Pocket Kings (11 page)

By the end of April I had won over $25,000. In two months I had netted about half of my Real Life salary.

I wasn't writing at all. I was playing.

Every morning I resolved to call Clint Reno and demand to know what was going on with my book.
It's my book,
I would thunder (he'd have to hold the phone a yard away from his ear).
It took me three years to write and I
DEMAND
to know what's going on!
But by the day's end, I'd forgotten all about that and was usually a few hundred or thousand dollars richer from playing cards. And I'd gotten lost in the maelstrom of puerile chat. It was saltwater taffy for my soul. Book? What book?

I checked and checked for any news about the
Plague Boy
movie.

I'm not really sure what Development Hell is, but that's where
Plague:
Th
e Movie
seemed to be languishing. Was a film my only hope?
Th
e movie gets made,
Plague Boy
gets reissued with a new cover (
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING TOM . . .)
and
Love: A Horror Story
gets reissued (
WRITTEN BY
TH
E AUTHOR OF PLAGUE BOY, NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING SCARLETT . . .)
people start buying the books, publishers are interested in me again, offers pour in . . .?

Th
ere was never any news.

Once a week I e-mailed Clint. Groveling like a hungry dog. No reply came.

One warm April afternoon at about 3:30 I was exactly halfway between the kitchen and the couch, heading for the latter, when the front door opened. It was, I saw, Cynthia. Near the couch was a coffee table with frosted green glass, and on the frosted green glass was my laptop, and on the laptop was poker. Millions of colors and seventeen inches of poker. For two hours I'd been enduring, with groans the neighbors may have heard, a terrible losing streak. Cynthia had no idea that I would be home and in the blink of an eye I had to decide whether to dash to the couch to close the laptop or to skip to the door and tell her either that I was only working half days now or that I loved her. Or both. But the blink passed, so did a few others, and instead I stood frozen in the living room, a cold can of Coke in my hand.

She was equally frozen in the doorway, bewildered by my presence.

“What are you doing home?” I asked.

“
Th
ere wasn't much to do and I decided to come—what are
you
doing home?”

My laptop let out a soft but suspicious
brrrnnng.
I was wanted at a table.

“So you're only working a half-day today?” I asked, almost sounding accusatory.

“Yes.
Th
ere wasn't any—”

“Well, me too. I'm only working a half a day. Today. And tomorrow. And last week.”

I told her more of the truth (and the can of Coke was no longer so cold): I'd affected this historic life-change of mine about three weeks before. I now only worked from nine to 12:30. She asked me why I hadn't told her this and I said, “I've been meaning to but I kept forgetting. Sorry.” She moved into our tiny foyer and asked me how I was spending my free afternoons at home, and I told her, “
Th
ey're not free. I'm writing a book. It's not like I'm not doing anything.” She walked farther into the apartment and was straddling the foyer/living room borderline; she asked me what I was writing and I told her that it was Book II of a trilogy. As I'd completed the
American Nightmare
Troika years before Wifey had entered my life, she wasn't aware of its existence. (She hasn't read any of my unpublished books and could barely make it through the first chapter of
Dead on Arrival
because, in her words, “It's just so depressing.”) So now, according to my boss Diane, I was writing Book I of the
Trilogy,
but according to Cynthia, I was writing Book II. (It was a good thing they weren't friends.)

“You could have told me this,” she said. She looked past me and saw the coffee table.

“I know. I could have.”

“You
should
have.”

“Well, I just did.”

Th
e laptop emitted another
brrrnnng.
Th
ere would be no third: Either I resumed playing within thirty seconds or I would be kicked off that table.

“I have to get back!” I said to Wifey. “
Th
ings are coming to me a mile a minute and I can't afford to lose them.”

“
Th
ings?” she asked. “What things?”

Book II.
Th
e
Trilogy
! My life's masterpiece!
Th
e things were the words, images, dialogue, descriptions, and plot twists of the project that would make me a literary immortal! What I was put on this Earth to do!

“You have to start telling me more, Frank,” she said. “
Th
is really isn't good.”

Frank?
Who?

It took me a second to realize who Frank was. For the last two hours I'd been Chip Zero.

She sat down on the couch, kicked off her shoes and sighed, and I apologized and told her that from now on I would tell her everything.

I slammed the top of my laptop shut before she could see what was really going on.

6

It's Not My Party

I
have so far in these pages kept Artsy Painter Gal's appearances to a minimum.
Th
at may be because in the very beginning, she didn't play an important role.
Th
e real reason, most likely, is that whether it's in books, movies, or music, love stories bore me.

Artsy Painter Gal lives in Los Angeles. She is a few years younger than I am, is married and has two daughters. Her husband is a successful investment banker (what else?). As a young painter—single, living in West Hollywood with six other bohos—she showed plenty of promise, was mentioned in several magazines; her artwork was displayed in several shows in galleries and small museums.

