David Diaz

“For a while we thought it was the Indian reservations cutting into our business. For a while they were getting 1500 people a night out there. Now I’ve heard their business is way off too. It’s gotta be the economy.”

There’s a certain time in midmorning when a retired man’s home becomes his prison. He's had his coffee, cleared his lungs of phlegm, smoked a cigarette or two, and had the routine quarrel with his wife over who left the thermostat on all night and who didn’t let the dogs out. The thought of watching the missis fuss over her dried-weed collection one more time, or worse, listening to her get on the phone and fret over her ailments, becomes intolerable, and he knows he has to get out of the house or he’ll lose his mind.

The Ace’e Duce’e is a little cubbyhole tucked in between the Playhouse bar and the State Theater. There are larger, fancier card rooms up the street, like the California Room and the Lucky Lady.

Shortly after ten o'clock the grumpy old men come shuffling into the Ace’e Duce’e, one by one. Flip, the black and skinny janitor/assistant manager, is out front with his broom, stirring up the dust on the sidewalk. It’s still too early in the day to risk conversation, so he just smiles warmly at each of the customers as they enter. Inside, Bill, one of the co-owners, greets the players: “Two more and we got us a game!” “One more and we got us a game!” “Gentlemen, we got us a game!”

Of the three tables, the one by the window looking out onto El Cajon Boulevard is the favorite. The light is good there, and in a slow game the players can watch the traffic on the sidewalk and street. The old men buy their chips — sixty, eighty, maybe a hundred dollars — and sit down, still not saying much. Most talk in a card room, they well know, is just a bunch of horseshit — which is okay in a way, but it takes time to warm up to it. “Believe there’s a ball game on Channel 11,” somebody finally says, and Flip switches on the TV.

The Ace’e Duce’e is one of the smallest card rooms in town. It’s just a little cubbyhole tucked in between the Playhouse bar and the State Theater. There are larger, fancier card rooms up the street, like the California Room and the Lucky Lady, which feature a house dealer and a faster style of poker, but the Ace’e Duce’e, which probably has the smallest pots of any card room in town (usually between ten and fifty dollars), has found its own niche among the ten poker rooms on El Cajon Boulevard. The Ace’e Duce’e caters mostly to the older, retired card players who don’t mind taking turns dealing their own cards and saving the $200 or $300 the dealers in some card rooms make in tips every day. A conservative player who isn’t concerned with winning big can play here from the time it opens at 10:30 a.m. to the time it closes at 2:00 a.m., and never lose more than the $1.25 per half-hour it costs to sit at the table. And many of them do just that.

The card players take a hand or two, betting lightly if at all, before they settle into the game. One fellow puts on a pair of flip-up sunglasses that only go down when he’s dealing. Another holds an unlit cigar in the center of his mouth. Yet another has the habit of stroking his bald head between deals. Most of the players at the Ace’e Duce’e have been playing with each other for so long they know each other’s strengths and weaknesses as well as they know their wives’ moods, which tends to stalemate the game. But when a younger player wanders in who looks as if he just got out of the navy and fancies himself to be a card shark, they eye him like vultures eyeing a sick cow. “Sit down,” Flip says happily, writing the newcomer’s name on the chalkboard. “Get t’know ever-’body. Be just like family here before y’know it.”

“These guys any good?” the kid asks Bill; and Bill, a neatly dressed man with a pencil-thin mustache, answers quite truthfully, “Son, there’s over 400 years of poker experience sitting at that table.”

As extravagant as Bill’s claim may sound, it’s probably an understatement. Of the seven players at the table, none is under seventy, and all you have to do is watch them crack their knuckles to see that most of them knew their way through a deck of cards by the age of ten. If the world were always fair, players under the age of seventy wouldn’t be allowed to play at the Ace’e Duce’e, because they really haven’t got a chance. Oh, there may be some nimble-fingered shufflers still in their teens. And there’re some pretty confident gamblers in their thirties and forties. There’re even some fifty- and sixty-year-old youngsters who can walk away from a game a few chips up. But day in and day out, the experienced players will tear them up.

