Pocket Kings (33 page)

As we were closing the door to our high-roller suite for the last time, the door to the other suite flew open, and one of the Go-Go Girl escorts, in shocking pink hot pants and a black fishnet halter top, ran out and headed down the hallway toward the vending machine.
Th
ere was none of the usual silly giggling from inside the suite. Another of the escorts, possibly Shiloh, stepped out and stood hand on hip . . . she still had on the sequin-spangled mini and was telling the other to “Hurry! . . . hurry!” She looked fed up and tired.
Th
e hot-pants escort came jiggling back with a bucket of ice and went into the suite. Shiloh looked at me and said, “
Th
is isn't all it's cracked up to be, let me tell you.”

I looked in and saw Rusty Wells on the floor, not a stitch on save for his white Stetson, on his hands and knees. Two other woman were standing over him while he retched onto the shag carpeting, and the Jacuzzi in the room was hissing and the steam was rising.
Th
e ice-carrying escort handed a few cubes to another one, but nobody knew what to do. Rusty's back and arms were as pink as coral and he was vomiting and laughing and there was a handcuff around one wrist and he said, between heaves: “Awww man, it just don't get any better 'n this!”

Twenty minutes later we were at the airport.

Security there did a double-take: the dull, moppy gray hair on my driver's license photo no longer matched the hot yellow hair on my head. But then they figured it out.

I didn't want to be there when Johnny said good-bye to Tracey, so I went into the small airport bookstore and looked for myself in the fiction section and, of course, didn't find any sign I'd ever written a book or even been born. However, three neat stacks of
Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen
books were prominently displayed on their best-selling-fiction table. Each copy, I saw, had an Oprah sticker, and a serrated knife sliced through every organ from my neck to my colon.

(My blurb had
almost
gotten into the book. Was this as close as I'd get to ever being published again?)

Th
ere was tap on my shoulder and it was Second.

It was time to board and we got on line. We didn't mention History Babe.

“Hey,” Johnny said to me as me moved forward. “Did you win or lose?”

“Where? . . . Here?”

His puffy, bloodshot eyes needed a long rest: the flight to New York and then to England might not be enough.

“Yeah. Did you finish up or down?”

I told him that I hadn't bet the entire time. Not on the terrestrial flesh-and-blood plane, only in cyberspace. Not one hand of poker or blackjack, not one roll of the dice.

“I didn't bet either,” he said with a little laugh.
Th
en he said something out of place, for him (or for anyone): “Didn't Albert Einstein say that God doesn't play dice? Well, neither did I.” Who knew that the night clerk of the second-best hotel in Blackpool could quote Einstein?

We had traveled over 2,500 miles and driven over lolling, shade-drenched hills and down through emerald and teal sunswept valleys; we'd gone past a thousand Main Streets and around spankin' brand-new exurbs that looked as if they were constructed out of Legos, and past redbrick high schools and A-frame Lutheran churches with purple and cherry-red stained-glass windows; we'd seen spewing smokestacks and abandoned factories and mile-high silos and cricket-infested fields with phantom Christinas dragging themselves along the tall grass; we'd driven past sunlit malls that bustled like ant farms, past moonlit ballfields and lonely eternities of cornfields; we'd gone over mountains and through great charred wastes all the way to the desert; and neither Toll House Cookie nor History Babe nor Second Gunman nor Chip Zero had risked one single red American cent.

But I had won—on the laptop, in the flickering etherworld—more than $29,000 in three days.

12

WWHMD?

W
ifey never did find out that I hadn't been in New York pining away for her return from the Appalachians.
Th
ere was no telltale tan, sunburn, extended hangover, or conglomeration of hickies, and the apartment looked just as bad as if I'd been there the whole time. It was perfect. What wasn't perfect was her first impression of my new platinum-blond hair and tricked-out James Joyce shades. (When she first got a glimpse of it, her response was simply: “Okay . . . so, why?”) I kept the look and she said, unconvincingly, she would try to adjust.

One night I went to my desk and pulled out
Dead on Arrival
from a drawer and looked at it with fresh eyes. It had been a while. I read the part where the wife kills herself and her children. Twenty pages later my main character was having sex with his kids' babysitter, fifteen pages after that he was doing his late wife's sister. Nick Hornby, I knew, couldn't write stuff like this if he wanted to. And he wouldn't want to. John Updike, John Cheever, and Richard Yates had never come close to this type of ugliness.
Th
is was the churning, toxic cesspool behind Revolutionary Road that everybody preferred to agree wasn't really there.

“So,” I asked Cynthia later that night, “did you finish it?”

“Not yet,” she answered. “It's so dark.”

I looked at her blankly and she said, “I don't know what else you want me to say.”

She would, I could tell, never finish it. She and thousands of others would never make it to the last page. It was a crying shame.

