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

I had people. I flashed to how happy my daughter was when I told her I won a hundred bucks in a game last summer. I’d driven down to AC with two pals, on the Manboob Express, and brought back one uncashed dollar chip to give her as a souvenir. “One hundred dollars!” Here’s a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it’s going to pay off later. She believed in me. I was her dad.

I was lucky.

I was gonna play in the Big Game and give it my best shot. It was not the National Series of Poker, it was the World Series of Poker, and I would represent my country, the Republic of Anhedonia. We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another person. I would do it for my countrymen, the shut-ins, the doom-struck, the morbid of temperament, for all those who walk through life with poker faces 24/7 because they never learned any other way. For the gamblers of every socioeconomic station, working class, middle class, upper class, broke-ass; for the sundry gamers twelve stories below, tossing chips into the darkness; for the internet wraiths maniacally clicking before their LCDs in ill-lit warrens in Akron, Boise, and Bhopal, who should really get out more; for all the amateurs who need this game as a sacred haven once a month, who seek the sanctuary of Draw and Stud, where there are never any wild cards and you can count on a good hand every once in a while. For Big Mitch and Methy Mike, Robotron and the Lady with the Crimson Hair, the ones who would kill to go to Vegas and will never make it there, my people all of them. Did I sound disdainful of them before? It was recognition you heard. I contain multitudes, most of them flawed.

Plus, I’ve always wanted to wear sunglasses indoors.

In the spring of 2011, I received an e-mail from the editor of a new magazine. He asked if I wanted to write something about sports.

No, I said. I didn’t follow sports. Sure, now and then I mixed it up in a Who Had the Most Withholding Father contest with chums, but that’s as far as it went for me competitive sports — wise. More important, I was catching my breath after pulling out of a long skid. I had recently finished writing a novel about a city overrun by the living dead, and the plunge into autobiography had left me depleted. I’d barely gone out in months, devoting myself to meeting a moronic deadline I’d imposed in a spasm of optimism. Dating was a distraction, even the frequent-buyer card at my local coffee place was too much of a commitment. Now that I was done with the book, I was starting to feel human again. I wanted to rejoin society, do whatever it is that normal people do when they get together. Drink hormone-free, humanely slaughtered beer. Eat micro-chickens. Compare sadnesses, things of that sort.

The editor had heard that I liked poker — what if they sent me to cover the World Series of Poker?

No, I said. I did indeed like poker, and although there was no way he could know it, was very fond of Las Vegas. But ten days in the desert, in the middle of July? I chap easily. And again, I wanted to give myself a break. In the past year I had devoted myself to the novel and to figuring out the rules of solo parenthood. If I wasn’t writing, I was hitting the “Activities for Kids” sites in search of stuff for the kid and I to do on the weekends. It was a hard job, tracing a safe route through the minefield of face-painting, peanut-free caroling, and assorted pony bullshit that would get us safely to dinnertime and the organic hot dogs. A trip to Las Vegas would cut into our summer hang, which I’d come to idealize. It’s complicated, raising a kid who is half Anhedonian. There’s always the question of assimilation in this country: How much of your native culture do you keep, and how much do you give up? I wanted her to respect both sides of her heritage, so in the summer I’d teach her how to be a carefree American. We’d sip plus-size colas, watch TV on sunny days, be the lazy assholes the Founders intended.

Then the editor of the magazine asked, What if we staked you to play in the World Series and you wrote about that?

I had no choice. The only problem was that I had no casino tournament experience.

I’d been playing penny poker since college. College kids counting out chips into even stacks, opening a case of brew, busting out real-man cigars — these were the sacred props of manhood, and we were chronically low on proof. A couple of years later, in the ’90s, I had a weekly game. Inconceivable now: getting half a dozen people in the same room every Sunday night. We put in our measly five bucks. There was always someone who’d mined their couch or plundered their jar of laundry quarters, the twenty-something version of hocking your engagement ring.

We talked a lot about who we wanted to be, because we weren’t those people yet, and reinforcing one another’s delusions took the edge off. You humor my bat-shit novel idea, and I’ll nod thoughtfully at your insipid screenplay treatment, or plan for the paradigm-shifting CD-ROM game. Like I said, it was the ’90s. Dealer’s choice: Everyone got their turn to pick the game and expound upon the next harebrained scheme that would make us artists. The home game is always a refuge from the world. That ’90s game was an escape from our unrealized ambitions. We were true gamblers, laundry money or no, because we were sure that if we pulled it off, everything would be different. We were so busy bucking each other up that we barely noticed when someone introduced Hold’em into our mix of Seven Card Stud, Five Card Draw, and Anaconda.

A couple of years after that game trailed off, we started a Brooklyn writers game. A cliché, yes: more props. Monthly, ’cause who had the time now that we were actually writing books instead of just talking about it. The stakes stayed the same, though — five bucks, because we were writers. The game still a refuge, this time from the truth we’d discovered about fulfilling your dreams. We had done it, and we were still the same people. Nothing had changed.

There was a brief period, during my ’90s game, when I wanted to learn more about poker. I was sick of hanging around doomed hands like a dope, waiting to fill in my straight, hoping that the final down card in Seven Card Stud would paint in my flush. Slow learner that I am, I’d just outgrown pining over women who weren’t interested in me, and whenever I looked at a busted hand, it gave me a familiar pathetic feeling. Gamblers and the lovesick want to bend reality. But it’s never going to happen. If you woke the hell up, you’d understand that and stop chasing.

It occurred to me that I should research how often big hands popped up. Full houses and trips and what have you. Not the “odds” of them appearing, as that sounded too much like arithmetic. Just a loose idea of how often nice cards appeared in my hand. So on Sunday afternoons while the hangover matinee played on the TV, I squatted on the floor and dealt out Seven Card Stud for myself and three ghost players. I’d play my game, fill in the dummy hands, and see who’d win.

Did my yearnings pay off — did that Jack appear when I needed it, that scrawny pair bulk up into trips? Well. It wasn’t very scientific. Anybody who retained a little high-school math could arrive at the real odds more efficiently. And a couple of rounds for a couple of hours on a couple of Sundays was nothing compared to the weekend crash courses possible during the heyday of online play, when you’d hunker for hours, you got your mouse in one hand and a sporkful of kale salad in the other. But in my little way, I got an intuitive instruction on different hands. At the very least, I stopped chasing straights as much, and that, coupled with my poker mask, paid for some cab rides home Sunday night.