The ultimate welsh

I wrote the first draft of The Vapors at Bobst Library at NYU on the south side of Washington Square Park. It was a pleasant situation for writing. Libraries offer both peace and quiet and a low-grade hubbub at the same time, which helps someone like me focus. When I really struggled, however, I would take walks around the park. Eventually I came to befriend a pair of gin players, and I would join them every day at lunch for a few games.

One of the players, a white guy in his sixties who taught at NYU, was an avowed socialist organizer who loved to talk (or more often, rant) about politics. The other player was an African American guy in his fifties who lived in the park and made his living playing games. Washington Square Park is mostly known for its chess players, but it has been home to many game players over the years. Scrabble, backgammon, bourre, even poker was sometimes dealt around the tables in the corners of the park. And always for money. He made his meager living gambling on any game that you could name. He was a savant, too. He would destroy the professor and me at gin every single day. We tried to limit our losses by playing for a strict $10 a game, rather than using Hollywood scoring and letting him schnieder us into the poor house. The only time I ever got a break from losing to him was when he'd take a break to smoke crack and let me and the professor play each other. Even then, I was mostly loser, but at least I had a prayer.

I learned a lot about gin in those months, but the lessons were expensive. I gladly paid, because I missed playing gin, which is possibly my favorite card game. The game was once very popular in the United States, from the end of WW2 into the 1960's, but it has long since faded away. Outside of the high-faluting bridge clubs and Jewish social clubs of Manhattan, it's nearly impossible to find a regular gin game in the city. In most places around the country, gin is only found in country club dining rooms, and even then is a rarity. The gin generation has been dying off, and the game is going with them.

I'm sentimental about gin because I used to play with my father. It was one of the things we did to pass the time. I've written before about playing chess with him on the road in the summers, but chess was never something he took seriously. Gin was a game he could win at. And gin required less concentration. It was a more social game, allowing us to shoot the shit as we played, or take breaks between hands to pick the next race or flip the burgers on the grill or whatever.

I have written about gin before, about how I met the legendary gin player Michael Sall and asked him to tell me his secrets. I am not a great gin player, but I studied enough to develop a significant edge on my dad. After he got sick, we played gin a lot. I showed him no mercy. We would play for a penny a point, and each game was putting him in the hole a good $30 or $40. He'd carry over his balance to the next game, and I'd keep the total running in a notebook where I kept score.

At one point during his illness he needed to travel to the Mayo Clinic in Florida for a clinical trial. I took off work so that I could drive him and accompany him while he was there for two weeks. He brought along his best friend, who barely said a word the entire drive from Arkansas to Florida, except to express absolute disbelief and confusion about the episodes of The Best Show I played to entertain myself as I drove. When we arrived to the beach house we had rented near the Mayo Clinic, my dad's friend pulled from his luggage a pound of weed and a glock 9mm and put them on the kitchen table. I couldn't believe it. "Why do you have all of this pot?" "To smoke it." "Why do you have a gun?" "I never leave the house without it."There isn't a cop alive who wouldn't have taken one look at us and not thought we were drug dealers. If we had been pulled over on that drive, we'd have all gone to prison for intent to distribute. He slept with the glock under his pillow at night. He never once left the beach house the entire time we were there.

That week in Florida my dad and I played a lot of gin, and his debt kept climbing. I took some time to teach him a few tricks I had learned about reading people's hands and playing defensively with your own. I also taught him a dirty trick I had learned to cheat, though I swore I never used it against him. I told him it was fine if he wanted to try to use it against me, and if I didn't catch it, he shouldn't feel guilty if he won. He asked me why I was teaching him all of my tricks. I told him I supposed I felt bad for him. He was stuck pretty deep to me. And while I think it's fun to lose at a game to a better player if it means you're learning something new, I didn't get the impression he was trying to improve. I didn't want him to just lose over and over again.

"I don't mind," he said. "I just like spending time with you. And besides, you're the one taking the worst of it. I'll be dead before you ever see a dime."

The clinical trial didn't accept him. We had to cut our trip short a week and head back to Arkansas. Luckily, and incredibly, my dad and his friend smoked all of the weed. The gun made the trip back with us, though, so I kept it under the speed limit. He was right about never having to pay up. He made it three more months.The last entry in my notebook shows him owing me $243. Death is the ultimate welsh.

I have a couple of new things to share with you this month.

I spent about a month covering the World Chess Championships in London for The Ringer. I wrote something pretty long, and honestly I could have written three times this much. After a month of reporting on two continents, and fifteen games of chess, I had a mountain of stuff to write about. In the end I chose to focus less on the match and more on what chess means to me, or at least what I think it might mean to me? I've written about chess in this newsletter before, so if you like this story and you're a new subscriber, I encourage you to go back and read my tinyletter about Bobby Fischer coming to Hot Springs.

I also wrote a four page comic about a scandal in the 1960s at the Friars Club when some mobsters were caught cheating a big money gin game. The comic is in the new issue of Victory Journal, which isn't online, so you'll have to actually buy it and have it mailed to you if you want to read it. It was a story I had been wanting to write for a long time, and it was very cool to get to do it in this way. I had never written a comic or collaborated with an artist before, and it was a lot of fun. I also got to play some gin with the EIC, who it turns out had his own "gin games with dad" stories to tell. I suppose there are more of us in the big city than I assumed. If any of you ever want to get together and play, holler at me. As long as the game is for money, I promise I won't cheat.

Happy holidays,

David


P.S. As always, if you're reading this on the web and you don't already subscribe, please subscribe so you'll get these in your email inbox. And if you forward this to friends, please ask them to subscribe as well. I never send out more than one a month, and lately I'm failing to even keep that pace. In the new year I hope I can write more of these, and not just when I'm trying to promote something I've written elsewhere. Happy holidays and I'll see you in the new year.