I didn't know much about the books Deke Rivers and Last Resort Press put out, but they had to be worse than
Dead on Arrival
. I wasn't going to shell out one cent to have my breakthrough novel published and it would have been nice to have gotten paid for all my hard work, but by now any publisher in the world could have had it for free.
Didn't they know that?

(But maybe I didn't want them to know that.)

After I reread the first half of
Dead on Arrival
and reflected on how I'd ascended halfway up Literary Mountain only to plummet all the way back down, after I considered that the path back up was now blocked to me, I would venture to say that of the eleven pints of blood in my body, ten and a half consisted of furiously boiling rage.
Th
e other eight ounces were merely anger.

Clint Reno had let me down. I had to let him go. Even though he had let me go first.

I wanted to tear every hair out of his head, especially the slick ones in his perfect ponytail, and then pummel him in front of his coworkers who, in this juvenile homicidal fantasy, would cheer me on and claim to the cops that they'd seen nothing, heard nothing. “Great job, Frank!” one of them would say. “We were hoping someone would do that to him one day.”

(“You really have to stop carrying around these horrible grudges,” Wifey has told me numerous times. “It's unhealthy.” “You don't understand,” I've explained to her, “I
am
my grudges.” And it was true: if I didn't have them, then I didn't have me.)

Clint hadn't e-mailed me when I had pneumonia, he hadn't e-mailed me when I was in a hospital with an eye patch over my eye and another patient's excrement all over my pajamas (yeah, I know: that never really happened, but
he
didn't know that!). I thought of sending him e-mails telling him I had brain cancer . . . I wanted to see at precisely which ailment he would be moved to write me back. A stroke? Pleurisy? Food poisoning? Maybe no disease was drastic enough. Maybe he would only contact me after I was dead.

I decided to stalk his sartorially perfect ass again.

I had just sat down at my usual Dunkin' Donuts stool across the street from his office and thrown back three Munchkins when I saw him strutting down the street. I hadn't really thought about what I'd do if I saw him (I wasn't armed), but I got up, grabbed the box of doughnuts, and trotted toward him, intending to pretend that this was a casual run-in.

“Hey, Clint!” I called out with a friendly Hey-Look-Who's-Here wave from the other side of the street. It was 9 a.m. and blustery out, but his ponytail didn't whip in the wind. He probably spent an hour shellacking it every morning before he left the house.

“Yes?” he called back with a squint, not really seeing me getting closer.

“Clint . . . it's me . . . Frank Dixon!”

We stood a foot apart. As usual, he was dressed impeccably. His tie not only always matches his shirt but also the affected faint freckles dotting the bridge of his nose.

“Aahhh!” he said. “You must want Clint.”

“
You're
Clint,” I said. “Right?”

“No . . . I'm Vance.” His identical twin brother. His business partner. Who works in L.A. and who seldom comes to New York.

“You are?” I asked.

“Heh.
Th
is isn't the first time this has happened to me. Or to Clint.”

“You're really Vance Reno?” Now I was the squinter and he was the squintee and I was clutching the Munchkins so tight that the box was starting to crack.

“Clint happens to be in London now on business.”

I could have asked Vance what he was doing in New York, I could have asked him why he now wore his hair in a ponytail just as his brother did, I could have asked him, “So since when did you start wearing suits?” since the two times I'd met him he'd worn jeans and a T-shirt, and I could have asked him since when did his tie and shirt match so perfectly, but I opted not to. If it
was
Clint trying to avoid me and pass himself off as his twin, then I couldn't bring myself to humiliate him (Clint) by telling him that I knew he wasn't really him (Vance). If it was Vance, then I didn't want to confront him (Vance) either, since he wasn't really him (Clint).

But I did gather up enough courage to say: “Wow, it's amazing how much you look like him now, Vance,” my words not dripping with as much sarcasm as I would have liked.

“Yes,” he said, just about to enter the building to escape me, “I'm quite often mistaken for myself.”

I politely asked him if he could, once he was upstairs, do some quick digging around and find out to which publishers Clint had sent
Dead on Arrival.
Why do you want that information? he asked. Not letting on about Ross F. Carpenter, I said: “Because I just do.”

He told me he'd get right on it and hurried inside.

All the Munchkins were on the ground at my feet.
Th
e box had broken.

“How much more of this abject misery can one human being take?” the fed-up
Time
Magazine reviewer had remarked about
Plague Boy.
Life was giving me a brutal pasting and I was just taking it. It felt like all ten billion other people in the world were kicking, punching, and biting me and would rather abuse me, shame me, and cause me tremendous anguish than eat, breathe, drink, and have sex amongst themselves. It was their idea of a good time.

(Once when I was about nine, my Uncle Ray and I boxed in his Elizabeth, New Jersey, living room. He broke my nose with a right jab.
Th
e blood poured out and I began to cry at the top of my lungs. “Why didn't you put your guard up?” Uncle Ray asked me. “Why didn't you punch back?” As he plugged both my nostrils with tissue and tried to comfort me, I whimpered, “Because I didn't want to hurt you.”)

