Colson Whitehead - The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

Zone One

Sag Harbor

Apex Hides the Hurt

The Colossus of New York

John Henry Days

The Intuitionist

Copyright 2014 by Colson Whitehead

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Portions of this book were previously published, in different form, as Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia in Grantland (July 2011).

Jacket design and illustration by Rodrigo Corral Design

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Whitehead, Colson, 1969
The noble hustle : poker, beef jerky and death / Colson Whitehead.
pages cm
1. World Series of Poker. 2. Poker. 3. Gambling. 4. Whitehead, Colson, 1969 I. Title.
GV1254.W45 2014
795.412dc23 2013031448

ISBN 978-0-385-53705-6
ISBN 978-0-385-53706-3 (eBook)

v3.1

FOR ALISON RICH

who made people pick up a book about elevator inspectors

an-he-do-nia: the inability to experience pleasure

I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze has helped my game ever since I started playing twenty years ago, when I was ignorant of pot odds and M-theory and four-betting, and it gave me a boost as I collected my trove of lore, game by game, hand by hand. It has not helped me human relationshipswise over the years, but surely Im not alone here. Anyone whose peculiar mix of genetic material and formative experiences has resulted in a near-expressionless mask can relate. Nature giveth, taketh, etc. You make the best of the hand youre dealt.

This thing draped over my skull and fastened by muscle is also a not-too-bad public-transportation face, a kind of wretched camouflage, which would come in handy on my trip to Atlantic City. Flash this mug and people dont mess with you on buses, and this day I was heading to training camp. I had six weeks to get in shape. I was being staked to play in the World Series of Poker for a magazine, and my regular game was a five-dollar buy-in where catching up with friends took precedence over pulverizing your opponents.

There was no question about taking a bus. Im of that subset of native New Yorkers who cant drive. Every spring, I made noises about getting my license and checked out the websites of local driving schools, which as a species embodied the most retrograde web design on the internet, real Galpagos stuff, replete with frenetic logos and fonts they dont make anymore, the HTML flourishes of the previous century. How could I give my money to a business with so incompetent a portal? My wife and I owned a car, and she drove us everywhere, which came to be a hassle. I used to joke that I was afraid of getting my licensethat I was at a point in my life that the first time I got behind the wheel, Id just keep driving. The first couple of times I made this joke, people laughed. Then maybe my delivery began to falter, there was a change in tone, and theyd look around nervously, peek over my shoulder for another person to talk to. My wife had the car now. We got divorced four days prior.

Id been looking forward to a descent into some primo degradation to start my trip, a little atmosphere to match my mood, but of course the Port Authority was cleaned up now, like the rest of the city. In the daytime, anyway. Across the street, the shining New York Times tower watched over the entryway, a beacon of truth and justice and Renzo Piano, and inside the terminal corridors the stores were scrubbed nightly, well-buffed, the reassuring and familiar places youve shopped at plenty. Duane Reade, Hudson News, the kiosks of big banks yet to fail. I could be anywhere, starting a journey to anyplace, a new life or a funeral.

I rushed to make the 3:30 bus and thought Id have to gulp down a hot dog from a street vendorfearing a grim return of said frank hours later at the tablebut had time to pick up an albacore tuna sandwich with dill, capers, and lemon mayo on marbled rye, plus an artisanal root cola, all for ten bucks across the street at Dean and DeLuca. Estimated Probability of Degradation: down 35 percent.

I waited to board and saw I didnt need a public-transportation face. The other passengers queued up for AC were exfoliated and fit, heading down for Memorial Day fun, not the disreputable lot of Port Authority legend. Their weekend bags gave no indication that they contained their owners sole possessions. Where have all the molesters gone, the weenie wagglers and chicken hawks? Whither the diddlers? The only shabby element I registered was the signage at the Greyhound and Peter Pan counters, still showcasing the dependable logos remembered from the bad trips of yore. Returning from a botched assignation or misguided attempt to reconnect with an old friend. Rumbling and put-putting to a scary relatives house in bleak winter as you peered out into the gray mush through green, trapezoid windows. Greyhounds were raised in deplorable puppy mills and drugged up for the racetrack, I think I read somewhere, and Peter Pan used to enter kids bedrooms and entice them, so perhaps there is a core aspect to the bus industry that defies rebranding.

The bus was state of the art, like it had wi-fi, and even though I sat two rows up from the lav I did not smell it. It was two and a half hours to AC, plenty of time for me to graze on my inadequacies. Poker eminence Doyle Brunson called Holdem the Cadillac of poker, and I was only qualified to steer a Segway. In one of the fiction-writing manuals, it says that there are only two stories: a hero goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. I dont know. This being life, and not literature, well have to make do with this: A middle-aged man, already bowing and half broken under his psychic burdens, decides to take on the stress of being one of the most unqualified players in the history of the Big Game. A hapless loser goes on a journey, a strange man comes to gamble.

According to the two crew cuts in the row in front of me, the weekly pool party at their casino was killer, but I wasnt going to make it over there. I hit my poker book, cramming. Big raises make big pots. Before you enter a pot, think about who the likely flop bettor will be. The highway bored through miles of Jerseys old growth, as if the forests had been mowed down specifically for passage to our destination, a tunnel to the Land of Atrocious Odds, and then we broke off the expressway and the big gambling houses burst up, looming over the gray water. We passed the one- and two-story buildings of downtown Atlantic Cityclapboard homes, broken chapels, purveyors of quick cashthat seemed washed up against the casinos like driftwood and soda bottles. Then we pulled into the Leisure Industrial Complex.

Growing up in the city, I never went to a lot of malls, so I didnt have the psychological scars of my Midwestern friends, who cringed at the thought of all the adolescent afternoons spent mindlessly drifting across the buffed tile. I like the Leisure Industrial Complex when I can find it, those meticulously arranged consumer arenas. I dont care if its a suburban galleria sucking the human plankton into itself from the exit ramps or a metro-area monolith stuffed with escalators to convey the herd to the multiple price-pointed retail outlets, food court stalls, and movie screens.