Читать книгу For Richer, For Poorer - Victoria Coren - Страница 8

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THE CHIMNEY SWEEP

‘Good luck will rub off when I shakes ’ands with you . . .’

– from Mary Poppins

As I deliver the punchline, I run a finger across my chest, describing an imaginary slogan on a T-shirt.

Then I tell the audience, ‘That wasn’t really a joke. I just felt like touching my tits.’

They fall about. I seem to have found their level.

‘Well,’ I continue, ‘if you want something done properly . . .’

Another roar of laughter and a round of applause. I’m not actually being funny. I’m just exploiting the fact that it’s 2 a.m., everyone in the club is drunk and a female stand-up comic is a bizarre curio, like a talking monkey. Throw in something rude, and they’re in your pocket.

It is a good feeling. It seems unfair that butchers and doctors and electricians don’t get applauded for doing their jobs, too.

♠

I have just left school and I’m so happy I could kill myself. Now to work out what to do with the rest of my life. I’ve been writing a ‘teenage newspaper column’ for a couple of years, and an agent got in touch to ask if I’d like to join a stand-up comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Why not? I’m immortal. Nothing could ever frighten me again, after walking into the school hall every lunchtime and wondering who to sit next to.

So I have chanced my way into this strange, counter-cultural, late-night community. It is a pure meritocracy: you can hold your own or you can’t. London’s little circuit of subterranean comedy clubs, packed and hot if there is an audience in double figures, is utterly seductive for the insecure. You can hide in a private world and prove yourself publicly at the same time.

It seems to be thought of as a man’s business, with very few female comics in these clubs, and the idea that ‘women can’t hack it’ is irresistible.

When I’m sitting around with a bunch of comedians in a room above a pub, after the shows are finished, drinking and listening to stories, I feel, for the first time away from my family, an epiphany of belonging. All the school rules are overturned. You can be fat here. You can be short or short-sighted, Jewish or Asian, useless at sport, baffled by sex – it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re brave and quick-witted.

In fact, the worse your social skills, the more you have to talk about.

♠

I play poker occasionally. Some of my brother’s friends know a couple of people who run a private cash game in Archway, so I visit a couple of times. They are a nice, funny group. A couple of them are famous: Ross Boatman, who’s in London’s Burning, and Jesse Birdsall, who’s in Eldorado. The others are just gamblers who haven’t got to grips with life yet: Barny Boatman, who works for P&O; Chris Colson, who doesn’t seem to do anything much; and Patrick Marber, a stand-up comic who’s thinking of writing a play.

The games are Omaha, seven stud and hi-lo split. But the stakes are a bit rich for me. I love poker, but I’m bad at it. I lose £200 or £300 every time. I’m currently making £210 a week working in a shop, and £25 a time for comedy performances. The only way to learn poker is to go to a casino (far too scary) or get fleeced in these expensive live games. I can’t resist stopping by every so often for the fun, the scathing banter and the takeaway pizza, but I can’t afford it more than once every few months.

♠

I tell my parents that when the year comes to an end, I’m not going to university. I think I’ve found a sort of vocation in comedy. I love the underworld, I love the screwed-up people, I finally fit in and I am happy. I’m not going to give it up to study T.S. Eliot and The Wife’s Lament. I can’t bear to re-enter the misery of my school years. And I sense that I’d never go back to comedy if I stopped to be a student for three years. I’d lose my nerve, and I can’t risk that. Something finally feels right to me. I’m on my yellow brick road. So, I’m going to write to the admissions tutor at Oxford and say thank you very much, but they should give my place to somebody else.

Then I look at my father’s face. I love him more than anyone in the world.

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘I was only joking.’

♠

Having saved up all my shop and comedy money, I have managed to swerve the expensive poker games for long enough to build a travel budget. Most of the girls from my school have gone to India, where they all seem to be getting spiritual and getting food poisoning. They consider this a big plus, since most of them try to throw up after meals anyway, but it doesn’t sound like much fun to me.

I have no interest in ‘discovering myself’. I want to discover America. My father travelled there in 1960 and spent two adventurous years studying American fiction, dating American girls, driving American cars across American landscapes, eating hamburgers and going on civil rights marches. From him, from the cinema, from Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick and Dallas, I am in love with America, too. I keep a giant folded map in my bedroom, and take it out to stare at the redolent, romantic names: Hawk Springs, Dead Man’s Gulch, Looking Glass Falls.

Over two tightly budgeted months, my friend Nicky and I take Greyhound buses all round the southern states, up via New York to Massachusetts and on across the country, all the way over to the west coast through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado. We hop aboard a shaky twin-prop flight to Alaska, taking the first train of the season from Anchorage to Fairbanks. We rent a car and drive around the Painted Desert, New Mexico, Arizona and the Grand Canyon. All there is left that we really want to see is Wyoming, the Dakotas and Las Vegas.

