Tarantino Apocrypha

I've never been what you would call a gracious host. Sure, I threw a couple parties here and there back in high school when my parents were out of town. Those were opportunities not to be wasted...not when 100 or so close friends could come by and get wasted instead. We had a rotation going. That was what we did.

It didn't take me long to figure out that stale booze and fresh vomit were better mopped up off someone else's floor. Ditto for visits from the cops, brought on by noise violations, drunken brawls, or reports of participation by the less than twenty-one. All these were better endured on the road.

Throw in an anti-social wife, and my chances of hosting a party plummet to about nil--right where I want them.

Ironically, I never would have hosted that game if not for my wife. Not that that would carry any weight in the eyes of the law. No excuses.

Not that she encouraged my gambling, or that it needed encouragement for that matter. But she determined that my second job required more privacy than a locked door and earbuds could provide. Once I'd moved a TV, VCR, DVD player, etc, etc into a downtown walk-up, it was only a matter of time before Frank leaned on me to get into the weekly rotation.

When successful, a poker player is a lot like a leach, while a game is like a host, slowly getting the blood drained out of it.  If the host is healthy, nobody really notices the leach, and he eventually falls off, bloated and happy.  If the host is sickly, it dies.

You can probably tell by my choice of simile just how reluctant I am to host anything.  Poker is a predatory game, and I do whatever it takes to stay on the predator side of the ledger.  Hosts are prey.

I'd been on the predator side of the ledger to an unusual degree for a couple of months.  I'd been catching cards and wringing maximum value from my made hands with an almost brutal effectiveness.  The unfortunate side effect of my winning streak was that it made it easier for Frank to guilt me into hosting the game.

There was no way in hell either I or my wife was going to let a bunch of degenerate gamblers with nasty habits come over (I didn't even like some of them knowing where I lived), but with my little fuck-flick viewing pad vacant, as far as Frank was concerned, that apartment was on stand-by for poker.

In the end, the arm-twisting from Frank was minimal, as the siren-song of easy money lured me onward in a way that Frank never could.

The property owner in me hoped that the evening's guests would be upstanding citizens, relatively speaking, while the predatory edge-seeker in me was rooting for wayward degenerate freaks, eager to spew money they really couldn't afford to lose. As a misanthropic social hermit, I left the recruiting of players to my network-rich associates. The game's proverbial fate was in their proverbial hands.

We got started once we had six people.  I didn't know any of them besides Frank, but I recognized them all, either from other home games or nearby casinos. These were the sort of players that you could expect to grind out a small profit from, as long as you didn't get too out of line.  Which is to say, considerably less degeneracy than I would prefer.  On the other hand, I felt like my odds of getting through the night without any arrests or property damage were solid, so there you go.

Next to arrive was Bumfights Bill, along with a guy Bill apparently knew from AA meetings...or NA meetings. I wondered if the guy had found his way 'round to GA meetings yet. Some people are addicted to addiction.

Addict or not, the new guy turned out not to be the sort of whiny bitch who objected to others drinking in his presence, so the rest of us determined to put a dent in a bottle of Booker's. If nothing else, we'd get to see if a few socially lubricated but otherwise responsible adults could outlast a sober but recovering addict, who itchily eyed the bourbon,

Or we'd get to see how long it took him to fall off the wagon.*

We didn't.  AA 1, Darwin 0. Or if you prefer, Buzzed but competent players 1, Short Stacked Recovering Addict 0.  His resolve to stay sober outlasted his capacity for losing money, and he was out the door after about an hour, sober as a jaybird.

Bumfights Bill managed to build his stack a bit, but the other players remained composed and patient. Bill played well for stretches, but could be counted on to eventually spew his chips in a fit of spastic weirdness. I wasn't sure who all had played with him before, Bill is such an oddball, I felt like you would intuit that about him from his appearance.

If Bill's appearance wasn't sketchy enough, the conspiracy theories would tip you off. I'd put the over/under on Bill bringing up black helicopters, aliens, tinfoil hats, etc., at 75 minutes, but I'd get too much action on the under.

That night Bill lasted nearly two hours before he started talking about the ZOG, the truth about 9/11, mind control, the CIA and LSD, freemasonry, the CIA and cocaine, the grassy knoll, the CIA and heroin...

