Lucky Charm "Now listen up, Justin," my father said to me as we stood outside the door to Black-Eyed Pete's Pool and Arcade Emporium that day. "I'm not really supposed to be bringing you in here. Pete's not really. . . uh. . . well, fond of children. But since your mother was called into work today, and I sorta promised the guys I'd be here for the Big Game, I haven’t got much choice." With my father, every poker game was a 'Big Game'. The way he said it, you knew it was meant to be capitalized in his mind. "So you just stay with me and be very quiet. And after we're done here, we'll get home before your mom does and setup for your birthday party. Okay? Oh, and if Pete happens to say anything to you while we're in there, you just smile and say 'yessir’". The year was 1979 and I was turning nine that day. My father, a man of such small stature that he was known to all by the dubious moniker of ‘Little Willie’, was once again unemployed, a not unusual occurrence for a man whose resume sported more holes than the PGA tour. We lived in New York and my mother was a nurse at the Bellevue Center. Her salary was more often than not the only source of income for our family. Little Willie’s frequent unemployment made him my primary caregiver, long before the term ‘primary caregiver’ had been invented. On those rare occasions that Little Willie did manage to go out and actually find himself a job, he always seemed to get himself fired within a few weeks, a month at the most. That's not to say that my father was a lazy or shiftless man; he wasn't. He was just a man who had never found the job in life that he was suited for. He'd been everything from a nightclub doorman to a door-to -door insurance salesman. He had tried selling used automobiles at Uncle Johnny's Deals on Wheels, but had been fired from that one after only two days on the job. "I just couldn't sell that piece of junk to that nice old lady", he explained apologetically to my mother when she found out. The third job he had been fired from in less than three months, but still she couldn't be mad at him. He always seemed to have such a good reason for getting fired . . . it was never his fault, he'd explain. Was it his fault he'd accidentally walked in on his boss and the girl who sold the makeup getting to know each other rather affectionately in the mop closet of the Woolworths' after only two weeks of working maintenance there? Why, no, of course not. And could he really be blamed for taking a swing at the man who'd thought to sic his dog on him, when all he'd wanted to do was demonstrate the amazing cleaning power of the Bissell Steam Clean Deluxe? That he had spent the weekend in jail for that one was just one more example of how bad his luck was, as my father saw it. After all, he'd only been defending himself, hadn't he? And he would promise that next time, the next job he got, that would be the one, we'd see. And my mother would sigh, and nod supportively, knowing in her heart that the next one would be the same. Try as she might, she couldn't help but love him, for it wasn't as if he was a bad husband; he was just a bad provider. As a husband he was great, she'd say. . . loving, faithful and, as I overheard her telling my Aunt Lucy one day when I was ten, wonderful in bed. I hadn't known what that meant at the time; my young mind conjured up pictures of the pillow fights and tickling contests. Most days I rarely saw Little Willie; I’d see him before school when he’d make my breakfast, scrambled eggs, the same thing every morning, it being the only breakfast food he knew how to cook. It wasn’t until my first Saturday night sleepover that I realized eggs could even be cooked any other way. Then I’d be off to school and by the time I returned home in the afternoon, he’d be gone, off to some poker game or other. My mother always worked the midnight shifts, so by the time he’d return home to let her go to work, I’d be fast asleep. Little Willie never took me to a movie, or a baseball game, or even tossed around the football with me in the park. I’d see other kids my age doing these things with their fathers and wonder what made my relationship with Little Willie so different. I asked my mother once, and she just smiled at me with sad eyes and said, "Your father loves you, Justin." And those sad eyes were what stopped me from telling her that I just didn’t believe that was so. I knew Little Willie liked to go to Black-Eyed Pete’s to play poker; he talked about it often enough. But I’d never expected him to take me with him there. In a way I was excited, not only because I was doing something with my father for once, but because I knew my mother would be furious if she found out and the very illicit nature of it woke the butterflies in my stomach. Entering Pete's was like following the White Rabbit