A Novel Idea

82.6 Miles, 5:17 a.m., 83 MPH, 1 Amazing Night

I am falling in like with you…

…deal with it.

Blissgasm...

That voice in my head is back, “I have to shake this one off.  I need some moral support.  Whatever you do don’t call Roy he won’t be helpful.  Joe, call Joe.”

Dialing… “You have reached the voi…”click,

“Fuck Joe.”

Dialing…”Hello.”

“Roy, it’s Rich, we need to talk”

“Dude what did you do this time”

“Just shut the fuck up and listen.”

You know those times in your life when you have been in a relationship for a while and you just get, well, comfortable.  You pick up little habits, gestures, reflections of the other person that don’t necessarily translate to anyone other than the person you are with.  It might be the way you fall asleep together, the way your feet just happen to cross one and others under the sheets, or  the way her head just fits under your arms when you put your arm around her.  These are the things that make relationships worth being in.  But, how awkward is it when that person is gone and you start all over with a new girl.  All of a sudden she doesn’t like your feet touching her when you sleep, or you just happen to let out a little sigh when you hug her tight for the first time.

Hugs are a very crucial part to the beginning of any physical relationship.  It is the building blocks of getting comfortable enough with another person to let them touch you.  Hugging starts at such a young age, subconsciously we have years of experience hugging others, how to hug them, how long, how tight, where to put your hands.  Still despite my years of experience I recently had one of the most awkward hugs in my entire life.  Before we get to that though, I want to go over, from a guys perspective what different hugs mean, if, for no other reason, to further embarrass myself at the end of this story.

The most basic of hugs is something I like to call the side-hug.  This is the most basic hug in the book.  This is a complete sign of friendship and nothing else.  Guys, if you are trying to get a feel for a girl and she side hugs you, things are going well from a romantic standpoint.  The side hug is a one handed maneuver where the guys hand goes around the girls head and the girls goes around the guys waste.  A slight pull is executed so that the side of the hugger’s hips touches briefly.  Now the next iteration of the side hug is for closer friends and the only difference is that the girls arm goes around the guy’s neck and the guys arm goes around the girls waste.  This is still using just one arm, but it does set you up for a cheek kiss if one is necessary.  Again, guys, if you only get one arm in regardless of location, whether it is high or low, you are in the friend zone.  Deal with it.

Now the next step in hugging is the double arm variation.  This is where you are wrapping both arms around the person you are hugging and squeeze.  Now the first part of this hug is when the guy hugs a girl around the neck and the girls arms are around the guys waste.  This is the perfect hug for the end of a first date that was completely mediocre.  No fireworks.  No fist fights.  Just vanilla.  This hug is safe.  As a guy, it shows you that the girl is comfortable with you touching her, but she isn’t that into you yet.  If you see a girl go for your waist and you are planning on kissing her guys, you should strongly reconsider.  Now the final and best type of hug is when the girl wraps both arms around a guys neck and pulls you in close. Guys this is when you put your arms around her hips and let her start getting used to having your hands in the vicinity of her ass.  Now girls, this might come as a shock to some of you, but you have a secret weapon when this hug is deployed.  It’s called the boob press.  When you are into a guy and hug him, as a queue that you are ready for the hug to end, you will press just your chest into his, essentially pressing your boobies into his heart and then release.  Guys, if you happen to ever get boob pressed you are so in.  

So now that we are all squared away on body language and hugs let’s get back to that conversation between Roy and me.  I had been out of a particular relationship for a while, but I was just starting to date a new girl.  I still had all of the old habits from the old relationship fresh in my mind.  I hadn’t made my move with the new girl yet, and one night after a particularly good date, I decided it was the perfect timing for that first kiss.  She was leaving my house and I was walking her to her car.  It came time for the hug.  Her arms went high, awesome, I let my hands slide down from the top of her shoulders to the very small of her back.  Our eyes met, both glistening with anticipation, our breathing deepened momentarily, our bodies were now meshed together, I had picked her up slightly off of the ground for and then set her down, there it was, the boob press.  I was so in.  I pull  her in close…”hhmmmmmmmm.”

My eyes shot open.  That voice in my head that is constantly running chimes in, “Uhhh Richard, (yes I talk to myself in the third person) what the fuck was that?  You did not just hhmmmmmm on this girl.  Oh shit, you did, you hmmmmmed all over her.  Jesus you are lame.” Now for those of you unfamiliar with this hhmmmmmm sound that really does not translate well in text.  It is that sound you make when you are with someone for a long time and just the feeling of them next to you sends you into bliss.  The noise is half of a blissful sigh and half orgasm.  We can call it a blisgasm for the remainder of this tale actually.  So I end up quasi pushing this girl away out of sheer panic.  No kiss.  Hell, I couldn’t even find the words to say goodnight.  Just me standing there waiting, wishing, that she did not just hear me blisgasm while hugging her good-bye.  She got into her car and drove away.

