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Penny Ante

Every night, after another factory shift, there's little to do but lay on the couch, point the remote control at the television and aimlessly switch channels until I can settle on a program. I'll check Discovery Channel or The Learning Channel. Sometimes I'll flip to the History Channel so I can bone up on my encyclopedic knowledge of the JFK assassination conspiracy. It may not be blonde college girls consuming body shots and flashing their breasts at the camera, but at least there's the grim satisfaction that I'm learning something.

Lately, I've been marveling at David Blaine's amazing card tricks. I've had ample opportunity to study his technique since TLC has played the same episode of Street Magician for five nights running. His nimble sleight-of-hand is impressive enough to make the most homophobic heterosexual wonder what kind of handjob he could give.

Mostly, though, I'm reminded of my own fifty-two card experiences. I was never interested in playing "pick-a-card" with rummies off the street. For me it was always seven card draw, though I'd concede to the five card variety providing there was money to be won.

This need to gamble took root during my pre-teens, instilled in me by my loving family who gathered around the Formica kitchen table every Saturday for a drunken, prolonged bout of seven card draw, penny ante poker.

On these nights, my father sat at the head of the table if a perfectly square table could be said to have a head. He wore his customary wife-beater T-shirt and paisley pajama bottoms. His arms and shoulders were muscled from a decade of flopping a mop to make ends meet, his belly distended from the booze needed to ease him through the decade. Before him a bottle of Coors and an ashtray formed the boundaries of a vast copper empire dotted with nickel and dime settlements.

My mother sat at the chair to his right. She wore a frumpy pink nightgown, frayed at the ends. Her dyed red hair jutted off her scalp in every direction and a Raleigh cigarette dangled from the corner of her lip as she grimly surveyed her ordinarily dwindling penny pile. Competitive beyond reason, she played every hand as if her entire life savings (ha! she didn't have a life savings) rested on every losing hand. She made it a point to call the winner of any particular hand an asshole.

To his left, my grandmother, the mother of my mother and bane of my father's existence, perched on the uneven chair reserved for her. She came equipped with her own accessories, those being fingers laced with white gold and diamonds, a bottomless glass of peppermint schnapps and a perpetual scowl aimed directly at my father. Pennies were beneath her, and she arrived at every game clutching a change purse full of dimes and quarters she cashed in for pennies at the start of play.

I sat across from my father. I radiated desperation. Not a high roller wagering a million dollars on a roll of the dice could match the intensity in which I played the game. I wore a gunky maroon housecoat that hung off my scrawny shoulders like a wizard's cloak, an article of clothing I shunned every other day of the week. As far as beverages, I was pretty much limited to fruit punch which, like my mother's wine, was poured straight from the box. My penny pile, like my arms, was puny.

My grandfather never played. I think he enjoyed the one evening of tranquility a week allotted him, hunched in front of his old timey record player listening to Whoopee John's rousing polka rendition of "Who Stole The Kishka".

Though I'm positive the deal must have rotated after every hand, I only remember my father dealing. He took his cue from Jack Nicholson's R.P. McMurphy.

"Ace high to the lovely wife. The kid's got a pair of deuces showing. The battleack's got absolutely nothing and the main man's sitting on another gold mine. Bet goes to the mighty deuces."

I surveyed my cards. A pair of twos and a ten. A ten and an ace in the hole. And, of course, another king secreted in the folds of my housecoat.

"I'm gonna go with a penny."

"Big spender puts up a penny. And I will raise you two cents, kiddo."

He said this as the Vantage hollow-filtered cigarette affixed to a gigantic, plastic Walgreens brand filter wedged in my grandmother's wrinkled maw skipped around, worrying the plastic with her dentures. She put in her penny, then, begrudgingly put in another two at my father's behest.

My mother folded.

Another card. A goddam six. I took a swallow of Hi-C. My mother polished off another glass of the red stuff. My father bumped me again. He had nothing showing, a jack high. We put up our pennies. Next card under. I peeked at the three of spades. Nothing. Two pair. I kept my father honest, putting up my pennies.

My father, much like his idol, liked to communicate with his eyebrows. He waggled them, now. "Well, ladies, can any of yous beat three jacks?"

"Ain't one jack enough?" I asked but my sarcasm was lost on him.

As Dad raked in his winnings and Mom called him an asshole and Grandma twisted another Vantage into her filter, I subtly dropped the ace of hearts in my lap.

On the next losing hand I dropped another king. The hand after that I won fairly with a straight. I also won the two hands after that with assistance from my lap cards.

"Looks like the worms turning," my father muttered. He had just tried to bluff me, insinuating he had another king to match the two showing. I knew this to be false on account of the two kings securely hidden away in my housecoat.

I felt no guilt from hoodwinking my family. I needed to win. I needed those pennies to finance my social life which consisted of walking down the block to Pakistani Khal's corner store so I could wile away an hour or two playing arcade games. I heard from the grapevine that he had just gotten in Gunsmoke. In the days before Nintendo and porno movies, this was a very big deal.

