He goes into the bedroom. His wife is sleeping. He sits down on his side of the bed, trying not to wake her. He doesn’t bother to undress.
She turns to him, still asleep. She manages to mutter, “Poor baby, always working late. You get a lot done?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great. Mmm, I got to get up soon. Wake me up at 7, ’kay?”
“Sure.”
He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket, sets it on the nightstand next to his pillow. Does the same with his keys, his change. He reaches into the suit jacket. The right pocket. He finds it there.
The bell, washed clean by the river, traveled on its journey, has arrived here.
Maybe it’s the fatigue, but he’s not so concerned with
how
as he is with
why
. The bell demands a story, a confession.
He holds it in his hand, examines the detail.
He does not move. He stays this way for a long time, as long as he can.
His concentration broken, he looks at the clock.
Five till 7.
Everything seems to change.
He rings the bell.
T
he call came at 4 p.m., just when I was starting my prep for the day’s first bong hit. It had been weeks since I’d heard from my agent. I put down my gear and listened.
“Some cherry producer at New Line likes your treatment for
Cedar Fever
,” he said.
This was a crappy horror comedy that I’d written two years before, about people whose allergies get so bad they start turning into plants. Not exactly what I’d dreamed about when I moved here. But after a while, you’ve sleepwalked long enough so you’re not really dreaming anymore.
“No shit?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Stupid fuck read your book, and he thinks you can still write.”
Silence, as I decided whether or not to defend myself.
“You got a clean shirt, one with buttons?” he asked.
“I
am
still married,” I replied. “So probably.”
“Good. Because I scored you a sit-down at 3:30. Do
not
be late to this one …”
He bitched at me for a few minutes, then turned nice when he asked if I knew where he could get some weed. By the time I got his ass off the phone, Karen was coming in the door, looking fine as ever. Admissions of love came less and less frequently from her these days, not that I blamed her. One minute she was at a Santa Monica beach party getting felt up in a hammock by a promising novelist, and before she could hiccup, she found herself paying the mortgage on a two-bedroom condo in Glassell Park and coming home every day to an unshaven, unemployed stoner. She was as bitter as an unripe plum, so I was glad to have some good news for her. I just about fell on my ass when she threw her arms around my neck and put her tongue in my ear.
“You get this gig,” she said, “and I’ll cruise you up to Ojai for a weekend of blowjobs you’ll never forget.”
I hadn’t received an offer like that in nearly a decade. She still loved, me, maybe. But I was feeling a little jittery at that moment, and I told her so.
“Maybe I should …”
She blanched whiter than a snow leopard in February.
“No, Nick,” she said. “You’re
not
fucking going to the casino. Not tonight. Not before the biggest meeting of your life.”
“I’ll play a few low-stakes hands and be home by mid-night,” I said, reassuring myself as much as her.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Come on, babe,” I said. “You know it relaxes me.”
“It does anything but.”
I picked my keys off the kitchen counter and headed for the door.
“You’re going
now?
You’re not even going to have
dinner
with me?”
“The 5 can be a real bastard this time of night,” I said.
I was out the door so quickly she couldn’t possibly have jinxed my opening flop.
Before I moved to California, I played poker occasionally at basement tables with ten-cent antes, where the real object was to drink as much Old Style as possible without vomiting. Winning meant zero, and losing even less. I had no idea that I was coming to a place where poker transcended hobby, leaped above pastime, and approached something near civic religion. The first couple of home games almost turned me back toward the path of righteousness; one was full of twenty-five-year-old schmucks hatching plans to date-rape a stripper in Malibu, and the other featured new dads who were busy discussing home renovations and the difficulties of finding a reliable nanny who’d work for less than seventeen dollars an hour. Neither scene appealed much. In fact, I couldn’t think of
any
home game I’d enjoy, unless I were sitting around a table with nine clones of myself. Other men can be a real pain in the ass.
Then one night, a guy mentioned that he was heading out to Commerce that weekend to play in some tournament that might get him into some other tournament that might get him into the World Series of Poker. I guess it had never occurred to me that the three thousand gambling billboards I saw a week could be advertising poker rooms. And when he said that the games ran twenty-four hours a day, all year, the amateur anthropologist in me began to quiver. This, I thought, could be the ideal canvas for my art, so I went along.
