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Dan Kennedy (1:22)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories on the podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York and Los Angeles and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org the story you're about to hear by Josh Axelrod was recorded live at the Moth main stage. The theme of the night was man and Beast.

Josh Axelrod (1:48)

Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone. Whenever I have a little free time, I like to hang out at home by myself and cry. Although lately I've been branching out a little bit. I've been getting into Internet poker. It's a little bit healthier, I think. Slightly more glamorous. Although it can be hard. It can be hard trying to prove your manhood for real money against a group of strangers over the computer. And it's especially hard when you're half drunk and playing four or five games at the same time while simultaneously trying to hunt down and kill a cockroach the size of a Pringle that you spotted inside your apartment. And I found myself in this predicament a few months back. I had been out drinking with my friend Kirk. I was feeling a little bit despondent. And you know, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I always feel like mild depression should be treated with a mild depressant. A little bit of alcohol, perhaps Some of you this evening are espousing this particular theory. It's Homeopathic. You know, like, cures, like. So I was out with my friend Kirk. My girl had recently left me. She had told me in so many words that I wasn't man enough for her. She said, I want a man, and you're still a little boy. And I said, am not. She said, aren't you? I said, am not. We went back and forth like that for a minute. She was 15, by the way. So it was a very weird conversation. And I said to Kirk, you know, I'm just. I'm feeling down. And I feel like when a woman says, you're not enough of a man, what she means is, you're not enough of an animal. You lack the sort of the bestial energy and the vigor and just even the mere desire to touch another person, which animals seem to have. And Kirk, who's sort of like myself, he's a little bit of a geek also. And he said, you know, he used to be a mathematician, and now he plays poker for a living. And he said, yeah, you know, I. I know what you mean. And we started to talk a little bit. I also, as some of you may know from stories that I've told here at the Moth, I gamble for a living. I've done that for five or six years now. As a true story. It's sort of a weird, unnecessary story, but it's the way it's turned out. I don't play poker, though. I play a different game. I don't really understand poker. And Kirk was telling me this evening about. As we drank, he was telling me about poker and about how wonderful it's been for him and how wonderful life has been for him since the Internet poker explosion got going. Because he was saying he used to have to be on the road all the time, going down to Las Vegas, out to Atlantic City, up to Connecticut, traveling all the time, which is what I have to do. And for the past two years, since this sort of epiphenomenon has broken out, he's just sat in his living room grinning maniacally at this, at the computer monitor and sipping like a big thing of Coke and just clicking the button. And he said, you know, it's amazing. There's just. The players out on the Internet are horrible. He tells me, they're terrible players. They play any two. Any cards at all. They don't think about what they're playing. They just. They think they're playing Galaga, you know what I mean? Or a video game. They just press the button and bet and bet. They forget there's real money attached to it. And all you have to do is play tightly and conservatively and it's a very easy way to earn a living. And really it can be quite good. And he was saying, you know, you might want to consider this because maybe you'll feel a little more manly and sort of grounded and focused and intact if you're just sitting in one place for a while. And I thought about it and he said, sure, there's a couple of books you can read. You could start, you know, obviously not tonight when we've been drinking, but here's a couple of ideas. And he gave me some pointers and we had one more round for the road. I took a cab home, booted up my computer, logged on to party poker.com, zapped some money over from my net teller account, and got down to my new business. As I thought of it in my semi sort of drunken state, I cracked open another beer to sort of celebrate the glamour of starting a new lifestyle and began to play. And I was trying to remember what he had said. I was playing, I was tight, tight, and I would fold. And they were. And the players, it's true, just like Kirk had said, the players were very aggressive. They bet and all the time. And every. They were just all the time. It's like they always had these hands betting. And I was losing very quickly. And I noticed after a little while, about an hour and a half of this, one of the players I was losing the most to was this maniac who was in almost every hand, all the time betting. His screen name was M. Brown714. It was M. Brown,714. He was from Huntington Beach, California. They actually tell you when they, you know, when you're on the screen where they're logged in from. And I'm from Huntington Beach, California. And as the pummeling continued, I started to realize, you know, the sun was coming up and I was maybe not thinking so clearly, but I thought, you know what? I know this son of a bitch. I know who this is. M. Brown, 714, from Huntington Beach. This is Matt Brown. This was my nemesis, Matt Brown, my nemesis in eighth grade, back in junior high school, seventh grade eight. The kid more than any other who was responsible for making my then life a then living hell was this had to be him. He was always so aggressive. And we would play. We played basketball at recess. And you know, in the 1980s in Southern California, it was all about basketball. That was your soul, that was your test of manhood. There was no such Thing as sort of wit or knowledge of trivia or, you know, musical talent. There was nothing. It was just, could you play basketball? How assertive were you on the court? That was the sole way that a man defined himself. And Matt was. He was very aggressive and he could beat me. And finally I decided to. Over the summer between seventh and eighth grade, I gave it some thought and I thought, you know, basketball, basketball. And I was trying to, you know, use my sort of geek wisdom. And I thought, what you're trying to do with basketball is you're trying to put the ball through the hoop. Which I know sounds a little bit obvious, but I was very proud of that at the time because I thought, it's simple. It's very simple. In essence, you put the ball through the hoop. If you can just learn to make any shot, just any shot from anywhere on the entire court at any time, you, even