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

Perhaps I am projecting.

Nonetheless, we have now definitely waded into the waters of training area numero three, EXISTENTIAL :

I can’t help it if I understand that everything tends to ruin. Over our heads, Skylab is eternally falling down, I can see it all, the debris raining without cessation. I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom. By disposition, I was keyed into the entropic part of gambling, which says that, eventually, you will lose it all. The House always wins. Even for the most talented players, the cards fail for weeks or months or years, the beats are the baddest of the bad, you are blinded out of existence. Remember how I mentioned the blinds and how they escalate at intervals? If you don’t keep ahead of them by doubling up your stack, they’ll eliminate you. This is what I knew now: They are a Wave of Mutilation. You survive one wave of a Big Blind, then the half-size one of the Small Blind, diminished, and then the next wave starts gathering force down-table. I was in tune with decay, I had it down. What I needed to do was get in touch with decay’s opposing force, whatever that thing is that gets us out of bed each day and keeps us a few steps ahead of the wave: the hope of some good cards next hand.

For the citizens of the Republic of Anhedonia, luck is merely the temporary state of outrunning your impending disasters. But sometimes my countrymen and I have to look beyond our native truths and pray. Even a temporary respite from the usual level of soul-snuffing drudgery is a blessing. Luck would have to do. You need skill in poker, but you also need the puppet master to be in a good mood every once in a while. I didn’t have much skill, but I’d prepared the best I could. I suppose I could have run simulations of previous World Series on the holodeck, but I didn’t have a holodeck, at least one I want to talk about. Luck would have to carry me where my training failed.

I packed. Arranged my affairs. Was there anyone I’d forgotten to disappoint before I took off? It’d be a while before I returned, and I didn’t want to leave them hanging. On the morning of Friday, July 8, I hopped a plane to Vegas to play in the Main Event. Like one of my beautiful losers, I would step on the scale before a live studio audience and we’d all see how much bad stuff I had shed.

I pity people who’ve never been to Vegas. Who dismiss the city without setting foot on its carpeted sidewalks. I’ll forgive the sanctimony in the question “But what do you do there?” The obnoxious self-regard. Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals. As a foreigner, I make a point never to judge the cultural norms of my adopted country.

The pity remains, however. Frank Sinatra, the king of Rat Pack — era Vegas, once said, “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” The world is a disease you shake off in the desert. To delude yourself that you are a human being with thoughts and feelings, when your experience is but the shadow of truly living — it moves me to tears. Although I should note that in Anhedonian, the word tears means “to shrug in a distinctive ‘well, what are you gonna do?’ fashion,” and has nothing to do with lachrymal fluids produced by glands in the eye.

I recognized myself in the town the first time I laid eyes on it, during a cross-country trip the summer after college. My friend Darren had a gig writing for Let’s Go , the student-run series of travel guides. Let’s Go USA, Let’s Go Europe, Let’s Go North Korea (they always lost a few freshmen putting that one together). The previous year his beat had been New York City. We spent the summer eating fifty-cent hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and “researching” dive bars like Downtown Beirut and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, which were beacons of pure, filthy truth in a city still years away from its Big Cleanup. This summer he was assigned the Southwest. The subways didn’t run that far out, but his roommate Dan had a car, a brown ’83 Toyota Tercel, and the idea was we’d hit the open road and split the writing duties and money three ways.

It was 1991. We’d just been diagnosed as “Generation X,” and certainly had all the symptoms, our designs and life plans as scrawny and undeveloped as our bodies. Sure, we had dreams. Dan had escaped college with a degree in visual arts, was a cartoonist en route to becoming an animator. Darren was an anthro major who’d turned to film, fancying himself a David Lynch — style auteur in those early days of the indie art-house wave. I considered myself a writer but hadn’t gotten much further than wearing black and smoking cigarettes. I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college’s creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep “Write What You Know”—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world’s indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

First thing, Dan hooked up our ride with new speakers. We didn’t have money or prospects, but we had our priorities straight. No, I couldn’t drive, those days being the template of my passengerness. That spring, on schedule, I swore I’d get my license so I could contribute my fair share, but no. Look, I know how to drive, I’m just not legal. I took driver’s ed, but never got around to taking the road test. Never mind that I passed the class on false pretenses. I shot up half a foot junior year and had weird growing pains, like an excruciating stinging in my neck if I turned my head too fast. So every time the instructor led me into busy Broadway traffic, or told me to merge onto the West Side Highway, I faked it. I’d turn my head a little to simulate checking my blind spot and hope for the best. Everyone has blind spots. The magnitude of my self-sabotage was such that I willfully ignored all of mine. If you don’t look, you can pretend nothing is gaining on you.

I promised to make it up to Dan and Darren by being a Faithful Navigator, wrestling with the Rand McNally and feeding the cassette deck with dub. Dub, Lee “Scratch” Perry, deep deep cuts off side six of Sandinista! — let these be indicators of the stoner underpinnings of our trip out West. As if our eccentric route were not enough. From New York down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to visit a college pal. He took me to my first mall. Even then, I had a weakness for those prefab palaces. “I asked Andy why there were no security guards around,” I wrote in my notebook. “He told me I had a New Yorker’s mentality.”

Then hundreds of miles up to Chicago for a disappointing pilgrimage too complicated and inane to detail here. We bought two tiny replicas of the Sears Tower as consolation. Veered south, taking in the territory, cooking up plots. Inspiration: “discussing the plot of the movie Darren wants to write, about 7-Elevens that land in cornfields.” Down to New Orleans, where we slept in a frat house on mattresses still moldy and damp from the spring flood. One of Darren’s childhood friends belonged to the frat. His brothers wanted to know why he was “bringing niggers and Jews” into their chill-space. We sure were seeing a lot of America on this trip.

Then west to tackle our Let’s Go assignment proper. Bull’s horns and turquoise rocks. We wrote up the Grand Canyon, which almost rivaled our Great Trouble Ditch back home, where on the vernal equinox we burn offerings to Saint Gus, who drove the smiles out of Anhedonia with nothing more than an electric zither and a list of proof. Hit Lake Mead, which also summoned pleasant memories of another homeland monument, the Puddle of Sorrows, where we held Senior Prom.