Pocket Kings (14 page)

“Hey, I need to use the computer for a minute,” I said to the bartender. “It's urgent.”

None of my buddies were online but I played three hands, playing as the leathery-skinned Cowboy: I lost $300 the first hand, folded the second, won $600 the next hand with two 9s and two 5s. Up $300 in four minutes.
Th
en Artsy Painter Gal showed up, told me how nice I looked in chaps and snakeskin boots. I told her I was at a book party and couldn't stay. I played two more hands. I felt a pat on my back and turned around and saw it was Toby Kwimper.

“Frank!” he said, surprised to see me. He may have seen the screen.

“I'll be right with you,” I said.

I told APG I had to go and would see her soon. “Sure, Tex,” she said.

I spent ten minutes with Toby and he told me about how much he was enjoying golfing every day and not working in publishing anymore. His wife was a pediatrician and they'd be okay. “I'll figure something out,” he told me. I was happy for him but it was sad to see what had happened and devastating to know that it was me who'd wrought it. (I felt so guilty and sad for him that I had trouble looking him in the eye.) Toby asked if I knew Jill Conway and I told him I hadn't met her but that I'd blurbed the book and that's why I was here.

“You blurbed the book?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I told him. “I attempted to come up with something reasonably clever.”

We spoke for another two minutes, then separated, but not before he introduced me to his successor, Scott Heyward, who shook my hand limply, wiped my sweat off on his pants, and walked away. I knew exactly what Scott was thinking:
So this is Frank Dixon, the guy who drove our legendary editor Jerome Selby to blow his brains out. I'm getting far away from him.

I went back to the computer and played two more hands. Artsy was gone.

When I turned around I saw Toby picking up a copy of
Saucier
and looking at the jacket.

I noticed a few people from my old publishing house, including the Publisher himself: he saw me and smiled like he had a mouthful of razor blades. (Or maybe he didn't recognize me with my new shorter haircut and new ten pounds.) None of them wanted to talk to me. . . . I was a dark cave they didn't want to walk into, a narrow ledge they didn't want to stand on. I understood.

I wasn't going to network with any editors or publishers here. It wouldn't work. I was damaged goods.

I pretended to make another cell phone call, just so I wouldn't look like such a loser. Toward that same end, I sent myself a gibberish-laden text message, then read it, and responded in kind a minute later.
Th
en while I was calling Wifey I overheard a conversation between four people sitting at a nearby banquette.
Th
ey were the first people at the party, the tourists who'd made it there before I did.
Th
ey were Jill Conway's cousins, it turned out, up from Baltimore for the week of the party.

“You're Jill's cousins?” I said, slurring my words just a bit.

“Yes, we all are,” said Cousin Lena.
Th
ey were all in their thirties and very friendly.

“I'm Frank Dixon,” I told them.

“Okay,” Cousin Nick said. He was the tallest of them and the only male.

“I blurbed her book,” I explained.

“Oh!!!!” they all said in unison.

“So you're a writer too?” Cousin Nick said.

I admitted I was.

“And what have you written?” Cousin Tina asked me.

I told them I'd written
Plague Boy
and
Love: A Horror Story
and they'd never heard of either book. I was used to that and no longer did it elicit a wince.

Cousin Nick picked up a copy of
Saucier
and began examin­ing
it.

“Jill is a big fan of my first book,” I told the Cousins sheepishly.

“Are you sure you blrrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbkbkb?” I heard Cousin Nick say. He was drowned out by music suddenly coming on and by the din of the crowd, which was now up to a very loud hundred or so people.

“Huh?” I asked him. I turned to Cousin Lena and said: “Hey, when Jill shows up, tell her I said hello. I'm gonna leave now. Will you tell her that Frank Dixon said hello.”

“Are you sure you blurbed the book?” Cousin Nick asked me. He had the book open on his lap.

Th
ey began talking among themselves, about what they were going to do tomorrow in New York.
Take in a museum. See Central Park. Don't wanna get mugged though. Hee-hee.

I picked up a copy of
Saucier.
I flipped it over, looked at the back of the jacket.

Th
ere was a brief two-paragraph description of the book, then three blurbs, including one from Beverly Martin: “Not only the sharpest and funniest book written by a woman about working and food that I've read in years, but the funniest book written by anyone about anything.” Mario Batali had even weighed in: “I'd never hire Jill Conway to work for me, but I would read any book she ever wrote.
Saucier
is hysterical, sharp and very tart.”

I was nowhere to be found.

