In 1957, Corky Bell opened his private games to any comer who could handle the action and began a new career as a poker impresario. The first—and last—Memorial Day weekend game at the Aloha Room was arranged at the request of one of his longtime players.
Until recently the Aloha had been a dependable if unremarkable after-hours joint on Mount Morris Park West, its tiki decor a novelty uptown. Now that the fad had crested, the Aloha wore its age in the flaking Polynesian sea scenes on the walls and the smiley-face graffiti defacing the wooden totems. The red bulbs of the electronic tiki torches had burned out years ago and were no longer manufactured. Tendrils of fabric resembling long blades of grass skirted the small tables; most had fallen off or been plucked. Customers cottoned on to management’s indifference—the surly and incompetent bartenders galled—and a new neighbor upstairs, a lawyer, liked to lodge noise complaints. Currently the Aloha Room was reserved for private engagements.
Corky Bell got it for free. The owner owed him six grand, couldn’t scrape up the vig, thus this arrangement. For the game, Corky Bell brought in a generously sized poker table with dignified green felt and sturdy oak legs, so incongruous with the Aloha’s South Pacific theme that it might have been a meteorite from a secret corner of space.
“They’re going to remember where they were that first Memorial Day weekend because they spent it with Corky Bell,” he told Lonnie. It was Thursday, May 20th, one week before the game. Lonnie was a dealer, on the up-and-up, and one of Corky Bell’s first calls when he pulled something together. Regulars on the circuit knew him from Mo Mo’s games at the Sable Club, or Mike Yella’s Morningside game, where T-Bone Givens was gunned down by the Ryan brothers in the summer of ’67 and went facedown in a bowl of potato salad. Lonnie didn’t talk much. His sympathetic eyes took the sting from bad beats, and when complimented on his magic touch after a monster hand, he did not reject the notion.
Lonnie was in. It was almost like old times. In their heyday, Corky Bell productions were a holy enterprise. His game the weekend after New Year’s was the hottest ticket in town, his July Fourth smoker a certified hoot, and his one-offs unforgettable if not always remunerative. His tables attracted politicians and bone breakers and narcotics peddlers, doctors, bankers, and preachers. White players took taxis up Park Avenue and commuted from the new suburbs to test themselves against authentic criminals. The grub was top notch, sandwich miracles from the storied Jewish delicatessens and sometimes prime rib under a heat-lamp gizmo, and the bartenders kept the players topped off, on loan from whatever cocktail lounge or nightclub was the rage that year.
Celebrities popped in. Not just his cousin Sylvester King, not just local musicians, but Hollywood types. New Year’s ’63, Peter Lawford took a seat, in town “doing research for a part.” Said he’d play a round and stayed for two days, cycling through a greatest hits of anecdotes when it got quiet or he felt unappreciated. “I look her over—she’s got legs—and say, ‘Any more like you at home?’？” Sonny Liston sat in after he got laid out by Leotis Martin. Leroi Banks, the ventriloquist, was on hand with his dummy Mr. Charles flapping on his lap, just like on TV. The dummy talked shit all night, working blue material that wouldn’t make it past the censors. “You went to the free clinic, baby? They say you got splinters? I wouldn’t know anything about that.” Liston had a reputation as an animal but giggled like a little girl at every dumb joke out of Mr. Charles’s painted mouth. Big tipper, too.
Corky Bell didn’t put on as many games as he used to. External forces: His girlfriend Stacey asserted New Year’s rights and July Fourths they now spent in Sag Harbor, where she kept a bungalow. Internal forces: The rush, the pleasure of harnessing the energies of good luck and bad luck, of being a momentary conduit of fate, had been replaced by cold dread ever since Chickie James shot Skippy Damon in the face over a full house and the geyser of blood soiled the felt surface and cursed the chips, both of which had to be replaced.
Another bad omen. Too many to count. Harlem wasn’t the same. Crooks these days had no code and less class. A cathouse set up next to his favorite fried-fish joint, and he had to see these young girls whored up outside when he got a craving for whiting on white bread. As a grandfather, it upset him. Slumming it in Harlem was more dangerous than exotic these days and white men with a taste for seven-card stud or hi-lo now hit the goulash houses in the Garment District. Corky Bell checked out the goulies once. Lasted twenty minutes before this cracker with a toupee and busted yellow teeth complained to management about sitting next to colored players. Colored was not the word he used. It was long enough to get the picture: fixed decks, colluding partners, bowls of steaming goulash if you got hungry, and unventilated rooms if lung cancer happened to be a side hobby.
When he got the call from Cameron Purvis about setting up a one-off Memorial Day game, he didn’t realize how much he missed cards. Cameron Purvis grew up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx and had been a mainstay of the holiday games, driving up from D.C., where he worked for the government. Corky Bell couldn’t tell the white players apart, but Purvis stuck out because of his fucked-up job. “I’m out there introducing America to the wonders of ‘Our Friend the Atom,’？” he told him that first New Year’s game, “one of the best friends we have these days.” With new innovations in demolition, medicine, and agriculture, nuclear energy was more than a bomb, it was the future, today. “Let me tell you a thing about radioisotopes…”
By ’63, the Cold War proved an impossible headwind. “I’m in shelters, now, buddy,” he explained. Hawking backyard bunkers for the American Fallout Shelter Company. “It pays to be nimble.” He was delighted to see Corky Bell arranging the seats when he arrived at the Aloha Room early Friday evening. Corky Bell was not the only one grateful for a reminder of the good old days; Purvis’s work was not as fulfilling as it used to be. “I got sick of feeling like an errand boy for the RAND Corporation, you know what I mean?” The table stared silently. Currently he consulted for the U.S. military, doing image rehab on tactical-use herbicides like Agent Orange. “The average American hears the word chemical,” he told the table, “and gets all sorts of negative associations. It’s my job to rearrange the brain.” The players nodded.
The first hand was at 8:06 P.M. on Friday, May 28th. Eight players opened up the action and the game sustained a vigorous ebb and flow of new blood, chumps, showboats, and colorful protagonists for the next few days. They rotated through five-card stud, draw, razz, ace-to-five lowball, deuce-to-seven, and hi-lo, with an all-day seven-card stud marathon on Sunday in honor of Purvis’s dad, who served in two world wars and had been an aficionado. Memorial Day—a time to remember those who served. When the energy flagged, Purvis started up a round of “From the Halls of Montezuma” and revived the proceedings.
Diehards napped in the back room and returned after an audit of their botched hands and miscalculations, men skipped Saturday and returned for a forty-eight-hour stretch on Sunday. When Corky Bell needed shut-eye, his nephew George presided. Old-timers reminisced over previous menus, like the Reuben sandwiches from Levi’s and the time Corky Bell ordered trays of fried chicken from Lady Betsy’s and had to pause the game until “motherfuckers learn how to use a goddamn napkin.” Was there enough food? Booze? The table mix of personalities lively and invigorating? A fistfight almost broke out over who fried the better bird, Lady Betsy’s or New Country Kitchen. The scramble made Corky Bell feel ten years younger.