Pocket Kings (20 page)

As I won more money and wagered more money, I often found myself conversing and joking around less. I was spending less and less time with my usual crew.

Because it wasn't just a game anymore. Now it was business.

Grouchy Old Man:
We don't see you that much anymore, Chip.

Chip Zero:
Hey, I'm here now, aren't I?

History Babe:
Yeah, but we know you're just slumming with us small potatoes. So tell me, what's it like up there, Mr. Zero, huh? Is it true that they serve caviar and Cristal and that when a player wins a hand he gets a bj underneath the table from a stripper?

Amarillio Slim-Fast:
Just go, Chip. Quit your slumming. Our feelings won't be hurt. You don't wanna be down here with the poor folk.

One time I won $7,500 in one hand—it was quad 7s beating a full house, Queens full of 7s—and I didn't get one NH for it. I was flabbergasted and I missed my old buddies who, every time I took their hard-earned money, always had the good manners to compliment me.

Th
e weird thing was that for me to lose fifteen grand in one day with a stack of $150K was dreadful and would torment me until I won it back, but it felt not one iota worse than when I used to lose $15 when my stack was $1,500. It meant the same amount, to the second, of teeth-grinding; it meant the same amount, to the decibel, of cursing aloud (“DAMN it! God DAMN it!”); the empty soda can I hurled against the wall traveled to the wall at the same velocity; it meant the same amount of lost sleep. It might take ten or one hundred hands or four or forty hours of up and down play for me to win that $15K back, but it also might take one off-the-wall lucky hand . . . and the same was true with the fifteen dollars.

Th
e thrill of victory was no different either. I can only pump my fist so hard so many times or jump up so high off the floor and I can only yell, “YEAH BABY! YEAH BABY!” so loud. If there were such an instrument as a Pleasureometer, I believe it would record that the amount of joy a kid feels when winning the Little League World Series is exactly the same as he feels when, twenty years later, he wins his first World Series.

I was now playing twelve hours a day on the average.

My dream states were crazed by poker, by cards, by players, by chips, all through the night. In the fuzzy half-life just before sleep, when people kick their myoclonic jerks (there is, I swear, a player named Myoclonic Jerk), there glimmered hardworking, soot-faced 3s of Clubs, overly optimistic 9s of Hearts, radioactive Pocket Rockets and the snooty, powdered faces of insolent Queens and Kings. As soon as I closed my eyes, this electric cardshow began.
Th
e shuffling of cards and the clattering of chips became the soundtrack of my dream life. Flops, turn, and river cards were being dealt from midnight until dawn. Even though I still had real dreams while asleep, ever distractingly present were cards, cards, chips, cards, players, cards, cards.

Another strange aspect of my new profession: when I looked at possessions I not only saw the things themselves but also saw the hands that made them possible. And not just the hands, but the people I was playing against and the pots I'd won. Every Sunday night Cynthia and I made the bed; it was impossible for me to look at that new $3,000 made-in-Italy bedframe and not think: three Jacks,
Th
e Scarlet Bettor, Pearl S. Luck, $3,000. Instead of seeing our brand-new sixty-inch plasma TV and whatever show I was watching, I saw: King-high straight, Folda Meir, Ante Maim, Willie McTells, $3,500. When Wifey got dressed to go to work, if I wasn't already in my study playing, I would look at the shoes she was putting on and think not of Jimmy Choo but of a Jack-high club flush, Derek Cheater, Ministry of Foam, Flush Gordon, $500. Not only did I see the hands, I saw them as they developed, card by card, raise by raise.

I used to imagine playing golf to induce sleep. It was a trick my mind played on my body, and if you're ever having a rough night, try picturing yourself as Phil Mickelson pitching out of the rough at Torrey Pines: you'll be fast asleep in two minutes. But that no longer worked, for as I lay curled up on my Sleep Number mattress (three 3s, Foldilocks, Pest Control, Lindsay NoHand, $1,000) and as I saw myself driving the ball off the tee, the sky hanging over Pebble Beach transformed into a fluttery mobile of playing cards and the fairway before me became the baize and the sand traps were full of millions of infinitesimal chips, not sand.

