someone said, “We ended up having a good time” or “Then we fell in love.” I mentioned the Robotrons, who saw the flop with anything, pocket lint and paper clips. “I love these young players,” she laughed. “Give ’em enough rope. Call their craziness when you have a monster.”

She’d teach me things. About poker. About life. It’d be like one of those racial harmony movies I never go to see, like The Blind Side , where a Southern white lady instructs a weirdo black guy in how to use a fork. Broken barriers. Montage sequences. Golden Globes. But instead of forking up food, I’d be forking up poker knowledge. The way I understood it, from trailers and Oscar telecast montages, the black person teaches the white person something in return. I had no idea what that would be.

EXERCISE :Get a Poker Handle. The Old Masters of poker, they had truly awe-inspiring nicknames: Amarillo Slim, Sailor Roberts, Pippi Longstocking. So I got to brainstorming.

The Slouch: I slouched. Rocket Racer: after the Spider-Man nemesis/ally from the ’70s, a black guy on a rocket-powered skateboard. It was a multivalent moniker, alluding to my melanin count, my transportation issues, and “rocket” was slang for pocket Aces. “A pair of Aces, you better get ready to race if you want to take the pot from me,” he informed the empty room. Five-Dollar Colson: referring, for once, not to my home-game buy-in but to what I’d charge for most acts if I ever started hooking. I sell myself short a lot. Finally, I went with the Unsubscribe Kid. I liked the implied negation of things other humans might enjoy. Now all I had to do was get someone to ask me what my poker nickname was.

Pity the poor pilgrim who gets on a Greyhound bus and hears “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” come over the speakers. You are the Midnight Cowboy, extricating yourself painfully from your past, or you are Ratso Rizzo, expiring in the back row, wheezing and unsaved. But I found my seat, settled in with the day trippers, day workers, and hollow-eyed freaks, and got into the new rhythm of my days. “I can’t see their faces / only the shadows of their eyes.”

It went like this: I’d drop off the kid at school, hop on the subway to the Port Authority, and catch a bus to AC. Then I’d gamble gamble gamble, catch a midnight bus back to the city, sleep all day, and pick up the kid from school the next afternoon. I’d make dinner, put her to bed, read Harrington, take her to school, and start over again.

Over the years, my half-dead face had kept drop-off patter to a minimum, but occasionally I’d share a few words with the other parents on the way into the Lower School.

“Can’t believe the school year’s almost over.”

“They grow up so fast.”

“Off to work?”

“Actually, I’m going to Atlantic City to gamble.”