From Library Journal
To cover the 2000 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas for Harper's, McManus insisted on entering.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
McManus went to Las Vegas in May 2000 on assignment for Harper's to cover the World Series of Poker, which has grown into a hugely popular, heavily publicized $23 million event. He was to throw in coverage of the trial of Sandy Murphy, an ex-stripper, and her boyfriend, Rick Tabish, accused of murdering Ted Binion, the tournament's host, well known for his voracious addictions to sex, violence, gambling, and drugs. To satisfy his own gambling urge, McManus enters the poker competition and spends 10 days immersed in the culture of Vegas and gambling, rendering a fast-paced, riveting account of his progress through the tournament. At one point, after losing $10,000, he parallels his own irrational, impatient behavior with that of defendants Murphy and Tabish. McManus also offers a play-by-play account of his long-shot action, with sidelines on the pros and cons of computerized poker, reviews of classic gambling texts, and virtually anything else that crosses his mind. Most fascinating is his portrait of the customs and sensibilities of the eclectic homo pokereins across every race and nationality, male and female (including a very aggressive barefoot and pregnant professional poker player). A delicious inside look. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Very entertaining and very accurate."
-David Sklansky, author of Theory of Poker
"James McManus is the only literary poker-player ever to have made it to the final table in 'the Big One,' and he did so by playing brilliantly. I admire his achievement, envy his skill and discipline, and was completely absorbed by his subtle, detailed, lively account of the longest four days of
his life."
-A. Alvarez, author of The Biggest Game in Town
"In writing about poker Jim McManus has managed to write about everything, and it's glorious."
-David Sedaris, author of Holidays on Ice
"Chasing after the great big epic of the USA, McManus finds at the poker table a reflection of just about everything that matters: love, money, violence, resentment, envy, fear. Positively Fifth Street is a love story, really, and just the far side of gonzo, too, with the tranquilized reporter following his dream right into the story - like the kid at the Natural History Museum who crawled inside the diorama."
-Rich Cohen
"James McManus shifts his writing style into high gear here as he joins predecessors A. Alvarez and Hunter S. Thompson on a journey into the heart of American insomnia--Las Vegas. Murder, sex, drugs, Sylvia Plath, Amarillo Slim, the history of cards, the psychology of gambling, and most insistently the edgy drama of no-limit Texas Hold'em--it's all here in language that
nearly burns a hole in the page."
-Billy Collins
"Many have tried, myself included, but no writer before Jim McManus has made it to the final table of the 'Big One' at the World Series of Poker. It's the equivalent of NASA sending a poet to the moon -- and the resulting book is just as enthralling."
-Anthony Holden
"Beware of this book. Jim McManus portrays a Vegas that most of us don't believe ever really existed--seedy and thrilling and deadly--and his poker scenes rank with the most exciting sports writing you'll ever find. I'd never even heard of Texas Hold 'Em when I first read his blow by blow account of how he won a quarter million dollars--as an amateur!--in the World Series of Poker. Now, because of him, I'm hooked on the game."
-Ira Glass, host of "This American Life"
"I was present during the events McManus describes in glorious detail. At the time, I didn't know how a man with McManus' relatively limited tournament experience could perform at such a high level. Seeing the courage he displays in Positively Fifth Street by baring ALL elements of his experience, including the negative ones, I know now that it wasn't just luck and good play that got him to the final table. James McManus has nerves of steel (or iron balls, as you prefer), and you will find yourself unable to put down a compelling true tale weave of ultra-high stakes poker, murder, sex, and the human heart."
-Andrew N.S. Glazer, The Detroit Free Press
About the Author
James McManus is a novelist and poet, and most recently the winner of the Peter Lisagor Award for sports journalism. He teaches writing and comparative literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including a course on the literature and science of poker.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE END
Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew this at your school. To it, everyone’s subhuman for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives. You’ll be one of those if these things worry you.
