Fear and Self-Loathing in the Valley of the Mutants
Like I said once more
I'll say it once more
Knew you would make me feel so good
wanna do you kkkkkrrrrrrrrrrssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
cant get enou kKkkkkkrrrshhhhhhhhhhhh
NO, OH GOD NOT NOW!!!!
For months I had put off spending money at Best Buy to purchase a decent set of headphones for my music player. My lethargic and frugal ways would blow up in my face at the very, very wrong time. For, alas, I was deep in the heart of ...The Valley of the Irritating Mutants.
Presumably, these mutants had arrived en masse stepping off a charter bus from Irratationville and had made their way into the Beau Rivage's Spring Break Poker Tournament '09. I did not feel I was in my place to question their presence, whether or not they fed from the same troth, bathed in the same lagoon, worshipped the same strange gods that could only allow such abominations to roam freely on this earth, grazing and wandering from the tundra to the high plains to the wastelands, and eventually to this poker room. It was without question that they were working in tandem, an unholy alliance of somehow unhooved grunting mammals cavorting and scheming together without even a hint of a full moon--though cleverly making it appear as thought they did not know one another -- to ruin my Main Event.
I had a feeling that by the very end of the night I would have discovered who their leader was...the Alpha-Mutant, if you will; the bus driver himself, that he would reveal himself to me in complete radiant technicolor brilliance. Oh, what would he be like? I wonder...oh, how I cannot wait to discover him!
Well there was no time to wonder about that now; it was the beginning of the Main Event, and it hadn't been the best week for me. I couldn't shake a lingering cold that had stuck around all week leaving me hacking and blowing my nose every couple of minutes...I felt oh, so Outbreak monkey. On top of that, once or twice in the couple of $340 buy-ins I had played, I had performed average at best, donking and spewing in marginal situations. I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform well, and when I don't no one's harder on me than myself. Poker is the ultimate game of self-control; as Alan Schoonmaker brilliantly wrote in his book "Your Worst Poker Enemy," a clever title referring to one's self. I had been my worst enemy all week, however the day would bring many helpers, many more than I had planned.
I had come close to doubling up my initial 10,000 chip stack within the first 15 minutes. Not a bad way to start off at all. This should be a cakewalk. Just sit back, relax, maybe play a couple of premium hands, but hold off on any "clever" moves until level four or five, where the antes make things interesting and festive. $104,000 for first? Easy money....Ha!
Enter my new least favorite Eldo-American, who I have named "Indiana Old." Indiana Old, although around 70 years young, has the shrill, ear-splitting voice of an annoying 9 year old Georgia boy fresh off a Coca-Cola induced sugar high. A human voice could only be more nerve-shattering perhaps if Whoopi Goldberg bred with Bobcat Goldthwait and their disgusting sub-human child with an all-powerful voice of nails on a chalkboard could somehow scream through the back of Screetch's (from Saved by the bell) skull, somehow combining their voices together into some unheard of sound with the capability to bring down a 747 in mid-flight.
I first encountered Indiana Old -- oh, yes, the name you were wondering -- Indiana Jones style fedora -- at yesterdays Mega-Satellite. Sixteen of us left, top nine get seats into the main event. I'm sitting on 45,000, enough to coast comfortably into 9th place while everyone else around me conveniently kills each other. I get moved to his table just to his right. My plan? Don't even look at your cards, just pitch them into the muck, maybe every now and then, make it look like you're struggling with a decision to eat precious seconds off the clock, helping to eliminate the small stacks.
Now here's what happens when you go against your plan. Everyone folds to me and I look down in the cutoff seat to see -- KK! Raise! 4800 (3 X BB). Indiana Old, ALSO with enough chips to cruise into 9th place decides to go all in. Apparently he wants first place, which has the same value as 9th place. My jaw hits the floor. What other hand could he possibly do that with?
Think time. Let's see what I know so far about Indiana Old.
1. He's an old person.
2. He has an Indiana Jones hat.
That is absolutely all the information I have.
