Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? -Jack Kerouac, On the Road
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
Almost as soon as the yellow crime scene's do not cross tape came down from around the bombed-out ruins of the Las Vegas Crystal Casino's Poker Room, construction crews erected twelve-foot-high barriers across the Strip to hide the damage. Architectural renderings plastered onto the barriers promised "The New and Improved Las Vegas Crystal Hotel & Casino Opening In 2021!" In fact The Crystal would never be rebuilt and the site remains a vacant lot.
When all that she could see of Sin City was a soft and distant neon blur in the pickup's rearview mirror, Camarin SanJamie turned her battered Ford off the interstate and onto the two-lane blacktop that old timers still call the poker road.
"Why'd they call this the poker road?" asks Tom Gunterson, watching the speedometer lean ever faster towards the right.
"Back in the day when Las Vegas was just getting started, there were only two federal highways running through Nevada-U.S. 50, New York to San Francisco, and U.S. 66, Chicago to Los Angeles-both of which bypassed Las Vegas, one to the north the other to the south. All that was left to connect Las Vegas to the outside world was Nevada State Route 9, a hundred miles of twisty, cracked and crumbling asphalt. After Nevada legalized gambling, but before they built the superhighways, State Route 9 had brought so many old school poker players into Las Vegas that they started calling it the poker road.
"In the early 1950's-when a gallon of gas cost only 32 cents-road gamblers and poker hustlers wandered around the back highways always on the lookout for poker road kill. Playing poker on the road was a dangerous job back then and players had to watch both their cards and their backs.
"When asked whether he had ever killed another poker player, Johnny Moss replied, 'I don't know if he died.' And Doyle Brunson once said, 'To start with, you had to keep from getting arrested by the police. Then, you had to keep from getting cheated in the games. You also had to worry about collecting the money if you won. Finally, after all that was said and done, you had to keep from getting hijacked.' If they could get to Las Vegas in one piece, all of those dangers disappeared. Then all they had to worry about was each other. Kind of like how I worry about you, soldier boy."
"I am not a soldier," says Gunterson. "I am a U.S. Marine."
"Soldier? Marine? What's the difference?"
"What's the difference between Injun Squaw and Native American?"
"I prefer to be called an indigenous person."
"I prefer to be called a gyrene. Where exactly is it that this poker road leads?"
"I'm tired of the cookie cutter, fluorescent-lit, temperature-controlled, big rake, corporate casino card rooms and so we are going to a poker room so old that the tables wobble, the cards have a thousand smudge prints and the chips, like the players, are rough around the edges. Hang on, soldier boy," yells Cammy SanJamie, flooring the gas pedal. "I am taking you to a hold 'em honky tonk!
Neither noticed the shiny black car, its lights off, trailing after them in the darkness.
(To be continued in the next issue of Poker Player)
