Pinochle

There was an episode of the Twilight Zone that terrified me.  Most people may not find it terrifying, but this particular episode illustrated one man’s slipping from the normalcy of the world he lived in to a situation where he was completely helpless.  Over the course of the episode, the man’s perception of English slowly became rearranged.  By the end, the man accepts his madness and opens a child’s picture book to a picture of a dinosaur.  Instead of the large-lettered word reading “dinosaur,” it reads, “Tuesday.”  Terrifying, it really is. 

It’s the idea of all logic and order that you have come to expect becoming upset in a way that makes you feel like you’re losing your grip on reality that is the killer there.  The helplessness of not being able to speak the language and the realization that you are being disarmed, shut down and possibly taken advantage of is the same feeling I encountered on the night I attempted to learn Pinochle.

Okay, I can already feel myself getting upset.  Before I get all wound up and start my super-charged narrative about a horrible misunderstanding, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I take responsibility for all that went wrong and it was MY inability to master the four thousand chaotic rules of this particular card game while suspending my sense of natural reason and order.  The fact that this was harder than understanding baseball in Chinese (Cantonese), was all on me.  A ten-minute tutorial given to me by three people simultaneously before being expected to play the game masterfully should have been more than enough to ready my troubled mind.  Any frustration around the night’s events were brought on only by my poor self-esteem and had nothing to do with a game that has probably been used to effectively torture prisoners in Guantanamo.  I will accept ownership of my actions despite any of the cloud of ridiculousness surrounding the game or implied emotions of the night in question.

For everyone born after 1970, Pinochle is a game using playing cards and governed by rules created by a crazy person.

I believe Pinochle originated from a castaway on a remote island and his only friend, an incomplete deck of playing cards.  After exhausting all the card games he knew, somewhere around lonely year nine, the castaway developed a game that he could play as a team with his wife, a conch shell he named Gloria, and their neighbors, Bill and Eliza Coconut.  He called it Pee-Knuckle, after having to urinate on his hand from a particularly nasty jellyfish bite he received while rescuing his wife from the ocean floor where she lived.  It was an inside joke that the two shared.  Pee-Knuckle was also Gloria’s nickname.

When the castaway was eventually rescued, I imagine that whatever doctor that treated him told the castaway’s family to help the castaway slowly adjust to life back in the civilized world by doing activities common to the castaway’s island environment.  One of the activities most easily adapted by the family was the insane card game that eventually turned into a family tradition. 

The game was rechristened Pinochle to hide the family shame of a man married to the shell of a dead gastropod mollusk, the game made its way slowly into society as an odd curiosity from party to party as a fad.  From there, I assume the game has hung on as an unexplained tradition that nobody understood the benefits of—which there are none.  There are none.

I believe the above origin is a much more likely version of how this game became popular and reject the “official” French/German history as a false flag laid down by the family of the castaway.  You would go to extreme lengths to cover up the shame of a seashell marriage in your family too. 

Before I knew any of this; before the perceived world I lived in was tainted by the shroud of doubt Pinochle brought with it—not unlike a social disease—I was just a man who loved his girlfriend and wanted to spend more time with some of her oldest and dearest friends.   

I don’t know how they knew the game; if it was a form of childhood punishment to learn all the rules, or if they happened to be descendants of the lonely, cray-cray castaway, I never got the backstory.  They just wanted Wendy and I to come over, get to know me better and play a little Pinochle, whatever THAT was.  But if I would have wanted to condense the night down to the simplest ideas, I would have walked up to Wendy’s friends and told them that I was not smart.  I then would have INVITED them to hit me in the face with a shovel.  I would have preferred the speed of that interaction to what inevitably happened.

Krissy and Jeremy were old friends of Wendy’s and had gotten to know Wendy’s previous, ponytail-sporting boyfriend through many different fun activities.  They are very nice, good people and I liked them right away.  I knew that as a couple, it can be very difficult when a friend couple calls it quits.  You don’t want to take sides, you feel like you have to be supportive and sometimes you have to say good-bye.  Then there’s the effort made to get to know the new person and to re-invest time and energy into a new person.  That’s where I was with Krissy and Jeremy.  They had to say “good-bye” to the pony tail and “hello” to the drummer. 

