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

I slept poorly the night of 2A. I had played it safe the first day, stuck to the winners. I hadn’t gambled too much. Now I had to reconnect with that old faith, that when the next card turned over, I’d see my future there.

I thought I heard crickets.

There was some nice theater to the Ceremonial Unbagging of the Chips at the start of Day 2B. “Dealers, if a player is not present two minutes before start, remove their chips and place the bag on their seat.” I was at White 83, Seat 6, and per Coach’s assessment, I was still swimming in a tide pool with the guppy luckless and jelly-organism amateurs. No big stacks. Steven Garfinkle had told me that one of the great wonders of poker was that a normal Joe could sit down at a tournament table next to one of their idols. Which was true, it was a beautiful thing, like finding yourself playing [a sport] with [a famous player]. (I stopped following sports once Ty Cobb retired.) But I didn’t want to sit next to Jonathan Duhamel.

Country Time was my speed. Country Time, on my right, was a sober, elderly gentleman in a brown sweater, and I did not think he meant me harm. I did a little Alexander to chill me out, breathe in, breathe out, and checked the other stacks through my sunglasses.

Did I neglect to say I was wearing sunglasses? I hadn’t the nerve during my trial tourneys, as I felt like a douchebag, but the first time I stepped into the Pavilion I happened to be wearing them, and it felt good. I felt safe. They were nothing special, the ones I’d been wearing for years, but they’d filtered out some of my city’s more evil wavelengths many times. The visor in my suit of armor.

Perhaps it is also possible that I have not mentioned the rest of my battle gear. I wore a track jacket. A special track jacket. A few weeks before the Main Event, I set up a solicitation on one of the social media sites:

If you’ve seen the tournament on ESPN, you know that all the real players wear the names of sponsors on their sweatshirts and caps and T-shirts .

I want to blend in, so I am now accepting sponsors. There are two tiers of sponsorship .

In the Premium “God’s Chosen” Sponsorship Level, I will wear your name, enterprise, slogan, or credo on my shirt for $11.25. There are three slots open .

In the Hoi Polloi Sponsorship Level, you can purchase one of 1 °Commemorative Signature Bracelets. They will be green or orange in color, I haven’t decided which. On the outside, they will bear the slogan KEEP WINNING HANDS. This will “buck you up” when you need it, an imperative, a prayer, or simple statement of fact, depending. On the inner part of the bracelet, where no one can see, they will read STILL SAD INSIDE. This will remind you of the truth .

They will be sold for $4.95…

It has been pointed out that the cost of producing this merchandise will exceed the money raised. To which I say, I have never been good at math .

I got a few responses. I didn’t get my act together to order the bracelets before I left, but I got the duds. I went to a custom T-shirt joint in Dumbo and handed the designer the specs. I’d have to pay extra for a rush job. She double-checked my chicken-scratch, track jacket first.

“Republic of … Ann-hee—”

“Anhedonia,” I said.

“What are those?”

“Those are lightning bolts,” I said.

She told me to pick out a color for the T-shirt’s font, something to accent the brown fabric. I didn’t want to clash. Fuck that. She made two suggestions. I picked one.

“That’s ‘Vegas Gold,’ ” she said. “Maybe it’ll be good luck!”

I wanted diverse sponsors: a person, a business, and a slogan for the back. So I put “WSOP 2011” over the left breast in Space: 1999 letters, and my pal Nathan Englander’s name on the right sleeve — he was in my home game and had been a stalwart ally during Poker Quest. The NYC bookstore McNally Jackson anchored the left sleeve. The bookstore’s Twitter feed had offered up a slogan, something like “Crying on National TV Is My Tell,” but, uh, the name of the store was shorter so I went with that. The owner had given me some picture books for the kid one time, so it felt right.

Finally, on the back I put “My Other Hand Is Bullets,” in an old-timey Western font, which my friend Rob Spillman had suggested. I explained to the designer that “Bullets” was slang for a pair of pocket Aces. I didn’t want her to think I was going on a murder spree, or to a panel discussion. I already owned a “This Is More of a Statement Than a Question” T for panel discussions.

When I told Coach about the paraphernalia, she laughed but also suggested that maybe I hold off on wearing the TV shirt until I made it into the money. “It’s a bit snarky,” she declared. Players were going to target me anyway, because they’d catch on to my inexperience (gee, how?) and because I “didn’t look like the average poker player,” like a Big Mitch, one hand eternally patting his gut. No point in giving them another reason. Okay, in the money, sure. As it happened, the WSOP cracked down on logos this year, part of the fallout from the Feds’ assault on online poker sites. It reduced the sometimes absurd number of patches you saw on the TV shows, which made the grizzled players look like steamer trunks in a ’40s movie.

I was going to wear the jacket, though, a snazzy red number with the name of my homeland on the front and the aforementioned lightning bolts, lest anyone doubt where I was coming from.

Finally, I had my talisman. Our last day together, I asked the kid to give me a good-luck charm. I was going to be gone three weeks all told, the longest we’d ever been apart, and I started missing her even before I left. I’d make up the time when I got back, we had years and years ahead of us, but how can you make up moments? I was standing on the terrace outside the convention hall, baking in the merciless Vegas heat and trying to keep a steady signal on my cell, when she told me, “I saw a rainbow, Daddy!” The ex-wife and the kid were in upstate New York, and I knew it had rained because folks were complaining about it on my Twitter feed. Her first rainbow. It hadn’t occurred to me that a rainbow was one of the milestones. Unscrewing the training wheels, sure, but light refracted through water vapor? What she felt about it was the important thing. Light refracted through water vapor. Here I was dying in the desert. The kid. What else did I have but the kid?

That last day, I asked her to pick something out from her toys. “I’ll keep it on my table and it will give me good luck, and I’ll think of you whenever I look at it.” She deliberated, and chose a pink flip-flop. It was an inch and a half long, made of soft foam, and dangled from a key chain. It just appeared one day, probably from the bowels of a birthday party goodie bag — there was all sorts of weird little crap in those things, nestled among the Smarties and renegade Now & Laters. “Can you write something on it?” I asked. “Like ‘good luck’?”

She deliberated again, and wrote GO LUCK in a six-year-old’s penmanship on the sole of the flip-flop. We let the ink dry.

A pink flip-flop on a key chain. The first day I played, I kept it in my jacket pocket. I couldn’t bring myself to put it out there. It was definitely not cowboy, it was the very anti-Brunson made physical. On Day 2B, I pushed the charm up against my $23K. There was invisible stuff tied to the ring besides the pink flip-flop, too, all my psychic baggage on a string, limply rising to the ceiling of the Pavilion like a bouquet of faltering balloons. All right, Luck, I’m waiting.