Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  In Vegas I had created my nick: Chip Zero. It was the first thing that came to me.

  Now I went to a play-money table. Although there were no instructions on how to raise, check, fold, etc., it was easier than putting a round peg in a round hole. You simply had to move the cursor to the correct box and click—a four-year-old could have figured it out. The dollar amount rose when you clicked RAISE, your avatar (I chose the Big Man) folded when you clicked FOLD. It was easy, all too easy.

  The game was Pot Limit Hold’em and I watched from the sideline, not taking part. After a while I clicked PLAY and there I was, wired in to all corners of the gambling globe.

  The low blind, I got a 6 and a King for my pocket cards. Not good, not terrible. There were three others at the table, and the flop came up 10, Jack, Queen. The betting began and, even though it wasn’t real money, my hands quickly got clammy. After a raise and a few calls, the pot rose. I stayed in with nothing but a possible straight. The turn came up another 6, giving me a weak pair. Everyone was passing—they didn’t have much either, it was easy to surmise. Or they might be bluffing; someone might have the straight or two or three Jacks or Queens and be slow-playing me, sucking me in. But what did I care?: It was play-dough, not even as tangible as Monopoly money.

  The river card was a 6. I had 6-6-6.

  I raised. One person folded, the other called. One of them reraised and I saw it. The thought that there were two pocket Queens lying in wait for me flashed across my mind and my hands got colder, clammier. Then it was time to show the cards.

  I won. Some man (I assume it was a man . . . online, you can never really tell anything) from Topeka named Topeka Tim had two Queens. But my devilish trips had bettered him.

  I won over seven hundred bucks in that first hand.

  The money was fake, but the pride, shock and 5,000-volt thrill were not.

  “That was just too damn easy,” I said to Wifey sometime later that day.

  Other than poker, I’ve never excelled at anything. And it’s not for lack of trying.

  I wanted to be professional athlete. That was Plan A. If that didn’t work, then I would, I thought, become a great artist. That was Plan B.

  But I was never good at sports. To observe me playing basketball is to watch a great unforgivable insult to the game itself, and generations of Naismiths have spun in their graves whenever I lofted up an air ball from three feet, dribbled the ball off a shin (my own or an opponent’s), or jammed an elbow into the temple of the man I was putatively guarding. I am still a Teaneck playground legend of sorts for not being good at it but for never giving up. Five on five games, three on three, one on one—I played them all, and I’ve shot hoops by myself a thousand times. I tried so hard but never got good, and it became as common a sight in the neighborhood as the Mr. Softee truck rolling down the street in summer, me slumping my way home from basketball courts and playgrounds, baffled, sweaty, and thoroughly distraught.

  I was a third-string wide receiver on my high school football team but never got into a game and quit the team in my senior year to dedicate myself to smoking pot and chasing stoner skirt. In my twenties I played on a Garment Center softball team and once hit a ball high over the left field fence . . . but I stood at home plate too long admiring my majestic wallop and was called out at second base. It ended up just being a long out. At summer camp I was on the B team in soccer and swimming. I was lousy at golf, tennis, and ice-skating and have never won one single game of chess. I was like a clumsy third baseman who lets the ball go between his legs every time it’s hit to him, in that I never picked up the signals that the Gods of Success were sending me: some people, no matter how hard they want something and no matter how much they work at it, will forever be relegated to life’s B team. Where we belong.

  A perennial mediocre student, as early as my teens I found myself staring at the ceiling and wondering: Is it really asking so much to be good at something? At anything?

  When I finally came to accept that I wasn’t ever going to be a professional athlete I switched over to Plan B. My major in college had been Art History. The tests were easy, most of the students in the classes were girls, and I loved what I was studying.

  So two years after graduating I flew to Paris with all my savings and found a run-down apartment in a seedy section of town and moved in. Never having studied drawing or painting, I was going to teach myself from the ground up. I would be a naïf. If I led a miserably Spartan life, which I did, I had enough money to live there for a year. There’d be no numbered ducks at Tour Argent for me, nor any Le Big Macs; my lone extravagance would be the International Herald Tribune every day and a whore on Rue St. Denis once every two months.