down that absurdly large rabbit hole. All the windows in the building had been painted over with thick black paint that looked like the grease that always got all over my hands every time I had to put the chain back on the second hand bike I'd gotten for my sixth birthday. The only illumination in the dim room came from the weak white glow of the fluorescent lamps that hung suspended above the pool tables. The smoke was so thick that my eyes immediately started to burn. Everywhere I looked, I could see men smoking Camels and Lucky Strikes, or my fathers brand of choice, unfiltered Marlboros. The smoke drifted off the ends of what seemed like hundreds of cigarettes, wafting upwards in lazy swoops and whirls, to collect under the light of those fluorescent lamps, like an acrid storm-cloud waiting for the proper moment to unleash its torrential downpour. It seemed to me that the moment we walked in, everyone in the room stopped what they had been doing to stare at us. Perhaps the mistaken impression of a child, but it was enough to make me uncomfortable, and very conscious of how out of place I was. My father too, I could tell, for his face seemed a bit whiter than it had been moments ago. It was not everyday at Black-Eyed Pete's Pool and Arcade Emporium that the door to the outside world opened up to admit a child barely tall enough to see over the pool tables. And it seemed that our presence had attracted someone else’s attention as well. Sitting on a stool at a bar strewn with overflowing ashtrays and empty beer mugs was the largest man I'd had ever seen. Seated, it was hard for me to tell how large he really was, but a guess would have put his weight nearer to five hundred pounds than four. The massive head which swiveled slowly around to view our arrival was covered almost entirely in thick, shaggy white hair, leaving only his eyes and mouth really visible through the beard. His cheeks, what could be seen of them, hung down from his face like the jowls of a bulldog, to be lost in the thick folds of his neck. Even from twenty feet away and through thick smoke and dim lights, I could clearly see the fleshy stomach that protruded from under the porcine man’s once white T-shirt, a stomach marked with dark purple veins that formed a crazy roadmap map, broken here and there by open sores, like potholes in the road. One hand, fingers as round and greasy as breakfast sausages, lay idly scratching one of those sores. As I watched him watching us, he labored himself off his stool, a feat somewhat like watching a house lift itself from its foundations. As he lumbered towards us, Little Willie bent down and whispered in my ear. "That's Pete. Now remember, you just stand there and don't say anything but 'yessir'". "Now just what do you think you're doing, bringing a kid in here?" Those deep rumbling words were directed at Little Willie, but the harsh glare that came with them was all for me. "I don't recall this place being named 'Black-Eyed Pete's Baby- sitting Service'. Do you?" "Well, no Pete, uh, but. . . " my father began. "Madigan! Get over here, Madigan!" Pete bellowed. From out of the dim shadows of the back of the room came a man who must have been Madigan. Whip thin, and standing tall enough that he had to duck the high-hanging table lights, he was dressed all in black, so that he seemed to be formed out of the shadows he had walked out of, as if some evil spirit had been hovering there waiting for Pete’s call before coalescing into the shape known as Madigan. The skin on his face was stretched so tightly over his sunken-in eyes and sallow cheeks that I had the impression I was looking at a skull. Even his hair was brittle looking and that sickly yellowish color one would expect of a long dead and decaying corpse. More terrified than I'd ever been in my life, I grabbed desperately for my father’s hand, something I never did but the warmth of it seemed the only link to normality I had. Little Willie looked at me in surprise, but merely squeezed my hand tighter. "What's up, Pete?" The walking cadaver asked, in a voice suprisingly soft and lilting, not at all like the creaking of bones, or the hissing of snakes that I had expected. "What's up? I'll tell you what's up! Little Willie here seems to be under the mistaken impression that we're running a baby-sitting service!" He shook one meaty finger at me. "Now, I may be mistaken, but I don't recall seeing any signs saying "Childcare Provided' anywhere around here, do you?" "Now, now, just relax," Madigan said. Looking at the two of them standing side by side, the overly thin Madigan and the corpulescent Pete, I couldn't help but think of Abbott and Costello. Although I couldn't imagine anyone playing straight man to Pete. From the thunderous look on Pete's face, I wasn't sure that laughing was something Pete