part 2 - see below for part 1

So Roy walked us down to his unfinished basement where there stood a variety of chairs and a 3 ft by 3 ft card table.

" Where are we going to play ?", I asked.

" Right here ! " Roy replied in a tone as if he'd just won the lottery, " I'm going to go get some chips" and he set off bounding up the stairs.

Now there was NO WAY we were going to fit seven people around this table. I look look at Josh, he shrugged and we started rummaging around the piles in the basement hopeful to find some other table or flat surface to work with. In the very back next to the furnace I found an old door the I drug out to the middle of the floor. Josh found 4 bar stools in another pile and after some effort we had ourselves one hell of a poker table ( except for the knob) and were ready to roll.

All of us sat down and waited for Roy's return. to my right was Bill who declined my offer of beer and indicated that he already " had about a 12 pack in him" though I really couldn't tell. To my left was Roys wife and I was enjoying the fact that my chair was a good foot taller than her chair and appreciating the structural advances that have been made recently in brazier manufacturing.

Then Roy came bounding down the stairs with a bag of nachos and a deck of cards, " I FINALLY FOUND A FULL DECK !!!! WHEW. I knew I had one somewhere up there. I have another half of a deck exactly like this up up there too. If you want I can mix them together and we can play with a deck and a half. Then we wont have to shuffle so much." Thankfully that offer was declined. He threw a tattered pack of bent and torn cards onto the table. I didn't even bother to count to see if they were all there. I did however note that the card completely folded in half was the nine of diamonds.

Now, please don't consider me a prude. I understand not everyone has a poker table or chips. In fact I usually have a couple of chairs, $20 in ones and fives, and an extra set of poker chips in my car as I recognize that if you don't regularly host a game you might underestimate what you need. But, and call me crazy if you will, I do have the minimum expectation that if you are going to invite people over to your house to play cards that ...you know... you at least HAVE SOME FUCKING CARDS !

As I was breaking the chips up into stacks to distribute, Roy whistled for his dog and I heard it come in the house above us and it's claws tip-tapping across the kitchen linoleum. When I next looked up a big ass boxer or rotwiller or some fucking attack dog came bounding across the floor. Ron about jumped out of his pants.

" AHAHAHAHHAHA, Don't be scared...he's friendly", Roy yelled as he hopped up and playfully ( !?) smacked the dogs across the chops and then started hugging him. " AHAHAHAHA, Watch this ! " Roy yelled as he ran across the room and dug through a pile of stuff. He pulled out a two gallon, empty, plastic bottle of Tide and held it over his head. The dog went absolutely apeshit. It started barking and jumping up and down foaming at the mouth. Roy ran over to a string hanging from the rafter about 6 feet away from our makeshift table and tied the string to the bottle leaving it hovering 4 feet from the ground. As he came back to his chair (Purposefully jammed in between his wife and I) the dog started jumping up and down growling and snapping at the bottle.

I tried my best to not jump up screaming and continued to focus all my attention on the counting...17...18....19...and 20. Doing my best to ignore the attack dog 6 feet to my right I announced, " I have the chips in stacks of $20. If you want to buy in for $10 just toss the two green chips back to me and we'll be set"

There was a long pause and the wife leaned over and started whispering to Roy. " Ummmm", Roy said, " That's a little much to start isn't it ?"

" How much do you WANT to play for ?", I asked , my staring burning a hole through Ron for taking us away from our sure fire $40 pot limit buy-in for what was becoming a penny ante kitchen table game.

" hmmmmm", no one wanted to offer up an opinion. So I thought about what might be the MOST amount I might be able to squeeze out of the game... I offered, " how about a $5 buy-in with a 10 cent minimum bet and a 50 cent max ?" .... and decided anything less than that and I was just going to fake a kidney stone and get out of there.

" ok" Roy allowed, " let's get started".


As I looked over a Roy trying to shuffle the bent up cards, I noticed Mrs. Roy staring right at me....when I looked up, her eyes never looked away and she smiled the kind of smile that says.... " I know that if my husband catches you looking at me he's going to feed you to the dog....and I know that if I keep flirting with you that you won't have any choice but to blush.....and I'm not sure what's going to happen but it's really turning me on knowing that there's a fairly good chance that someone might die tonight all due to my hotness"

or something like that.


So as I anted I reassessed the situation. Here I was in some basement that could easily double as the setting for a bad S&M porn video, playing on a old dusty door, with a killer dog attacking this shit out of laundry detergent bottle. All at the same time I have to try and play card while never, ever looking left. Yeah, it was a bit stressful, but how much worse could it really get.

Thats when the string broke.

The rest of the night was trying to play retard poker while the dog batted that bottle from one end of the basement to the other...Occasionally knocking the jug under the table where we'd have to left our legs and at the same time hold the table on the barstools to avoid both losing the table and/or a foot.

Some of the highlights of the card game:

HAND #1 - Roy says, " here's a little game I like to call 7 card stud" like he fucking invented it. He then dealt me 7 cards face down and I realized that, in fact, he did invent it.

" Excuse me" I interrupted hold my 7 cards, " can you please explain the game ?"

" OH WE GOT OURSELVES A NEWBIE !" he taunted me.." The way you play this game is you pick up your seven cards, discard the two you don't want....then we start betting"

" Ohhhhh", i said in surprise, " THAT seven card stud"
xxxxxxx

About every third hand roy would ante by spinning his chip on end. Then we'd have to all sit there awkwardly while the thing spun down and roy giggled madly. After about the 5th time Ron would wait to ante until after Roy and then throw his ante and the spinning chips as an alternative to having someone have to hit the guy with a shovel. Unfortunately all that did was encourage Roy.

xxxxxxx

You know it's a unique situation when the main staples of the game you are playing are Blackjack, Acey-Duecey, and some game i can't remember where if you play...you can never fold. Oh BTW, in this game, if you are in and you run out of money on the table, you have to stay in until you no longer have money money on your person or in your vehicle. Thankfully, in order to keep the game friendly, they did not invoke the "go to the ATM " rule. Remember, this is the same dude wanted to cap things at a $5 buy-in. Obviously I chose this games to make one of my many pee breaks.

xxxxxxx
Two times Roy's wife was against me heads up. The first time he talked her into playing two pair into my trips. The second time he talked her into laying down a flush draw to my top pair. In other words, while he fancied himself a card player he had no idea how to play, meanwhile even though she needed a sheet to tell her " what beats what" she actually had a feel for the game. After the second loss, which meant I scooped a $5 pot, she stopped asking him questions and started asking me. That raised the tension in the room about 1,000,000 degrees.

So finally after getting $15 up...10 cents at a time....and suffering through what amounted to psychological torture, it wasn't the spinning coin that got me. It wasn't the dog, the rickety table, it wasn't the litany of bad jokes, nor was it having a lunatic asking me every time I folded " does your wife play, bawhawhawhawhaw ?".

Nope, what finally got me was the wife dropping a nacho chip onto her skin tight linen pants. She stood up, walk over next to me, grabbed a napkin, licked it and started rubbing the spot on her inner thigh. " Damn ! " she said barely containing a smile as she worked at the stain with vigor, " I hope this doesn't leave a stain on my new pants.". Then she turned around, sticking he ass too close to my face for anyone's comfort and asked, " I didn't sit in anything as well, did I ?"

Ron started petting the dog, I cashed us in and we got the hell out of there.

True my friends, every word.