These two sentences tell two incredibly different stories. Old: mega-conservative. Hat: swashbuckling adventurer. All I can do now is go back to my original game plan. Despite the fact that 9 -2 is sometimes known to be a premium hand for me, with my hyper-aggressive style and all, I manage to somehow pitch KK agonizingly into the muck. I show him my KK before I do to establish my image, but due to his eldo-vision he then squeaks in that high pitched noise to me that he did not see my hand. Those of you with a piano at home wishing to know the tone of his voice: bang as hard as you can for about five hours on the second E flat high above middle C until your finger is numb from pain.
Should my Kings have nuked the fridge after all? Indiana Old would not share with me his holding, but only squeaked out at about 85 decibels that "We're going to be good neighbors. Real good neighbors. HA HA HA HA HA."
Forehead ...vein.... throbbing. Pulse..... rising. Bile..... churning....concentration........shattering......can't......go.............on............ taste of .....blood from......biting .....my................lip..........
I'm down 10% of my stack now. Way to stick to a plan, moron. Come, on, dude, just throw your hands away.
Very next hand on the button, I look down at AKs. I know I'm supposed to stick to a plan, but I just showed Indiana Old (and physically had to tell him), and my redheaded lady friend KK that I folded. Surely they would have to respect my raise the second time around, knowing I was not stealing but playing premium hands (although folding like a total Emo) . The odds of them waking up with a top 4 hands were severely remote anyway. Raise. $4900 this time. My redheaded buddy goes all in for her last $25,000...did I fail to notice she had a shove-stack?! I know she's not messing around, because we're on great terms, and she's no fool. I also know she has AK as well. Sometimes you just know. And sometimes you choose to play it safer than you ever have in your entire relatively young poker career. I fold again and she shows me what I already knew, just out of the 10% chance she had rockets instead. She's unsuited making me a small favorite. And I realize how much I'm being a donkey, my own worst enemy, and a short-sighted twit.
I'm down to 32,000 no longer enough to fully slam on the brakes, averaged stacked...I'd have to pick two more targets perfectly and play them out. Fortunately, I do just that. Indiana Old and I both (ugh...) win our seats.
But that was yesterday, a day that Indiana Irritation would only use the word "neighbor" merely fourteen times. Today, as fate placed it (Indiana does not deserve the human pronoun "he") across the table from me in the $2600 buy-in main event, he actually shrieked out the word "neighbor" an abacus-tilting 47 times. I know because in my journal I made a scratch-mark for every time he used the word, and I'm at over 9 sets of 5 scratches.
Indiana Old's hystrionic screetching would ordinarily, by itself, be MORE than enough to put me on tilt. Surely the Lord above would not act wastefully, putting WAY to much irritation at this table for me to even process. Wrong, Kai, He had different plans. My only hope after today was that there is a FINITE amount of IRRITATION in the universe and that much of it had been wastefully spent at this table. You are still banging that note on your piano, aren't you? Continue at full strength and speed and try to read.
To my left is a mullet wielding flop-loving calling station (WHY am I destined to have never ending eternal problems with business-in-the-front, party-in-the-rear coiffed goofballs?) whose only calling requirements pre-flop seems to be "Is Kai in the hand?" The last guy to hump my left leg mercilessly like a soaking wet, filthy golden retriever and not let go for several hours was David "Freddy" Kruger, who at least is a good player, but this guy is pricing everyone in every time I have a hand.
Recently placed to my immediate right is ...are you ready for this circus attraction...the world's loudest breather. He sits down next to me and sets down a pack of Marlboros, and breathes so loudly, I think he's actually joking. Okay, I get it. You smoke and you've got emphysema now. Ha, ha. Very clever....wait, you're not kidding. You really breathe this loudly now. For reals. Wow. Ashton Kutcher's not going to jump out from behind the podium or anything now, right, this is actually how loud you breathe. Serioulsly?
Remember the loud, painful wheezing Vader let out continuously as he was dying at the end of Return of the Jedi? This cat probably did the voiceover.
