Ship It Holla Ballas! (9 page)

“Well, okay, I guess.…”

He follows his new patron into one of the VIP rooms where the man’s friend is enjoying the company of a stripper on a small couch. Two other strippers occupy an adjacent love seat.

“What’s up?” Good2cu asks a little suspiciously.

“The ladies want somebody to dance for them,” explains the drunken businessman, waving a bill in the air. “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks a song.”

Good2cu isn’t a great dancer. With lessons and practice, he might get to below average. But over the last semester he’s been hitting the weights five days a week, part of a calculated strategy to improve his lot with the opposite sex. Now it’s time to get rewarded for all the hours he’s spent at the gym. He takes off his shirt, approaching the two strippers on the love seat like they’re wild animals who might attack if provoked.

Instead they reach out and caress him, running their hands over his six-pack.

“Feel his ass!” one of them yells while doing just that.

Typically, the person getting a lap dance is not allowed to touch the person giving it, but Good2cu’s not about to complain. He tries to imagine what the dancers would do, were the situation reversed. He leans in so close to them his nipples nearly make contact with their faces. He straddles their legs and assumes the cowgirl—
cowboy?
—position, then turns around and grinds his ass into their crotches, giving them a little reverse cowboy for good measure. When the song comes to end, his patron hands him a $100 bill, pulls another from his wallet, and waves it in the air: one more?

Hell fucking yeah.

Any inhibitions Good2cu brought with him into the room have disappeared. One of the strippers slips a $20 bill into the elastic waistband of his boxers. The other buys him drinks. Not just any drinks, but bottles of Cristal. The stuff Jay-Z drinks.

After several songs, Good2cu takes a breather, sliding into the love seat between the two topless women. The drunk businessman has seen enough. “All right, party’s over,” he tells Good2cu. “Time for you to jet. Just tip the girls first.”

“Me tip them?” Good2cu replies with mock astonishment. “I dance better than they do. They should be tipping me.”

The ladies giggle and nod their heads in agreement. The man is less amused. He pays Good2cu what he’s owed and escorts him out of the VIP room.

A few minutes later, one of the strippers catches up with Good2cu. “You should have tipped us,” she says. “If you had, that guy was going to give you like a thousand dollars or something.”

Good2cu just grins.

Whatever.

Yesterday, he was a college student worrying about midterms and suffering through a typically frigid Michigan winter. Today, he’s a high-rolling poker god who just got paid to dance for strippers.

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane …

13

Why would I want to run bad? That’s not how you win.

—Good2cu

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(February 2006)

Good2cu isn’t sure why he bothered sleeping. The two or three hours he managed to sneak in only make the loss of those he missed that much more painful. He has no idea what time it was when he passed out on Slim Pickens’s couch. All he knows is that the sun was shining.

It’s only 9:00
A.M.
, but the tournament is scheduled to start in an hour. Fortunately, he’s still drunk enough from the night before to ward off the hangover he knows is coming. After his lap dancing debut at the Spearmint Rhino, Good2cu split off from the group to check out TAO, the swanky nightclub inside the Venetian, with his new buddy Apathy.

Apathy is from Canada, but Michigan is so close to the border it might as well be one of its territories, and he and Good2cu quickly discovered that they share many of the same values, namely the three P’s: playing poker, partying, and,
cough,
pursuing the ladies. Both of them are also under twenty-one, so they were a little hesitant to face the bouncer guarding the entrance to the club, choosing to duck into a nearby bar instead.

Apathy picked his screen name to express his worldview, but “carefree” would have been a better choice. He doesn’t get too worked up about the things that drive other players crazy: bad beats, cold decks, grandstanding opponents. And while he strives to play poker like an emotionless automaton, away from the tables he fairly pulsates with positive energy. He’s an effervescent raconteur with enough rascally charm to make most of the people who meet him immediately want to become his friend, rip off his clothes, or both.

Within minutes of sitting down at the bar, Apathy starts chatting up the two girls sitting next to them. They’re also underage, but they decide that the four of them together might stand a better chance of getting into TAO. Apathy’s cherubic face makes him look a good three years younger than his actual age of twenty, but he has no trouble convincing the doorman that he’s thirty-four, just like it says on his fake Canadian driver’s license. The girls are hot enough to avoid getting carded at all. Which leaves Good2cu and his New York driver’s license with the upside-down back.

