It was the night of the first presidential debate, a debate that almost didn't happen, as John McCain went to Washington hoping to help by injecting presidential politics into the economic crisis. But after saying he wouldn't participate he changed his mind and flew into Oxford to level with the American people. At the beginning of the debate, McCain admitted it was mostly his fault.
"It's all this deregulation," he said. "It's market fundamentalism, a misplaced, uninformed belief that the market always corrects itself. All my career, I've worked to remove oversight from giant corporations. I've trusted the greediest and most ambitious among us to police themselves. I was wrong about that. And I was wrong to advocate going to war in Iraq, wasting $700 billion and 4,000 American lives, destroying that country while the Taliban grew stronger in Afghanistan. Some of the most serious mistakes in the history of America were made by me."
It was a shocking thing for him to say. But it was big of him to admit it. After the debate, we played poker.
The Game
We played in my kitchen, our view the windowless backside of Chelsea Gardens, the tacky Mission monument to the next round of gentrification. Adam Krefman had stolen my folding chairs, so I borrowed chairs from Olu, my downstairs neighbor. Dan and Isaac showed up first, then Ben and Tono. Finally, Sarah and Molly. It was nice to have women at the poker table. They wore low-cut shirts and giggled a lot, exploiting stereotypes and pretending like they didn't know how to play. They won all night.
We started with Texas Hold'em. Two cards down, five across the middle. Later, we switched to San Francisco Peach Grove, and then Denver Peach Grove. Those are just the names of the games, but it's the people that matter.
When Sarah had a good hand, she would call. She would never raise. And this made Isaac furious. He bet blue chips into her like she was his personal slot machine. And, like most slot machines, she never paid out. She just took it, digesting his money, and smiling like it was an accident. When he had high pair, she had triple queens. When he had a straight, she had a flush. When he thought he had a flush, he didn't, and when we played high-low Isaac didn't qualify.
"Listen, miss," Isaac said angrily at one point.
"Did you just call her a bitch?" I asked.
"I did not say that," Isaac said. "Tell him what I said. Otherwise, he'll put it in the report. Do not write that I called Sarah a bitch."
"The poker report never lies," I said.
The truth is, Isaac lost to Sarah again and again. He lost so many times it was ridiculous. It was like a slow-motion film of a man punched repeatedly in the face. The man's arms are at his sides; the fist is coming toward him. You almost want to yell something, like "Raise your arms! Defend yourself!" But you don't. The back of the fingers line up against the man's cheekbone, the knuckles rolling into the jaw; a spray of spit flies from his mouth. And then she hits him again. It was a metaphor for all senseless violence. There was Isaac, bluffing half the time, not even a high pair. And there was Sarah, only playing when the cards were perfect, smiling like a carnivore at a meat convention. It was like so many modern conflicts. First, there was some provocation, and then the larger country flew an armada of bombers across the border, and soon everything was burning. And you could see how people become desensitized to violence. You could understand why traffic slows on the highway as the drivers take a long, hard stare at a wrecked car. And you could understand movies like Pulp Fiction and Scream, where people are killed in mean and senseless ways yet somehow it's funny, somehow we're still able to sleep at night. And we all sat calmly laughing, unaware of our own cruelty, even as Sarah did to Isaac what a butcher does first to a plucked chicken.
Molly played with a similar strategy. She's recently married. Her husband, Chanan, was supposed to play, but Molly wouldn't let him out on a Friday night when there was still cleaning to do at home. Since her wedding, a couple of weeks ago, Molly has carried her beauty differently. Before, it was like a secret, but now it's a flashlight she's shining in your eye. "I have such terrible cards," she would say, turning her face in profile. "I should fold." But her cards held up. She won all the time. On most hands, she didn't even ante. She couldn't be bothered to throw in the quarter. And nobody had the guts to tell her. We all knew what she had done to Chanan.
If there was a loser for the night, it was Dollar Dan Weiss, a distant relative of Harry Houdini and one half of the fabled San Francisco band the Progressive Reading Series All-Star Minstrels. Dan makes most of his money working in a new-and-used-book store. In other words, he makes very little money and lives on the tail end of a dying industry. Like many publishers, he doesn't know when to fold. In fact, Dan never folded. "It's more fun to bet," he said. And he kept tossing quarters and red chips and whatever else onto the felt. He lost $24 in all. Mostly to Tono.
Tono was the big winner for the night. Which is a little scary, because Tono's a known cheater. With two beautiful women directly across the table, nobody was watching Tono very closely, which is unusual for him. He's just visiting from Colorado. He was Ben's college roommate. Ben, who's never done a bad thing in his entire life, becomes someone different when Tono's in town. He becomes Bad Ben and does nothing but drink, smoke, and gamble for four days. I thought that would change after the birth of his daughter six months ago. But I was wrong about that.
"How's T.?" someone asked him through the haze of smoke.
"Who?" he replied.
"Your daughter."
"Where's my beer?"
The Upshot
The game went late. Vanessa came over, as did Tori. Olu came up for a little while to make sure we weren't fucking up his chairs. At one point, I realized there were four gorgeous women in my kitchen, and two of them were playing poker. The other two were like cheerleaders. Three of them were seriously drunk. How did this happen? I asked myself. When did I become trustworthy?
And then it was over. Or kind of. Congress is on the verge of a bailout; nobody's sure if it will work. The country's already $11 trillion in debt—what's $1 trillion more? People stuck around for a bit, helped me put away the table, bring Olu his chairs back, bag up the recycling. Isaac asked if he could sleep on my couch, and then left. Everything went back to normal. But what if John McCain won the election? What then? It was like imagining a world without sunlight. Would any of this matter, these games, this kitchen, these doors? Would we still play poker, or would we only play poker? In the end, poker is a game of hope. Sometimes it's a game for suckers, but the best players are optimistic realists. They're people who believe something good can still come out of this mess. The worst poker players are cynics. They stick with what they know, even when it's a losing hand. They don't enjoy the game, but they don't know how else to spend their days. They're terrified of change. They're old before their time, and even older when their time comes. They're like CEOs of failed companies asking to be hired based on their experience.
Barack Obama plays poker. John McCain's game is craps. McCain's been known to stand at the long Vegas table, bug-eyed, swathed in green light, blowing on the dice, ignoring aides imploring him to leave. When McCain gets going at the craps table, his mouth gets a hard line to it, his shoulders pull together, and his brow stretches so tight it's like his forehead's going to rip. He doesn't hear or recognize what's going on around him. He stays focused on the task at hand, without food or sleep, until all the money's gone. Craps isn't like poker. In poker, you have a chance, but in craps you're playing against the house. And you should never bet against the house with your own money. Because the house always wins.
Stephen Elliott
Editor
The Poker Report
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