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

Then I ran out of time. Met with Coach for a final huddle. She’d just returned from the early stage of the WSOP, that land of abundant Omaha Hi-Low and H.O.R.S.E., Six Handed. Trying to scrape up a stake for the Main Event.

“It was heaven. Heaven!” Pure joy in her voice at the thought of it. Although Helen cashed deep in the $1,500 No-Limit event, she didn’t win enough to pay her way into the Big Game. She was off gambling until September. “I had an agreement with myself,” she said. “That’s how we tell ourselves we’re not addicts.” Whatever works, I say. Since she’d returned east, she’d been too bummed to follow WSOP news. I tried to give her an update, what I had gleaned from her Twitter list of players to follow, but I was pretty useless.

Coach gave me another poker seminar, and I scribbled bullet points. She briefed me on some new moves she hadn’t seen before — people in Vegas were breaking out their next-level shit all over the place. After listening to her talk of stealing blinds and short-stack mentality, I was freaking out. Told her so. She shared a new mantra she’d come up with for this last WSOP trip: “It’s okay to be scared, but don’t play scared.” When you’re scared, that means you’re paying attention. Don’t let it destroy you.

I recalled the time my father abandoned me in the Dismal Forest in Northern Anhedonia when I was eight. He blindfolded me, put a crossbow in my hands, and said, “Don’t come back until you take down a twelve-point buck for supper.” Was I scared? Sure. But I did what he asked of me, and over the years I’d successfully convinced myself that I was a better man for it. (Never lost my hatred of squirrels, however, the devious little fuckers.) Fear situates you in the moment. Focuses you. I knew that.

“You’re gonna be targeted no matter what, ’cause you’re very pretty. You do not look like the typical player.”

Pretty?

“You know, you got the threads. I have never seen that at the poker table.”

No, I did not look like the average player — i.e., I was not a paunchy middle-aged white guy. Dreads and threads. No apologies. I’m a dandy. When it came to raising the kid, my ex-wife and I split duties according to our strengths. She did morals and ethics. I did clothes. When I took this assignment I had no idea that my plumage was going to be held against me. First my deplorable lack of tournament acumen, now this.

As a woman, an “other” at this Iron John weenie roast, Coach knew what she was talking about. “I have the same situation where you look different,” she said. “They’re not going to give you credit, and they’re going to come after you, and you have to wait for situations to take advantage of that.”

So, watch out, Little Lord Fauntleroy, with your prancing and cavorting. On to other practical matters. Have a big breakfast. She was not a germophobe, she assured me, but she advised against getting a burger or whatever delivered to the table, as people do. “If that fell on the floor, I would probably eat it. But the poker chips is filth. It’s filthy.” She didn’t have to tell me. I end every excursion outside my front door with a Purell rubdown. Nook and cranny, baby. “That’s why I enjoy a banana or Snicker’s bar,” Coach confided. “Because it has its own wrapper, and you just hold the wrapper.”

And perhaps most important of all: Potty Rules. At break, you got hundreds of dudes stampeding to take a piss at the same time. The queues for the women’s were no biggie — the one perk of low female participation — but the men’s was ludicrous. Duck out during the levels to use the john, or else “you’ll be spending your break time in line.” Plus, I added to myself, it would give me more time to survey my anxieties between play.

I wrote it all down, feeling like a jerk. Staked to play in the Main Event, here I was picking the brain of someone so obviously in love with the game — the rushes, the science, the sheer dynamism of it — and she isn’t going to be there. She’d dipped into the circuit for nine months, flown out for the WSOP, but hadn’t made it into the Big Game.

Per the racial-harmony movie script, I was supposed to give something back. What kind of Magic Negro was I? Sheesh. I had, as a child, thought Doug Henning to be a “cool dresser” and “kind of a badass,” but digging an eccentric magician’s clothes sense and metaphysical je ne sais quoi was not enough to make you Will Smith or Michael Clarke Duncan in an Oscar-bait film, melanin aside. I should have been delivering homilies, sucking out sickness by laying on my healing hands, helping some catatonic little white kid come out of his shell, whatever the fuck, and all I could do was take notes.

I was playing for Methy Mike and Big Mitch and the other home-game slobs, but of course I was also playing for Helen now. I recorded her wisdom and pledged to play according to the teachings of my sensei, and try not to mess it up too much.

“Get into your spine,” Kim said. “Get into your body.” I was getting into my spine, I was getting into my body. Per instructions, I imagined a string that traveled through my head into my spinal column, and that the rest of my body dangled off it: the Marionette, they called it. “I want you to feel supported, and unsupported.” It was easy to relate to being a puppet, under the sway of some malevolent and capricious puppet master: This was already a close approximation of my relationship with my deity. In Kim’s studio — as the fan almost covered the noise from the playground across the street and the ambulance hustling by — I pictured myself floating through the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, past the rows and rows of the barking slots and the creatures who clawed their hands through big, white chum buckets of coins, deep breath in, past the crowd huddled around the craps table as they cheered on some lucky devil’s rush, deep breath out, past the cheapo blackjack tables and the high-stakes blackjack tables and the cordoned-off rooms of the super high rollers, which were always empty save for the eerily patient dealer, and into the Pavilion, the chamber as large as a football field where the tournament unfolded, the numbers and color codes hanging from the ceiling on wires, where my first seat of the tourney awaited my rebuilt posture. Shuffle up and deal.

“Did you get what you wanted out of it?” Kim asked. It was our last training session. Yes, I had. I could use this. Nowadays, whenever I watched James Bond fly across the world to Shanghai to karate chop a mad genius, I couldn’t help but think, “But what about the jet lag? Isn’t he pooped out from the jet lag?” Under Kim’s tutelage, I felt younger, de-harrowed, as if time were reversing itself. Even my gray hair had disappeared. Or so I thought. My ex-wife and I had owned white-haired cats, and it turned out I’d only washed the remnants of their hair out of my dreadlocks.

“I bet you have a good poker face,” Kim said. “You’re hard to read. Most people, you can tell if they’re having an easy time or if something is painful. With you, you can’t really tell—”

“My blank face—”

“It’s hard to tell.”

There it was again. For years and years, people had told me I had a good poker face. When they heard I was going to play cards at a friend’s on Friday night, or I ran into them on the subway while carrying my suitcase of monogrammed chips, which was a gift from a college buddy after I was a groomsman in his wedding, they’d say: “I bet you have a good poker face.” They don’t know a set of trips from a royal flush, but they know this fact. What they’re really saying is: You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing normal human expressions. You are a throwback to a Neanderthal state of raw, uncomplicated emotions, or a harbinger of our cold, passionless future, but either way, I don’t know what’s going on in your head.