  I needed to go to a place where I knew no one, had not one distraction, could barely get by with the language. The starving Artist-in-Paris fantasy may seem hackneyed, but perhaps there is something to that fantasy after all, which is how it became so hackneyed. To make matters even more stereotypical, I was fleeing a scarring breakup with Diane, my college girlfriend, whom I’d caught in bed one day snatching away my little brother’s virginity. I had to go someplace far away and immerse myself in something so I’d stop thinking about her.

  Once there, I created a serviceable atelier out of my living room and soon the living room ceased to exist as such: it was a windowed box containing rolls of canvas, an easel, tubes of paint everywhere, brushes and pastels on the floor, and me. There was no phone, TV, or radio. Once a month I made the long walk over to the American Express on Rue Scribe to get mail.

  Weeks passed without my saying a word to anyone, other than “Un vin blanche, s’il vous plaît” to a bartender. The prostitutes on St. Denis cost $40 a throw then, and I painted a nude of one of them, a bulky, crossed-eyed blonde. (I was classy enough to uncross them in the picture.) I’d begin drawing and painting at eight in the morning and some nights I’d paint until 3 a.m. Once I got going, I couldn’t stop. Even when I wanted to, I couldn’t. Looking back, this must have been my first battle with addiction and it was one I didn’t want to lose.

  As I worked and struggled, I dreamt ahead several decades. My paintings would hang in museums all over the world and in the homes of the stinking rich, those despised clients of mine who saw my work as investments and not as unique works of unparalleled beauty. I had a house in Maine, a loft in SoHo. In books and monographs, black-and-white photographs of the much-younger me in Paris ran alongside the paintings I was executing at the time. In these photos my paintings can be seen hanging on the dimly lit wall and propped up on the floor behind me. My sad, lonely eyes stare out and I am haggard and hungry, my jeans and sweatshirt are splattered with paint, and a cigarette dangles from my hand . . . even though I’ve never smoked.

  Needless to say, no such picture was ever taken.

  The time flew by and I wanted to slow it down just so I could paint more. I would sit down at my easel and focus in on the work at hand, focusing as I’d never focused on anything in the past, and before I knew it, ten hours had elapsed. If anyone had been there to ask me how much time had gone by, I probably would have said ten minutes.

  It may have been the greatest time of my entire life.

  But it was time that went right down the drain. It became Zero Time, a year of my life that just did not happen. Because I wasn’t any good. I made no progress at all and was just as bad on Day 350 as I was on Day 1. I denied my lack of ability every day and every minute, I denied it even as my arm, wrist, and back ached from painting twelve hours straight. I denied it when I hung my completed canvases on the walls of my Parisian apartment and stood back to take them in. I denied it as I sketched at two in the morning, did watercolors at noon, and gouache and Conté crayon at nine at night. I denied it right up to the moment when I had only enough money left to make it to the airport and for my plane ticket home.

  There was no Plan C, which is how I wound up becoming me.

  Taking into consideration the myriad items on List A, which contains those thin
gs I’m not good at (sports, painting, carpentry, anything musical, cooking, being charming at parties, anything of a financial nature, crosswords, computer know-how, conversing about indie films and alt rock bands), and the items on List B, which contains those things I am good at (writing novels that don’t sell and screenplays that never get filmed and plays that never get produced, playing poker, not doing volunteer work), you would think that List A would feel sorry for List B and perhaps send a couple of things over just to boost morale. Sort of like a talent mercy fuck. But List A is merciless, takes no prisoners, brooks no quarter, and the end result is I might very well be a no-talent bum of the first order.