We had a little dinner, and things were going very well.  Jeremy and I found common ground around geek culture.  Krissy made a spectacular dinner and let a strange drummer in her home hold her baby.  Before long, it was time to sit down and play cards. 

I’m no stranger to cards.  I’m fluent in several different variations of poker and familiar with many more.  I play Blackjack, War, Baccarat, Rummy, King’s Corner, Go Fish, Old-Maid, Uno, Memory Match—I know my way around a standard deck of 52 plus Jokers. (FYI-unless called out before hand, Jokers aren’t always wild, they play as aces, in straights or flushes.  See, I know the cards.)

The problem is, Pinochle doesn’t use a regular deck.  It uses 48 cards from TWO different decks.  To make a Pinochle deck, you take out all the boring cards, the twos through eights.  Leaving 9 through aces of all four suits (club, diamond, heart, spade).  I didn’t know that when the first hand was dealt. 

All the cards were dealt to the four of us, and my poker trained mind was pretty excited at the hand I was given.  My twelve cards had at least three straights, two flushes, enough full houses for two duplexes and five-of-a-kind. Everything was cool until I realized that I had a couple pairs that were the same suit; something impossible to have when playing poker, and in the old West would have gotten a cowboy shot for laying down a hand like that.

“Misdeal,” said Krissy, “too many nines,” as she laid her cards down to show us all. 

“Okay, everybody give me your cards,” said Jeremy as he laid his hand down too and collected Krissy and Wendy’s cards.

“Excuse me?” I said, not wanting to surrender the greatest hand of cards I’ve ever been dealt in my life, “what the hell do you mean, ‘misdeal?’” Every gambler knows that you play the hand you’re dealt.  That’s where the cliché comes from.  However, that isn’t the case in Pinochle.

“Well,” said Jeremy, patiently shuffling and explaining what just happened, “sometimes on a deal, someone will get a bad hand that doesn’t meld.  Too many nines will do that.”

“I see,” I said as I nodded, but I didn’t see.  I then contemplated telling Jeremy that there was something wrong with his deck of cards, but the little lawyer in my mind activated by my ADHD meds, waved both hands in front of himself and mouthed the word, “NO!” So I didn’t mention the extra cards. 

Wendy looked over at me from her seat with a big smile that said to me, “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

I replied to her with my own subdued smile, “I’m drowning in my own inability to grasp new concepts.”

After several hands of me fumbling through the wacky deck and moving cards in and out of my hand with Jeremy, who was my partner.  I started to understand some simple moves I could make, but if I only understood an eighth of the rules, how was I going to put together a strategy to win?  I figured I could just try to pick up as much as I could and run out the clock on this activity.  That was when Jeremy, unbeknownst to me, decided that it was time for me to learn how to cheat.

Pinochle is a game of auctions and bids.  You’re looking for trick cards and trumps.  You create melds of cards out of specific combinations worth different point values.  To the new player, all of this will appear to be arbitrary, like you’re playing a game with a six-year-old who constantly creates new rules to the game you’re playing based around what that six-year-old needs to win.  It was like the creator got tired of passing cards around, looked down at the hand they had, laid it down on the table claiming to have one with a hand because it had two Jacks, a queen of diamonds and all four kings.  “That’s it! That’s the winner!” 

So when you’re cheating with a partner, it is common to do so with what they call “table talk.”  That’s when you seemingly are talking about one subject, but you’re communicating to your partner what you either have or need certain cards.  An example of some simple table talk would go like this:

“So Steve, have you seen the Avengers, and if so, how many times?”

And the answer would be:

“Loved it! Saw it twice, but I’m most anxious to see Reds2 this summer, I really dug the first one.”

And now with the translations:

“So Steve, have you seen the Avengers, and if so, how many times?”

(Do you have any diamonds? How many?)

“Loved it! Saw it twice, but I’m most anxious to see Reds2 this summer, I really dug the first one.”

(This is the second time I’ve told you that I have hearts and not diamonds. Are you going to give me the 2 queens I need to go with the one I have of spades?)

