“You slummin’ today?”
This isn’t the sort of question that a dealer should ask a player. Not by a long shot. But Annie wasn’t just any dealer: she was loud and brash and married to her curiosity. Her bright brown eyes fixed on me as I stood above a $4/$8 limit hold ‘em seat with a rack of white, poised to join a table packed with oldsters who stared sullenly at the baize with tight-lipped frowns. If they heard Annie—she’d yelled to me from the dealer’s box—they gave no indication. This wasn’t the first time that my presence had caused a slight stir, and it wouldn’t be the last. When other dealers saw me, a red chipper, sitting with the white chippers, sometimes they couldn’t resist asking questions (“You lost?” “You bored?” “You gonna hit the jackpot?”). To them, I was bonkers to waste time where I didn’t belong: in the cardroom’s equivalent of the slums.
They weren’t wrong. Cardrooms, I’ve decided, are like high-school cafeterias: you sit with your buddies, give each other sh*t, and imagine what life’s like at other tables—among the jocks, or the nerds, or the musicians, or the cheerleaders—without really glimpsing what’s going on. From the outside, the white chip game appeared to be a special sort of hell for retired geezers. Every day around noon, the same shabby regulars shuffled to Table 3 like mummies, sitting very close together in a little circle facing one another. As they waited for another hand, they sluggishly sipped coffee and munched Lucky Dogs and gazed mournfully at the neon JACKPOT sign that flashed its six-figure payout. A year passed before it crossed my mind that these people might be worth meeting, or even that they were peopleat all, rather than flimsy phantoms. Eventually I started visiting the white chippers a few times a week or a month, a Saturday afternoon here, a Monday night there. Maybe then, I remember thinking, I’d better understand where I belong.
I also remember the moment when it felt like I’d been granted entrance to their little tribe. The shabbiest, gloomiest white chipper was a bespectacled shaggy-haired grump in his sixties who always wore a frayed red-checked flannel. Every day he would sit for hours with an expression of defeated disdain, like a convict eking out a thirty-year prison sentence. For months, he ignored me. One day I was sitting on his left, and we were both card dead for what felt like hours, although it might have only been for a few orbits. After he’d folded his hand, I showed him Seven-Trey offsuit before tossing my rags into the muck. No response. Next hand, after he folded, I showed my rags again. “I had Six-Three,” he mumbled wryly. We started mucking and showing in rhythm, making a game out of our terrible starting hands (was it really possible for anyone to run worse than us?), bonding through commiseration. Suddenly I was a worthy confidant. My new friend nodded at a doddering dealer whose thin reddish hair barely covered her scalp, and said, “That’s The Red Skeleton.” It was Annie. Across the table, a balding man with wounded eyes hesitated above his seat, scanned the table with a forlorn frown, donned a cheap pair of Bose headphones, and rejoined the game. “Mr. Happy’s back,” he said. Then he added, as an afterthought, “The Human Cigar.”
I wasn’t sure that I’d heard him correctly. The Human Cigar?
“Yeah. Smells like smoke all the time. Maybe that’s why he’s so happy.”
Sludge and Castro and The Undertaker were also in attendance. Then there was Ship It J.J., a boisterous Indian Heineken-guzzler who howled so loudly that players across the room shrugged in annoyance or amusement, wondering how someone could get so animated over shipping measly $50 pots. “And what’s your name?” I asked, turning to my right. Muttering something like J.W. or J.D., he sounded almost ashamed by such plain initials. And it was a shame: all these years in the cardroom, and Eeyore didn’t have a proper nickname.
As a part-time member of the white chippers, I began to see the cardroom with a different set of eyes. It’s easy to view “the cardroom” as a monolith, but the population contains its own hierarchies, ranks, pecking orders—and there isn’t much interdivisional mingling. There are exceptions, of course. One time Old Soni, a green chipper, bought into the white chip game for five grand—ten times more than the rest of the table combined—because he was bored or petty or he’d lost a bet. I don’t know why. He casually flicked greens into the pot, stoically soul-reading his opponents, wordlessly asking them, Do you see how much I’m worth? Do you see? Noticing their buddy’s shenanigans, green chippers sauntered over from the Big Boys Game and lobbed wisecracks Soni’s way. Some of the white chippers laughed or scowled or ignored him. Others—wealthy lowrollers whose shabbiness was a masquerade—treated him with something like amused pity. How much, they asked themselves, is cardroom status really worth in the outside world? Where things mattered most, they reminded themselves, they were the winners.
Despite their differences, the green and red and white chippers had something in common: at least they were in the game. Nick the Greek, the infamous gambler who repeatedly won and lost fortunes, understood this. Once he was spotted in California playing $5 draw poker, and someone asked what he was doing in such a puny game (You slummin’? You lost?). The Greek replied: “Hey, it’s action, isn’t it?”
Mr. Green was rarely in action. I can still see him lingering on the cardroom’s fringes beside the other railbirds, gazing intently at the white chip game with the tired, hungry expression of a stray pit bull. He was a stocky old Black man, five feet tall and white-whiskered and sleepy-eyed, who looked like he might collapse from exhaustion at any moment. Propping him up was a rickety black cane. Around three or four in the afternoon, Mr. Green would hobble to Table 3 and greet Castro and J.J. and Mr. Happy and whoever else was around, and they would nod back; even Eeyore nodded respectfully in his direction. After we got to know each other—I’m sorry to say that I never knew him well—I liked to give Mr. Green a vicarious sweat. He would perch behind my right shoulder and lean forward, huffing expectantly, and I couldn’t help noticing the sour smell of his breath. We peeked at my cards together. If I made a flush or a boat his whole body would gently quiver. If I made what was, in his eyes, a bad fold (it wasn’t possible to make a bad call) he would gleefully berate me. “Hold ‘em!” he’d say. “The game is hold ‘em, not fold ‘em! Learn how to play, young man!”
Every so often, Mr. Green managed to scrounge together two crumpled twenties for a minbuy. He would sit as close to the middle of the table as he could in order to compensate for his poor vision, and as cards skimmed across the table a childlike glow suffused his face. He kept one sleepy eye on the action and another on the blinking neon sign past the dealer’s right shoulder, above the Lucky Dogs Stand: BAD BEAT JACKPOT. Quads over quads, straight flush over straight flush, one life-changing bink, that’s all it takes. Just one bink. JACKPOT: not so much an investment but a one-in-a-million lottery ticket that transports you to a dramatically different life, the sort of life you’ll never be able to earn by working a nine-to-five. JACKPOT: a miraculous windfall that elevates you from $4/$8 limit to $15/$30 Omaha, from the slums to the Big Boys Game, from a ramshackle shotgun in the Ninth Ward to a white-columned mansion on St. Charles Avenue.
Mr. Green played fast and loose. He pressed his luck. He gambled so recklessly that it wasn’t a question of whether he’d lose, but of when. And so he fit in with the lowrollers who’d been gathering long before the downtown casino opened, decades earlier, at Municipal Auditorium in the Treme, at The Treasure Chest in Metairie, at Boomtown on the Westbank, at home games and front porches and smoky bars. It wasn’t the money that mattered so much to them as the winning, the stacking of chips in tall towers. Now they gathered every afternoon on Table 3, dreaming of jackpots, Kings and Queens of a tiny white-chipped world.
