The Poker Deck

I was eight, maybe nine, playing cards with my grandmom at her table. It was an ordinary afternoon and I was losing, which is the only detail that actually explains what happened next. Somewhere in the middle of the game I became convinced she was cheating.

So I threw the deck. The whole deck. Fifty-two cards off the table and into the air, from a kid who had been perfectly pleasant ninety seconds earlier. My family has retold that story at every holiday since, and I have never once been able to argue it down.

For the record, I was almost certainly wrong. I was eight and I was behind, and eight-year-olds who are behind do not run careful investigations. My grandmom was playing straight. I have apologized for the deck plenty of times. I have never once apologized for the instinct underneath it.

Because that is the part that matters. Not the losing. The unfairness. I could handle getting beaten by somebody better than me, and I still can. What I could not handle, at eight or at any age since, was the idea of getting beaten by somebody bending the rules. Something in me refused it before I had any language for it. That reaction never went away. It has cost me sleep, money and more than one relationship, and it is also the reason I eventually went to war with people who cheat for a living. It started at a card table, over a hand I was losing fair and square.