I was left standing in my driveway, alone.  I had just prematurely groanjacualted during a hug that should have lead to our first kiss.  I am going to be single forever.  I am going to live with my mother, her 8 cats, and have the highlight of my week be wearing my nice pair of pleated khakis to starbucks on the weekend for a five dollar mocha frappacino’s.  Fuck.Me.Running.  Seriously. 

10 minutes later.

“I can’t believe you hhmmmmmmmed all over that girl.  You are going to be single forever.”

Thanks Roy.

Kanye West, Late Registration, Track 16

The accusation of being self involved isn’t a new one to me.  Looking to the past events of my life I have always put myself before others.  I guess that is just part of my personality at this point.  It isn’t something that I am particularly proud of, but it is something that I learned to accept.  It is also amazing to me just what, especially at a young age, your mind can decide what is too painful to store and pushes those memories deep deep down, where, in my opinion, they should stay. 

Regardless, when I was in fourth grade my dad walked into my bedroom one night and told me that my mom was pretty sick and needed to go stay at the hospital for a few days in order to get better.  I don’t know why that didn’t seem out of place to me at the time.  No clue.  But again, there I am, even at the age of 10, self involved to the point that I am focused only on beating that next level on the video game that I don’t even think to be more inquisitive to what is wrong.  To me, that is how hospitals worked.  You get sick, you go, you get better, and you go home.  I didn’t even think it was strange when my aunt, my mother’s sister showed up to stay with us.  To me, in my world, it just seemed like a convenient time for her to be here.  I had no clue what was going on.   

A few days later I visited her in the hospital and that’s when things got difficult for me.  My dad told me that she was very tired so if she didn’t seem like the same kind of person that I am used to not to be alarmed.  He told me not to touch her because she might be sore from some of the tests that the doctors had performed on her.  I still can smell that hospital room in my memories.  It is awful.  It is one of those smells that makes your throat swell shut, either from the stench itself or from the tears it brings back.  Those tears crashing from the inner depths of your memories right up front.  A tsunami of grief that has been lying in wait for just the right mix of odors to come back.  Walking into that room, smelling that awful smell, seeing pipes, fluids, machines, monitors all attached to her, I immediately new I should have paid more attention to what my dad was saying.  All of a sudden the visiting rules were banging in my ears.  Don’t touch, be quiet, and tell her you love her. 

She kept calling me Jason.  That’s my older brother’s name.  She told me there were small leprechauns in the corner that had just gotten married.  She told me that there was an angel that would sit in the chair next to her each night and hold her hand.  She said the wings were the whitest thing she had ever seen.  Well in all fairness she told me that the angel was whiter than the leprechaun bride’s dress, but I guess when you are stoned out of your mind on pain medication that is about the same thing.   

I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother had just had her right breast removed.  She had been struggling with breast cancer for a couple of months and the decision had been made to remove her breast before the cancer could spread.  As an adult now, I realize how long this process must have been to come to this conclusion and I knew nothing about it.  Literally at this point, all I knew was that my mother was seeing mythological Irish creatures in her room and that she thought I was my brother.  I hadn’t been part of the process at all.  There must have been weeks of doctors appointments, second opinions, preparation for the surgery.  All of this being done to my mom and I was shut out. 

I remember her coming home and being locked in her room for days.  I wasn’t allowed to see her.  I would catch glimpses of my dad or my aunt walking out with bloody bandages at times.  I remember hearing her cry at night.  If ever there is something worse in this world than falling asleep to your own tears, it is falling asleep to the sound of your mothers.

There were people constantly dropping by with dinners.  Our freezer was full of food.  My dad told me no matter what, even if I didn’t like the food, I had to thank the person for giving it to us.  I’ll never forget that my 5^th grade teacher brought us a spinach casserole that stunk to high hell.  I had to thank her for this crap?  Fuck that, I thought, I can remember her asking me how my mother was doing and I had to fight the urge to tell her that her nasty ass dinner had made her sicker.  It wouldn’t have been a good joke at the time, but let’s be honest, when in my life, has the prospect of making a bad joke ever stopped me from making it.  I guess I had more discretion when I was younger. 

Two years later my mother had her second breast removed.  She had reconstructive surgery this time and I could over hear her bragging to her friends that she was getting two tattoos after the surgery.  The tattoos were new nipples.  Cancer might have taken her breasts, but she was going to keep her femininity.  To this day, I have never met a more amazing woman in my life than my mother.  She has lived through 3 marriages, breast cancer, working in child protection for the State of Louisiana, and being a widow.  Not to mention raising 3 sons and a daughter who have never been appreciative of everything she has given to us.

