Dr. Peng was the first to respond. A man had slipped past me and security’s ID check in their usual daytime ease. His clothes were dark and his face was shaven; only a hint of white stubble placed his age. He wore a baseball cap and shades. He kept his head down. He spent some time at a hot blackjack table. When I saw him again, he was settling up at the Sklansky Bar. Then, still holding what he’d purchased, he joined us at five-ten no limit.
The man mumbled polite muffles to Assumi and Baron for parting while he took the unfavored and central five seat; a bit like a steer shaking hands with the butcher. Tobacco and rum flooded the air like a gas. His hands trembled a bit: brown liquor washed over the rim of the chipped lowball as it found the clink of the cup holder. He had no rewards card for the dealer and didn’t want one. All the same, tiny Dr. Peng, manager of the Endboss, arrived unsummoned.
The game went on. The doctor stood a few feet away from the table to observe. Holding her hands behind her, she disappeared into the crude red and black oils of face cards that lined the nearby wall. The man didn’t acknowledge her, nor did he offer much talk, and although I am a blowhard in general, I was quiet. I had noticed the dealer Kyle keeping an eye on him from the first, perhaps out of our shared suspicious habits, or maybe he just realized something was afoot when the table chatter slowed. Or maybe it was just because our cardroom’s boss had tilted her head in that certain way that produced a lot of anxiety among the ne’er do wells. Or maybe she was just considering how to correct my guys on the security detail.
She could be a furious woman, Dr. Peng, a real honey badger. So, despite being no taller than a child, she made the villains of the Endboss nervous. Not me, usually. There is no money in fear. There had been bets on who she was or had been, or get her to explain her story, and some other less polite variations on that, too. No dice, no matter how I or others tried. Shuit knew things, I was convinced, but he only smiled.
The man tossed a chip, and Gerbil James’ eyes grew wide. Buried in fat and obscured by his constant hand waving and finger fluttering, I don’t think I’d seen such an expression on his face before. “Fucking Donavon, what the hell are you doing at my casino?”
The man did respond. He even smiled. A strong chin poked out from below the mismatched baseball cap, but no words followed. The Gerbil’s surprise got Dr. Peng’s attention. She’d even raised her left eyebrow, which most of the players knew was even more significant than her presence or even that certain movement of her hands which seemed to indicate a managerial decision had been made.
Of course, Gerbil James didn’t own the Endboss, as far as I knew. Nor was it really a casino as much as an aggravated and appropriately dumpy cardroom here in Bellvin Gardens. The Gerbil hadn’t even been here at the beginning, like Shuit had. Still, James’ shock was so genuine I really didn’t have the thought to blame it on his regular pomposity, and I concluded that he really must know who this fellow was and that it meant something.
“In the flesh,” the man responded after far too much time, with an accent that spelled out some old Americana, a port on the Pacific or an island off Connecticut. He looked at his cards, unbothered. Now I was truly interested. I’d always had a bit of a sleuth and a sharp in me, and I liked to know who I was playing with. I have a lot of action on this and that, and while I don’t think it interferes with the play at the Endboss, some might question where the money was ultimately going or who was sharing with who and of course these are not questions you want being asked. So I expected much more of an interrogation after this admission, but on this the Gerbil surprised me again, saying nothing and doing nothing more than fishing out his phone from the folds of his sailing boat cloak. I looked to Dr. Peng for more information as well, but she was gone.
Most of the players, of course, were oblivious to any details of the new player while simultaneously interested in his abilities at the table and how much money he was buying in for. No one, man or woman, can objectify a person better than a poker player. And of course this Donavon had the misfortune of sitting straight in the middle five seat, on display like a pageant contestant or a slave, or truer to poker, the mark. I had two horses on his left, and of course my primary, Assumi, had known which seat to guide him into.