We could go down to Ground Zero. But that's depressing, I don't want to see that. How about going on the Circle Line? I'd like to go to Saks. Is there anything in Brooklyn?

My blurb hadn't been used. It wasn't there.

Because I didn't count. Nobody had any idea of who I was, so why bother using it?

I walked away to a corner and drank another glass of wine and nearly wept in the dark.

Jill Conway finally showed up, all in slimming black, got applauded, made the rounds. Her face glowed, her eyes sparkled, her smile lit up the room. It was her night. I overheard people wondering who would play who in the movie version.

Anne Hathaway would just be so perfect. . . . No, it simply has to be Reese! . . . No! Scarlett!

Toby Kwimper introduced Jill to me and her face remained expressionless when she heard my name. I said, “I'm Frank Dixon!” but maybe she hadn't heard it above the music and the clamor of the hundred sets of wind-up chattering teeth and her own ego bubbling over.

“I wrote
Plague Boy
!” I reminded Jill, having to yell right into her ear. “Beverly Martin told me it's one of your favorite books?
Th
at you have whole chapters memorized?”

She shrugged, leaned in and yelled back: “Huh?
Vague
Toy???” She shrugged again and shook her head, dumbstruck. She was still crinkling her nose when she was whisked away by Abigail Prentice, whose job it had once been to remove me from such awkward situations.

She had no idea who I was. My books meant nothing to her.

Crossing the street two minutes later, a meat truck almost ran me over but swerved at the last instant. “You fuckin' idiot!” the driver yelled at me. Just as I was about to yell back and deny it, I realized he was right.

When I got home, Cynthia was asleep and I went online right away.

I went to the small $5-$10 blind rooms, where people came to the tables with only $300 or so.
Th
ese were the little guys, the ants, the nervous newbies who were just feeling their way around playing for real dough. I wiped a few of them out and apologized for it, then moved up to a table in Medium and played one-on-one with a stranger, a German guy named Hamburg Deluxe. He'd come to the table with $3,000 and ten minutes later he had not one pfucking pfennig. I played at a small table for twenty minutes in High and thrashed the three other players so badly they all quit at once. I went to another table and wiped everyone out. . . .
Th
ey were just giving me their money and it didn't even seem like they were really trying. For the first time ever I went to the Ultra-High No-Limit tables, where all the players have cantaloupes for balls. A player named SaniFlush, who many on the site called the Master of Disaster and who was arguably the most feared and talented player on the site—his stack was over $900K at the time—was there. I played one hand with him, won $6,000 with only two 8s and left. I went to a 5 Card Draw table and crushed the five people in there. A guy said to me, “Hey, you're too good,” and I told him, “Yeah, I sure am.” I played Omaha—I barely knew the rules—and won some more. I won and won and won and it felt terrific. I was stomping over everything and everyone, crushing and destroying and mowing down all that I saw. So this, I marveled, is how postal workers feel when they return with a machine gun to the scene of their disgruntlement and spray everybody to shreds.

By the time I logged off, at 3 a.m., my stack was up to $50,000.

PART II

Flop

($250,000)

7

Chills

I
had made $50,000 at online poker in less than six months. It was more than I'd gotten for
Love: A Horror Story,
which took two grueling years to write. And playing poker wasn't work, not even close. It was a game! I remember a ludicrous statement by the much-beloved and vastly overrated sports writer Red Smith about how writing a column was like “sitting down at a typewriter and opening a vein.” And how many writers, when they're not griping about their legions of demons, have described a blank page as terrifying? You'll never once hear a housepainter describe an unpainted wall as terrifying. If a blank page is terrifying, then what is it like when someone puts a gun to your head and cocks the trigger or the bank is foreclosing or the doctor tells you your brain tumor is the size of a Titleist golf ball? If rattling off a column about the Dodgers defeating the Giants 5–2 was really like opening a vein, then perhaps Mr. Smith should have sought a different, less terrifying line of work and preferably not at the Red Cross.

In June I quit my job completely.
Th
ere was no point in even working half-days.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Diane Warren, my boss, asked me in her office.

“Yes,” I said. “Completely sure.”

“And how is the book coming?”

She meant the
Trilogy,
of course . . . but I forgot which part of the Triad I'd once told her I was writing: did Diane think I was writing Book I and Wifey think I was writing Book II? Or did Diane think I was writing Book II and Wifey think I was writing Book I?

Th
e truth was, of course, the whole trilogy was already written. Long ago.

“It's coming along.”

She swiveled back to face her computer, but I wasn't through. A working stiff doesn't get a chance to do this that often in his life so I wanted to milk it for all it was worth.

