Pocket Kings by Ted Heller Page A

money was a fitting climax.
    Second Gunman: I just noticed something. She won about three hands in a row while she and Tex were doing it. Pest couldn’t concentrate. You know what I should do? I should get a female nick and start playing for RM [real money]. Talk dirty to the men players and steal all their quid while they choke their chickens.
    Th at struck me as a cunning, strange, and possibly extremely sick idea . . . but also as a pretty good one.
    Th e lovers’ pixilated afterglow was now interrupted.
    Pest Control: wife just got home, bubb! c u later?
    Of course he would. Th ere never was a second when she wasn’t logged on.
    Bubbly British Bird: yes. hope so. luv u! :) bye!
    Like an actual man getting actual action from an actual mistress, Pest had had his fun and now it was time for a swift exit. Who knew if his wife really just did come home? But who knew if he—or Bubbly British Bird—had really been toying with their own body parts? Maybe in reality not only was Bubbly not holding her toothbrush, maybe she didn’t even have a toothbrush because she had no teeth or arms at all.
    Eavesdropping on private conversations became a regular part of my life. It was just as sneaky, forbidden, and reprehensible as an extramarital affair and probably just as much fun. I would do it for about an hour a day, fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, sometimes only a minute at a time. I still played poker the same amount of time, though. So the eavesdropping time ate up more time when I could have been writing.
    But there was nothing to write and nobody to write for.

    When Plague Boy came out, in February of 2000, I was booked to do a reading at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. I couldn’t wait. By the time of the reading, Plague had only officially been out a week, and so far, everything was going well. Th e reviews were good, and though the sales were modest, with a few more good reviews, they might pick up. Th e rotating fan that was my literary career had yet to be hit.
    In about half of the reviews, however, I had been referred to as “reclusive.” One or two reviewers made comments such as, “Dixon, who guards his privacy jealously . . .” and “ Th e publicity-shy novelist . . .”
    Th ere was only one reason for this: Th ere was no photo of me on the book jacket. Because of that and that alone, it was construed that I probably was either a shotgun-toting long-bearded maniac who wrote his little books on an old typewriter deep beneath the ground in a Wyoming bunker, or that I was a vampire whose face did not show up in mirrors and photographs. Th e simple but embarrassing truth was that ever since Th e New York Times Style editors airbrushed me out of my wedding announcement picture, I have been pathologically camera shy. No photograph, to my knowledge, has been taken of me ever since.
    Abigail Prentice, 1 the chief publicist at my publisher, and Toby Kwimper kept insisting that a photo of me appear on the dust jacket, and Abigail told me their art department would hire a sympathetic photographer who would make it easier for me. Toby advised me, “It’ll look really weird without a picture. I promise you.” He asked me to think about it—and I did—but the more I thought about it the more I resolved not to go through with it. Th ey were getting close to shipping the art to the printer and I still hadn’t made a decision. “Well?” Toby asked me, the deadline only hours away. “Well,” I said to him, “I . . . I just don’t know.” Th e deadline passed and there was no picture and that is how I became, for a few weeks, “the reclusive author.”
    My reading at Barnes & Noble, I felt, and all future readings would put an end to such talk. I didn’t live in a bunker, I used a computer and not a typewriter, and I owned no shotguns and didn’t suck blood out of peoples’ necks.
    Th e Plague