Can’t We All Get Along?

It’s a little late for New Year’s resolutions, but maybe I can make a midyear resolution. I’ve been thinking about all the people I’ve ticked off by sticking them into my columns, and wonder if I should apologize and back off. If I did, I might not have anything else to write about, but at least I wouldn’t get so many death threats.

Of course, not everyone has minded my humor. As I’ve said before, one of my favorite targets used to be John Bonetti, because of his Brooklyn-Italian accent, his continual war with dealers, and his record number of “coise-woid” penalties. But he never objected, and always would say that I made him “piss in his pants laughing.”

This was despite the fact that our first meeting was not very promising. It was in 1996 at the Four Queens Poker Classic. The casino had issued a number of commemorative poker chips. He was on one of them, and my sweetie, Barbara Enright, whom the Four Queens named “1st Player of the Year,” was on another. During one of the tournaments, John was needling Barbara, offering to sell her $5 chips at a discount. To retaliate, I printed a batch of flyers offering to sell his chips for something like $1.95. He caught me distributing them and wasn’t very appreciative, but he got over it and we became friends.

Tom McEvoy, another good friend, never complained when I made wisecracks about his taste in clothing, notably the time when we were in a clothing store, and he insisted on buying an atrocious necktie decorated with pictures of pigs on motorcycles. Recently, he informed me that he bought the tie just to give me column material. Of course, he also once wrote a column calling me a lying, no-good wretch, but he was just kidding — I think.

Frank Henderson, one of the most likeable guys in poker, pretty much gave me free rein to satirize his hustling endeavors (like the time I wrote about him selling players the rights to have poker hands named after them). And Phil Hellmuth has never come after me for the jokes I’ve made at his expense, such as the time he had a meltdown and Barbara had to change his diapers.

Others, though, have been less tolerant. Eskimo Clark once threw a fit for my casting him in a movie called The Barstow Kid Rides Again, in which Aunt Sophie tries to kiss him and he says, “Get away from me, you old hag.” Eskimo threatened to sue me for a million dollars, saying he would never talk that way to a lady. (Whoever said Aunt Sophie was a lady?)

More frightening was the intimidation and threats I got from another player because he thought that a character named Ham Gristle, voted the meanest man in poker, sounded a little like him. In the story, a banquet was held in Gristle’s honor at the Barstow Card Casino. When I saw Gristle seated behind a plate of glass, I asked Big Denny if it was to keep the audience from throwing tomatoes at him, and Denny said it was to keep Gristle from spitting on the audience. Since the player in question is known to have punched out several people for various reasons, I have been careful to watch my back ever since, especially after he once invited me to step outside and go “jogging” with him.

Then there is Windy Waggy, whom I have used in a few stories. While she is a fictional character, the inspiration did come from a lady who had always been a puzzle to me, because she was as well-known for her pushy, name-dropping traits as she was for her accomplishments in poker and business. I dreamed up Windy after learning that the lady has a habit of camping out at people’s homes until they have to find ways to get rid of her. This led to a story in which she descends on the Barstow Card Casino and bosses Big Denny around. No trouble so far.

Then, last year I learned that this lady had been hustling voting members to get her into one of the poker halls of fame. It didn’t take much imagination to write “Vote for Windy Waggy,” a story in which she puts up billboards, spray-paints homes, and badgers me to help get her into the Poker Hall of Fame.

This time, the lady in question reacted. She also talked about suing (maybe she and Eskimo could file a class-action lawsuit). The best thing to come out of it, though, was that now she won’t talk to me.

My final run-in was with a former news bureau writer who has authored a couple of travel books and did some tournament reporting. We became friends mostly because we both favored Omaha high-low. But I soon discovered that he was a very strange dude. He would parade around with a copy of The New York Times under his arm and disparage every other newspaper from the Los Angeles Times on down. He said that he wouldn’t have a cellphone because his “spook” friends at the CIA warned him that people could find him that way (did he think Osama bin Laden was looking for him?). Whenever I introduced him to someone, the first thing he would say was, “I’m a journalist.” Once, while making a doctor’s appointment by phone, he informed the receptionist that he was a journalist, and then, to make sure that she knew he was an international journalist, he informed her that the traffic in Los Angeles was worse than in Bangkok.

Then, he began bombarding me with e-mail obituaries of his numerous newspaper colleagues, who seemed to die at the rate of one a week. He also continually sent me vague warnings of dire looming crises in various countries. So, I decided to christen this doom-and-gloom guy “Doomsday Don,” and use him in a couple of columns. No problem there, because Don actually got a laugh from reading them.

But he also got on my nerves by continually e-mailing me perceived lapses in grammar and ethical standards that he came across in various poker magazines. “Write and tell them about it,” he would urge me. (Yeah, I’m sure they would have appreciated that.) Trying to get him off my back, I sent him a joking message, saying that a mutual friend told me that he had stolen material from another writer for his travel books. Instead of seeing it as a jest, he took it seriously and contacted the friend, thus getting him sore at me (and costing me a lunch to make amends), and indignantly cut off all communications with me.

So, while I still have a couple of friends left, I’ve decided that my midyear resolution will be never to write anything satirical about anybody.

And if you believe that, I have some nice swampland that I’d like to sell you.

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 more than 20 years ago. His early columns were collected in his book, Read ’em and Laugh.