I’m sitting backstage, alone, waiting for someone to call me on stage. A once lonely tub of water and ice recently made friends with two dozen or so Heineken. I remove one from the tub teetering just below room temperature, pop it open with a Bic lighter to enjoy while I wait patiently for the others to cool to a more desirable temp. Enter Paul Bolger.
Paul takes a pack of playing cards out of his front jean pocket and asks me if I’d like to play a game of poker. I cordially agree to the game of distinguished gentlemen. We then concur on a verbal agreement that the winner of the hand, five card draw, takes a lofty prize of ten dollars. Noting that Paul failed to shuffle the deck at all, I deduced there was mutiny afoot. Surely my four aces fell to his astonishing royal flush, a hand that bolsters the odds in five cards of 1 in 649,740. Roughly 156 times that of the odds of my four of a kind. I enticed Paul to quickly fess up to the crime, knowing that I was a man of my word and would have paid him had the game not been rigged in his favor. Enter one half of Paul Bolger’s rhythm section.
“Alan. Poker? Ten bucks?” Paul asks with a concealed grin aimed at his last unsuspecting victim. “I’ve never played poker before, but sure, ten bucks,” groans the assumed Slovak born beat keeper with a tone of Eastern Europe buried beneath his now Chicagoan influenced accent. Paul’s face lights up as his prey unknowingly lies defenseless in the eyes of an amateur pocket casino peddling predator. “Oh, it’s easy. I’ll deal the cards out and show you the ropes. We each get 5 cards to start.” The mastermind quickly flutters out 5 cards to each player, alternating one at a time. “Now the goal of the game is to match face values, suits, a combination of the two, et cetera... There are actually a lot of different hands you can win with, but we’ll get into that a bit later.” Alan glances over his cards and knowing that four aces has to be something good, chooses not to return any cards and keep his hand as it was dealt. “Hope you have that ten bucks handy, Paul.” A look of modern falsified anxiety from Paul surely assures Alan that the game is his. The forced odds of nearly three quarters of a million to one were about to be thrown in Alan’s face. “Holy shit! I got a royal flush!” The excitement in the room was so hollow and phony we could have all been off-broadway. “A royal flush? Does that beat four aces?” Alan stutters. “It most certainly does!” Paul contends. Alan's ten dollars was certainly ascertained by shady means and he began to realize it. “Royal flush? Who the fuck gets a royal flush? You fuck cheat me out of ten dollar!” His ill mannered temper, broken english, and native accent were in full effect following a discovery of the leisurely coup d’état. “Relax! It was a joke. I had no intention of keeping the money,” Paul explained, “What should we open our first set with?” Alan coming back to reality, socks Paul in the shoulder in retaliation for his shenanigans and calmly suggests an extended fourteen minute or more version of their love child, one of many, “Over and Back.”
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