Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  Joe never gave advice he hadn’t earned the hard way but it hadn’t stopped me growing to love the game. I wasn’t unduly troubled that I hadn’t taken his advice. I’d never played cards for a decent stake, nor ever thought I would. In the first place I lacked the resources, and in the second, I told myself money wasn’t the object. I was a Cabbagetown kid, after all, and knew that nothing is for nothing. You earn money or you steal it. The first comes from the sweat of your brow, and the second inevitably brings nasty consequences. The idea that you could simply gain a fortune by betting on a horse, a number, a card or a sporting result was patently stupid; any mug could work out the odds and they were never, or very seldom anyway, in your favour. It wasn’t why I was growing more and more to love five-card stud or any other form of the game I was eventually to learn.

  I’ve mentioned my memory for music but now I could use cards to exercise my brain. It was as if I was receiving brain nourishment, feeding my hungry mind. This was one of the reasons I read so voraciously and certainly what attracted me to jazz, to the endless possibilities it contained. Art Tatum never played a piece in the same manner twice. His musical genius always saw another possibility and his musical memory always told him where he’d been before and, perhaps more importantly, where others had been before him. Nobody before or since has brought, or probably ever will bring, what the greatest piano player of all time brought to his medium, but his prodigious memory was a part of it. In some small way I shared that with him; I could visualise what I’d previously seen almost as clearly as if it were in front of me.

  I liked five-card stud because I knew so much more about the hands I was facing. I could recall the face cards players had received for the entire session. This meant patterns in their play started to emerge before very long. It never occurred to me that everyone in the poker school didn’t have this same facility until Reggie Blunt and I discussed the subject one afternoon several months after I’d joined the game.

  Yet again, he’d lost the two dollars he’d held as his stake and I’d been fortunate enough to end the game some six dollars richer, somewhat more than any of the other players had made and with everyone remarking that Jack of Spayds had scooped the pot again. Reggie wanted a final whisky. We’d strolled over to the Brunswick from the John Robert Johnson Caribou Café and were sitting at the bar, where I’d ordered a sarsaparilla to nurse through the half hour it would take for Reggie Blunt to consume his fifth Canadian Club for the afternoon. For want of anything better to say, I’d remarked, ‘Wasn’t it funny you having the same face cards in two hands, Reggie?’

  His head jerked back and he looked genuinely surprised. ‘I beg your pardon, old chap,’ he said in his affected Anglicised manner.

  ‘You know, early on you held the ace of diamonds, nine of diamonds, queen of spades, jack of clubs, and then, in your second-last hand this afternoon you had exactly the same face cards.’

  ‘I know no such thing, my boy. Nor can I for one moment see how you could know this.’

  It was my turn to be surprised. ‘But surely you remember . . . I mean . . .’

  ‘Indeed no! Are you telling me you can remember the cards I held in my hand all afternoon? How, pray tell? What’s the trick, old son?’

  ‘It’s not a trick. It just seems to stick in my head . . . in my memory. I think it’s because I’ve had to learn so many piano scores. Surely you’d be the same. The brain starts looking for patterns.’

  ‘Well, perhaps yours does, old boy. I can’t say the same for mine, which seems increasingly to be falling to bits.’

  ‘But you know you need a good memory in music, just like you need a good memory for cards.’

  ‘No doubt it helps, old chap, but my memory’s like a sieve.’

  I admit I was surprised. I’d thought up to this point that this was what I had to learn, this was the essence of the game and that, for the most part, people who had played a lot were experts at just this sort of information gathering and processing. ‘I enjoy playing cards and I try to remember the face cards everyone gets and my mind starts to see patterns in how they play their hands,’ I explained.

  Reggie seemed to be getting a trifle edgy. It was as if what I was telling him was bullshit or, alternatively, dangerous. ‘Bully for you, Jack. So you think you know what their hole card is?’

