The Poker Report

4-16-03

"Sending Love And Money To Syria Since 2001"

A Quick Poker Report And A Note On The State Of Things

The big money rolled into Folsom at about 7:30 Pacific time. My publisher and his CFO stood outside my building, pitching stones to my window from the ghetto streets below.

It was Jensen, Wendy, Andrew, Scott, Dave and I. Scott and Andrew brought beer. Dave brought whiskey. Noticeably absent were Ben and Gideon who were lost somewhere along with America's moral compass, poised as we are at the gates of Damascus, the muzzle of our tank canons titled toward the Golan, the paved over corpse of Hama, and the occupied ports of the Levant. Wendy brought cookies.

We started with hold'em, a small Texas game with small stakes, two down, three up across, then one, then one. Wendy was winning huge, pairs below, five diamonds before fourth street, wrapping her thin white arms around large stacks of red and white chips, sliding them noisily across the felt into her trays.

"Everybody loves me because I'm a winner," she said. The cookies were exceptional.

Betweens calls and raises and cashing out four dollars down Jensen showed us short films of a woman he had met in Italy last week.

But Jensen left early, and Wendy also left after not too long. Her boyfriend never arrived but called her often throughout the game until she returned to him. And then there was just Scott, Andrew, Dave and I. And we were bored and drunk. We thought maybe we would do something. The lights were off across the city. We thought maybe we would do what Ben did that one night in Las Vegas at the Hard Rock Casino. Then we thought we better not do that. We thought maybe we would raise the stakes.

Andrew won a poker tournament recently and felt ready. He won a thousand dollars and told us the stories of what it felt like to be famous, to come over the top with a pair of kings on the flop and a pair of queens in the hole, how a crowd of people watched him play every hand, and they came up to him after the tournament and paid their respects to him as the reigning champion, how a young Spanish woman had asked her to bless her baby and how he had to explain to her he was not a priest. But in real life Andrew doesn't make very much money and sometimes has to supplement his income by selling his body on Polk Street to old men in light blue Hondas.

Fifty-cent ante, two dollar max raise. Dave poured Andrew a glass of whiskey. We played Omaha high-low. Andrew pulled a wheel and my pair didn't trip. Scott asked if he had to play three cards. We said no but it was already too late. I swept thirty dollars with a pair of tens in the hole with three sixes shining in the flop. I accepted cash from Dave with an 8/7 straight while he held out for a busted flush. And by midnight I was forty dollars richer than I had once been and Andrew was fifteen dollars richer and wondering still about paying the light bill. Scott and Dave returned to their black Mercedes, slightly lighter than when they came in. They would drive across the quiet water of the bay to their wives and rolling hills of the Marin headlands. Dave left a plastic bag full of towels on my floor. Good people like Scott and Dave are always welcome at our poker game in the Mission.

"You want to go to the Right Spot?" Andrew asked. "Spend our winnings on cheap beer and disillusionment."

"No," I said. "I have to be up early in the morning. And I'm already disillusioned. They're lifting the sanctions on Iraq and running pictures of President Bush waving at crowds of schoolgirls in pleated skirts."

"Have it your way. We should get those guys back over here."

"I know. They're good people and I'm always lucky just before and after a war."

***

Stephen Elliott

Editor

The Poker Report

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read my review of Positively Fifth Street, the new poker memoir by James McManus, published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: http://www.sfbg.com/lit/mar03/poker_faces.html

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