“This shit is fake,” the bouncer says, sounding pretty sure of himself. He hasn’t even seen the other side of the license.

“No, it’s not.”

“Um, yeah, it is.” The bouncer lowers his voice. “I
make
fake IDs for a living.”

There’s something inherently corrupt in a world where age-verifying bouncers make fake IDs on the side.
But hey,
thinks Good2cu,
we don’t always get to choose the world we live in, do we?
He removes the $10,000 roll from his front pocket and peels off two bills. “Here’s $200, bro. We all good?”

A quick look into the bouncer’s eyes, and Good2cu realizes he’s made a rookie mistake. Not his attempt to bribe a bouncer—that’s standard. And $200 would definitely have been enough. Probably too much. No, the error was flashing his entire bankroll.

The bouncer’s eyes narrow greedily as he takes in the sight of all that cash. “Make it a thousand,” he says. “Then we’ll be good,
bro.
”

“No fucking way am I giving you a thousand dollars just to get into a nightclub.”

“Then you won’t be needing this anymore.”

The bouncer moves to pocket the fake ID, but before he can Good2cu rips it out of his hand and takes off running, stumbling over the velvet rope and sprinting down the up escalator. A backward glance reveals two security guards barking commands into walkie-talkies. Good2cu ducks into the Venetian’s casino, hoping to blend in with the tourists, and doesn’t turn around until he’s out the front door and safely ensconced in a cab.

*   *   *

By the light of day, Good2cu’s able to better appreciate the Venetian. Its cavernous lobby is an extravagant homage to the churches and palazzi of Italy, a Baroque era’s greatest hits collection—frescoes on the ceiling, gold and marble everywhere else. There’s even a canal with real gondolas, and the hotel’s art exhibit includes works by Picasso, van Gogh, and Matisse.

Praying that the hotel’s security staff has turned over since the night shift, he doesn’t linger long in the lobby. Besides, the tournament’s about to start. He hurries toward the elevators, rides to the third floor, and approaches the hospitality suite Irieguy has rented for the occasion. The sight of a linebacker-sized security guard makes Good2cu stop in his tracks.

“Name?” asks the guard.

As the first tendrils of his hangover creep around the sides of his skull, Good2cu croaks out the name his parents slapped him with at birth.

The guard scans the clipboard he’s holding and shakes his head. “Not on the list.”

“How about ‘Good2cu’?”

The guard smiles and checks off the name on the list. “I love this gig. I don’t know what’s going on in there, but you guys got some really great names. IHateKeithSmart. SkipperBob. TheNoodleman. Is this some sort of fraternity thing?”

Good2cu forces a smile. “Something like that.”

The atmosphere inside the suite pulls him out of his stupor. Like a packed concert hall moments before the headliner takes the stage, the room is buzzing with expectant energy. There are a few older guys milling around, but they are far outnumbered by kids his age. Despite their youth, most of them project showy confidence and sport gaudy watches—a skilled thief could easily pull several hundred thousand dollars worth of timepieces from this room.

Nearly twenty tables are scattered throughout, each decorated with two identical stacks of chips and a deck of cards, solid evidence that a poker tournament is about to get under way. But most poker tournaments don’t have open bars and a stripper pole. The pole is currently being used by a topless woman who clearly spends a lot of time working on her flexibility. The bar is being put to good use by almost everyone else. More topless women circulate throughout the room. Some are serving drinks; some are serving in other ways. Good2cu spots a very happy-looking Bonafone sitting beneath a half-naked woman, compensation for not being allowed into the Rhino the night before.

Wow
.

Good2cu’s on his way to the bar when he gets intercepted by Irieguy, who is accompanied by one of the few women in the room wearing a shirt, albeit one that’s several sizes too small and reads:
I
♥
TO MAKE BOYS CRY
. Not to be outdone, Irieguy’s wearing a T-shirt that announces,
I’M HERE FOR THE LAP DANCE
.

