“One time, dealer! Lemme see that…”
I banged my head against the desk in honest-to-goodness frustration as Alaska Joe described the Queen of Spades with a torrent of racially-charged profanity so foul that I cringed despite my years of daily access to the private thoughts of poker players.
I didn’t want to kick the man when he was down. I took this job because I wanted to make dreams come true, or at least inject a little excitement into stale lives – not that I got to do much of that in my position, but the opportunity hung before me like a ripe apple, if I just kept my head down for a few more quarters. I wished like hell that Lucinda had been the one to catch Joe’s case instead of me; she’d have no qualms about sending him straight to the rail.
Neither the raw desperation nor the rank profanity of Joe’s demand forced it to my attention. Rather. it was the combined fervency of at least fifty other people – players, cocktail waitresses, his dealer as well as those at adjacent tables – rooting against him that sliced like a machete through the thicket of inane requests that constitute the soundtrack of my days.
“Keep it low, dealer.”
“Ace ball! Gimme an Ace!”
“Don’t do it….”
If you’ve spent any time in a poker room or even seen the game on TV, then you know what I’m talking about. Usually the sums on the line are small, fifty or a hundred dollars in cash, but every once in a while we hear about a five- or six-figure pot, maybe even seven during the World Series. Not that I can distinguish based on the urgency of the plea; these people will shriek, bargain, and cajole for a $20 deuce on the river.
My job is not to give it to them, mostly. I am a spoilsport, a killjoy, a dream-crusher. I am a poker god.
Well, a poker paradeity, technically. I process a thousand or so requests each day, most of which end up in the old circular file. There are protocols, I’ve been reminded, everything’s got to balance out on the quarterly reports. The gutshots have to come in on 9.09% of rivers, and the Ace-Kings had better beat the Ace-Queens 73.96% of the time. Heaven help us if the bean counters from Statistics & Probability find any discrepancies.
But which Ace-King holds up and which straight draw gets there? That’s where we come in. Not that I get to put my thumb on the scales of fate directly; this has been made abundantly clear to me in performance reviews. It’s the poker gods who decide whether the lightbulb salesman with the hairplugs catches the case Ace that enables him to put that new porch on his lake house or whether the wisecracking grandmother in seat six busts the know-it-all in the hoodie and sunglasses.
My job is conducting background research, flagging potential interventions, and basic compliance testing. Exciting stuff, I know. For most, it’s a rung on the ladder: put up a few consecutive years of satisfactory reviews, and then you’re a poker god, your days full of leisurely lunches and meaningful decisions.
I spent the weekend wishing that Alaska Joe would crawl back into whatever hole he came out of, just as everyone within earshot of him did. He spread trouble like a hyena’s stink, marking his territory and warning away others.
We mostly don’t pay much attention to mushes, which is our word for third parties wishing bad luck on a particular player. If you aren’t involved in the pot, we’re not inclined to pluck the strings of fate for you, because those strings resonate, and while it may seem like no big deal to you if Abrasive Abrams gets stacked by that divorcée whose cleavage you’ve been ogling, we’ve got to take all the consequences into consideration: what’s she going to do with the money, where’s he going to go when he leaves the poker table, you get the idea.
Alaska Joe’s luck (my bad luck, to put it another way) had already been uncanny, no thanks to any intervention from us. By all rights he should have been broke several times over without ever becoming my problem. I ignored him for as long as I could, but the mushes kept coming, piling up into an avalanche large enough to trigger a mandatory review. That meant no more fence-sitting for me, I was going to have to either go to bat for Joe or take a bat to him, and as hard as I looked for an excuse to do the former, he seemed dead-set on forcing the latter.
I typed some preliminary data into my spreadsheet: name, age, mushes received, improbability of requested outcome. Then, sighing, I fired up the History Monitor and braced myself for a rough ride through Alaska Joe’s past.
He’d come into some money following the death of his father and quickly set about dusting it off at the poker table. Making another run at playing professionally, he called it, though there was nothing professional about the man.
“Don’t waste your time.” Even without the cheery lilt she affected, I recognized Lucinda by the reek of her perfume, the distinct aroma of orchids vomited from the stomach of a wet dog. “The guy’s a loser, let him lose.”
