It seemed five miles to find the poker room again. I stopped for coffee and a Danish. The Danish was obscenely sweet, the coffee thin and odorless.
I found Butch. It wasn’t hard. He hadn’t left his seat. The table had become highly promising. Two guys in Hawaiian shirts and shorts, red-faced and pounding bourbon shots. One long-haired guy, steaming. Cursing every card as it was dealt. Guaranteed irrationality on tap. It’s what you dream of. A brace of young depressed compulsive losers there as well.
Heaven.
I sat down.
Deal me in, I said.
It was a five-ten limit game. Not huge, but you could win, or lose, enough to make you notice. I started slow, conservative. Taking time to educate myself about the players’ tendencies. Mr. Longhair jamming every pot with hope and desperation, trying to recoup his long-lost stake. The depressives on the other hand played slow. Agonizing over every bet. Tight and passive, they call it. Plum pickings. Any time you felt like taking their money, you just put in a big bet. If they didn’t have the nuts, they’d fold like origami. If they had the cards, they’d gleefully re-raise, their childlike excitement so apparent on their sallow desperate faces you’d have to be a brick to fail to notice.
Not to say there weren’t some good players at the table too. Butch. Me, maybe. A woman to my left. Small and feisty. I liked that. I liked the worn suede boots she wore, zipper on the side. I liked the tear in the knee of her jeans. I liked the hand-knit driving gloves, the crumpled visored khaki hat. I liked her large and succulent mouth, her watchful eyes. I liked that she chewed gum with unselfconscious vigor. That she threw her chips into the pot the same way.
With all the dead money at the table, it didn’t take long to double my stake.
Once I’d taken a couple of easy pots from the sallow pair of desperados, they wandered off to recoup at the slot machines.
I wished them luck.
I meant it.
I had a small rush.
Poker players live for the rush. The statistics guys tell you it’s all random. And yes, you can grasp that. But, like saying love’s a chemical affair, it might be true, but it doesn’t come close to describing what it’s like to be there. When you know, you just know, the next card will fill your boat. Full house. Give me your money. And the rush can run and run, hand after hand of mammoth cards in the hole and improbable draws on the end. Until, as suddenly as it started, you hit a wall. Bricks in your face. Wake up. Back to normal. Fold, fold, fold.
The key is to recognize the rush when it comes. Loosen up. And when it ends, go tight again, before you lose it all.
Every poker player knows the rush. Even the bean counters, the statisticians. A rush by any other name is still a rush. The master of the rush is the master of the game.
But it’s a truism that most decent players can maintain their A-game only for an hour or two. Success, especially, tends to weaken your resolve.
I was no exception. I started loosening up. Feeling cocky. Playing non-suited connectors for a raise. Forgetting to vary my play. Even tourists will pick up your habits after a while. I was duly punished a couple of times, most embarrassingly by one of the Hawaiian shirt guys. Lost half of what I’d gained, on busted draws. Retrenched. Went back to tight aggressive. Got back to double.
The hours went past like a river in the rain. The dawn came through the skylights. It seemed like I had just sat down when I looked up and half the tables had emptied. As the high-limit tables broke up the pros drifted over, looking for small fish to fry. The game got tough. Butch was up a grand. He could play with these guys, with a cushion like that. I stayed awhile, to see if I could hold my own with them. A glib young Asian guy with shades and a thin mustache slow-played a boat and caught me napping. Just calling with two pair instead of raising or getting out. He and the dealer bantered like old friends. A grizzled bent-backed veteran sat down. He and the Asian guy traded unsubtle gibes about the fishing season.
It didn’t take me long to figure out the fish was me.
I folded a few hands, until I finally got something worth playing. Ace Queen off-suit. A good hand. Not a great one. A hand that could get you in trouble, especially in early position. I raised. The old guy re-raised. The Asian guy called. Everyone else folded. I had a bad feeling.
The flop came Queen and rags. It’s the flop you want with that hand. If an Ace comes, you can get out-kicked by someone with Ace King, which is exactly the type of hand the old man might have re-raised me with. But with the Queens, I couldn’t get out-kicked. I had the Ace. And if an Ace came now, well, Aces up can win a lot of money. So I was feeling better.
I put in a bet.
The old guy raised, and the Asian guy re-raised. Hell, I thought. What was going on here? It was a rainbow-flop – the three flopped cards were different suits – and far enough apart that straight draws were unlikely, the more so because of the pre-flop action. Someone could have the same hand as me, of course, which would be a pain but not a disaster. The big problem was if someone had flopped trips. I eyed my two opponents. Could one of them have played that way pre-flop with a small pair, hit the trips on the flop? Sure.
