The Poker Report

3-5-02

"Handpicking Your Elected Officials Since 2001"

Before tonight’s game but after a hamburger and cheese omelet from Georgies donut shop I went down to City Hall to cast my absentee ballot. I’m voting for more sunshine and redistributing the wealth. I’m voting for less rain and more people on the streets. I’ve been sitting at home trying to write stories. There’s the novel I’ve been working on for a year about a movie character that wants to leave LA: He thinks to himself that he is tired of the car chases, the violence, the love that’s only good in moments before it turns bad and then it always turns good again but then breaks your heart. He’s tired of sex and killing and then more sex. In short, he’s tired of Los Angeles and everything Hollywood has to offer him. Recently I’ve been working on a short story about a drag queen set during the Gulf War: When I kissed her there was always that stubble on her cheek.

There’s others. The love story about a young journalist and his girlfriend set in Israel during the Intifada: "The Palestinians are raping her. That’s what they do with tourist girls left alone. Have a nice day." He hands Jan back his passport and Jan passes through to the other side of the checkpoint where he boards a sherut that takes him towards the city center.

And there’s other stuff. I’ve been learning from Kealey that if you want to be a great writer you need to stay in your room, conduct your relationships over the phone and the internet. That’s what great writers do these days, or they go to Italy with their families. And on Tuesdays there’s poker.

Tonight Cooney showed, and Ben, and Jon, and Donahue. Tobias Wolff called halfway through the night to reschedule an appointment we had the next day. I said to him, "You hear that, old man? People are having a good time." Josh was back from the world championship arm-wrestling competition in Poland. And Fox was there for the first time in a pink shirt with cursive lettering, flexing her biceps, her eyes lit like glitter, manic for aces in the hole.

I tried to teach Josh how to play. In Poland Josh was competing against Russian arm wrestlers with no legs, or with two legs and only one arm. They cut off their limbs with dull instruments to increase their weight advantage and twisted what was left of their bodies around the table, or wedged themselves in the wall. Josh was in the smallest weight class but he had all of his arms and legs. His normalcy was like a stone around his neck. When you’re normal you’re vulnerable. He wore the Team Kazakhstan jacket to play poker in. Said it brought him luck. Said at the end of the competition he went up to the smallest Canadian girl there and kicked her ass. He said beating her was easy.

I told Josh about playing aggressive and tight. Play the cards you’re dealt, make them pay. It served him well. But it didn’t help me at all. I was bleeding blue chips, pushing pink stacks towards Vermont, sailing piles of white around the Chesapeake horn. Donahue was pulling chips two fisted and the dog came out of him, the woof and growl of winning, howling towards the ceiling for a six high low hand, foaming from the teeth for double trumps, biting at the table legs. Foxy lowered her light blue shades over her nose. She told Chris, You better watch out. She said, You win, I win. She flexed her biceps, shot her index finger towards his nose. You know what I mean, she told him. And Donahue stuttered for something to say. I told him not to pee on my floor.

Otherwise it was a quiet night. Josh pulled snakes below and played it tight and aggressive, just like I told him. Do as I do, not as I say. Cooney cashed eighteen up and smiled sheepishly, "What can I say, I’m tall, so I’m closer to certain things." Abby was off in Mexico gambling on cock fights, visiting with her family. Jon lost fifteen dollars playing Clue keeping the queen of clubs against his heart while trumping indiscriminately over the diamonds, only to be swallowed by the nearest king. And it only broke out in violence one time. For the most part we were well behaved even with Jon pouring beer into the chip holders because he prefers to drink it with a straw and perhaps because we ran out of beer so we had to make greyhounds, or because it was March 5 and they were tallying up the votes and the men in the dark suits were carrying the ballot box to the bay where it floats next to the rusted out hull along pier 39.

Stephen Elliott

Editor

Poker Report