Texas Hold 'Em at the Paradise Lounge

One pleasure of my job is that I occasionally get to travel somewhere in the United States to interview a former worker at a plant about where the drums were buried or how they didn't really truck the TCE to Kansas City but just dumped it out back.

Sometimes these trips produce fun side-adventures, which explains how Tuesday night found me in the twice-weekly game of Texas Hold 'Em at the back table at Christine's Paradise Lounge in Herington, Kansas. I bought into the game after polishing off the best chicken fried steak I've ever tasted.

You forget how friendly small town America is. Too many years on the coasts have wiped out any trace of my Wyoming upbringing, but I still felt at home under the open sky, talking to the locals over beers in the roadside dives. The poker players were especially welcoming. I don't really play, so Cathy (on my left) helpfully reminded me when it was my turn to bet, and how much would keep me in the game. Once or twice she peeked over my shoulder and whispered helpful things like, "that's not a straight," and "if I were you, I'd fold."

During the trip I finished Junot Diaz's first book, a collection of stories called "Drown." I read it because I wanted to see what all the fuss is about, and Diaz didn't disappoint. Diaz's writing is so fresh and alive -- he practically invents new uses for the language on every line, but none of it sounds forced or pretentious. It doesn't sound like he's working to make his language so musical.

Diaz's stories are also incredibly rich, putting you on the street in the Dominican neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey, a strange and beautiful place to be at the same time you are criss-crossing the heartland.

It took me an hour and a half to lose $20 in the poker game, where a different kind of lingo prevailed, a world away from the charged jive of Diaz's characters but just as musical and engaging. I go back to Kansas the week of October 8th. If I'm in Herington that Tuesday night, you'll know where to find me.