This is the official site of the Tuesday Night Poker club of NYC.  Here we will store news, commentary, photos, and the general history of our madcap escapades each and every Tuesday night. This site will be a virtual scrapbook and permanent online documentary of our adventures in gambling arguing and drunkeness.

Lead Story. August 7, 2001

The Fix

We’ve talked about alternates from time to time on TNP.  No doubt they play a key role in our game; the 9^th man at our table is like the 6^th man in basketball.  Since we usually play with 8 regulars, and relish the times, due to business or pressing duties, we slim down to 7, (ah, to play seven card games again!) we find ourselves calling upon our reserves less and less.  However, eventually occasion arises (and curiously often in the dog-days) and we make the distressed call.

Notwithstanding Koneo’s excellent ‘Ode to the Alternates,’ I think special consideration and thanks need to be made to a particular reservist for heroics well beyond the standard call of duty during these last two weeks.  He also lost a ton of money. 

Gorg has hosted, toasted, and roasted the poker game each of the last two weeks in his fashionable yet under-air conditioned upper west side palace.  With the wife and girls cooling their heels for the summer in some idyllic Vermont mountain stream, Gorg has slaved away at…well, whatever the hell he does…all day in the fetid and blistering metropolis.  Arriving to his empty sanctuary, alabaster walls solemnly muted from their regular duties: reverberating the giggles and peals of his fair progeny; he finds himself in that rarest of all states of fatherhood: alone.

Confronted with a trove of possibilities (ah, to walk the parquet nude again, or dare I rent a movie of my own choosing…a porno perhaps) he opts instead to invite seven half crazed animals into his sublimely empty nest so that they may shout and argue and smoke and drink and break things and get all uppity and stay up way too late.  He hosted the game, not once, but twice, and in a row! And with such grace did he extend his hospitality; his losing most if not all of his money seemed an extension of conviviality.

Why?

I have a theory that once a man is used to a certain amount of discommoding in his life he gets to missing it when it’s gone.  With the wife and kids away, he fills that hollow silence with the fertile cacophony of poker and the walls resume their happy work reflecting the howls and jybes and shouts of men gambling and acting stupid and generally behaving with less decorum and maturity than their former petite subjugators. 

Gorg didn’t appear to be having fun.  He, like so many other junkies, was merely getting his ‘fix.’  His dissonant addiction needed feeding and we, the players, like so many vials and needles, supply the illusion of normalcy.  He main-lines us at 8 and by 11 is as spent and heavy lidded as any other nodding wretch.