was even capable of. "He's just a boy, what's it gonna hurt, him being in here?" "Now you listen here," Pete said in an icy voice, the waggling finger now turned towards the skinny man, leaving me relieved that the attention was somewhat off me. "When our Daddy owned this pool hall, we weren't even allowed in as kids." I stared at the two of them in shock. Brothers? I couldn't imagine any two people looking more unlike brothers than these two. . . they were the epitome of opposite. "And now that he's retired and left it to us, I ain't about to start changing his rules." "I don't seem to recall Daddy running illegal poker games in the backroom either," Madigan replied in as icy a tone as his brothers. "Seems to me that our Daddy's somewhat of a religious man, or have you forgotten all those Sundays spent in church? I don't think that he'd cotton too much to learning about your little sideline business. Do you?" Pete's face had gone that peculiar shade of white that I had always associated with the rubber glue that I used at school. Until then. After seeing that, that color would always remind me of Pete. "You wouldn't dare," he whispered. "You're in this just as much as I am," with each word, the whisper got louder and louder, until he was just short of yelling. "What do you think paid for that new Buick you're driving? If you tell Daddy -" "Hold on, hold on," Madigan interjected, his gaunt hands held up in a gesture meant to be placating. "Nobody said I was gonna tell Daddy nothin'. I'm just making the point that sometimes the old rules are just that. . . old rules. And if Little Willie here wants to bring his son in, I don't see what harm it's gonna do." "Uh, really, Madigan, it's all right if -" my father began, breaking off as Pete's enraged visage swung his way. I'd never seen anything like the way his gray face became as red as a ripe tomato in the blink of an eye. It was like all the blood in his considerable body had risen to his face all at once, as if his surely overworked heart had gotten confused and finally given up directing all that traffic. "Now you listen to me, Little Willie. If you insist on bringing that little brat in here, I'll allow it this time, only because you're one of my better customers. But if he so much as makes one little peep, breathes too heavy, or even passes gas near me, you're both outta here, quicker than a fly sticks to shit. Got it?" "Sure, Pete," Little Willie said, flashing him an easy grin. Centering his red-faced glare on me, Pete growled, "Got that, kid?" Still too terrified to speak, I couldn't even squeak out the 'Yessir' I had prepared. A jerking nod was the best I could manage. Giving me one last malevolent glare, Pete thundered off back to his post at the bar. Madigan bent down on his haunches in front of me. "Now don't you pay Pete no mind. He's not half the bear he'd like everyone to believe." I wasn't sure how much I believed that. "Well, all this commotion over you and I don't even know your name. Mine's Madigan. What's yours?" "Yessir!" I blurted out. That had been the only word on my mind to say for so long now, it was like my tongue had forgotten how to form any other word. Madigan looked up at my father quizically. "It's OK." My father smiled down at me. "Madigan's one of the good guys, you can tell him your name." I looked at the skeletal figure, noticing how his eyes twinkled as he smiled at me encouragingly. "Jus- Justin. Justin La-Lar-Larkin," I said. "Well, Justin, Justin Larkin, it's certainly a pleasure to meet the young master that Little Willie’s always bragging about." I stared at him. Bragging? Little Willie? About me? Surely he had something a little backwards. "So you've come to lend a little luck to your Daddy's poker hand, have you?" Wide eyed and still trembling slightly, I merely stared at him. "That's right," my father answered for me. "My boy's gonna bring me all the luck in the world today, so I hope you and the boys brought your checkbooks." Madigan let out a bellowing laugh, making me cling to my fathers hand even tighter, and leaving me wondering how such a rumble could come from so skinny a chest. "I'm sure he will at that. He couldn't make your luck any worse," he said, his warm grin showing the remark for the joke he'd meant it as. "Well, no sense wasting anymore time, the boys are all back there and they're just waiting on us." With that, he strode off towards the back of the pool hall, leaving my father and me to follow, both of us nearly running to keep up with his long strides. He rapped on a door set into the back wall and it opened from the inside, revealing a room more brightly lit, and, if possible, more filled with smoke than the one we were in. Seated around a large wooden table were two men, both with a cigarette in one hand and holding cards in the other. "Well, 