And then there's Maude

Man, I thought I was going to get beat up by a wacko the other night. And a wacko lady at that.

Earlier I wrote about the sidewalk incident, and how I'm stupidly prone to escalating confrontations over nothing. It might be just wishful thinking, but I like to think the frontal lobotomy has helped smooth out my little self-endangering temper bursts, and that might have helped Friday night at The Muck.

With Gina and Franny both spending the night with friends and Michelle still in North Carolina, I decided to head out to the Muckleshoot Indian Casino for a poker session. I'd been there for hours already when a highly noticeable woman came sashaying into the card room, seemingly on a serious attention-seeking mission. Although it wasn't apparent at first, she was probably close to 60 years old, with a slightly drawn, wrinkly face. You didn't notice that immediately because of her flamboyantly bodacious body, topped by enormous fake breasts in which -- judging by her plunging neckline and, later, her chatter -- she took equally enormous pride.

Picture my mom's head, complete with the flaming red hair of her youth, atop Loni Anderson's 1970s-era figure, wrapped in a clingy, silky thing stolen from Beyonce's closet. You had to look at her ... just to make sense of it all. She was like some Dow Corning/Clairol experiment gone horribly wrong.

Seated one table over, she kept bumping into and flirting with one of the three aging frat-boy buddies in our game, and I thought she was working it way too hard. It's a type I hate, and I already disliked her even before she was transferred to our table, two seats to my left. When she arrived she kept up the look-at-me banter, including feigning confusion when a dealer asked her, per house rules, to remove her poker chips from their plastic tray and stack them on the table like everyone else.

“What,” she said, “is somebody complaining about my rack? I don't think that's ever happened before.” Ho ho ho. No, the dealer said before rephrasing the request, I'm sure everyone here appreciates your rack. The frat boys loved it.

Anyway, half an hour later or so came the hand that brought our weird confrontation. On a flop of ace-queen-four she bet out from early position. There were six players in the hand, including me on the button (the nominal dealer, last to act), and a very experienced player sitting between us, who was first to act but checked the action to Maude Lollobrigida.


I had entered the pot with the 8 and 10 of hearts, and with two hearts on the flop giving me a flush draw I decided to call her bet, along with everyone else. The turn was a blank. Lollobrigida bet again, several of us called. There was no heart on the river, the final card, either, and when Miss Boobalicious fired yet another bet, representing an ace at worst, everyone folded around to me. At that point I had nothing -- no flush, no pair, only 10 high -- so there was no way I could call.

As I pitched my cards into the muck I breezily announced that it would be up to someone else to take one for the table and call her down. There was only one other player left in the hand, the experienced guy to my left, and sure enough he placed eight chips out there to see her hand. As he did so he turned over his fairly weak holding of queen-nine -- giving him only the second best pair on the board, with a middling kicker. Surprisingly, Rack Lady showed an even weaker hand, queen-three, and the good player sitting between us took down a nice pot.

That's when the flirtatious chatter ended and Boobalicious Lollobrigida turned into Bea Arthur on a menopausal rant. She stared at me for the longest time and then snarled, “That was really chickenshit.” And she repeated it. “That was unbelievably chickenshit.”

She didn't elaborate, but her complaint was that I had encouraged and influenced another player's decision, a breach of poker etiquette. She blamed me for costing her the pot.

Well, I get it. I've been mad before after losing a hand I expected to win. And technically, I suppose, she had a gripe. But the truth was that my little speech had neither the intention nor the effect of changing the other guy's play; I was just jokishly announcing that I was folding, in keeping with the light character of the game. Besides, the guy who won the pot usually plays in a much higher-limit game; he was just at our table while waiting for a seat. I'm sure he could play circles around me, not to mention the crazy chick, without even looking at his cards. Also, I wasn't exactly running over the table. Short of the drunk frat dudes, I was the last guy he needed poker advice from.

But boy was she mad. She kept staring at me and muttering. My instinct was to argue with her, to point out how little I had to do with the outcome of the hand. Maybe even to scoff at her own play: Hey lady, queen-three is bad luck.

Instead I knuckled the table a couple of times -- the universal sign of poker kinship or good luck -- and apologized for saying anything that might be construed as advice to another player. That ought to settle that, I thought. Lobotomy to the rescue!

But Mad Maude wouldn't let it go. I thought she was going to come out of her chair and slap me around or suffocate me or something. After 10 more minutes of glaring she asked for a table change, then came back to whisper something in frat-boy-flirtee's ear. When she left, the kid, Dale or Derek or something, looked at me and said wow, she really doesn't like you.

Whatever she said, her little hex worked. Derek and his buddies snapped me off for several big pots and I lost 160 bucks for the night.