Unfortunately, we start in Las Vegas. I write in my journal:

Sunday 2nd June

Nevada is amazing. Right over the state line, in the middle of nothing but dusty hills and sand, there are huge pink and yellow casinos, and nothing else at all. After driving through empty hot landscape for ages, you think you’re imagining them, that they’re a mirage. It’s like that old cartoon where the cars keep driving past the hotel and the man in the fez is standing outside saying, ‘I knew we shouldn’t have built it in the middle of the desert!’

Then Las Vegas is BREATHTAKING. Millions and millions and millions of neon signs and shiny hotels and pink plastic flamingos and adverts for famous people and sparkle and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT. We were going to stay at the Las Vegas Hilton where The Four Tops and The Temptations are appearing nightly, but the Desert Inn has Joan Rivers.

It’s AMAZING what hotels give you for the money here. The Desert Inn said they’d charge us $75 a night if we agreed to stay two nights, and for that we’ve got a STUNNING room with its own bathroom, seven free drinks each and millions of ‘Buy 5 get 5 free’ tokens for roulette and poker chips. It’s so weird and amazing after all the youth hostels. They valet parked the car!!

Couldn’t resist the casino and they couldn’t resist us either – business is so slow that they only asked for ID once and my fake student card held up fine. So I was able to lose $5 on fruit machines and $47 on roulette. I was doing all right at roulette, but decided in advance that it was OKAY to lose all my winnings for the fun of playing. Tonight I’m going to try poker.

We never make it to Wyoming and the Dakotas.

♠

You wouldn’t think there was anything especially character-building about eating cheese sandwiches and reading Milton under a tree. But my college is ambitious, heavily male-dominated, and our tutors approach English Literature with military discipline. They specialize in reducing new students to tears, stripping away our confidence, then gradually bestowing approval as we work longer and longer hours, until we hunch over the books all night with an obsessiveness born of Stockholm Syndrome.

I like it. Standing my ground with alpha males, not showing fear, trying to make them laugh, noticing their own vulnerabilities, aiming always to win respect – I’ve grown up with my father, and taken my chances with a rowdy Brixton club audience; this is fast becoming a comfort zone. Being shouted at by macho Yeats scholars (a construction which may sound oxymoronic to anyone who’s never met the men in question) is a pleasure. The only terrors of university life lie in the bars and parties, the competition for social and sexual success. It takes two years to find a proper best friend, a quirky theologian called Charlie, who introduces himself to me with a bizarre puppet show and an enormous row about whether or not Beyond The Fringe was funny. Our relationship really takes off when it turns out he is head of the five-strong university cribbage society. Cribbage is much easier with six.

Until Charlie stumbles into the picture, apart from one intense, doomed love affair with an angry medical student, I spend most weekends back in London, hanging around in comedy clubs and stopping in occasionally at the Archway game to lose money I can’t afford.

I miss the comic meritocracy. But getting older brings a self-consciousness which makes it quite impossible to go back on stage and shout ‘Good evening!’ at a bunch of sceptical strangers. I’m not scared of the idea, just embarrassed.

By the time I leave university, comedy has changed. It has developed an unexpected cool streak. Articles in newspapers are describing it as ‘the new rock and roll’. Comedians have become sex symbols. They have groupies. They have managers and TV deals. They don’t seem to be the community of outsiders that attracted me in the first place. They have become the in-crowd.

So, the natural path is to settle back behind a typewriter and try to craft my jokes from there. Broadsheet newspaper readers are far less demanding than stand-up comedy audiences. If you’re appearing after 2,000 words of earnest opinion about Bosnia, they’re happy if you can give them a single wry smile. And if they don’t smile, what the hell? You’re safely alone at home, not standing there like a lemon, being rubbed against the grater of public silence.

But there’s no risk in it. No clench in the stomach as you walk to the microphone, wondering what kind of an audience they’re going to be. No euphoric high when you hear the first laugh and know it’s going to be okay.

And how can there be any community, any belonging, when I’m alone at the typewriter? It’s a good life, but there is something missing.

♠

I am standing in the doorway next to 7-11 in Notting Hill, clutching a bottle of whisky. The door is opened by a delicate, laconic little fellow with an explosion of black hair that makes him look, somehow, as if he is a Victorian street urchin who’s spent the afternoon up a chimney.

He looks at the bottle of whisky, baffled. He seems as though he is about to say something sarcastic, but doesn’t. He takes the bottle from my hand, mutters a thank-you and puts it down on the stairs. I don’t see it again.

He leads me up into a small room that appears very crowded with people. I can’t quite tell how they all fit round the table; it’s a Mad Hatter’s tea party with dormice slotting into teapots. They’re eating sweets, talking, dealing, swearing. Hugo, the chimney sweep, murmurs a couple of half-introductions, then gets bored and gives up. There are a few journalists, an IT man, a sleepy second-hand book dealer, a few undefined extras. And there is a slender, elegant, quirkily dressed woman, the first woman I have ever seen playing poker: Kira. A mutual friend has sent me to this game, amazed by the coincidence of knowing two female poker enthusiasts. Such unlikely specimens had to be introduced.

