Pocket Kings (46 page)

I stood up and looked at him and grabbed his tie.

Reader, I decked him. One sock to the jaw. A vicious right cross.

I knocked him hard to the floor—his head rebounded frighteningly off the radiator—and thanked him for his advice and left.

Heading down the stairs, I thought:
So should I send Clint my poker memoir when I'm finished? Who knows—maybe he'll like it, all will be forgiven and he'll shop it around!

It's true. I slugged Clint Reno. (
Th
at bitch had it coming, too.) He could have called the cops and had me arrested for assault and for impersonating a reclusive, successful, vastly overrated author, but he was probably too embarrassed. (If a headline were ever to read
FAILED AUTHOR PUNCHES OUT LITERARY AGENT
, nobody but another literary agent would ever take the agent's side.) I imagine that a few minutes after I left, Courtney was either holding a bag of ice to his face or sitting on it.

It's all true. It all really happened.

One memoir that isn't all true rests on my institutional coffee table at this very moment:
Nuts,
by Gerald Waverly. Waverly, I admit, possesses a flair for a tale and, unlike this memoirist, keeps his story moving forward with every sentence, which is quite an impressive accomplishment considering he is an unfeeling, cutthroat sociopath. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money was; Gerald Waverly robs people for the same reason but also because afterward people feel used, barren, and violated and banks do not.

Particularly fascinating in Waverly's 289-page rip-roaring memvel is when he states Americans make the best marks because they are “so trusting, so earnest, so desperate to be loved, so heartbreakingly gullible.” According to
Nuts,
two years ago, Waverly, in the guise of a three-star chef named Simon Barker, wormed his way into the life of a Minneapolis realtor: they became chums, took a long weekend in Puerto Rico together, picked up hot Latinas.
Th
en he defrauded the poor guy out of 420 grand. A few months later, pretending to be a roguish Welsh poet named Ewan Llewellyn, he did the same to a bipolar art dealer in Palm Beach.
Th
ree Queens ruined him. (
Th
at score was for 800K . . . so maybe I shouldn't feel so bad.)

But as is the case with other pseudomemoirs, I just cannot tell where truth ends and fiction begins. Some of it seems all too real, some of it stinks like week-old haddock and chips. Because in the final chapter of the U.S. edition, Waverly, now passing himself off as Nigel Hatcher, comes to America,
purposely
loses ten grand in a makeshift New York City casino (located beneath a hospital, not a bodega) run by colorful Brooklyn mafiosi (they even say “fuhgedd­aboutit” to him once, which is, for my taste, one time too many), then ends up driving to Las Vegas in a stolen red Mustang convertible (no mention of Abdul Salaam, thus robbing F. Murray Abraham of the plum movie role) with a self-loathing literary has-been named Chet Morton (who'd had his only book hit the best-seller list ten years before and who plays online under the name the Big Man), and picks up, along the way, a handsome streetwise New Jersey homicide cop named Delroy Johnson (poker handle: King of Spades) and a Pamela Anderson look-alike (poker handle: Astro Physics Chick). Exaggerations abound, embellishments bounce all over the place like Super Balls, and bald-faced whoppers spit in your eye. “I shagged Astro on the bonnet of the Mustang on Route 66 in broad daylight while the Big Man and King of Spades watched and cheered me on,” Waverly claims. Huh? Route 66? “
Th
e Homicide Cop bruthah and the Former Writer and I had a pissing contest to see who could piss the farthest across the Rio Grande,” he tells us. “I won.” “I'm going to write a book about you, I think,” the literary has-been slurs to Nigel Hatcher one night in an Amarillo honky-tonk. “Please don't,” Waverly, knowing that a few months later he'll cheat chubby Chet for almost every penny, requests. (Don't worry, Nige, I won't!) In Las Vegas, Waverly not only wins $80,000 from Astro Physics Chick at poker in their high-roller suite at the Bellagio but then dumps her for three strippers. He buys a Bentley and gets into a card game with the hunky homicide dick and takes him for sixty large. By the time he's driven back to New York, not only has the washed-up writer developed a serious man crush on the dashing Brit (“He was even starting to talk like me,” Waverly writes. “
Th
at's when I knew he'd be mine”) but so has his wife, Mrs. Big Man, who literally gets on her knees and begs him to whisk her away from her humdrum New York life and take her back to London, where Nigel supposedly manages a successful hedge fund.

Well, at least in his version, I did at one time crack the best-seller list.

So who is Gerald Waverly? And who is Bjorn 2 Win?

“What I like to do,” Waverly tells us in Chapter 3 (“How To Be a Nefarious Scoundrel”), “is present myself not just as a friend but as a hero. It was easy to do if I also manufactured a villain. It was easy being Luke Skywalker if I was also Darth Vader; it was easy being Churchill when I was also Adolph Hitler. It never failed.”

Gamblers are paranoid by profession and should be.
Th
e odds are stacked against you and everybody truly is out to get you.

