Pocket Kings (34 page)

#7: When I see writers on the street I won't let them just walk by. Oh no. If some priss like Julian Barnes or the doughy has-been Salman Rushdie should cross my path, I will get right in his face and tell him, “You should have stopped writing twenty years ago. What's it like to do nothing but read and write all day long?” “Hey, you! Joyce Carol Oates! I could take you!” “Hey, Richard Ford! How my ass taste?”

Four 7s in High. I repeat:
four
7s. $2,250. I was Ralph Kramden and everybody else was Alice and I was going ballistic all over her apron. “Get something in your head, Alice! I'm the king here! Remember that!
Th
is house is my castle! I'm the king! Remember that! King, king, king! You are nothing! A peasant!
Th
is is my house! My castle! I'm the king!”

My next vow was that when I went over $300,000, I would stop playing poker and work on the
American Nightmare
Trilogy.
Th
at amount would certainly be enough to tide me over. If I couldn't stop playing poker, I also vowed, if I found I was hooked, then I would seek treatment. I Googled the words “gambling treatment addiction facility,” and among the thirty pages of results, the first and foremost was the Shining Path Clinic. I went to their site, which was sophisticated and well designed, and looked at the photos of their perfectly manicured grounds in the arid Southwest, of patients talking to therapists and to each other and playing Ping-Pong, I looked at the ads for Atavan and Paxil, and then went back to my Declaration of Principles and returned to #7, which was becoming my personal favorite.

If I ever see Calvin Trillin I will say to him to “Do you honestly believe that that novel you wrote about a guy and his New York parking space would
ever
have gotten published if you with your fancy
New Yorker
pedigree hadn't written it?! Joe Blow writes that book, it don't get published.
A guy and his parking space??
Fuck you . . .
Bud!
”

An Ace-high heart flush in High. $1,500. Was this a dream? Was some other poker player dreaming
me?
Now I knew what it was like to be Mike Tyson when Mike Tyson was still Mike Tyson, before he became . . . Mike Tyson.

If I ever see Dan Brown on an airplane I will follow him into the restroom and I'll barge in on him just when he's closing the door and yell, “Do you realize that you're not any good and that you're just lucky?” I will stalk Mitch Albom and lunge at him and when I've got him down on the sidewalk I'll say, “Hey, you know how you always write books about dying or dead people? Well, guess what? Your next book can be
about yourself!
'Cause as of now you're dead!” I will fear nobody. “Hey, Cody Marshall, you gave away my ending once? Well, it's payback time and now I am ending
you.
” I will drop a 90-pound television on Jonathan Franzen's already swelled head from ten flights up and yell down: “Hey, Franzen! Guess you finally got a TV now, huh?”

Ultra-High. A table for three with Ante Maim and SaniFlush, the baddest player on the site. I had squadoosh.
Th
e Big Doughnut. But I kept raising and raising.
Th
ey finally folded. $3,600. Fireworks were going off and “Ode to Joy” was blasting and millions of people were on their feet applauding. To echo Rusty Wells in mid-puke: “It don't get any better 'n this.”

I logged off at 4 a.m. and, according to Wifey, I giggled in my sleep all night long.

Two weeks later I logged on, as usual, at eight in the morning and a mostly blank page came on my screen and told me that Pokergalaxy.com was closed for repairs but would be back up soon.
Soon?
When is “soon”? Is “soon” five minutes, five hours, or five weeks?

How could they do that to me?

I checked every few minutes to see if it was back. Sometimes I just clicked on the refresh button so I suppose I was, from time to time, checking every few seconds. I went to the kitchen, opened a box of Froot Loops, checked the site, went back and got the milk out, checked the site, went back to the kitchen and poured the milk over the cereal, checked the site, then brought the bowl into my study and kept checking with every spoonful. Two hours later I interrupted a pee halfway through, checked to see if the site was back up, and then went back into the bathroom to finish. It still wasn't up at two, so I brought my laptop to a restaurant near my apartment that I knew got wifi. But it never did come back up that day.

When Cynthia came home from work I was a pale, shaking ruin and I told her I wasn't feeling well, which was not a lie.

Th
e next morning the site was back up.

Th
ere were e-mails from my Poker Buddies.
Th
ey had all, they told me, gone through a similarly rough twenty-four hours. Kiss My Ace told me that his one day without any contact with Boca Barbie was the worst twenty-four hours of his life. “And i once did,” he added, “this marine corps training in the desert when we had no food or water and had to eat these scorpion things we hunted down.”

Artsy Painter Gal:
I don't ever want to go a day without you ever, ever again!

Chip Zero:
I thought the site would never come back up, that you were gone from me forever.

Arty Painter Gal:
I thought the very same. I was really panicking! I can't bear the thought of losing this! It would kill me.

