The first key to being part of a heist is to show that you’ve got a special skill. There are guys who can sit on top of elevators and make them all fucked up, and there are guys who make disguises. There’s usually someone like a girl who is really good with knives and is also kind of terrifying. But whatever the skill is, you need SOMETHING. Which is why I spent a lot of years barfing on money.
I can play my body like a fiddle. Like someone who is good at fiddle can play a fiddle, anyway. I’m no good at fiddle, so it’s not a good comparison. But you know what I mean.
I can barf on command. Shit. Belch. Whatever. I can do other stuff too like cry, but that’s never worked. Never got me out of a ticket. Probably because it’s pretty ugly when I cry. It’s too pathetic, and instead of getting me out of the ticket, it gets me into a worse ticket because the cop is so disgusted. Then I go to court, cry again, and pretty soon I’m in an orange jumpsuit and someone’s telling me to ask for kosher food because it sucks less.
I know what you’re thinking. Being able to barf whenever you want doesn’t sound too useful. But trust me, if there’s one thing I learned from this lady who built an empire off pictures of her giant butt online, any gift is useful. You just need the right application.
The first trick is getting invited to a poker game. My tactic is to sit at a bar with a Poker For Fuck-Ups book next to me, and I look at a page, shuffle a deck of cards, but I shuffle them so they all explode up in the air. Then I gather up the cards and look in the book again, like I’m trying to figure out what went wrong, and then I shuffle again and explode the cards again. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get invited to a poker game when you do it like this.
Meanwhile, I have two fat wallets poking out of the back of my pants, and when I buy my drinks, I pull out a wad separate from the two wallets. And while I pick up the cards I exploded, bills fall out of my pockets and the collar of my shirt and my ear (this is a variation of a trick I learned from my fun uncle or “funcle,” not to be confused with a “fuckle.” That’s a different uncle who you might also get money from, but he doesn’t just give it to you. You earn it. With silence).
My whole act seems pretty obvious. Some people will tell you “Don’t hit me over the head with it,” but I’ll tell you right now, if you hit someone over the head with a wallet full of money, they will get the point. And the point is that you have a wallet and inside that wallet there’s money.
Last week I got invited to a poker game. I was getting housed, like usual. One of my biggest problems is I genuinely don’t know how to play poker. At all. You’d think I’d pick some of it up by now, but I’m pretty thick that way. Plus, I’m usually focused on the food and drinks at poker parties. You’d be amazed. Like at this party last week, there was a GIANT party sub. And if you don’t know the difference between a sub and a party sub, the difference is a party sub is gigantic. That’s what makes a sandwich into a party, gigantism. It’s the same principle as drinking. What’s the difference between drinking and partying? Quantity.
Anyway, I’m eating a lot of party sub because it’s pretty good, and I just keep folding. Every time I’m supposed to bet or call or whatever, I say, “Fold,” and set my cards down on the table. Because one of the keys to eating a lot of sub is to have your hands empty of cards most of the time. The more time there’s no cards in your hands, the more time you can have sandwich in your hands, which is only one small step from having that sandwich in your face.
The one guy, Hank, picked me up at a bar while I was doing my explode the cards routine. He invited me over to his garage, where we’re all sitting around this fancy poker table he built, which then he had to put in the garage because it was destroying his marriage to have a poker table and a bunch of guys smoking cigars inside.
I know a lot of the keys to things, and the key to a good marriage is to take whatever you love the most in life, whatever brings you joy, and be willing to relocate it to the garage and use it only once every few months when you’ve built up enough relationship capital to have a big fight with your wife without her leaving you because you wanted to experience one shred of joy, which involved picking up a stranger at a bar, getting annihilated, spending hundreds of dollars on sandwiches, and staying up until 3 AM and playing poker.
I’m not married, but trust me. I’m a good observer.
Anyway, the other guys are getting suspicious because I keep folding, but it’s cool because they keep collecting my “aunty,” whatever the hell that means, and I’m doing a good job of talking through mouthfuls of party sub and saying stuff like, “Gee whiz, of all the rotten luck,” and other stuff Charlie Brown would probably say if he tried to play poker and always lost.