  So that was my life the day I won that first hand of fake money: I had two books under my belt, and while they had not sold well, one (Plague Boy) had been optioned by Hollywood (the red-hot director Pacer Burton was slated to direct). I’d written a third novel but its fate was unknown and possibly extremely dire. On the plus side, I had a great job. My wife and I had enjoyed seven truly wonderful years of a yin-yang marriage. However, we had been married for ten, and lately (ever since my books began withering on bookstore shelves), my irritable and shabby New Jersey yin had been clashing with her carefree and classy Park Avenue yang. Because I could no longer bring myself to start another book and because I had so much free time on my hands, the stage was set for me to become a semiprofessional poker player.

  At least I was doing something I was good at.

  I refused to let all the lights go out.

  A week or so after I got back from Vegas, I opened up, with Wifey’s approval, a separate account at my bank and put a thousand dollars in it. When I got home from work one day I went into the Galaxy and set the whole thing up, linking the new account to the site. In the eyes of over 50,000 winners and losers around the world, I was now Chip Zero, Man of a Thousand Dollars. I would either grow my stake into two or three thousand or fritter it away in a week. If it turned out to be the latter, then so be it. I’d have learned my lesson.

  Things would be different now: I wasn’t gambling with play money. Play money was Whiffleball; this was hardball. Of course, I didn’t have to play for real money—I could shuttle between the play tables and the real ones, hone my skills in the former to unleash them in the latter.

  Cynthia hadn’t come home yet, and after ten hands with the fake stuff, I made the move into Real Money World. I went to a table in “Low” with five- and ten-dollar blinds; my hands were ice-cold and my armpits were like sponges. As is possible on the site, before I took my “seat,” I observed the game and the players for a while. It was not surprising that play here moved slower, that the players deliberated longer: money really does change everything. This was like going from playing checkers with a ten-year-old to playing chess against Big Blue.

  I had also noticed—the site informs you—each player’s winnings (or stacks); that is, how much money players brought to the table. For example, Foldin’ Caulfield (an orthopedist from, ironically, Council Bluffs who either plays poker between surgeries to relax, or performs surgery between poker games to relax) might have a stack of $150,000, while Halitosis Sue’s stack was a modest $450. For this, my first game, I chose a table where people didn’t have that much, took my seat and played as the Big Man again. I don’t know why, but I was drawn to that avatar. (If Wifey resembles, as she thinks she does, Ava Gardner a year past her prime, I resembled Gérard Depardieu then, circa the 1980s, albeit with moppier, grayer hair and not as big a galoot. I was ten pounds overweight but, in my defense, it had been the same ten pounds for twenty years.)

  Chip Zero was now in the house.

  I dumped five bucks the first hand, folding two fours. The winning hand was three Jacks. Okay, I thought, so now I’m down to $995.

  I dumped twenty the next hand, hoping that my nines and eights would prevail. But three nines kicked me right in the teeth and I let out a groan that sounded like a Bassett hound being neutered by a failing veterinary student.

  Well, this isn’t that much fun.

  But I had nothing else to do. There were no books to write. If I wrote them, there was nobody to publish them. If I wrote them and somebody published them, there were no readers to read them.

  In the third hand, not only did I win all the money back with a full house, Kings full of tens, but suddenly I was ahead a hundred dollars.

  I vowed then that, as God is my witness, I would never be behind again.

  When Wifey came home she put a pot of water on the stove to make pasta for dinner, but simmering with glee I ran over, turned the burner off, dumped the water into the sink, and whisked her out for dinner. In the restaurant I said to her, “I think I may finally have found something I’m good at” and told her it was poker. She wasn’t as happy for me as I would have liked, but when I told her how much I’d won and how easily I’d won it, well, I think she came around. I didn’t pay for dinner that night and neither did she—a few faceless poker players whom I’d never met wound up paying for it. We downed an eighty-dollar bottle of wine and when we returned home I was still so excited I couldn’t sleep. So at about three in the morning I went into my little study, flicked on a small light, and made a list of the things I could do to resurrect my literary career.

  Go to book parties and sucker-punch the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, David Eggers, David Mitchell.

