The attraction to poker mystifies me. Besides Rounders, which I only liked because of John Malkovich’s awesome consumption of Oreo’s (I was 10 when I saw it), I have yet to find any part of the poker culture enjoyable. I understand that gambling is a hell of a lot of fun, but something about poker turns my brain to mush. Some friends of mine have done quite well for themselves financially through the game, and I appreciate that aspect of it. But sitting around a table for hours, doing the exact same thing, ultimately resenting your table-mates and feeling like you’ve been had, I’d rather leave that for Easter.
Same goes for Poker culture (exception being the most oreo-centric parts of Rounders). I can’t watch it on TV, read the books, or even the parts in Casino Royale that involve it. To say the least, I am poker-averse.
HOWEVER, Colson Whitehead’s sobering, muscular, and whip-smart writing about his participation in the World Series of Poker has gotten me to give up my aversion, if only to tag along as he navigates the sad world of casino poker.
The first article, published on Grantland last week, begins with Whitehead navigating the no-longer delapidated and deplorable Port Authority Bus Terminal,
Where have all the molesters gone, the weenie-wagglers and chickenhawks? 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 relative’s house in bleak winter as you peered out into the gray mush through green, trapezoid windows. Greyhounds are 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.
Whitehead then continues to Atlantic City, where he waxes on the modern Casino Resort, which he describes as ” a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit.” I’ve never been to Atlantic City, but on passing through Las Vegas last year, pretty broke and completely sun-drunk, the first thing I experienced after leaving sunlight for my 24-hour stay, was the site of a decapitated Lenin in front of a bar called “Red Square”. To be certain, the Casino-Resort is a place to degrade oneself. Which is exactly what Whitehead is looking for in Atlantic City, and after brief failure, succeeds.
I found my degradation. You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can’t change people. I was among gamblers.
In degradation, Whitehead finds a common cause with his fellow gamblers. Given the opportunity gamblers dream of, to be entered in the World Series of Poker, Whitehead claims he’d like to carry the banner for them.
I would do it for my countrymen, the shut-ins, the doom-struck, the morbid of temperament, for all those who walk through life with poker faces 24/7 because they never learned any other way. For the gamblers of every socioeconomic station, working class, middle class, upper class, broke-ass; the sundry gamers 12 stories below, tossing chips into the darkness; for the Internet wraiths maniacally clicking before their LCDs in ill-lit warrens in Akron, Boise, and Bhopal, who should really get out more; for all the amateurs who need this game as a sacred refuge once a month, seek the sanctuary of draw and stud, where there are never any wild cards and you can count on a good hand every once in a while. For Big Mitch and Methy Mike, Robotron and the lady with the crimson hair, the ones who would kill to go to Vegas and will never make it there, my people all of them. Did I sound disdainful of them before? It was recognition you heard. I contain multitudes, most of them flawed.
I wait eagerly for his next dispatch. UPDATE: Part II has dropped!
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