'bout time you slowpokes got here," one of the men said, his voice a lazy drawl. He had a dark brown Stetson hat on, and a toothpick hung lazily from one side of his mouth. His long brown hair hung out from his hat on all sides, framing a face as granite-like and weather-beaten as any cowboy I had ever seen on all those late night Westerns I wasn't supposed to watch. Looking at him, I immediately thought of the Marlboro Man, that smokers champion, before all those anti-smoking fanatics picketed for his removal from ads. And I noticed that the cigarette he held tightly between two yellowing fingers was indeed a Marlboro. . . unfiltered, of course. "Hey Little Willie, that your kid?" came a gravelly voice. Sitting beside Marlboro Man was the quintessential old geezer that one would expect to see at any self-respecting poker game. He sat rocking back and forth in a wicker rocking chair, the only piece of furniture in the room that didn't look like it had been bought in some garage sale in the forties. The light from the obligatory fluorescent bulbs overhead shone off the top of his bald head, the exposed skin of which was wrinkled and speckled with liver spots. "Jeffrey, Harlan," my father said, nodding in turn to both. "Yes, this is my boy Justin." "Boy, I've heard of losing your kids in a poker game, but I never thought I'd see it!" Marlboro Man quipped. "Hey, Little Willie, I'll see your kid and raise you my wife!" the old man put in. "Now there's a bet I'd rather lose!" "All right, all right," Madigan said after the laughter had died down. "Justin's gonna sit in on this game with his Dad today, so I expect you animals to play nice and keep the swearing to a minimum." Breaking open a brand new deck of cards (the same Bicycle brand that garnished the spokes on the wheels of my bike), he expertly shuffled them, cutting and bridging them faster than my eye could follow. "The game," he pronounced, "is straight poker, no draws, no limit and the buy in is a five hundred minimum. Shall we proceed, gentlemen?" All joking was put aside and the men at the table became deadly serious. For two hours, I watched my father play, the pile of chips in front of him growing smaller with each hand at the beginning, until I thought he was going to lose it all in the first half hour. But slowly his pile began to show signs of serious growth, as if it took the cards a few hands to realize he was a good guy and deserved their support. By the end of the second hour, Little Willie's amount of chips had more than tripled, and I noticed something else had changed. There was a light in my father’s eyes that I’d never seen there before, and the smile on his face was as bright as the noonday sun. He looked more . . . alive somehow, like he was actually enjoying life. In nine years I’d never seen him look like that. Only two players remained in the game now - my father and Marlboro Man, the old man having lost all his chips by this time. "Well, Little Willie," Madigan said with a smile towards me. "It seems you may have found your good luck charm. I haven't seen you win this much in forever." My father smiled at me and tousled my hair, the first time he’d ever done that. I could see the sweat glistening on his brow and feel a slight tremble in his hand. Playing poker must be hard work, I thought, although I couldn't see what could be so strenuous about sitting around a table drinking beer and playing cards. "Shall we continue, gentlemen?" Madigan dealt the cards and the game went on. For another hour the two men continued playing, with Little Willie winning nearly every hand, until finally all of Marlboro Man's chips resided in my fathers pile. "Well, if that ain't the damnedest piece of luck I ever seen!" Marlboro Man said. "You have horseshoes and four leaf clovers for breakfast, didja?" "Now why would I bother with such a breakfast when I've got the only lucky charm I'll ever need right here?" my father replied , clapping me on the back. I smiled with pleasure and satisfaction. Even though I knew I hadn't done anything to help my father win so much, he seemed to think I had, and that was good enough for me. "I told ya a poker game was no place for a kid." Marlboro Man sighed good-naturedly. "I guess I should've stayed home today!" I could understand his point. He must have lost close to a thousand dollars to my father. I felt a little sorry for him that day; a thousand dollars was alot more money in 1979 than it is today. My father cashed in his chips to Madigan and we said our good-byes. And after that, before we went home, Little Willie took me for ice cream. And pizza. And then we went bowling. My father was in as good a mood as I'd ever seen him in. Of course, winning over a thousand dollars will do that to a person. After that day, it became a ritual for us. Every second