“Just doing my due diligence,” I told her without looking away from my screen.
“So sorry to interrupt,” she lied. “Presentation’s at three, and if you’re still on Alaska Joe, you’ve got a lot to review before then! Lemme make it up to you: I’ve got an airtight case for the most adorable redhead. It’s his first time in a casino and he’s so nervous. Don’t worry, you’ll know him when you see him. He needs the money for an extra special date. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for them! Honestly, I think it could be wedding bells, they make the cutest couple. He hasn’t got a speck of dirt on him, so you might as well skip right over that case and save yourself some time.”
“Thanks for the tip, Lucinda. So good of you to stop by.”
“See you at three!” She shimmied back to her desk, leaving me alone in a fog of her mercaptans.
Breathing through my mouth, I dove back into Alaska Joe’s story:
“Square up!” he barks at the table as soon as he arrives. Not that there’s any need – the stench of body odor and pipe tobacco ensures that no one’s sitting closer to him than they have to. Then “Two whiskey cokes!” to a passing waitress who hasn’t asked and no tip for her when she returns with the drinks.
There’s a scowl etched on Joe’s his face like he already knows he’s going to lose, which then you might wonder what he’s doing at the casino in the first place. Thing is, he owes money to so many people – state and federal taxes, child support, myriad loans and gambling debts – that this inheritance is going to slip through his fingers one way or the other. Matter of fact he came by the name Alaska Joe because of a rumor that he skipped town on some particularly unsavory lenders. (Not true, by the way. That debt got paid. These weren’t the sort to abandon their collection efforts just because a guy runs off to Alaska.)
Joe’s so unpleasant that even though he’s losing heaps, people mostly just want him to go away. He’s not going anywhere, though, not while he’s still got cash in his pocket. He keeps drinking, finds someone to sell him some blow so he can keep playing, and after three days without shower or sleep he’s coming down from the coke with funds depleted to where he’d have to quit the game to buy more, and cards are the one thing Alaska Joe loves more than drugs.
So there’s a collective sigh of relief when Joe makes his last rebuy with a fistful of crumpled bills wrestled from deep inside the pockets of his sagging trousers: tens, fives, a couple ones. Couldn’t be more clear that this is it, he’s off to nobody gives a damn where as soon as he loses this buy-in, which at the rate he’s going shouldn’t be long at all.
Sure enough, he’s all in with the King-Ten of spades, not a great hand but it’s got a fighting chance against most. Against a pair of Aces, however, Joe’s King-Ten is Lennox Lewis battling Tyson in his prime, and that’s just what the man on Joe’s left, who’s all self-satisfied smiles, calls him with.
The flop has the Ace of spades to give the smiling man trips but also the Jack of spades to give Joe a gutshot straight draw and a flush draw. Then there’s the measly four of diamonds, which would be insignificant except that the turn is the four of hearts to give the pocket Aces a full house and just about seal the deal for old Joe’s rival.
Now everyone – damn near the whole poker room has been sucked into Joe’s black hole by this point – recognizes that this is the climax of his run, one of those hands where far more than money hangs on the turn of a card. Sometimes luck is just luck, but sometimes it’s a judgment of character, an allotment of cosmic justice. Card players know those cases when they see them, and if anyone is due for divine judgment, it’s Alaska Joe.
Joe still has a glimmer of hope in the Queen of spades, which would give him a royal flush, but no one believes it’s coming, Joe least of all. Miracles happen, but not to him.
Every casino-goer to cross Joe’s path in the last few days has already cast his own private judgment and done so without difficulty or doubt. Joe can feel the whole building rooting against him, but he’s so used to being hated that he’s learned to feed off it, like fuck you too, and harder. He’s an easy man to hate, but that’s why mortals don’t get the deciding vote. Those of us in the cosmos have access to a bigger picture.
When I cast my line further into Alaska Joe’s past, the last thing I wanted was to hook a lunker. I was in enough trouble with the poker gods as it was, with S&P auditors crawling up my ass on account of some backdoor draws off by a tenth of a percent last quarter. Lucinda was right: this one was a gimme. No one in the office would bat an eye if I left Joe to his fate. But his life had the sordid appeal of those websites with footage of real decapitations and men discharging firearms into their own heads. I couldn’t stop watching.
