Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [15]
Almost every movie—On the Waterfront, Streetcar, I Confess.
There’s One-Eyed Jacks …
You took those three fucking words right out of my mouth. Him and Katy Jurado—that’s the whole movie.
He’s in Cincinnati Kid, isn’t he? Isn’t he the mechanic in that?
Mancini, who’d been warming up, hesitated. You know, Karl has been in great fucking pictures, but Cincinnati Kid has problems. Remember they’re having this game of no-limit five-card stud. And Steve McQueen has, I recall, aces and tens. And Edward G. Robinson—another grand master of the art, if he’d been a chess player, they’d have a statue of him—has three cards, no pairs. Now, you never ever give them a chance to draw, when that happens. You just don’t give them a chance to draw again. Period. But Fancy-Pants McQueen puts in a piss amount and allows Edward G. to stay in and draw a card—he should never be allowed to get to that card. You’d put in everything, your wife, your parrot, to prevent him from drawing, you make it too expensive… . You know you have the best hand as things stand. You bet all your money.
So what happens? I forget what happens.
Edward G. lays down a straight flush he’s just made, and busts him.
Cooper didn’t know the movies they were talking about. The others were in their thirties and forties, he was the youth among them. They watched over him, knowing him as a compulsive risk-taker, dangerous even to himself. But what he could do, which surprised them, was imitate the way each of them played, as if he were speaking in tongues. Though in the mania of a game, when you had to be calm, Cooper could be either startling or foolish. Someday he might be their skilled heir, but it felt to them that for now he was still in hand-to-hand combat, mostly with himself.
Whereas Dorn’s friends were in it for the way of life. They played twelve-hour marathons, crossed over from scotch to cocaine, read Erdnase and Philip K. Dick by the pool or in the back of an air-conditioned car, fucked glowing women with the Discovery Channel loud in the background, and shot up in the elevator going down. Cooper didn’t participate, was an untouchable. He was sane everywhere but within a game. There was Peruvian flake to keep the others from getting tired. Asleep they could not win. That was the only logic. Several years later in Santa Maria, when a woman named Bridget attempted to give Cooper some, he held her face between his hands and said, ‘I know you won’t believe me, but one day you’re going to write four hundred words down on the back of a matchbook and think you’ve written a masterpiece, you’re going to believe you’re invincible.’ She smiled back at him: ‘You’re invincible, Cooper.’
In a deli one evening their group spoke of unusual winnings. Dorn mentioned a player called The Gentile who had won his future wife in a card game, with a pair of nines.
There were setups, larceny, and drugs everywhere. Two men asked Dorn to suggest a reliable card mechanic, and he mentioned Fidelio. ‘Pretty name,’ they said. ‘What nationality is he?’ ‘Filipino,’ Dorn said. ‘No, thank you,’ the gamblers said, ‘we need an Aryan.’ Cooper was appalled, but Dorn said, ‘Fair enough, they want a dealer who’s invisible.’ It was a world where you needed to quickly forgive. You found yourself drinking with hit men or smack dealers who might have killed someone