Right about the time I get AK, Indiana Old has repeated the same cricket chorus joke for the THIRD time about how you "never bluff a drunk neighbor. HA HA HA HA HA!" Few things rake my central nervous system worse than lack of originality and heavy repetition. Throw those things at me at high volume and you've got someone on tilt. I wait for a large hook to appear from stage right and yank Indiana Old offstage with boos erupting from the crowd, but, sadly, none appears. He's only getting louder and less interesting. Darth Marboro breathes heavily to my right. The leg-humping call machine, Lord of the Mullets, awaits to my left. Five other players are also severely annoying in their own special way, and two are respectable...not the kind of ratio of 7:2 on the irritation-ometer I'm looking for. I lose a biggie with the AK.
We're still at the 25 - 50 level. But the mutants here have been playing like it's the 1000 - 2000 level, and like someone's giving away free steak and vagina downstairs and they can't wait to get in line. The noise, chatter and blue collar humor emitting from these scarred souls becomes overbearing, and I turn on my iPod. That's when I realize this is the end of my day. I slam my earbuds into my ear and jack up the music desperately, my fingertips jamming into the side of my cellphone at an almost dramatic fashion. Somewhere, long ago at the very beginning of the domino chain of events, a Chinese child slave worker was beaten too mercilessly and did not assemble a wire to the highest factory specifications. And me, at the end of the domino chain of bad karma, would have my nervous-system saving, soothing music broken apart with incredibly loud static.
kkkkkssssjjhhhhhsshhhhhhhhhhhhhkkkhhhhhhhhhhh!
"HEY THERE NEIGHBOR!!
(heavy breathing) "HHHHRRRRRRAAAAA .........CHHHH.............HHHHHHRRRRRRRAAAAAAA.........CHHHHHH...................HRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAA....... LUKE!
Kkkkkkkkkssssshjjjjjjshhhhhhhhhsssshhhhhhhhhhhh....
"NEIGHBOR! NEIGHBOR! NEIGHBOR! HA HA HA HA WE'RE GOOD NEIGHBORS! NEIGHBOR!
"durn, man, I can't believe you ain't played a hand in half an hour, I wanted to git in and call you, durn, man, hey you ever watch Jeff Foxwor...
"NEIGHBOR! YOURE A GOOD NEIGHBOR!!!! I'M A DRUNK NEIGHBOR! HA HA HA HA HA!
Kkkkkkksssshussshhhhhssssssssskkkkkkkkkkhjhhhhhhhhhhh
AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! I RAISE! Ten Five offsuit! I had officially entered the puzzle factory, my cerebrum being a vestigial organ of the past. As I'm raising with pure feces, I'm trying severely hard not to roll my eyes at these people not out of politeness but out of the sheer terror that if my eyes wander upward I might actually see my skin, my freaking epidermis, crawling around by itself on the ceiling. I don't think I could witness that kind of horror and not die from pure shock.
Whatever happened for the next half hour I do not remember, because it is a blind spot in my memory. But when I woke up, I had a serious lack of chips. Now that I had senselessly spewed myself into a short stack by the beginning of round four, the very place that I wanted to have lots of chips, but now don't, our new jocular, rotund dealer, whose name rhymes with Malfred plops down in his seat, and in carnival barking fashion announces ceremoniously to the talbe, "Ok, folks it's the 4th level now...you better get ready to do some gambling now! Here we go!!!"
Kkkkkkkkkssssshhhhhhhhhjhhhhhhhhhhzzhhhhhhhh! Kkkkkkkkkksssshssssssslshhhzzzzzzzzhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! Oh my God, my earbuds aren't even in my ears anymore! That screetching noise is coming from inside my head!
Wow, wow, wow, Malfred, that was the most uncalled for statement YET from any "professional" dealer ever! Could you be the leader of the mutants we were looking for? Sangreal Mutantus? Are you the sacred bus driver of the twinkiemobile? Oh, no, not yet, my friends.
