Gregory Hofmann
Deuces, Aces, One-Eyed Faces are wild. The Suicide Jack is two wild, and the Poopy Ace is worth four. Ante up for some blackjack with a gang of cutthroat twelve-year-olds.
If you were dealt the Poopy Ace, you had five of a kind or an easy royal flush. If you didn't have it, the safe thing to do was fold every time.
I lost my Rickey Henderson rookie card and my brother lost a Playboy centerfold in the same hand to our neighbor Tim Whitman. Tim had six aces, but he was so terrified of his father discovering his naughty winnings that he took it home and immediately burned the centerfold in the Whitman family trash. It took some time for him to regain the trust of the Hofmann boys and return to the poker circle, and why did his family burn all that trash, anyhow?
I lost my lifetime collection of baseball cards to my older brother in one afternoon of loose cannon five card draw. Final hand of my young poker career, he spun the Poopy Ace in his fingers like Kingfellow the wizard twirling a dagger of fire. The edges of the card were soft and browned after years of use. The titular drawing on it had faded some, but even as I lost everything, I smiled at the simple comedy on that card. The Ace of Hearts. Turned upside down to form a bright red set of butt cheeks. Legs added below, and a torso added above. The pooping man is surprised that he's pooping, just as I am surprised to be losing the collection that I had spent my childhood accumulating.
The Poopy Ace is still at home. So is my baseball card collection, but it's not mine anymore. Real Hofmann family skeleton in the top right hand drawer of the old sewing machine. It's in a pack of cards bound by rubber bands to a 1985 edition of According to Hoyle. I learned how to play Cribbage from that book, but not Bridge or Euchre. My mother is always excited to reteach me the basics of Pinochle when I come home for a visit. And every time that we sit down at the kitchen table for a game of Gin Rummy, there's the Poopy Ace, robbed of its power because my mother says we can't gamble on Gin Rummy. We should just have a good laugh, a couple glasses of wine, and fill each other in on new thoughts, lingering concerns, and weigh her understanding of the world against mine. She wins that hand.
I'm not a gambler any more. I am a writer, and usually of fiction. As I fill pages with stories of socio-political drama, bad love gone good, non-violent violence, sci-fi travel memoirs and the architecture of religion, I have many bookmarks to hold my place. Among them, one is my mother, one is my brother, one is my other brother, and another is the Poopy Ace.
In my third book written within the fictional universe of No Surrender – working title: Epic – as the inanimate world comes alive at the atomic level and battles to maintain a balance between humankind and a living Earth, as a plague of zombies descends upon Rick Chicago and the Church of It-Doesn't-Matter Saints, and as Maggie Smith and her new boyfriends enjoy salads and coitus, a piece of poop on a mission comes up out of a toilet in Seattle, Washington. There's graffiti all over the walls – enough erotic testimonials about a man named Raymond that he almost takes the name for himself, but instead he calls himself FeCaesar the Imperialistic Roman Turd. He takes a wife and he leads his shitty people out of the sewers, out of the city and into the light, the fields, the mountains, the soils where their ancestors once laid themselves down to give their bodies back to the earth. It is not a journey easily made on account of modern sanitation and the gross factor, but he's got six dirty aces up his sleeve. He's a cultural challenger masquerading as a poop joke. He's got hope on his side because where I grew up, playing poker with Tim Whitman and my brothers, everything was wild. Total batshit crazy chaos. Go all in, because you just might win. You also might get the poopy end of the sticky.
Deuces, aces, one-eyed faces. The Suicide Jack is worth two. And the Poopy Ace will bring power to your people. True fucking story.
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