How bout a revolution?

For some reason there has been a ton of references in my life about poker these days.  There was a time, you see, when I was a legitimate poker player.  A rounder, a true grinder, a shark in sheep’s clothing.  Poker as an acceptable hobby was still in its infancy and I was part of it.  I had been playing cards since I was 20 years old, I started playing legally in casinos a year after that and I was good.  In my hay day I played in underground tournaments three times a week, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights.   The weekends I would play in the casinos, Friday nights I would skim money off of the drunks stumbling in off of Bourbon Street, Sunday nights were spent with grandmothers looking to blow their grandchildren’s inheritance.  I called my Sunday sessions the Social Security game.  Considering the fact that I had a full time job and that by all estimates the money I am currently putting into Social Security I am never going to see back, I would justify my check raises by collecting back the money that afforded a 78 year old woman the luxury of spending her last days at a poker table.

Poker players are just like fishermen in the fact that each of us has a good story.  We all have a tale about that huge fish that got away or the time we landed our prize and it was as big as your head.  Let’s face it; part of the appeal of poker is seeing just how much bullshit you can pipe into somebody before they call you out on it.  This of course is a huge part of the reason I was successful.  To me, life, like poker, is made up of moments when you decide; how beneficial is it going to be for my success to completely and utterly lie to someone with a straight face.  It is one of my tragic skills.  It is one I have perfected.  Thanks mom and dad for that divorce, who knew that me pretending to be okay with that would benefit me so well.

Now, there was a particular evening that still sticks out in my mind as one of the most memorable evening s of poker I have ever played.  As cliché and awful as it is, I feel like I have to quote O.A.R. on this one and tell you that, it was a crazy game of poker.

It was my Thursday night tournament that I was becoming a regular at.  It was at a bar in my town and it usually started around 7 in the evening and had to be done by 2 in the morning for the bar to close.  It wasn’t a very exclusive tournament, but people wouldn’t just open up to you for a while.  When you play poker with the same group of people over an extended period of time the only thing that will get you from one week to the next is your reputation.  Everyone there called me the kid.  At the age of 22 I was at least 15 years younger than the next oldest person at the tables.  The other players constanlty made fun of my age.  Asking if it was alright if I stayed up past my bed time or if my mom was going to pick me up after they won my money.  I usually just sat there in silence, occasionalling retorting something about my mom being asleep, but their wife said she would be by to pick me up. My reputation was that of a very solid player who rarely would bluff, or do anything fancy.  I was vanilla; I was the egg shell white on the walls of your new house, unthreatening, easy to get along with and boring.  This was an act that I had built over the course of many weeks.  Walking into the bar people would acknowledge my presence and then go back to doing whatever else they were up to.  I would pull a chair up to the bar waiting for the game to start and the bar keep would have a cherry coke waiting for me.  Still to this day I get a rush from the smell of cigarettes and cherry sodas.  Those two things just feel like poker to me.

In this particular game there were 40 players, 5 tables and it only cost 30 dollars to play.  The winner of the tournament got 800 bucks, second place got 200 bucks and the remaining cash went to the others in the top 6.  Now I can’t tell you anything about this game up until the final table.  I am sure there were hands that I played very well and there were some hands that I absolutely mis-played, but somehow when it got down to the final 6 I had the most chips out of everyone and it looked like it was going to be a very profitable night for me.  Two players were knocked out and things were pretty getting pretty close between three of us.  I knocked the 4^th player out and going heading into the final 3 I was the chip leader again.  Now, for those of you who play poker can attest to, when you have been playing poker for over 5 hours straight and it is getting late into a tournament and early into the mornings the size of your stack is more important than any other factor.  I was happy with where I was and I began analyzing the remaining two players.  One player was a young Hispanic kid.  He knew the strategy, he knew the math, his judgment was off at times and I knew that it would take a solid hand for me to take him down.  The other man was Mickie.  Now, Mickie is exactly the type of guy that his name implies.  Mickie was way past three sheets to the wind.  His head was bobbing at the table trying to half stay awake and half try to keep the bar on a level plane in his mind.  His words were slurring and you could see sweat pouring out of his floral shirt.  His chest hair poking through the unbuttoned top 3 buttons were like wet vines trying so desperately to escape the jungle he was wearing.  His gold chains were able to suppress some of them, but others were not so lucky.  Mickie was my mark.  He was my ticket to the 800 dollar pot that night.  But there was the 2 o’clock deadline looming out there and Mickie was setting up for a war of attrition.  You see, if it came to be 2 before there was a winner, the remaining players would just divide the money evenly.  This meant that each of us would win a little over 300 bucks, which was fine with Mickie, who had the least amount of chips, but for me, was unacceptable.  There was an hour and half left and we would need every second of it.