City of Commerce may be the most ironically named place in America, which is saying a lot. I suppose it was once full of factories that made things. But that’s not what commerce is about in this world anymore. The only commerce now is a five-cent rake on the pot. One person in fifty goes home with a profit and one in five thousand actually makes a living. If those had been the commercial odds during the Industrial Revolution, Californians would still be riding donkeys down to the San Diego Mission. Maybe we’ll get there still.
From the moment I first walked in under the faux-gold-mirrored awning, lit with a circumferential rectangle of two-inch-wide bulbs, I knew I was sunk. This hardly represented the seamiest gambling scene I’d encountered—that honor goes to the Friday midnight riverboat blackjack cruise in Joliet, Illinois—but it was probably the most baroque. The place obviously prospered beyond measure. However, unlike Vegas patrons, these players required little frippery. The most lavish theme in the world couldn’t draw the casual gambling tourist to City of Commerce night after night. They were here to play cards.
I’ve never seen garbage on the floor. Someone’s always vacuuming the rugs or polishing the faux-marble, and there’s no sign of chipping paint. The casino has a sushi bar and a sports bar full of flat-screen TVs. Yet the place always seems suffused with a kind of jaundice; the lighting scheme encourages the shakes, and nausea. It’s ugly, almost as though the casino were deliberately trying to throw us off our game.
I prepared for my meeting, in my mind, as I whipped the Acura down the 110, and then onto I-5 as I moved through Downtown, crawling past merges like a sheep on wheels being herded off to slaughter. But by the time I was halfway to Commerce, thoughts of pitching grew cloudy, replaced by visions of flush draws dancing in my head. The landscape grew generic, sooty, industrial, less definitively L.A. to the casual observer. This town, to me, isn’t most notable for its candlelit, leather-bound nightclubs or fancy Valley gallerias. Like anywhere else, it’s the outlet malls and truck-stop Arby’s, pathetic little trees dwarfed by ten-foot freeway sound walls. I could be leaving San Antonio, or Atlanta. By the time I get to Commerce, the empty concrete lots, smokestacks, and shoddy public parks call Gary, Indiana to mind. What else can I think about in such an environment but poker?
The parking lot was as full as visiting day at maximum security. I pulled the car into a spot in the back row, between a gleaming Cadillac SUV and an Oldsmobile that looked like it hadn’t been washed since 1973. There was someone inside the Cadillac. I could see the glint of a cigarette through the tinted windows. I should probably have been looking in front of me instead. In my hurry to make it to the tables, I slammed my right big toe into the curb, sending a hot shard of pain up through my leg. It felt like I might lose the nail. Why the fuck did I wear sandals to the casino anyway? I limped to the awning, past the lifetime smokers getting their hourly fix, and into the California Games Room with its ridiculous Wheels of Fortune and lucky-hand jackpot tables. Then past the two twelve-foot-high gold plaster sphinxes, the casino’s one concession to Vegas-style garishness, and on into the main gaming hall.
Though I recognized the woman working the board, one of an interchangeable rotation of semi-attractive Filipinas who worked there, she didn’t know me from the other 1,200 low-rent fliers who’d approached her since the start of her shift, asking if there were any open spots at the 3–6 or 4–8 tables. As it turned out, the waiting list was nearly as long as that for Lakers season tickets. She did have some seats, however, at the 2–4 tables upstairs.
Why not
, I thought.
I’m only gonna be here a couple of hours.
On a busy night, sometimes you’ll get stuck in the overflow, a partitioned conference room on loan from the adjacent Crowne Plaza Hotel. It could have been used earlier that week for a home-equity loan officer convention, or maybe a really sad low-budget wedding. But now it was twenty tables of cheap poker, with decent coffee and tea service and complimentary plates of Chinese food on the hour. I had a five-minute wait, and then they sat me down, throbbing toe and all.
I had a pretty good night too, until the Russian showed up.
At 11 p.m., I found myself up a hundred, maybe 140 bucks. That represented a good night for me, even though I would have had to work a seventy-hour week before it started to resemble anything close to the equivalent of a decent living. Still, I’d drawn the perfect table mix of sour middle-aged Korean ladies, old dudes who bore the perfume and hairstyle of late-era William S. Burroughs, a couple of Persian frat boys from UCLA, and a pockmarked
cholo
who leaned so far onto a cane when he stood that he fell to a sixty-five-degree angle. Like so many doomed poker players before me, I told myself just one more hand before I leave.