me, could become the greatest living basketball player just in the whole world. All you gotta do is learn to do it. It's one trick, right? It's one move. And I watched a videotape and. And I read a book. And you do this thing with the flip your hand, which looks effete, but that's what you're supposed to do. And I got over the effete part and I started practicing and then became good. My mom's sort of over the garage hoop that we had. I became very good. And I could make almost any shot anywhere in the driveway. And from the middle of the cul de sac, I could make that, which was like a six pointer as far as I was concerned. And we went out and the school year, eighth grade started, and I started going out at the recess and the lunch and playing the pickup games. And I found that I still wanted to shoot. And I would try shooting. And the only problem was that whenever there was another human being within two feet of me, I would freak out. I would just throw it, like backwards over my head. I would panic completely, but I could. But I could make free throws because there was no. There was distance there. And so Matt, because he was so aggressive, continued to foul me. Now that I was shooting a lot, he was fouling me and hacking me and all these things. And I got to take a lot of free throws. But he didn't realize that you shouldn't really foul someone ever who cannot make any shot except a free throw. He didn't see the lack of sort of insight was lacking. But I started scoring a lot just in free throws alone in these games. And midway through the semester my scores were getting as high almost as Matt's were, just on the basis of these free throws. And I noticed that the way he looked at me began to change. Like the way he regarded me. And sort of a little bit of a hint of respect was blooming there. And after a game one day he came up to me and he patted me on the shoulder, which is the first time he had ever touched me in a non violent way. And he said, you know, we should hang out sometime. And of course it didn't occur to me to sort of, you know, say, no, you bastard, you've made my life. I said, yes, please, please, can we, please? I almost dropped to my knees and I said, come back to my mom's house after school and this will have a. We'll have a wonderful time. And we did. We went back and we played Super Mario Brothers. And at a certain point, Matt got up and said, you know, where's the bathroom? We were having fun. And I pointed out I had my bathroom, which is the bathroom that I was recharged with cleaning. It was mine, it was my project, my responsibility. I was very proud of it. But I was also the reason that there was a small Dixie cup upside down in the corner near the shadow near the shower. Excuse me. There was a Dixie cup on the floor because over the summer there had been a cockroach in the bathroom when I had been taking a shower. And I panicked and I put the cup on top of it, which I would use for the tooth brushing. And I put the cup on top of it. And I thought when I would take it up and I would kill it. But then I was afraid to do that because I'm very scared of bugs. So I just thought, I'll leave the Dixie cup on top of the cockroach for one year and it'll starve, it'll just die and it'll solve the entire problem. So I left it there. And then until this moment when Matt said I heard him from the bathroom, he flushed, he opened the door, he cried out, what's this? And I walked over there to say, oh, don't worry about that. But it was too late. He was picking it up. And the roach. It had been a few months, but to its credit, the roach just was still moving in the same direction that it had been moving in two months before. Roaches are very focused, you know what I mean? They have that animal kind of presence of mind. And it just kept going. And I shrieked. I let out a scream because I was very scared of it screamed. And Matt shot me this look. And I knew immediately that the story I screamed, frankly, like a little girl. And the story I knew the next day, all around the schoolyard, it was going to be the story that the roach and the Dixie cup, and he would be telling it to everybody. And as soon as I realized what was about to happen, the trap I had set for myself, I started to cry. And so the story that actually, this was before, I enjoyed the tears so much. So it was a very. It was embarrassing. And the story that went around the next day was that there had been a cup and screaming and like a girl, and then tears, all tears. It was a horribly embarrassing moment. But Now, I thought, 15 years later, the sun's coming up in Brooklyn, and I have Matt Brown by the short and Harry's, because he's being way too aggressive. He doesn't know how to play. He's betting all the time. He's like a maniac on a Galaga machine. I'm playing tight. Little drunk, but playing tight. I'm gonna get him. And I found. I sort of looked around the website and found that he was playing four or five different tables at once. So I logged onto all those tables, got into every single game. Not that I had the poker capacity to sort of be able to play skillfully, but I waited and I bid my time and I waited. I was losing a little more and more. And then finally I got into four hands at the same time with Matt. Where I had the nuts is the poker term I've since learned the best. I had the best hands you got. I had the straights, and I didn't even know the term. And I had flushes and boxcars, whatever it was. I had the best hands that you could possibly have. I was going to win all the pots right then. I knew it. There was no doubt in my mind. And as I was about to. He was betting and I was betting, and I knew he was betting he was a sucker and I was gonna get him. And as we were about to just have the showdown of all the hands at the very same time with just me and Matt in all four of these pots, this beast, it was almost the size of a duckling, frankly. This enormous roach darted out from underneath the desk, and I sort of reared back, but I was in. Now I was in kill mode. And I went after it across the room. I whipped off my shoe and I came down right on top of it, and I killed it. And I killed it dead, without no hesitation. And no Dixie cups. And I whirled around to the computer monitor, ready for a moment of double victory. And I saw that I had been automatically folded out of all four hands because the software to keep the game moving, if you don't click, you're booted out. So all these pots that I was all going to win to the tune of almost $1,000 folded out of automatically. And so there was no comeuppance with Matt Shaw that evening. With Matt Brown, excuse me, that evening. And if he thinks, if he thinks there's a Matt Shaw story for another night, which is very precious. But Matt Brown, Matt Brown got no comeuppance that evening. And if he ever thinks of me these days, I'm sure he remembers that moment in the Scream, like a little girl in the corner of the bathroom. But that cockroach can tell you I kill like.