After I bust out of the tournament in style, by reraising all in with a severe over-bet on AQ (knowing that someone would pay an astronomical price), on a Q 7 3 board with a third party calling on a flush draw getting 1.4 to 1 odds...the kind of person I'd love to keep in a cage and sell tickets to the curious public to observe and feed treats to, I take my walk of shame down to the cash game in the Beau's main poker room.
I'm really down about my severe missteps over the past few days, and how I'm so easily rattled by loud idiocy, however, this cash game is going really well and I'm up $750 as some really nice kid decides to give me all his chips with the second-best straight. That's when I noticed the temperature drop about 6 of 7 degrees and the air begin to thin out as our new "dealer" sits down in the box.
The table is now playing cautiously, and I've shown down nothing but monsters for an hour. Seven people limp in for the pre-flop raise of $15. Sniff sniff....weakness. I look down in the BB to see AKs. All options are available to me at this point, but the thing that really jumps out at me is that two of these guys, if I hit, are going to pay me off quite well, maybe even into the four-digit range. I severely over-bet, happy with whatever happens. $130 to go, bitches. It sends out a little shock-wave.
The "dealer," oh, lets just call him Flan the Retard, actually screams out loud, at the top of his voice no less...
I'm sorry....I need to pause here...
just give me a moment.....
ahem.
Ok. I think I'm ready for the punch-line now.
No.
Just another moment.
I think I'm ready.
Here we go.
As I throw $130 into the pot, Flan the Retard, our "dealer" screams out loud, with a big smile on his face....
"Wow! That looks like a MOVE to me!!!"
Feel free to read that last sentence once more to yourself in amazement. Did you get the same sense of shock that you did the first time or was it less punchy the second time around? I ask because that sentence has been on auto-repeat in my brain for a couple of days now, and for me, it hasn't lost its efficacy on the nervous system.
I try to keep it together. I don't move a muscle. The flop comes out 7 8 3. The nice kid, who called for the full $130 bets out, I think, a trillion dollars, and as I muck shows me A7.
I look over immediately to my right to my friend Jennifer, whose jaw is still on the carpet from the "dealer's" faux pas of the century.
In a bright flash, a million things rush through my mind. I wonder if Flan has an extra chromosome or if he was dropped at birth. The nature vs. nurture debate enters my mind quickly, too. I sadistically envision Flan dropped naked from a helicopter into the Amazon Rain Forest, with only his sheer survival skills to save him. I wonder if he could actually make it to the nearest river village or if he would die of starvation as he licked his arm for days on end from pure confusion brought on by his new surroundings. I quickly picture Flan in a million other social settings that any other male 50 years of age could probably handle without serious embarrassment.
"Flan, may I present the Queen?"
"Hey, Queen! What's up dude! I like amputee-porn! It's cool! Do you have any vanilla wafers? I fucking like them lots and lots!"
As I nearly black out from rage, knowing the Beau will not compensate me for my $130 loss to Flan's incompetence , I actually said something bitter to the nice kid instead of Flan, because I know if I say anything to Flan, it will be of a severely violent nature in a very, very loud voice, and I will be 86'd for life. Or arrested. I apologize to the nice kid, but he already knows why I'm upset. I manage to leave the table quickly, and leave knowing that something good has to happen from all of this.
I walk out of the Beau emotionally drained, barely ahead for the day somehow, dragging my epidermis on the carpet behind me. How I'm gonna get this thing back on I'll never know. Technically it's your biggest organ you know...maybe I could throw it in the tanning bed without the rest of me for a little while, it's definitely paler after today, and it's sure to freak out a few people. That always counts for something.
I get home and wash off my face and look in the mirror. There he is. At long last.
Oh, the horror. It's me.
It's me because I let these people get to me. I've got to be above this. I hadn't played my best before I encountered those from the underside of the rock anyway. The truth is, they just made me play worse. I'll have my new headphones ready for next time, but more importantly, I'll be sure to Re-irritate, like a well timed Re-raise. How on Earth I'd forgotten to do that, I'll never know.