The Russian sat down three players to my left. I call him Russian, though he easily could have been Ukrainian, or maybe from Georgia, something post—Soviet breakup, vaguely Caucasian. I never got a chance to ask. Regardless, he wore a red two-piece tracksuit and silver-tinted sunglasses, and a big gold chain with a Mercedes medallion around his neck. His tight-trimmed beard made him look particularly ridiculous, since he obviously got his fashion tips from a mid-’90s hip-hop magazine. He slapped down double what he needed to buy into the first hand. This, I knew, was a sure sign of a fast player; you should never, ever gamble until you understand your odds.
The dealer sent me a jack-ten, suited, worth playing if you’re near the button, which I was. The Russian, who was way out of position, raised when it came to him, probably not surprising given his brazen opening bet. I called. The flop showed a king and queen, off-suit. This was a great straight draw for me. Before I could raise, though, the Russian beat me to it, immediately folding the other two players who remained. I re-raised. He saw me, and raised me again. I called.
A nine came on the turn. My odds at winning stood at about ninety-seven percent. Yet still he raised me. And again. And then twice again on the river. He turned over his cards to reveal pocket threes. I sucked up his chips like a coin reclamation machine at the supermarket.
“Lucky man, Dodger,” he said to me, apparently referring to the Dodgers cap I always wear to Commerce, to augment my chosen posture of regular guy.
“Not so lucky,” I said. “Unlike some people, I just know what I’m doing.”
The other players at the table moaned and shifted a little. This wasn’t what they wanted to hear. But it was undeniable.
“We’ll see,” the Russian said.
I smelled profit in that conference room. My watch showed 11:15. One more hour, I told myself. I’ll milk this cow, and then it’s off to bed.
By 1 a.m., I was up several hundred bucks, no mean feat at a low-stakes table. But the Russian knew no play other than the check-raise. He may have folded one in ten openers. Other players tried to take advantage, but I had them read as well. Finally, the old dude to my right got up, cracked his bones, and mumbled off into the sooty night. The Russian immediately stood up and plunked himself in the chair.
“Now I will show you, Dodger,” he said. “Now we will play poker.”
And poker I did. His aggressive play dug him deeper and deeper holes. He did win a few hands, getting me to fold when I had bupkus. But he folded nothing himself, and I just kept adding plastic trays. By 2:30, I had nearly a thousand bucks in front of me. Karen had been buzzing my cell phone since midnight, and at one point left me a text message saying,
Don’t fuck this meeting up, Nick …
Even she couldn’t argue with a thousand-dollar haul.
I stood up, taking my trays with me, sliding the dealer, another anonymous, semi-attractive Filipina, a ten-dollar chip.
“Where you going, Dodger?” said the Russian.
“I’ve got a big meeting tomorrow.”
“So when do I get my money back?”
“Ain’t your money anymore,” I said, and the table exploded with laughter.
As I turned away, I didn’t see the Russian seethe, and I was too busy making a joke to the cashier about unmarked bills to notice him picking up the phone. Maybe if I’d skipped going to the can, I would have made it home that night.
I was making my way past the plaster sphinxes when a 310-pound side of Slavic beef slid into my purview.
“You took boss’s money tonight,” he said. “And boss doesn’t like to lose at poker.”
Somehow I guessed the identity of his boss, and tried to pull together an instant plan of escape in my mind. I mumbled, “Sorry,” and turned on my heels, angling toward where I thought a security guard might be seated. Instead, I whirled into another side of beef. Briefly, I felt my arms getting pinned behind me, and then something heavy on my head. A vague sensation of green digital numbers, blinking in random succession, passed before my eyes, and then I said goodbye to consciousness.
I woke with John Henry pounding rocks inside my head and the impression of dusty sunlight on my eyelids. A tentative opening revealed that I was in a hotel room, and a whiff indicated that smoking was allowed. Instinctively, I felt for my wallet. It was there, but pretty thin. My cell phone was also still with me, in my front jeans pocket. I removed it to find it out of juice. I turned my head. The clock beside the bed read 10:45 a.m. Less than five hours away from my meeting.
I sat up, and then stood, and found that the pounding wasn’t bad enough to prevent me from walking, or from taking a piss. In fact, the mirror showed me not looking any worse than usual, even a little better. Eight hours of sleep was eight hours, even if it was artificially induced. The sound of bad hotel porn was coming from beyond the attaching door. I opened it.