We must have played through 7 hands in an hour because Mickie was acting so slowly.  This had frustrated the younger guy at the table to the point that he had thrown away much of his lead over Mickie and now the three of us were sitting pretty close in the amount of chips we had.  Finally the kid gave in a bet away all of his chips when he shouldn’t have and Mickie won.  There were 20 minutes left before the bar closed and all of a sudden I went from being the sure winner in this, to the under-dog.  Now, with 800 dollars on the horizon, Mickie was in a rush to play each hand.  Seeing that he was drunk and emotional and not in any state what so ever to make any kind of decision I perked up in my chair, raised my baseball cap and spoke to him. “Mickie, there are 15 minutes left before the bar closes.  The way I see it is that you have two choices right now.  You can split the remaining grand with me, 500 bucks each straight up.  Or you can play me for another 15 minutes, by the end of which I guarantee, I will have not only all of your chips in front of me, but also 800 bucks.  This is a 300 dollar choice and I am leaving it up to you.”  Everyone in the bar laughed.  Hell I would have laughed too.  Mickie told me he liked his chances.  I looked him square in the eye, “Well, thanks for the extra money then.”

I quietly slumped back into my chair and waited.  I waited and waited, I played slow, and Mickie was getting more and more angry.  He let his anger control his bets.  He would throw up huge bets trying to get me to fold when he had nothing.  He was so drunk I knew he didn’t have an accurate count of the chips and with about 3 minutes left I did a count and realized I was slightly ahead of him in chips.  He hadn’t caught onto this yet.  Then I get dealt pocket 10’s and I was the first to act.  I just called his big blind and of course, in typical Mickie fashion, he raised me something ridiculous like 8 times the big blind.  I put him on at least on Ace and I knew that regardless of what happened on the flop this was the hand I needed to make my move on.  Ace.  Seven.  Ten.  I just flopped trip 10’s.  A great hand heads up.  An even greater hand heads up against a drunk Italian man who was holding an ace.  I check, hoping he is going to take the bait and bet big, he doesn’t, he checks.  Shit.  Three.  Now, most people here sitting with trips are going to put out a bet and see what happens, but I am waiting for the knock out and I know that if I slow play this he is going to try to bluff his way out of the hand.  I check.  He checks.  Fuck.  Now I have to bet the next hand.  I asked how much time there was left before the last card is dealt.  They bar says that the next hand has to be the last one.  The last card hits the table.  Ace.  I looked at Mickie, “Well Mickie, looks like we are splitting that money after all.  There is no way I could bet on that Ace, I check.”  He is furious.  His $800 payday just got reduced.  In a fit of anger he yells at me, “Well I am all in.” Click. Snap.  That is the sound of the trap being sprung.

I have a full house.  10s full of Aces.  It isn’t the nuts, but in this case it is the better of two hands.  It also wins me $800.  I tell Mickie that I call and lay the two 10s in my hand down on the table.  His eyes drop. “You mother fucker.  You fucking piece of shit, I will fucking kill you.  We still have one more hand.  You think you beat me, I will get that fucking money.” 

“Not tonight you won’t Mic, I have you covered.  Thanks for the extra cash though.” It was smug and perfect.  Everyone in the bar would be talking about this for weeks.  We had to get a third person to count the chips to be sure, but at the end of the count, I was right.  I had won.  The entire bar of rounders came up to shake my hand and tell me congrats.  Mickie was nowhere to be seen.  His girlfriend at slapped him after he got up from the table.  “That was rent money asshole.”  I am sure he went after her somewhere to make up for his short comings as not only a man, but as a poker player.  I was enjoying the attention inside the bar.

People were actually calling other players from the night at 2 in the morning to tell them about what just happened.  It was a great feeling to be part of this and it was an even better feeling to know that I had just won a little less than 2 weeks salary at the job I had.  Then there was the yelling.

We all thought we heard a scream at first, we weren’t sure if it was a scream or if it was just Mickie drunk accelerating out of the parking lot and screeching his tires.  The sound of shattering glass a moment later confirmed this for us.  We all ran outside to see what had happened.  Again, in life, much like poker, assumptions can ruin your life.  Mickie’s car had a broken wind shield, but was parked in the same spot.  His tires were fine, it was his girl that had been screaming.  She had a cut above her right eye and the blood was just starting to run down her cheek. 

“What the fuck Mickie!” someone in the crowd yelled, “What the fuck did you do?”  None of us saw the loaded gun in his hand yet.