Writing Scraps

Appendix. Fixing Chance | Part 1 | Aborted Draft

Appendix. Fixing Chance
Fox-Trot-9

[Summary: This little story is somewhat based on my experience in high school. First names are real, and I am the narrator, Evan. My friends and I set up my friend, Holden, by rigging a game, but the game rigged us. This episode never happened, but I wish it did.]

1. We Fix Chance

This is the short answer: We tried fixing Chance, but Chance fixed us in the end.

If you want the long one, let me think . . .

* * *

I'm Evan, and I was part of a club at Bonanza High School. No name, really. Just an eight-man club of card-sharks, playing when we finished our lunches in during our lunch period. Three or four stragglers sat at the table once in a while, but it was mostly just us eight. As one of the regulars, I was always reserved a seat. Daniel and I were the only skinnies in the group, and the rest were in varying stages of obesity. Holden was the middle man between the extremes, edging towards the slimmer side as he lost more weight, but that was during college. The rest, on the other hand, seemed to be gaining weight.

Anyway, during my tenure with this club, we were the local low-rollers. At least, I thought so. I'd always imagine myself as a dandy, dressed in a tacky suit and Panama hat, sometimes strutting with a cane in my hand like a gent from Edwardian-era England, perhaps even sporting a mustache like one of the "old boys," but that's overdoing it, I think. There's a charm I find in tacky fashion, but that's beside the point.

The point is that we were a close. We only played five days a week in the cafeteria at First Lunch, and we never gambled. It was against Bonanza's school policy. We played many kinds of poker: Straight Poker, Seven-Card Stud, One-Eyed Jacks, Texas Hold-'Em, Deuces Wild, and Jokers Wild. The only poker we didn't play was Strip Poker. We also played an assortment of games besides the poker genre: Blackjack, Go Fish, War, Speed, Hawaiian Speed, and Bullshit. If we wanted something more interesting, we'd play Rummy, Egyptian Rat-Screw, or Crazy Eights.

But besides playing cards, we used to play Slap Hands, called Red Hands, because we'd smack on each others' hands till they were red and swelling. It was a sadistic game. I remember seeing Vince cursing his head off after I delivered a chop across his knuckles. Real smacker-sounding, too. I'd wager you could hear the slap resounding through the din of muddled cafeteria talk. And the expression on his face, first wincing and then going wide-eyed and bat-shit-crazy with a I'm-gonna-fucking-murder-you expression. It was priceless. But by the end of our sophomore year last year, the school monitors stopped us. So we resorted to a more genteel sport.

There was nothing genteel about it. More often then not, we acted like rowdy, bastard drunks at a gambling table. But that was all right. The school cafeteria at First Lunch was naturally loud and drowned out most of the swear words we threw at each other, and in the last week before Spring Break, the cafeteria was louder than usual.

* * *

Anyway, Holden had an anomalous winning streak last week. Time and time again—it didn't matter which game we played—, he won every fucking game. As if the hand of God, or Fate or the fucking Devil himself guided the winning cards into his sweaty palms. And he got cocky, too. On the third day of his winning streak, he started saying, "Yo, what-up, bitches?" And he'd screw us over again. And again. And again. For five miserable days, we were his bitches.

That Friday, Matt, Anthony, Daniel, Vince, Brian, Chris and I stayed after school and devised a plan to get back at him. We conspired to con good-old Holden into submission by rigging a game. After a few minutes deliberating on which game to rig, we decided on Crazy Eights, Holden's favorite game. We knew the game well enough, and we knew all the combinations. Brian, our Houdini of card-shuffling, would Houdini-shuffle both decks so that every card would be in the same order, then deal them out. Chris would sit on Holden's left and Matt on his right, so they would get the face cards and cut him out of playing or screw him into picking up off the deck, while the rest of us supported them by putting down only number cards; that was the original plan. But when Matt got the stomach flu, his responsibility fell to me. We'd stay in the cafeteria after school till 6:00 p.m., practicing with each other till the moves and timing were perfect.