Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online

been a chess player,
they ’ d have a statue of him — has
three cards, no pairs. Now, you never ever give them a chance to draw, when
that happens. You just don’t give them a chance to draw again. Period. But Fancy-Pants McQueen puts in a piss amount and
allows Edward G. to stay in and draw a card—he should never be allowed
to get to that card. You’d put in everything, your wife, your parrot, to
prevent him from drawing, you make it too expensive.... You know you have the
best hand as things stand. You bet all your money.
So what happens? I forget what happens.
Edward G. lays down a straight fl ush he ’ s just made, and busts him.
Cooper didn’t know the movies they were talking about. The others were in their
thirties and forties, he was the youth among them.
They watched over him, knowing him as a compulsive risk-taker, dangerous even
to himself. But what he could do, which surprised them, was imitate the way
each of them played, as if he were speaking in tongues. Though
in the mania of a game, when you had to be calm, Cooper could be either
startling or foolish. Someday he might be their skilled heir, but it
felt to them that for now he was still in hand-to-hand combat, mostly with
himself.
Whereas Dorn’s friends were in it for the way of life. They played twelve-hour marathons, crossed over from scotch to cocaine, read
Erdnase and Philip K. Dick by the pool or in the back of an air-conditioned
car, fucked glowing women with the Discovery Channel loud in the background,
and shot up in the elevator going down. Cooper didn’t participate, was an
untouchable. He was sane everywhere but within a game. There was Peruvian fl ake to keep the others from getting
tired. Asleep they could not win. That was the only logic. Several years later
in Santa Maria, when a woman named Bridget attempted to give Cooper some, he
held her face between his hands and said, ‘I know you won’t believe me, but one
day you’re going to write four hundred words down on the back of a matchbook
and think you’ve written a masterpiece, you’re going to believe you’re
invincible.’ She smiled back at him: ‘ You’re invincible, Cooper.’
In a deli one evening their group spoke of unusual winnings. Dorn mentioned a
player called The Gentile who had won his future wife in a card game, with a
pair of nines.
There were setups, larceny, and drugs everywhere. Two men asked Dorn to suggest
a reliable card mechanic, and he mentioned Fidelio. ‘Pretty name,’ they said.
‘What nationality is he?’ ‘Filipino,’ Dorn said. ‘No, thank you,’ the gamblers
said, ‘we need an Aryan.’ Cooper was appalled, but Dorn said, ‘Fair enough,
they want a dealer who’s invisible.’ It was a world where you needed to quickly
forgive. You found yourself drinking with hit men or smack dealers who might
have killed someone with an eight ball the previous week. Fast lives were
ending all around them. The concern among their own group was which one of them
would be the fi rst to crash. The Dauphin or Mancini. They
saw less evidence of disaster with The Dauphin. Though he took Quaaludes
regularly, the odds were with him. And he seemed preoccupied with teaching his
friends about the recordings and skills of the great concert pianists, as well
as how to dress, railing against slip-on loafers, tattoos, men’s cologne, the
Windsor knot. He talked for hours on the proper length of the sleeve and the
correct height of a collar. The greatest work of literature for The Dauphin, as
far as clothes were concerned, was The Tale of Genji, and on those long
drives he read the other passengers to sleep with paragraphs from Lady
Murasaki. He had already lectured them on Japanese noir and the early femmes fatales. ‘You’ve not met them yet,’ he told Cooper,
‘but you will. They’ll come at you with a weakness. There is nothing more
seductive to a man than a woman in distress. They’re like priests, you never give them a handicap.
Cocaine fooled The