  ‘No, that’s too simple. It’s more a matter of knowing what cards have been face up during the hand already, so you know they’re out of play, combined with how someone has played similar card combinations all through the game. That way you can eliminate a lot of possibilities and calculate the odds of them having the hole card they need to beat you. You sort of accumulate information . . .’

  Reggie appeared to be thinking. ‘Hmm, that doesn’t work as well when you don’t have face cards, does it?’

  I laughed. ‘Dead right! That’s why I like five-card stud. You have more information to work with. You see most of the cards. It’s much easier to work out what players are likely to do and what their hole card may be.’

  Reggie Blunt shook his head slowly then sighed and lifted his whisky glass to his lips. ‘Christ almighty, and this is what I’m up against.’

  ‘C’mon, Reggie, you’re a lot more experienced than me,’ I protested, though I was secretly pleased to have impressed him a little.

  ‘Jack, you’ve obviously read Jacoby’s new book. It already looks like becoming the holy grail of poker players.’

  ‘No. Sounds interesting.’

  ‘Oswald Jacoby on Poker, it came out earlier this year or late last year. It’s already become the poker player’s Bible, the Gospel According to the Prophet Jacoby.’ I admitted again that I’d never heard of it. ‘Allow me to lend you my copy, although with your luck . . .’

  He left the sentence hanging, so I added quickly, ‘No, thanks, Reggie, that’s very kind of you, but I tend to be a bit rough on books. It sounds like I may have to read this one several times; I’ll buy one first thing.’ I’d have to stash it in my rucksack. If Mrs Henderson saw it beside my bed – my version of Jim Greer’s Bible – it would be the final straw, I’d be out in the street before my feet could touch the ground.

  I’ve already mentioned that Reggie Blunt was generally considered the school bunny but it wasn’t because he was stupid, far from it. He had a quick mind and was famous for his one-liners, the opposite end of the spectrum from his convoluted sentences. Here are just a couple I recall. Don’t take life too seriously – you’re not going to come out of it alive. God must love stupid people, he made so many of them. I recall discussing John Steinbeck’s new book, The Grapes of Wrath, with him. Lifting his whisky glass, he commented, ‘But then again, a hangover is The Wrath of Grapes.’

  The fall of the cards was obviously important, but it seemed in my limited experience that Joe was right, the same players almost always ended up with a pile of pennies in front of them while others constantly complained about their bad luck. Perhaps Jacoby, could explain why this was so, among other things, or why Reggie always seemed to draw the short straw.

  ‘Good for you, old son,’ Reggie said now. ‘I’ve only had my copy three months and it’s almost in tatters. Wouldn’t want it falling into further disrepair. I guess my brain doesn’t function quite like yours, otherwise, having chewed and digested Mr Jacoby’s wisdom, I really ought to have won a couple of pots in the past month. I guess I’m just plain unlucky. I do, however, recommend you read this book, Jack. If you are going to play the game properly, you might as well assemble the mental tools you’re going to need.’ He smiled at me in an avuncular way. ‘My boy, while I think you’ve probably got a natural gift, there’s still a lot you can learn . . . we can all learn,’ he added, I guess so as not to sound patronising.

  I’d come to regard Reggie Blunt as a decent, generous-minded guy, especially considering I had pinched his job and, in a manner of speaking, snatched the bread from his mouth. Though Cam Kerr and Peter Cornhill had assured me he had other means of support, just w
hat they were was never explained; they merely insisted he could afford to lose a few bucks every week at the poker game he so loved.

  Well, the book was everything and more that Reggie Blunt had promised it would be. Oswald Jacoby on Poker was a treatise on how to play poker to win, written by one of the world’s leading bridge players. It was mainly about five-card stud and five-card draw poker. He also dealt with seven-card stud, high, low and wild-card games and other variations, but these mainly cropped up in dealer’s choice games, which he didn’t think were worthy of serious players.

