Thursday, May 15, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Gambling and grace

By Gregory Crosby

While he disdains any pretensions to gonzo journalism early on, novelist James McManus' engrossing and idiosyncratic Positively Fifth Street has created an unintended exemplar of the genre some 30 years after Hunter S. Thompson turned a small assignment to write about the Mint 400 auto race into a "savage journey to the heart of the American Dream." McManus isn't so savage, but his disquisition into the temptations of Las Vegas is as expansively moralistic and cheerfully damning as one would expect from any good Irish Catholic writer who has sinned greatly and confessed of it mightily. It's also exuberantly comic, meandering and obsessive, in thanks to the fact that McManus becomes an unexpected part of the story that he's come to cover.

That story is of the 2000 World Series of Poker at Binion's Horseshoe. McManus, a lifelong poker player, came to cover the event for Harper's Magazine, particularly the wealth of women players who would be competing. He figured on taking some of his $4,000 in expenses and advance and entering a satellite or two, enjoying a little of the aura that tournament poker exudes. But what was to be an enjoyable sideline to his journalism took an unexpected turn when McManus, blessed by Lady Luck and prepared by hours of scholastic immersion in such poker texts as Doyle Brunson's famed Super/System, found himself not only winning a satellite event for the $10,000 stake needed to enter the series, but actually surviving to the final table days later. McManus came in fifth overall, winning $247,760: an astonishing achievement for an amateur who had never come near a tournament (though he had spent endless hours playing computer simulations on top of his lifetime poker experience).

Poker forms the core of McManus' story, but it is framed by darker events unfolding just two blocks away at the Clark County Courthouse: the trial of Sandra Murphy and Rick Tabish in the murder of Ted Binion. The sad tale of Ted Binion, over-privileged, wild, drug-addled, barred from the very casino where his father had created the poker tournament that McManus now was incredibly conquering and murdered by two of the sleaziest characters to grace the Vegas saga, dovetails nicely with McManus' own struggle with his divided self, the war between Bad Jim and Good Jim. Bad Jim is the sexed-up, alpha male poker fanatic who, with a twist or turn, might have ended up like Ted; Good Jim, the loyal husband and father, whose second marriage saved him from his dark side (McManus' wife, Jennifer, acts as the watchful Beatrice who he keeps ever in mind as he tours the Inferno of gambling and sex).

What results is a raw, very open book in which McManus analyzes himself in much the way he tries to detect the tells in the faces of professional poker players who quite naturally terrify him. Even as he exults in his amazing luck and poker prowess, giving detailed and vivid portraits of the personalities involved in the WSOP along the way, he returns to dark refrains on his fallen nature as reflected in the tragedies and twists of fate of the Binion family, one that comes to seem an extreme mirror of his own family history. McManus unfolds all of this in much the way he experienced it, resulting in a highly discursive book that for some stretches seems lost in its own dark wood of technical poker jargon, occasionally facile philosophizing on the nature of sex and biology, and unnecessary tangents, as when a passing reference to David Sedaris leads to a page-and-a-half anecdote about the time Sedaris was McManus' student, adding nothing. Aside from this chaff, and McManus' annoying habit of referring to Casino Center Boulevard as "Second Street," the book deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in Binion's murder, poker or Las Vegas, though its relentlessly Catholic cosmology is off-putting at moments (a single lap dance is treated by a guilty McManus and his appalled wife as if he's spent a month shacking up with the Whore of Babylon). Like Dante, McManus returns to the paradiso of his family, literally richer for having braved the big leagues and played well, spiritually richer for having put Bad Jim in his rightful place, achieving what both gamblers and saints long for: a state of grace.