Blast at the Bash (Dawn)

I was in Pennsylvania when the Phillies clinched the division. Who knew I was watching the beginning of their historic run? It’s been some time now, but let’s see if I can recall it. Ah yes, it was September, the markets were collapsing and the government had gotten hold of the genius idea that while success was an individual’s alone, failure should belong to us all... I like to call it the “Reverse Jack Kennedy.” Knowing better than to trust our fortunes to Wall Street or K Street, Mary and I emptied our savings and took them to the safest place that we know: Atlantic City poker rooms. I had gotten, what I thought, was a nice deal at the Tropicana, sixty dollars for the night. But when we got there, I found out that they offered a $29 rate if you played four hours of poker. If. HA!
We settled in to the room, took stock of the porno paintings on the wall and went to play. The Trop poker room is a very different place than when Karol and I used to go there back in the halcyon days of 2/4 limit. It was on the empty side for a Thursday, but they had enough games running so that Mary and I were seated at two different tables. My table was just wretched. I sat down in time to see the end of this hand play out:
Board Ah3h7hJh
There was some post turn action, but as I sat down, the ten seat moved all-in. The two seat insta called, girl to my left in the four seat thought and thought and finally she moved in too, guy in seven seat also called. The pot was well over a grand.
River was 3 spade and the girl jumps out of her seat and promptly does the Price is Right boobies jump. She turns over pocket threes while screaming, “Quads(up)quads(down)quads(up)quads(down)” Guy in the two seat says “Fuck,” and shows the King of hearts. The ten seat is all “aww man, cold deck,” and shows ACE/FIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And the other doofus said he had the ten of hearts.
So the girl gets all the money and she just won’t stop talking about it.
“Yeah, I knew someone had the flush, but I was hoping for the board to pair, so that I would have a full house. I didn’t even think about getting quads. Can you imagine. Quads?”
Even now, months later, I feel the urge to rip the tongue from her mouth.
When her boyfriend gets back from his smoke break, she starts prattling on all over again “baby, I got quads! You missed it. I had pocket threes and…” here I imagine her gurgling as the warm blood fills her mouth and she watches in horror as I throw her detached tongue in the middle of the felt.
Anyway, two seat is steaming…actually…the whole table is steaming, so when there has been a raise to $17 called by five people in front of me and I look down and see KK in my SB, I bump it to $50. Two people call. Flop is Q 8 2, I bet $100. Two seat steamer calls. Turn is an Ace. I check. River is a 9. He bets $60, enough to put me all-in. And, in retrospect, I should have either moved in at the turn or folded here. Instead, I call. He turns over Q9. He then insists that the dealer turn my hand over. This makes him my number one enemy. I actually start playing very aggressively back at him. And do pretty well in getting much of my money back, what I do not see coming is that stupid girl’s boyfriend.
The hand was something like I raise to $7 with sevens, a bunch of people call, he reraises to $30, four people call. The flop is 456, I bet $40, he raises to $80. I call. He inexplicably moves all-in when another four hits, I immediately put him on nothing and call. He says fuck and turns over 36. I don’t show. River? You betcha. Six.
I muck my hand and say “nice hit” and walk away. I hear him start explaining how he was open ended, so he could have hit any three or any seven or the six. I am tempted to go back, but ever since that ugly ugly 2006 December, I have a no more than two buy-in rule at casinos.
The next day, Mary and I hit Caesar’s because she had never been there before. I lost again, but a nice pocket jacks vs. AJ hand got me to only double digit losses by the end of the day.
Evidently Al had promised Mary all you can eat sushi when we got to the Bash because she wouldn’t let me stop for food anywhere.
“No! Sushi!,” she said smacking me and double locking the doors.
“But…I’m huuunnngggrrrryyyyy.”
“No soup for you!” she answered smacking me again.
Finally, when the gas gauge indicated that Professor Paula Francese was also hungry, I was like, look, we have to stop, I’m getting a cookie!