My dreams were no longer peopled by friends, family, and acquaintances, but by Poker Buddies and their cartoon avatars. In these dreams I was usually the Big Man with the round, rose pink sunglasses. I no longer dreamt on film or on tape. I had gone digital.

Th
ere were days when, all told, I played poker for seventeen hours.

Why was this happening to me? Why? Except for my alcoholic Uncle Ray, there is no history of addiction in my family, and never before in my life had I ever evinced any symptoms of addiction or even the slightest hint of a propensity for any kind of addiction whatsoever—other than for alcohol, sex, and drugs.

So why then? Why had playing cards taken over my life? I didn't even watch poker tournaments on TV—Orange County housewives, Alaskan crab fishermen, and Shark Week were more captivating to me.

When you wake up each morning, you are pretty sure how the day will go. If your life is managed right, there are few surprises in it . . . which is precisely the problem. When you see a movie you usually know within the first half-hour how it's going to end, and usually you don't even have to read the final twenty pages of a novel. But the course and outcome of a hand of poker is
always
a mystery, and even with only a dollar on the line, the suspense always kills me.

Th
e Chip Zero Super System involves folding a lot of hands, which makes for a lot of boredom. Sometimes I'll wind up folding six hands in a row and when this happens there's nothing to do but either watch the other players play and make note of their tactics and tendencies, or daydream. (Some days this new job of mine was just as boring as anyone else's.) During one such lull I sent an e-mail to Toby Kwimper, asking my dear old editor if he was interested in
Dead on Arrival.
I thought that Toby would like the book, I
knew
he would like it; after all, he had liked my first two books and both he and I were still the same people. It would be great, wouldn't it, if he wanted to publish it . . . then I would call Ross F. Carpenter and he'd arrange the deal with Toby's new house, TriHo Books.
Th
e key thing was to screw Clint Reno over and make him regret treating me so shabbily. As I folded bad hands I repeatedly imagined Clint picking a copy of
Publishers Weekly
and reading:

Frank W. Dixon has sold his third novel,
Dead on Arrival,
for an undisclosed sum to TriHo Books. Toby Kwimper, who edited Dixon's
Plague Boy
and
Love: A Horror Story,
will edit. Reportedly the deal is in the high six figures, although neither Mr. Dixon nor anyone at TriHo would confirm. Calls to Ross F. Carpenter, Mr. Dixon's new agent, were not returned. Mr. Kwimper described
Dead on Arrival
as “a coruscating, blistering, brilliant and disturbingly revelatory journey into the dark, twisted, wounded, damaged psyche of the Modern American Male.” Several movie companies have approached Mr. Carpenter for rights and a seven-figure deal is said to be imminent.

I lived for such a moment. No, not the book finally getting published—and at this point, the undisclosed sum could be a dime—but for the moment when Clint hanged himself in his office by either his Hermès tie or his own ponytail, the copy of
Publishers Weekly
still rolled up in his hands. He had let me dangle for months . . . now it was time for him to do some dangling.

One day an archaeologist will stumble upon some scrawls in an Eritrean cave or some cuneiform script on thirty-sixth-century B.C. tablets and publish a scholarly paper that proves what I've long suspected: writing was invented not as a way to communicate, record history, or effect commerce, but as a way to settle scores with enemies. A club to the head is great but it only kills once—you embarrass someone in print, it lasts forever. Hemingway humiliated the writer Harold Loeb in print while Loeb was alive, transforming him into the ex-pat Jewish shitheel Robert Cohn in
Th
e Sun Also Rises.
It was a devastating drubbing, although Hemingway made one minor miscalculation: had he not used Loeb as the basis for an unforgettable fictional character, not one single person today, including me, would remember who the hell Harold Loeb was. James Joyce exacted revenge on his old roomie Oliver St. John Gogarty by turning him into Buck Mulligan—once again keeping a mediocrity alive for eternity—and centuries ago, some Roman guy stole Ovid's girlfriend (or his boyfriend) and so what does Ovid do? He grabs a pen and some papyrus and turns the guy into a hyacinth.