So despite the interlude, it was just another normal day here at the Endboss. In fact, in a few more hands this new man Donavan would lose his short stack, ace queen against jacks. From such an auspicious and tense introduction, to a voyage back to the Sklansky Bar. James somehow rose to follow him, which was unusual in itself, but I couldn’t tell you what happened as I got tied up in a big pot. While I was taking in the chips and Assumi was complaining about my turn call, the Gerbil returned and was tucking his ridiculous raincoat, for two other raincoats had clearly died, back into the dealer’s chair he always reserved when playing.
“Who was that?” I asked James, my glibness returned.
“Just a random.” Such a liar.
The Gerbil in general knew not to give me an inch of information, never mind a mind the name of connection he might know or even squeeze for a little juice. I laughed a little but I think it was more because I had sucked out on my own player. She owes, anyway.
“That was Donavon Rosecrans.” Yea, the Gerbil could never really stay quiet. “A true prodigy of poker and gambling. But a deadbeat all the same. I was able to collect on a few small debts I had completely given up on. I am amazed and happy and will buy anyone here a cup of coffee.”
While a few grunts half-appreciated the Gerbil’s terminous humor, it was Shuit, nearly always silent, who got my attention.
“More than a prodigy, the prodigal son of the Endboss. An original owner from when Belleville put up the licenses for the Frontier Room and Pioneer Cards.”
“Like in chess?” asked one of the randoms at the table. Kyle would give me his name later; he was in for two buy-ins and worth knowing.
“No, what I mean is someone who is a favorite, as in the bible story,” said Shuit, somewhat confusingly, as he had used two different words.
“Use that word then, use real words not fancy ones.”
An argument struck about the meaning of these words and then about another word and why you should or shouldn’t use them and when. Since many people have strong feelings about vocabulary or really any unknown idea, it carried on for some time. I pretended to listen but was really still entranced by Shuit’s information. Where there were private facts, there was available money. I prodded for more but the smiling old Turk reverted to form and had nothing else to add. The Gerbil had won this round or at least done better than I had. The game went on. My interest in the man Donavon subsided as my interest in cashing out Assumi’s chips increased.
The next day, when I came to repeat my win, I was shocked at the state of the room. Yesterday it had been the typical Tuesday empty affair, seats open like wounds for Dr. Peng to fix. The loudest sound had been a vacuum cleaner working the ashes and croissant crumbs around the Three-Card table in the adjoining room.
Today, chaos.
At least four poker tables were filled, including pot limit. A crowd of very different looking men was standing near the five-ten game under the nudie card paintings. The wait list for my five-ten game was so long it didn’t fit the Poker Atlas screen. If I had had any clue, of course, I would have called in my name. I could go to the Hustler, as I hate waiting, or I could figure out what the hell was going on.
For information, find the information broker. I saw Parking Lot Man himself leaning like a medicated pimp against the half-wall wrapping around the octagon of bar.
“Look,” nodded PLM. “Some of these ragamuffins have been here since midnight.”
The game was crowded not only with the maximum players. A mob had formed around the one man. So that explained everything: collections.
“Who the hell is this guy?”
PLM, whose real fake name is Ahab, shrugged. “No idea, but word got out.”
I sensed insincerity, but I wasn’t going to press. Parking Lot Man was stronger and wider than me, and even though he certainly knew something about owing, he had respect others didn’t. I couldn’t treat him as I prefer to treat my clients. PLM, who owed close to ninety grand to the Gerbil, was good for the money, everyone knew. He was known to keep all things real, especially his vocabulary if not his word.
“Big moment,” PLM said.
The chaos became the firestorm. Donavon had been ripped out of his seat and pushed against the red and shirtless jack of hearts. His sunglasses had been knocked away. A short and bald firebrand known as Mwin was responsible. I could hear his incomprehensible threats to the older man. Players encircled the two. Donavon gripped the little ball of muscle and greed by the shoulders, keeping him away but doing little else. Yet for the first time, I got a real look at the interloper, because he had thrown his head upward, exposing his neck, as if to ignore the bulldog’s threat while still protecting himself. A strange pose, really: this guy clearly owed a lot.
