35yo Song - (tie) Shape of My Heart, Sting/My Prerogative, Bobby Brown
He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn't play for the money he wins
He don't play for respect
He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of a probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance
Welcome to my ass2dahole phase.
They say I'm crazy
I really don't care
That's my prerogative
They say I'm nasty
But I don't give a damn
This is how I live
I don't need permission
Make my own decisions
That's my prerogative
Now, it gets thick. I'm a talented kid, raised to be good before great and no respect for any other portion of my raisin'. From the start, if you hired me to work hard for you, i was gonna end up being smart. If you hired me to be smart for you, i would work well past dark, swim like a shark for you. If you wanted to be smart as you could be, NObody would help you more than i. Try to be smarter than me, i will bury you, fire every morsel of carbon i can summon til you're toast.
And then i found poker, a game based on acting smarter than everyone else for money. Thanos' glove, Batman - is THAT a fit?! My new pal Vito showed me the way - not only the Peruvian Checkraising Powder but the nucular 'tude. He came to play the horses with me one morning early in our friendship. Some Brooklyn Blowfish was waxing Runyonic in the next row and smirked over one of Vito's misconceptions of my plays. Shouldnta did that, blowfish. Vito, confessing he didn't completely understand the Racing Form, challenged the old man for $1000 that he could turn 100 bucks into more by the end of a racing day. Found the ol blob's chokepoint, dusted him, by day's end he was literally bouncing up and down the rows, pointing down his vanquished foe like Ali. Oh, i gotta be around this cat.
Hella team, we were. Couple years later, we were up Tahoe at the only other huuuuge poker tournament - Super Bowl of Poker - and were told that the greatest gambler of all time, Jack "Treetop" Straus, needed someone current to pick horses for him, he & i got along right away, he hung with us now & then til he died. Treetop called me & Vito the best "psych" players he'd ever seen and said that he fervently wished that our style of play would beat the Sklanskyite math players who were also coming up to challenge the old guard at the time. We didn't, because the math guys figured out the math of psych, too, but we gave em a nice run. We had free coke (Vito showed me how to bankroll smalltime dealers in "casino quarters" in exchange for half their powdery profits), beautiful ladies - Vito's wife Peggy was one of the best people i've ever known and his goomah, Fancy (a hi-roller plane hostess i've written about here before) was more fun than a flashback, my Mary more than kept up and, because she was so turbulent, we was broken up & out to prowl enough for me to sample plenty other options without actually being unfaithful, and, of course, money for nothin'. It beat rock & roll.
We rammed & jammed, flimmed & flammed, rose & fell, heavened in hell, gave the world a head start and ALWAYS chased it down. Soon, games werent enough, we gambled on life - handicapping marriages & other entanglements, actually sharkin' the prolims of others for profit. Ended up we bet against each other's lives - and you can guess how that went. There's more, but that would be braggin'...