#557 - London 2008 #64 - Day of the Dead

My friend Melissa, the photographer whose boyfriend is Allen Cunningham, asked me to help her get together with Al Alvarez, famous English author, poet, and critic, and legendary in poker for writing THE BIGGEST GAME IN TOWN, the best book ever written about poker. I met Al last year through our mutual good friend Tony Holden (himself a famous English author, opera critic, and poker legend for penning BIG DEAL and, in 2007, BIGGER DEAL). I heard his health had declined but it was magical meeting him then. At 5′6″ and slightly stooped, I thought him a giant.

Melissa knew him and Tony from way back, but she hadn’t been in touch with Al for awhile and asked me to help. This created a gathering party of four - me, Melissa, Al Alvarez, and Tony Holden. We would meet at a pub in Hampstead named “The Flask.”

It sounded very British and authentic, especially to a non-drinking American like me. Melissa insisted we take a cab and then gave the driver a large tip. I’m usually a good tipper but, after hearing the different tipping styles of Americans and Europeans, I felt I couldn’t have stuck out more as we exited the cab while the driver tried to get Melissa to take some of the tip back.

I needn’t have worried. Though The Flask seemed like a local’s hangout, there was a big sign on the wall encouraging people to visit the pub’s web site and Facebook page. Then I saw camera flashes and heard excited American voices at the next table.

But the show and the afternoon were stolen by Al Alvarez. After again hearing that Al was nearing eighty, not getting around so well, in declining health, etc. etc. etc., I wouldn’t have been surprised if he appeared as a spectral apparition on The Flask’s website. But in the flesh, Alvarez looked and sounded very fit, active, ALIVE. He swam in a nearby pond earlier in the day, something he does even in Hampstead’s frigid winters. Yes, he has a walker to help him through the cobbled, rutted streets, though he acts as if he somehow hasn’t earned it after punishing his body for most of his eighty or so years with strenuous acts of derring-do. (I have a picture in my office of Alvarez, hanging by a thread, from the side of a mountain.)

Here before me was the same man from that picture, with a bit less hair and a walker stashed behind him but still with the color and vitality of the man on the mountain. Alvarez was an energetic raconteur, his razor-sharp mind in top form. And I can’t think of a person I’ve ever met who more accurately embodies the description “twinkle in his eye.”

Anthony Holden has written thirty books and told me some of the most entertaining stories I’ve ever heard. Because of him I’ve partied with Steve Martin, Erica Jong, Tina Brown, and Sir Harold Evans. But he was relegated to a footnote - as was Melissa, a great storyteller with an admirably big mouth - to Alvarez, his mentor, colleague, card-playing conspirator, and Crony of more than three decades.

Visiting with Al Alvarez was a lively experience.

So we mostly talked about death.

Seriously.

For some reason, these guys (with Alvarez leading) rattled off stories of dead poker players. There was the one about the funeral of a member of Tony’s and Al’s famous Tuesday game. After the funeral, as they were returning to their cars, one player in the game said to Al, “We’re all ending up here anyway. I don’t know why we didn’t just bring the cards and chips to pass the time and save ourselves a trip.”

Or the other funeral of a player in the game. As he was being lowered into the ground, someone whispered to Alvarez, “Poor fellow. He’s finally going all-in.”

We talked about Jack Straus (deceased) and Sailor Roberts (deceased). We talked about the letters that Straus and Crandell Addington wrote Tony after both his parents died in the span of a week. Naturally, we also mentioned poker writer David Spanier, also once a part of the Tuesday Night Game, who also passed away long ago.

Inevitably, Jimmy Chagra’s name came up. I mentioned that Jack Straus was briefly a suspect in the most expensive federal murder investigation - more expensive than investigation of the Kennedy Assassination - in history, the murder of federal judge “Maximum John” Wood, just before the start of Chagra’s narcotics trafficking trial. Chagra’s gambling had kept the big game going in Vegas and made Straus and Roberts a lot of money. They were frequently with Chagra and Straus was a marksman, relevant to the fact that the judge was shot from a great distance with a high-powered rifle.

The man currently in prison for that murder, Charles Harrelson, was a regular around the fringes of Vegas gambling and he is the answer to several unbelievable trivia questions. He is actor Woody Harrelson’s father and supposedly, to get a pass on the Wood killing, offered to confess instead to killing President Kennedy from the grassy knoll in Dallas, a claim that for years was considered not impossible. Melissa mentioned that she knew a woman who helped Harrelson get a gun, not knowing its use, but who went to prison and died there. And Chagra’s wife, who also went to prison for the murder, died in prison as well.

Jimmy Chagra’s older and younger brothers were both murdered, his younger brother a talented defense lawyer. I mentioned that the only person still alive was probably Jimmy Chagra, who went to prison on the trafficking charges but not the murder and was released not long ago.

Then Melissa told me that he, too, died of cancer, very recently. He was, however, spotted at least once between his release from prison and his death at the Bellagio, hanging around Bobby’s Room.

So it was an interesting and strange afternoon. Al Alvarez is still a vital presence and his entire aura is life-affirming. He was hardly at death’s door, but for some reason we all had our psychic cable TVs tuned to the Moribund Channel and couldn’t find the remote control.

Melissa and I had at least one non-death experience - an argument. In the cab on the way to the pub, we argued about whose terrier has gotten into more mischief. I was in the running for awhile, because Harpo has eaten a computer and a torah. But Melissa’s and Allen’s dog won, eating a couple pairs of expensive eyeglasses, trying to make off with one of Allen’s bracelets, and eating a $600,000 check.

“I had to put the check together over a couple hours, like a jigsaw puzzle, then call the issuer and the tournament director and the bank to explain it all. The bank took the check because the signature and the bank’s ABA number were intact, but just barely.”