Pocket Kings (6 page)

When Clint still didn't reply, I began to fret for his health or for the fate of the tiny literary agency he ran with his identical twin, Vance.
Th
ey didn't handle any of the Big Boys (the Jonathans, Davids, Richards or Shteyngarts); they only handled struggling mediocrities-with-mostly-good-reviews-but-poor-sales such as myself. (I often thought that when the Reno Bros. took on
Plague Boy
they presumed they were getting the next David Sedaris and didn't realize that not only could I not stand David Sedaris, I wanted nothing to do with people who could. ) I Googled “Clint Reno” and “Vance Reno” and “Reno Brothers Literary Agency” to see if the three of them were still alive. Perhaps a chopper carrying their entire staff to an off-site retreat had gone down a few weeks ago. Perhaps they'd been purchased wholesale by a large Shanghai conglomerate interested in cornering the market of middling American literature, or maybe it had dawned upon them that in ten years all novels will be written in 3D text-message form.
Th
ere was no news of the sort. It seemed Clint was still alive and kicking and so was Vance (he works in L.A. and handles the movie and TV end) and that the Little Agency that Could (but wouldn't) was still around.

Th
e eight-cylinder engine of my Joseph K. nightmare was only getting warmed up.

Lacking the onions to call—and also thinking that being Mr. Nice Novelist and not bothering my agent would somehow be to my benefit—I sent another e-mail.

Hey, is everything okay? Hope it is. Did you get my last couple of e-mails? Any news on
DOA
?

Th
ere
had
to be news, for when I was writing
DOA
I didn't feel like I was a novelist or an “artist” so much as a cat burglar sneaking into the jewelry box of a much better novelist and pocketing a priceless gem. I hadn't ever done anything to deserve such a good idea.

Clint didn't answer my e-mail.
Th
ere was no news, and when you're trying to make something of yourself, no news is never good news and is a lot worse than even bad news.

After winning the first fifteen grand, I didn't get so nervous playing anymore. I usually played for about ten minutes for fake money before moving into the real-money rooms, where I'd work my way up the tables, going from Low to Medium to High. I was Spider-Man crawling up a building, moving from the cheaper lower floors to the posh penthouse apartments.

Slowly, I began making friends in the Galaxy.

Th
is was at a table one Wednesday night: I saw that Bjorn 2 Win, Wolverine Mommy, Y. A. Spittle, History Babe (who was new to me), and a few others were present, so I joined in, this time playing as the suave James Bond character, a tuxedoed Clive Owen look-alike with a sleek gold cigarette case frozen for all cartoon eternity in his hand. I folded crap the first two hands but won $900 the next one with only a pair of 6s.

Bjorn 2 Win:
Can I get my money back, Chip?

Chip Zero:
Huh? From just now? I won that fair and square, Swede.

Wolverine Mommy:
So History, what do you do for a living?

Bjorn 2 Win:
No, from the other day. You think you're a good poker player, you're not.

History Babe:
I just got a certificate for teaching but haven't found a job yet.

I had a 4 and 5 of clubs and the flop showed two more clubs, a 7 and a Jack. Of all the dilemmas in Hold'em, for me the biggest is getting two pocket cards of the same suit. I always stay in and have probably lost more than I've won vying for the flush. (Which would prove what I've always suspected: hope and enthusiasm usually get you in trouble.) And sometimes, of course, even when you get the flush, you can still lose to a higher flush or a full house. If you've ever lost a with a King-high flush to an Ace-high flush, you know the feeling of there being no justice in this world.

Wolverine Mommy:
My husband teaches history!

Chip Zero:
[trying to avoid Bjorn] Oh yeah, Wolve?
Th
en when was the Battle of Hastings?

Wolverine Mommy:
History is the hubby's thing, not mine.

Bjorn 2 Win:
You play predictable, Chip. Also, you think you're funny, you're not funny.

History Babe:
1066. Awww, that's an easy one.
Th
at's the pi=3.14 of history. Toss me something tougher than that.

Bjorn 2 Win:
How many more childs will you have, Wolverine? You should have stopped at 1. I cannot believe your husband even desires to make more childrens with you.

Wolverine Mommy:
GFY!

Th
e site informed us:

Dealing the turn card: an Ace of Hearts.

Th
e Ace didn't help my flush at all but I still had four clubs. As soon as he saw the Ace, Bjorn 2 Win raised two hundred bucks, and a few others folded.

History Babe:
When was the Diet of Worms, Chip?

Chip Zero:
Diet of Worms? No thanks, I'll stick to Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

Dealing the river card: an Ace of Clubs.

I had my flush.
Th
ere were three clubs in the community (the five cards on the table) so it was possible that someone else would have a flush. But there were two Aces and Bjorn leapt in again, raising two hundred. I figured he had three Aces, but kept in mind his best-case scenario and my worst: he might have a full house, Aces full of something. But I had an Ace-high flush and would be a moron to surrender it.

History Babe:
C'mon, Chip, take a guess. If you're wrong I won't spank you.

Chip Zero:
Th
is had something to do with Martin Luther right? Or was it Lex Luthor?

Fifth Beetle:
History, I think he might want you to spank him.

Chip Zero:
Well, I wouldn't turn it down, no.

Bjorn 2 Win:
It's just not right to leave so quickly after winning, Chip.

