Flushed

Chapter 2-1

2

I learned to play poker from my father, Martin Wells. Well, the mechanics of the game at least. He didn't know enough about the game to teach me the right way.

Dad worked at the local college in the shippingeceiving department. Though he never said as much, he hated it. Every evening he stomped through the front door, slamming it behind him, and before he could be bothered to utter so much as a hello to either his wife or his two children, he greeted the liquor cabinet first. Booze was his first love.

This first drink within moments of his arrival would be one of many.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not accusing my father of alcoholism. I don't believe he needed to drink. My father never let his family suffer financially or otherwise to pay for his whiskey. He was stressed out from work, family difficulties, finances and whatever else may have been going on. Drinking helped him to relax.

I spent much of my childhood listening to my father complain about work. When he would sit in his favorite armchair, after pouring himself the first glass of whiskey, he would begin a tirade about his day. This was directed toward my mother, but not at her. There was always something for him to complain about. He was passed up for the supervisor position yet again, or so-and-so called in sick yet again, he's so unreliable he should be canned. Everybody should be canned according to my father. Everybody but him.

By listening to him going on every afternoon, one would get the impression there was nothing my father liked about the occupation he'd held since graduating high school. This wasn't the case. There was one thing. He liked the hours. Dad worked Monday to Friday, from eight in the morning until four. He once told me he liked these hours because it allowed him to spend more time in the evening with my brother and me. I never believed this for a second. My father spent more time with the television than with us, providing the family with a great service by keeping an eye on it to make sure it didn't get up and walk away.

My mother, Carolyn, was a nurse in a home for the elderly. She worked night shifts from eight until eight. This meant my parents only saw each other for a few hours in the evenings between when Dad got home and Mom left. This little time together saved their marriage. You never saw two more miserable people when they were together. They could sit in the same room for over than hour without once acknowledging each other's existence. Dad would watch TV and mom would read a mystery novel, never even glancing up at her husband.

My brother, Doug, was twelve at the time. Our parents had deemed him old enough to stay home by himself but not quite responsible enough to look after his nine-year-old brother. This conflicted with my father's weekly poker game since it was held at a friend's home. Moving the game to our house wasn't an option. Four guys who chose to relieve their stress every Wednesday night with gambling, cigars, beer, and dirty jokes wouldn't have been tolerated by my mother. Even if she wasn't there when it happened.

Of course, my father wasn't going to let anything get in the way of his only social activity, but there was no one available to look after me. Marty Wells solved this problem the only way he knew how. He took me with him, always with the stern instruction that I was never to tell my mother about it. When I suggested he let her know ahead of time he was going to bring me was when he had provided me with the one piece of marital advice I would ever get from my father, which may have worked in his marriage but certainly didn't in my own. The advice was, “It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

Mom would have to have been the world's biggest i***t to not know what was going on. Dad lost no less than three hundred dollars a week at these poker games, so my mother was either aware he was gambling the money away or she was under the mistaken impression that my father had acquired a d**g habit.

The poker games took place in a garage owned by a man named Harold Booker, who was old enough to be my grandfather. He told dirty jokes despite the presence of a nine-year-old boy. After he would tell the punch line, if I happened to be standing within his reach at the time, he would slap me on the back, still laughing, and say, “Don't worry, boy. You'll get it when you're older.”

The garage stank of cigars. Save for a small wooden table with four mismatched chairs around it, it was empty. This meant there was nothing for me to do while I waited for my father's friends to clean him out, so I ended up watching and learning the rules of the game.

Though the other men tolerated my presence, I'm pretty sure this was only because they needed my father to be their fourth player. If this meant having the brat tag along, so be it. I never felt welcome at the card games. There were even a few comments made that Dad only brought me to help him cheat. No one took this idea seriously, of course. During the time I was witness to these weekly poker games, I had never seen him win. Well, a few hands here and there, but my father was always broke by the end of the night.

I'm not sure what the attraction was, but these weekly poker sessions were the beginning of my obsession. I even got my parents to buy me a poker set for Christmas. So now that I had a deck of cards and chips, I set up mock games at the kitchen table, acting as each player. Of course, since I knew what each hand was, it didn't help me to improve.

The next step was convincing my parents to buy me a poker game for our Tandy 1000 EX. This wasn't an easy task since my father could be very frugal with money if the purchase sought didn't contain alcohol. Eventually, I wore them down and my only other obstacle became fighting my brother for the computer. Since he was three years older, he always won. But when I complained to Dad about it, he would always relent, if only to get me out of his hair.

I found the computer game to be the best of the available resources for learning the game. The books I got my brother to take out of the library for me helped with theory but, as with most things, practice was the best way to learn. I didn't learn much from Dad and his poker buddies since they were amateurs and didn't strive to improve their game.