I pulled over somewhere near U Penn in Philly and ran to the 7/11. I locked Mary inside the car. Of course, she was so fixated on the sushi, she decided to hotwire my car and make a run for it. Good thing I set the alarm, so my car could call me for help.
I have gotten a new portable GPS for my car, but when the GPS instructions diverged with Mary’s paper ones, I let her choose which ones to follow. She chose the paper.
This was a mistake.
We ended up weaving though PA at 25 MPH on these local roads that doubled as train tracks. So every few minutes we’d be stuck behind a trolley or an Amtrak or something. The neighborhoods got sketchier and sketchier. The gas station that we found would only allow you to charge $25 worth of gas on a credit card…anything more than that you had to go into the store and get fingerprint checked. We continued to follow the local roads until we dead ended at a deserted covered bridge. Night had begun to fall.. Gas was getting low again.
“We are so going to die.”
“Yeah,” she agreed.
I turned on the GPS and it started to do that awesome thing where it points arrows in both directions.
“Stupid, Mary!” And thusly, my new GPS was named Mary.
The fully grown Mary suggested that we turn in the opposite direction of the covered bridge. So we did. This took us along an even more deserted stretch of road which reminded Mary of some horror movie she saw where the townspeople sacrifice out of town strangers so they get good crops for the year. Awesome. And then I don’t know who started this, but we started to imagine that the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers were chasing us. Look, don’t judge us. We saw muskets.
Finally, we found a road with a name that was on her printed MapQuest directions.
“MapQuest? Why didn’t you tell me it was MapQuest?! The only thing worse than TomTom is MAPQUEST!”
I turned Mary back on and she guided us the rest of the way to the Bash hotel. We checked in with an elderly black woman who told us to call her “Mama.” We explained to Mama that we were also checking in for the men in our party who were taking their own car in. She asked us for their license plate number. I called Alceste, he was driving so he passed the phone to Jordan.
“Hey can you give me the license plate number?”
He said sure and I could hear Alceste tell it to him, and then he’d tell it to me and then I’d say “what?” and he’d say “which what?” and I’d say “the third thing, after the N” and he’d say “there was no N, I said M” and then I’d say “right, after the N.” “No, M,” “M? Then what was the first thing? 3?” “No. E.”
“Okay, start over…use names instead of letters…like Nancy or Mancy.”
This went on for like twelve minutes. If we were at war, we’d all be dead before we could confirm the nuclear codes. Dead.
Mary was all about the sushi by this point, so we went up to the rooms, checked out both rooms before choosing the best of them and throwing our bags there.
We drove over to the pre-Bash tournament place, there were a bunch of guys standing out front, including the generous Riggs, who had scored free Mets tickets for KJ and I last Spring. Though, for some ridiculous reason he kept calling them “Phillies tickets.” At one point, someone asked if I was a Yankees fan, and instead of saying anything, I peeled off my sweater to reveal my Mets T-shirt underneath, I might have accidentally grabbed a bit of the t-shirt though, because one of the guys said “um…can you do that again…please?”
Shut it.
When I got to the pre-Bash tournament I was surprised to see CK. But she was there, along with Drizz and Falstaff and Mrs. Falstaff. I was starving, so I went over to the food and started to stuff my face with fried rice and chicken. Mary on the other hand was all “where’s the sushi”?
“No sushi for you.”
The tournament got started about twenty minutes later and I texted Alceste and Jordan, that they should be fine on the timing.
Jordan texted me for the address.
I gave it to him. “Something something Morristown.”
He texted back “Do you mean Norristown?”
“No, definitely not. Morristown. What the hell’s a Norristown”
I didn’t hear from them for a while and then he texted again “I can only find that address in Norristown.”
“Well, keep looking. We’re in MMMMorristown.”
I went over to Mary’s table to see how she was doing and told her “those dumbasses are lost looking for “Norristown.”
“That’s where we are, Dawn.”
“Wait…it’s not Morristown?”
“No. Norristown. With an N like Nancy.”
Oh, please, not this again.
