Wise men speak because they have something to say. Fools speak because they have to say something. -Plato
Of the 149 funerals held for the victims of the suicide bombing of Las Vegas' Crystal Poker Room, Delia Harris attended a total of 39. Putting aside her own grief over the death of her fiancé, the poker champion Jonathan Gray, Harris crisscrossed the country attending the funerals of murdered poker players.
One of those murdered players was Marcia Parsons, who most high stakes poker players called "Wild Thing," a tribute not to The Trogg's 1966 You make everything groooooovy song but to Marcia's style of wild-and-wide-open play
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Marcia Parsons had lived a of wild-and-wide-open life, having run away from home to join not the circus but the poker circuit. It was there that she and Delia Harris had met and become lifelong friends. Now one had traveled to the other's hometown for the funeral.
A small, shrill group of The Reverend Biggs Brother's Poker Puritans were already at the cemetery. They had begun to show up at many of the burials of the suicide bombing victims to celebrate their murders. These shock protests, loud obnoxious graveside demonstrations designed to hijack solemn ceremonies, made national headlines.
Benjamin Parsons was, unlike his sister, a penny ante poker player. He knew little of the game and less about its politics. When it came time to read the eulogy, Parsons, faced with a screaming snarling mob of anti-poker protestors, froze solid, unable to comprehend why his sister's murder was cause for absolute strangers to curse and revile her.
"Mr. Parsons," asked Delia Harris, by now no stranger to these obscene chants, "do you want me to read the eulogy for you?"
At a nod, she took the paper from him and read, "We who loved Marcia and now take her to her final rest, have learned an ugly truth. Some people, for sick and twisted reasons I will never understand, are willing, even eager, to kill other people just because they play poker."
She was a Hold 'em Whore!
"I know there's a whole lot of hate in the world. Racial and religious and sectarian violence goes on all the time. But who in their right mind massacres people over a card game? This is America. Not Armenia, or Rwanda, or Darfur, or Bosnia. We don't have killing fields and ethnic cleansings. Or, at least, I didn't think so until I lost my sister in a mass murder no one seems to care about."
She was a Poker Prostitute!
"I've read that they are beginning to call the suicide bombing of The Las Vegas Crystal Casino's Poker Room "America's Crystal Night." Germany's Kristallnacht was in 1938 when the Nazis started their Holocaust. Is that what's happening here? Have American Poker Nazis started their Hold 'em Holocaust? I don't want to believe it's true, but I have no evidence that it's false. What I want to know is this-why would anyone kill my sister, and 148 others, over a poker game?"
She was a Card C%*t
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Delia Harris turned to the place where Ben Parsons had been standing, but he was gone. It took three policemen to pry Parsons off the Poker Puritan demonstrator who had cursed his sister. Delia Harris bailed him out the next morning before leaving to attend another poker player's funeral.
She believed that she would never see him again.
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
(To be continued in the next issue of Poker Player)