It won’t surprise you to learn Joe had a rough childhood, some of it from classmates – even before the drugs and the drinking he was already the smelly one – but most of it courtesy of his now recently-deceased father. The old man gambled, too, so money was a fleeting thing, to be spent when you had it because soon enough you wouldn’t. I’m not saying I liked the guy, but it wasn’t hard to see why Alaska Joe was the man he was.
My foray turned up everything I expected: dirty jobs, small-time drug deals, assaults both prosecuted and not. I slowly grew aware of something missing, though, and the more I searched the more glaring its absence became. I reviewed cocaine-fueled parties and call-you-in-the-morning one-night stands, sure that I had missed one, but Joe’s scowl was ever-present.
I went all the way back to his ninth birthday before I found what I was looking for. His grandfather, who would drop dead of a heart attack inside of a year, had come to visit for the occasion and presented the boy with a deck of cards and a copy of Hoyle’s Rules of Games. Three generations of Joes sat around a puckered formica table, the grandfather explaining the rules of Stud with a patience the father could never muster.
Joe relaxed, sensing that his father would not lay a hand on him in the presence of his own father, and the three played, the men getting pleasantly drunk and the boy sampling his first beer, eager to impress, fighting the urge to scrunch his face and spit out the yeasty brew.
Unlike the beer, which was a taste he would not acquire for another few years, the game hooked him immediately. His grandfather dealt, calling each new card with the color of a radio commentator: “Queen catches a trey, six no help, eighter from Decatur.”
Eventually the father called it quits. He needed to lie down was the truth of it, but he said, “Kid’s too tough for me,” and the grandfather laughed, and then there it was, the broad happy smile that I’d been looking for, the one that, as best I could tell, Alaska Joe had not worn again since that night.
If the universe were fair, I would have found enough compelling cases elsewhere in my file to justify shunting Joe to the sidelines. There would have been public school teachers, widowers who fed stray dogs, and wealthy retirees who donated all their winnings to charity.
I searched for them in vain, finding only grad students who cheated on exams, wealthy housewives who shoplifted for the thrill of it, bankers who denied home loans to minority applicants. They all had redeeming qualities, and I took up a few of their cases, but not enough to comprise a full workload. Not without Alaska Joe.
It’s not that I saw him as some poor victim. At some point, we’ve all got to take responsibility for our actions, and tallying up his life, I found Joe playing the part of the perpetrator far more often. He’d struck his own boy a few times, which was part – a small part, admittedly – of why he didn’t stick around, didn’t trust himself when he was drinking but wasn’t about to stop.
Lucinda would have plenty of ammunition, no doubt about that. And what did I have in my corner? A smile? I needed something more, not just excuses for bad behavior but a reason to root for Joe. Trouble was, except for that smile, there really was nothing to like about the guy. He had no softspot for the downtrodden, never took a younger poker player under his wing, never even took car keys away from a drunken friend. His fifty-seven years among them had truly contributed nothing to his fellow humans.
My powers extend only as far as browsing the past. I can root around to see who’s earned a little luck, but I can’t peer into the future to weigh the consequences of Joe winning or losing this pot. That’s the province of the poker gods themselves, if only I could convince them to look.
That smile was still all I had when I headed into Presentation. Lucinda was already set up, of course, early and eager, makeup impeccable, files arrayed around her like an arsenal. And there I was bringing a smile to a gunfight.
I was completely unprepared for the other cases, the individuals she’d identified as deserving of special consideration. My heart just wasn’t in them, and I’d burned all my preparation time digging in vain through Joe’s past. It wasn’t just the redhead; virtually all her candidates won reprieve from the whims of chance. That was usually how it went, though. She was the darling of the paradeities, undisputed next-in-line to become a full-fledged poker god.
“Years of unpaid child support.” Lucinda hammered her fist into the podium to emphasize the final point of her rebuttal. She hadn’t mentioned the times Joe’d hit his son, but I wasn’t naïve enough to think they’d escaped her notice. Probably she was saving them, an Ace up his sleeve in case I tried to raise Joe’s own abuse as an extenuating circumstance.
“Well, ah, there is… there’s a jackpot. At this casino. A bonus, that is. For making a royal flush,” I stammered. “Maybe, if Joe wins the jackpot, he sends the kid some money?”