But there is no smalltalk; this isn’t a dinner party. The hellos take about eight seconds before I am asked for money, given chips and dealt in. The entire conversation is about poker. There seems to be an intense group fascination for each hand, each deal, each variant, each card. If they’re not talking about the hand in play, they’re talking about a hand that just finished or a hand that was played last week. If it isn’t a hand they played themselves, it’s a hand that somebody played ‘in the Vic’.

The game itself seems easier than the ones I’ve played before. The stakes are smaller. And although the conversation is saturated with poker, the atmosphere is more light-hearted than I am used to. No alcohol, no machismo, lots of junk food and giggling and double entendres and throwing sweets at people who win pots. There’s nothing cool about it. It’s somehow . . . silly. And yet it’s completely engaged and engaging, involving and enthralling. Within an hour I am not just playing poker, I’m debating poker, arguing about poker, laughing about poker, inhaling poker. I even win some money.

‘Thanks for having me,’ I say, very sincerely, on the way out. ‘I had a great night.’

‘Come again,’ says The Sweep. ‘We play every Tuesday.’

A SUITED ACE

A♦ 6♦. That’s a pretty hand. I’m fourth to speak, and I should probably raise. But I would have to pass for a re-raise, and I don’t want to waste chips.

New players get very excited about lone aces. In the past, doing TV commentary on amateur or celebrity tournaments, I’ve invariably found myself shaking my head in despair as yet another player fritters his chips away by refusing to pass any hand with an ace in it. Just like me, as a kid, playing in that old teenage game with the boys, waiting for aces.

The problem is, everybody likes aces. If you bet with an ace, someone else will call or raise with an ace. In that situation, with A6 or A7, if you miss the flop you’ve got nothing, and if you hit the ace you’re probably still losing. What a mess.

AK is obviously a big hand, though not as big as some kids seem to believe. It’s no pair! But it carries a strong promise. Everybody loves AQ, too. AJ is moving into tricky territory – and A9 is not just a poisoned chalice, it’s a goddamn beaker of arsenic.

Suited wheel cards, I like those. A2, A3, A4, A5 of a suit: you’re drawing to a straight and a flush as well as two pair. And with the wheel cards, you don’t tend to get all feverish if you only hit the ace. I love those ‘spokes’.

Very big aces, great. Very small aces, focused goal. Middle-sized aces: like plastic lobsters in a Chinese restaurant window, they aren’t nearly as tasty as they look.

So what shall I do with this A6 I’m looking at, then? If I’m going to raise, I won’t want action. The ace is not just a plastic lobster, it’s a red herring: I might as well raise with any cards at all. A6 could be a particularly bad choice, because my cards might well be counterfeited by any hand that chose to get stubborn. So I opt to be conservative, and pass.

Emad Tahtouh makes it 50,000 to go out of the small blind, and Michael Muldoon calls in the big blind.

Flop comes 8♥ A♠ 5♦.

I should feel regretful: my hand would probably have been good here. In fact, when Emad comes out betting 70,000, I’m relieved.

He’s super-aggressive, this Emad. Probably the biggest threat on this table. He is a pro, making most of his money in the high-stakes games on PokerStars. I remember him from the World Series of 2005, he was one of the Lebanese-Australian crew who came out with Joe Hachem. I played a bit with Emad on the cash tables that year. Very nice guy. But I know his playing style.

A couple of days ago, in this same tournament, I made a deliberately small raise with AQ to trap Emad on the big blind. He was short of chips, but had just enough to make me pass for an all-in re-raise if I had a medium-strength hand. And I knew he knew it. I knew he’d move in if the maths were right. So I made the maths right, and he stuck it all-in with an 89 offsuit. To his annoyance, I called immediately – and to my annoyance, he hit a nine. The best-laid plans . . .

So now I feel like he’s made this tournament on borrowed time, with my chips, and sooner or later it will be my job to knock him out. Like Batman in a multi-way fight, when it comes to the biggest challenge, with the personal twist – ‘Leave this one to me.’

And this could have been the hand. If I had raised with my A6, and he had played back, and I had called, then I would probably be winning on this flop. My tactic with Emad is definitely to try and use his own aggression against him.

The problem is, just because he’s a good, strong, aggressive player, that doesn’t mean there’s a law against him being dealt a good hand. Why can’t he have a bigger ace than A6? Sure, if everyone passes to his small blind, he can raise it up with any two cards – but everyone on this table can play, everyone knows that you can raise with anything from the button or small blind when the others have folded. Poker double-think suggests, therefore, that people would actually be raising with real hands in these spots. Would I have wanted to play for all my chips, for my entire tournament, with a weak paired ace? I’m relieved that I passed. Michael Muldoon also passes.

On the very next hand, Peter Hedlund (a tall, tipsy, talkative Swede, who has seen his massive chip lead whittled away with each fresh beer) moves all-in with KQ, and is unlucky enough to find Michael Muldoon with AK in the small blind. No dramas on the flop, and Peter’s out in seventh place. He wins £36,600. The next prize is £44,000 – so that pass of A6, however girlish and weedy, might have won me £7,400.

And we’re down to six.