#609 – The Night of the Book

I’m decompressing after a busy WSOP Final Table, a big load of blog posts – hope you liked them – and a number of overdue obligations, including several months of personal bills and reporting the results of my three essay contests. Then a book got in the way. Not even a book I was writing, for chrissakes. I started reading David Carr’s The Night of the Gun and vowed that I wouldn’t sleep until I finished it. That blissful moment occurred at 4:43 AM, and then my mind was so busy spinning what I learned from the book that I couldn’t sleep.

So let’s summarize:

1. How did I leave town for four days and come back to find many of my personal bills were three months overdue?

2. I will complete the judging for the essay contests. Winners will receive tournament credit or cash in their accounts, even if the FTOPS are completed. Seriously, though, I hope get the results out by tomorrow.

3. Read David Carr’s The Night of the Gun.

Even if you don’t read. Even if you only read books from Two-Plus-Two. Even if you think the genre of non-fiction starts and ends with The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. Everybody with a measureable IQ should read this book, or have someone read it to them, or listen to the audio. There is even something important in it all for poker players.

Here’s the story. David Carr is a couple years older than me; he’s 52. Between the end of his teens and his early thirties, while otherwise pursuing a career as a talented locacl reporter in Minnesota, he became a drug addict. By his own admission, he was into the Life deep and hard.

At the beginning of the book, he tells a story that I (incorrectly) thought pointed him in the direction of rehab and sobriety. He screwed up one-too-many times at work (one-too-many apparently being in the hundreds) and his editor told him to clean up or he was fired.

He chose getting fired. An(other) epic bender followed, he threw a buddy on top of a car, and then followed the buddy home, where the buddy pulled a gun on him and the police were called in.

But, talking years and years later with the friend, the guy said, yes, he remembered the night, yes, he remembered the fight, “but David, you were the one who pulled the gun.”

Carr refused to believe it, even when, plowing over that same damaged ground with another friend, Friend #2 told about how he helped David skip town on his landlord and drug debts, sneaking back in the apartment to get Carr’s drug stash “and your gun, which you told me where you had hidden it.”

But Carr never owned a gun and hated the few occasions on which he had, as a journalist, picked one up and held it. If there could be so much in dispute about these signal moments in his life – within a year after this, he went into rehab, kicked drugs for good, raised twin daughters as a single parent, remarried and had another daughter, and became a highly-regarded reporter for The New York Times – how much else about his life had he gotten wrong?

So David Carr, a scrupulous journalist for a living but with a careless, faulty, addled brain for his own life, decided to research his own life. He interviews his old friends, drug dealers, doctors, lawyers, rehab counselors, and lovers. He finds police reports, court records, news stories, and medical records. He tells the story of his descent into drugs, the (mis)adventures he had, the cost of that lifestyle, and his recovery. At each juncture, he tells the folktales that, as a professional storyteller, he has leaned on for more than two decades to explain his prior life and how it got fixed.

Then he holds those stories up to the light and finds lies, distortions, omitted details, and ambiguity that served him well but was essentially convenient and dishonest. The true is sometimes better, sometimes worse, and sometimes unknowable. But David Carr unearths a fascinating story – several in fact: (1) the story of the mess he made of his life; (2) the story of how memories become distorted, even about important things, even in ridiculous ways; (3) the story of his recovery and return to the world; (4) the story of how “happily ever after” was, in some ways, as big a simplification and his shorthand for his original slide; and (5) the story of what happens when you go back to things you thought you had left behind, to memories better unremembered, to a chaos with which you thought you made peace.

Apart from being incredibly fascinating reading, this book contains a special significance for poker players. Improving as a poker player means continually learning new skills. At first, it’s about learning the basic rules of the game – hand values, betting structures, etc. Then it’s about skills of the next higher level – hands to fold at the outset, playing draws, hands to fold after the initial rounds. Move a level higher and you’re learning about check-raising, semi-bluffs, etc.

The road to improving at poker is a journey over several bridges, each requiring a higher-level set of skills. I don’t know if anyone ever comes out and says it but I’ve always maintained what you have to do to cross the last bridge: know yourself.

More difficult than anything you will ever learn about poker is learning what’s going on in your own head. The biggest obstacle to your improvement – even (maybe especially) after you learned about every other kind of skill – is your own skewed perception of reality. When I’m asked if there is a common thread among the best poker players in the world, I don’t hesitate: their success is directly related to the extent they are brutally honest with themselves.

In fact, when I see top players stumble, it can be attributed to a failure to be honest with themselves. And I know of many instances where these same great poker players have mastered poker but failed in their lives away from the table because they could not translate the honesty to their other affairs.

The hardest thing you will ever have to do in your life, when you add it all us, is be honest with yourself. David Carr’s The Night of the Gun is the best study I’ve ever seen about how we can delude ourselves, and what happens when we tell ourselves the jig is up.

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