I don't have that kind of courage, imagination, or talent. Disgracing a living person in print is like blowing a man's brains out face to face and keeping both your eyes open. But getting back at Clint Reno in the above fashion was as tidy a thing as pressing
SEND
on my cell phone and blowing him up from a hundred miles away.

So it was too bad that Toby never responded to my e-mail.

It was during another stretch of folding and daydreaming when Harry sent me an e-mail, asking if I wanted to cowrite the script. He had two weeks free around Labor Day, he told me. I e-mailed him back and told him I loved his idea but had plans to go with Cynthia to Empyrean Island then. I'll think about it, though, I wrote. And I did.

He e-mailed me back the next day and attached a file containing a vague scene-by-scene breakdown for the screenplay. “I NEED YOUR HELP WITH THIS!” he added.

I read the scenario and saw what was good and what wasn't and what might be done with it. I opened a page in Word and gazed for a minute into the terrifyingly empty blankness of it. It really did make me shudder from head to toe. I cut and pasted Harry's scenario in. It was now mine to tinker with . . . all I had to was add or subtract a few words, jumble things around, throw in some ideas. I stared at the screen, then played a hand of poker. I went back to the scenario, read it two times and even giggled when I thought of some dialogue and plot twists I'd throw in. Maybe, just maybe, this time something that Harry and I wrote would work! We were a lot older, a lot wiser, a lot less stoned, and now he knew Hollywood pooh-bahs. I played two more hands of poker, did some chatting, then went back. I read it again and thought of which actors would be great for which roles and envisioned them saying the lines that I would write. Leonardo DiCaprio, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Giamatti, Keira Knightly, Jake and Brad and Cate . . . the usual gang.
Hey maybe, if Harry and I cranked this out quickly, I could get it to Pacer Burton and he could make
Plague
and then do this! What a one-two punch that would be!
I played five more hands of poker, then another five.
Th
en I closed the file without saving it and e-mailed Harry and told him that I'd look at the scenario and get back to him.

“Let me know soon,” he wrote me only seconds later, “okay?”

I promised him I would.

Th
e words on the Nirvana Resort & Casino Web site describe the place better than I can: azure, snorkeling, turquoise, white sand, tropical breezes, couples, spa, lazy river pool, casino, relax, sun, frozen drinks, time stands still. Empyrean Island is a forty-minute ferry ride from Nassau; the ferry docks inside the hotel lobby.
Th
e Nirvana
is
the island, from what I could tell: the property occupies 90 percent of the land. You can walk around the island, on the beach, in two hours and never be out of the shadow of the hotel itself.
Th
e Nirvana's three immense towers are connected by bridges, and each bridge—for the benefit of the incredibly lazy—contains a moving sidewalk (the tread is made of clear fiberglass, and right beneath your feet swim hundreds of dazzling tropical fish).
Th
e theme seems to be Indian and Zen (there was a delicatessen in Tower 3 called Koan's Delhi) with some West Indian thrown in.
Th
e hotel staff, man and woman alike, wear russet brown silk shirts with Nehru collars but also Bermuda shorts, and the music playing throughout is a jingly mix of sitar and ska.
Th
e logo, an Eastern-looking cursive
N
escaping from a circle, is everywhere—on the floors, the linens, the china, the staff uniforms, the casino chips.

(
Th
e last time I'd been in the Caribbean was when I had to join fifty of my coworkers at an off-site retreat five years before. We were led in trust exercises, which included rock climbing (I passed on that) and cliff diving (no way). During one drill I was supposed to catch a coworker named Mimi, an assistant V.P. in her twenties, in my arms as she fell backward. Our cheery Facilitator counted to three and Mimi fell. I instantly stepped back and let her fall to the ground. “Why did you do that?!” the astounded Facilitator asked me as Mimi dusted the sand off her red polka-dot bikini. “Because to be honest,” I told him, “I just don't trust her.”)