Doomsday Don Visits Barstow

My fans constantly ask me if the characters I write about are real.

Of course they are! Do you think an award-winning journalist like me would make them up, or even exaggerate? And most of the performers in my columns are so outrageous that even I wouldn't have the imagination or gall to invent them.

Amazingly, the majority are characters I met while playing in home games at Ralph the Rattler's house. While a couple of them, like Bob Ciaffone and Mark Tenner, are normal and thus of no value to me, the rest could have come straight from Saturday Night Live. They include, of course, the slithery snake himself; Action Al, the hyperactive clown who's always throwing idiotic column ideas at me; Break-Even Benny, who always breaks even because he's so tight that he never plays a hand; Booger Boy, who once got tossed out of Binion's when he was caught picking his nose and wiping his finger under his chair; Happy Harry, the poster boy for depressive behavior; and (drumroll), the star of that crew, Big Denny.

On his own, the big ape has come up with even better lines than me. For example, one time I was having dinner with him and the Rattler at Lillie Langtry's in the Golden Nugget, which featured a strolling magician. As usual, the Rattler was getting on Denny's nerves, and when the magician stopped by our table, Denny asked if he could make Ralph disappear. Another time, on a Card Player Cruises poker cruise, Denny was unhappy with the way his eggs were prepared. After sending them back two or three times, he threateningly asked the waiter if he knew how to swim.

And then there's Doomsday Don, who is also very real. He never played at the Rattler's house, but he'd fit right in as far as Looney Tunes behavior is concerned. We do have a couple of things in common -- sort of. We both favor Omaha eight-or-better. The difference is that I've mined the game for laughs in my columns, while Omaha has only made Don more distressed. Both of us happen to be writers. The difference here is that I write funny stuff, while Don was a newspaper obituary editor. In other words, I am a humorist, and he is a gloomorist.

By comparison, he makes Happy Harry look like Mary Sunshine. While Harry is despondent only about his own setbacks in life and poker, Doomsday Don's anxieties are global. He constantly e-mails me obituaries of famous journalists who were supposedly friends and colleagues of his; or dire warnings of impending meltdowns in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan; or notices of nuclear weapons being smuggled into the U.S.; and, most disastrous of all, of casinos planning to raise the juice for tournament buy-ins. He won't carry a cellphone because CIA "spook" friends warned that his location could be traced that way (yeah, like Osama bin Laden really cares where he is). One time, he breathlessly informed me that astronomers had found a giant comet that they calculated would crash into the earth in the near future.

"When?" I asked.

"In less than 20 million years!"

Oh, I've tried to help him cheer up. I once took him to a Jackie Mason show. While the rest of the audience was rolling in the aisles, Don was anxiously reading newspapers, looking for disaster stories. Another time, I tried slipping some Prozac into his vitamin box. When he noticed them, he panicked, convinced that terrorists had found him and were attempting to poison him. Another time, I sent him for analysis to Dr. Wolfgang Krock, the eminent poker psychologist. That didn't work out too well. After three sessions, Krock became so terminally depressed that he had to go into rehab himself. When the good doctor was released, I asked him for his professional evaluation of Don.

"Vould you like der full report or a summary?"

"A summary will do."

"He's cracked."

"What's the full report?"

"He's very cracked."

To get Don off my back for a while, I suggested that he drive up to Big Denny's Barstow Card Casino. "They have great games there, and it's a really plush casino/resort," I said, lying my head off.

"Barstow?" he asked suspiciously. "Where's that?"

"Out in the desert. Halfway between L.A. and Vegas."

"The desert?" he shuddered. "Rattlesnakes and scorpions and tarantulas; oh my. No way."

I assured him that the casino was in the middle of town, not out in a tent. He then asked if Barstow was where they used to test nuclear bombs, leaving radioactive fallout. I reminded him that the testing was in Nevada, but neglected to mention that the casino itself was built on a hazardous-waste disposal site. Still not satisfied, he demanded to know if Barstow was the place where aliens in spaceships had abducted residents for testing.

"No, Don," I sighed. "That was Roswell, New Mexico." (As if any alien would be crazy enough to take this character aboard.)
His last question was whether the water was safe to drink. I assured him that the water was safe, but didn't tell him that the food at the casino wasn't.

His suspicions somewhat allayed, Don headed north to Barstow. I wasn't too surprised to later discover that things didn't go well there, either. The only newspaper Don could find was the Barstow Bugle, and the only stories it carried were of Cub Scout meetings, bake sales, penmanship awards, and crop reports; nothing remotely disastrous. When he'd ask a farmer at his table if he heard anything about Pakistan, the rustic would scratch his head and say, "Can't say as I recall any fella by that name."

Still uneasy about his surroundings, Don kept asking the players about dangers from tornados, earthquakes, flooding, forest fires, coyotes, and volcanoes. The more he talked about gloom and doom and potential disasters, the more alarmed the locals became, and one by one, they went home to make sure their families were OK. Finally, Big Denny got wind of what was going on. Hustling over to Doomsday Don's table, he grabbed Don's shirt and lifted him out of his chair.

"What's da idea scarin' all my customers off, ya little fruitcake!" he bellowed.

Don's jowls swung as he vigorously shook his head. "You have no idea," he declared. He then began listing all of the dangers that lurked, domestic, nationally, internationally, from nature, and from space. Denny's face grew paler with each revelation. Finally, he threw Doomsday Don out and closed the casino for the night. The next day, he doubled the security, installed bars on all of the windows and metal detectors by all of the doors, built barbed-wire fencing, and brought in a pack of guard dogs. You can still play at the Barstow Card Casino, but now you have to show valid ID and be prepared to be strip-searched. Oh, and no space aliens allowed, either.

Max Shapiro, a lifelong poker player and former newspaper reporter with several writing awards to his credit, has been writing a humor column for Card Player ever since it was launched 20 years ago. His early columns were collected in his book, Read 'em and Laugh.