I text Jordan back something like “mah bad,” and he and Alceste show up a few minutes later ready to beat me about the head.
There is like one more level of rebuys when they get there and Jordan promptly busts out one hand after the rebuys end. I text him “lenon.” He texts back “noron.”
The tables were playing sooo crazy. I kept hearing rebuy, rebuy, rebuy. And it was always coming from Falstaff.
His wife was at my table and she doubled up early when she went all-in for 10,000 during the 25/25 level and the wife called her. She had pocket rockets.
I was doing okay, until a mix-up at the last hand right before the end of rebuy period. I had been shuffling some of my chips with my right hand, while the remainder of my chips sat under my left hand, I don’t know when or how, but at some point the chips I was shuffling disappeared, either into the pot somehow or into another’s stack. I was mad about it and did what I do when I’m mad. Punish my stack. “I’m all-in.” I hadn’t even looked at my cards. But truth be told, I had been playing super tight all day, so I probably shouldn’t have gotten the THREE callers that I got. Spaceman ended up winning the monster pot with 9hTh with TEN high. But it was the last hand before rebuys so I was able to rebuy up to a medium stack again.
I probably lasted one level past Jordan when the Rooster moved all-in in front of me with AQ and I called him with KK.
Flop was Queen high. He kept saying “I have outs,” and then taking for freaking ever to deal the turn. It was a harmless blank and he starts doing the “come on, I have outs” thing again for an hour before dealing the river. He peels the card up by the edge and peeks at it and starts cheering before he reveals another queen. I was highly annoyed.
“Fuck you, Rooster.”
“Okay! I’m liking the new you, Dawn. So I’ll see you later tonight in my room.”
Ewww.
Turns out I had him covered by like 400 chips, so I got to suffer through the break before coming back for my last hand where I was all-in for less than the BB. Everybody called and Rooster flopped the nizzuts with 45 on a board of 367. That was all she wrote.
I ended up getting started in a cash game, with a Jordan, Vinnay and a bunch of other bloggers that I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. I texted Karol, who was in AC, that we need to start blogging again because nobody knows who we are. She texted me back “We’re old school.” And I wondered if somewhere, out there, F-train felt the inexplicable need to kill himself.
The guy to my left, an Asian kid from Virginia or Maryland was complaining about how slow it all was because he was used to playing online. “What’s all this shuffling and cutting and dealing? I want to click something!”
I remember Jordan getting stacked on some hand, and then bluffing another guy on a hand and then getting mocked when the guy was like “oh no, now we’re gonna have to read about that hand in four parts on his blog.” I laughed so hard. Alceste had busted out of the tournament, but Mary was hanging in there, so we waited around. Finally, Alceste said he was crashing and wanted to make sure it stayed “figurative,” so he and Jordan left.
I palled around with CK in the cash game and waited for Mary. I wasn’t doing well in the game, so I thought about hitting up an ATM. I asked one of the guys in the game if he knew where the closest Citibank was. He said there was one about a mile away down the end of the road. I thought about making a quick run there, but before I could decide, Mary ended up busting early from the final table when her aces got cracked. We drove home with Otis and Drizz and basically giggled at Otis’ sad loneliness all the way back to the hotel.
No one wants to be paid in pesos.
The next morning we met up with the guys for brunch at a local diner.
Everything on the menu was sooo cheap. Like coffee: twenty cents. Pancakes: 1.00 Orange juice: seventy five cents. So everybody ordered like a million things. I was particularly enamored of the pumpkin pancakes, but they were listed as pumpkin nut pancakes. So I asked the waitress if they could just do the pumpkin part, which would be delicious; without the nut part, which would kill me. She assured me she could.
Ten minutes later we were making room around the table for four for our meal for twenty. I took a bite of the pancake and immediately stopped chewing at the first crunch. Pancakes do not crunch. I did a spit take and washed my mouth out with water. I ended up poaching the baconey goodness of Jordan’s breakfast, but I started to worry that my tongue felt heavy and swollen. I bailed on the after breakfast walk, for fear that exercise would just spread the toxin faster.
