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

A mall with living rooms. The concept of such a thing, to eat, drink, and play, and then dream inside its walls. No windows, for what sight could be more inspiring than your true self laid bare, with all its hungers and flaws and grubby aspirations. Stroll past the high-end shops with accented names, recognizable theme restaurants owned by TV chefs, indoor Big Tops, man-made wave pools, and find nourishment for any desire zipping through your brain. If there’s a gap in perimeter through which an unfulfilled wish might escape, it will be plugged by your next trip.

They even have bus depots. Some casinos are equipped with snap-on bus depots, an optional component for the base model. Like the Tropicana. Today’s outpost of the LIC was the Tropicana, local franchise of the famous Vegas standby, where James Bond busted heads in Diamonds Are Forever . Methinks he did not arrive on Greyhound. You might escape if the bus didn’t pull directly into the building itself, so the depot was a worthy investment. Some of the passengers stood and funneled to the door, causing a scandal. “Where is he going?” “They’re not waiting for their bonus?” Meaning the twenty-dollar voucher they give you to play upstairs — it’s worked out between Greyhound and the casino (they really want you to stay). For what kind of inhuman monster didn’t wait for their bonus — it’s free money.

I jumped up and joined the apostates. I was vibrating with newly acquired poker knowledge and couldn’t wait. The smell of ancient cigarette smoke and the mellow undertones of men’s room disinfectant were an intoxicant. I checked in, chucked in some buffalo wings for fuel, and soon I was in the Tropicana Poker Room.

I found my degradation. You can rubble the old Times Square and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority and clean under its fingernails, but you can’t change people. I was among gamblers.

I sat down at a $1/$2 table with types I would encounter with some frequency during my training. Like Big Mitch. Big Mitch is a potbellied endomorph in fabric-softened khaki shorts and polo shirt, a middle-aged white guy here with his wife, who was off dropping chips on the roulette felt according to her patented system. Fully equipped with a mortgage, a decent job, and disposable income. The segments of his thick metal watchband chick-chicked on his hairy wrist each time he entered the pot. Your average home player. What Big Mitch wants the most, apart from coming home to see that young Kaitlyn hasn’t had a party and wrecked the house while they were away (she’s really been acting out lately, but Pat says all girls go through that stage), is to brag to his home-game buddies and certain guys at the office of how much he won tonight, with a breakdown of a Really Big Hand or two. He will be less vocal about his failures, as we all are.

Next to two Big Mitches was a Methy Mike, a harrowed man who had been tested in untold skirmishes, of which the poker table was only one. If Methy Mike had been hitched, the lady had packed her bags long ago, and if they had spawned, their parenting goals probably ended with making sure their kid didn’t get a tattoo on her face, and they did not always succeed. Often locals, Methy Mikes are on a first-name basis with the bosses and dealers and cocktail waitresses, and you can count on hearing a little catching up. “Haven’t seen you in a while.” “I’ve been … had some stuff come up.” So I see. Iggy Pop takes a look at these guys and says, “Wow, he’s really let himself go.”

They are weathered by the sun, by their lifestyles, which you can only guess at, the underlying narrative of their decay, and resemble unfortunates who have been dragged on chains from the back of a beat-up van and left to desiccate in the desert, like one of the down-and-outers in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre . Undone by their hardwired inclinations and undying dream of a new start. “Can you help a fellow American who’s down on his luck?” Luck — they believe in luck, its patterns, its unknowable rules. They will, seeing pocket Jacks demolish some weekend punter, tell the table, “Let me tell you a sad story about a pair a Jacks.” A sad story for every hand, every one of the 1,326 possible starting combinations.

And then there was Robotron, wedged in there, lean and wiry and hunkered down, a young man with sunglasses and earbuds, his hoodie cinched tight around his face like a school shooter or a bathroom loiterer. Weaned on internet play, Robotron is only here tonight because the Feds shut down all the U.S. online poker sites a month ago. Black Friday, something about money laundering. Here with the humans. Otherwise the Robotrons would be back in their childhood rooms, eight pixelated tables open on the screen; he can play eight games at once, zip zip. It’s not so hard once you retrain those pathways in the brain, cramming decades of poker experience into eighteen months. Why leave the house at all, between the poker sites and the porn sites? What are other people for, but for robbing or fucking? (The goddamned Feds, breeding a new generation of libertarians in the subdivs.) Real people, talking, breathing, it must be so weird to them. Their earbuds help keep ’em out, playing music, self-help manuals, If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single? as read by Edward James Olmos, or the latest invasion plans transmitted from their home planet.

There was one woman at the table, a quiet sixty-something lady with bright red hair, the follicles of which it was perhaps possible to count. Five percent of commercially available hair dyes actually match a color that occurs in nature. Hers was not one of them. I liked her.

I will now take a moment to explain Hold’em to the lay reader, I don’t mind. In my home games, I often assumed the mantle of the Explainer, laying out the rules for the newbies — the indulging girlfriend, the language poet in town for the weekend, and, maddeningly, people I had played with dozens of times before. I wrote the hand rankings on a little piece of paper for them to keep by their chips, reminded them it’s “one or two or none from your hand, and three or four or five from the board.” I stopped being so amenable once my kid started talking because I was explaining shit all the time now. “Daddy, why is the sky blue?” “Daddy, how do fish swim?” “Daddy, where shall I keep my secret fears of the world, and tend to them like my private garden?” Nowadays my poker neophytes are on their own.

You start with two cards. You know what an ante is, my friend, even if you have never played a single hand of poker. Gotta pay to play, that’s the American way, sweet pea, whether it’s parking meters or X-ray specs. In Hold’em, only two people plop down an automatic bet without seeing their cards: the Small Blind and the Big Blind. Blind, because you’re in a dark mine probably about to step into the abyss. Depending on the stakes, the Small Blind is one dollar and the Big Blind is two dollars (or twenty-five cents and fifty cents, thirty dollars and sixty dollars, whatever). This way there are always two people invested in the hand, to different degrees. They’re in, and maybe they’re protective of their opening contribution, will feel moved to defend their one dollar or two dollars, the way a parent on a playground might steer their progeny away from that weird kid who’s been eating nuggets from the sandbox (feral cats use this place as their bathroom at night, according to a parenting blog).

If the rest of the players at the table, a maximum of ten, want to enter the hand, they have to match (or call) the Big Blind of two dollars or fifty cents or whatever, or raise it, or fold. And so on for the others ringed around the table, until it comes back to the Small Blind, who has to bring up his initial forced bet to match whatever the current bet is. Finally, the Big Blind, who, also having bet without seeing her cards, can match or raise, because they want to protect their little tyke, or because they got a monster hand, you never know. Two dollars is two dollars, we live in a capitalist society.