Suffice to say, at that age, I had very little money if only because my mother and father had very little money. What little capital I was bringing in took a mighty hit when my father caught wise to my church scheme. Somehow he'd discovered that every Sunday morning, rather than attend Mass at St. Casimir, I'd slip into the vestibule, grab a bulletin for Mom, and hightail it to the bowling alley where, with the three bucks enclosed in the tithe envelope, I'd play their arcade games for an hour.

I took a beating over that ploy. When I considered the near omniscience needed to detect my wrongdoing, I dumped the two issues of Hustler hidden away in my closet on the off-chance his sense of criminality included masturbation.

It was this omniscience I weighed my Blainian card switching ability against. Maybe I thought the half case of Coors he consumed during the course of the evening weighed in my favor. Maybe I just thought the few bucks was worth the possibility of incurring his wrath.

I allowed myself to lose the next hand, betting low to minimize the damage. All of the sudden, my grandmother ducked below the table. My muscles tensed. What had been three well-hidden cards before had escalated in a matter of minutes to ten cards strewn across my lap. And, now, my grandmother was on to me.

She immediately emerged from below the table with a fifth of peppermint schnapps. She replenished her glass and set the bottle back down on the green and yellow linoleum.

My relief lasted scarcely a moment. My mother and father noticed the deck's anorexia at the same time.

"The deck's looking a little skinny," Mom said.

My father glanced at the deck in his hands. You didn't have to be David Blaine to guess the deck was about ten cards short.

With a precise flick of the wrist, I tossed the accumulated cards at my grandmother's feet.

Dad raised an eyebrow. He looked across the table, toward me, not quite making eye contact. "All right, did everybody turn their cards in?"

"I sure did," I casually took a pull of fruit punch.

Everyone else attested to their innocence. My mother peered under the table. "There they are by ma's foot."

Grandma's cigarette rose like an exclamation point. She leaned back and looked at the conglomeration of bicycle cards fanned out between her slippered foot and bottle of hooch.

She took a drink of her schnapps looking as calm as myself. "I didn't put those goddam cards there." The words rattled off her lips with a raspy, Germanic inflection that struck fear in the hearts of grandpas everywhere. I believe she went to her grave truly believing in her Aryan heart that Hitler was a good guy.

My mother retrieved the cards.

Dad being the consummate politician his janitorial career required tried to gloss over the gaff. "Probably slipped from your hand while you were shuffling what with all the rings on your fingers."

"I didn't put those cards there, I says."

"No one's accusing you," my father finessed. "I'm just saying they could have dropped from your hand as you tried to shuffle with diamonds all over the place."

"Well I'll be goddammed." This came from my mother who had the ten or so cards spread out before her. "I don't think she just went ahead and dropped four aces while she was shuffling. And two kings. And a jack..."

"Forget it," my father warns.

"And a queen, and an eight?"

My grandmother arose with a flourish, gripping her fifth in one hand, her glass in the other. "To hell with all of you." She swooped up her silver into her change purse. "You can keep the pennies," she said walking to the door.

"I'm not saying you did it," my mother said.

"Well, who else could it be?" Best to start defending myself before any accusations could be leveled my way. "I sure didn't cheat. I'm lucky to win at all." As I tried to hide the recently procured pile of dimes and quarters behind my juice box.

Walking past me on her way out the door, my grandmother accidentally on purpose raked her diamond encrusted rings across the back of my head causing intense pain and, I'm now sure, accelerating the male pattern baldness process that afflicted me so tragically early in life.

We listened to the boards creak as she climbed the stairs back to her living room sanctuary, the floors carpeted in blue shag, walls painted a soothing maize. Here, she'd sit on her burnt umber sofa, watching Star Trek and Bonanza reruns while she toiled away on one of her thousand piece jigsaw puzzles that invariably depicted a covered bridge.

"Well," Dad said offering a rare smile. "I guess we won't have to put up with the queen bitch for awhile."

My mother shot him a dirty look. The look was meant to convey without his mother-in-law's generosity we'd likely have no roof over our heads. This was a fact my father was reminded often.

"So how'd the cards get there?" My mother asked.

"How the hell do you think." He motioned toward me. "If this were the wild west, he'd be laying back with a bullet in his skull by now."

Mom gave me one those looks normally reserved for failing grades. In true Clintonian fashion, I neither admitted nor denied the allegation. I didn't have the balls to ask them to define cheating, though.

Strange memories to surface, two o'clock in the morning, watching David Blaine confuse a group of Rastafarians by actually levitating off the ground. I think about my father two years in the grave (in a plot purchased by his mother-in-law) before my grandmother took her last nip of schnapps. And, even now in my late twenties, I'd still cheat at penny ante poker for a little extra pocket change.

The only trick I'd like to perform is switching consciousness for unconsciousness quicker than the eye can see.

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