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

“I’m terrible at the Final Table when it’s Heads-Up,” I complained to Coach at the end of our first meeting. Dealing one-on-one with another person, in primal communication, it fed my psychological defects. My shrink thought this was a suitable line of inquiry, and perhaps we’d get to it once we dealt with all that other crap.

“You won’t be playing Heads-Up,” Helen said. In the WSOP, like all tournaments, when people get knocked out the guys on the floor fill the seats with other players, but once the Main Event is reduced to nine guys, they adjourn until November. To maximize TV ratings. In the unlikely event al-Qaeda gunned down everyone in the tournament except for me and a Robotron, I’d have plenty of time to learn about proper Heads-Up play.

The study problems in Phil Gordon’s books gave me grief, I told her. “Phil Gordon’s always like, ‘I was at this table playing 8–6 offsuit’—”

“Forget that. You’re too you to play that way. Play your game.”

I was too me. Precisely.

EXERCISE :Floss. It’s difficult not to think about decay in a casino. How all our hopes and dreams are but insubstantial creatures, prey to chance and human frailty. The winnowing of hope, the evanescence of desire. Those horror-show pants we bought that one time. One can’t help but contemplate decay when confronted with such a constant parade of monstrous dentition in casinoland. That’s what I got for playing the cheapo games, but still, take care of yourselves, people.

I threw myself into my training. My game was improving, even if I had yet to repeat the success of my first tournament. It was nice to have a diversion from how I usually spent my days, which was basically me attempting to quantify, to the highest degree of accuracy, the true magnitude of my failures — their mass, volume, and specific gravity. It passed the time in the absence of hobbies. Sure, I worked on my nagging sense of incompleteness a lot, when I had a spare moment, but that was more of a calling than a hobby.

On to the second area of training, PHYSICAL :

The vessel of my body — this fragile sack of blood, “essence” (see above), and melancholy humors — had to get up to competition-grade performance. I’d long aspired to the laid-back lifestyle of exhibits at Madame Tussaud’s. There are cool perks. You don’t have to move around that much or waste energy on fake smiles, and every now and then someone shows up to give you a good dusting. Over time I had indeed become the wax-dummy version of myself, but that wouldn’t cut it at the Main Event.

Throughout the ages, much has been written about the interrelatedness of the mind and the body. Suburban moms who lift Volkswagens off pinned toddlers, for example. I’d be a fool to ignore the holistic reality. In Vegas, I’d be lifting metaphorical Kias and Hyundais left and right.

To the outside observer, it seems like poker involves a lot of reclining in chairs, but you’re still burning fuel. “Lex and I lost five pounds!” Helen informed me, referring to their last trip. The Main Event at the World Series of Poker ran seven days, each one a twelve-hour series of jungle engagements. You had to be vigilant. You grab a bite when you can, the caloric intake going to power your game, your all-important table image, the mask of your poker identity: alternately representing strength and weakness, riding herd over tells, manufacturing ersatz tells, placing bait for traps, stealing and thieving blinds. Picking up chips. Putting down chips. It adds up.

Could someone gimme a hand in my new self-improvement scheme? Up until now, my idea of “making a new start” was not importing my bookmarks to a new browser. My torpor had stretch marks.

Finally I got a recommendation from an old girlfriend who’d become a physical trainer. I think she and I are in agreement that we were a crappy couple, both of us subprime dating quality, even by the low, low standards of early-’90s High Slackitude. It had been a terrible relationship, but I was grateful, for it prepared me for terrible relationships to come, so that I would not be surprised. The Matrix sequels, for example. In later years, she became a physical trainer and left the state. She was very helpful and gave me a local name: Kim Albano.

Kim was a licensed physical trainer and patient soul. A Long Island native, she moved to the city in ’99 and entered the biz because she simply loves inspiring people to be healthy. She called her practice “Conscious Intermodel Fitness,” specializing in posture and core strengthening, Vinyasa yoga with a little Iyengar thrown in. Alexander Technique. I had been given yoga mats over the years as gifts, but the phrase “loose-fitting clothing” had always confounded me, conjuring visions of tunics or otherwise Jawa-type vestments, neither of which I owned. I ultimately opted for dad-style cargo shorts, whose multiple pockets I increasingly relied on to spare me the indignity of carrying a fanny pack or man bag.

I met Kim at a space she sometimes used on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. She’d offered me a group lesson in Prospect Park with some of her regulars. Too public, I thought. I preferred to work out like I eat beef jerky: making vulgar grunting noises sans witnesses. Needless to say, I was a tad let down when the storefront studio allowed passersby to observe my lesson. Another exhibit in the bizarre sideshow that is a New York street. Per usual.

I described my assignment before we met, and she was amenable. “I have to become a Living Poker Weapon in six weeks,” I said.

“You mentioned ‘Rocky-style’ in your e-mail,” she said.

“This might be a bit conceptual.”

Kim did my intake, quizzing me about my exercise history (mere vapor), ailments (psychosomatic in the main), and hydration regimen (“You have to keep drinking water”). Was I under stress? I had just finished a book, I explained, so I was less stressed than I had been. Any injuries she should be aware of? The only big thing was this formidable crick in my neck, which had only lately disappeared. My magnificent ergonomic chair, the steadfast galleon I had sailed through books and books, had finally sprung a leak. After ten years, the webbing of the seat had given way, so I stuffed a throw pillow in there when I had to work. I sat in there half sunk, arms grotesquely angled, and over the weeks a stupendous crick took up residence around my left shoulder blade. The pain was exacerbated by my habit of crawling to the living-room couch when I had insomnia. The 5:00 a.m. traffic reports on the bleary, early-bird news shows often returned me to sleep — in my aforementioned license-less state, the reports of blocked interstates and impenetrable bridges were a lulling white noise to me, abstractions stripped of meaning. I was sleeping on the couch so much it was as if I were married again. “But it’s mostly gone away,” I told Kim.

I described an average day at the tournament, the importance of keeping your shit together as you trudged through bad beats and dead cards, resisting the lure of going “on tilt”—a species of berserker rage that destroyed one’s game play. She taught me how to sit. She taught me how to breathe according to the basic principles of the nineteenth-century health guru F. M. Alexander, and reintroduced me to my neglected spine, which I had long treated as a kind of hat rack for my sundry, shabby articles of self.

We ran through elementary yoga poses — cat, cow, downward dog. I mentioned that we got twenty-minute breaks every two hours. What could I do to stay loose and limber? She said, “Cat, cow, downward dog.” I said, “I can’t do that in a casino.” My table image would suffer. We proceeded. I liked the sitting and the breathing, the glancing moments of “proprioception.”