In Las Vegas I had vowed to do something. It was now time to make more vows.

No longer would I let people kick me around. I had to fight back. I had to wriggle free from the Whipping Post of the World and whip back.

I logged on to the Galaxy, opened up a page in Word, and started playing poker and making my vows at the same time.

At the top of the page I wrote “What Would Herman Melville Do?”

Herman Melville wrote
Typee
(his
Plague Boy
) and then
Omoo
(his
Love: A Horror Story
). A scrappy sonuvabitch, that New York-born and -bred fighter kept fighting back.
Moby Dick
was his un­doing, but still he never gave up.
Th
ey kept knocking him down but he kept getting back up.

#1: I will call Clint Reno. I will
demand
the list of names I need. No e-mails. No messages. No snail mail. Voice-to-ear contact. Live, as it happens. He
will
comply.

#2: No, I won't call. I'll push my way into his office. If he gives me a dirty look, if he threatens to call the police, I will yell so loud that I'll see his eardrums turn to powder and sift out of his ears.

I won $850 with three 5s at the Medium tables and it put me above $232,000.
Th
e next hand, I won $600 with two 8s.

#3: I will call Martin Tilford and ask him, “Hey, remember me?
Th
e seared peppercorn tuna at Café Quelquechose? So, Martin, I was wondering . . . have you made it to the second sentence of my book yet?”

Two 10s and two 5s at the High tables. $1,450. Two Aces the next hand: $900.

Herman Melville was a steel-tough, sea-tested, iron-nail-chewin' battler but wound up working for U.S. Customs. It wasn't going to go that way for me. Why not? Because I had poker to fall back on. No dumb uniform for me other than pajamas or sweatpants. I had to be resilient.
Th
e more they knocked me down, the tougher I'd get, until their own fists were bloodied and broken and they couldn't knock me down anymore.
Th
is was war! I would become a raging pest, the Mother of All Nuisances, the Annoying Hyper­active Little Brother to everyone who had ever mistreated me; I'd be the bane of the publishing world's existence and
Publishers Weekly
would put me on their cover, my newly peroxided and bespectacled kisser inside a circle with a red X through it. I would be the Fly in the Lit World's Ointment, and my mug shot would be pinned to the walls in PEN offices around the world (if there are such offices). You rejected me? You snubbed me? Well, guess what.
It's clobberin' time!

A 10-high straight in High: $1,600. Two Queens, two 9s: $1,300.

#4: I will buy a
Writer's Market
and deluge agents and editors and I
will
be published again! I do have two books under my belt and it's not like I'll be coming at these book peoples from nowhere. Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads . . . here is a man who would not take it anymore. Here is a man who stood up. A man could stand up! I won't be ignored! Attention must be paid. I can coruscate, blister, and unsettle like nobody's business. I can lick any man alive and give him the kind of spiritual rash to end all kinds of spiritual rashes!

Th
ree 10s in Ultra-High. $3,100. What did some ten-year-old bully once say to me while he was beating me up after a basketball game: “You fuck with me, you fuck with the best. You fuck with me, you die like the rest.”

Back down to Medium. Two Jacks
.
$500. Two hands later, a club flush: $700. Van Morrison once sang, “Listen to the lion in your soul.” I was listening to mine with the volume cranked, and the lion was roaring so loud the neighbors would soon be banging on the wall.

#5: I will track down this “actress” who had only two speaking lines in a play I once cowrote that was workshopped in Minneapolis but who went off on her own one day and wrote a five-page monologue for herself. I'll track her down at whatever restaurant she's slinging hash in or office she's temping at and ask her: “So, uh, how's the whole acting thing working out for you?”

Back up to High. Leopold Gloom, Sam Spades, Bjorn 2 Win. Full house, 8s full of 3s. $3,800. In the real world I was a deuce or a lowly 4, but here I was a face card, a puissant, swaggering, omni­potent King barely noticing his subjects as he trampled them. Maybe it really was better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, especially since Hell paid so much better.

If you ever cut me down, if you ever ignored me, if you ever disrespected me, then, pal, I am about to become the worst hemorrhoid you will ever have!
You die like the rest.

I took a breather. For ten seconds. I reread my vows. It was becoming a manifesto!

#6: I will call and e-mail editors in the U.K. and they will publish my book over there and I will win the Man Booker Prize and
then
I will have Deke Rivers publish my book here and will thus be able to keep 90 percent of the profits and share not one cent of it with all the American publishers who rejected me. If they reject me in England, then I will visit upon them something so wicked and so downright irritating, that they'll
wish
it was just the Black Plague coming around again and not me.

Two Queens. $2,400. Back to Medium. Two 9s, two 7s. $450.
Th
e world was full of ants and I was a size 18EEE shoe. It was Hiroshima and I was the
Enola Gay.