In fifteen minutes or so, the old-timers have discovered the new kid’s weakness: he can’t afford to lose. He lets most hands pass, betting nothing more than the twenty-five-cent ante; then, when he thinks he’s got a good hand, he cautiously bets four or five bucks, and one of the tough old veterans immediately calls him and raises the bet ten or twenty dollars, forcing the kid to fold. Nobody shows him any mercy, figuring if he’s old enough to sit at a card table, he’s old enough to learn a lesson. Now and then someone will take a youngster like that aside and explain to him that poker is an idle game, for idle men, and that a young man should be out working instead of wasting his time in a card room. Not that it does any good. In forty-five minutes, the kid has lost sixty dollars. He quietly pushes his chair back, rises, and slinks out the door without saying a word. “It’s tough to win when you’re afraid to lose,” one of the players observes.

Tom, the other co-owner, comes out to announce that the bathroom is back in service. “Somebody lef a cigarette on the floor the other night,” Flip explains. “Caught fire in a stack o’ newspapers; come back nex’ mornin’ and the bathroom was all burn .up.” Besides blackening the walls, the fire cracked the toilet bowl. But the announcement that it’s back in order brings only a round of scornful howls from the clientele. “I think I’ll just keep using the one next door,” somebody says. “At least they clean theirs once in a while.”

Some of the players take out cigars and light them, hoping to keep the swarm of flies away from their faces. The sunlight through the smoke makes wavy patterns on the table.

Someone complains about the foul odor in the room, which smells like a thrift store — that sour old smell of things which have outlived their usefulness — and Flip turns on the fan to blow the bad air around a bit. One of the players has brought his miniature collie along, and the dog wanders under the tables, crunching peanuts that fell on the floor the day before, or perhaps the week before. One player complains that he hasn’t won a decent hand yet. “You deserve to lose with a hat that ugly,” someone tells him. “Maybe so,” he growls in reply, “but at least I only paid six dollars for it. You paid twenty for that one you’re wearing, and it ain’t any better looking.”

The pay phone on the wall rings, and one of the players jumps. “That’s my wife,” he says ominously.

“You know her ring, do you?” the baldheaded player teases.

Bill picks up the phone and sings cheerily, “Good morning! Ace’e Du-ce’e!” He glances at the card table and his eyes roll heavenward. “No, darlin’, I sure haven’t seen him today. Yes, darlin’, I sure will tell him if he comes in.”

Now and then, wives have been known to come into the Ace’e Duce’e and drag their husbands out, and the management, concerned as much with its own well-being as with that of its players, provides the clientele with at least a small degree of protection from such intrusions.

By noon the eight players at the table have turned over a couple of times. Some of them lose their daily limit and leave. Some of them win their daily limit and leave. “Winning always makes me drowsy,” one fellow yawns as he rakes in his $300 in chips and excuses himself from the table. Some of them slip next door to the Playhouse to have a beer — it’s against the law to have alcohol of any kind in a card room. And some of them simply stagger over to the black Naugahyde couch with its stuffing falling out, and take a snooze. No one seems to suffer from the Las Vegas gamblers’ sense of urgency. Luck, as most people know, may run in streaks; but poker, as almost no one under seventy knows, doesn’t have a whole lot to do with luck. The next hand, the next game, can wait.

It’s a peaceful time of day. For several minutes at a time there is nothing but the silence of old men meditating over a hand of poker, while yet another TV ball game drones on. “Did it rain here this morning?” someone asks.

“Five minutes is all.”

“Same in Hillcrest.”

Several more minutes of silence.

“Looking out that window, all I see is signs in Vietnamese. Those people own damn near everything around here now.”

“They ought to, the gov’ment’s been sponsoring them for ten years.” “The gov’ment’s been sponsoring the blacks for fifty years and they don’t own nothin’.”

