It's the honky, honky-tonk woman
Gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues.
-The Rolling Stones, 1969
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
Long ago the people native to the Southwest's high desert carved out a tortuous twisted dirt path across their land. They called it "The Serpent's Trail."
The Serpent's Trail is today a hundred miles of cracked and crumbling two lane blacktop. To Nevada it is State Route 9. To the road gamblers on their way to Las Vegas long before the Interstates, it was a blue highway called the "poker road."
Blue highway is the term used to describe state and county roads, now called "secondary roads," that were shown in the road atlas as squiggly blue lines. On this particular long squiggly blue line there is only one place for a gambler to stop along the way. For twenty miles in either direction billboards advertise-
Hold'em Honky Tonk
Liquor In The Front
Poker In The Rear
"We're here!" says Camarin SanJamie, turning her battered Ford pickup off the poker road and pulling up to an old, looks-like-it's-about-to-collapse, wooden building. Tom Gunterson, riding shotgun, cannot hear a word she says over the raucous rock-and-roll blasting out of the The Hold 'em.
"Come on!" says SanJamie, grabbing Gunterson. "Let's go play in a real poker room!"
Sergeant Thomas Gunterson, USMC, had played poker all over the world, everywhere from Saigon's Club AK-47 to Bagdad's Ali Baba Bar, but the Hold 'em Honky Tonk was like nowhere else. Part 1890's Texas saloon, part 1900's Mississippi juke joint, part 1920's Chicago speakeasy, part 1940's Nawlins' night club, all mixed into a wall-to-wall packed-to-capacity card room filled with people playing fist-full-of-chips no fold'em hold'em.
Cammy SanJamie elbows her way to the bar, slaps down a sawbuck, "Gimme two longnecks," she shouts over the din. The bartender stares at SanJamie, narrowing his eyes into a squint.
"You the uppity squaw what cussed out the preacher man down Vegas way?"
Gunterson's bulky form suddenly looms up from behind SanJamie, "What if she is?"
"Who's he? John Wayne?" Another long squint at SanJamie, "Is you, ain't it? Seen you on the TV." He pushes back the $10 and offers up two longnecks. "Sumbitch Goddon't-like-poker preacher had it commin," he tells her. "Your cash is no good at my bar. Take it to the tables," and then shouts at the top of his lungs, "We got us here a real poker playing princess! ... and she brought John Wayne!"
Cheers, whoops, and hollers. Two seats immediately open up at a no-limit table. "Shuffle up and deal!" shouts SanJamie, telling Gunterson, "I'm feeling lucky tonight."
Outside a car pulls off the poker road. The nondescript man behind the wheel stares around him in open-mouthed wonder. The garish flashing neon. The raucous rock-and-roll music. The carousing card players. "The poker prophesy is true!" he tells himself. "It is just as the blessed reverend Biggs Brother has described 'hold 'em's hell hole.'"
He parks next to Camarin SanJamie's Ford pickup. He has pursued her all the way from Las Vegas to purgatory's poker pit with only one purpose. "Tonight," he says, thinking of the poker squaw who has so grievously offended The Reverend, "I will rid the world of you." He turns and walks towards the Hold 'em Honky Tonk. He has a gun. He is a fanatic.
(To be continued in the next issue of Poker Player)