Saturday, Black -Eyed Pete's held a big game and every game my father would take me. He never won as big as that again; indeed, in time he began to lose more often than not, even with his 'good luck charm' with him. But I think by that time, he wasn't in it for the money. I think he was simply enjoying the time we got to spend with each other,now that we had found something we could do together. I'll never forget the look in his eyes the day I told him I couldn't make the game because I had my first high school football game that day. I thought that he would be mad. . . we'd been going to Pete's every second Saturday for almost five years by then. But he wasn't mad. The tears that welled up in his eyes were pride, he told me. That Saturday, for the first time in over ten years, my father missed his game, and came to mine. There he was, in the stands, cheering himself hoarse as I ran for two touchdowns and over fifty yards in my first game. And when my coach said to me after the game, "Helluva game Larkin, are your shoes made out of rabbits feet or something?", I told him, "Nossir coach, the only lucky charm I need is right there in the stands." # Twenty years have passed since that day at Pete's. It's January, 2000 now. The glorious millennium. Only not so glorious for me. My father died two weeks ago, quietly in his sleep. I think he must have known it was coming, because he phoned me up that day and asked me to go with him back to Pete's. I was concerned at first: we hadn't been in fifteen years. My father hadn't gambled at all in all that time; he'd given it up for good this time, I'd thought. But he set my mind at ease with "Just one final time, Justin, for old times sake?" and there was such pleading in his voice that I couldn't say no. Black-Eyed Pete’s had changed considerably in the fifteen years since we'd been. The majority of the pool tables had been removed and replaced with dozens of those loud and violent video games, and the crowd was much younger . . . obnoxious teen- agers who should have been in school. Madigan met us as we came through the door, a little older and still as skeletal as ever. At least some things remained the same, I thought. Pete had died a few years ago, he informed us. Weight related heart failure, which surprised noone. I was quite upset to hear of his death, for regardless of his crabby nature and professed dislike of children, I'd grown quite fond of Pete over the years, and I suspect he had developed a bit of a soft spot for me as well. The game was still being held every second Saturday, though the only player who remained from the old days was Marlboro Man, who greeted us with such warmth I thought he would break my ribs before his bear hug was through. He was still dressed in his cowboy style. "Thelma asks about you all the time," he told me. I had dated his daughter through all my high school years before we drifted apart in college. "She's still single, you know," he said with a wink. "Uh, I'm engaged, Mr. Perrin," I lied smoothly, shooting my father a warning glance that served to quiet his burgeoning smirk. I had begun calling him Mr. Perrin when I had dated his daughter, but in my mind I always thought of him as the Marlboro Man. And I'm not engaged, not even involved, and that's the way I like it. "Lucky girl. Well, Little Willie, it's been a long time since I've had the chance to take your money. You sure you're up to the challenge?" My father laughed and laid five crisp C-notes on the table in reply. There was a sparkle back in his eyes that I hadn't seen there in the five years since Mom had died. I was suddenly glad we had came. They played for five hours, cleaning the other players in the game out in less than two. I was awed watching them play. It was like watching two stately old lions fighting for supremacy. At the end, once again all of Marlboro Man's chips sat in front of my father, and a huge smile, which had been such a rare sight in the last few years, was plastered all over my fathers face. "Well, Little Willie, it's a pleasure losing money to you again," Marlboro Man said with a grin as they shook hands. "See you and Justin here next time?" My father looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be here, Jeffrey. Me and my lucky charm." But that wasn't to be. That night my father died. They found him in his bed, a deck of cards on the nighttable, a book on Poker lying open on his chest, and a peaceful smile on his face. Marlboro Man and Madigan came to the funeral, where Madigan gave the eulogy. And at the end, before the closing of the casket, he laid five cards in Little Willie's right hand; a royal flush in hearts. He put a stack of chips in his left. "The game goes on," Madigan whispered as the casket was closed, and I nodded through my tears.
Copyright © 2001 Colin W Linder |