“Well, that’s different,” the player says, with just the right amount of Irony in his voice to indicate it isn’t. No one seems to care if this offends Flip or not, and he acts as though he hasn’t heard.

Another five minutes of silence.

When a snappy little fellow walks in wearing Bermuda shorts and yellow knee socks, the gamblers begin hooting and hollering, which flatters the old boy so much he does a little tap dance for them and says, “It’s springtime, I thought I’d go Miami-style!”

“I wouldn’t be seen in public with legs like that,” one of the players says.

“Last time I wore shorts a cop stopped me and told me to get off the street,” Bill confesses. “He told me I was a public nuisance.”

As a rule, gamblers at the Ace’e Duce’e don’t talk much about their personal lives. Some of them have been playing there for years and are still only known by their first names. Part of this is the gambler’s mystique — the less others know about you, the less they’ll be able to predict what you’ll do. Part of it is guilt — if you won’t tell your wife where you play poker, why should you tell the poker players about your wife? The most serious gamblers carry this to the point of paranoia, but most of the regulars at the Ace’e Duce’e are there for the company as much as for the gambling — though they might never admit it — and little by little they let themselves be known. One guy gambles with his pension check; another guy is a millionaire; so-and-so is going to Omaha again this summer; what’s-his-name is dying of cancer, can’t you see it in his face?

Just as the gamblers are awakening from the afternoon doldrums, the dog, which had been napping along with everyone else, runs out from under the table and begins growling at somebody coming through the door. Since the dog rarely growls at anybody, all the players look up to see who could be so menacing. A grizzled semi regular named Dan strides to the back of the room and deposits his bedroll in the corner. He’s wearing a week’s growth of beard and clothes that look as though they might have been stolen from the Goodwill box. “If you’re playing high draw, count me in,” he tells Bill. “Otherwise, count me out.”

“Would you believe that guy used to be one of the sharpest dressers you ever saw?” one of the players whispers.

“Nothing but a bum now.”

“Not a bum. He gets a pension from the navy. Maybe a tramp, but not a bum.”

“I heard he lost $250 yesterday.” “Yeah, and he owes the Lucky Lady $3400.”

“That’s prob’ly why the dog was barking at him.”

“What’s his problem? Is he a drunk?”

“Naw, he says the Mafia’s after him. Says he has to keep moving or they’ll catch up with him.”

Dan sits down at the table, and with the saddest eyes possible, slowly evaluates each of the players. He lets a few small hands pass, chucking in his twenty-five-cent ante, then staring off into space. When one of the pots gets up to fifty dollars or so, he jumps in, wildly doubling whatever anybody else bets. He buys a few big pots that way before somebody calls his bluff — and Dan beats him with three of a kind. The other players are impressed with this daring style of poker, but Dan just stares off into space again, weary and indifferent, tortured by the gambler’s dilemma: he’s too far in debt to allow himself to lose, and winning only reminds him how much farther he has to go to get out of the hole he’s dug for himself.

Sometimes card room owners welcome a player like that, even though they know he’ll ask for credit, lose whatever they give him, then ask for more. It’s against the law for card room owners to use shills — unlicensed employees who are paid by the house to play poker with the hope of attracting paying customers — but if they give credit selectively, to gamblers like Dan who stimulate interest in the game, they can accomplish the same thing. Legally, they can collect on unpaid debts by going to small claims court, and they sometimes do; but if they choose not to collect from certain customers, that is nobody’s business but their own. In effect, by giving credit, then failing to collect, they have hired shills.

Around three o’clock free sandwiches are served — a loser’s consolation before going home — and the late-afternoon crowd begins sifting in: a biker with two-tone sunglasses and a bouffant pompadour; a 300-pound farm boy with the sleeves cut off his blue work shirt; a black kid with dreadlocks and patent leather navy shoes. None of them can last more than an hour or two with the old boys, though.

