The Poker Report

12/1/02

"Bringing in the New Year since 2001"

New Years Eve and the sun is rising over the pond behind the house in South Lake Tahoe. We hit the poker table late last night. Wendy, Ben, Cooney, Donahue and myself. It was a rough game of cards for me, perhaps my last game of cards of the year. I lost seven bucks while sipping dark rum and soda pop. I lost on pairs of kings and open ended four cards straight. I lost mostly to Donahue who’s been turning it on since reading Poker For Dummies.

The conditions on the mountain were hard yesterday, thick ice waiting to take your board out beneath your feet. Afternoon, the heat melting the ice became softer and we poured through the trees while a snow and then a rain began to fall.

The game was hard. After all, I was following up on a tremendous victory at Ben’s mother’s house. And I’ve been worrying about John Ashcroft and what’s happening to civil liberties and the man in charge of our destruction, a pious, stern, Christian racist who won’t dance and speaks in tongues on Sunday afternoon. And I worry about social security, as our money flows from T-bills to Wall Street and Wall Street wins forever. There will be no more picket lines, no more strikes. We won’t allow steel workers to walk out on our social security checks. We won’t allow Amazon to go under while delivering our retirement funds. It will be the end of the forty hour week which has already died, it will be the ascendancy of Wall Street to unparalleled dimensions upon the American conciousness. It was under these circumstances that I lost my seven smackers.

But worse. Wendy was insisting on inserting the word ‘strow’ into the English dictionary. "Get Webster on the phone!" she bellowed as we hid beneath the table, Ben and Cooney hugging each other for comfort. "Don’t kill me," I said to Wendy, at this altitude the dark rum going to my head.

It had all started earlier. Tired and wet we played a stormy game of Boggle where our competitiveness beat out our forgiveness and our good will was out on the patio trying to climb into the hot tub only to cover the top and drown to death. The air is thinner, and colder, every vertical foot. We dealt in slang, aphorisms, annotations, and acronyms. In the morning I woke and made a bad cup of coffee and tried to work on a novel that has been going nowhere quickly for some time now but I couldn’t get the word ‘rune’ out of my head, and what had been done to me, and why.

And that was the state when the poker game started. Tense. We hid away in this small mountain town, the world going mad for all we cared. We finished Fox’s guacamole in sweeping gestures, pita stuck to our fingers, en route to beers and cups of water stuck deep in the snow around the back.

Ben won big as well, was the thing. Ben and Donahue tucked our money in the pockets of their dishonest jeans. 2002 might be different. In 2002 things could change. This was the year that was. Poker on Tuesday nights, poker on Mt. Shasta, Las Vegas, Salinas, California. We played cards at the rodeo, we played cards before and after our horrible cinema and I fell asleep one cold night outside on Ben’s porch, my book having just been released, two angry lesbians making out in a bar called Phoenix, and me in my leather pants. This was the year that Ben and Wendy hooked up, creating a near impenetrable alliance of misspelled words and untrue facts. The year that Donahue went from loser to winner, and the year that Cooney lost and then lost again. Abby went from on the road to rock and roll star, a string of bad luck and hope for the future rounding itself out in a new apartment above the Castro and a high paying job in the non-profit sector.

Fox never played poker, but she was around, hanging on to a second year fellowship at UCSF, nobody had the guts to complain. The poker report was filled with ins and outs, conspiracies and rumors. And guest editors like Chris Cooney, the impenetrable Jon Berry, Ben Peterson. It was the year Q’s head lolled to its side, spit like a yo-yo dripping from his lower lip.

On the periphery, Karina, Julie, and Alice swinging like monkeys on a vine while money and chips changed hands, they skipped the action, cigarettes on the porch, the prostitutes screaming on sixteenth street. Andrew Miller came and went and ultimately I used his rock and roll posters to wrap my Christmas presents. It was a year that came down to me losing seven dollars to a mechanical engineer in a ski town three hours outside of San Francisco under the glow of a large TV set and a thin brown carpet. "It all comes to this," I said to Fox’s empty bowl of guacamole, half a bowl full of red salsa sitting untouched on the coffee table. "What can we do now?" I said, long tall Cooney sleeping on the couch, Ben and Wendy lost in netherland, Alvarez and Leslie swallowed in South Lake casino paradise, their own thoughts muted by the bells and whistles of a world gone mad, a pull at the handle, and fat blackjack dealer with nowhere left to turn and no one to turn to, six kids in the trailer under ace covered bedsheets calling it a night and calling it home.

It wasn’t the New Year yet when Nina and Michael showed up. I spent New Years eve in Harvey’s casino playing four eight hold ‘em while Alvarez and Caveman cruised the strip looking for redemption in Keno, blackjack, and slots. My first dealer of the day was Olivia and she looked like she might have played the lead in her high school production of Grease thirty-five years ago before running off with some loser to Reno where she got her dealers license and moved into a trailer on the outskirts of town, two kids spending the nights under ace covered bedsheets mom brings home.

