Sample story

THE HAND

This is a story about a bar game from 1993, I think.

Iowa City, Iowa, is a mecca of the writer community, and many famous writers have spent time in a little hole-in-the-wall bar in town called The Fox Head. In those days, I was a young kid hanging out with a lot of famous writers, and one night at the bar a number of us struck on the idea of starting up a poker game in one of the booths.

We would use change for chips: a penny was $1, a nickel was $5, and so on. After everyone emptied their pockets, there were several thousand dollars on the table. As the youngest member of the group, I was sent to the little grocery next door to buy a deck of cards. The grocery was called Dirty John’s because once upon a time it had been the only place in Iowa City where you could buy pornographic magazines.

I returned to the bar and cracked the seal on the cards. Some years later, I worked as a casino dealer in Atlantic City, but now I was just a kid fumbling with a brand-new deck, struggling, I’m sure, to give them a proper riffle. I should say that none of us in the game was a particularly strong poker player, but we all liked to think of ourselves that way. I’m fairly sure that one or all of us was pretty drunk by the time we decided to start a game.

The players included Frank Conroy, who was the head of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the most famous writing school in the world. Frank liked me because he liked pool too, and I was a fairly good pool player in those days (I went on to win exactly one match in a professional pool tournament). There was the poet Donald Justice, who was also an accomplished bridge player, and there was Denis Johnson, the author of the now famous Jesus’ Son. Johnson’s history of addiction and substance abuse made him a wild card of a player—he’d bluff you not to try to win your money, but just for the thrill of it.

Once, in the Fox Head, I wound up in the middle of a sword fight over a poker game. But that’s another story. I should also mention that almost everyone who played in that first game is now dead.

The game we settled on was Seven Card Stud.

The cards had come in a small paper bag from Dirty John’s. I dumped it and the wrapper on the floor of the bar, we ante’d up, and I began to deal the very first hand we played.

It’s a long time ago now, and I don’t remember all of the details, but I do remember that we were anxious to play—no one folded after the first bet. In fact, no one folded after the second bet, either. It was a pot-limit game, so it took a while to grow the pot, and at a glance you could see why everyone was staying in. There were a lot of face cards out there. And it kept on that way. Here we were, five or six men, tough hard-drinking writer-types who were anxious to demonstrate mettle by carelessly tossing out dimes and quarters. Everyone kept calling and raising, all around the table.

The last card came, and there was a final bet—and now, on our very first hand, everyone at the table was all in.

We turned the cards over. Everyone had a full house.

It took us a moment to figure out what had happened.

At Dirty John’s, I’d bought a pinochle deck.