Pocket Kings (19 page)

Keeping up the ruse that I still had a real job and a real place to go to every day, I kept going to Starbucks in the morning, where I would wait for Cynthia to leave our building. (If this seems sad, then keep in mind: this Starbucks is now closed and everyone who worked there was laid off.) Every morning I told myself that later that night I would tell her the truth. And one day, toward the end of July, I did tell her the truth but it certainly wasn't on my terms.

It was 9 a.m. and she'd been gone for fifteen minutes. I was so absorbed with an absurdly positive book review that day that I couldn't concentrate on anything. I read the review over and over again. Everything that they loved about the book—a slow-moving, elegant, and empty novel about post-9/11 New York—was everything that I would hate about it, if I ever read it, which someone would have to pay me good money to do.
Th
e book would do well, I knew, and so would the author's next book and the ten after that; it didn't even matter if they were any good (and they wouldn't be).
Th
e author was set for life and he had Osama Bin Laden to thank for it. After the fifth reading, the review faded to a rectangular blotch and then suddenly from nowhere, and from everywhere, I heard a voice asking me what I was doing there.

It was Cynthia. Right in front of me. A foot away. Looking at me, at the book review, at the poker on my laptop. She'd had to go back home, she eventually told me, to take a quick pee and, her bladder now emptied, she thought she'd get some coffee for the road.

A hundred lies, fifty of which were fairly plausible (and of those fifty lies, thirty of which she would have believed), occurred to me all at once and as I was weighing them out I heard my voice say: “I don't work anymore. I quit. A while ago. Sorry.”

Telling the truth, I thought, was an even more brilliant strategy than telling any of the lies I'd so swiftly concocted.

She snatched the newspaper out of my hand and slammed shut my computer. I thought of Gloria Graham throwing boiling coffee into Lee Marvin's face in
Th
e Big Heat
but realized that Cynthia was drinking an iced latte; if she decided to go all Fritz Lang on my ass, it wouldn't have been so bad.

“We'll talk about this later,” she hissed.

I told her that I looked forward to the discussion and that it would be like being rid of a tremendous burden, her knowing the truth I'd been hiding from her all these months.

As she headed for the door, I reminded her that I was writing, not just playing.

She believed me but didn't seem to care.

But at least I wasn't cheating on her.

Although I was. Sort of.

Artsy Painter Gal and I would e-mail soft-core fantasies to each other—always worded in the present tense (“I'm slowly pulling off my panties while you . . .”)—and, in hers, she carefully avoided the elephant in the room: what I looked like.

Courtesy of Google Images I was able to find two pictures of Victoria Landreth, her real name. APG had told me that she once looked like a young Joan Collins and I could see it: she had the same cheeks and black hair, the same lustrous eyes and lips. I don't look like that anymore, she informed me. (But who among us didn't look better fifteen years ago unless we've had plastic surgery since?) Every time she told me she didn't care at all what I looked like, I told her that if she knew what I looked like she might start caring. I informed her I had gained some weight since discovering online poker, though I kept the numbers vague. “Don't you think,” I asked her, “that if I looked like George Clooney my wife would be keeping a much shorter rein on me?” She said, “If you looked like George Clooney, you wouldn't have gotten married!”

“True, very true.”

“Labor Day weekend.
Th
e Nirvana on Empyrean Island. We'll be in Tower 1, the hubby, the kids, and me. Why don't you take a few days off and we'll meet. You'll have fun. Maybe you'll get a nice suntan or even—dare I say—start writing again?”

“I'll start doing that when you start painting, okay?”

“Sorry. You're right. But I'd love to meet you.”

After that conversation I had trouble concentrating on the tasks at hand: winning money, obliterating the competition, being King of Hold'em Hill. Gambling was now my full-time profession. It was what I did for a living. I was a pokerizer.

But that afternoon, a week after our Starbucks encounter, as I pondered telling Cynthia I was thinking of taking a few days off to go to the Caribbean, I dropped around $18K. It was an ugly onslaught of lousy cards and dumbass moves. Or maybe I wasn't concentrating because I was daydreaming about a lazy river pool and ice-cold Coronas and finally meeting my e-mistress, or I was thinking about heading out to Vegas to work with Harry on his script. When Second Gunman saw my diminished stack the next day he said, “Bloody hell! What happened to you?!” While I was recounting with blow-by-blow detail my run of bad hands, I lost an additional $1,800 to him.

Did I want to meet Artsy? Yes, desperately. Did I want to get out of New York City for a spell? Certainly. Did I want Artsy to see my new wider, plumper self? Hell no. (
Maybe,
it occurred to me,
I could send Lonnie Beale down there to fill in for me!
) Did I want to see Artsy's husband? Nope. He was the robust, outdoorsy L.L. Bean type and not only was he capable of doing many of the things that I wasn't, but he actually enjoyed doing them: wearing a tool belt, camping out, running marathons, making money. When women in showers all around the country fantasized about anonymous, faceless firemen and handymen and brought themselves to orgasm, it was him they were picturing.

“I'm thinking of taking a few days off,” I told Cynthia over pizza in SoHo that night.

“From
what?
”

“From New York . . . I haven't been out of town for a while. Not since . . .”

“Since Las Vegas, right?”

Right.
Th
e dice table at the Luxor. I told her that I had the Nirvana Hotel on Empyrean Island in mind. Massages. Tropical drinks. Total relaxation. Chillin' like a villain.

