I have to start this week’s reading response with the image of two seasoned (read moderately wrinkled and beginning to grey—or balding) male sports enthusiasts chest-bumping while sucking in their stomachs which leads to a slip of their jeans hopefully to fall no lower than the small tuft of hair above their butt-cracks. OK, so I can be a little crude when the occasion calls for it. And this is it. I find Colson Whitehead’s chronicles of a place called Anhedonia truly inspirational in that regard. I had to look up the author’s designated homeland, his native soil. The MedicineNet.com definition reads, “Anhedonia: Loss of the capacity to experience pleasure. The inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences. Anhedonia is a core clinical feature of depression, schizophrenia, and some other mental illnesses.” Wow. That’s a pretty tough place to live (which might explain the divorce and the fear of learning to drive in Whitehead’s sports confessional, if too conveniently).
I found this image of poker champs at http://www.worldpokertour.com/ after reading Whitehead's description--too perfect!
Congratulations to Jack McClelland, WPT Champions Club™ Members Scotty Nguyen and Barry
Greenstein, and the seven other poker legends on being nominated for the Poker Hall of Fame.
I find Colson Whitehead to be an E. B. White without the New Yorker sophistication, without the classy act amid the pig poop—“free to be me” as we used to say in my youth (read late sixties through the seventies), served up with an ample helping of self-loathing. In the bus depot he is Frank Conroy in Grand Central Station sizing up the vendors and their environs (sans the tender age and later insight). upon reaching Atlantic City, Whitehead mocks and scoffs at the “Plex” his symbol of American social-improvement—a steaming pile of success—that peeks into our craniums through the all-seeing-electronics of invisible marketing masters, who track our potty breaks and eye movements with equal appetite.
By now, one can’t help but notice that after reading Whitehead’s “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia,” that I have slipped into his sass, fallen into his sarcasm, drifted toward his asides. But he is also self-depreciating; doggedly owning his “soulless gaze,” his face a “mask,” …“this thing draped over my skull.” But more than that, Whitehead’s words read as the silent scream of a man “half-dead inside.” Perfect for poker, he acknowledges. But he is no master of the game. He is using his assets but they are tottering on sleeplessness. And he pauses to somewhat morbidly find the silver lining in joint custody, “you're going to go max 36 hours until someone discovers your decomposing body. “Anyone seen him? He was supposed to pick her up after school.’” That insight alone is worth the read. Oh, wait, but I gave it away. Well, take it as a teaser, because there’s more waiting to be uncovered.
Grantland.com, where this piece resides, seems to invite the masculine version of “touchy-feely,” emoting that is veiled safely under the guise of “sports writing” (which includes sixty-something bottle red heads and hulky boozers and hoodie encased young internet addicts with sweaty palms slapping cards and poker chips down on a felt playing field).
Many of Whitehead’s big confessions and provocative humor, at the expense of social targets, are delivered in a dah-dum, end of paragraph quick jab sentence (unless he can’t resist another aside). Waxing literary, he talks about fiction forms that guide this piece as the journey of a hero or the visit of a stranger—declining the hero for a “hapless-loser” he dons the robe of the stranger who “comes to gamble.” This is perfect Whitehead self-flagellation: If I’m the first to throw a punch at my own face, or life, or fears, or loserliness—then it is funny and you have nothing left to hit me with, seems to be his dance. A great and time-honored tradition in comic writing (and performance, for that matter). And from that lowly place, mediated by a brief admission of prior acts of kindness, Whitehead is free to poke and prod the many soft spots in his comrades’ armor, shifting it to the right, lifting to peek underneath, revealing conversations around him like a skilled fly-on-the-wall journalist, who wears the mask of a feckless participant in the game at hand—1-2 poker.
And “luck is merely the temporary state of outrunning your impending disasters.” That’s the state of Anhedonia according to Whitehead. This tour leading to the Las Vegas Pavilion and the World Series of Poker—all the studying, Helen, his “sensei” but this is still Whitehead, the pragmatic pessimist. So he starts his recounting of the final leg of his epic journey with more whippings and a dose of sass: “Like my first sexual experience, my time at the World Series of Poker didn't last long … is how I would have started this section if I'd been eliminated the first day. But I wasn't. Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.” Mortal decay and the sarcophagus that he has tried out in the approximation of “cement” hotel room beds—will have to wait. He's made it to the big time where celebrities saunter through casinos.
I’d have to say my favorite constant in the Whitehead’s piece, aside from the dependable beat-himself-up shtick, was the relentless sprinkling of metaphors. Near the end of the Part Three, he was muddling through the tournament and sums up his modus operandi, “I railbirded for two days, watching, trying to get accustomed to the ebb and flow of the place, listening to the crickets.” I'm with him. I've slipped back to countless hot August nights, escaping my stifling bedroom listening to male members of the orthoptera clan rubbing their slender thighs against pulsating veins in their forewings; “diddling” as Whitehead would say. Not unlike poker players playing Texas Hold’em “under blue and crimson” lights in a dark shelled cathedral to the “Leisure Industrial Complex,” displaying and then bagging their chips.
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