The beauty of authorship is the ability to write history. They say the victors write history, but in poker, the losers can write history. And if someone pisses me off I can kill them in a book, which I have been known to do. I can write fairy tails, but what if nobody reads? I can produce an audio book, and you can listen. And if you won’t listen, you can watch the video book. I won’t even make you subscribed to any paid networks like Netflix, Amazon, HBO, or Paramount. I could list a few more sites for the purposes of search engine optimization. I’m counting on morbid curiosity. People gaze upon me like gazers at a car wreck, and wonder how a guy who sucks at poker managed to win over $200,000 lifetime in poker. Do you see what a confidence boost it is to destroy my bankroll for the poker patrons at the Pensacola Greyhound Track.
I walk away after losing in a tournament and dealers like Jeremy, Tank, or Tania scoff and say, “Can you believe he says he won over $200,000 in poker tournaments?”
“Careful he doesn’t hear you badmouthing him.”
“He’ll put you in one of his books.”
Jeremy added, “Yeah he made me a ghost in that Trained Ghost Gimmick book.”
Tania spoke up, “Yeah, he made me a bratty hostage daughter of a senator. in his new gladiator book. He even spelled my name wrong.”
The reality is the www.GlobalPokerIndex.com said that’s my total lifetime winnings. While I do write fiction, I don’t misrepresent the facts. While I do enjoy killing certain characters in the books I write, I can’t kill everyone. For some there are fates worse than death by prose.
When poker dealer, Matt, knocked me out of a tournament, and yelled out seat open with a little too much enthusiasm, I made him a gladiator in the dystopian version of my futuristic Spartacus titled Reenactment Gladiators, where gladiators attack Washington DC instead of Rome. He is Austin Matthews, who I also named after my cousins from Arkansas. Matt’s character has the duty of amputating the fingers of wealthy hostages in response to government attacks on gladiators who were forced to reenact Civil War battles using live fire rifles and cannons on various video platforms like Tiktok and YouTube. Modern surgical intervention allows everyone to be saved from virtually every injury sustained on the battlefield. Unfortunately, Matt’s overzealous elimination of me from a tournament altered the fate of every gladiator as he became the victim of a weaponized bacterial infestation that was nicknamed Uranus Pacmaniasis Bungholius, because nobody could remember the name Vibrio Vulnificus type 2, that was shortened to VV2 .Vibrio Vulnificus is a real species of flesh eating bacteria that people get when getting in the ocean around Florida. It leads to a disease called necrotizing fasciitis. In Reenactment Gladiators, the bacteria is weaponized, so that it eats the flesh of rectum and anus. So, it’s like a Pacman of the bunghole, which causes terrible bloody diarrhea, and Matt is the first one to contract the terrible disease.
You may recall that Phil, the husband of Alice who I nicknamed the psycho-killer insulted me a few weeks ago when I was eliminated from a tournament. The insult I attributed to him went as follows, “Mark, maybe you should read about poker instead of write about poker.”
Alice would never insult me like that. Nonetheless, Alice and Phil made it into The Reenactment Gladiators. In that book, Alice is a real psycho-killer, just like her nickname metaphorically described her in many of my previous articles Phil thought he was safe, because I have a vampire named Philanescu in The Lost Art of Bloodletting who is at times called Phil. However, Phil was destined for a new role in the gladiator book. Phil will be a snitch.
In the gladiator book, I go so far as to describe many murders that Alice conspires to perpetrate with Lethal Kathy, and Poker Face Bob who run a bed and breakfast in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Alice uses a secret blend of herbs, spices, and poison to sedate and incapacitate guests who have freshly caught fish cooked and served after Bob takes those guests out fishing on his charter boat. Once the guests are sedated, Kathy enters the guestrooms and slices their throats just like the AI video in a previous article describes. Alice hires a slick talking black attorney who gets Alice a off on the basis of mental defect. That attorney is named named Carl Andrews. Carl is a guy who plays Omaha High-Low with me, and asked me to put him in my book. Andrews is named after Andy Williams. Andy Williams is from the South Suburbs of Chicago. He describes himself as the “Hood Candidate” in his run for Attorney General of Illinois. He came to my attention, because he is helping one of my ghosts in The Trained Ghost Gimmick.
The ghost I speak of in Reba Gardner. Reba was based on a real tragic person by the name of Rebecca Bumgardner. In the book she dies in prison, and returns to haunt the Princess Theater in Columbus, Mississippi, because she sold her soul in exchange for a free beer. Check out the video trailer on my website, because she’s in it. The real Becky Bumgardner was framed for selling methamphetamine, because she would document the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Department harassing her on her YouTube channel called Lowndes County Accountability. She was given 24 years in prison, even though video surveillance never showed her handing over any dope. The certified informants lied under oath. Becky’s sister, April Bumgardner, actually found the surveillance footage with time stamps that prove that the prosecutor knowingly suborned perjury in this case. This is not a weird technicality. She didn’t sell drugs. April gave me the court transcripts , which I used to tell her story in my ghost comedy. Her story is nothing but a tragedy. I am determined not to let her be a ghost in a Mississippi prison. There was a time when I didn’t like to be around her because she was incessantly messed up. However, she has evolved into an elegant, articulate, sober, devout, Christian lady who deserves to live life as a free woman. I expect her to be set free due to the malicious prosecution that landed her in jail.