Ship It Holla Ballas! (31 page)

According to the rumors swirling around Two Plus Two, Perky’s parents have cut him off, forcing Perky to borrow money just to stay in action. Previously, his opponents had to be mindful of Perky’s unlimited bankroll, which allowed him to make bold moves at the table less affluent players would be unlikely to attempt. But now they’re starting to view him as a badly wounded animal that needs to be put out of its misery, which is why Tweety is so eager to get his money into the mix.

Good2cu flies to New York, where he finds a very different person from the one who arrived at the Ship It Holla compound in a Rolls-Royce the summer before. Gone is the tanned, good-looking kid who danced around the tennis court. In his place stands an emaciated shell, pale as a corpse. His sickly appearance gets attached to an explanation a few minutes after they sit down to play at the table Perky has set up in his apartment in Trump Towers. The kid is popping pills into his mouth like they’re M&Ms.

“Got a headache?” asks Good2cu.

“No, dumbass. Why do you think I’m called PerkyShmerky?”

“Never really thought about it.”

“’Cause I love me some Percocet.”

Perky’s soon chopping up the pills with his American Express card and snorting the powder to bypass the built-in time-release mechanism. Good2cu does his best to ignore the distraction, but he can’t dismiss the feeling he gets when he returns to the table after a bathroom break. The next hand has already been dealt. Something doesn’t feel right. But he keeps his mouth shut and plays the hand, a pair of deuces that becomes much stronger when the flop delivers a third one.

He’s made a set—a huge hand and usually a winning one as well, but a minute later, Perky turns over an even bigger set. A stunned Good2cu stumbles down to the streets below a $325,000 loser and calls his partner.

“I think I just got cheated,” Good2cu tells Tweety, explaining how he thinks Perky rigged the cards during his trip to the bathroom.

“Don’t pay him then,” responds Tweety.

“But I’m not
sure
I got cheated. It’s just a feeling.”

“Trust your gut, kid. Do not pay that motherfucker.”

Good2cu wrestles with the decision. He doesn’t want be a sucker. If he lets one guy cheat him, everyone will see him as an easy mark and he’ll never survive in this world full of angle-shooters and con artists he’s chosen to inhabit. But he feels slimy not paying Perky based solely on a hunch, so he coughs up the cash he owes him and does his best to banish the incident from his mind.

When he gets back to Vegas, Good2cu receives a call from a floorman at the Bellagio. A certain “celebutante,” a B-list actor more famous for marrying well, is sitting at a table in Bobby’s Room next to an actual garbage bag full of cash and chips. The Celebutante is generally a pretty good player unless he’s wasted. And, man, is he wasted. Good2cu makes the five-minute drive to the Bellagio in three.

He needn’t have hurried; the Celebutante isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He claims that he hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours, and his frequent trips to the bathroom—powdering his nose with cocaine, Good2cu suspects—promise to keep him awake, if not altogether coherent, for many more.

The drugs having turned off his inner filter, the Celebutante seems determined to offend. He propositions a cocktail waitress by tossing two $5,000 chips onto her tray. He rambles. How he used to be afraid of having anal sex with his ex-wife. Venereal disease. How one night, blotto drunk, he managed to cast aside that fear.

Right now Good2cu can’t stand to be around this guy. But he also can’t afford to leave. As long as the Celebutante keeps reaching into his bag of cash, Good2cu will keep sitting at the table. It’s what any professional poker player would do.

The game continues for nearly four straight days. When his energy starts to flag, the Celebutante hires a couple of prostitutes to stand behind him and cheer. By the end of the session, he isn’t even bothering to visit the bathroom to refresh his buzz; he’s snorting bumps right at the table.

When the Celebutante finally bows out of the game, a quick count by the other players at the table estimates his loss at close to $2 million. Good2cu’s take exceeds $500,000. His celebration is muted by exhaustion and a bit of disdain.

This,
he reminds himself in a weary, cynical voice,
is the life I’ve chosen.

57

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

—
Hamlet,
Act II, Scene II

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(January 2009)

Raptor’s been reading a lot of books lately, even more than usual. In one of them he stumbles upon an exercise that seems worth giving a try. He’s supposed to imagine that he’s a hundred years old and allowed the use of a time machine. What advice should his future self give his present self about how best to pursue happiness?