“And then there's the movie, of course . . .”

“Oh yes,” she asked, turning back to me. “How's that coming?”

I told Diane what I understood to be the truth: Pacer Burton was going to direct
Plague:
Th
e Movie;
the script had been written and was making the rounds with actors' agents. I sprinkled in a dash of untruth: the budget was $150 million, stars were foaming at the mouth to be a part of it. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Cameron Diaz, and Judi Dench would drop whatever they were doing if the project got the green light.

She turned to her computer again, where an Excel spreadsheet awaited her perusal.

Diane was a little too unruffled to see me go, and it bothered me. But she had no idea (until she reads this) that I was playing poker on company time.

(And now the truth can be told: the Diane who was my boss and the Diane I once caught in flagrante delicto with my little brother are one and the same. At the end of my job interview, years before, she shook my hand and said: “You know, I've never quite forgiven you for walking in on me and your brother that time.”
WTF?
)

I had now escaped the clutches of Writer Diablo Numero Uno. I was free! Free as a bird, like the Jonathans and Davids and Chabons and Shteyngarts and Jay Easton McEllisses. No more real work, no more offices, no more bosses. Free at last!

But it was poker, not literature, that had unchained me.
Th
at wasn't the plan.

Th
e week I quit I vowed to myself:
Now that I'm free, I'll start writing again. Sure, I'll sneak in a hand of Texas Hold'em every now and then, maybe win a few thousand here and there, but I'll write a book. I lied to my boss and my wife about writing one, so that will compel me to actually do it!
I was like a bride-to-be buying a wedding gown three sizes too small, hoping that in two months I'd lose the weight and be able to squeeze into it.

Th
e prospect of buckling down and writing again was bracing and exciting. I couldn't wait to get started.

On my last day there was no going-away party; a manila envelope did not travel desk to desk and no present was bought for me. I had no exit interview with Human Resources and thus could not complain about the thousand imagined injustices inflicted upon me by all my coworkers. I simply tossed my company key-card into the trash and left.

After much deliberation—okay, not that much deliberation—I decided to wait before telling Wifey about this gigantic move of mine. I would simply lay low.

Th
e day after the
Saucier
party, I sent an e-mail to Clint Reno. It was one thing for him to ignore me, but what he was doing was systematically nullifying my existence.

CR:

Last night I was struck by a Drakes Cake truck.

I suffered a broken tibia, a bruised vistula, a fractured fibula, a partially separated tiber, two broken metatarsals, several 2nd degree lacerations on the skull, 3rd degree abrasions on both knees. I've lost 2 important teeth. My right tympanic membrane is just about shot and it's going to be a while before I hear anything out of that ear again. I have a temporary patch over one eye now and my leg is in a cast.

I'm e-mailing from the hospital now. But I'll be okay. As for the man in the next bed, he wasn't so lucky. Last night he suffered his third aneurism in as many days, reeled over to my bed and died on top of me, not before soiling most of my blanket. It took 7 hours before a nurse showed up to remove the deceased and his excrement from my person.

Clint, have you heard anything from anybody about
Dead on Arrival
? Could you please tell me who's read it?

You know, I ran into Bev Martin at a book party and all she did was rave about how “fantastic and coruscating”
DOA
is. “It's really your masterpiece, Frank,” she said, “your chef d'oeuvre.” And Jill Conway, whose novel (ironically about chefs and hors d'oeuvres!) was being feted, told me she was and I quote, “slobbering in anticipation of reading it.”
Plague Boy
is her favorite book of all time, did you know that, Clint?

So please let me know what's up.

FD

Surely even Hardhearted Callous Clint would reply to that!

He didn't.

I had weekdays completely free now, so one Monday morning I went to the corner of Spring and Lafayette Streets, where the Reno Brothers Literary Agency is located.
Th
ere was a Dunkin' Donuts across the street and I sat on a stool near the window. It was 8 a.m. I waited from 8 to 10 o'clock, drank four coffees and ate a box of Munchkins, and stared out, keeping my gaze fixed on the building entrance and looking for any sign of my agent. He'd be hard to miss: six foot four and slender, a full mane of carrot-colored hair always kept in a ponytail, clad always in unwrinkled bespoke Savile Row suits. I saw his three partners go in, at 8:43, 9:18, and 9:48. But there was no sign of Clint Reno.

Am I really stalking someone?
I asked myself.
Yes, you are,
I answered.

I waited another hour, drank more coffee, ate another box of Munchkins. Nothing.

