In the Game
(HAPPY COSTUME BLOGGING! As a special treat Favorable Odd$ has its first GUEST POST from the hilarious Tom over at www.gospelaccordingtohate.com. Enjoy!)
It was the big night. After seven years of life, heart wrenching waiting, and studying from the eleventh stair of the old farmhouse, I was in the game.
Seven chairs encircled the round dining room table, which was draped in a midnight green army blanket. My chair was the special one, dragged in from the kitchen, the one with the extra seventeen inches of height on it, so that I could reach the piles of red, white, and blue chips that I was about to rake in.
“But he’ll slow the game down, and he doesn’t have any money,” my silver whiskered grandpa protested.
“Now, Dale, we need seven players. I’ll take care of him,” my frizzy curled grandmother proclaimed, as she put me in for a dollar and pushed a magical pile of plastic pennies, nickels, and dimes in my direction. Grandpa spoke as he reluctantly dealt me five cards, “Draw is the only real poker game, no spinners, no wilds. Just you, the cards, and your neighbor.”
Poker! All my life, I’d watched, impatiently waiting, and now the cards were in my seven-year-old hands. I laughed in delight. “We’ll see if you’re laughing after I clean you out,” Grandpa threatened. I beat him on the first hand, three nines to his three fives. He smiled. I was in.
For the next three hours and twenty-seven years, Grandma and Grandpa taught me every intricacy of poker: betting, bluffing, and bullying. They taught me Five Card Draw, Seven Card Stud, and countless variations of each with spinners, low spade in the hole, etc. My favorite game was Pass Three to Your Neighbor. Grandpa let the game’s real name slip: Screw Your Neighbor. “Damn it,” he scolded himself embarrassed that my seven-year-old ears might know what screwing meant. I loved it when he cursed. He sounded so authentic, so alive.
I felt alive at the poker table that night. There, the members of my mom’s Irish-German family, Catholics and Protestants, school teachers, postal workers, and farmers, became card sharks, and that quaint town in central Iowa, Vegas. The poker table was the one place that all of us, no matter how different came together as equals. All the baggage went out the window, and there were only five cards that determined your fate, unless of course you knew how to bluff.
“Grandma taught me how to bluff,” I explained to Lukas, my five-year-old nephew, who was perched on my lap. “Just watch. She plays dumb, acting like she’s distracted with the popcorn and root beer she’s bringing in from the kitchen. But don’t let her fool ya. That’s when she’s got a full boat.”
“And Grandpa, well, he’s harder to read. If he sits back quietly, he’s luring you into a trap. Get out.”
That was the last time I played poker. A couple years later, I held a royal flush, hearts, in my hand.
“Uncle Tommy?”
“Yes, Lukas.”
“What do those cards mean?”
“It’s a royal flush. The best hand you can get in poker.”
“Uncle Tommy?”
“Yes, Lukas.”
“Can I put them in Grandpa’s hands?”
“Sure.”
Lukas, feeling for the first time like a grown up, lowered the cards into the casket and said goodbye to his great-grandpa.
