The Wild Card by Mark Joseph Page B

you were the only one who could understand it, and he wanted you to have it.”
    He leaned over and handed the book to his son. Alex was a star science student who’d long since surpassed the abilities of his high school teachers. Poker, he thought, was a game of odds and probabilities with a dash of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. He thumbed through the little book, opened to a page at random, and discovered it was written in code.
    â€œCan you read this?” Alex asked his father.
    David shook his head. “I don’t want to,” he said. “I never tried to figure out the cipher.”
    â€œIt’s probably a simple transposition.”
    It was David’s turn to shrug.
    â€œCan I go?” Alex asked.
    â€œThere’s something else.”
    David left the room and returned with a cardboard box that contained the old man’s personal effects from Laguna Honda. Inside were two unopened packs of playing cards and a polished chip carousel made of beautiful laminated teak and filled with two hundred red, white, and blue handmade ceramic poker chips.
    â€œMaybe you’ll do better than we did,” David said. “Maybe you can win it all back.”

10
    Some months after his arrival in Vietnam, Bobby started thinking of himself as a psychic fragmentation grenade exploding in slow motion. Boom! Shrapnel! Whistling birds of death, white-hot chunks of rage expanding from his center, ripping mind and nerve, inflicting wounds. By 1995 the shrapnel had burned through three wives, two children, four bankruptcies, and a really nice Porsche. He’d run out of ways to kill himself slowly and gave up trying to do it quick. Only one thing had remained constant, and that was poker. He played cards, and if he wasn’t in a self-destructive mood, he almost always won. When he was on the downside of a manicdepressive run through the brambles of his past, he lost. It was a cycle, but that’s overstating the obvious.
    At the moment of his detonation, before Vietnam, before anything, really, his life had been of a piece, on track, in the groove, daddy-o. He was on his way to Berkeley, and then all at once everything went awry and he started blowing up in slow motion. He’d been eighteen when it happened, and by now, after thirty-two years, the shrapnel had expanded to the limit and was losing momentum. Gravity and friction are implacable.
    Hands in pockets, shoes scuffing the sidewalk, shoulders hunched like James Dean, Bobby walked the Tenderloin, the soft underbelly of urban decay that lay just below fashionable Union Square. Massage parlors, bars and cars, downtrodden human dregs skulking around grungy liquor stores. In three blocks seven whores asked him for a date, and an equal number of panhandlers demanded spare change. The girls got a smile and a wisecrack, “Haven’t I seen you on Virginia Street in Reno?” and each beggar elicited a “Howdy, pardner” and a buck. The Tenderloin suited his mood. In spirit and
decrepitude the district hadn’t changed since Bobby had last seen it in 1963.
    He found his way by feel from Market Street, not sure where he was headed until he chanced upon Original Joe’s Italian Food, steaks and chops, the real thing on squalid Taylor Street. The once elegant Florentine steakhouse was dying just as the neighborhood around it had died long ago. The façade was untouched, last updated in the ’50s. Red neon, swinging glass doors, cozy leather booths, an open kitchen with cooks in toques and checkered pants, ancient waiters in seedy tuxedos, and broad-stroked caricatures of long-forgotten dandies on the walls.
    Eating a New York medium rare, Bobby was in a time warp. This was where his father brought him after ball games, the swanky place he and Nelson and the rest of them took high school dates for a fancy downtown dinner. The place stank of sentiment and old times and perfectly broiled steaks. Not a single item of