8 - The Letter, pt. 1

Sit down with a poker player, I mean a really good, professional poker player for more than a few minutes, and you will realize that the good ones, the really good ones, can calculate and rattle off statistics at an alarming pace. They do it constantly. If they pick up two aces, they know that the odds of drawing those cards are one in two-hundred and twenty-one. Four aces in a deck of cards, the probability of drawing one ace is four in fifty-two. Having removed one ace and not replacing it reduces the probabilities of drawing another ace on the second draw- therefore the probability of drawing an ace on the second draw is three in fifty-one. Multiply these probabilities and you have one in two-twenty-one. That's the easy stuff. You don't even sit down at the table without knowing that. Then let's say the river comes out and it's a king, a queen, and a ten, and they're all the same suit. Good poker players know instantly that the odds of that exact combination coming out is one in seventy-two thousand. The odds of a jack in the right suit coming out at this stage is actually a paltry one-in-forty-seven, but the odds of that happening on top of all that has already happened is a whopping three and a half million to one. Those are the sort of odds fingerprint experts give as testimony in court, and men are convicted for life on. Yet, at this stage, against all odds, this is exactly what has happened. The odds of anything else having happened are precisely zero. The odds of anything else ever having happened were zero at the moment the cards were dealt- the order was already decided. It all played out like clockwork.

This is the insanity that lies behind probability- the odds of any one thing happening may be infinitesimal, yet one of those practically impossible things will happen. This is why a lot of professional poker players periodically take a few months off the game after a big loss- because the massive odds can overwhelm you at times. The odds of your straight flush being beaten are incomprehensibly small, yet that hand has been beaten, been beaten over and over, in fact. Even when the chances that it would be beaten were to be so small they would tend towards zero, it still happens- in fact, it must happen.

Of course, if you talk to the really, really good players, the dozen or so at the very top, they will tell you it doesn't even matter what you're holding. You could be holding onto a pair of duds- the aim is to win the pot before it ever gets to the stage where you have to show them. That was, in my father's philosophy, the secret of life. Always pretend you had the winning hand, and make damned sure everyone believed you.

There are two fundamental problems with that idea, and you've probably already figured at least one of them out. The first was that, after a while, you start believing your own pitch. If you really believe that whatever you project is the truth, after a while you get suckered by your own scam, and you believe it to. Then you don't know what the truth really is, and that becomes a big fuckin' problem when you run into problemo dos, that being, underneath marketing, under probability, underneath what you believe, there's this little thing called reality, and it doesn't care what you believe, or what you've been pitching as the truth. You end up being the guy who lays down his pair of twos like it's the nuts flush, and you get cleaned out. You can tell everyone how great you're feeling, but if you've got cancer and you act like you don't, it will eat you from the inside out and what people perceived will be largely irrelevant. Perception is not fucking everything. I'm not saying you can't manipulate what people perceive in order to make them buy your product, or your story, or you, I mean, I did get a degree in marketing, just like the old man wanted, and I recognize that it's a powerful thing. I'm not saying it ain't. I'm just saying that it is only powerful in the context of recognizing that it is a layer on top of reality, or a way of presenting reality to best effect. Once you cross the line and start to believe that your bullshit is reality, well, then you are not the player. You're the played, and the worst part of it is you are playing yourself. Like the saying goes around the poker table- if you can't spot the sucker in the first couple of rounds, you are the sucker.

