Proximity Muse

This is the last of my character development bits. Next I’ll ship these off to my writing partner to get his take, then I’ll start on a treatment. The wife has insisted she sees the Dealer as Rob Lowe and I’m hard pressed to disagree.

The Dealer is the MC of this back room poker main event. He looks to be in his early 50s, with graying hair, a healthy tan and a fit body. It’s clear from the way he shuffles and deals the cards that he’s no stranger to the tables. The Dealer wears a comfortable looking gray linen suit with plenty of pocket room to hide the .45 he keeps in a shoulder holster. The money for this soirée is his and the two large, no-nonsense looking goons that accompany him and the money are also packing heat, but in a much more obvious fashion. They carry MP5s and back-up 9mm in ankle holsters. The Dealer doesn’t fuck around with security.

What the Dealer wants from the game is to watch the people involved, like it’s a reality show put on just for his benefit. He knows the players involved, maybe better than they know themselves. He intentionally puts people from diverse backgrounds together just to watch them rub each other the wrong way. He doesn’t discriminate against cheaters or ruffians either. As long as no outright violence is committed at the table, he doesn’t get involved. If someone can cheat and get away with it, no one is more delighted by it than the Dealer.

But he doesn’t put up with any shit. Each player is allowed to bring two spectators along with them. The visitors are told not to interfere with the game, but unless they try something violent, the Dealer is just as amused by the visitor’s antics as he is by the players. He realizes that a great many people bring along spectators to help them cheat, and, while he technically discourages this, it’s really just another piece of the game. If violence does take place, either from the players or the spectators, the Dealer responds in kind. Fisticuffs are met with brutal beat downs (courtesy of the goons) and the very sight of a gun brings a lethal response from the Dealer himself.

I’m still plenty sick. Don’t expect much from me quite yet.

Unsurprisingly to anyone with even the vaguest idea of world geography, Mr. Kobe hails from the magical land of Japan. Mr. Kobe is the youngest of our poker players at a mere 25 years of age. He wears those thick-rimmed glasses popular with the hipster crowd and dresses in suits that probably cost than might be apparent.

One of the themes of our tale is how the mobile phone has changed things over the last decade or so. Each of our players has one, The Dealer has one, and even some of the cronies have ‘em. In Mr. Kobe’s case, his is a super slim Japanese model that makes the iPhone look like the primitive software it actually is. The phone has all the usual bells and whistles, but the one thing about it that stands out is its audio and video capture abilities. His phone is basically skinnier version of the Flip, and Mr. Kobe uses this aspect of his phone more often than any other, much like the iconic buck toothed Japanese tourist from the 80s. He takes pictures of people. He takes pictures of places. He takes pictures of food. He samples the music playing in a bar. The phone is nearly constantly in his hand.

Mr. Kobe is actually Yakuza, naturally, and is painted from throat to wrists to ankle with Irezumi, the old school method of Japanese tattoos. Because it’s generally frowned upon to show your tattoos around other people that aren’t gangsters, Mr. Kobe keeps his shirt buttoned to the very tippity top, won’t roll up his sleeves (no matter how hot it gets), and is unlikely to so much hike up a pant leg to scratch his calf. To American eyes, this gives Mr. Kobe a sort of nerd-esque or conservative flair that dovetails nicely with the Japanese tourist image.

The Yakuza originally formed around the activities of two groups: gamblers and wandering merchants (steal stuff in one place, sell it in another). Although Mr. Kobe definitely hails from the gambler end of the family, he knows a thing or two about moving cattle quickly and quietly in the dark of night. He’s killed men before and has a particularly low tolerance for cheaters, which, thanks to his family history, he’s quite good at catching.

Mr. Kobe is accompanied by two younger Japanese guys that look as though they might have come directly from the set of The Fast and the Furious. These kids don’t have the tattoos, or the sense of honor of real Yakuza, but finding decent recruits to add to the family has become harder and harder as Japan (and Asia in general) continues to advance economically. Like I said, they may not have Yakuza “class,” but they still have guns stuffed in their oversized fanny packs. I’m not even giving them names. They won’t last long enough to need ‘em.

The Yakuza have fairly impressive organizations already at work in the US, and Mr. Kobe is just here on vacation. There might be a few other Yakuza around as well, but they are more likely here to gamble than they are to engage in a turf war for drugs, prostitutes, etc.

So, meet the only player at the table with a gun. Meet. Mr. Kobe.

Continuing with the character work for my next project.

Mr. Vegas

Mr. Vegas looks his name. He wears designer shades indoors, has expensive, lounge-lizard kinda clothes (complete with alligator/shark skin shoes) and slicked back hair that is just starting to thin to a widow’s peak. He’s slightly overweight as well. Not so much you could call him fat, just enough to give him the look of being soft. A nervous habit is to use the 100% cotton handkerchief in his pocket to mop his sweaty brow.  His fingernails are manicured and he has that orange spray-on tan. He tells loud, bad jokes, and smokes a stinky cigar. His cell phone goes off at the most inappropriate times possible and has Livin’ La Vida Loca as the ring tone.

Mr. Vegas tells the ladies he isn’t married, but thanks to the spray-on tan it’s pretty easy to white ring around his finger where a wedding band should be. In short, Mr. Vegas is a walking, talking cliché of all the things you’d expect from a Vegas douche bag. He should be. He’s spent a lot of time perfecting his act. The bit about not being married might be the only truth he speaks all day.

