Poker Personalities
I sat down at a 1-2 table with some types I would encounter with some frequency during my training. Like Big Mitch. Big Mitch is a potbellied endomorph in fabric-softened khaki shorts and polo shirt, a middle-aged white guy here with his wife (who was off dropping chips on the roulette felt according to her patented system), equipped with a mortgage, a decent job, and disposable income. The segments of his thick metal watchband chick-chicked on his hairy wrist each time he entered the pot. Your average home player. What Big Mitch wants the most, apart from coming home to see that young Kaitlyn hasn’t had a party and wrecked the house while they were away (she’s really been acting out lately, but Pat says all girls go through that stage) is to brag to his home game buddies and certain guys at the office of how much he won tonight, with a breakdown of a Really Big Hand or two. He will be less vocal about his failures, as we all are.
Next to two Big Mitches was a Methy Mike, a harrowed man who had been tested in untold skirmishes, of which the poker table was only one. If Methy Mike had been hitched, the lady had packed her bags long ago, and if they had spawned, their parenting goals probably ended with making sure their kid did not get a tattoo on her face, and they did not always succeed. Often locals, Methy Mikes are on a first-name basis with the bosses and dealers and cocktail waitresses, and you can count on hearing a little catching-up. “Haven’t seen you in a while.” “I’ve been … had some stuff come up.” So I see: Iggy Pop takes a look at these guys and says, “Wow, he’s really let himself go.” They are weathered, by the sun, by their lifestyles, which you can only guess at, the underlying narrative of their decay, and resemble unfortunates who have been dragged on chains from the back of a beat-up van and left to desiccate in the desert, like one of the down-and-outers in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, undone by their hardwired inclinations and undying dream of a new start. “Can you help a fellow American who’s down on his luck?” Luck — they believe in luck, its patterns, unknowable rules. Will, seeing pocket jacks demolish some weekend punter, tell the table, “Let me tell you a sad story about a pair a jacks.” A sad story for every hand, every one of the 1326 possible starting combinations.
And then there was Robotron, squeezed in there, lean and wiry and hunkered down, a young man with sunglasses and ear buds, his hoodie cinched tight around his face like a school shooter or a bathroom loiterer. Weaned on Internet play, Robotron is only here tonight because the Feds shut down all the U.S. online poker sites a month before (Black Friday, something about money laundering). Here with the humans. Otherwise the Robotrons would be back in their childhood rooms, eight pixelated tables open on the screen; he can play eight games at once, zip zip. It’s not so hard once you retrain those pathways in the brain, cramming decades of poker experience into a 18 months. Why leave the house at all, between the poker sites and the porn sites? What are other people for, but for robbing or fucking? (The goddamned Feds, breeding a new generation of libertarians in the sub-divs.) Real people, talking, breathing, it must be so weird to them. Their ear buds help keep em out, playing music, self-help manuals, “The Art of War” as read by Edward James Olmos, or the latest invasion plans transmitted from their home planet.
There was one woman at the table, a quiet 60-something lady with bright red hair, the follicles of which it was perhaps possible to count. Five percent of commercially available hair dyes actually match a color that occurs in nature. Hers was not one of them. I liked her.
From “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia” by Colson Whitehead for Grantland, 2013; Photo by Keenan Constance (@keenangrams)
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