  I read the book twice over during the following week, my brain snatching at the contents, hungry for more as the possibilities of the game became increasingly apparent. To use an apt comparison, it was as if I was back at my first lesson with Miss Bates at the piano. Or later, standing bewitched by Art Tatum. I realised, as I had when first confronted by both classical music and jazz, that I knew next to nothing and that the mountain to climb was exceedingly steep.

  Years later I would admit to myself that it was at that very moment in my life in Moose Jaw that I took the first step on my way to becoming obsessed with poker. Jazz and then poker – honey mixed with arsenic. Stupid, stupid Jack Spayd! Why oh why hadn’t I remembered that Joe’s advice was always sound?

  CHAPTER NINE

  SOMEWHAT TO MY SURPRISE, my performances quickly grew in popularity and the Sunday jazz lovers now crowded into the ballroom at the Brunswick, much to the delight of Cam Kerr and the hotel management. Young guys in uniform, on weekend leave from the camps, drew an appreciative following of young women who, I hoped, also enjoyed the music. It all did wonders for the general ambience of what had formerly been a dull and unprofitable hotel Sunday.

  My salary had been raised to $30 a week and, taken together with my poker winnings and odds and ends, I was clearing a good $45 with lunch and breakfast thrown in. I’d hit the jackpot in terms of my scuffing experience, a fact that left me feeling vaguely guilty because Joe Hockey had sent me into the wilderness to grow up and get some life experience and here I was living off the fat of the grasslands and actually adding to the money I had brought with me. My mom’s nose job was looking ever more affordable.

  Jack Spayd had once again fallen on his feet and I guess was still pretty much the same kid they’d all tearfully seen off at union station almost eight months previously. No doubt they’d imagined I’d have to endure many hardships before we all met again, especially Joe, who’d been damp-eyed at the station.

  I couldn’t help feeling rather smug. Sometimes I’d imagine myself arriving home and sitting at the kitchen table in my mom’s flat. I’d casually reach into my jacket and place a bulging envelope on the table. ‘Here, Mom,’ I’d say, sliding the envelope towards her.

  ‘What is it, Jack?’ she’d say, picking it up and opening it. ‘Oh my goodness! Jack, what on earth . . .’

  ‘The money to do the rest of your nose,’ I’d say with a little smile.

  Of course I’d written to them all often enough saying I was okay but I could read between the lines of my mom’s weekly replies and knew that she believed I was merely putting on a brave face. Stoic young Jack out there in the wilds among the savages. Joe would be wondering about the musical compromises I was being forced to make as a price for my hard-won maturity. Miss Frostbite had urged me to remember I was a gentleman and not to fall into coarse ways. She’d taken a lot of trouble to turn the gauche Cabbagetown kid into ‘a charming young gentleman’.

  I felt reasonably sure I’d become a better jazz piano player despite having to play the popular music my audience demanded. Swing was now sweeping the county and I didn’t mind because in Joe’s words, ‘You gotta go where the hep cats goin’. You don’t want to get yo’self stuck in no jazz lullaby land.’

  Furthermore, with the aid of Mr Jacoby and his wondrous book, I was slowly becoming a better poker player, beginning to realise that while you win and lose over time, the better player usually comes out in front. I felt I was improving and the others were standing still. If Reggie Blunt had dog-eared Jacoby’s book, the information didn’t seem to have sunk in – he was still the bunny. I was becoming the winner of the game rather more often than not, so I’d throw in the odd good start to a hand, just to keep things interesting for the others. Ours was a small-stakes Saturday social game and I didn’t need Joe’s warning to know I’d soon mess things up in the group if I won too often; nobody needs some show-off punk kid repeatedly snapping up the stake they’ve had to save to bring to the game. As it was I was doing nicely, even if I was being careful not to rock the boat. They were my buddies after all and in a strange place far from home friends are not easily made and should not be taken lightly.

