Coffee and Cigarettes

The dim daylight of an overcast morning crept through the venietian blinds, casting vauge horizontal stripes across my face. Chronic insomnia kept me up until 4 this morning. I turned on the television, it was nearly 11. Just in time for "The Price Is Right."

I wriggled my feet into my Fredbird slippers. I learned last year, via a dislocated shoulder, that bare feet and hardwood flooring is a bad combination. I stumbled over to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee, which I poured into a mug, with about a 50/50 blend of Bailey's. I walked across the room and opened the blinds. The dim light still managed to reflect prismatically off the lingering cigarette smoke from last night. I cracked open the window, to thin out the air, and resumed last night's chain-smoking marathon.

I finished off the mug of coffee/booze and poured another. I fired up my laptop and checked my e-mail. A bunch of junk, and a note from Dad, reminding me of our regular Thursday night poker game at his house. This has been a tradition for almost 15 years, beginning at the apartment Tanner and I shared straight out of college. For the first month, it was a regular Friday night game, but that conflicted with the race schedule at Fairmont Park, so we pushed it back to Thursdays. Up until October, we had been playing at Tanner's place in Shiloh, but when he married, the rules changed. His wife is a vehement anti-smoker, so the cigarettes and cigars were banned from the game. That lasted exactly ONE week, before Dad decided there was room in my childhood home to host the group.

The core of the group has been steady for a decade or more: Dad, Mike Tanner, my uncle Jim, and myself. Tanner will occasionally bring other writers from the Post. It was a great thrill for me to play poker with Bill McClellan, and I've had the luck to do it about three times now. Hell of a poker player. Uncle Jim is a tobacconist on "the Hill." He always brings more cigars than we could ever smoke. He refuses to allow us to pay for them, but he plays poker VERY well, so he usually makes out all right. Jim will occasionally bring favorite customers over to play, but most of them don't care to trek out to the Metro East to play in a home game. When college friends of Tanner and I are in town, I invite them to play, and since I've been dating Susan, she and her brother Gary frequently join us.

Dad's reminder e-mail always begins a flurry of correspondence, trying to figure out who is bringing who, so we know how much food, soda, booze, and cigars to bring. Dad always brought the food. Uncle Jim brought cigars. Tanner was picking up a case of Coke, he and I were splitting a case of beer, and I decided to pick up bottles of Kilo Kai rum and Dewar's White Label scotch. Tanner wasn't bringing anyone tonight, Uncle Jim might bring a friend, Dad was flying solo. I shot off an e-mail to Tim and Monica McKenzie to see if they were joining us. Tim was a college friend, as well as my most recent client, when he discovered forged Al Capone letters at the ballroom he was refurbishing. I also e-mailed Susan and Gary. It looked like I was going to be responsible for the bulk of guests tonight.

I finished the pot of coffee and dressed. I needed to check in at the office, on the off chance that there was a case waiting for me.