  But this might be a problem as there is no chance at this point I’d ever get invited to such a book party.

  In lieu of the aforementioned Jonathans and Davids, I could punch out an old coot like Phillip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates and hopefully not kill them. Or I could take on a career-dead writer like Marty Amis or Sal Rushdie, both of whom could use the publicity, too.

  But Joyce Carol Oates once wrote a book about boxing and could possibly beat me up.

  In a profanity-laced article in The Atlantic or The New York Review of Books, I could drill the above Jonathans and Davids new assholes. Why, it would be the literary scandale of the decade! I’ll write unending comma- and semi-colon-filled sentences about their books and their abundant lack of talent. Pick one single ungainly sentence of theirs—just like the real critics do!—and use it to skewer their entire oeuvre. Use words like “pullulation,” or short fancy-ass words like “fictive” so that people take me seriously. It would make Mailer v. Vidal and Hellmann v. McCarthy look like the undercard of a Golden Gloves featherweight bout! One of the offended geniuses would go on Charlie Rose and, after belittling my inconsequential output and poor sales, dare me to a boxing match (or, if it’s Marty Amis or Sal Rushdie, a tennis or cricket match), and I would go on Charlie Rose and come up with a lame excuse why I couldn’t go through with it (“Charlie, I’m not going to dignify that juvenile challenge with a comment.”).

  But in order for me to pull this off I’d have to read their books . . . and I didn’t want to.

  I could burst into the Reno Brothers Literary Agency and pummel the hell out of Clint Reno, my agent (if he still is my agent). In this wacky world, not only would that get Dead on Arrival published, it would also land me a reality TV show on Bravo.

  Start a blog. Tweet. The final desperate cries for help of wretched losers everywhere.

  Write a new new novel, get it published; the novel gets good reviews in the Times, I go on Oprah and Charlie Rose. But who am I kidding? The Times hates me so much that they Photoshopped me right out of my wedding announcement picture, turning me into the conspicuous gray blotch hovering over my blushing bride’s shoulders.

  Write a book about my dog. My lovable dog Max, Molly, Spanky, or Duffy. He or she could be a gorgeous purebred or a big ol’ scruffy mutt who followed me home one day. The dog keeps my marriage intact and happy, and saves my troubled daughter from drowning one day. Because of the dog, my severely autistic son sinks twenty shots in a row in a high school basketball game, and the dog sees my wife through menopause and a cancer scare. Spanky gets old and blind and dies in my arms. Fo
r the first time in my adult life, I—ever the cold-blooded stoic—cry. Ultimately not only has the dog taught me the true meaning of Love, it has rescued my literary career.

  Pen a poorly written trilogy of mysteries set in Stockholm and then die of a heart attack.

  I could get a job in advertising, then get fired. Then get a job at Starbucks. Write about the whole wonderful, fulfilling experience, and quit the job when the book gets sold to the movies.

  Confess in one memoir that I was once a young, homeless, drug-addicted but still ravishingly beautiful transvestite prostitute who serviced truck drivers and the squealing livestock they transported. In the next memoir confess that I wasn’t, that I was really my sister, a tough white kid who hung around with murderous but tender­hearted black L.A. gangbangers and who had once escaped the Holocaust, after meeting my wife in a concentration camp, and been raised by wolves in the Brussels woods.

  I could write an A Million Little Pieces–like memoir, all of it pullulating with exaggeration and falsehood. Concoct my very own crack whore, whose shattered life I later save. I’ll pass myself off to the literary world as a tough guy, a bad boy, a ticking time bomb, the kind of brooding, barbwire-skinned punk who calls a bartender “barkeep” and befriends mafiosi and boxers and corrupt clarinet-playing Negro judges.

  Or I could write a real memoir, about losing out as a novelist, discovering poker and winning tons of money and adulation but losing everything.

  But with so many phony memoirs getting published these days, it has become almost impossible to publish a real one anymore. The world prefers the fake stuff.