  Like many an only child, I’d spent most of my life with adults, and although most of them had been women, there had been Mac and Joe and the members of the band as well, so I didn’t feel out of place among these men. While it would have been nice to have friends of my own age, I’d never quite managed to have a buddy at school. I’d always had my days mapped out for me with music and the library and weekends spent accompanying my mom to museums and parks.

  As I passed through puberty I longed for a girlfriend, but girls had always been scarce in my life and when I did meet one she usually thought I was a bit weird and we had nothing to say to each other. What does a classical pianist say to a Cabbagetown girl when he’s either got his head in a book or he’s practising scales and she believes she’s hit the jackpot if, at sixteen, she can leave school and get a job as a kitchen hand in a downtown café and eventually become a waitress?

  I’d been a kitchen hand at the Jazz Warehouse, but you soon exhaust the conversational possibilities of dishwashing. The most fun I could ever remember with my peers was during winter when we’d play shinny on the frozen pond, but even that had ended when Miss Bates noticed a bad bruise on my left hand where some kid’s hockey stick had connected with it. ‘Your hands are your future, Jack!’ she’d scolded. ‘Broken fingers could put an end to everything. I simply won’t have it!’

  It seems crazy, but as a kid I understood women better than men and men better than boys my own age; girls I understood not at all. The twins were the closest I ever got to girls, and they were six years older than me, and light years removed because of their experience. At seventeen I was going on forty but I’d missed out on the experience of getting there. My childhood adventures had all come through the characters I read about in books and most of them were either English or American.

  I guess this was why Joe wanted me to get the hell out of Cabbagetown and live a bit, fall flat on my face a few times and harden up. Life wasn’t meant to be as easy as it had been for me, and if the Depression had taught kids anything it was that few avoided an apprenticeship in hardship before they launched themselves into the world. I’m sure he was right. But while most young guys my age were going through the tedious and difficult process of growing up, I needed to grow down, or backwards, if such an experience is possible. The only thing I had in common with a normal teenage boy was puberty, that strange time when nothing makes sense and your hormones are going berserk and you are happy for no reason, and angry at most of the people you know at some stage, or at life in general and most particularly yourself. Of course by the time I got to Moose Jaw this onerous time was pretty much over for me. Still, I needed to grow down to seventeen or eighteen and my best hope of doing so was, of course, the army – lots of young guys together seemed an ideal way for me to grow backwards into becoming a normal kid, young man and soldier.

  I missed jamming at the Jazz Warehouse and longed to play with other musicians. Finally, after a lot of discussion over many hands of poker, I persuaded my older buddies in the poker school to form a small group. The owner of the Caribou Café, John Robert Johnson, had agreed we could have a gig for an hour and a half before our poker games. He was a truly great guy and trucked in a piano from home which he claimed his mother had once played and then his daughter. It had
stood idle in the parlour for five years because, to his disappointment, his daughter had lost interest as a teenager, married early and become a young mother almost immediately.

  It was a Grinnell, an old upright from before the Great War, but he’d had it tuned and the key pads replaced and it wasn’t all that bad. We played to the Saturday-morning coffee crowd which soon grew in size and we were able to repay John Robert Johnson in a small way for his generosity as his takings increased.

  I offered to play the harmonica and leave the piano for Reggie Blunt but he insisted that he’d been fascinated by the electric guitar ever since it had appeared on the musical scene as a new instrument and had purchased one three years back. He had been taking lessons by correspondence, he claimed. I’d never really appreciated the skill Elmer Perkins had brought to the Jazz Warehouse from Tennessee until I heard Reggie play; there’s a lot more to the electric guitar than meets the unfamiliar ear, though of course Reggie’s guitar, despite being the butt of many a joke among the other musicians, was welcomed.

  As for me, I was attracted to the free forms adopted in the twenties by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. Those dazzling extended solos were where I wanted to go on the piano. I was groping towards my own style, and it was this, I believed, that was attracting a more involved audience to the Sunday solo concerts where I had possibly cornered the market for jazz purists in Moose Jaw and Regina.