After returning home, playing some poker and eavesdropping on an unbearably torrid session between History Babe and some seventeen-year-old named Royal Flash 89 (“I'm licking your warm cum off my hard nipples,” she purred), I e-mailed my would-be agent Ross F. Carpenter:

Hey, Ross. Just wondering if you've gotten a chance to read
Dead on Arrival.
If so, hope you like it. Pls let me know if you can.

Ross wrote me back within ten minutes:

Not yet, Frank. Did you get that list from the Reno Bros. yet?

Was at the
Saucier
party last night. (Jill is one of my authors.) As I understand it, so were you. Too bad hour [sic] paths didn't cross.

Th
e e-mail blurred to a steamy highway mirage, then came back to me.

At least Ross, unlike Clint, had responded to my e-mail.
Th
at was a positive sign.

I went back to the Dunkin' Donuts and stalked Clint every morning of the second week of my new full-time freedom. By Friday the women working there knew I wanted a box of Munchkins. . . . I didn't even have to ask for it; they just saw me and started loading them up.

I never saw Clint or his ponytail.

Th
at Friday I called up the Reno Brothers. It was now six-plus months since I'd handed over the
DOA
manuscript. A half a year of waiting and virtual silence.

“Hi, I'd like to speak to Clint please?” I, voice cracking nervously, said to Courtney.

“Clint is in California now,” she said. “May I put you through to his voicemail?”

Fifteen boxes of Munchkins, about forty cups of coffee, a few low-fat muffins here and there . . . and Clint had been 3,000 miles away the entire time.

“You . . . you have voicemail now?”

“Is this Frank Dixon?”

“Yes, it's me,” I stammered. I was being reduced to jelly by a grad student (probably) who answered phones and filed paperwork and mailed back unsolicited, unread manuscripts and got coffee.
Th
e lowest entity on the publishing food chain was causing me to stammer, perspire and tremble.

Make that the
second
lowest entity on the food chain.

“Clint wanted me to relay something to you,” she began. “He said that when the movie of your book gets made and if the book was ever reissued . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“He wanted to ask if his name could be removed from the acknowledgments page . . .”

“Okay. Sure. I could do that. Yeah. Definitely.”

When we hung up, an alpine fog wafted into the apartment. But the fog swiftly scattered because I realized . . .

She'd said
when
the movie gets made! She hadn't said
if.
She'd said “when.” Was that why Clint was in California? His identical twin brother, the ponytail-less Vance Reno, handled the movie end of their business, but since I was Clint's fair-haired boy perhaps Clint had gone out to L.A. to iron things out and finalize everything.
Th
e movie gets made,
Plague
gets reissued in paperback with Leo and Brad and Scarlett on the cover and hits the best-seller list; the all-pro shitheel who rejected
DOA
and called me a Master of the Suburban Mimetic calls Clint and begs to publish it.
Please, Clint, please! I'm sorry what I said about the mimetic! Please, Clint! I take it all back! I'm on my knees now, Clint. Tell Frank I'm sorry about the mimetic! Please, Clint, please!

Th
ere was still hope.

I continued to win and continued to not write. But I swore that once my stack hit $100K I would start writing again.

Sure, there were times when the Poker Fates were not smiling at me, when Lady Luck was so furious at me for not believing in her that she kept plunging ice pick after ice pick into my heart, when everything wrong that could happen did happen . . . but those times were few.
Th
e biggest loss I incurred was three weeks after I quit working: I'd been on a mini-losing streak and Second Gunman told me that Bjorn 2 Win was sitting alone at a table in High, waiting to drop a ton of cash. I quickly found the Offensive Swede. We folded a few garbage hands but then, with a full house, 3s full of Queens, I kept raising and reraising. But the Butcher of the Baltic had Queens full of 3s. I lost over $4K. If you've ever seen a boxer get punched so many times that he has no idea who he is, where he is, what day it is and that he is even partaking in a boxing match, then you have some idea of how I felt.

Flabbergasted and wounded I sucked it up and said, “NH, Swede.”

“You do not even means that. You are too hurt right now.
Th
is does gladden me.”

He vanished before I had a chance to win it back.

I lost $2,000 more dollars that day in a frantic effort to win the money back. I took a walk—it was June and New York was only just beginning to heat up—and went back upstairs. I was steaming, livid, dazed, and my stomach turned inside out. I wasn't used to losing and didn't like it at all. I had no job and my books had failed. Poker was all I had. If I wasn't any good at this, there was no point in being. I went back online and dumped another grand.