The truth is that Mr. Vegas is a cheat and a card shark. He’s so obvious that people underestimate him. Mr. Vegas isn’t just counting cards or scuffing the edges of aces with a sandpaper ring, no sir. He’s high tech. It’s not common knowledge, but a few years back, a Japanese company put out a cell phone with camera that was pulled from the market. The camera had all sorts of goodies and filters, and combined in just the right way it literally became the sort of X-ray camera teenage boys have fantasized about for decades.

The jerkwad shades Mr. Vegas wears are a variation on the cell phone. They provide just enough of an X-ray picture to let him see what cards folks are dealt. Obviously he can’t just walk around with his X-ray shades on all the time. Someone would become suspicious sooner or later. That’s where the hankie comes in. Each time he wipes his brow, he is actually turning the X-ray function of the shades on and off. The hankie contains a tiny chip that has a very short transmission range, which communicates with a similar chip in the shades.

Even with the shades, keeping track of multiple opponents’ hands is tough work. To help him out, Mr. Vegas has a toe-tapper counter that transmits to his cell phone. Any time someone has a really good hand, Livin’ La Vida Loca blasts out and he receives a nonsensical text message. The wording of the text message relays hand and opponent to Mr. Vegas.

Mr. Vegas rarely steps out of character around other people, but everyone has a weakness and his is booze. More often than not it’s the free drinks rather than the cards that defeat him.

Meet Mr. Vegas.

Today I thought I might start working on a new project, and I thought I’d share some of that work with the class. We’re going to take a stab at a character study. One Mr. Idaho.

Mr. Idaho isn’t this fellas real name, of course. It’s just what I’ll be calling him. In fact, I have no intention of actually giving him a real name. I asked myself what the most boring state in the union might be and the answer I got back was Idaho. If you live in Idaho, I apologize. Give the potatoes a hug for me.

So, Mr. Idaho is very much like the picture I posted. A boring, suit and tie, wage-slave for the insurance industry. He probably went straight to a state college right out of high school, did the requisite amount of partying (not enough to get him in a frat, though) and scraped through with a C+ average. What? A C+ average isn’t bad. We had a president with a C+ average. But I digress.

Mr. Idaho marries the first woman to give him a hummer. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s unattractive or 40 year-old virgin material, that just means the girls in Hometown, USA had firm ideas about where a penis should be placed. He and the missus pop out the usual 2.5 children, buy a house with a white picket fence and settle down into American stupor.

Right now, Mr. Idaho is a boring motherfucker. That’s fine. Most people are boring. You ask a crowd of people what they do for fun and you’ll get way more “I watch TV” type answers than you will “I ski naked” type answers. Further, for the purposes of my study, boring is what I want. Now let’s tie boring to the theme I’ll be working with, which happens to be poker.

Mr. Idaho watches every poker program on television and DVRs the one’s he misses. He enjoys poker so much that he organized a weekly poker night, where the guys sit around, drink beer, curse, (but no smoking in the house) and play cards for penny ante. It turns out that Mr. Idaho is a pretty solid poker player. He ends up with way more pennies than he loses. He dreams of playing poker in a real casino for big time money.

Last Tuesday, Mr. Idaho’s boss asked him to accompany him to a insurances sales convention. The town the convention’s being held in just happens to have a casino. As an aside here, there’s no good reason to always make that town Vegas anymore, either. Hell, Pittsburgh has a casino. If you feel you must go all in (as it were) with the glitz of Vegas, cool, I’m just saying you have alternatives. Anyways, Mr. Idaho knows about the casino and decides to go to the convention. He spends the next few months saving up as much extra cash as he possibly can, maybe even quietly siphoning off some of the savings account, to make a credible stake for some serious poker.

What actually happens to Mr. Idaho while playing poker is the meat of the story, so that doesn’t really need to figure in the study. We will want to know seemingly trivial things like the names of his wife and children. My initial temptation is to name the wife Gladys, but I’ll resist. Mr. Idaho isn’t nearly old enough to have a wife named Gladys. Speaking of age, I figure Mr. Idaho is mid-30s. So, names. Here’s the thing about names. Sometimes a name should mean something, and sometimes it really doesn’t matter. Mr. Idaho doesn’t have a name because I want him to have a certain anonymity. I want my audience to be able to stick the name of whoever Mr. Idaho reminds them of on the character. I’m also tempted to just leave the wife with a cutesy nickname, like Honeybuns or Snookie. This is the only name we’d ever hear Mr. Idaho refer to his wife by (he will, of course, just call her “my wife”). It would even be on his iPhone. The kids need real names though. Simple names will do. Mr. Idaho and his Snookie Bear aren’t really that imaginative. We’ll go with Matt and Ashley.

Now we need something in Mr. Idaho’s background that would make him willing to take a risk. To this point he’s a pretty boring and low risk kind of fellow. For him to do something crazy, like snort coke and bang a hooker over the balcony railing in his hotel room, he’s going to need a shove. Maybe Mr. Idaho is a really bad winner. He’s a trash talker. The more he wins, the more excited and self-confident he gets. Eventually he passes the line from vaguely annoying to egomaniac. The penny ante games at home aren’t enough to bring out the worst in him, but if he won some real money, he might start to behave like a real jackass.

Meet Mr. Idaho.