Damn. I didn’t know what to do. And I was taking too much time thinking about it. Giving them a read. I always try to take the same seven seconds to make my move. Fold, call, bet, fake an angina attack, whatever. Keep the tells to a minimum. But I was well over ten seconds. I could feel them figuring me.
I folded my Queens.
The old guy and the Asian guy checked it down. Showed their cards. Junk.
That was enough for me. They were very good. Or colluding. Or both.
I got up and stretched. The pros encouraged me to stay, eyeing my remaining chips. I declined.
Butch gave me a Look. The Look said: Hey, man, you’re a pussy.
The office beckoned. A three-hour drive awaited. It wasn’t going to be an easy day.
Come on, I said. I got to get to work.
Butch heaved a sigh of friendly exasperation.
We cashed our chips. Butch had a healthy wad. I hadn’t done as badly as it felt.
Hey, I said, I did you a favor. Those guys were going to eat us both for breakfast.
Speak for your own self, said Butch.
I grabbed an acrid coffee from the kiosk by the door. I tipped the valet an absurd amount from the chips I’d kept.
They’re only made of clay, I told Butch.
He shook his head in mock despair.
We got into the car.
My first instinct, on settling into the well-upholstered seat, was to lean it back and sleep. I fought the feeling, shifted slowly into drive. I drove. I felt empty. My stomach growled and hurt. I hadn’t eaten all night.
My mind wandered with the road. Against my better inclinations, I started talking about Warwick.
He was not a man you reasoned with, I told Butch. Warwick was a man you obeyed or defied. There was no middle ground. The last time I’d tried to reason with him, I’d learned my lesson.
I’d come to the defense of a junior lawyer who’d been accused of having too much fun. Some associates had gone out partying one night, after a long day of combing through hundreds of boxes of financial documents. They’d had some drinks. Things got a little out of hand. Unfortunately for the young fellow in question, somebody had a disposable camera, and took a few shots of him blearily, and apparently incompetently, trying to impress his favors on a female associate. She was herself possessed of considerable, shall we say, charms. Which charms were rather well displayed, in at least one of the photos.
I was Chairman of the Hiring Committee at the time. Sometimes better known as the Firing Committee. Warwick called me into his office. Showed me the pictures.
I laughed. Silly kids, having a little fun.
Warwick found my laughter inappropriate.
What we see here, he said, is highly unprofessional behavior.
Charles, I said. They’re just kids. Need I remind you of some of the more entertaining evenings we had as juniors?
He looked genuinely puzzled. It struck me that in fact he did need to be reminded – Warwick had a prodigiously selective memory. But as soon as I began describing a certain hot-oil wrestling incident of fifteen years earlier, he cut me off.
Those were different times, Redman, he barked. There are potential liabilities here.
Charles, I said. Last I heard the girl hadn’t complained to anyone.
Be that as it may, he replied in his flat stentorian voice, the firm has a responsibility to react forcefully and expeditiously to such incidents.
Why should this guy be punished out of proportion to the event? I asked. Just because he was unlucky enough to have been with someone who had a camera? Worse things happen every night of the week, I’m sure.
We cannot fail to act when we have acquired reliable information, he pontificated. To do so could set a precedent, or be used as evidence of a firm policy of disregarding such incidents.
Don’t you think this is a bit hypocritical? I asked. A whole bunch of our partners are married to former associates, Charles.
We cannot allow the values of the past, even if we personally share them, to undermine the well-being of the firm.
I felt like I was talking to a badly programmed automaton, and was about to launch into a screed about his lack of humanity when I noticed on his desk a piece of paper filled with neatly regimented point-form sentences. I belatedly realized that he’d been glancing down at his desk regularly as he spoke.
Egad, I thought. Talking points.
He’d been reading from a script.
I hadn’t been talking to a human being. I’d been talking to a piece of paper.
Butch laughed long and loud.
With an evil as overweening as Warwick’s, I said, driving mechanically toward the office, there must be a pre-existing pestilence, germinating in some organ or another. The spleen, probably. The gall bladder. Some eighteenth-century thing involving bile. I’m confident that whatever it is will kill him someday. I’m just not sure I can wait that long.
I got some friends, said Butch with a laugh. Anatomists.
Anatomists?
Sure. They specialize in certain bones.
Bones?
Sure. Kneecaps. Like that.
Sure, Butch, I chuckled, have them call me up. We’ll do lunch.
For a moment, just a moment, I thought it might be a real good idea.