And then, suddenly, she stopped.

(Sound familiar?)

After our first encounter, I was smitten. Two days after that I found her at a table; she was playing as the Dragon Lady.
Th
e Big Man was taken, so I played as the Dapper Bond Guy.

It was a $50-$100 blind table; her stack showed that she had amassed $11,000, which was impressive since she hadn't been playing very long. It was 6 p.m. New York time.

I stayed silent for a few hands—money, luck, and good cards were going back and forth, which is the usual seesaw flow—then she won $1,200 with trip 10s.

Chip Zero:
NH, Dragon Lady.

Artsy Painter Gal:
TY, James.

She won the next hand with two eights.

Chip Zero:
Hey, you called me Big Blond Boy the other day. I haven't forgotten that.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Of course you haven't.

Artsy Painter Gal wins $400 with three 5s.

Chip Zero:
You're on fire today, Artsy.

Artsy Painter Gal:
I'm always on fire when a dashing guy in a rented tux sits next to me.

Chip Zero:
I'm sure there's a fire extinguisher in this joint somewhere.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Well, while you're spraying, you might want to get your underarms too.

I found her again the next day.
Th
ere are four female avatars a player can play as: the busty longhaired Jayne Mansfield/Lady Godiva Blonde, the exotic Dragon Lady, the Blowsy Housewife, and the Wrinkly Bag Lady (aka Granny).
Th
e table was full when I found APG and I had to do something I disliked: play as a woman. So I sat in as the Blonde, the only available seat.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Wow, look at you! Love the dress. Dior? Chanel?

Chip Zero:
What?
Th
is old thing? I only put it on when I don't care how I look.

Artsy Painter Gal:
You'll never be able to sneak an
It's a Wonderful Life
reference past me, baby.

I won $1,500 (the more players at a table, the more you win) with two Aces.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Very nice pair, Blondie.

Chip Zero:
Th
anks. I knew I had that hand won.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Oh, I wasn't talking about your cards. I meant your chest.

In Hold Blood:
Ugh. You 2 need to get a room.

Chip Zero:
I thought you liked them. You haven't stop staring at them since I sat down.

At first it was impossible for me to flirt guiltlessly. I loved Cynthia and she loved me. We were destined for each other and knew it the second we met. “You should have proposed to me the day we met,” she often told me. “I would have said yes.” It was either an act of divine intervention that she and I found each other or the greatest stroke of luck in my entire life.

With her I may not have been much, but without her, I know now, I am nothing.

One of the reasons I had retained the services of the Reno Brothers Literary Agency for
Plague Boy
was their accessibility.
Th
ere were no associates or receptionists to intercept the calls.
Th
ey only put their voicemail on when the office was closed, and it wasn't even voicemail: it was just an old-fashioned answering machine. If I called Clint either he or one of his partners would pick up the call, or the phone would ring and ring and you knew nobody would pick up the call. From what I've heard, other agencies are different. Not only is it common for an agent not to return your call, but it is expected. It is expected that if a secretary or associate intercepts the call that he or she will not relay the message to the agent. With
Plague
and
Love,
when I called the Reno Brothers, Clint picked up. If I left a message on their answering machine at night, Clint would call me first thing the next day. I was hot then. A comer.
Th
e next David Sedaris.

(Agents are very weird people. Not as weird as the writers they pimp, but close.)

In May, five-plus months since I'd finished
DOA,
I came down with pneumonia. I'd never had it before: it just came and attacked me with a vengeance. It lasted about two weeks, and I spent two nights in a hospital. My fever went up to 103, I coughed and hacked through the night, I sweated and stank and shivered.
Th
e only relief was the two bottles of cherry-flavored codeine my doctor prescribed and the barrage of sincere get-well wishes from my Poker Buddies. “Hope you feel better,” Wolve e-mailed. “
Th
inking of you, honey,” Cali Wondergal wrote. “Any better today? Hope so, kid,” Grouchy Old Man said, sounding way too much in real life like James Frey's imaginary wiseguy friend Leonard does in fiction.

Was there a way I could make this malady work for me?

CR:

Haven't heard from you in a while and I hope you are well. I'm not. I've been deathly ill of late. Very bad. Spent 4 nights in the hospital last week. Fever of 105.5.

With that in mind, can you inform me as to the fate of
DOA
? Anything new on it at all? Bad news, good news? Anything? It really, really would help me to know right now. I'm in a bad way.

Th
ank you so much.

FD

Clint never responded to that e-mail.

But toward the end of my sickness I got an e-mail from Beverly Martin, who was now done with her third novel.

hey you!

jill conway really loved your blurb and it's going on the book jacket. you should get an invite any day now to her book party, which is at florian, june 1, 8 p.m. your old editor toby kwimper should be there! can't wait to see you. xoxo.

bev

Not a word from Bev on
DOA,
which she'd been soooo excited to read. But at least she hadn't called me the Master of the Suburban Mimetic.

