Some are naturals: Mikey Bread for Michael C, a baker Johnny Soup for John Campbell Joe “River” Jordan, who so thoroughly embraced his nickname that when his daughter was born last fall he somehow talked his wife into River as the baby’s middle name. We give each other poker nicknames, and goddamn right we use those nicknames. We are giddy clichés of dogs playing poker. I knew that a poker game was something I needed, but I don’t think I anticipated how fully my friends (and their friends who became my friends) needed it too. And then, if you’re lucky, as I was, it does. And you’re doing so in the hopes that the game, the experience, will live up to the insane and worthy cultural expectations we all have for it. Launching a weekly poker game is an audacious, probably narcissistic enterprise: You have to believe that you-and more importantly, the game-can energize the participation of a bunch of guys on a regular basis. That anomalous red chip in the middle is known at The Mango as “the talisman.” Mark Jannot Massive nuts-quad Aces and A2 low-in Hi-Lo Omaha. (Having a space for the game was a nonnegotiable criterion while apartment-shopping in early 2019.) Now, we play at a (thankfully somewhat longer) table made of a non-mango wood in a Dumbo apartment I share with my inamorata, Juliana. That’s how the game came to be called The Mango. For the first couple years it was in Harlem at a table made of mango wood.
One night a week-lately Mondays-a game comes together in my apartment. This time I got a quorum, and have pretty much every week since. The next week, I tried again: Please join me, TOMORROW NIGHT, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, for an opportunity to demonstrate that you remain unbowed in the face of the impending apocalypse and to redirect your passion and anger in a productive direction, namely fleecing your neighbors. The idea of having a weekly poker game was burning in me. Around this time, I had moved into a new apartment, my own, after separating from my wife. Thank god my poker-aligned cronies knew better than I not to risk the mixing of these two variously holy and unholy passions, poker and politics, so I wasn’t able to get a game going. I tried to start my very own weekly poker game the night Donald Trump was elected president.
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