Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
Rules tell you something about how the world works.
Whether it’s my rules, Gibbs’ Rules, George Washington, Fred Harvey or pirate rules, rule sets give a guide for behavior in situations where you’re not sure what to do. Follow the rules, reap the benefit. Or break the rules and reap the benefit. Hard to know sometimes which to do… (and by Vegas Rules I do not mean “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” 😏)
Tim Powers writes secret histories with a healthy dose of the supernatural. Declare is a crazy quilt of a novel including spies, Djinn (the supernatural kind), Kim Philby, Lawrence of Arabia, Mt. Ararat, Saharan adventures, Nazis and the Cold War. On Stranger Tides is pirates, Blackbeard, voodoo, zombies, and the quest for immortality.
I’m (re)reading Last Call, a secret history of Las Vegas, featuring Bugsy Siegel (and his unsolved murder), the Arthurian Fisher King legend (related to our medieval friend Chrétien de Troyes), tarot cards, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and poker. In particular, I’m keeping an eye on Powers’ magical system and how he creates such a natural “supernatural” atmosphere.
Scott (Scotty) Crane is the one-eyed son of Georges Leon, a mathematician who is looking for immortality and control of Las Vegas. Georges wants to turn Scotty into a a sort of “body double,” where Georges’ soul will infest Scotty’s mature body at a later time. Scott’s mother gets him away from Georges, and Scott is adopted by Ozzie, an itinerant poker player.
The world of Last Call revolves around cards, poker, and the Tarot. Unsurprisingly, there are rules. Rules that help keep you alive. Rules for your behavior, and rules for an invented game called Assumption, played with tarot cards. Let’s see some of them. Maybe they’re good for more than poker.
Leon didn’t look at any of the random suits and numbers that were defining the moment.
“You don’t—” Leon began.
“I know,” Scotty had said in quick shame, “you don’t talk about important stuff in front of the cards.”
“These people sound like idiots.”
“They are idiots,” Crane said. “It’s not profitable to play poker with geniuses.”
Here’s Crane headed to a card game, wondering if he needs a gun for protection:
And the car keys are in the living room, he thought as he started out the bedroom door—and then he paused.
If you bring a machine, you’ll never need it, Ozzie had always told him. Like a fire extinguisher in a car. The day you don’t bring it is the day you’ll need it.
He shrugged and went back to the dresser by the bed. This isn’t the time to ignore the old man’s advice, he thought.
This advice sounds metaphorical, but in the book, it’s entirely literal:
“You never play for money at home,” Ozzie had said. “You don’t want the cards to know where you live.”
Ozzie on games when you need to watch your back:
And he had made sure Scott understood when it was that you had to fold out of a game.
That had been the advice Scott had ignored in the game on the lake in ‘69.
“If the drink in your glass starts to sit at an angle that ain’t quite level, or if the cigarette smoke starts to crowd in over the cards and fall there, or if plants in the room suddenly start to wilt, or if the air is suddenly dry and hot in your throat, smelling like sun-hot rock, fold out. You don’t know what you might be buying or selling come the showdown.”
“You know,” Newt had said slowly, almost reluctantly, as he finally unknotted his tie, “there’s a game on a houseboat on Lake Mead tonight.” Newt had lost more than ten thousand dollars.
Ozzie had shaken his head. “I never gamble on water.”
He tucked a wad of bills into his jacket pocket. He had increased his roll from about twelve to about twenty-four thousand in the past twenty hours. “Even when they had the boats out there in the ocean, three miles off Santa Monica, I never went.”
… and then slid it to the place where Leroy had been sitting.
Leroy leaned forward and curled his brown hand down over the cards; for a moment he seemed to be kneading them gently, and Scott was dully sure that the man was cheating, feeling for a crimp or an unshaved edge. Ozzie had taught him long ago that cheaters were to be either used or avoided, but never challenged, especially in a game with strangers.
Mavranos had got up and slouched back into the living room; now Crane heard him say, quietly, “Blue van just pulled up, and three guys got out of it; they’re heading for your place.”
What’s in the pot is gone, Ozzie had always said. It ain’t yours anymore. You might win it, but until you do, you gotta regard it as spent, not chase it.
“Up on your porch now,” Mavranos said.
Of course, when the antes or blinds have been high, so high that it’s as much as you’re worth to stay in a dozen hands, why then you gotta play looser.
“Lights on in your living room,” Arky said. “Kitchen now. Spare bedroom. Real bedroom, too, probably, but I can’t see it from here.
And if the antes have been so big that guys are staying just because of it, sometimes you can bet everything you’ve got and win with a damn poor hand.
Powers has been interviewed in a number of places about how he researches his “secret histories,” but I love this quote in particular:
“Often I’ve thought if you could get a really thorough big detailed biography of anybody, you can approach it with the kind of paranoid squint I use for research, and almost certainly find enough clues to hang a book on it.
“Paranoid squint.” heh.