Do yoga, eat healthfully, and stay in good shape,
he writes.
Read often, write even more. Ask everyone you meet what their favorite books are. Go to more ballgames and play more golf with your dad. Go back to school, and major in something that you enjoy learning about. Stop worrying so much about having “x” amount of money in the bank, because x will forever be increasing and focusing on such a hopeless pursuit will suck the life out of you
.

Afterward, he notices that “play more poker” doesn’t appear anywhere on his list.

The downswing that started last July reached its worst point in November, when the loss swelled to almost $650,000. He’s won back most of that money, but still finds himself less and less compelled by poker. Instead of playing one of the biggest online tournaments of the year, he does yoga by the pool, shops at the mall, cooks dinner for some friends, and watches the Cowboys game on TV. He feels like he’s reaching a turning point.

“See, we all KNOW what makes us happy,” he blogs. “We KNOW what we need to do; it’s not some unreachable mystery that only a select few people are aware of. YOU know what makes you happy. The only thing preventing us from doing these things is apathy and laziness.”

Raptor gets more serious about jiujitsu, regularly sparring with blue and purple belts. He meditates without moving for one hundred full breaths—when he first started practicing, a few months earlier, he could barely do five. He adds a new column to his spreadsheet that calculates the percentage he has invested in online poker. He vows not to let it reach the teens.

He wishes his relationship with Haley gave him the same peace of mind. Lately they’ve been arguing. She says he’s too emotionally unavailable and, after three years of dating, she wants to feel more connected to him. The idea of marriage gets tossed around. Raptor loves her, but feels more inclined to sell everything he owns and travel the world than start a family. So he’s devastated but not exactly surprised when, during what’s supposed to be a romantic New Year’s Eve cruise, he finds her making out with a random guy.

The ensuing breakup causes him a lot of pain, but he also feels energized. He has been actively seeking big changes in his life, and now they’re beginning to manifest themselves. He receives an acceptance letter from St. John’s and starts making arrangements to move to New Mexico in the fall. His plan is to sell everything he owns, all of his houses and cars, and take at least the first semester off from playing poker.

Meanwhile, his old high school baseball coach has taken him up on his offer to help out the baseball program on a volunteer basis. In a couple of weeks Raptor’s going to be an assistant coach for the junior varsity team, pitching batting practice to fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds boys.

The shoulder hasn’t fully healed. He also hasn’t thrown a baseball in more than a year, so he asks a friend to meet him at the field to see if he still can. There’s a moment of dread as he steps onto the pitcher’s mound. He smacks the ball into his glove a few times, hoping that old habit will help calm him. Then he rears back and throws.

The familiar
thwap
he hears as the ball meets the catcher’s mitt makes him break into a huge smile. It isn’t a perfect strike, but it will do.

58

Poker makes you a good decision maker. You’re able to analyze and weigh options and everything else, but in terms of practical skills for employment, you really don’t have any. You get used to making a lot of money without working that hard.

—Good2cu

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
(April 2009)

Good2cu is generally unabashed when it comes to self-improvement. In an effort to get better at talking to women—and despite a shitstorm of ridicule from his friends—he once contemplated hiring a coach who promised to teach him the secrets of pickup artistry. It’s not like his whole life is predicated on chasing women—lately, Good2cu finds himself wishing, more than anything else, for a serious girlfriend to share his life with—but he finds that the techniques recommended by the pickup artist actually make him feel more comfortable talking to people in general.

Last year, looking to shore up his lack of grace on the dance floor, he took a ballet class. Every time he glanced at the floor-to-ceiling mirror he saw how silly he looked in tights. His classmates—a bevy of ten-year-old girls—seemed to agree, tittering every time he moved. At the end of the class, one of the girls helpfully pointed out to Good2cu that he had WBRS.

“What’s that stand for?”

“White Boy Rhythm Syndrome,” she answered, eliciting a chorus of giggles from her friends. Good2cu has been avoiding the dance floor ever since.

