Pocket Kings Read Online Free Page A

winning hand was three Jacks. Okay, I thought, so now I’m down to $995.
    I dumped twenty the next hand, hoping that my nines and eights would prevail. But three nines kicked me right in the teeth and I let out a groan that sounded like a Bassett hound being neutered by a failing veterinary student.
    Well, this isn’t that much fun.
    But I had nothing else to do. Th ere were no books to write. If I wrote them, there was nobody to publish them. If I wrote them and somebody published them, there were no readers to read them.
    In the third hand, not only did I win all the money back with a full house, Kings full of tens, but suddenly I was ahead a hundred dollars.
    I vowed then that, as God is my witness, I would never be behind again.
    When Wifey came home she put a pot of water on the stove to make pasta for dinner, but simmering with glee I ran over, turned the burner off, dumped the water into the sink, and whisked her out for dinner. In the restaurant I said to her, “I think I may finally have found something I’m good at” and told her it was poker. She wasn’t as happy for me as I would have liked, but when I told her how much I’d won and how easily I’d won it, well, I think she came around. I didn’t pay for dinner that night and neither did she—a few faceless poker players whom I’d never met wound up paying for it. We downed an eighty-dollar bottle of wine and when we returned home I was still so excited I couldn’t sleep. So at about three in the morning I went into my little study, flicked on a small light, and made a list of the things I could do to resurrect my literary career.
    Go to book parties and sucker-punch the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, David Eggers, David Mitchell.
    But this might be a problem as there is no chance at this point I’d ever get invited to such a book party.
    In lieu of the aforementioned Jonathans and Davids, I could punch out an old coot like Phillip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates and hopefully not kill them. Or I could take on a career-dead writer like Marty Amis or Sal Rushdie, both of whom could use the publicity, too.
    But Joyce Carol Oates once wrote a book about boxing and could possibly beat me up.
    In a profanity-laced article in Th e Atlantic or Th e New York Review of Books, I could drill the above Jonathans and Davids new assholes. Why, it would be the literary scandale of the decade! I’ll write unending comma- and semi-colon-filled sentences about their books and their abundant lack of talent. Pick one single ungainly sentence of theirs—just like the real critics do!—and use it to skewer their entire oeuvre. Use words like “pullulation,” or short fancy-ass words like “fictive” so that people take me seriously. It would make Mailer v. Vidal and Hellmann v. McCarthy look like the undercard of a Golden Gloves featherweight bout! One of the offended geniuses would go on Charlie Rose and, after belittling my inconsequential output and poor sales, dare me to a boxing match (or, if it’s Marty Amis or Sal Rushdie, a tennis or cricket match), and I would go on Charlie Rose and come up with a lame excuse why I couldn’t go through with it (“Charlie, I’m not going to dignify that juvenile challenge with a comment.”).
    But in order for me to pull this off I’d have to read their books . . . and I didn’t want to.
    I could burst into the Reno Brothers Literary Agency and pummel the hell out of Clint Reno, my agent (if he still is my agent). In this wacky world, not only would that get Dead on Arrival published, it would also land me a reality TV show on Bravo.
    Start a blog. Tweet. Th e final desperate cries for help of wretched losers everywhere.
    Write a new new novel, get it published; the novel gets good reviews in the Times, I go on Oprah and Charlie Rose. But who am I kidding? Th e Times hates me so