For those of us who hadn’t heard the news, there was shock and then dismayed speculation. We were sitting in The Dungeon, the cardroom’s low-ceilinged back area, waiting for the Saturday morning hold ‘em tournament to start. The Nurse had dropped a bomb—Pat was dead. A few regulars nodded soberly. Others crinkled their noses in confusion and wondered: which Pat?
“In his sixties, $1/3 player, he’s a golfer,” The Nurse said from the 3 Seat.
“Always wears an Alabama hat,” the 6 Seat said.
“He owned a windshield company,” the 8 Seat added.
“He was on dialysis, right?” Dealer Larry asked.
“He and I used to talk about golf a lot,” The Nurse said. A burly bald man with a hangdog face, he was unusually chatty today. “There had been a couple weeks where I didn’t see him, and I said to myself, Man, I think something bad happened to Pat. I was trying to call him, but he never would answer me back. One day I was sitting over there”—he pointed into the main room—“and I asked the dealer, ‘Have you seen Pat?’ Right then and there, Pat came over and tapped me on the shoulder. That was a couple weeks ago, and now he’s f**king dead.”
“I know he was on dialysis,” Larry said again.
“He was a diabetic,” The Nurse explained. “Had a wound on his foot, and it got infected in the bone.”
“Damn, I didn’t know that! I knew he was sick, though.”
“Yeah,” The Nurse said softly. For a few moments the table was shrouded in pensive silence. Then the floorman mercifully announced Shuffle Up and Deal, and we busied ourselves with the tasks of posting blinds, checking hole cards, and deciding whether to fold or raise. It was satisfying, when the first pot was played, to hear the sound of chips hitting chips.
Over time, I’ve discovered that I have what psychologists call a contextual memory. I’m bad with names and dates, for example, but I’m good with faces. If I’ve played cards with you, chances are good that I’ll remember where we played; I might even recall a hand or two. For a few minutes I brooded beside The Nurse in Seat 2, helplessly mulling over a faceless name. Pat. Pat. Pat. The only poker-playing Pat I could recall was Actor Pat, and he was doing fine. Taking out my phone, I pulled up Facebook and found the profile picture of a guy I instantly recognized. Of course—that Pat! He was bald with a stubbly white beard and a sturdy smiling face. He looked like Ed Harris. Sitting beside him was a radiant woman in a black dress and a pearl necklace with matching earrings. They were out somewhere in New Orleans, enjoying a candlelit dinner on a narrow balconied sidestreet. Like most profile pics, he appeared to be presenting the best version of himself—healthy, happy, and well-loved.
Seeing Pat’s face evoked two memories. I remembered the time we’d first talked, at a $1/3 hold ‘em game in the middle of the main room. By then we’d played together a handful of times, and I’d always sensed a slight swagger about him: he stacked his chips in tall towers of forty, bet aggressively, and liked to show an occasional bluff. It turned out that both of us were from upstate New York. He’d lived way upstate, near the border, and we reminisced about warm summer afternoons at the Thousand Islands Country Club, where the first tee looks out onto the St. Lawrence River. When I racked up to leave, we shook hands and wished each other well. From then on there had been a cordial warmth between us, forged out of the mutual respect of two cardroom regulars.
The second memory is very clear. It’s a Monday afternoon, and I’m on the waitlist to join the white chippers. In the meantime, I sit in a $1/3 game in the middle of the room—Table 9, Seat 4, almost exactly where I’d met Pat—and before I can unrack my chips I’m dealt Ace-Jack. I toss in three reds and three players call, including a beleaguered bald guy whose chips are stacked in plain twenty-chip columns. It takes me a few seconds to realize that I know him. It’s Pat.
The flop comes King, Queen, Ten of different suits. Boom, Broadway, easy game. I bet, everyone calls, and suddenly the pot is a few hundred bucks. The turn is a low brick, and I bet big. This time only Pat calls, and the slow, wary, begrudging manner in which he does so tells me that he’s got a good-but-not great hand—two pair, maybe, or Queen-Jack. There’s no acknowledgment or chatter between us, just the tenseness of an abrupt confrontation. The river comes—it’s another brick; I still have the nuts—and Pat stares at me like a wounded deer, his bony arms encircling his last $300, praying that I won’t bet. Foolish thoughts invade my mind. I consider giving my almost-friend a conspiratorial, I’ve-got-you-beat glance. I consider betting small. I consider pity-checking. But no. When I move all-in Pat recoils in his seat like someone’s slapped him upside the head. He’s a sorry sight, this feeble old man, but I don’t care. It feels good to crush his soul.