He even managed to work in Helter-Skelter and Quentin Tarentino. It all made about as much sense as it usually did. The rest of us were asking him if Tarentino was a CIA creation when he ran out of chips.

"I'll be back--I gotta go bump off an ATM."

The door slammed behind him.

"D'ya think he's kidding?"

"He's kidding. But don't let him buy chips with any bills covered in exploding dye."

"Don't you need a black light to see that stuff?"

We decided to take a break and put a bigger dent in the bourbon. With the AA guy already out, there wasn't much easy money to be had until Bumfights got back...unless the Booker's took over. I don't know if anybody else was thinking this way, but I was. We all wanted to see Bill knit his conspiracies into a coherent whole, as unlikely as that may have been.

After about a half hour we settled down to play. Bill wasn't back, and I figured the game might wind down without some fresh blood.

Bereft of Bill, we discovered that we mostly agreed that the CIA were guilty of their misdeeds, but disagreed as to their motives. And Quentin Tarantino was a genius.

"I love Pulp Fiction. But all that crap about coke being out, and heroin in? Complete bullshit." Frank could only wait for conspiracy story time part two for so long, and was up on his soapbox. Nature abhors a vacuum.

"I'll buy that Vincent Vega got into skag in Amsterdam. Eurotrash on the dole, sitting on their ass waiting to die, heroin makes sense. This is the land of opportunity. Wall Street. Sink or swim. America runs on cocaine. Has for decades.

"You have a couple of fashion models and grunge rockers OD, suddenly Newsweek thinks there's an epidemic. Meanwhile, coke comes in by land, sea and air, gets cut with baby laxative, chopped up with American Express Platinum cards, and snorted with hundred dollar bills, so fast the cartels can't keep up. Coke is as American as mom, God, and apple pie."

"What about Bill? Pretty sure he's had junk running through his veins," interjected one of us."

Frank's eyebrows raised. "Bill?" He paused for dramatic effect. "Bill is the exception that proves the rule."

Bill was an exception, no doubt. "What about that NA cat?"

"Fuck him. He's lucky this didn't come up before he got stacked. He'd probably be on the phone to his sponsor by now...or looking to score."

It was funny. I'd never seen the guy before, and he left within the first hour, but I instinctively agreed that he was most likely a basket-case. Funny too, that while we were drinking in front of him I thought of him as the AA Guy, but now that we were debating boy vs. girl, he was the NA Guy.

Meanwhile, I realized that I wasn't worried about Bill. I thought of him as somewhere between a lost soul and a force of nature. He'd survive the apocalypse, along with the cockroaches. Bill was indestructible.

The door knocked, aggressively enough to worry me, and I jumped up to answer it, acutely aware that none of us were armed...as far as I knew.

Through the peephole I saw slicked back black hair, a tan face I didn't recognize, and a leather jacket.

I opened the door as far as the chain lock would allow, which wasn't much. "Who are you?" I asked, aggressively enough to come off like "Who the fuck are you?"

"Theo."

I half-turned. "Anybody here know a Theo?" I was met by blank stares and shrugs.

I looked back through the crack. "Nobody here knows a Theo.  Who do you know?"

I didn't ask him how he found out about "this," because that would be one step closer to admitting there was a "this." Next I'd be admitting that "this" was a poker game.

No security, no password....I felt like I was running a half-assed speakeasy. Or a john trying to determine whether a hooker was a narc...or a hooker trying to figure out if a john was undercover.

He said a name I didn't recognize.

Somebody behind me overheard. "The AA guy."

I didn't like it. I barely knew the AA guy...or was he the NA guy? Before I saw him as a guy who couldn't keep his shit together without help from his higher power, but an NA guy could have done time...or got out of it by turning snitch. The distinction was suddenly critical.

I followed my gut and let him in. He didn't have a cop vibe. But neither did Mr. Orange.













*If you think the shark in me was rooting for this guy to fall off the wagon so he could lose his money, you aren't entirely wrong, but the property owner in me didn't want to deal with a blacked-out guy who couldn't handle himself and was far more interested in getting him out the door incident free.  Most guys who put themselves in the hands of a higher power don't do so because their liver is crying for help.