I raised. Fifth Beetle (he's an entomologist) folded, so it was just me and the Horse Slaughterer of the North.
Th
e pot was approaching two grand.

History Babe:
Martin Luther, yes. I don't think Lex was involved.

Y.A. Spittle:
Was this before or after he nailed his forty feces to the door?

Wolverine Mommy:
He so did not do that!

Chip Zero:
Yes, Lex Luthor did that. He was mad at Superman for making him bald so he nailed his feces to the little door on the Fortress of Solitude.

Grouchy Old Man is waiting to enter the game.

Bjorn reraised. Maybe he did have a full boat. It would be me being force-fed my just deserts if he did. But I called.

Chip Zero wins $2,600 with an Ace-high club flush.

Wolverine Mommy:
NH!

Fifth Beetle:
VNH, Chip.

Chip Zero:
Th
nx. No props from you, Bjorn? Where's my dap at, Ingemar?

Bjorn 2 Win has left the table.

(I pictured him taking a cleaver and cutting off the scrotum of a dead horse and then hurling each grapefruit-sized nut as far as he could into the Scandinavian snow.)

I stayed at that table for an hour and added a cool six grand to my stack. Players came and went, but the history chatter did not.

History Babe:
So Chip, who's your favorite character from history?

Fifth Beetle:
Always liked Julius Caesar. I was born on March 15, the day he was killed.

Chip Zero:
Wow, you must be over 2000 years old! You seem awfully spry for a man your age.

Grouchy Old Man:
You know, just for the Caesar salad alone, you gotta hand it to Julius.

Chip Zero:
Th
e hell with the Caesar salad. I mean, what about the Orange Julius? And if you're going to go by history and foodstuffs, what about the Napoleon?

Grouchy Old Man:
I guess if you're a conqueror or something to that effect, you get a food named after you, huh?

Chip Zero:
It's a good thing the Nazis lost or otherwise we'd be having little pastries called adolphs or himmlers or something.

Meanwhile another hand was underway. I had two twos, usually a loser hand. But—and I had noticed this a few times by now—the other players were now more involved in our conversation than with their hands or with the money at stake. I kept up the inane chatter.

Chip Zero:
All right, History: Desert island? Ethelred the Unready or William Pitt the Elder?

History Babe:
Hmm. Can't I just have Brad Pitt? I wouldn't be Unready for him.

Chip Zero:
Grouchy, Betsy Ross or Marie Antoinette? Desert island?

Grouchy Old Man:
Th
at's a tough one.

Chip Zero:
Betsy could probably sew you a loincloth out of coconut hairs but Marie would probably give you much better head.

I raised, they folded, and I won with only a pair of 2s. When all was said and done, I would've gotten beaten by Grouchy Old Man, who revealed he had two 9s, and by Wolverine Mommy, who was so busy LOLing that she hadn't noticed she had 9s and 2s.

I had developed an M.O.: keep 'em talking, keep 'em laughing, win their money.

I was playing too much, I knew. But because I was winning, it wasn't easy to stop.

Plague
got negative press before it was even finished. An article had run in
Publishers Weekly
about the purchase of the book; this was immediately pounced upon by a weasely media pundit (one of those parasites who spends all day writing about people who spend all day writing about people who spend all day writing about . . .), who, on a seldom-read and no longer extant website, called my novel “the lowest form of trash, the rankest kind of rubbish, the grossest sort of detritus, and worthless mind-polluting slag at its absolute worst.” Now, at this point, the book hadn't even been set in type and I hadn't yet earned a dime out of it.
And already the reviews were negative?
Two hundred years ago this would have been enough to challenge someone to a duel; those days are gone but nowadays, in place of pistols at forty feet, there is e-mail at fifty words a minute. I fired off a quick one and it was curtly responded to by the weasel. In the response he had the temerity to call me thin-skinned!
Th
e following day I found out where the Web site offices were (only five blocks away, as it happened) and stormed past a receptionist and confronted him in his office. I figured he'd be a 110-pound Ivy League twerp, and that the years of pent-up fury I had over him—plus my menacing Gérard Depardieu scowl— would be enough to make him piss his Old Navy chinos. He turned out to be tall, muscular, and well-dressed and could have knocked me out easily, but it didn't matter. “You call me thin-skinned?!” I yelled at him. “How dare you?” His stunned coworkers rushed to his cubicle as I continued. “YOU DARE CALL ME THIN-SKINNED, YOU SNARKY GODDAM CHATTERING CLASS FUCK?! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU FUCKIN' ARE?!” Eventually my inner Teaneck, New Jersey, and I were asked to leave by the petite office manager, who said, just as the elevator doors opened for me, “You know, Mr. Dixon, you do sound a tad thin-skinned.”

I had little knowledge of the book business before I was published, and now I have a lot less. Everybody seems so scared to do the wrong thing that they wind up doing nothing. I worked in the clothing business once, and in those days the Mafia was all over the place—they were at the airport clearing the goods through customs, in the trucks delivering the cartons from the airport to the warehouse, and delivering the goods to the stores. It was dirty and people were frightened, but at least you knew the rules. In publishing, everyone is governed by a sort of invisible, elastic British constitution that has never been written: nobody knows whether there
are
any rules but everyone pretends there are and that they know them.