Probably once a week a gang of us will go out for an expensive lunch. There’ll be nine or ten of us in our business suits at some expensive restaurant.
There’s a ritual that we perform at the end of the meal.
A hand of liars poker is played, and the loser picks up the tab.
It is played thusly:
Everybody pulls out a dollar bill. The green numbers are your “hand.” The first person calls out a hand. “two twos” might be a starter. Play then proceeds to the left. The next person has three options:
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They can call out a better hand “two threes,” or “three twos” for example. You can call anything you want, as long as it’s better than the previous hand.
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You can call “bullshit” which means you think the person is lying. They will then reveal their hand. If they had what they said, you lose. If they don’t, they lose.
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You can “pass.” This doesn’t get you off the hook though, because if everybody passes, that guy wins, and everybody else loses and splits the bill. This is a cowardly thing to do, and people who habitually pass are looked upon with scorn and contempt.
In this way the game escalates until either there is a big winner, who gets a free lunch, of a big loser who buys the whole thing.
Most people do the smart thing, and play not to lose, as these lunches are often five or six hundred dollars.
There is a code of honor, about this game. You can’t stack the deck. That is, it is considered bad form to hunt around for a good dollar bill, or to go to the bank and get a hundred ones, and stick the best one in the back of your wallet. You’re supposed to pick a random bill.
Unfortunately, honor is one thing, but when it’s lunch at the House of Kobe, a man’s honor comes cheap.
It costs a dollar.
The house of Kobe is the most expensive place we eat at. They got Sushi, and ungodly expensive steaks. We only go there once or twice a year, but when we do, it seems a recklessness is in the air. Everybody orders and eats like there’s no tomorrow, and when the bill comes, it’s seldom under a grand.
Nobody in history had ever been stuck with the bill at the House of Kobe. Every time it gets down to “passing,” and the bill gets split.
Not until The Kid showed up, that is.
Usually the hand was played out in nervous silence as we stared at our lobster rolls and grasped our little pre-prepared dollars in sweaty hands.
You didn’t try to be the winner at the House of Kobe. To win you had to put yourself out there on the ragged edge and risk total defeat, and that was just too much for most of us. Mostly we were just glad to put our $100.00 or so down and get out relatively unscathed.
Next to me in the office is my buddy Chris. He’s a small balding italian guy with a goatee and suits from Hong Kong. He has a swarthy demeanor and beady little eyes, and the last few times we’d gone to the House of Kobe he’d gotten the free lunch by calling a big hand right away, and daring anyone to defy him. We’d all know he would hoard his dollars for months waiting for the House of Kobe, and we were all victims to his bullying, as well as to our own inner fears.
Chris rode in my car as we rode down to the House of Kobe, and he was talking big. When we got there, he hit the Sake hard and ordered a bunch of the most expensive tuna.
Sitting next to me, and ordering the spaghetti was The Kid. He was a young Irish guy by the name of Pat. This was only his second time out with us, and his first at the House of Kobe.
As everybody ordered big, Pat’s eyes got wide when he looked at the prices. You could see the fear and apprehension in them.
You see, The Kid wasn’t any good at liar’s poker. It was his first time, and we went easy on him at the Mexican restaurant, and the whole gang wasn’t there. Still he had to swallow a $350 bill all by himself. And, as I said, Pat was new in our business. He didn’t have much cash, so it hurt him hard.
He couldn’t afford to lose at the House of Kobe.
A silence grew as the meal neared to a close, and we all reached glumly for our wallets. The bill sat in the middle of the table like a death sentence surrounded by the remains of our feast.
Chris grinned evilly and leaned back rubbing his stomach as he held his bill.
I looked down at the four fives I had found rummaging through my wife’s wallet that morning, and prayed it would be enough.
With shaking hands, The Kid rifled through his threadbare velcro wallet, hoping he had a dollar in there, somewhere.
He obviously hadn’t learned the lesson from the taco incident. You needed to prepare and have your dollar ready when you went to the House of Kobe. The boy was playing with fire, and if he didn’t learn quick this might be his final outing. Where the House of Kobe was concerned we were all vicious animals, and sitting at the top of the heap, the meanest dog in the bunch, was Chris.
It began to rain that cloudy day as Dr. Patel called out the opening salvo.
“Ummm. I have three threes,” he said coughing.
Sitting next to him, Mark stared at his Bill. “I pass,” he said shamefully.
Next, it was me. I knew better than to reveal my full hand on the first go around. I considered bluffing. I could call out “three sevens” even though I had none. It was innocuous enough that I’d probably get away with it. If it came around to me again, I’d scare everybody when I switched from sevens to fives and if I was lucky somebody would call me. More likely everybody would be afraid and I might win.