“Ready to play some poker?” asks Irieguy.

“All I need are some chips and a chair,” says Good2cu gamely. “And maybe some aspirin and a Bloody Mary.”

“That’s the spirit. The pairings for the first-round matches are over there.” Irieguy points to a large poster on the wall. “As for the rules, you can cuss or swear or say whatever the fuck you want. You can even expose your cards while you’re still in a hand if it floats your boat. The only big no-no is behaving rudely toward the lap artists. If you do that, I’ll kick your ass out, or worse, make you listen to Daliman’s bad beat stories. Dinner will be catered. And I hope you like alcohol, or you’re going to be severely disappointed by the beverage selection.”

A Bloody Mary helps part the fog, but there’s still a lot to take in. Beyond the thirty-two Two Plus Twoers actually playing in the tournament, there are twenty to thirty other people in the room, each of whom has paid $170 for the right to hang out, eat catered food, drink massive quantities of alcohol, and enjoy a few lap dances.

The tournament promises to be entertaining as well, as there’s a fair amount of money at stake. Those who paid the $200 entry fee can win as much as $3,650, while the players who put in $500, like Good2cu did, are vying for the top prize of $6,400. Each match features two players squaring off against each other, with the winner moving on and the loser getting shunted into the consolation bracket. Some of the matches will be over in four or five hands; others will go on for two or three hours.

A second Bloody Mary restores Good2cu’s swagger and loosens his tongue. He loudly announces that he’ll bet anyone $200 that he’s going to win his first match. Given that the room is split pretty much evenly between the Two Plus Twoers who have never heard of him before and those who witnessed his drunken exploits the night before, a line quickly forms. By the time the first cards hit the felt, Good2cu has wagered over $2,000 on himself.

A few minutes later, the players who bet against him are lining up once again, this time to pay him his money.

14

“They were eighteen or nineteen and they had it all. They had the world by the balls, so they had a little bit of attitude because they’d had way more success than any person should have at that age. I remember thinking,
These kids have way too much money for their own good right now. But they’ve all earned it. They’ve all gotten it by being this good at this game.
But it definitely seemed like … you just worry.”

—TheNoodleman

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(February 2006)

Irieguy can’t believe it. All he asked of these guys was that they follow one simple rule—don’t mess with the lap artists!—and here they’ve gone and broken it.
Twice!

ZeroPointMachine is tripping on acid or mushrooms, possibly both, which Irieguy wouldn’t consider a problem if the creepy old guy weren’t relentlessly urging all the strippers to do the same. Irieguy doesn’t waste much time contemplating the proper response—he boots ZeroPointMachine out of the suite.

But he’s not so sure what to do about durrrr. One of the lap artists claims the kid flicked water in her face, then gave her some attitude when she complained about it.

Irieguy’s never met durrrr before, but knows him by reputation. Only nineteen years old, durrrr regularly competes in the biggest games you can play online. Some are calling him a poker prodigy. Others joke that he’s not entirely human.

Irieguy just wants to know what to make of the stripper’s story, so he seeks out Raptor, who knows durrrr better than anyone else in the room. Raptor and durrrr struck up a virtual friendship via AIM last fall. In January they met at a tournament in the Bahamas, where they hung out together nearly every single minute and went from being virtual friends to actual ones.

Raptor explains to Irieguy that the woman probably mistook durrrr’s aloofness for condescension, an explanation that gains merit when Irieguy introduces himself to the lanky kid with the probing eyes, owlish eyebrows, and Spock-like ears. Durrrr takes in the lecture from Irieguy as if he doesn’t quite comprehend the words coming from his mouth. The effect is unsettling, almost otherworldly.

When Irieguy finishes, durrrr chuckles nervously, explaining that he wasn’t aware that he’d splashed anyone with water and that if he did he was sorry. The kid seems sincere, so Irieguy lets him stick around.

Getting kicked out of the room wouldn’t have affected durrrr’s plans all that much, as he’s not even playing in the tournament. Despite paying the $170 entertainment fee, he’s been spending most of his time in the suite he rented next door, quietly engaged in an online battle for stakes that make Irieguy’s entry fee look like pocket change.