“I read where the airlines are having a price war again. Probably be a good time to take a trip.”

“Henry, didn’t you take one of them three-month, unlimited-mileage bus trips one time?”

“Yeah, it took me four days to get to Orlando. That trip cost me ninety-nine dollars for the bus ticket, and $300 for the booze. You couldn't pay me a thousand dollars to do it again.”

A cluster of Vietnamese women passes by the window, their high heels click-clacking on the sidewalk, and their sweet perfumes swirling temptingly around the open door. Flip growls lustily from deep in his throat while he toys with the lint in his hair — but not one of the gamblers even looks up from his hand.

The pay phone rings. “Ace’e Duce’e,” Bill says.“No, darlin’, still haven’t seen him. You know I will, darlin’.”

Seeing a woman playing at the Ace’e Duce’e is about as unusual as seeing a man at a Tupperware party — there’s no rule against it, it just rarely happens. There aren’t many men who like to play poker with women, and nowadays, even fewer who will admit it. Women often don’t know how to play the game, the men say, and only slow it down when they insist on trying. The pleasure a man takes in finding another gambler’s fault and hammering at it until the gambler breaks is not as satisfying, for emotional reasons, if the broken gambler is a woman; nor is it as tolerable if the gambler doing the hammering is a woman. More importantly, though, having a woman present disrupts the serenity which the men go there to find. A few women — mostly Orientals — ignore this custom, apparently unaware that the cigar smoke they find so annoying is intended to be a female repellent. In those cases, the custom must be enforced in other ways.

About four o’clock three girls barely out of their teens walk into the Ace’e Duce’e and announce they want to play low draw, which is a simpler, faster-moving game of poker favored by less skillful players. The girls are tough looking for their age, big shouldered, big hipped; they're also nervous about being in a card room and are trying hard not to show it. Flip looks at the girls as though they were sent there by God to save him from one more dull afternoon listening to old men play cards, and he falls all over himself trying to make them feel comfortable, trying to work his devilish charm. “We’ll have a low draw table goin’ in just a minute. Lemme have your names and I’ll write ’em on the chalkboard.”

But this only makes the girls even more nervous. One of them arrogantly flips the ashes from her cigarette like a priest sprinkling holy water. “Isn’t there a game going now?” she asks.

One of the players who has been observing all this pushes his chair back, stands up, and looking down at them with a perfectly blank poker face, says, “Don’t you girls know you can’t come in here? This is a card room.”

Some of the other players laugh at this little joke, but the girls don’t. “I don’t see no sign,” one of them challenges.

The poker player just looks over his glasses and down his nose at them, amused to see their tightly wound ball of confidence unraveling before his eyes.

“Let’s get out of here,” the second girl says, obviously flustered. At the door, the third girl pauses to say, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “At least we ain’t no hookers!”

Flip looks depressed as he watches them go. “Don’t get many young girls in here,” he says. “Hardly ever get any old ones,” his mouth souring on the word old.

The baseball game drones on. The flies buzz. Hours, days, weeks pass by. “Check,” the poker players say. “Check. Check. Check.”

Card rooms are rapidly becoming extinct in San Diego. There were more than a hundred of them in the Forties, but only thirty are operating now. For the .last three years, the chief of police and the city council have been plotting to weed them out. Already it is illegal to open any new card rooms within the city limits, the old establishments can’t change their present locations, and after July they will be forbidden to sell their businesses to new owners. The old owners may operate until they die or until they go bankrupt, which could be very soon, since they haven’t been allowed a fee increase over the current $1.25 per half-hour for the past nine years. The reason behind the city’s phasing out of card rooms is that they are said to be centers for vice: bookmaking, loan sharking, prostitution, and drugs. In 1983, when the squeeze on card rooms began, the city police claimed to have made almost a hundred vice arrests in card rooms in the previous five years.