What was I thinking? Chris always won at the House of Kobe! What if he saw through me, and called? We’d eaten so much, I just knew that big fat bill was north of twelve hundred. Was I crazy. “Three fives” I mumbled, cowardly.
“Pass,” said David.
“Pass,” replied Mike.
“Seven fours!” Chris announced with an evil gleam in his eyes. “I’m gonna like my free lunch!” He leaned back and rubbed his stomach, guffawing loud enough that diners at other tables stared at him fearfully.
Everybody else passed, and then the bet came to The Kid.
“Ummm. Yeak. Ok, I gotta beat it, or pass. I got it.”
“OHHHHHH Pat, You can do more than that,” said Chris, obviously enjoying The Kids discomfort. “If you want, you can call me a liar.”
“Oh,” said The Kid. “No. I wouldn’t do that.” He mumbled and fumbled some more over his crumpled bill. He was visibly going to pieces.
I cringed in pity.
“Ummm, three twos,” he said.
“No, Pat,” said Chris with slow venom in his voice. He could sense the kill. "You either have to beat the previous hand, pass, or call “bullshit.”
“Just pass. Just pass” I mumbled inaudibly under my breath. “C’mon Kid, use your brain.”
“Ummm, OK.” He said. “Ummmmm. Yeah, Ok. Eight eights.”
A huge gasp erupted. There are only eight digits on a bill. Eight eights is almost impossible. I’d never actually seen more than six of a kind on any bill in ten years of looking. It was a fool’s call. He was anybody’s meat who cared to cry “bullshit.”
“You sure of that, Pat?” asked Chris, smiling with liquid evil dancing in his eyes.
“Yeah. So? Why not?” The Kid replied, still not getting it.
Chris just shook his head.
There was a long silence before Harry said “Pass.” Then, Patel passed. One after another the passes kept coming, and then it came to me.
I knew what was going on. They were trying to save The Kid. If everybody just passed, The Kid could get off. He didn’t deserve this. We were gonna let him slide. It was a fine and generous thing to do, and I was proud of all my friends for their willingness to do it.
My moment of warmth ended quickly when I looked down to my left and saw that all the efforts were for naught. One look at Chris, and you just knew he wasn’t passing. He wasn’t paying nothing, and The Kid was going down with a stray bullet. Nothing personal. Nothing anybody could do about it.
Unless.
I looked down at my dollar.
I could take that bullet. It wouldn’t kill me. It would hurt, but it had been a long time since I had to shell out. If I did it everybody would know I did it to save The Kid, and there’d be no shame in it. I was doing well financially. I could do this. I had to. It was the right thing. All I had to do was call out “eight nines.” Chris liked me. He might even know why I did it in that cold black heart of his. Maybe he would just pass and not make me eat the bill.
I looked around at the ten people, and Chris, into whose hands and mercy I was about to place my fate, and then I did what I had to do.
“[sub]pass[/sub]” I mumbled.
And so it went until it came to Chris.
“BULL. SHIT,” he intoned with loud laconic disdain. The Kid practically jumped in his seat.
He held out his shaking hand to Patel and handed the bill over, and as he did so The Kid changed.
His hand steadied, and a confident gleam came into his eye as he regarded Chris.
“MY God!” exclaimed Patel. “I don’t beleive it. This is something that my comprehension can’t… uh, comprehend.” He said it like that was somehow extraordinary.
“Huh,” Chris started. the smile still plastered on his face.
“Look,” replied Patel. “they’re here! All eight of them!”
And they were. I saw it myself.
Chris looked around, seeking escape. He searched all our eyes for a sympathy that wasn’t there, and saw the eights himself.
Then, with a shaking hand, he reached for the bill, removing that long unused Visa from his pocket with resigned defeat.
Back at the office I got the story from The Kid, who now walked with a swagger in his step.
It seems we are not the first to play the game this way. After his big defeat at the Mexican place Pat had called his father and told him the story between sobs.
Pat’s father spent thirty years as an advertising executive in New York, and he’d played the game many a time.
After thirty years of playing, Pat’s father had once found the eight eights in his wallet, but never used it, figuring it was too big a gun, to ultimate a weapon to ever use. There were times that he wanted to, but something, fate perhaps kept that dollar bill in the back of his wallet, unused, even long after his retirement.
Whe The Kid called, Pat’s father knew why he’d never used it, and he drove down and handed it to Pat. He spent hours teaching him just how to play that bluff, how to make it work, how to bait the trap, and how to spring it.
And, when the moment of truth came that dark rainy day down at The House of Kobe, the Kid came through, playing Chris like a master.
There was a new Sherrif in town.
