DeathRow Erik

He’s a movie actor… a stuntman… a professional poker player… a former football star… a charity- poker organizer. He was run over by a school bus. He’s someone who learned to play poker while spending time in a Pakistani prison for drug smuggling. And he’s probably the funniest (and raunchiest) poker blogger around.

His name is Erik Aude (pronounced AwDAY). He’s easy to spot in a cardroom, because he’s impressively buff at 6-foot-1 and 215 pounds. But the wonder is that he’s even still alive. After being run over by a school bus in the third grade and suffering a broken pelvis, he became the first person on the planet to have his urethra severed and reconnected, a procedure that took 40 surgeries. “I is Ironman!” he declares.

His mother, Sherry Aude, is a casting director who helped him break into films as an actor and stuntman while he was in high school. His credits include roles in sitcoms and such movies as Varsity Blues, Remember the Titans, Van Wilder, Scorpion King, and Dude! Where’s My Car? He was also a high-school football standout, who didn’t let injuries slow him down. Then, in 2002, when he was 21, his dream life and sports/acting career came to an abrupt end when he was arrested with 3.6 kilos of opium in his suitcase at the Islamabad airport and sentenced to seven years in a Pakistani prison on smuggling charges.

It was a bum rap. He was working in a gym in Burbank, California, when he met a smooth talking used-car dealer named Razmik Minasian, who hired him to pick up a suitcase filled with fine-leather jackets. He never mentioned that drugs were inside the linings. Two years later, a story in the Los Angeles Times related how Erik would write to his mother nearly every day from his prison cell:

“He tells her about the beatings he has endured, the executions he has witnessed. He tells her about his boredom and despair, and the wasting away of his once-chiseled weightlifter’s body. Sometimes, the 23-year-old muses about suicide.” The story goes on to tell how his mother “has exhausted and nearly bankrupted herself trying to save her youngest child from a seven-year sentence she doubts he will survive.”

Well, Erik somehow managed to make the most of this grim period. He learned to play poker while spending his first nine months on death row (which is how he got his nickname from an Australian newspaper), then moved into the general population and passed the time by running tournaments.

“I was the only American the entire time I was there,” he says (with his nationality earning him repeated death threats). “There were a lot of Europeans. Most of them — in fact, all of them — were a bunch of SOB’s that deserved to be there. We’d play for cash. Five or 10 rupees was the normal buy-in, and we’d play tournaments mostly for food. Toward the end, I was getting 60 to 80 players. The guards and superintendents would even play. My days were always filled up with something, whether learning languages, playing poker, working on my case or another prisoner’s case, or watching movies. I had fun in jail.”

Six months after his sentencing, he was proven innocent when Minasian, pleading guilty in a separate drug-smuggling case, signed an affidavit that Aude did not know that he was an unwitting drug “mule.” But it wasn’t until Aude had spent 34 months in prison that his conviction was overturned and he was released, and he arrived back in America on Christmas Day.

“After my return,” he explains, “I found the road to acting and stunts nowhere near as easy as before, so I did the only other thing I was ever good at: I was given $50 by a friend, and I turned it into $1,200 that night at the local casino. I never looked back. I’m now a celebrity professional poker player who has played in and won dozens of charity tournaments.” In February, Aude personally brought more than 30 celebs to the WPT Celebrity Invitational at Commerce Casino, where a player he taught to play finished 11th. Along the way, Aude, who also owns three restaurants, resumed his acting and stunt career while flying around the country to help with charity poker tournaments.

OK, so what about the blog business? Well, he churns out frequent diatribes about poker and his personal life on Facebook and Twitter. They’re wild, riotous, and filled with more expletives in almost every sentence than John Bonetti could come up with on his best day. Although a few people find his ravings offensive, most of his followers think they’re hysterical.

Here’s one of his latest (as of this writing) and funniest blogs — not recommended reading for children.

This week started off as the worst week ever. Doctors diagnosed me with sleep apnea and told me that there was really nothing they could do for me. I panicked. I took this to mean the end was near, so I applied for some credit cards (maxed the hell out of them), a Macy’s gift card, started smoking Marlboro, moved up to a steady heroin habit quickly, sold 4 gallons of sperm to support my habit (it was not all mine), had sex with a flight attendant (unfortunately, we weren’t in the air, but I still claim Mile High status), rented two videos from Blockbuster with no intention of ever returning them, took out a 90 percent four-hour loan from a man named LegBreaker, and told him to kiss my ass as I jumped on the back end of a train to secure my getaway. Outran the cops; they were extremely fat and off duty, but it still counts. Stepped in some dog shit. Yelled at the dog. Got bit by the dog. Rushed to the free-clinic emergency room. Waited 14 hours before being treated. Pointed out that it was pointless to be treated, because my days were numbered from the sleep apnea. Learned it meant I snored, and nothing more. Received 17 shots in my stomach for the treatment of rabies. Keyed the car of the doctor who caused all that … yeah.

And that’s Erik Aude. He’s a man of many talents, but there’s one thing he’s not likely to be — ever: a kindergarten teacher.

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.