So of course it came as no surprise (well, I lie, it did come as a surprise to be honest, though it shouldn't have) when my dad turned out to be an inveterate liar, one so engrossed in his own lies that he actually believed them to be truths. Let me tell you about a guy named Richard Castellano. True story, this. He showed up in a small town in upstate New York, and rapidly convinced the entire township that he was the talent scout for a movie that was looking for a location to be shot on, and locals to play bit parts. The whole town practically fell over itself trying to get him to bring the production there, lined up around the block to be shot by him in the hope they would be in the movie when it came, the city council even gave him money, paid his rent, bought him things, in a hope to sweeten the deal. And it worked, y'know, the guy, he said: "For sure, the production is coming here." He was as surprised as anyone else when the whole thing never materialized. It was a lie, created by him, but by the time it got to the end of the scam, he was as big a part of it as anyone else, he was as taken in by his own dream as everybody else was. In short, he was a crazy man. Like Marlon Brando going crazy on the set of 'Apocalypse Now'. Actors, ad men, car salesmen, priests, they're all marketeers, they all walk the same thin line between believing the lie enough to sell it to everyone else, and believing it so much that they become it.

My dad was not Richard Castellano, but he may as well have been. By the time his lies unraveled, he was just as confused by their unreality as everyone else was- more so, probably.

I remember the exact moment when I resolved not to be that guy, when I saw how close I came to believing in his religion. It was the day I got fired from my first and last marketing job. My boss took me into his office to talk about, god, I don't know, whatever campaign we were working on at the time. I think it was a promotional gig for a new website that had basically no business model. The thing was not going to make a profit, and we knew it, but we had to sell it to investor portfolios like it was a sure-fire money-spinner. It was basically a money-sink for clueless investors, and we were the ones who had to sell them the lemon. And well, we went back and forth over this, my boss and I, over where we could draw the line between reality and the picture of reality we wanted to project. And at one stage, trying to get his point across, he quotes Oscar Wilde at me!

"Remember what Oscar Wilde said: 'If people act on something as though they believe it to be a reality, then it becomes a reality.'" He said, as smug as you like, as though he'd just served the ultimate pithy expression and all further discussion was moot. Well, two things: One, Oscar Wilde never said that, and never wrote it. People just love to attribute any and all quotations that seem smart to Oscar bloody Wilde. But two, and worst of fucking all, my boss really believed that Oscar Wilde said it, even though the man had unlikely read any Wilde in himself. He was like, disproving his own essential argument in the very moment that he created it. If he believed that was an Oscar Wilde quote, so his reasoning went, then for all intents and purposes, it was. Well I'm fucking sorry, but no, he didn't say it, and no amount of belief was going to change that. Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal. That's a bloody genuine Oscar Wilde quote right there, and I said that to my boss, along with a more forceful version of what I have just written above, and I think it became very clear to both of us at that time that I was not exactly cut out to go very far in the world of marketing.

So I determined to live a life free of bullshit, or at least, as little bullshit as one can get away with in this world. I promised myself I would be above all of that. I went back to school, studied accounting. Not creative accounting. The hard numbers stuff. Didn't do amazingly at it, but did well enough to get ahead. After a while, I don't know, ten years, I got a sort of a reputation for being the guy who called things as they were. Certainly didn't advance my career at all times, certainly some bullshitters surged ahead of me at certain points, but like the tortoise and the hare, eventually those guys would slip up, while I plodded quietly along. The marketers of the world don't want you to know it, but there is actually a call for honesty in most businesses, and if you've got it, after a while it pays off. So I came on the long path, but after a while I became fairly successful at what I did, and moved up the chain in a pretty respectable firm.

I met my wife there. Alison. She was an accountant, too. God, I loved her. It was a slow courtship, took years for me to work up enough nerve to ask her out. Turns out she had been working up her nerve for just as long. We got married four months later. We were both on good incomes so we were able to get a pretty decent house fairly quickly. It was all a bit of a whirlwind. Kids soon followed. Three sons, one after the other. Evan, then James, then Carl. I see them so clearly in my mind. No, not in my mind. I see them as though they are standing right in front of me. So beautiful, my beautiful boys. My whole life was them. I see them. Watching me. Asking why. How can you live your whole life being true, doing everything right, and still screw up so badly? I had fifteen incredible years with them, my God, when I think about how much time I wasted, how they frustrated me sometimes, how I never saw what was right in front of me. I tried to be a good dad, I tried to be a good man. I fucked up so badly. Christ, forgive me. I fucked things up so bad.