The Poker Report
5-31-03
"Plagiarizing The Truth Since 2001"

Special Report! Live From The Book Expo America 2003!


Los Angeles is a soot filled busted flush. Quiet clouds hang over your paradise here, the evil remnants of some notion you had when you were a child, something about being famous, something about your name in lights. At night, in downtown LA, the buildings are tall and sturdy and the streets almost wide. There’s never too many lights on in downtown. Hollywood, Tinsel Town, the celluid dreams that built this weigh station over a pile of scorched sand, they still exist on Melrose, and you can pick up a hooker there and buy her something to eat at Astro Burger, once you option your first script.

The Book Expo journeyed west this year and I journeyed west with it, to play poker on top of the Biltmore Hotel. We set up a table with stolen chairs from the Mezzanine. Pat didn’t want me to steal the chairs. He said there was a man guarding them with a walkie talkie and a broken lip. "They'll catch you," he said, quivering like a wet bird. "You don't know me." Pat was wrong, the way he always is when he’s scared, but he wasn’t scared the rest of the night, he played the evening like a pro.

Outside the weather was so temperate you couldn’t feel it but when you came in you had to wash your face. I filled garbage cans with ice and beer. Buy in was ten dollars a head. Dave and Pat and Scott paid double and Scott won half of it back. Todd Pierce was sitting across from me, his new book, The Autralia Stories, a novel, balanced precariously across his thighs. Craig Clevenger, the only living underground classic, bought in on the strength of his first work, The Contortionists Handbook. Avril wore a blue shirt and shared my chair, and Dorothy paid in full and danced against the steel edge of the table, gyrating madly for eights over sixes.

“Dialogue is what makes a good story,” Scott said.
“Shutup and play,” I told him.

Pat won with three sevens on the river, a straight draw, and a pastoral duece kicker. He had two in the closet, three in the hole, trips and pairs and kings stomping puddles and plunging swords straight through their temples. We changed the deck and he made it on fifth street every time. He won every hand. He had forty in dollar blue stacks in front of him before the next star was born.

We played baseball, threes and nines were wild, fours cost a quarter, and Todd Pierce showed us a man who wouldn’t fold and then showed us what happens to that man. Todd is a writer determined to lose everything he has. Dave won big, twelve large, except he was cheated on the buy in and had to spring for the beer and the whiskey and the cheap plastic chips. He lost eighty on the balance but made new friends and friends is something that’s hard to price. He's an honest publisher, and as such, is destined to die poor. The girls from the marketing department arrived at eleven, eyes spinning and smelling of ocean; they hovered on the other side of the television. If AOL knew about Amy and Tasha, lounging on the second bed in khakis and innocent shirts, would the jackals have flown through the windows? Would they have shut the hotel down? They were both young and married at the beginning of the evening, and still married before the game was through.

An agent named Stephanie from Manus Lit showed up at witching hour. A little color in her hair, thick black glasses perched on her symetrical cheekbones. I was drunk by then and I had the ability to see through things. I told everybody Stephanie was my new agent.“Negotiate with her,” I told them mucking my hand. “Let me know when we got a deal.”

Like book publishing in general, and also the world, the cards were unforgiving last night. Pat proved once and for all he’s a better player than me and always has been and if I had listened to him closer than I have these last three years I might not have made such a mess of things. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and sometimes I call Pat my hindsight. Sometimes I call Pat my ‘double-two-oh.’

Authors make dirt, unable to quit their day jobs. Editors are unappreciated geniuses. Bookstore owners sweat when they’re not crying, a labor of love and love is also misery as every jealous husband knows. Over the sick Los Angeles skyline, an amalgamation of suburban villages funded and fueled by need, nine of us threw hold ‘em and held scrotum, and bellowed in the voices of savages. Wendy, a relative outsider, freshly published by Random House, held her hand with three nines while sharing a wild, the scrotum pot at seven and a half bucks. She hadn’t listened to the rules and she hesitated to pay and so we waited and watched until she pushed her blue chips into the center of the pile and announced she'd be quitting. “That’s what the authors are like over there,” Craig Clevenger said. And Craig knew, his own novel slugging its way from the outside walls while counting inventory at a Borders in Santa Barbara.

It was before dawn and the radiation outside was at a minimum when I left. By then there were only three authors, two publishers, and an agent. You can’t trust agents, but some things are better than trust. Outside the air was warm with time passing and bits of polution. I took a good look at the girders in the city of angels before asking the desk clerk what room I had slept in the night before. I wondered if those steel beams would always hold the city up this way.

Stephen Elliott
Editor
The Poker Report

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Buy Todd’s Book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931561281/qid=1054398840/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-3261595-2547812
Buy Craig’s Book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/193156115X/qid%3D1054398816/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-3261595-2547812
Buy My Book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931561184/ref%3Dase%5Fnowhere500com/103-3261595-2547812
Ask David Kneebone why he didn’t show up: davek@mcsweeneys.net