“You know,” I reminded her, “I
am
working on a book. And I'm exhausted.”

(A year ago I would not have been able to pull this off with such aplomb and without even a telltale swallow or momentary look askance. Before this I had really only mastered the white lie, saying things like, “Okay, pork chops are fine,” when I really wanted chicken. How had I become so good at subterfuge, deception, at outright lying? Why was I able to pull it off without any slight twinge in my conscience?
Th
e answer is easy: poker. Poker had taught me to bluff guilt-free.)

I told her the
Trilogy
was truly groundbreaking stuff. For the hell of it I pinched some twaddle from Hemingway and told her that what Cezanne had done with painting and landscapes, I was doing with literature. To my tremendous relief and great disappointment, she bought it.

“So,” I told her, “I need a break from that. And from the poker. Or I could bring the laptop and just work on the book by the pool.”

(We'd had our talk. I nearly cried when I said how sorry I was for not having told her I'd quit my job. I told her I was miserable and that all I wanted to do was write. I'd been living a lie. She was still mad.
Th
e next day she wasn't quite as mad.
Th
e day after that she was only mildly sore. And now . . .)

“Instead of the laptop,” she offered, “you could bring me.”

“I was just about to ask if you wanted to go,” I lied. “You didn't give me the chance.”

As soon as we got home, I booked the trip. I went back online, spent five hours playing and won back four thousand. Shaken by disturbing dreams of Joan Collins and Gerard Depardieu, I woke up at four to take a leak and then played some more. I played until Wifey woke up at the usual time, and by that afternoon not only had I won back all the money I'd lost but also enough for our little end-of-summer fling.

No longer did I have to go through the ruse of pretending to take the subway to work, so that morning I walked Cynthia to the subway station. As she was about to descend I said, “Hey . . . I have these for you.”

I told her I was sorry for everything and handed her the Elsa Peretti necklace and earrings. Even though it was ninety degrees out and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, this was that rainy day.

“You don't need to do this,” she said.

“I know.”

We kissed on the lips, she took the jewelry anyway, and we parted.

(Some shameless, no-longer-relevant author once received a shitload of money for plugging Bvlgari in a novel. I am getting nothing from Tiffany for mentioning them in this memoir but if they wish to contribute, they know where to find me.)

Th
e jewelry was originally meant to be so glittery that it would blind her to any amount of deception and treachery. But we were past that now. For the most part.

It's one thing to be a pariah in the literary world, where I never belonged, but to be a piranha in my own fish tank—Pokergalaxy.com— would be too much to bear.
Th
e Galaxy is not only my refuge, it is the Patusan to my Lord Jim, the streets of Persepolis to my Tamburlaine.
Th
ere the world is a Sunday best-seller list and every weekend I am Mitch Albom. In August I made it past the $150,000 earnings mark.
Th
ere was no confetti, no streamers, no dancing girls; CNN, FOX News, and Gawker did not report it. Were I the blogging or tweeting kind, I would have given it nary a mention. But the amount was, in six months of work, more than what my first two books had brought me.
Th
e problem now, though, was that as I went to this table or that table to play, some players, when they saw the intimidating size of my stack, would leave right away.

I've heard that there are some porno actors who are so freakishly endowed that a few actresses refuse to work with them.
Th
is was as close to that as I'd ever get.

I understood what was going on and a few times purposely lost the first hand or folded the first couple of hands.
Th
at way the other players present would think I was on a bad schneid and would stick around to move in for the kill. Once in a while I'd declare falsely that I'd already dumped $15,000 that day and was showing no signs of turning it around. When I did that, it was unbelievable how popular I quickly became. All the world, it seems, loves a loser.

Th
e more I won, the more I had to wager and the more confident I felt, and it was difficult to believe that only a few months ago my hands were clammy when I bet $10 of play money. Now I mostly shuttled back and forth between the High and Ultra-High tables. If I was on a real losing skid, I rode it out, gnashed my teeth and shook my legs so much that the floorboards began to splinter. When my luck changed, when I was winning again and all the gears were meshing, I felt confident and moved back up to the Big Boys.

Th
ere were people on the site who had won a lot more money than I did, such as the incredible, inscrutable SaniFlush. Usually lurking silently in Ultra-High tables or at the No-Limit tables (where I rarely tread), by August he had won over a million bucks. I have played against him a few times but prefer not to. Watching him operate is like watching Rembrandt paint although probably a lot more exciting. His avatar is always the Psycho Killer with the Aviator Frames and the Hooded Sweatshirt, and he plays among the super-elite on the site; SaniFlush is frighteningly unpredictable, is a rampant pre-flop raiser and a maniacal bluffer (he may have been born with an extra testicle or two) and those are three things I avoid. He rarely says a word, and Second Gunman calls him the Prince of Poker Darkness. One time I saw SaniFlush foolishly draw to an inside straight and win $15,000. Even though they were disconsolate and must have hated his guts that second, Babe Ruthless and
Th
e Great Chatsby, his opponents that game, tossed him a NH and a VNH. SaniFlush didn't even say TY. For all I know he's a real poker superstar such as Jesus Ferguson, Daniel Negreanu, or Phil Ivey and he's just sneaking in a few online games to warm up for in-the-flesh games with real people and real cards.