O’Connor noted the hesitation of the man’s betting and concluded he had a fair, but unspectacular hand. Afraid to drive him to fold, he bet only fifty thousand again, which McKennah saw.
They looked at each other over the sea of money as the fifth card, the river, slid out.
It was a king.
As delighted as O’Connor was, he regretted that this amazing hand — four of a kind — hadn’t hit the table when more people were in the game. It was likely that McKennah had a functional hand at best and that there’d be a limit to how much O’Connor could raise before his opponent folded.
As the next round of betting progressed, they goosed the pot up a bit — another hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Finally, concerned that McKennah would sense his overconfidence, O’Connor decided to buy time. “Check.” He tapped the table with his knuckles.
A ripple through the audience. Why was he doing that?
McKennah looked him over closely. Then said, “Five hundred K.”
And pushed the bet out.
The crowd gasped.
It was a bluff, O’Connor thought instantly. The only thing McKennah could have that would beat O’Connor was a straight flush. But, as Diane had made him learn over the past several weeks, the odds of that were very small.
And, damn it, he wanted his bump.
O’Connor said in a matter-of-fact voice, “All in,” pushing every penny of his into the huge pile of cash on the table, nearly a million and a half dollars.
“Gentlemen, please show your cards.”
O’Connor turned over his kings. The crowd erupted in applause.
And they then fell completely silent when McKennah turned over the modest three and five of hearts to reveal his inside straight flush.
O’Connor let out a slow breath, closed his eyes momentarily and smiled.
He stood and, before taking the Walk of Shame, shook the hand of the man who’d just won himself one hell of a bump, not to mention more than a million dollars.
The weeks that followed the airing of Go For Broke were not the best of Mike O’Connor’s life.
The loss of a quarter-million dollars hurt more than he wanted to admit.
More troubling, he thought he’d get some publicity. But in fact there was virtually none whatsoever. Oh, he got some phone calls. But they were mostly about the foiled robbery attempt and Dillon McKennah’s rescue. He finally stopped returning the reporters’ calls.
His pilot for Stories was now completely dead and nobody was the least interested in hiring him for anything other than things like Viagra or Cialis commercials.
“I can’t do it, honey,” he said to Diane.
And she’d laughed, saying, “It wouldn’t be truth-in-advertising anyway, not with you.”
And so he puttered around the house, painted the guest room. Played a little golf.
He even considered helping Diane sell real estate. He sat around the house and watched TV and movies from Netflix and On Demand.
And then one day, several weeks after the poker show, he happened to be playing couch potato and watching a World War II adventure film from the sixties. Mike O’Connor had seen it when it first came out, when he was just a boy. He’d loved it then and he’d loved it the times he’d seen it in the intervening years.
But now he realized there was something about it he’d missed. He sat up and remained riveted throughout the film.
Fascinating.
Long after the movie was over he continued to sit and think about it. He realized that he could identify with the people in the movie. They were driven and they were desperate.
He remembered a line from Homicide Detail. It had stuck with him all these years. His character, tough, rule-bending Detective Olson, had said to his sergeant, “The man’s desperate. And you know what desperation does — it turns you into a hero or it turns you into a villain. Don’t ever forget that.”
Mike O’Connor rose from the couch and headed to his closet.
“Hey, Mike. How you doing? I’m sorry it didn’t work out. That last hand. Phew. That was a cliff-hanger.”
“I saw the ratings,” O’Connor said to Aaron Felter.
“They weren’t bad.”
Not bad? No, O’Connor thought, they were over-the-top amazing. They were close to OJ confessing on Oprah, with Dr. Phil pitching in the psychobabble.
“So.” Silence rolled along for a moment. “What’re you up to next?”
Felter was pleased to see him but his attitude said that a deal was a deal. This was true in Hollywood just as much as on Wall Street. O’Connor had taken a chance and lost and the rules of business meant that his and the producer’s arrangement was now concluded.
“Taking some time off. Rewriting a bit of Stories.”
“Ah. Good. You know what goes around comes around.”
O’Connor wasn’t sure that it did. Or even what the hell the phrase meant. But he smiled and nodded.
Silence, during which the producer was, of course, wondering what exactly O’Connor was doing here.
So the actor got right down to it.
“Let me ask you a question, Aaron. You like old movies, right? Like your dad and I used to talk about.”
Another pause. Felter glanced at the spotless glass frames of his posters covering the walls. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”
A lot of people didn’t, O’Connor was thinking; they liked modern films. Oh, there was nothing wrong with that. In fifty years people would be treasuring some of today’s movies the way O’Connor treasured films like Bonnie and Clyde, M*A*S*H or Shane.
Every generation ought to like its own darlings best.
“You know, I was thinking about Go For Broke. And guess what it reminded me of?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“A movie I just saw on TV.”
“Really? About a poker showdown? An old Western?”
“No. The Guns of Navarone.” He nodded at the poster to O’Connor’s right.
“Go For Broke reminded you of that?”
“And that’s not all. It also reminded me of The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch, The Dirty Dozen, Top Gun, Saving Private Ryan, Alien…In fact, a lot of films. Action films.”
“I don’t follow, Mike.”
“Well, think about…what was the word you used when we were talking about Stories? ‘Formula.’ You start with a group of diverse heroes and send ’em on a mission. One by one they’re eliminated before the big third-act scene. Like The Guns of Navarone. It’s a great film, by the way.”
“One of the best,” Felter agreed uncertainly.
“Group of intrepid commandos. Eliminated one by one…But in a certain order, of course: sort of in reverse order of their youth or sex appeal. The stiff white guy’s one of the first to go — say, Anthony Quayle in Navarone. Or Robert Vaughn in The Magnificent Seven. Next we lose the minorities. Yaphet Kotto in Alien. Then the hotheaded young kid is bound to go. James Darren. Shouldn’t he have ducked when he was facing down the Nazi with the machine gun? I would have. But, no, he just kept going till he was dead.
“That brings us to women. If they’re not the leads, they better be careful, Tyne Daly in one of the Dirty Harry films. And even if they survive, it’s usually so they can hang on the arm of the man who wins the showdown. And who does that bring us to finally? The main opponents? The older white guy versus the enthusiastic young white guy. Tom Cruise versus Nicholson. Denzel versus Gene Hackman. Clint Eastwood versus Lee Van Cleef. DiCaprio versus all the first-class passengers on Titanic.