The Glory of Rome, the world’s largest gaming vessel, floated on the Ohio River fifteen miles from Louisville. As its name suggests, the riverboat’s interior was gaudily filled with classical columns and murals and frescoes—imagine a poor man’s Caesar’s Palace, and you’ll have an idea. It was pure chance that I was here. For the last two weeks, I’d been on a crosscountry road trip starting in Houston and driving to Florida, North Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, and West Virginia. After getting a late start out of Lexington, I realized that there was no way I’d get to Chicago in an afternoon. No biggie. I would visit Louisville, play poker, and head north tomorrow.
As I walked towards my seat in the spacious poker room—six of thirty tables were full—I was surprised to hear someone call out my name. I’d never been to this casino (or even to this state) and nobody knew that I was here. I was so far off the grid that, if I mysteriously disappeared, no one would suspect anything for days, or even weeks.
Yet someone did recognize me. Staring from his $1/$2 hold ‘em seat was a pasty guy in a baggy gray sweatsuit, black wraparound shades, and long, stringy black hair. Incredible. Of all the players in all the cardrooms in the country, and I bump into a college basketball buddy I hadn’t seen in ten years. We shook hands, joked about strange coincidences, and agreed to catch up after playing for a while. An hour or so later, I followed him up a short flight of stairs and onto a side deck, the kind of outdoor nook that dealers and regulars probably used for smoke breaks. It was so dark that I could barely see anything. We stood by the railing, just the two of us, staring into the starless sky and listening to water lapping the side of the boat.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, lighting a cigarette. He spoke with an Eastern European accent, precise and mechanical, like the Terminator.
“Traveling,” I said. “Visiting friends and family. And playing poker when I can.” It was a vague answer, one that I’d grown accustomed to giving.
“Still balling?”
I wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. The question was an invitation to step into the past, back to the days when younger, hungrier versions of ourselves did nothing but eat, sleep, and hoop.
We called him The Bosnian Bomber. He was a big guard who loved to launch deep threes and practice goofy trick shots and pull sick ankle-breaking crossovers—a wannabe Jason Williams, the next White Chocolate. From our perspective—in the eyes of the varsity players in whose ranks The Bomber desperately wanted to join—he was a bit of a joke. He had skills, don’t get me wrong. But something seemed slightly off, lost in translation. Once, in a jayvee game against a rag-tag community college, The Bomber’s squad was down one with twenty seconds left. His coach, Buckets, a peppy poindexter barely over five feet tall, instructed him to bring the ball across halfcourt and call timeout so they could draw up a last-second shot. Nodding affirmatively, The Bomber lowered his head like a bull and switched into streetball mode—you could spot the change in his determined eager eyes—dribbling between his legs, behind his back, spinning, stutter-stepping, sizzling with enough swag to impress the Harlem Globetrotters. A second defender swarmed him, then a third, and still he didn’t feed his wide-open arms-waving teammates. Four, five, six seconds passed. Buckets bounced up and down on his stubby legs, frantically gesturing like a capeless matador toward the sidelines, screaming, TAKE IT OVER! TAKE IT OVER! Seven, eight, nine. Finally The Bomber sliced between two defenders, crossed halfcourt, and called time-out. Blustering onto the court, his furious face tomato-red, Buckets demanded to know what in God’s name was going on.
Coach, The Bomber replied with wide-eyed confusion, you told me to take over!
Naturally, he was a coach’s nightmare. But how could you stay angry at someone who loved the game so much? Watching him, you felt closer to the playground, to basketball’s soul. Days passed, semesters slipped by, and every afternoon The Bomber was exactly where you’d expect: in one of the gyms, playing five-on-five or one-on-one or solo, dreaming of the day when he’d get his shot with varsity. He never did. I quit the team at the end of my sophomore year, throwing away what The Bomber would have killed for, the words of an old camp counselor echoing in my ears: Talent is wasted on the talented. If The Bomber lacked my technical skills—I played a dependable white-man’s game—then I had none of his brazen passion. Taken together, the two of us could have made one hell of a basketball player.
Now, outside on the dark deck, my college buddy looked sluggish or stoned. It was hard to picture him breaking any ankles at a nearby gym. “And what about you?” I asked. “Are you still playing?”
Grasping the rail with both hands, he gazed down into the murky water from behind those Terminator shades. “I played professionally in Bosnia,” he said after a long pause. “But I suffered a leg injury and had to return home. For a while my mind did not work correctly. I had legal troubles. Things were...very bad for me.”
I waited for him to continue.
“But things are better now?” I finally asked.
“Indeed,” he said, flicking a cigarette into the river. “I am calmer now. I have proper medication. I chill and play cards.” He turned to me, as though he’d received some sudden insight. “Do you have a place to stay tonight? You would be welcome at my parents’ home.”
The invitation surprised me. My plan for the night, to the extent that I had one, was to sleep in a motel or my car. A comfy couch sounded appealing.
“Thanks for the offer,” I said. “Let’s play for a bit and decide later.”
I settled back into my hold ‘em table and texted Pat, another college buddy. You’ll never guess who I bumped into, I wrote, just as I was dealt the Ace-Deuce of diamonds. I raised to twelve and was called by an erratic guy in his forties who’d been straddling, limping, and raising a bunch of hands. He called my flop bet and led into me with a small bet on the turn, which I called, hoping to bink a flush. After a non-diamond nine fell on the river, he heaved a weary sigh and bet $150 into the $100 pot.
My flip-phone vibrated. Ignoring it, I studied the board: Five, Six, Queen, Ace, Nine. My front-door flush draw had missed. The straight draw, on the other hand, had hit, and my opponent was repping that he held Seven-Eight. But did he? For whatever my read was worth, he looked comfortable. I had top pair, no kicker—just a bluffcatcher. Time to fold. Hoping to distract myself from the sting of another losing hand, I checked Pat’s reply.
Wait, he’s out of jail?
What was that supposed to mean? I texted back a question mark. Pat responded with a link that took me to a local newspaper article:
Man Accused of Lodging Knife in Wife’s Neck.
Jesus Christ.
I snuck a glance behind me. The Bomber hunched over his chips, hoodied-up and grim, speaking to no one. I thought of the playful, exuberant kid who balled all day, every day, and wondered what had happened during the last decade. And why poker? Of all the things that he could be doing, why was he surrounding himself with gruff guarded men? Maybe the game offered him a weak approximation of the game, of basketball. That was my best guess. It’s hard to know if poker, like any physical or mental competition, eases or stokes our capacity for violence. The article’s grisly details—contusions to the face and chest, stab wounds across the torso, a knife jammed through (not into, through) the neck—reminded me of another athlete, The Juice. Somehow, unlike Nicole Brown Simpson, The Bomber’s wife had survived.
A more pressing question was how to handle the offer to crash at his parents’ pad. I couldn’t stay with him—could I? I squirmed in my seat. As absurd as it seemed, maybe I should accept the invitation: I would silently show support for a once-chipper dreamer whose mind had hijacked him. No words needed to be exchanged. No one would need to know. I would know.
Twenty minutes passed. One more hand, I told myself. I folded and snatched a rack from beneath the table. Staring straight ahead, I snaked around the fringe of the room towards the cashier.
Then I was gone.