—LES MURRAY, “Rock Music”
Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here …
—LADY MACBETH
Anubile blonde squats on her boyfriend’s bare chest and he’s too stoned to do much about it. Nipple clamps? No sir, not this time. Even one would just be, like, way generous. Seizing him by the neck with both hands, she raises her shins from the carpet and presses her full dead weight onto his rib cage and solar plexus, forcing more air from his lungs. How’s that feel? As she rocks back and forth, they lock eyes. “You like that?” she asks, flirty as ever. “How come?” Her name is Sandra Murphy. When she wears clothes, her taste runs to Gucci, Victoria’s Secret, Versace. Her latest ride is the SL 500, in black. She used to work at a high-end sports car emporium in Long Beach, so she knows what the good stuff is. After that gig she moved to Las Vegas and danced topless professionally, but she hasn’t had to work in three years—not since she danced for the guy she is currently laying her hands on. “My old man,” she calls him sometimes, or “my husband,” especially since she moved in. And she would sort of like to get married. Settle down, kids, that whole deal. Not right now, though. Because you, you’ve got time, as Liz Phair advises in “Polyester Bride,” one of Sandy’s all-time favorite songs. Time to get rich, see the world, party hearty. And lately she’s been having the time of her used-to-benot-so-great life. Million-dollar mansion, cute boyfriend, bionic sex, Benz, plus she’s keeping her looks, above all. That’s the key. In 1989 she was runner-up for the title of Miss Bellflower, a south-central suburb of Los Angeles. That was nine years ago, when Sandy was seventeen, but she maintains her dancer’s physique by working out five days a week, and she still keeps the sash in her closet. Most men, her boyfriend included, cannot get enough of her, especially the way she looks now. She is lithe, wet, determined, on top.
The boyfriend, Ted Binion, is heaving for air. He used to run the Horseshoe Casino with his father and brother, but those days are long gone. The Nevada State Gaming Commission threw its Black Book at Ted a few months ago, banning him from even setting foot in his family’s venerable gaming house. Plus his heroin habit has been shutting him down sexually, closing him off from the world, getting him into real fixes. He’s promised himself, promised Sandy, promised just about everyone (at least three or four times) that he’s going to kick, stick to booze, but he isn’t so sure that he can anymore. What he is goddamn sure of is that he’s in serious pain. In fact, he could die any moment here. Wrenched into a bone-on-metal knot against the small of his back, his wrists are fastened together with the rhinestone-studded handcuffs he and Sandy picked up a few months ago at a boutique in Caesars Palace, down on the Strip. Clamps, thumbcuffs, clothespins, wet strips of rawhide—this stuff has been part of their routine since they first got together, a day he’s exhausted from cursing. It was part of what got them together, but whose fault was that? They’d always loved boosting their pain-pleasure thresholds with pot, XTC, Ketel martinis, tequila, sometimes bringing one or two of Sandy’s girlfriends into the picture. This time Sandy got the drop on him, and she’s used it to cross a big line. Ted doesn’t have too much fight left, however, so there isn’t much else he can do about it. Fifty-five years old, he’s been smoking cigarettes, using street drugs, and drinking extravagantly since he was a teenager. Right now—just after nine on the morning of September 17, 1998—he has three balloons’ worth of tar heroin and eighty-two Xanax in his stomach and large intestine, some of it already coursing through his arteries, triggering the soporific enzymes he was hoping this time wouldn’t take. He’s always had a weakness for what he calls Sandy’s pretty titties, and he’s getting an eyeful right now, whether he wants to or not. In spite of the Xanax, the heroin, and the fact that she’s choking him—maybe these things have all canceled each other, he thinks, like waves out of phase—there’s really no denying the low, distant stir of an erection. It’s a million miles away now, thank God, already receding at the speed of light squared …