Did Charlie Brown have leukemia? Is that why he was bald and with no eyebrows? I guess the good thing when your kid has leukemia is that you can get them a Snoopy and be pretty sure the dog will outlive the kid. Hey, it’s not a huge ray of sunshine, but I’m talking about childhood cancers here. What do you expect?
After a couple hours and a couple feet of party sub, it’s time to make my move.
The money is all out on the table, and I take a moment to center myself. It’s a tough puke this time. I’m very full, but it’s all bread and meat and stuff. I should probably drink smoothies or something at these things, but you’d be surprised how little these guys seem to care about their health. They’re just always eating smoked meats and cheeses and stuff. Not a lot of probiotics.
I just have to think of something really gross, and that can usually get me going. Someone told me once that if you’re having sex and want to slow it down, imagine you’re having sex with your grandma on a huge pile of garbage. That was pretty gross, but when I tried that one it backfired and I finished really fast. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a testament to the abilities of the person I slept with that time. But either way, it weirded me out, and I haven’t really come back from it.
If all else fails, I squeeze my balls a little. That’s pretty nauseating.
Hank is like, “Hey, man. Are you playing or what?”
“Just a second,” I say.
I say, “I think that sandwich might have something funny in it.”
Or, at least that’s what I start to say before puke rockets out of my mouth and covers the table, the cards, most of the other players, and best of all, the money.
The part of puking you never get used to is when you have to wait to take a breath. Puke takes forever to finish up so you can breathe in again. My eyeballs are tight in the socket, and I wonder if they’ll shoot out of my head too. That would be cool if I could do that, but this is real life, not Beetlejuice world.
I won’t bother you with the details of how long it takes to clean a garage full of puke. Where do you even begin? One time I did one of these, and the guy who owned the house, he stood there in horror, handing me paper towels one at a time. A paper towel would be totally saturated, and you couldn’t even tell any cleaning had gone on whatsoever.
After I finish, there’s usually at least one person who leaves right away. Like leaves the entire house. There’s usually one person who vomits or almost vomits himself and can’t stay in the room. There’s always one or two people who stay in the room, but they mostly just want to unwind all the puke. And puke is something you can never unwind.
If you do a puke like this right, it goes everywhere. Hope dies last, but the interval from first to last when it comes to a guy sitting at your poker table, he’s covered in puke, the table, everything, the time between the hope starting to die and dying its last is a pretty short interval.
And everyone has a limit. Some find the limit when puke mostly fille an ash tray, and a cigar on the edge is still burning and starts cooking the puke. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone go beyond that. That’s pretty much the touchdown plus conversion of puking on poker tables.
I just start sweeping puke and paper towels and the whole tablecloth into a garbage bag. And the money. Sometimes they see the money go in, but is $20 of your money worth having if it’s covered in puke? Some people say yes, but most people just want this whole thing to be over. And if they get testy about it, I start gagging some more.
When I go out to my car with my bag full of puke and money, there’s a guy out there, leaning against my car. I don’t get all bent out of shape about people leaning on my car, but the problem is I have a really shitty car, so even though I don’t get bent out of shape, my car actually does get bent out of shape when people lean on it or lightly brush against it. If I drive faster than about 40, the wind resistance starts to warp the frame.
This guy looks slick. It’s hard to describe someone who looks slick because when I do, the person just sounds like an asshole.
Okay, this guy was wearing shoes, but leather nice shoes, but they looked comfortable too. And he didn’t have any socks on. If I tried to do that, the shoes would smell terrible. But with this guy, you could tell his shoes didn’t smell bad at all and his feet probably didn’t sweat and most of the time you figure he probably doesn’t smell all that bad where I smell like a giant ballsack just from riding in the car to work when it’s a little too sunny.
The guy said, “Nice work in there.”
I covered my mouth and said, “Thanks.” I covered my mouth because I definitely still smelled like puke breath.
The guy, the slick guy, he reached in his pocket, and he pulled out a thing of gum. He held it out to me, and I went to take a stick, but he said, “Keep it. The whole thing. I don’t chew gum.”
I said thanks and chewed a piece, and then I put in another piece right away because I could tell one wasn’t going to cut it. The first piece sort of absorbed the puke flavor from my mouth, so it just tasted like puke flavor.
Pretty quick I polished off the whole pack.
By the time the slick guy said, “I have a business proposition for you. Want to take a ride?” I had to nod because my mouth was too full of gum to say actual words