Pocket Kings Read Online Free Page B

much that they Photoshopped me right out of my wedding announcement picture, turning me into the conspicuous gray blotch hovering over my blushing bride’s shoulders.
    Write a book about my dog. My lovable dog Max, Molly, Spanky, or Duffy. He or she could be a gorgeous purebred or a big ol’ scruffy mutt who followed me home one day. Th e dog keeps my marriage intact and happy, and saves my troubled daughter from drowning one day. Because of the dog, my severely autistic son sinks twenty shots in a row in a high school basketball game, and the dog sees my wife through menopause and a cancer scare. Spanky gets old and blind and dies in my arms. For the first time in my adult life, I—ever the cold-blooded stoic—cry. Ultimately not only has the dog taught me the true meaning of Love, it has rescued my literary career.
    Pen a poorly written trilogy of mysteries set in Stockholm and then die of a heart attack.
    I could get a job in advertising, then get fired. Th en get a job at Starbucks. Write about the whole wonderful, fulfilling experience, and quit the job when the book gets sold to the movies.
    Confess in one memoir that I was once a young, homeless, drug-addicted but still ravishingly beautiful transvestite prostitute who serviced truck drivers and the squealing livestock they transported. In the next memoir confess that I wasn’t, that I was really my sister, a tough white kid who hung around with murderous but tender­hearted black L.A. gangbangers and who had once escaped the Holocaust, after meeting my wife in a concentration camp, and been raised by wolves in the Brussels woods.
    I could write an A Million Little Pieces– like memoir, all of it pullulating with exaggeration and falsehood. Concoct my very own crack whore, whose shattered life I later save. I’ll pass myself off to the literary world as a tough guy, a bad boy, a ticking time bomb, the kind of brooding, barbwire-skinned punk who calls a bartender “barkeep” and befriends mafiosi and boxers and corrupt clarinet-playing Negro judges.
    Or I could write a real memoir, about losing out as a novelist, discovering poker and winning tons of money and adulation but losing everything.
    But with so many phony memoirs getting published these days, it has become almost impossible to publish a real one anymore. Th e world prefers the fake stuff.
    I printed out my list, looked at it, tore it up, and threw the pieces out. Th en I logged on to the Galaxy and played a few hands. I crept back into bed with my wife, who was curled up and sound asleep and had no idea that her husband was now five hundred dollars richer.

3
    Big Slick
    W here else but on the Galaxy could I find camaraderie at any hour of the day or night? Where else could I find a place where failure was not only expected, but was hoped for? For when you’re sitting around an online poker table, you’re joined by at least one other and possibly nine other likeminded souls and, though they are out to take your money, you are, for a short time, willfully and inextricably bound to them. If you stick around long enough, you will witness them fail miserably and they will be courteous enough to return the favor.
    Th e first friend I made online turned out to be my best: Second Gunman, a hotel receptionist in Blackpool, England. For the first few days I played, I was so nervous that I refrained from any online chatting. I’d noticed the chat going on (there’s a small oval box where players talk to one another) but I wanted to concentrate on the cards and make sure I made the right moves: it was one thing to channel Doyle Brunson, another to channel me, but I wasn’t ready to do both at the same time. It wasn’t until my sixth day playing that I noticed I was often playing with the same people.
    â€œChip,” Second Gunman said to me one day, “how are ya?”
    I panicked but only mildly. I had been playing