The New Kings of Nonfiction
Page 51
“T.J. likes his hand,” Andy whispers to me, “and I think Chris has ace-nine.” I remember the matching A-9’s Chris and I turned out to be holding last night, how the untranquil mood had been scalpeled by laughter. I watch now as Chris takes off his hat, then his sunglasses—whoa—in an instant defanging his aura. The thinning hair above his temples accentuated by the length of the strands, brown eyes a tad bloodshot and sunken, he also looks much more like Jesus.
He calls. As the low-decibel buzz from the previous five or six minutes rises to a crescendo, he turns over A♠ 9♣. T.J. immediately shows him A♦ and . . . Q♣. The crowd gasps and whistles.
“Pretty astonishing call,” I tell Andy.
“Chris’s?”
“No, yours.”
He nods modestly, as though he hasn’t been making reads like this the whole tournament, then elbows my arm. “Ace-queen look familiar?”
“Oh, boy . . .”
The flop—4♥ 2♥ K♣—keeps T.J. in the lead. When K♥ falls on the turn, Andy groans, “Not again!” Because now any deuce, four, king, or ace will give us another chopped pot. Exuberant Ferguson boosters entreat the poker deities for a nine. Cloutier fans are more numerous, but it isn’t clear what they should beg for. Hollering “Let’s go, T.J.!” is pretty much all they can do.
Jesus leaps from his seat with his fists in the air and T.J. thrusts his big paw across the table before I see the last card. What else could it be but “A nine!” Bob Thompson ejaculates. No one, especially Bob, seems able to believe it. Chris reaches across the table and clasps T.J.’s hand. “You outplayed me,” he says. T.J. shakes his head, disagreeing. That he just got harpooned through the ventricles doesn’t register on his vast, craggy features. He’s smiling!
Cathy Burns and the Fergusons are all over Chris now. Hugs, kisses, pogo hops, shimmying. Chris still makes his way around the table to where T.J. is standing with his wife, Joy, inside a crush of reporters. While Chris is almost as tall, when the two men embrace their difference in mass is straight out of vaudeville: the burly tight end hugs the sinewy swing dancer, steel-wool ringlets meshing with yard-long chestnut locks. “Are we still friends?” Chris asks.
“Of course. Don’t feel bad. You played great.” But once they let go of each other, T.J. asks, “You didn’t think it would be that tough to beat me, did you?”
“Yes, I did.”
I congratulate Chris, then try to tell T.J. how brilliantly he played. “There’s a lotta luck in poker,” he rumbles, “and if you’re gonna play this game you better get used to that.”
Needing oxygen and sunlight, I go for a walk down on Fremont, then head south along First Street. Strip joints and flophouses, pawn-shops and T-shirt emporia, a few dozen down-market tourists. In Las Vegas, Fifth Street is Las Vegas Boulevard South, which also is known as the Strip. Family Vegas. We are far, far away from that world. Already the scorching southwest wind has driven some grit through my lips and made my pale forehead feel crisp. I think of my children, my wife. By this time tomorrow, I’ll see them.
At the far eastern tip of the Pacific time zone, Las Vegas sunsets come early. Even at five-thirty or so on a May afternoon, even through polarized lenses, there are horizontal shafts making you squint and ricocheting dazzlements that make you shade your eyes, and then there are glares that make you duck. And then there are thermal traps where it must reach 130 degrees. And when these are interrupted by gelid blasts from gaping casino doorways, it’s a little like wandering along the perimeter of the eighth and ninth circles of Hell—all of this, mind you, while heading a block north toward Paradise.
But the thing is, I maybe could’ve won the damn thing.
RANKING OF POKER HANDS
STRAIGHT FLUSH: five consecutive cards of the same suit, such as 8♥ 9♥ 10♥ J♥ Q♥. The highest possible hand is an ace-high straight flush, called a royal flush.
FOUR OF A KIND: four cards of the same rank, such as 10♣ 10♦ 10♠ 10♥.
FULL HOUSE: three cards of one rank and two of another, such as three fives and two queens.
FLUSH: five cards of the same suit, such as 2♦ 5♦ 7♦ J♦ A♦.
STRAIGHT: five consecutive cards of mixed suits, such as 5♣ 6♦ 7♠ 8♥ 9♠. (In a straight, an ace can be used as either a high or a low card.)
THREE OF A KIND: three cards of the same rank, such as 6♦ 6♣ 6♥.
TWO PAIRS: two cards of the same rank and two other cards of another rank, such as Q♦ Q♣ and 9♦ 9♥.