After stewing for a while in impotent agony, Pat finally folds. I push my face-down cards to the dealer along with a red chip—an excessive, guilt-tinged tip. Pat shakily gets up and limps to the cashier’s cage. Only now can I see the magnitude of his frailty, his pipe cleaner legs inside a pair of faded jeans. When he returns with two hundred in red, he plays passively, calling raises and surrendering after the flop with an expression of defeated resignation. The only thing for him to do, it seems, is follow this grim script till the end.
Over the PA, I hear my name for the $4/8 limit hold ‘em game. As I rack up for my table change, Pat summons me over with a peremptory wave. I slink over to his seat, feeling like a misbehaving son. He waves me closer. Leaning down, I can feel his breath on my ear as he croaks a predictable question.
“Did you have it?”
“I had it,” I say.
Now, chatting with The Nurse, Pat’s memory was already fading. I was learning about The Nurse’s failed marriage and the subsequent custody battle over their four-year-old son. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “If you always got your money in at fifty-fifty, would you play poker?”
“Depends how much I felt like gambling,” I answered coyly.
He grimaced and shook his head. “I’ve played with you,” he said decisively. “You’re a guy who likes to get his money in good.” He looked at me and then at Big Dan, a burly bearded outdoorsman in Seat 1 who was listening with interest to our conversation. “Marriage is like getting your money in at fifty-fifty. Half the time some b*tch is gonna walk away with your cash. Half the time!”
It was easy to imagine Big Dan cracking skulls in a barroom brawl or grabbing a deer with his huge bare hands. But as he sat there, listening respectfully, you could see that there was something gentle and longsuffering about him. He had also been through an ugly divorce, and suddenly they were commiserating about supervised visitation and OurFamilyWizard and the messiness of asset-divvying. Big Dan’s ex-wife had spiraled completely off the rails; he’d had to hire two private investigators. “And she still took half your sh*t,” The Nurse said.
Big Dan nodded, and shifted his weight. “But I still got the kids, the house, everything in it.” He sighed. “It is what it is, man. But I did learn that you can fix some of that. There’s prenups. There’s all sorts of sh*t that you can do.”
“Well, not only that, but look.” The Nurse took a deep breath. “I was raised Catholic. I believe in God. But if you find a chick that everything’s cool with”—now he was addressing me, as though my future was still salvageable—“just cohabitate. If it doesn’t work, there’s no paperwork and one of you gets the f*ck out and...I don’t know, man.” Muttering to himself, he assumed a pose of dismal meditation. “I’m bitter,” he said sadly. “I’m still bitter.”
“You’ve gotta forgive and let that sh*t go, man,” Big Dan said quietly. “You’ll feel better.”
Forgive and forget: easier said than done. Without realizing it, I had tried to forget about Pat and the misery I’d inflicted upon him, but my mind wouldn’t let me. Poker: a word that connotes not only poque, the French card game, but also one of those long metal rods used for prodding and stirring an open fire. Fitting, isn’t it? Over and over, the game pokes and prods and pricks and gnaws at our well-being. And yet here we were, ten middle-aged men gathered together inside The Dungeon: a circle-jerk of suffering. A year from now I’ll pile pain upon Big Dan, too, in a $2/5/10 game where he’s emotionally unmoored, where the money means too much. After I stack him he’ll lumber away, deep in thought, intermittently processing the hand for months, as many of us do in the wake of stinging loss, until one day, back inside The Dungeon, he’ll turn to me and say, tentatively, “I don’t think you’ll remember this.” I’ll remember.
But all of that would happen later. Now, sitting beside me and The Nurse, Big Dan was telling us about his ex-wife and opioids. The problem had started, he said, with anti-anxiety meds that had been prescribed for her depression. Things got out of control when she’d started to mix three or four bottles of wine a day with the prescription stuff. “I’m a nurse,” The Nurse told him. “We’re doing work with rural community health centers to take on this opioid epidemic that we have. The withdrawal from anti-anxiety stuff is worse than heroin. It’s worse than anything.”
“It changed the person that she was,” Big Dan said. “She started doing stuff that she never would’ve done.”