It’s absurd but it was at this moment when I started to feel closer to Donavon. First off, he wasn’t as old as I’d suspected. A good looking sixty-year-old with a pronounced chin and and nose. His eyes were black and his curly hair was white and gray. Only his black eyebrows had kept their color and shine. Hard to place this man, but I thought of how certain homeless people look so noble even in their insanity, and how many successful men are so ghoulish.
Just when I suspected Mwin going to throw a forbidden blow, which would surely get the troublemaking and dangerous little fuck out of the room at last, or perhaps, it seemed from the physics of their struggle, ram his head into Donovan’s guts, Dr. Peng arrived and with security. The big black one now made up for his lapse on ID check with a deft throw; a warrior, Jordan, and clearly making use of the gym I’d gotten him into. Mwin was whining on the carpet and Dr. Peng was yanking Donovan away from the table. The mad congregation of collectors and gamers and gamblers followed.
Our doctor and the second guard, a slack-jawed and resentful youth who was under my thumb for a few hundred, led the wiry old Donavon to what I guess Dr. Peng thought was a neutral space, deep in the back of the Sklansky Bar. Yet as she pulled the rather worn out but noble-looking fellow past me, it occurred to me how strange to bring him to the bar. Why not to her office? Or outside? Either way, I’d be calling on the guard to fill in the details.
I leaned over the short dividing wall of the bar, looking to get some idea of what was going on. It seemed I wasn’t the only one: the crowd of debitors and hangers-on were right with me. However, Dr. Peng, at least, had thought of this, and my security guard was now a pawn completely foiling the group as well as my plans of gaining some eavesdropping, because he stood at the ramp to the bar and announced it was off limits for the time being. They crowed and complained. Meanwhile, the bartender and the bus boy pulled a velvet rope across the other entrance. Dr. Peng had checkmated her rowdy degens, for the moment.
I, however, knew the Endboss, if not its history, like the back of my hand. Instead of leaning over hopelessly like a fanatic in the first row of a baseball game in hopes of catcthing some morsel about this man at the center of so much attention, I absented myself from the crowd, and headed toward the back of the casino.
I was about to jump up the stairs but was intercepted, unfortunately, by none other than the Gerbil. While it’s easy to outrun a four hundred pound man, it’s very hard to get by him. I stepped to my left, looking to worm past him, but he had the better of the situation, merely swaying one way like a puffy and pudgy gate. We locked eyes and I understood that he knew exactly where I was going. The Gerbil had me, even if he was breathing hard. I had to beg off before I missed anything important.
“Where are you going, Mr. Christopher. I have a proposition for you. It’s about debt.”
He underlined that word with the bottom note of his disagreeable sing-song: I detest this man, and it is too easy to try to trap me with that word. “Do you care about anything other than money? Excuse me.”
“Oh, you are going up to the balcony to better hear what is going on between our dear leader and Mr. Rosecrans. And Assumi’s debt is rather worrying, don’t you think?”
The Gerbil had just presented me with three different swatches of information that I had no time to process.
“We can talk about Assumi later, I need you to let me by right now.”
“Well, I would never stop you so long as you were committed to a fair dealing.”
I knew what he meant: take a small loss. I would let Assumi pay her debt with his money and without penalties.
“Out of my way.”
When I settled slowly and painfully into a potentially squeaky chair directly overlooking Dr. Peng and Donovan Rosecrans, the distance to the pair seemed almost too close. I could see the top of her thinning and dyed hair and with his cap removed, the dry stiff curls of his. I was in a loft which was once used by staff for the busy cardroom that had preceded this place. Instead of the empty tables you’d expect on the first floor, here were desks and cabinets and lamps crowded with dust. They spoke, but I had no time for them.
The perspective we had was good, though. I could also see the mob of Donavon’s collectors, but really only their hands or chests. This was excellent as I wouldn’t want any to call out to me, knowingly or not. I concentrated on making out the faint but audible conversation.
“You just left. You left all of us…”
That was Dr. Peng. Left what? She continued and I inched as far over the ledge as I dared.
