Joe Jarvis

"Part of me dies every time a plane leaves O'Hare for Las Vegas and I'm not on it."

Chuckles pop throughout the crowded classroom at the School of the Art Institute, but the professor remains bolt upright in his chair, lips welded shut inside the gray arch of his goatee. Add black sunglasses and baseball cap and you have the persona of smooth menace James McManus maintained over four days in Spring 2000 while staring down the slickest players of the world's most ruthless card game, No Limit Texas Hold 'em. Of course, it takes more than perfecting an illegible facial expression to become the first amateur to get to the Final Table of the World Series of Poker, swim out of the shark tank with a cool quarter million and, after translating the experience into prose titled "Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs and Binion's World Series of Poker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)," create sufficient buzz to lure everyone from The New York Times to People magazine into a cramped Michigan Avenue classroom.

McManus reviews the syllabus and apologizes to his SAIC students for the steep cost of required texts: "I know some of you have trust funds that don't even come out to a thousand dollars a month." This quip garners significantly fewer chuckles than the first. Each student announces name, year, emphasis of study and impetus for enrolling in a class that examines the career of poker in literature. Most 'fess up to needing credit hours, and really, one can hardly imagine an easier way to fulfill prerequisites. After all, poker is a lowly parlor game, the diversion through which men drink and stay out until dawn complaining about wives who complain about husbands staying out until dawn drinking and playing poker. It's the national pastime that allows us average scrubs an imagined taste of the gutter-glamour of Americana: dudes flanked by girlfriend sweaters in smoke-choked backrooms or Wild Bill Hickok's brains splattered across aces over eights, the "dead man's hand."

On this first day of class, students find little challenge to the stigmas and stereotypes. McManus sets forth the essentials: how to play No Limit Texas Hold 'em; poker jargon (a "Siegfried and Roy" designates two queens, while holding a four and five constitutes a "Jesse James," referencing the said outlaw's favorite caliber of sidearm); and basic strategies instructing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. One student cold-calls McManus: "If you're so good at playing poker, why do you have to teach?"

McManus immediately thinks better of it and closes his mouth, clears his throat and opts for diplomacy, stating that teaching stands as his sure bet, the one gamble he can take without losing money. One wonders if the card shark couldn't make a living exclusively from cards. Buying-in on his weekly suburban "friendly" game requires five hundred dollars and McManus' weekend excursions to Indiana can net twelve thousand, with losses never surpassing a strict self-enforced three grand riverboat allowance. More than guaranteed money, teaching must offer greater, if less tangible rewards.

Walking into the middle of class several weeks later, one could hardly divine the course's focus from McManus' lecture: "The artistic world tends to be fairly hostile toward pro football. Big strong fast young men with hunting skills heavily padded and gladiatoring against each other while foxy babes on the sidelines in short pleated skirts cheer them on. Whether you approve of it or not, that is a very natural emanation of how it was five thousand years ago as the hunters came home. And by these means we ended up where we are today, biologically and genetically. So it would be a fucking bizarre miracle if we didn't have some vestige of that in our system." What has any of this to do with poker? Absolutely everything.

Immediately prior to taking one of the biggest gambles of his life and the single biggest risk of his poker career at the Horseshoe casino floors below where Hunter Thompson purportedly tested the limit of excess decades previous, in "Positively Fifth Street" McManus describes his disposition as "biosociosophical." McManus had been speaking with Kathy Kolberg, since McManus stayed in Vegas on his four-thousand-dollar advance from Harper's magazine to report on the growing number of "chicks with decks" and the murder trial of American poker royalty Tabish and his girlfriend Sandy Murphy.

Although he would discuss both subjects for the magazine and in "Positively Fifth Street," at the time McManus' ears deadened to all but the irresistible clatter of chips. Against the better sense of his wife, concerned with their children and a mortgage that subsumed his annual teaching salary, McManus threw down a grand--a full fourth of his advance--on a satellite game, a winner-take-all qualifier against nine other players, with the last-person-sitting spending the pot on a ten-thousand-dollar entry seat at the Series. Rewarded for heeding the call of biosociosophicalitic impulse, McManus won back his buy-in, and strolled off with nine grand of other people's chips, free-rolling his way into the Big Show.

Discussing the evolution of card decks, McManus explains to his class that in the poker world the idea of singular irregularity manifests in aces, four "sex neutral alpha spires, dominating the tabletop cosmos, a secularized version of the highest power," the power of whom, McManus notes, "no human may question."

Not even, say, a T.J. Cloutier, former professional football player and last of poker's proper Bad Ass Motherfuckers, who co-authored the strategy book "Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold 'em," which McManus unabashedly professes as his poker bible. Along with implacable old-school cred and tournament success, Cloutier also happens to carry the unfortunate distinction of being posterized by McManus during the upstart rookie's most dazzling single hand. McManus held "big slick," ace/king in the hole, but couldn't find a pair on "the flop," the three communal cards dealt face-up on the table. In his book Cloutier instructed his readers to always fold in just such a situation, so McManus, knowing that Cloutier knew that he knew what to do in just such a situation, naturally plunged in headlong, using psychology reversed enough times to revert to pi. A pair again eluded McManus when the dealer turned down "fourth street," a fourth communal card, also called "the turn." Cloutier pushed forward all his chips, forcing McManus all-in. The bet called and only one communal deal left, called "fifth street," or "the river," student and teacher turned over their holes cards, Cloutier holding a widowed ace/nine, neither hole card paired by the communal deal.

Never mind the private schooling and mortgage sitting in chips between he and Cloutier; McManus stayed in character. After learning the game from uncles, McManus played poker nearly four decades in order to reach this specific instance; this was not a single primal neurochemical burst short of the state of nature. The last card dealt during a hand of Hold 'em, "fifth street," came down--a harmless jack. Alongside the birth of his children and marriage to wife Jennifer as the most exhilarating life experiences, McManus ranks this hand, in which he endured that singular irregularity, the point of one's existence at which something becomes nothing or nothing becomes something, in this case a pot just shy of nine hundred grand and, of course, later, a great deal more.

"In 1470, card makers in Rouen," McManus breaks from his lecture. "Let's skip the part about French cards. The French are bad. Is that an oversimplification of the world?" A tender-faced fauxhawked student plays along, answering "yes." McManus grins. "I knew you'd say that. Because you're an art student." Halfway through the academic term, students have warmed up and the classroom buzzes with laughter. McManus ends discussion of the first mass manufacturing of decks in France, noting "when playing card games, we participate in cultural history." The professor pauses mid-thought and tilts his head skyward. "There went another plane."

(2003-04-09)

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