I figured I’d take it slow and relax before the Bash. I got the room key from Mary and went to the hotel room and brushed the heck out of my teeth and tongue. Then I decided to go look for that Citibank.
I went to my car and drove back to the tournament place and then made the left the guy told me. I measured out 1 mile on the distance measuring thing on the dashboard. Nothing. 2 miles. Still nothing. It was a nice day and I didn’t really have anything else to do, so I figured I’d go as far as ten miles out. When I found myself thirty miles out, I decided to put on the GPS to see how close I was to Atlantic City. I know there’s a Citibank ATM in Atlantic City! Plus, Karol had just gotten engaged there and it was probably rude of me NOT to go to Atlantic City to congratulate her. I’m pretty sure I read that in Miss Manners somewheres.
Anyhoo, according to Mary, I had, unfortunately, gone thirty miles in a not AC direction and I was now even further away from AC than I had started.
Still, I kept driving, I would find a Citibank.
No. No I would not. I found Washington Mutuals and Chases and Bank of Americas. Heck, I found Farmer’s Banks and Cherokee Banks and “Ha, now we’re just making banks up to frustrate you Dawn Summers” Banks. BUT NO CITIBANK.
NONE.
I had been driving for an hour and a half when I got a text from Alceste saying that if in fact I had gone to AC without him he was going to break my face.
I decided to pull into a 7/11 to get a snack when I saw a plaque that said “Citibank ATM inside.”
Awesome.
I drove back to the Bash hotel, watched a few episodes of Supernatural on my computer and then headed over to the Pub Olympics.
I ran into Mary at the corner and gave her the room key.
The pub Olympics were well under way when I got to the bar. I watched Falstaff crush Jordan in the wings eating and then I watched the relay shot drinking. I then participated in relay shot drinking of my own. I had two shots of Jamesons, an amaretto sour and a pineapple vodka (because the bartender didn’t know how to make a sex on the beach) in like the space of like ten minutes. By the time Alceste looked up the recipe for Sex on the beach on his phone, so the bartender could make it, I was having trouble holding things.
Mary came back from the room fifteen minutes later, astonished.
I was taking a picture with a bunch of people and I had the Sex and the Beach in my hand, and then, like, I dunno…I just didn’t have it in my hand anymore and an angry guy was grumbling about having to mop it up.
“But I JUST saw you on the street and you were FINE!”
“I’m still fine. That glass was broken!” I said “HA! AND NOW IT’S BROKEN AGAIN!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Shut it.
We went to get dinner. I wanted steak, but the lines were horribly long, so we ended up getting horrible “Italian” “food.” I didn’t eat. Yes, rookie mistake four: not eating before the Bash.
By the time we got back to the bash, the party was in full rocking mode. We were singing along to 80s Hair Bands and making up dance moves that defied all physics laws. Then Drizz began to take on all comers in arm wrestling. I almost signed up, figuring he’d take it easy on the girls, but when I watched him slam CK’s full body into the table, I changed my mind. What do people eat in the Midwest. Geez.
Mary and I devised the all important “skank scale,” and then rated the women around us. Especially this one giving me the finger:
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When the band called, last song, we filed out of the bar into the chilly PA night. It was raining and black people can’t get wet, so I ran back to the room.
Mary followed behind, we sat up staring at the ceiling for a while, which, I believe, is when Mary noticed the blood spatter on the walls.
Awesome.
We headed back to New York the next day. This time I let Mary guide us back. Good Mary. Not bad Mary.
She made an impressive move where she told us to make a left onto a dead end road and I was a little bit concerned when we found ourselves driving down a back alley which led to a gas station…but lo and behold! That gas station lead to the highway! Mary’s good!
I was supposed to meet up with Matty Ebbs at a secret game he has on the UES, but he cancelled it --- so I went home. And slept. In my blood spatter free bedroom. See you kids next year.
Oh, and this is for LJ:
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