Preface: This is a long story. I started fiddling with it back in April 2013. It has seven parts. Each one is long, but they are all completed. I'll put one up every day or so. There may be places where my expertise with regard to certain social activities don't match yours. If you find I don't measure up to your better understandings please accept this for what it is; a quasi-fictional story about several people. I hope you enjoy it. However, should you lose interest and stop reading be considerate and eschew scoring it.
The Curse of the Scots
The Curse of the Scots, Part one
Part One: Good Times and a Problem.
I'm a farmer, and a pretty damn successful one. Yep, that's me good old Cayden McLeish; landowner, truck farmer, forester, horse owner, even waterman; any way I can earn a little capital. Oh yeah, I'm ethnically Scottish. So I guess everyone knows what that means. I might be expected to be a little tight fisted; that's not really true, at least not in my case, and I might be a somewhat somber, maybe a little morose by nature; now that regrettably is true. I'm certainly an American, but in all sincerity my Scottish ancestry has prevented me from being too ebullient about anything. A person never knows; the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Once I got started I got my farm going really well. I'll explain how I came to own my farm later on. Anyway I managed to secure some good help. I put in corn and soy beans on most the open land, but I set aside a big chunk for vegetables; strawberries, tomatoes, cantaloupes, beans, and so forth. I don't live far from the ocean. Let me explain more about that.
Years ago the distance between my farm, it was my great-grandmother's farm then, and the beach was pretty intimidating, but when the nearby ocean resorts got really going in the 1980's, actually things started to kick in the 1950's, but that was way before my time, plus the expansion of the Interstates my connection with the beach got a lot easier. I hooked up with some other truck farmers, and some guys who'd set up fruit stands, and the beach became our new goldmine. I've been making money hand over fist during the summer months.
In the winter I started to have a lot more free time. I had horses, and I got involved with the trotters, the sulky races, I even have my own horse. But what I wanted to do was make some real money in some other way.
When I was in the army I had a lot of free time. I'll share some army stories later too. A lot of guys spent their time at the bars, or playing pool. I learned to play poker, and I got good at it. I especially liked Five Card Draw, but most especially I learned to like Texas Hold Em.
All up and down the east coast there have always been games. Players like me have to be careful though; some of these games can get pretty skanky. Don't forget everybody tries to cheat. If you're smart you know to stay away from the really big cities. Don't go near Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., or New York, and of course especially stay away from Atlantic City. These are the places where the big timers are found. They'll clean you out, and if they can't they'll have their whores rip you off or their thugs might kill you if you do too well, especially if they don't think you'll be back again or they're afraid you have an edge they don't know about.
Think about gambling as something akin to horse racing. If you go to the big tracks all the horses are so good they're almost impossible to handicap, but at the smaller tracks I've found it much easier to judge which horses have a better chance at winning. Same with cards; the big cities have so many really talented players it's impossible to win, but in the smaller towns the odds aren't so daunting.
I found some of the mid-sized and smaller cities in Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania have pretty good games. There's a problem there though; the good games seldom stay good for long, the cheaters and other frauds always find a way to screw things up. That means of lot of the games are hit or miss; sometimes they're good then sometimes...well... That's where I am now, at a game that's gone bad, and my life is about to change in a most dramatic way.
Cheaters and cheating are pretty commonplace in most of these small town games where outsiders like me show up. Be forewarned, I'm not here to give anyone a lesson on card tricks so don't try to second guess me, it's best to remember someone invents a new way to cheat almost every day. Players, quasi-amateurs like me, just have to be alert and careful.
Of course poker is like a marathon. A game might start in the early evening, and it could run for hours without any breaks or results. I hear they say if after two or three hours a player doesn't know who the fool or the sucker is at the table then it's probably them. One thing I've noticed is, after several hours those who rely on cheating, if I don't spot them right away, get progressively more careless.
There are lots of ways to cheat; palming cards, marking cards, scraping the edges, electronic gimmicks, having a couple players working together to drive up the pots on a target. These are all pretty run of the mill, and with a little experience it's easier to see, but always keep in mind, if you're not comfortable with the game at hand then get out.
One of the stupider things guys who run these kinds of operations sometimes try to do is find ways to actually see what's in an opponent's hand. There are a lot of ways to do this, but one way that almost never fails to show up is to use whores, hopefully pretty whores who will try to distract or spy out drunk or tired players.
So here I was in a gritty backroom in what was once considered a pretty nice bar. Whores were all over the place, in and out, some trying to work the table, others hoping to score some other way. People would think I'd be talking about some kind of sex; but more than likely its getting some drunk's wallet, and getting his cash and credit cards. I've seen it, and believe me it takes a sorry asshole to get taken, but it happens all the time.
Well I'd been playing this game. We were playing Texas Hold Em, it was close to 3:00 a.m., and I'd been seated uninterrupted for close to five hours. I stopped making piss trips when the pots started getting bigger. I'd stopped drinking or eating anything around midnight, and before that I was only drinking out of bottles I was sure had never been opened or tampered with, but that's another whole game. Sometimes I take condoms and piss in them if I get desperate. I'd just piss in the thing, tie it off, and drop it on the floor, somebody would eventually pick it up.
Anyway there was this whore who'd been surreptitiously hovering around me off and on for the past hour. I could see the 'host' knew who she was. He also knew what she was supposed to be doing. I'm just not supposed to know. How stupid could these people be?
She was trying her damnedest to distract me or to get a peek at my two down cards. She was stupid; it just wasn't going to happen. She looked old for what she was doing; maybe somewhere in her thirties, and she looked pretty shopworn. I'd feel sorry for the bitch if I didn't know what she was trying to do.
I discreetly watched what she'd been up to; that alone could be all her pimp wanted. The first thing I noticed about her was she was basically scared shitless. I wondered; I've won a few big hands, and the 'host' and another guy I see were working in tandem trying to cut me down. Right then, in this pot there was at least $4,000.00, a decent pot.
The dumb bitch has sent her pimp some kind of signal because I could see by his tell that he thought he had me. He dumped another goodly amount of money in the pot. His partner raised it a little more. It was left to me. I knew I had both of them, because I was pretty sure it was the pimp who had the better cards and he wasn't that smart.
I threw in my coin, "I call."
Sitting on the table was a jack, a nine, and a three.
The pimp dropped his two cards. He'd been holding a nine and a jack, "Two pair," he confidently called.
As he reached across for the gold I dropped my two cards, "Three threes I replied."
The son-of-a-bitch didn't even look at me. He looked at the whore, "Fuck," he scowled!
I started to reach across for my money when the prick did something completely unexpected. He called a buddy from behind the bar, "Hey, give me your belt."
I wondered; 'what the fuck is going on?'
He looked at the whore and yelled, "Get your ugly ass over here."
I watched as the whore cringed and sort of pensively walked toward her pimp.
He grabbed her, he threw her on the floor, and he started to beat her with this belt, "You bitch," he yelled, "you fucking bitch!"