The owners and players at the Ace’e Duce’e discuss this subject often. They wonder how an all-American game like poker could have acquired such a bad reputation. “The city fathers have decided card rooms don’t present a desirable image to the tourists,” Tom says. “Hell, you can see more flakes in the goddamned park, but they don’t close it down.”

“It’s the retired rich that don’t like us,” Flip says.

Cheating, most players agree, is almost nonexistent; most cheaters, who will occasionally try to hold cards from the game and reintroduce them at opportune times, are so well known around town, and are so carefully watched, that they don’t have a chance to pull their tricks. There is talk about one card room owner who was said to have embezzled more than a million dollars from his patrons in a bookmaking scheme, but the notion that poker players are any more inclined to vice than, say, people who frequent the racetrack or play bingo, makes most of the clientele at the Ace’e Duce’e laugh out loud.

How is it, they wonder, that card rooms can harm the public image of a town where the mayor is being tried for perjury and conspiracy, the sheriff resigned from a presidential commission studying organized crime because of lingering rumors of his own associations with mobsters, hundreds of greedy investors were practically standing in line to be bilked out of millions of dollars by a flimflam man running a glorified pyramid scheme, and a TV evangelist went $700,000 in debt telling people prosperity is their divine right? “Poker,” one card player says, “might be the only honest game in this town.”

“You can’t outlaw poker,” Tom says. “It’s an addiction, and people are gonna do it.”

“There’s always gonna be sharks, and there’s always gonna be pigeons,” someone else agrees.

“They been tryin’ to stop prostitution since the Bible days,” Flip says. “You can read about it in the Book of Psalms. And they still haven’t stopped that.”

“Card rooms will just go underground,” Bill says.

“They already are,” someone adds. “I know of three operating right now. And they aren’t paying the city any $3300 license fee, either.”

“The big card rooms will just pick up and go somewhere else. That guy up in Oceanside will have a whopping business,” Bill says.

“Best thing we could do,” one old codger nearing eighty says, growing more irate the longer he thinks about it, “is put a contract out on the chief of police and the whole goddamned city council.”

Besides their problems with the city fathers, the owners of the Ace’e Du-ce’e have fallen on economic hard times. In the nine years it’s been open, business has never been slower. And nobody seems to know why. “I say it’s the economy,” Tom says. “For a while we thought it was the bingo parlors out on the Indian reservations cutting into our business. For a while they were getting 1500 people a night out there. Now I’ve heard their business is way off too. It’s gotta be the economy.”

“It’s baffling,” Bill says. “Two card rooms on El Cajon Boulevard closed not long ago. All the card rooms are hurting.”

“We should have three games going right now,” Tom says sourly as two more players get up from the one active table. “Everybody acts like they can’t afford to lose nothin’. It’s gotta be the economy.”

Flip, who had been emptying ashtrays and missed part of the conversation, says, “I still think it’s the retired rich. They think we ain’t good enough for ’em.”

But what everybody is wondering, though nobody seems willing to say, is this: Are small, neighborhood card rooms like the Ace’e Duce’e living fossils out of an era of railroads, outhouses, straight razors, ten-cent cigars, and nickel beer? Is it possible they have only survived this long because their customers are mostly stubborn old men who come from a time when people created their own entertainment, using only the most basic of implements: cards, chips, and other people? The ranks of those old men are growing thinner every day. Can they be replaced by a generation raised on video games, Walkmans, and personal computers?

As the afternoon drags along, the last baseball game draws to a close and some of the card players get up to go home for dinner, Bill and Tom eye the table nervously. There are only five players keeping the game alive, and if one of them leaves, the rest will leave, too. “Check. Check. Check. Open for two. Call and raise you two. Call, whatcha got? Pair of kings. That’s it. I’m out.” The remaining players rake in their chips, cash them in at the desk, and leave.

The pay phone rings. “Ace’e Duce’e?” Bill answers. “No, I’m sorry, darlin’, he just left.” □