9 dudes at a table with their hot dogs (no homo)
Poker and grilling at a friend’s house. I didn’t do well in the game, but I did great at scarfing down 2 Bubba burgers during the course of the night. It’s been a while since I’ve played, which is not an excuse for losing. Neither is the fact that I was sitting next to a dude that I swear sounded just like Jon Favreau, and every time he spoke I looked up expecting to see Vince Vaughn sitting across from me, telling me I’m ‘money.’
Neither is the excruciating, painful process that was divvying up chips at the start of the game. Generally, three colors are used for three different denominations, players getting more chips of lesser value and less chips of greater value to start the game. It really shouldn’t be tough, yet there can be times when it becomes an issue, like counting out the money at the beginning of Monopoly. How many 10s do you get again? Last night, controversy arose when one guy brought some of his own chips that he really really wanted us to use. They were Joker chips, Joker as in the Batman character. Not only did they add less popular chip colors to the mix such as black and purple, they also had creepy images of Heath Ledger printed on one side, with large red HA HA HA on the other.
The argument went on for quite some time, this guy stating that we had played with several different colored chips before, others claiming there just weren’t enough to go around so why even use them. I tried to remain neutral because I didn’t know this guy that well, but if I did I would have been on him about how stupid it was to insist we use the Joker chips so adamantly, to the point that it halted the start of the game for so long. Not to mention he admitted the set cost him $90 which is absurd. For that amount of money you should actually get to hang out with Batman. The game eventually started, Joker chips in rotation. I felt uneasy sitting between bizarro Favreau and the Joker chips dude and couldn’t get into a good groove. I kept trying to figure out why he cared so much about using the chips, it just didn’t make any sense. Maybe he works for the company that made the chips, and he was trying to push product on us? Did he have a trunk full of sets, priced to own at $90? Then I started to worry that maybe he indeed was the Joker in disguise. I kept waiting for poisonous gas to start emitting from the chips he threw in the pot…all of our heads collapsing on the table, the last sound we hear being maniacal laughter, as he stealthily grabs the money and is out the door before any of us know what happened…
I hung around for a while after the game with my friend whose house it was and Favreau. The conversation jumped erratically as most late night sessions usually do. The Joker was definitely a heavy focus. There were brief discussions on everything from fantasy baseball to the proper pronunciation of the word cruller. Somehow the topic of black Olympic athletes came up and Favreau hypothesized that there were hardly and black athletes in the winter games because they simply don’t like the cold. He even went as far as to say, “There are no black skiers.” Finding this claim to be beyond the outer reaches of ignorance, I had to find out the truth. Low and behold, not only are there black skiers, there’s enough of them to have their own association! I should have bet that Favreau-sounding bastard.