Texas Hold 'Em didn't exist in those days. Or if it did, I never heard about it. Five Card Draw was the more popular game back then, which could be why I've always favored it over any other. I've been playing it since I was nine.

I can admit as my poker skills improved, I started to get cocky about it. Especially toward my father. It drove him insane.

“You need to learn to bluff,” I said one night as we were driving home.

“What the hell do you know about it?” My father was a quiet man, giving the impression of infinite patience. Once he had a few drinks in him, however, that patience was nowhere to be found and he was irritable with everyone. Especially me.

“I know you need to learn to bluff,” I told him. “It wouldn't hurt if you stopped betting so high just because you get a decent hand, too. Anybody can tell what you're holding. That's why you always lose.”

“Jesus,” my father said, shaking his head. “The kid gets a computer game and suddenly he's an expert.”

Even to a nine-year-old, it was obvious my father resented any unsolicited advice on how to improve his game so I never mentioned it again.

But I strove to keep improving. It got to the point where it even started to affect my schoolwork. When I got to high school, there were a few meetings between my parents and my teachers involving how my obsession with poker was the cause of my grades plummeting. Which, wasn't the big issue according to the teachers. Some of the other parents had been complaining about me taking their kids' lunch money during recess poker games.

So, I got the speech from my parents about how disappointed they were. Well, from my mom anyway. I don't think Dad cared too much. He hardly said a word about it. Just sat there as mom went on for almost an hour.

I didn't see the big deal. Those kids were old enough to know what they were doing, so it wasn't my fault.

I kept playing poker against other kids at school until I was eighteen and able to go to the local casino. That first night, I left with over two hundred bucks in my pocket. Since then, I kept going back and walking out with more money than I started with. I was making enough I didn't see any need to get a “real job,” as my parents kept suggesting.

Everything seemed to be going fine too until, one day, that woman entered my life.

Three nights after I had first seen her at the casino, I went back. There was no need for me to go every night. I wasn't trying to get rich. Just make enough to keep existing.

The place was swamped. There were people everywhere, making it hard to move around. The slots were chiming non-stop and the idle chatter grew to deafening proportions. This was unusual for the time of year. The busy season is in the summer. Since it was spring, I wasn't expecting it.

I don't like crowds. I've been told I have an anxiety disorder. Not by anyone who would know. I've never been in counseling or to see a shrink. But people think they're experts because they've read a pamphlet or seen a movie of the week. Whenever I'm in a large group of people, I have a hard time breathing, I feel this tightness in my chest that restricts it. My whole body tenses up and starts shaking. I sweat like crazy too. I don't know if this means I have a disorder or if I just don't like people very much.

I've had to learn to cope with this, though, considering what I do for a living. I've had to force myself to not make a break for the front doors every time I walk in. This is another reason why I only go a few nights a week. It's better for my nerves.

As soon as I set foot on the ugly, psychedelic carpet, I saw her. She sat on a bench, facing the front doors so she could see everyone who walked in.

I could have sworn I saw her breathe a sigh of relief when she saw me. I couldn't even guess why that might be. She did look a bit familiar, but I had no idea where I might have met her. Maybe she had one of those faces.

I did my best to ignore her as I maneuvered through the crowd, making my way to the poker room, which wasn't easy. There wasn't a lot of room to begin with. They had the place packed tight with slots and every possible casino game you could imagine, so space was pretty tight even without an overabundance of bodies. I ended up bumping into a few people as I tried to make my way through. One elderly lady, so intent on the slot machine she was playing you'd have thought I could have taken a sledgehammer to the back of her head without her noticing, became extremely irate when I accidentally nudged her on my way past. She yelled a few obscenities at me and called me names worthy of someone who'd run over her dog and backed up to do it again.

I turned around, intending to at least mutter an apology to the old woman. But the words caught in my throat when I saw I was being followed. I forgot about apologizing and turned to continue my way to the poker room, hoping to lose the woman in the crowd. Besides, the old lady probably deserved to be bumped into. She was probably selling babies on the black market or something.

It never once occurred to me this girl could have been following me because she thought I was attractive and wanted to ask me on a date. I'm not the kind of guy women ask on dates. I'm more the kind of guy women run away from because they think I want to see if they'll fit in my freezer.

It also never occurred to me she may not have been following me at all.

Luckily, the poker room wasn't as busy as the rest of the casino. Only a few tables were occupied that particular evening. I took a moment to study the people at the tables. I picked one that had three people sitting at it—not counting the dealer of course—instead of one of the others with four or five. This may seem odd since one would assume you could win more money off four or five people as opposed to three. But anyone who assumed that hadn't noticed what I had.