Faces in the crowd

We low limit poker jockeys recognize each other at the tables. At times it leads to respect, other times to disdain. We would still rather play with tourists like you fucks. At the mirage, I only know this on e old lady Marge by name, but I can identify any of the 3/6 weekend warriors. I don’t know their backgrounds, nor do I want to. Instead, I spend my time between hands coming up with outlandish back-stories for my opponents. Typically, I will replay their adventures in my head as I first recognize their caricature, then I will add layers to their yarn.

There’s that smelly guy with a bushy moustache who walks with an unresolved limp. Best I can tell, he’s a former mercenary for the right guard corporation, but then he was captured by Secret’s counter-intelligence. They applied their product to his then odorless pits. He found that while it was strong enough for a man, it completely fucked up his ph balance. Although they were unable to break him before he could escape from that warehouse on foot, a little bit of him died that day. While boarding an undetectable stealth schooner dispatched by his unit’s leader(referred to within the organization as a commander of the civilized or COC), he was shot in the shin with an armor piercing blow dart. He has since disavowed any connection to the underarm protection industry, going so far as to shun the smell stashing solvents he once sought to propagate. He grew an outrageous, almost cartoonish, moustache to hide his identity. Now content to his lot as a calling station, I have him filed in my mental Rolodex as agent number 98, Maxwell Stink.

There’s an elderly midget who always seems angry even when he’s dragging pots. He bitches at just about every dealer, and often mumbles as though the poker gods will further conspire against him if he proves audible. I conjecture that this man was a nazi. Not necessarily an evil nazi like the majority, but more of the fun loving Colonel Clink kind of nazi. Even so, Clink saw some shit, and every man has his breaking point. One day, he freed some American soldiers and they brought him back with them. They ended up traveling by boat, but the shit crashed into an island where he was stranded for many years. Once rescued, he received royalties from every episode of Fantasy Island because the tattoo character was loosely based on him. He invested all of those royalties in less then fruitful horse betting, and one day was so fed up after missing the exacta at pimlico, that he angrily wandered into a poker room.

One of the guys who I always saw across the table from me, sat down tonight and started dealing. I looked up and was like, “What the fuck, you deal here too?” He responded, “I have been dealing here for ten years.” I indignantly contended “I’m shocked, I can’t believe you never dealt to me before.” “Oh, I’ve dealt to you many times.” he said with a wink. That motherfucker, shit was going incognito on me, figuring out my plays and then grabbing a soft seat. I never put two and two together, but that was largely based on the pot that I smoked before each session.

I can’t help but wonder what these people think of me when I sit down. “Oh shit, its that pudgy dwarf who always preflop raises”, “Nice, the teeny fatty is coming our way to over bet a few draws”, “I think that’s the guy who stole the other half of my sandwich”. Whatever they’re thinking, I don’t really give a shit, cause I’m thinking about their lives. I’m thinking of the lies behind the man, and as long as I concentrate real hard on his boyhood days in the Canadian Wilderness, he will have no fucking idea what I’m holding. It could be just about anything.

Faces in the crowd

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