Jake started out an elevator technician in some fertile part of some state out east, someplace flat and unbroken except for the exclamation point of a twenty story building where they design and test and manufacture elevators. Well, what the hell, somebody has to. There are so many damned little jobs that no kid ever wants to grow up to do and yet somebody does. Nature and a vacuum, I guess. Jocko’s got nothing to say on what got Jake into working on elevators, spending his life traveling up and down and never getting anywhere. He’s got nothing to say about where Jake’s daughter came from or what happened to the wife, if there was one. As far as Jocko’s concerned the story begins when Jake decides he’s had enough, tosses the girl and a couple of suitcases in the car, and points himself west. He’s clear on one thing, though: Jake purely loved that girl of his. He wanted to give her the world, the life he never had, and the only way he saw to do it was with a deck of cards.
Jake’s game was poker, which buys him some cred — at least he wasn’t one of those fools who thinks he’s gonna get a yacht with a lucky run at a craps table. These were the days before anybody played poker on TV, back when you couldn’t go into any bookstore and find a dozen guides to reading tells and how to play pocket kings on the button, when cards were cards and not pixels on a screen. The pros back then were purely self-taught. They came up out of the Houston oil fields and backroom games in Brooklyn speakeasies, and they tended to be lean, hard men who weren’t above carrying a switchblade in a sock. They’d play anywhere, but Vegas was the gravitational center of their universe.
Was it foolish of Jake to feel that gravity and think he could be one of them? I imagine him winning break-room games played with cards greasy and soft around the edges from being handled by working men, then advancing to weekend games in homes where the host would peel the cellophane off a fresh new deck to start the proceedings. He realized gradually that he had a skill none of the others were aware of, that even when he lost he understood why while everybody else chalked it up to dumb luck and poured another drink. Eventually, somebody told him about a regular floating game, played a couple of times a month in a suite at the best hotel in town, and he saved up for a few weeks until he had the buy-in. After the first time he didn’t need to save up. A game like that would be visited once in a while by a pro working the routes between Vegas and AC, and it was the pro who spotted something in Jake and dropped a word in his ear: you could make a living at this. Maybe he was trying to be a nice guy, or maybe Jake pissed him off and he decided to throw him to the sharks.
Whatever happened, it got Jake in the car. He was making more money now with the cards than he’d ever made doing honest work, and there’s no surer way to twist a man than that. He had a couple of suitcases and a stake, and of course the girl. Jocko says she was a sweet young thing just about to turn fourteen when Jake hit Vegas, a redhead with playful eyes who was only too happy to go on an adventure with Dad. Jake’s dreams were all about building that daughter of his a life where she’d never know hardship or cold. Probably, he never even wondered what her own dreams were. If Jocko knows the daughter’s name he never says it, though sometimes he describes her, looking out the window as Jake cruised down the Strip and told her this was their new home. She’s just the girl, and Jocko really hardly seems to know she’s in the story at all.
So, Jake got a cheap apartment and parked her in the nearest school and went looking for a table. This is the point in the story where Jocko likes to settle in, lean forward, and curl a hand around his drink, and start talking about Jake’s games. It reminds me of an old song you probably know — “Stagger Lee,” Lloyd Price, 1959. Price used to sing it here in town to the tourists who couldn’t get tickets for Elvis. Price’s version, though, is just a slicked-up riff on “Stack O’Lee,” a folk song about a murderer that dates back to New Orleans way before the first World War and has hundreds of versions. Point being, I read somewhere once that Dr. John can sing “Stack O’Lee” for an hour straight and never repeat a verse. That’s what it’s like listening to Jocko talk about Jake’s Las Vegas poker career — endless variations on a theme. You can’t blame the man. Jocko’s a former card player himself. He’s been dealt every conceivable poker hand thousands of times, but he’s still fascinated by every card that gets flipped. You’ve got to be that way when you’re a gambler, and though he hasn’t touched a chip in years, Jocko will die a gambler. You’ve got to believe that the next card might just be the magic one you’ve been looking for your whole life, and you’ve got to go back over the stories of every hand you’ve played or heard of, looking for the key that will tell you how to solve the game forever.
If his listeners don’t care about cards, though, Jocko is capable of cutting to the chase, which is pretty much what you’d expect. Jake hit the ground running, and at first his little Midwest stake seemed like it would never stop multiplying. Every table he played at poured chips into his pocket. He bought presents for the girl, made sure she was dressed nicer than any of her new friends, took her to see the big shows, and tipped big when the hospitality girls ushered them to primo comped seats. Got himself a new car, started dressing like a gambler dressed in those days: shiny fabrics, narrow ties. And oh my yes there were women, and they were more than happy to hang on his arm. For a while Jake was living the story, living the dream. Vegas has a way of letting people do that for a while — years, sometimes.
Jake got about two, Jocko figures. Two years before the cards went sour on him. When it happened he fought it, and he was good enough to keep things moving through sheer force of will a little longer, but a graph of his liquid stash would tell the story clear enough — the sudden surge when he hit town, the long rising line of success, the slight downward slope that gathers momentum, the frantic lunges upward that get shorter and briefer. He hid it from the girl, tried to hide it from himself.
There’s no way most people will ever understand a slump like that — the desperation, the denial, the thousand small lies you tell yourself every day. It’s a roll of cash with a twenty on the outside filled out with singles, a pair of socks worn for a solid week because they might be lucky. As it goes on it feels less and less like luck and more like judgment. Tourists make calls on you they simply shouldn’t be able to make, obliviously smashing their way through intricately constructed bluffs, while men you’ve beaten a hundred times suddenly see your cards better than you can. That was the most frightening thing to Jake. He’d always been able to read his opponents like they were playing their cards face up. As his panic grew he found himself, night after night, staring across two yards of green felt at a man and having no idea on God’s earth what the son of a bitch was holding. He might as well have been playing roulette. Russian style.
The only thing he had to be thankful for was that the girl hadn’t noticed. She still thought her daddy was the king of the town, and he never wanted her to think any different. He couldn’t see anything in other cardplayers’ eyes anymore, but he still saw adoration in hers.
Then came the night when she kissed him on the cheek and went to bed, and he sat at their kitchen table staring at nothing, knowing it was all gone. In two weeks they’d be on the street, and as far as the girl knew everything was fine. She lived in her own world of high-school intrigue and spinning 45s, and as much as he loved her, he knew she wasn’t the type to ever notice that Daddy’s lady friends didn’t come around anymore or that his shiny gold watch had vanished. Jake only saw one way out — or rather, he saw two ways, but he wasn’t going to have her come out in the morning and find him.