I went down fast and furious. There was a bitter old man to the right of the dealer and he liked to make comments. Like when I said Raise when I should have said Bet. He liked to say things to the guy next to him like, Raise what? He thought he was pretty funny. He thought he was going to teach somebody something. Another guy sat down with poker player magazine in his lap. But the best player was a man they called Doctor who played beneath a big bushy beard and said something along the lines of, I’m much happier since I got out. He knew how to bluff nines and sixes, when to move and when to take a bead and how skip a blind and build a mountain. He took one hundred dollars from me when I was dealt a straight on the flop, three cards showing, three seven in the hole. We got in a bidding war which ended with him turning over a low house and me tossing my cards to the middle of the table and saying, I guess I did something wrong there.

When I got back somebody said, Those ATMs are quick. You didn’t even miss your blind. Someone else said, You bet those machines are full today.

I took a good measure after that, I went down two-hundred dollars. I didn’t look to win my money back but just to play straight and that worked fine after the Doctor left the table to do surgery on some whiskey and tabacco and I slowly won back my money and at one point looked at the grouchy old bastard who thought he knew something when all along I knew he didn’t know anything and all he had left was a tiny stack of red chips shorter than my thumb and I knew he’d be bringing in the New Year in front of his TV set in some half price hotel room on the outskirts of town grumbling to a bottle.

The cocktail waitresses name was Sookie, from Korea. And she wore her blouse open to show the smooth skin of her implants, her large breasts soaring away from her body the way I suppose Everest and K2 would if they were in Wisconsin. Everytime she walked by I had to crane my neck and I imagine she must have been a stripper at some point before she got too old for that, before the lines on her face went too deep to cover with a little bit of makeup. But she seemed happy, and everybody tipped her well, especially me. And the more I bet the more I envisioned this world where I approached Sookie over by the seven card table and asked her what it was she was doing for New Year and after that we went somewhere, back to her house, where it played out just like in Swingers except without the one guy busting in to use the phone and call his ex-girlfriend.

By the time Alvarez and Caveman came back Nicki was dealing and I was sitting behind three-hundred and twenty five dollars in reds and whites, the Tora Bora of Lake Tahoe, they would never find me. I cashed out and we headed back to the cabin and that’s when things started to get a little strange.

The Iowa caucus was there and the booze was flowing,, and Donahue decided he was going to give poker lessons to Leslie, Alvarez, Woo and Caveman. He was going to teach them how to play, five dollar buy in, which was ironic. Rather than collecting cash he kept a ledger of credit and nobody noticed what was happening until it was already past nine o’clock and time for dinner.

Fox and Wendy had cooked up an incredible stir fry, apple turnovers, salad with cilantro and Donahue was scowling, his forehead rumbling towards his eyebrows, his dull white teeth biting at the air, his fingers straining against the bright orange cotton of a Donahue Brothers Lawn Mowing Service t-shirt.

I had bought in for his five dollar game and ended up ten dollars for a grand total of fifteen owed from the bank. But Donahue was mad about something. I couldn’t quite place it. He didn’t want to pay me and we were all pretty drunk at this point. He said, I’m not going to pay you. Tell the story, write the book, I don’t care. I’m not going to read your stupid poker report. When he didn’t settle down we all became a little concerned. Christine with her big back settled onto his lap and this seemed to work a little bit. Finally, he was coaxed into the hot tub and when he came out he seemed a lot better. But I was wondering if perhaps this was the new Donahue, the 2002 edition, the mean, snarling, angry Donahue who never got into punk rock when he was in high school and now, ten years later, was finally ready to rebel.

When the clock moved towards midnight we broke out the champaign and I ended up with Andy and Karina while MTV broadcast live from time square, our generation, hands outstretched, in holding cells awaiting charges, all of New York turned towards the man behind the glass curtain dancing and rapping in a long fur coat, nothing underneath. There was a toast, Michael, Karina, Ben, Wendy, Andy, Cooney, Stassen, Stephanie, Baby Jack, Fox, Nina, and whoever else I might have forgotten. We hugged. We said we were glad to have spent this time together. Ben and I had made it through another year. We drank and we forgot for a moment. We toasted and we sipped and we laughed and we mugged and we took pictures and we grabbed more beers buried in the snow behind the house. And we shook and we smiled and MTV released their big red apple. Generation Marketing, Generation Cell Phone. Generation Reality TV. Generation Xlibris. We danced and we hugged and we smiled and we wished well and we didn’t notice, we were happy, and we forgot, once again, for the evening. Under an Ashcroft colored sky.

Stephen Elliott

Editor

The Poker Report

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