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

“Bring it into you,” she said, “make it yours, and then you can bring it into your poker.”

As I walked out into the glare and early-summer heat of Fourth Avenue, I felt a peculiar sense of well-being, which I quickly banished by sheer force of will, as I didn’t want to ruin my streak. Assimilating this knowledge would take time, but I felt that soon I would be a lean, mean sitting machine.

EXERCISE :Sunglasses. Like most people, I’d spent my whole life looking for a socially acceptable situation in which I could wear sunglasses indoors, and here it was. They made for good TV, most definitely, the sunglasses guys and their imposing, unreadable faces, their lenses reflecting back your own dumb face. Mirrored, wraparound, robin’s-egg-tinted. Sunglass Hut did not stock what I required. I needed the exactly just-so pair, some sort of Vulcan smithy-god to forge them in the very bowels of the earth, a set of glowing, molten intimidation shades in a scene drawn by Walt Simonson. Well, I tried, but despite my efforts I couldn’t bring myself to wear sunglasses during my practice runs. The social taboos were too strong, or my inner douche-bag monitor set too high, I dunno. I’d have to make do with my naturally half-dead mug.

Playing cards, making friends. Before one break, the elderly gent next to me told me, “You’re a good player.”

“Thanks.”

What had he seen in his life? A world war, a cold war. Dude walks on the moon, and another invents the internet. After the civil rights movement, the arrival of the first black president, perhaps the early twenty-first-century wonder that is a poker table in a hypermodern casino, and my presence there, reminded him of how much the world had changed in his lifetime.

“But you know what?” he added.

“What?”

“You talk too much!” Cackling.

I kept my mouth shut, it was true. Poker was the perfect game for me, as I didn’t have to speak. It was like Disneyland for hermits. I had found the place where I could go out among the humans, elbow to elbow for hours, and not say a fucking word. It brought me back to the old days, when I first started to write, and I’d spend whole days shut up in my apartment and the only thing I’d say to another living being was “… and a pack of Winston Lights.”

Quite a few things about poker reminded me of the writing life. Like, you sat on your ass all day. That was a huge one. Big plus. And we were all making up stories, weaving narratives. Pros will talk about “the story you’re telling with your hand.” A hand possesses a narrative arc with a setup, rising action, denouement. Each time you throw money into the pot you’re telling a story, from the opening call to the River re-reraise. As Saint Harrington put it, “A player is nothing more than the sum of his betting patterns.” After years of experience, you recognize plots: He must have trips, and that guy’s representing a flush by raising the pot on that third heart. You must fake out their reads, misdirect through the red herring of a half-pot bet or a bluff, spinning a story through hours of tells, betting patterns, your poker persona. Until the endgame, when the psychology of the characters catches up with everybody. Always on the lookout for that M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end when you discover you were dead the whole time.

The day-to-day horror of writing gave me a notion of tournament time. Writing novels is tedious. When will this book be finished, when will it reveal its bright and shining true self? It takes freakin’ years. At the poker table, you’re only playing a fraction of the hands, waiting, ever waiting for your shot. If you keep your wits, can keep from flying apart while those around you are self-destructing, devouring each other, you’re halfway there. The poseurs yakety-yaking about the Fitzgeraldian flourishes of their latest novella, the puffed-up middle-managers droning on about how they knew you had 10s — they never make it to the Final Table. Let them flame out while you develop a new relationship to time, and they drift away from the table.

Poker players and writers are always inside the game and also outside the game observing it. When I whipped out my notebook, no one blinked. I could have been recording bad beats, misplayed hands, or assembling a dossier on other players. No one cared what I scribbled. Like when you write a book .

EXERCISE :Purify the spirit. I had to improve my diet in Vegas, start eating a proper breakfast in order to make it through each day’s marathon. “Do you eat meat?” Helen asked. I did. “Good.” It was a long time to the dinner break, and that’s when some players start drinking, and drinking led to errors. No more ruining my body with noxious substances, poisoning my mind with various toxins. I was doing well with the cigarettes, had been off them for nine months, although it helped that the disappointment of not having a post-dinner cigarette, or a just-stepped-outside cigarette, or a just-woke-up cigarette was dwarfed by the newer, state-of-the-art disappointments the world threw my way. I was saved by scale.

Why stop with cigarettes? I could renounce more things, like (1) cut back on my microbrews and (2) most reality television. Get behind me, master brewers of Brooklyn, Portland, and Chapel Hill, you hipster hopsters and your newfangled brands of incipient, yuppified alcoholism. My reality-TV purge— America’s Got Schlubs, Keep Trying to Outwit Death You Stupid Monkeys —meant everything save the competitive weight-loss shows, whose contestants, I recognized, were on a parallel journey to my own. The Biggest Loser : exactly so. My failures possessed a weight, I carried them around, and before poker I sought the proper instrument of their measure. These reality-TV pilgrims had already learned how to calculate their weakness, for its substance possessed an actual mass determinable before a live TV audience. Those shows made me more teary than Pixar movies, the unalloyed pleasure these guys and gals displayed over their new mastery of self, the erasure of decades of daily, mounting mistakes. Just look at the pants they used to wear. This one guy lost a hundred and fifty pounds and said, “I was carrying another man around.” They had found themselves: It had been hiding in their skins all this time, waiting. That better, biding self. I could do it. More fiber, for starters.

Coming back at night was the worst of it. I’d briefly glory over some incremental improvement in my play, then remember I hadn’t won any money since my first Trop excursion. So much for aptitude. I was like a piece of meat, hacked from a carcass and heavily spice-rubbed, but still waiting to be smoked. Waiting to become what it was meant to be: a tough, cured, beautiful strand of jerky.

Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on “motherfucker.” At the end of my AC working day, I’d hit the bus terminal, with its wee-hour convocation of squalor. The buses didn’t run as frequently at night — it was easier to get in than out. Roach Motel. Drunks, drug-addled denizens, and Those with Nowhere to Go shambled about, trapped in the depot. When the bus finally arrived, the ride back was quiet and dark, the powered-down Port Authority a maze of metal gates and closed-off corridors. The terminal was too sprawling and impossible to police otherwise. Rotten Old New York, the Ratso Rizzo New York was still here. I didn’t know what I was doing there. Anyone present at that hour was a clump of hair stuck in the American drain. I just wanted to get home and catch some sleep before I saw the kid.