“It’s not a casino’s money, but there’ll still be armed guards.”
“Last time I looked 7-Elevens don’t have that kind of money in their fucking cash registers.”
“Guns involved, I’d be more interested for thirty.”
“I could go twenty-five.”
Sammy Ralston said he’d have to think about it.
Which meant only one thing: getting a call through to Lompoc. After he and Jake adjourned he managed to get Joey Fadden, doing three to five for GTA, hard because a weapon was involved. By virtue of the circumstances, their conversation was convoluted, but the most important sentence was a soft, “Yeah, I know Jake. He’s okay.”
Which was all Ralston needed.
And they proceeded to talk about the sports teams and how much they both lamented the name change of the San Francisco 49ers’ home to “Monster Park.”
The site of the game was the Elysium Fields Resort and Spa on the outskirts of Vegas.
On Wednesday morning, the day of the show, the contestants assembled in one of the hotel’s conference rooms. It was a curious atmosphere — the typical camaraderie of fellow performers, with the added element that each one wanted to take a quarter-million dollars away from the others. The mix was eclectic:
Stone T, a hip-hop artist, whose real name, O’Connor learned from the bio that Felter had prepared for the press, was Emmanuel Evan Jackson. He had been a choirboy in Bethany Baptist Church in South Central, had put himself through Cal State, performing at night, and then got into the L.A. rap, ska and hip-hop scene. Stone was decked out like a homie from Compton or Inglewood — drooping JNCO jeans, Nikes, a vast sweatshirt and bling. All of which made it jarring to hear him say things like, “It’s a true pleasure to meet you. I’ve admired your work for a long time.” And: “My wife is my muse, my Aphrodite. She’s the one whom I dedicate all my songs to.”
O’Connor was surprised to see Brad Kresge was one of the contestants. He was a bad boy of West Hollywood. The lean, intense-eyed kid was a pretty good actor in small roles — never with a major lead — but it was his personal life that had made the headlines. He’d been thrown out of clubs for fighting, had several DUI arrests and he’d done short time in L.A. County for busting up a hotel room, as well as the two security guards who’d come to see what the fuss was about. He seemed cheerful enough at the moment, though, and was attentive to the emaciated blonde hanging on his arm — despite the fact that Aaron Felter had asked that the contestants attend this preliminary meeting alone, without partners or spouses.
Kresge was unfocused and O’Connor wondered if he was stoned. He wore his hat backward and the sleeves of his wrinkled shirt rolled up, revealing a tat that started with a Gothic letter F. The rest of the word disappeared underneath the sleeve but nobody doubted what the remaining letters were.
Sandra Glickman was the only woman in the game. She was a stand-up comic originally from New York but who lived out here now. She worked the Laugh Factory and Caroline’s and appeared occasionally on Comedy Central on TV. O’Connor had seen her once or twice on TV. Her routines were crude and funny (“Hey, you guys out there’ll be interested to know I’m bisexual; buy me something and I’ll have sex with you.”). O’Connor had learned that she’d gone to Harvard on a full scholarship and had a master’s degree in advanced math. She’d started doing the comedy thing as a lark before she settled down to teach math or science. That had been six years ago and comedy had won over academia.
Charles Bingham was a familiar face from TV and movies, though few people knew his name. Extremely tanned, fit, in his early sixties, he wore a blue blazer and tan slacks, dress shirt and tie. His dyed blond hair was parted perfectly down the side and it was a fifty-fifty chance that the coif was a piece, O’Connor estimated. Bingham was a solid character player and that character was almost always the same: the older ex-husband of the leading lady, the coworker or brother of the leading man, a petty officer in a war movie — and usually one of the first to get killed in battle.
He’d been born Charles Brzezinski, the rumor was. But so what? O’Connor’s own first name was still legally Maurice.
The big surprise in the crowd was Dillon McKennah. The handsome thirtysomething was a big-screen actor. He’d be the one real star at the table. He’d been nominated for an Oscar for his role in a Spielberg film and everybody was surprised he’d lost. He’d been called the New James Dean. But his career had faltered. He’d made some bad choices recently: lackluster teen comedies and a truly terrible horror film — in which gore and a crashing soundtrack substituted, poorly, for suspense. Even on his most depressed days, O’Connor could look at himself in the mirror and say that he’d never taken on a script he didn’t respect. McKennah mentioned that he was working on a new project, though he gave no details. But every actor in Hollywood was engaged in a “new project,” just like every writer had a script “in development.”
They drank coffee, ate from the luxurious spread of breakfast delicacies and chatted, generally playing type: Stone T was hip. Sandra cracked jokes. Bingham smiled vacantly, stiff and polite. Kresge was loud. McKennah was Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. And O’Connor was the strong silent sort.
As the conversation continued, O’Connor was surprised to find how lucky he was to be here. Apparently, when word went out about Go For Broke, close to five thousand people had contacted Aaron Felter’s office, either directly or through their agents.
Everybody wanted the bump.
Now, the door of the conference room swung open and Aaron Felter entered.
“Okay, all, how you doing?…Hey, Sandy, caught your act on Sunset this weekend.”
The woman comic gave him a thumbs-up. “Were you that fucking heckler?”
“Like I’d spar against you? Am I nuts?”
“Yo, Aaron, can we drink?” asked Brad Kresge. “On the set, I mean. I play better that way.”
“You can do whatever you want,” Felter told him. “But you break any cameras — or any heads — you pay for ’em.”
“Fucking funny.”
When coffee cups were refilled and the bagel table raided again, Felter sat on the edge of the table in the front of the room. “Now, folks. Today’s the day. I want to run through the plan. First, let’s talk about the game itself.” He asked a young man into the room. The slim guy was the professional dealer Felter had flown in from Atlantic City. He sat down at the table and — after awing them with his incredible dexterity — went through protocol and rules of the game they’d be playing, Texas Hold ’Em.
This was one of the simplest of all poker games (selected, O’Connor guessed, not because of the contestants, but because of the audience, so they could follow the play). There was no ante; the players to the dealer’s left would place blind bets before the deal — a small blind from the player to the immediate left and then a large blind, twice that amount, from the player on his left to create a pot. Each player then was dealt two hole cards, which nobody else could see, and then placed bets or folded, based on those cards. The amount of the blinds would be set ahead of time.
Then came the flop: three community cards dealt faceup in the middle of the table. Betting commenced again and two more community cards were dealt faceup, making five. Traditional rules of poker applied to the betting process: checking — choosing not to bet — as well as seeing, raising or calling someone at the showdown.
When that occurred, players used their two hole cards plus any three of the five face-up board cards to make the best hand they could.
“Now, one thing we’re not doing,” Felter announced. “No hidden cameras.”