When Second came to New York, when we drove to Vegas and flew back, I never once saw his ID. Nor did I ask to, for why in the world should I have? “Gerald Waverly,” the author tells us, is a
nom de plume
anyway. Was Johnny Tyronne his real name? He told me he worked at a hotel in Blackpool called the Four Swans.
Th
e day I lost all the money and decked Clint Reno, I Googled the Four Swans and learned that there did exist such a hotel . . . until five years ago, when it burned to the ground. I called Blackpool directory assistance: there was no Johnny, John, or J. Tyronne or any other Tyronne. Further digging uncovered five other hotels in England called the Four Swans. No Johnny Tyronne had recently worked at any of them. My best mate was the shadow of a phantom.
1

Th
ere was no Bjorn 2 Win either.
Th
e day after I lost all that money, B2W disappeared from the site. He was the Darth/Adolph to Second Gunman's Luke/Winston. I tried to recall all the times that I'd played against the Baltic Butcher: not once had Second Gunman, despite having told me how pathetic a player the Swede was, ever been at the same table. Many was the time, moreover, that Second had
sent
me to play Bjorn. “He's dead money,” Second often told me. (And I recall now how conspicuously agitated Johnny/ Second/Gerald got in Las Vegas when I recommended we play Bjorn 2 Win for a few easy thousand. “It's not a good idea,” he'd snapped. He even told me how sorry he felt for him.
Th
at bastard. And he, with his First in Physics at Cambridge, had also quoted Einstein to me—momentarily slipping out of character—about how God does not throw dice.
Th
at cold-blooded rat bastard.) For eleven months Bjorn lost to me, then he began threatening me.

Winston feckin Churchill to the rescue.

Th
ere was no Bjorn 2 Win, there was no Second Gunman.

All his feckins and bloodys and gobshites and mates. Summoned right up from Central Casting, he was. He wasn't even an
original
fake! And I fell for it.

I think I can pinpoint the exact moment when he decided to make me his next mark. It was when I told him my real name and he checked out my lousy Amazon rankings.
Th
at's when he knew I was a soft target and could be had. Yes, that was it.

At Shining Path, while I held sweaty hands with my fellow addicts and lip-synched the Serenity Prayer, I could not stop myself from wondering: were the cards real? Were the games I played with Gerald Waverly on the afternoon of my downfall “honest” games? When we played with real cards, I won the first two hands, then he killed me the next three. (I was so whacked in the head that day that I didn't even cancel the check I wrote him.) Maybe he had stacked the deck, maybe he was pulling cards from his sleeve, a pants' pocket, or his asshole. But what I really think is that when we played online, when I sat on the floor under my self-portrait and he was at my desk . . .
I am convinced he had rigged the games
.
Th
e way the hands played out, card by card, bet by bet . . . it all played out perfectly like a script he had written. I was unwittingly starring in his movie, the movie of my own tragic downfall.

Second Gunman hasn't been on the site since that day. He's gone.

Show me a writer who isn't paranoid and I'll show you a deceased writer. Every year 200,000 new books come out, which means at least 199,999 other writers are hoping you fail. Critics lie in wait poised to tear you down.
Th
e odds are stacked against you.

In
Nuts
Waverly claims he occasionally uses other people as foils and shills. So then, was Artsy Painter Gal in on the scheme, too?
Th
ink about it. She formed a long-distance romantic connection with me, we conversed daily, she stood me up and vanished. And then—when I was vulnerable and wallowing in this nadir—Second Gunman, her possible accomplice, moved in for the kill. Yes, I did see APG in the flesh on Empyrean Island, I saw her husband and kids . . . but maybe they weren't really her husband and kids and were itinerant farm workers or out-of-work L.A. actors. Perhaps Gerald/Johnny/Second/Whoever paid Artsy and her “family” to go to that resort. Not only did they get a lovely weekend on Empyrean Island out of it but also an additional ten grand.
Th
at would be a drop in the bucket for Gerald Waverly when he finally cleaned me out.

All APG really had to do was pretend to like me for a little while.

Was History Babe in on it? Something about their relationship didn't seem right. Maybe Gerald flew her into Colorado so that we could pick her up. Maybe they're really husband and wife and it was some sort of perverted role play. Or maybe they're brother and sister.

Th
e only one I trust is Toll House Cookie. But maybe I shouldn't even trust him.

Is it possible that the
Times, Time
magazine, and
Th
e Boston
Globe
were also in on the caper?
Th
ey purposely gave my books bad reviews so that publishers wouldn't publish me anymore so that I would then take up playing poker and I'd believe it was the only thing in the world I was good at. And then Gerald Waverly would strike.

Maybe Hollywood was aiding and abetting, too, when they didn't make a movie out of
Plague Boy.

Maybe
you
were in on it when you didn't buy my first two books?

No, there was no Second Gunman. And Toll House Cookie, History Babe, Artsy Painter Gal, Wolverine Mommy, and Grouchy Old Man didn't really exist either. Because neither did Chip Zero. Cartoon characters all.

Th
ere's another possibility that chills me. In the dead of night I shoot up in my bed and think about it until it makes me sick. Was Cynthia in on it, too?

How convenient was it: I go to London to hook up with a mistress I barely know, the mistress doesn't show up, I return home, Wifey throws me out, I lose $550K?

Is it possible that she and Johnny fell in love with each other the first time he visited? And that, while I was penning this book in Michigan and New Jersey, they were conducting a torrid affair with each other? Supposedly Second returned to Blackpool and the Four Swans after Las Vegas . . . but I have no proof that he ever
was
in Blackpool. Maybe while I was busy not getting laid in London at the Royal Brompton Hotel, he was getting busy with my wife in New York on Sixteenth Street and Eighth Avenue.

“I enjoy tormenting my marks,” Waverly tells us in Chapter 5 (“I, Scumbag”), “after I distance them from their money.” He leaves “calling cards” for his victims, he says, objects he knows will strike a raw nerve. After he bilked the Minneapolis real estate man, he left a chef's hat in the man's underwear drawer; after he took the bipolar Palm Beach art dealer for a ride, he left a Welsh dictionary in his medicine cabinet.

Th
ose mysterious cold cuts in my refrigerator . . . was that Swedish horsemeat?

I'll never know.