 

You see, Mark Ruffalo played the Hulk in the Avengers and was the breakout star, and using Martin Scorsese as the asking party’s indicator code as would be pre-determined by the team, I then think of one of Scorsese’s film’s Mark Ruffalo was in, which is Shudder Island starring Leonardo DiCaprio, who was also the star of a movie called Blood Diamond. 

I bet you spotted the response right away, but if you didn’t, here’s what the reply means.  (Scorsese is only used in the original question, not the answer.) 

Loved = hearts.  Hellen Mirren plays a double agent in Reds2.  Hellen Mirren is also currently a huge hit in her stage play about Queen Elizabeth the 2^nd.  Hellen Mirren is universally loved in her country of the United Kingdom.  This meant I desperately need two queens of Hearts to go with one Spade.  Spades are shovels, shovels dig.  It’s just that easy.

Please understand this may be an over simplification of how table talk works but like I said, I wasn’t catching on too quickly.

When Jeremy instigated table talk, it caught me completely off guard.  He meant absolutely nothing by anything he said other than wanting to know about what suits I was after for cards.  But his opening question of a guy he was just getting to know seemed rather aggressive.

“So Steve, what are your intentions with Wendy?” he asked me, point blank.  “Do you love her?  Are you thinking about giving her a ring?”

This was at a time when Wendy and I were simply dating and I wasn’t yet ready to propose.  The subject was a powder keg between the two of us and here was an opportunity to either make a good impression or step in a big pile of emotional dog doo-doo.  Why would anyone ask that question to a guy like that in front of his girlfriend?

“I, uh, love her very much,” I said, avoiding the second half of the question.  I had had about enough of the situation.  I still didn’t understand the game we were playing despite it being stripped down solely for my benefit, to the level of game they use to teach learning-disabled pre-schoolers.  I already felt extremely stupid by not being able to figure out a card game and now I was being questioned about my feelings for Wendy.

“What about an engagement ring?” asked Jeremy.

“Oh Jeremy,” Krissy giggled, “that’s just a little obvious.”

What was obvious?  Holy cow, I was getting grilled there.  Was it obvious that I was or wasn’t going to get her a ring?  Was it obvious that I loved her?  These were nice people, I liked them, now it’s getting all hostile.  Wendy had known Krissy since before kindergarten.  What if I didn’t get her approval?  And Jeremy?  If he hit me with another supercharged question like that again, I would reach across the table and slap the tact back into his mouth.

I needed an emergency exit.  I needed out of that insane card game that I didn’t understand and turned nice people into pushy bastards.  It was still early though so I felt like I only had a couple options, cut myself bad enough to go to the emergency room where I could relax, or pee my pants and have to leave in shame.  The problem was that I couldn’t think of a good reason to use a knife and I had just used the restroom about fifteen minutes before.  What a horrible night this turned out to be.  I was proving to be a real dummy and now it seems I wasn’t good enough for the girlfriend I had fought so hard to win the heart of.  I was angry, sad and depressed all at the same time, and I still didn’t know what a good Pinochle hand looked like. 

I struggled through another hour of play before they all gave up trying to show me how to big, pass, trump and all the other ridiculous crap you do with a wonky deck of 48 cards.  We said our good-byes and I tried to not be bitter about the experience but I left there feeling not-good-enough.  I wasn’t good enough to play a bafflingly popular card game and not good enough to be with Wendy.

I expressed my anger to Wendy on the way home, and she deflated my concerns as quickly as one would deflate a child’s balloon with a push-pin. 

“That was just him asking about hearts and diamonds,” Wendy said, “Don’t make a big deal out of it.  And I love you… for some reason.”

Despite the night I had spent wrestling with gaming concepts slipping in and out of my grasp, it turned out that I still had a pretty cool girlfriend and when the haze of the night lifted the next morning, I would realize that I had fit in just fine with Krissy and Jeremy.

The main idea I would really like to have taken away from this is that Pinochle sucks.  This isn’t a matter of opinion… yes it is, but it is my opinion and this time I happen to be right, and that’s the Damm truth.