His latest effort at self-betterment involves hiring an accountant to take care of his finances for him, a decision motivated by his complicated tax situation. The government doesn’t make it easy for professional poker players to pay their taxes. Any money they win gets taxed at a hefty 25-percent rate, but the IRS doesn’t give them a refund, should they lose that money the following year. The accountant tells Good2cu that he’s going to have to send Uncle Sam a six-figure check, which might be a huge bummer were it not for the greater implication: poker-wise, Good2cu has had a very good year. He now has a $2 million bankroll, at least until he pays his taxes.

As he’s settling the last few details with his accountant, his phone starts blowing up with text messages from his new pal Antonio Esfandiari. There’s a part of Good2cu that still can’t believe they’re friends. He was in high school when Esfandiari, at the height of the poker boom, won a World Poker Tour event. Coverage of the tournament seemed to run in an endless loop on the Travel Channel, immediately turning Esfandiari into one of the game’s most recognizable players. Five years ago, Good2cu thought Esfandiari was pretty much a poker god; now they’re buddies, going to clubs together and hanging out in each other’s condos.

The texts invite Good2cu to join him and some friends for a party weekend at the Ivy Hotel in San Diego.
Ship it!
A few hours later, Good2cu is walking through the lobby of the hotel, smiling at pretty women in bikinis on their way to the rooftop pool. Another message directs him to the luxury suite, where Esfandiari and twenty-five of his closest friends have begun to preparty.

As they toss back tequila shots, introductions get made. Good2cu recognizes one of Esfandiari’s friends as another one of his childhood heroes: the professional video gamer Fatal1ty. He also meets a publicist named Courtney who, as it turns out, recently broke up with the author Tucker Max. For a moment it’s all too surreal for Good2cu, who sneaks off to call one of his best friends from high school.

“You won’t believe who I’m hanging out with right now,” he says.

The party moves to the rooftop bar, lit by the glow of San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. Esfandiari’s assistant, Amalie, gamely serves as a wingwoman, introducing herself—and Good2cu—to every woman in the bar. She orders shots with names like “Gummi Bears” and “Blowjobs” and encourages everyone around her to get on the dance floor.

Good2cu hesitates.
I can’t do this. I’m going to look like an idiot.

His friends beckon him. “Come on!” Amalie yells over the music.

Screw it. Let the haters hate. My goofy white boy dance moves are all I got.

He cycles through all of them—the shopping cart, the sprinkler, even some improvised disco. When the DJ puts on House of Pain’s “Jump Around,” Good2cu abandons any sense of choreography and simply does what the song demands. A few hipsters on the sidelines snicker. Good2cu doesn’t care. He’s too busy hurling himself into the air with all the force he can muster, reaching for the stars as if he might actually be able to grab one.

Epilogue

We’re all born and a bit later we all die. So all we have is each other.

—Irieguy

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(Present Day)

Irieguy and his girlfriend are out to dinner with another couple. They’re having a nice enough time, assisted by a couple bottles of good wine. When the bill arrives, Irieguy barely glances at it. It doesn’t matter if it’s $5 or $500 (which it is); he wants to gamble for it.

“Credit Card Roulette?”

“What’s that?” the other guy’s wife asks.

Irieguy quickly takes them through the rules. Since women never pay, only Irieguy and the other guy hand their cards to the server. Irieguy’s card gets returned first.

Ship it!
yells the voice inside his head, although the expression on his face hardly changes. “Tough break,” he says.

As the server turns to leave, the other guy’s wife snatches Irieguy’s Visa from his hand. “No way!” she demands. “Split it!”

The other guy smiles awkwardly and shrugs:
What can I do?

“Guess we’re splitting it,” Irieguy tells the server.

It’s one of those moments—and there have been a lot of them lately—that makes him miss hanging out with the knuckleheads who used to call themselves the Ship It Holla Ballas. Sure, he still sees them from time to time, but it’s not the same. As hard as it is for him to believe, the kids have all grown up. Nobody’s shoehorning eight people into a car; they all have their own high-performance vehicles. No reason to rent a house when almost everyone keeps a condo in the city. No need for wild parties after every win, when wins have become part of the routine.