The Poker Report

5-15-01

Power, Money, Gambling, and Sex since 2001

This was a tough week for poker. There were logistical difficulties to get over this week. The first was whether we could play poker on a Monday. Today I’m giving a reading for contributors to Fourteen Hills http://mercury.sfsu.edu/~hills/index.html at the poetry center at SF State. It’s a very prestigious event, there’ll be boxed wine and cheez whiz. I’m going to read my new poem, the tender ode to love, ‘Your Angry Lesbian Breasts.’ http://www.nowhere500.com/angry.html. We decided to have the game at Jon Berry’s house instead of the poker church on Folsom in hopes of including Alice Poon who flew all the way from Hong Kong to give Jon a kiss. But could we change the date and the venue and still be successful? Our plan seemed to fly in the face of everything we had learned in business school.

Alice, just to be nice, made meat on a stick and tempura as well as fried noodles with mushrooms. The whole time she assured us that she could not cook at all and yet the food was surprisingly good. We wondered what else she wouldn’t cook us and if it would be equally tasty. Things are always a little bit better when Alice is around.

The game started promptly at 7pm. My face still hurt from last week where Jon Berry had smacked me with a fish. But I wasn’t going to let that get me down. Cooney wasn’t there as usual. He has contracted a permanent case of the fear. Iowans are a scared lot, always running from the kitchen to the living room and then back to the kitchen again. They spend their whole life afraid and then one day they die and are buried in a corn field.

Last week Abby didn’t show up. Ben and I talked about it ahead of time. We decided we would gang up on Abby this week to get her back. We would give each other signals in order to better our odds against her.

In attendance this week: Ben, Jon, Abby, Andrew, Mark (Andrew’s friend), myself, and Alice. It was a chaotic, emotional game. I wasn’t allowed to take notes but these are the fragments I remember.

Abby whispering in Jon’s ear. Abby running her feet eagerly beneath my chair, our feet intertwining. Andrew’s friend Mark folding no matter what and walking where he started. Alice drawing four queens natural in a four card hand. Abby handing me a check for twenty two dollars and twenty cents. Jon buying in twice. Andrew’s half eaten burrito sitting on the kitchen table. Abby, breaking down, nearly crying, her arms crossed over an angry stomach, cheeks flaring red. She would kill me, or something to that effect. I’m sorry, I said, about that. But I wasn’t sure, it was just chips changing hands, but something had happened to Abby, she wasn’t with us anymore, she was screaming quietly, chewing on her lower lip. We were all afraid. We had done something wrong. I had done something wrong. I had said something, did something to Abby, and now she hated me. We would never be friends again.

Poker is a hard game that way. You never know what someone is made of until you see them fold on the flop. Abby left early after pulling a few bad hands. It’s exactly the kind of game that pushes people to their emotional limits. When we ran out of cheap beer Andrew ran down to the store to get some more. The tempura, the meat on a stick, the noodles, lasted all night long.

At 11:56 p.m. we broke it off. Ben, Andrew, Mark and I walked down to Valencia enjoying the crisp San Francisco air. Across the city faithful lovers spooned each other in a deep, peaceful sleep. They knew nothing of the world at war, the game. The lights in the taco joint were just going off. I felt a twinge of guilt. I asked Ben about Abby, I was worried. Did he think she was going to be OK? She had really flipped out tonight. I had never seen her quite so bad. It’s been hard on all of us, he said and I nodded. Tomorrow, he continued, I’m going to meet her at the Atlas and I’m going to beat her ass in cribbage. Then she’ll really be mad.

Steve Elliott

Editor

The Poker Report