“…do you think we need you now?”
“I did unforgiveable things, so I did not seek forgiveness.” The man Donavon’s voice was low and I’m sure I was missing some words.
“That’s not how it works.” Dr. Peng sounded like she was trying to be stern, to be herself as we all knew her. I tried to see her face.
“…then one day, I didn’t know what I was doing any more, as if I had taken a turn onto a city block I did not recognize, and the only thing to do… was to be forgiven and move on.”
“Forgiveness!” she started but then whispered a slew of words. Now I could recognize the strange sound I had never heard from her: emotion. I began to feel uneasy, as if I were getting a headache.
“We never finalized the papers,” she continued, a little louder so I could still eavesdrop. “So you are still… listen, you can come to the Endboss and make good on all that… but you are not welcome at…”
At what? I had to look down, had to see what was going on? Did she mean some other business?
I now saw that there were tears on both their faces.
“People need to be together. Even you.”
I had wanted a little more background on Donavon’s debts and potential crimes and secrets, but suddenly I felt a familiar warm feeling that made me want to leave my perch and run out of the room. I have to overcome this feeling occasionally, and I could tell I wanted to sneeze. It was just the dust, of course. I opened my mouth and staved off the violence my body wanted, yet at the same moment my eyes left their targets and I saw Assumi boring holes into my skull with her resentful child’s stare: she was so short that she saw under the bar’s ceiling and into the loft while the others could not.
“Settle your things here. You can come at this time each day.”
“And what about…” Donavon’s voice had turned into a whisper, too.
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
I backed away, sensing another sneeze and the warmth of the hated feeling. Is she crying over this man? He didn’t seem like a doctor or someone worth crying over. Instead of going back to the gaming floor, however, I found myself straining harder to hear the next words.
“I can’t face the players like this… What, how do you still have this, this is from…”
My eyes met again with Assumi’s wrath, and I realized I could not eavesdrop anymore. I crept downstairs, put the little velvet rope back on its dull brass hinges, and rejoined the floor. The mob was moving away from the bar. Donavon was gone, and Dr. Peng’s silhouette was disappearing into the administrative hallway shared with the restrooms.
Her husband perhaps? Had there been kids? Did they have an interest in the room that I had to worry about?
The crowd of debt collectors had vanished like vapor. Mwin was seated at an empty table, listening to Soh Ju’s complaints and directives. I even found a seat at a second five ten game that had opened mostly to accommodate all the interested parties. Game prop and general misreg Burke was at the table. Donavon Rosecras was gone but was still the topic. “Did you know he was player here, back in the day? A real tough player…” Beef Curtain Burke sounded respectful.
Did I need my ears cleaned? Was Donavan a hero? Anyway, I looked down at a pair of sevens and forgot whatever it was I was thinking.
I didn’t win much that day. Donovan would come back over the coming days and weeks. I was glad he was here at this stupid cardroom I spend so much time at. Somehow it’s a club but a club for people who never talk, and we only remember how we did this day and this week. Maybe I’m just not doing it right or maybe I stopped trying a while back, but sometimes I want to try. And here’s what’s really strange: most days Donovan comes in, Dr Peng nods at him and I want to smile; but every day he’s not there I get a little sad and I watch uselessly for our cardroom manager, that little ferocious woman we still know so little about. I guess those days she stays in the office.
I received the expected text from Assumi that night: she was going to pay off her debt and didn’t want to work the game for me anymore. Expected, but even so the Gerbil was moving fast, before I could change my mind or throw some obstacle at her or him. Anyone in this racket would want such a talented player on his team. He likely gave her a good enough deal. The crypto was in my wallet within seconds; there was no arguing if I had wanted to. I’m not sure why she wanted out, it could only be greed.