PAIR: two cards of the same rank, such as 4♦ 4♣.
GLOSSARY OF POKER TERMS
ALL-IN: having all of one’s chips in the pot
BELLY DRAW: a straight that lacks an inside card
BIG SLICK: ace-king
BOSS TRIPS: the highest possible three of a kind
BUTTON: disc that rotates clockwise around the table to indicate which player is the last to bet
CRYING CALL: a call with a hand you think has a small chance of winning
FLOP: the first three exposed community cards, dealt simultaneously
FREEROLL: to compete with other people’s money
JOHNNIES: jacks
KICKER: a side card accompanying a higher card or cards
MUCK: to discard or fold
RAINBOW: a flop of three different suits
SEMI-BLUFF: to bet with a hand you don’t think is the best hand but which has a reasonable chance of improving to the best hand
SLOW-PLAY: to check or call an opponent’s bet with a big hand in order to win more money in later betting rounds
SMOOTH CALL: a call when a raise is expected
STEAL: a bet big enough to cause your opponents to fold, especially when your own hand is weak
SUCK OUT: to make a lucky draw on fifth street, especially with a hand you should have folded earlier
WHEEL: a five-high straight, such as A-2-3-4-5.
“Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities” © Michael Lewis. Originally published in the New York Times, February 25, 2001.
“Toxic Dreams” by Jack Hitt. Copyright © 1995 by Harper’s Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduced from the July issue by special permission.
“Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” © Malcolm Gladwell. Originally published in The New Yorker, January 11, 1999.
“Shapinsky’s Karma” © Lawrence Weschler. Appears in A Wanderer in the Perfect City by Lawrence Weschler, University of Chicago Press, 2006. Originally published in The New Yorker, 1985.
“The American Man, Age Ten” © Susan Orlean. Reprinted by permission. Originally published in Esquire, December 1992.
“Among the Thugs” from “Turin.” From Among the Thugs: The Experience, and the Seduction of Crowd Violence by Bill Buford. Copyright © 1991, 1990 by William Buford. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Among the Thugs” from “Turin.” From Among the Thugs by Bill Buford, published by Martin Secker & Warburg. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
“Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy” © Chuck Klosterman. Originally published in Esquire, July 2005.
“Host” © David Foster Wallace. Originally published in The Atlantic, used by permission of the author.
“Tales of the Tyrant” © Mark Bowden. This story originally appeared in The Atlantic, May 2002.
“Losing the War” © 1997 by Lee Sandlin. Originally published in The Chicago Reader.
“The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hot Spot” © 2004 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.
“My Republican Journey” © Dan Savage. Originally published in The Stranger, 1996.
“Power Steer” Copyright © 2002 by Michael Pollan. First appeared in the New York Times.
“Fortune’s Smile: World Series of Poker” © James McManus. Originally published in Harper’s Magazine, December 1, 2000.
1 Stringfellow boasts many of the standard villains of the classic toxic-waste story—Texaco, General Electric, Rockw
ell, Lockheed. But the list of offending companies goes on to include some ambitious newcomers: Rich Steel Pickling Company, Evr-Gard Coating Corp., George Industries, J&M Anodizing, Mask-Off Company, Basic Industries, Inc., Buck’s of Upland, and, finally, a Mrs. Lucille Hubbs.
2 There are still other, ancillary suits born of Stringfellow, the most accessible of which turn on exotic distinctions in the hermeneutics of industrial insurance law.
3 Such proportions are fairly routine in the world of toxic-waste legal wrangling. According to a 1992 Rand Corporation study, 88 percent of the money spent by insurers on Superfund claims goes to legal costs. The balance gets spent on cleanup.
4 Speaking of Stringfellow, the eponymous hero himself passed away during the state trial, on July 18, 1993. The obituaries noted ironically that the old high-school dropout and former quarryman had opposed the dump until the state assured him it was safe. “When we went to restaurants,” his widow was quoted as saying, “he would use the name String instead of Stringfellow because people would glare at him.” The settlement bankrupted him. At the time of his death, Mr. Stringfellow, sixty-six, had taken work in a Costa Mesa shipyard, scraping boats.
5 According to one economic analysis, the formula to determine whether or not defendants will prefer a mass tort resolution facility involves the following calculation:
6 I have no idea why I would cast Jude Law in this role, particularly if Heath Ledger were available.
7 A guide to poker hands and terms is on pages 453-454.
8 In a poker tournament one plays hundreds of hands a day; the hands discussed in this article have been reconstructed as accurately as I and others can recall.