Because Sandy’s new boyfriend, Rick Tabish, kneels on the carpet behind Binion’s head, facing Sandy. Standing up, Rick is tall, dark, and, to Sandy’s mind, handsome. Six two, two thirty, with springy hair, beady brown eyes. Plenty strong. A star linebacker in high school and college back in Montana, he is now thirty-three, getting soft through the middle, hairline receding above his temples, developing confidence issues. For non-early bloomers, thirty-three can become the age of miracles—the time to start a family, launch a new venture, make partner, publish your first novel, even found your own worldwide religion. For the last couple of years, though, Rick’s been afraid that his best days are a decade behind him, and he desperately needs to make sure that he proves himself wrong. Because what the fuck else is he doing here? People around Las Vegas know him as Ted Binion’s friend. They met manning side-by-side urinals at Piero’s, and since then they’ve partied at Delmonico’s, the Voodoo Lounge, and plenty of strip clubs together, both with and without Sandy Murphy. When Ted needed a place to stash six tons of silver bullion, he hired Rick’s company, MRT Transport, to dig and construct a secret underground vault on Ted’s ranch in Pahrump. They used an MRT truck to haul the bars of silver from the Horseshoe’s vault out to the new one, along with a few million bucks’ worth of rare coins, paper currency, and $5,000 Horseshoe chips. Rick and Ted, in fact, are the only two people who know how to get at that vault. The ranch is now managed by Rick’s latest partner, Boyd Mattsen, and its front gate is guarded by peacocks. The peacocks were Teddy’s idea.
The story gets better and better, then worse. Much, much worse. Less than ten minutes ago, for example, Rick and Sandy tried to have sex alongside—even, for a regrettable moment or two, on top of—Ted’s handcuffed torso. If junkie Ted couldn’t fuck her, then Rick would take charge, and Ted would have to watch them, then die. That was their logic. Or, more accurately, their syllogism, if either of them knew what that word meant.
Ted knew. When he wasn’t out (or back home) raising hell, he read books and magazines as though his life depended on it. Civil War, western history, biographies of Sherman and Grant, Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln. He loved local and national politics, public television, the History and Discovery channels. He even loved reading the dictionary. So exactly how had a smart guy like him gotten himself in this fix?
Ninety minutes earlier, Rick and Sandy forced him to choke down nearly half a liter of tar heroin after lacing it with a hundred and seven 50 mg Xanax tablets. They’d handcuffed him at gunpoint and told him to lie on the floor, on his back. After cursing them out, even snickering at their gall, he complied. Still wearing shorts and a navel-baring T-shirt, Sandy straddled Ted’s chest and yanked up his shirt, something she’d done countless times—only now, instead of tweaking his nipples, she was pinching his nostrils together, leaving him no choice but to open his mouth. Careful not to scratch the esophagus, Rick used a turkey baster to squirt the gunky beige concoction past Ted’s teeth, down his throat. The stuff reminded Sandy of melting brown pearls, like some stupid mini-sculpture you’d find in New York or LA. In the meantime, gagging and desperate, Ted was offering her $5 million to get off him, and she could tell from the sound of his voice that he meant it. He’d pay her. They could kill Rick right now in self defense, then get married, have a baby—a girl baby, maybe, named Tiffany—and never even have to talk about this crazy Rick bullshit again. All she had to do was take the 9-mm pistol they both knew was hidden in the bench of her white baby grand piano and blow Rick away. (Ted and some cops had taught her to shoot at that range, and later she’d practiced on bottles and cacti in the desert.) Ted was begging her, calling her “baby.” That hurt.
Sandy’s outward response was to smirk, glance at Rick, shake her head. Even so, she was tempted. As Ted kept on pleading, her jangly nerves made her cackle and pick up a cardboard Halloween goblin. The goblin, with R.I.P. stenciled across the front in white-lightning letters, was left over from last year’s trick-or-treat decorations, and she thought it might add a nice touch; that’s why she’d tossed it onto the sofa last night in the first place. “You’re already dead,” she said now, jouncing the goblin in front of both men. Even Rick, who had beaten and tortured people before to get money, was taken aback by the ghoulish dementia of this weird cardboard Totentanz. Yikes!
While Sandy puppeteered the death dance on his half-naked chest, Ted was reduced to proposing to set Rick up in a series of ad hoc constru...
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