The younger security guard, who owns the ridiculous name of Matt – I call him Just Matt now – filled me a bit in on Donavon. It had been ten years at least, long before the Pita Pit had opened and closed on the bottom floor and even before the original Casino, the Pioneer which was a twin of the Frontier, it turns out. He came from some civil war family that had bought property in the Bells and Redondo Beach. Old money, but then how was Dr. Peng involved? Had Rosecrans been busto and swindled Dr. Peng into the mix? Was she left picking up the pieces or did she have a stake in the cardroom, possibly under his name?
Much to think about as I pulled through Gardena on my way to the Spoonhouse. Just Matt claimed they hadn’t missed him at the door, that the new system simply wasn’t picking up that he’d been trespassed. He’d forgotten I was right there. He’s going to need reforming.
As I walked into the tiny restaurant and took my usual spot by the spaghetti boiling contraption, the extremely disappointing shape of Gerbil James filled my Cartiers and basically the entire corner of the room.
“Isn’t there an Orson Wells movie about a fat man who follows a guy around?”
“Frankly my dear I do not think that was the plot,” the Gerbil complained. He toyed with everyone pointlessly, until he stuck the knife in.
“What the fuck do you want? You have Assumi. You have Ahab. You won’t get Ian.”
“Christopher, you use such vile words and phrases, you are not to be trusted in the least. Of course, you could never persuade me to take on such a fool as Ian. Assumi is delicious, however, quite a player. And her boyfriend is a genuine pro, in Las Vegas as we speak for the Signature. Your time with her was always on a clock.”
“Then why are you here, just to gloat and make me lose my appetite?” It’s hard to argue with the endless ambiguities of the Gerbil, who would never be caught dead telling the full truth and could mean something even I couldn’t perceive. It’s best to browbeat him into the point. The restaurant’s air was filled with tomato and hot beef oil and fish and steam and I was ravenous.
“We need to discuss the future of the Endboss. Only one of us can really own it, surely. And I think our appetites remain strong.”
“Which is the problem, you’re saying.”
The conversation grew from there. Just before I was served my meatballs over red sauce and noodles, the Gerbil pushed me an old title with a name I didn’t know that I didn’t want to see: Rosecrans. No Donovan, though. There was indeed a lot to talk about.
The next day, I returned to the Endboss. The situation had changed, and I took a moment instead of directly slipping into my usual seat in the usual game. There was Donavon, as I had mentioned, settling nearly forgotten debts in the Sklansky Bar. The new security guard was watching over him and no doubt had heard some interesting things; Jordan would get me his address. There was Dr. Peng, who I had once hoped to employ and still do but now may be a problem if this shadowy man from past Los Angeles was going to help her resurrect our cardroom. Still, I sympathized with her and would try to find a way keep her whole as possible, despite the future the Gerbil and I had divided up. The Prodigy was such a cool name for a cardroom and much more suited to modern gaming. To get kids to gamble they need to feel smart, not remind them that they are degenerates; that world of cool is over. Or the name could just be used for the bar: Sklansky was hopelessly outdated and it turns out he wasn’t the most upright guy. Drinking needs to be made smart again, too. Either way, I didn’t care that much; it’s the free drinks for bad beats that has to go. Names and words matter little compared to actions.
I sat. The Gerbil nodded. Shuit smiled aimlessly; we needed a chat, I see. Assumi, her face tired but her eyes artificially alert with heavy, juvenile mascara, only picked at the felt and moved her chips around from place to place; I will make no moves until she can relax and look me in the eye again. Of course, what they don’t know, or maybe only the Gerbil suspects, is that I am certainly not done with Assumi, and that I will have my way with her. That may sound like a bad idea to some, but there is no life in sweet ideas, and that justice must be served.
When I left the casino that night, I made a point of saying goodnight to the security guards; Jordan the Warrior had made his amends to me with a piece of paper with a number on it. He nodded respectfully, and the other one was new. He’ll learn or be taught. The projects continue, time rushes forward. I wonder what Donavon will bring to the mix, and to Dr. Peng. I wish I had the right words for how I felt. Daylight was done and the night’s ocean air was invigorating. We all stick together in poker, more or less.