Am I going to have to take my book to Deke Rivers at Last Resort,
I wondered with a few residual coughs
.
Th
at was miles beneath my writer's dignity . . . but my dignity was sinking lower and lower every day, and it was no longer so easy to compare what was beneath what.

Th
ree more swigs of codeine and soon I didn't care about anything. (To me the words “as needed” in a prescription translate to “all the time.”)

Th
e next day my temperature was normal.
Th
e invitation to the book party arrived and I RSVPed. Until this paragraph I have avoided mentioning that the publisher of
Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen
was my own former publisher. I had been dumped, cast aside, forgotten about, for books like this, for pink-covered, luxury-brand-name-filled, brainless chick lit.
Th
at's not writing, that's cupcake baking! Why couldn't someone be publishing
Dead on Arrival,
the book that was going to resurrect my career and make the Lit World take me seriously, instead of this I'll-blow-you-while-I'm-preparing-a-raspberry-coulis drivel?! It was a gross injustice. . . .
Th
is was my personal Sacco & Vanzetti, my Scottsboro Boys and Leo Frank all rolled into one! I had quit writing plays and movies because actors were all vain nincompoops and because I thought that in publishing, things were different. Publishers and agents were supposed to stick with writers through the mean and lean years.
Th
ey were supposed to be courteous, courageous, loyal, generous, and determined. Was it possible they were just as unmannerly, cowardly, treacherous, venal, and irresolute as I was?

But at least now I had a book party to go to. And a plan. In attendance would be editors, assistant editors, publishers, writers. Wall-to-wall literariness.
I could network there!

Like me, Artsy Painter Gal didn't have a profile up on the Galaxy. To our fellow players, we were mysteries. People could click on our names, go to our profiles, but learn next to nothing. When I first got a glimpse of her moniker I thought that she might be a house painter.

It had occurred to me that I might be stalking her. Five times, in the beginning of our relationship, I had sought her out and then—poof! just like Barbara Eden's genie popping into a living room—shown up at her table. But this fear was put to rest one day when I was playing at a table and
she
appeared. APG had been seeking me out . . . and when I realized the crush was mutual, for a few minutes I was fifteen years old all over again.

Th
at day I was riding one of those amazing streaks that serious gamblers go to churches to pray for. I remember staying in with one hand when I knew I should have folded. But I'd won so much by then that I figured:
Why the hell not? . . . I'll stay in.
I needed a 7 on the river to make a 9-high straight and sure enough, a 7 I got. As the Big Man in his yellow Don Ho shirt reached over to collect the $900, Artsy, in the guise of the Sexy Blonde, appeared.

We commenced the snappy repartee that would eventually become our daily conversation. It was something out of a Howard Hawks movie, had Hawks been born forty years later with a much filthier mind. Nobody could follow us, nobody could really join in, and, after ten minutes of the banter, nobody wanted to: the four other players left and it was just APG and Chip Zero.

After about ten minutes of absolute nonsense, all of it flirty and fun, she changed the tone.

Artsy Painter Gal:
So, uh, am I allowed one serious off-topic question?

Chip Zero:
One and only one. So make it count, baby. And I wasn't aware there was a topic.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Love it when you call me baby, baby. Okay . . . what's your real name and what do you really do?

If I told her that I had two unsuccessful books under my belt she'd know that I was a novelist, which might impress her unless, of course, she'd already met a few novelists in her life and knew better. (And I still dreaded the possible “Oh, I could write a book about my life . . . !” My answer to that is always: “No. You really shouldn't.”) I decided to . . .

Chip Zero:
Okay, I'll tell you. I've written 2 books.
Th
ere!

Artsy Painter Gal:
Uh-huh. Everybody's written two books. Were they published?

Chip Zero:
Yeah. But nothing for a while.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Can I get a title or do I have to torture you by wrapping my incredibly long, thin, recently waxed legs around your neck and tightening them?

I waited a few seconds and thought it over.

Chip Zero:
Th
e first book was about a man unwittingly carrying the plague and accidentally wiping out millions. But in the end it turns out he didn't really. He was just the dream of a dead person in Hell. It was sort of a comedy.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Was it called
Plague Boy
?

My heart skipped a few beats and I think I even saw my rotund platinum-blond cartoon avatar perspire behind his round, rose pink shades. (Only on one occasion have I ever seen anyone reading a novel of mine in public:
Plague
had just come out and there was a pretty girl on a subway, smiling and turning the pages greedily; when I approached her and told her I had written the book she was reading, she looked for the author photo and, finding none, assumed I was a lunatic trying to pick her up. I quickly shuffled to the next car, then got off the subway at the next station, five stops prematurely.) A writer who's written a book that hasn't sold, when told by someone that they've read the book, will often joke, “Oh! So
you're
the one!” A defense mechanism, a way of grinning through the anguish. But APG had read the book.