Chip Zero:
Look at us. We're just as sickeningly sweet as Kiss My Ace and Barbie. We must be making people throw up if they're spying on us.

Artsy Painter Gal:
OMG, you're right. Look what you've done to me! You've made me GOOEY!

Th
e next day things got even more serious between us.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Chip, what I said to you at the Nirvana I meant. I would like to see you again.

Artsy Painter Gal wins $300 with two 9s.

Artsy Painter Gal:
I know it's completely insane and we don't even know each other but I know what I want, ok?

Chip Zero:
I don't think we don't know each other. We do this so often. I tell you everything.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Name a time and a place. Where and when? And make it soon.

Chip Zero:
I don't know. I'll give it some thought, I promise you.

Where and when?
Th
ose words stayed with me for days, for weeks.
Th
ey floated off my computer screen and hung in the air and followed me around.
Th
ey loomed over me as I sat at readings in Barnes & Noble and asked writers annoying questions afterwards (“So what made you write this book, how much did you get for it, and what did you do with all the dough?”).
Where and when?
I would be eating with Cynthia in a restaurant and the words undulated over my calamari, onion rings, or sushi. In ghostly hues the letters shimmied and shimmered morning, noon, and night, like the weird lettering of “Come to the City” in Murnau's
Sunrise.
It was the same situation, too: a woman, not my wife, from a faraway place was using all her wiles to lure me away from my loving, devoted wife. If anyone said the word “where” in the course of a sentence, I saw “and when?” appear, wobble, and then slowly disintegrate.

I was true to my word to Victoria. Not only did I give it some thought, I saw it and heard it and dreamt about it and couldn't shake it.

Ever since coming back from Empyrean Island, my sleep had gotten even stranger. Lately it was a rare event when a real flesh-and-blood human being even made an appearance. Mostly animated poker-playing figures populated my dreams. I, of course, was the Big Guy, the big lug in the Hawaiian shirt. Cynthia always showed up as the dark, sultry Dragon Lady in the red silk dress, and Artsy Painter Gal was the buxom Lady Godiva Blonde. Sometimes we sat around a poker table, sometimes we stood on the street around a poker table, sometimes we sat up in bed playing cards and dunking poker chips in onion dip. When I dreamt about Harry Carver, he was the Leathery Cowboy; Lonnie was the Black Pimpin' Dude with the monster 'fro, and my mother was always the Blowsy Housewife. And there was little or no talking . . . now it was mostly instant messaging.
Th
e nonsense-speak of dreamlife had been replaced by chat and emoticons. Nobody laughed—they LOLed.

Real life was little different. Or was it that my dreamlife and the doings on the Galaxy and in the real world were mixing into one confused
tricolore
pasta? When I handed over money to real people in the real world, I felt like I was the Big Guy losing a hand and shoving over my chips. When I turned over things, such as mail, magazines, or a bill at a restaurant, I felt like I was turning over playing cards, and it was disorienting to see “$90.00” looking back up at me instead of a 9 of spades. When I heard numbers in real life, or on television (“And Bryant hits another three-pointer” or “
Th
e S and P rose five points today”), I always associated them with cards (for an instant I envisioned Kobe Bryant hoisting up a 3 of diamonds from twenty feet) and if someone told me that her father had just had heart surgery, I envisioned a team of doctors in an operating room removing from a gaping, blood-soaked chest cavity an 8 of hearts.

No longer could I say that I was haunted by poker.
Th
e Galaxy was now the world I lived in.

A week before
Th
anksgiving my first book was down to 711,762 on Amazon but my second was holding steady around 768,000. Soon the two books would meet up in a place called Nope. I e-mailed Harry and asked what had become of his movie idea; he e-mailed me back a few days later telling me he'd get back to me soon. Ads were now appearing in the papers and on TV for
Breakthrough,
which wasn't just called
Breakthrough
but was “Pacer Burton's
Breakthrough.”
He had gone from being hot to very hot to being hot shit.

I was in the middle of writing a brief e-mail to Barbara Bennett at Egregious Motion Pictures when—
puff!
—I received a brief e-mail from Barbara Bennett at Egregious Motion Pictures.

I am so sorry to be the one to tell you this but Egregious isn't going to renew the
Plague Boy
option. Pacer Burton was really excited about the project but he's had a ton of other offers and after carefully considering his choices, he decided not to do
Plague Boy.

I'm very sorry. I know this meant a lot to you. Please don't slay the messenger!

Hey, you can always have Vance and Clint shop
Plague
around again. I'm sure they'd do a great job.

I couldn't wring from my crushed, deflated soul the graciousness to send Barbara a heartfelt thank-you for all the work she'd done for me, which was a considerable amount. I couldn't even muster up enough energy to close the e-mail, so I just sat there staring at it for thirty minutes. I didn't sob, I didn't wail, I didn't whimper . . . because those are all things that dead people cannot do.