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

Everything begins and ends with these two cards. You are the ant: They squeeze you like the fingers of a mean kid. You have to learn which combos are worth engaging and which are not. For example: For three years I was cursed with sitting down in the exact wrong seat at group dinners. Wholly and inescapably hexed. Adjacent to a blowhard lush, between two narcissistic twerps, face-to-face with the mime. You look at what you’ve been dealt and think, This will end badly , and check out of the convo and endure until next time. Or maybe you make the best of a bad situation and play the affability game, go for it, but your optimism is only rarely rewarded. The lush starts talking about “immigrants,” the narcissists discuss that new boutique colonic joint, the mime won’t shut up. Once in a while, though, you have a pretty swell time with that unpromising start, and it is these improbable nights that feed the gambling delusion. “If it worked once, I can make it happen again.” (The dinner analogy makes the most sense to misanthropes, I reckon.)

Then comes the Flop: three communal cards in the middle of the table. Sharing with strangers — we’ve moved from capitalism to communism. Flop, like you’ve parachuted into the war zone and landed in a strategic position, or the champs at air command have miscalculated again and dropped you smack in the enemy trenches. Everyone checks, bets, raises, or folds according to their present coordinates. Checking is ducking from artillery, like if I lie low maybe I won’t get hit and my lot will improve. Taking a second to see what’s going on.

Then comes the next communal card, the Turn, as in: Turn the corner to see the next obstacle fate has thrown in your path, three goddamned tourists walking shoulder to shoulder so you can’t progress, or a block party hosted by Everyone You Owe E-mail To. You have improved, or not. Finally we get to the last card, the River, and fortune’s drifts and eddies have borne you to a safe harbor, or you suddenly discover that pirates crept aboard a few rounds ago and you’re about to be robbed: Hold’em.

About Limit and No Limit: I have good card sense, I’m a pretty good player in my five-dollar buy-in game, in the way that a lot of people are good in low-stakes games. The size of the bets is capped, “limited,” so people hang around to the River waiting for a miracle, and why not, you can always buy in for another few bucks. Let’s say when you’re playing cheap at Mike’s on Saturday night, the maximum bet might be one buck — there will be no handing over the keys to the Prius. On a bad night you lose forty dollars, cheaper than the date nights you regularly schedule in the hope of “keeping things fresh,” cheaper than tromping off to one of the crappy 3-D movies, what with the price of popcorn going through the roof. Over five hours, you got your money’s worth. At the $1/$2 chump game I was playing at the Trop, the Small Blind was one dollar and the Big Blind was two dollars.

In No Limit, that’s where you get the ladies and gentlemen dropping their genitals on the table, declaring “All in!” You can bet your whole stash, it’s crazy. Exciting! Thrill of Gambling! That’s what they were playing one table over from me. Fewer Methy Mikes there, and no ladies, crimson hair or no. No Limit is what the boys play these days. The stakes are intensified, but if you bust out, you can still buy back in. In a home game, you can sometimes reach into your pocket and throw a dollar in, if the hand has gotten interesting and you want to keep playing. In a casino, you can only throw in the chips you already have in front of you. That’s the cap on your All In. But if you bust out, you can pad over to the ATM machine, pay a strip-club-worthy service charge, and get a new stack of chips.

In a tournament, if you go All In and lose, you’re out.

Tonight was a warm-up. Tomorrow I was playing in my first casino tournament. Ever since I’d taken this assignment, I’d been playing poorly, trying to apply the half-digested poker knowledge I’d gulleted down from books, crashing and burning. If I couldn’t maintain a decent level of play in a home game, how could I face the Big Boys in Vegas?

I hadn’t slept in weeks. I had to make something happen tonight, even at this crappy $1/$2 table, just for morale’s sake. The $1/$2 limit is the crummiest card game available in the modern casino. If it were street retail, it’d be a combo KFC — Taco Bell — Donate Blood Here. You can make a little money playing top hands, but you’ll rarely bluff everyone out because staying in until the Magical River is not expensive. In Vegas, I’d be playing with people who didn’t bother with these crap stakes.

Next to me, Big Mitch shuffled the top two chips of his disappearing stack. The money could have been so many things. A new propane tank for the grill, or an anniversary dinner with Pat at that new fusion place. Methy Mike ordered another Jack and Coke and tipped the waitress with a dollar chip and a “Thanks, darling.” Robotron could see right through our meat and straight into our poker souls, groaning as he announced, “I have to fold to your Ace-Queen.” (The goddamned Feds!) The Lady with the Crimson Hair fondled her chips, and I played tight and won eighty-one dollars. Chicken feed, but enough to cover the entrance fee for tomorrow’s tournament.

I toasted my success in A Dam Good Sports Bar upstairs in The Quarter, the casino’s dining concourse, meant to evoke Havana. The home of the original Trop, back in the day. It would do. The table next to me ordered 40s of Bud Light, which arrived on ice in buckets. Is that how they celebrated in Cuba’s gambling heyday? They toasted the night’s festivities, just a few sips away.

I had been here before, in American cities of a certain size, a bunch of gnawed wing bones before me. Drinking beer alone among flat-screens and dead eyes. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, because in the end, whatever goes down, whatever you get up to, your triumphs and transgressions, nobody actually understands what it means except for you. What did it mean to you in your secret heart to win that money or lose that money, to hold that person. To see them walk away. It is unshareable. No one to narc on you to the folks back home: The only narc here is you.

Because I was in AC, Vegas’s little cousin, the stakes — the highs and lows — were smaller scale. I wanted to tell someone, I won eighty-one bucks. But who cared about eighty-one bucks? Who’d care that I had just started a journey that would take me from my crappy New York apartment, a.k.a. the Our Lady of Perpetual Groaning, and out into the American desert, where I’d be bullied, bluffed, and tested by the best poker players in the world. As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. “Life is a journey, not a destination.” Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.

The table next to me ordered another bucket of 40s. They had their expedition, and I had mine.

I returned to my room. I was going to hit the books again before the 11:00 a.m. starting time. My bed was impossibly stiff, as if all the years of bad luck in this place, the busted hopes and evaporated rent money, had been turned into cement, cut into slabs, and then wheeled down the carpeted hallways into the rooms. We slept atop our sarcophagi. I realized I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, some real hobo shit. My ex-wife and the kid were upstate, engaged in holiday-weekend goodness. Here I was acting as if I had nobody. One of the overlooked benefits of joint custody is that you’re going to go max thirty-six hours until someone discovers your decomposing body. “Anyone seen him? He was supposed to pick her up after school.”