Two of the poker gods exchanged looks like maybe I should be encouraged to seek employment elsewhere.
“Perhaps,” Lucinda pounced, happy to let the disposition of the case ride on this unlikely outcome. “Let’s see what happens.”
I won’t keep you in suspense: Joe doesn’t pay off that child support if he wins, and he certainly doesn’t get around to those back taxes. No one can quite believe it when the Queen falls, and if you watch the faces in the crowd, you can pick out the exact moment when two unrelated onlookers decide they’re through with organized religion.
The loser, incredulous, picks a fight with Alaska Joe and gets himself 86’ed, and it’s only for that man’s protection that the floor doesn’t give Joe the boot on the spot as well, because probably the two would end up tussling in the parking lot and good chance Joe has a knife and a willingness to use it.
The floorman uses the royal bonus as a pretense to drag Joe away, don’t worry your chips will be fine, and after they pay him his $500 they parade him past the craps table where he decides to stop off for a few rolls, then next thing you know they’re bringing his chips over from the poker table and that’s it for the inheritance, or what piece of it he was able to get in cash anyway.
“Well,” Lucinda said, trusting that that would settle the matter.
“Anything else for today?” the presiding god asked.
“No, sirs,” Lucinda said, popping up to stand at rigid attention.
“No,” I muttered into my chest.
Their Eminences rose and filed into the hallway. “See you tomorrow!” Lucinda chirped as she followed them out. She flipped the light switch, leaving me alone in a conference room lit only by the eerie blue light of the Future Monitor, still freeze-framed on Joe’s eviction from the hotel.
After a quick glance to confirm that the room was empty, I rewound the tape. I watched Joe close the door on hotel security, spit whiskey into an empty bottle, suck vomit from his toilet, moonwalk to the craps table, unroll the dice, return the royal flush bonus to the poker room manager, and finally I was back at the moment when the Queen falls.
I wanted to keep going back, to watch Joe collect the last of his inheritance and leave the casino, unlearn of his father’s death, return all the loans, undrink the booze, unscrew the women, unfather the child, unflinch at his own father’s unballed fist. I wanted to watch him ungrow, shrink back to an infant, crawl into his mother and then ooze back out into his father in hopes that perhaps a new zygote or none at all would breach the fallopian tube.
Surely there was a paradeity behind such occurrences, someone like myself with the power to intervene in the mad attritive battle for fertilization. I wanted to plead Joe’s case to him, show where Fate unfettered had led this man. Surely it was an oversight, a mere lack of foreknowledge that kept the gods from sparing not just Joe but everyone in his life from the poison inside him.
But the Future Monitor traveled in one direction only, and soon I would have to leave it lest someone discover me alone with it. I could go no further back than the falling of the Queen, so I replayed that scene, zoomed in on Joe’s face and there it was, a hint of the nine-year-old’s smile, gone almost as quickly as it appears but it’s there, tugging at his eyes like a rottweiler, and he seems as confused by it as by the miraculous river.
Despite the clock-cleaning I just got from Lucinda, I found that I was smiling as well, not only at Joe but at all of the other disgusted faces, because they are none of them saints. The woman in the seven seat, the one who raises money for the art museum, has on two separate occasions struck a car in a parking lot and driven off after swallowing Vicodin that was not prescribed to her. The man across the table, who tips big and compliments everyone (except Joe) when they win the pot, is in such a good mood because he and his wife’s sister have finally consummated their long-simmering attraction. And the impeccably-dressed gentleman in the nine, the one who gave a twenty-dollar bill to the sunburnt panhandler with the laconic dog, has nearly seven figures in a bank account about which his wife, soon-to-be-mother-of-his-child, knows nothing. In the twenty-five alternate futures in which Joe does not catch that miracle Queen, these people are all smug smiles, thinking that’s justice served as they watch Joe shuffle off cursing his luck.
Although there was nothing vague about their decision, the poker gods never actually issued a verdict. They took for granted that I knew what to do, that the just disposition of Joe’s case was as apparent to me as it was to them and their darling Lucinda. But the man’s fate technically remained in my hands, the final card undealt until I either specified an outcome or declined to intervene.
Today, I decided, is Joe’s day to smile.