Northampton Men's Book Group: 2017

"A funny and entertaining inside look at a gambling industry in which big players use complex algorithms but nevertheless can lose to the most average of rubes..."

Publishers Weekly

"I can tell you this about Dueling with Kings: High Stakes, Killer Sharks, and the Get-Rich Promise of Daily Fantasy Sports: It is the best thing you’ll read about the industry, of any length."

Dustin Gouker, March 6, 2017 09:24 PST
LegalSportsReport.com

Daniel Barbarisi, Evan's nephew-in-law and heir-apparent to the Michael Lewis throne, will be at Evan's house on Wednesday, April 12, to read excerpts from, field questions about, and receive well-deserved kudos for his just-released book, Dueling with Kings.

Be there.

I work as a reporter for the Redwood Reporter. Yep, a Redwood Reporter reporter. I moved to California after college and wrote for the East Bay Express in Oakland/Berkeley for a few years where I was assigned a piece on the burgeoning marijuana business on the North Coast. I fell hard for the conifers, the cheap weed and a free spirit by the name of Scarlet Magnolia. She had a last name but never volunteered it. The story that came out of the assignment won some local awards and finalized in a few nationals and soon the Tribune, Chronicle and Examiner called with offers of bigger and better, Utne Reader expressed serious interest and Newsweek wanted me on staff.

But I couldn’t shake the image of a ratty sleeping bag, a sixer of Red Tails, and Scarlet breathing all giggly and minty down my neck on a beach we might never find again. So I chose smaller and better, called the Editor at the Reporter, and packed my rain gear and moved up to Redwood, AKA Deadwood because of its blighted nightlife, Wetwood due to the persistent mistiness, and Getwood for the ubiquitous boner joke. It is also where the model for the Walter White character on Breaking Bad built his Blue Crystal Empire. The guy’s name was actually Walter White. I’ve always meant to ask Paul Gilligan, the creator of the show – not that we hang out or anything, just like to think about it – if that was an inside joke or some kind of contractual deal. Perhaps, when Gilligan asked White who he had always dreamed would play him in the movie version of his life, White had answered, “Walter Fucking White, that’s who!” and Gilligan just got creative with his solution.

Anyhow, my first assignment was to get myself into Walter’s good graces and ultimately, into the business itself. At first, my editor, a kudlergeon who favored suspenders, ink stains and a vocabulary that would make Richard Pryor blanch, asked me to go undercover.

“Hell,” he said. We haven’t hired you yet. He won’t have a clue that you’re working for us.” He used different descriptives, of course, so you can use your imagination if you want to fill in the omitted blanks.

“Yeah, that’s all cool and stuff,” I said. “But going undercover seems a lot more dangerous than going in straight, you know, like as a writer.”

“How so?” he said.

“Well, he’ll think I’m undercover.”

“Which you would be.”

“Yeah, but if he’s thinking “undercover,” he’s thinking narc or 22 Jump Street or some such, not that I’m an undercover writer.”

“You got a blankin’ point,” he said. “Just sport the hat you’re actually wearing.”

“Something like that.”

So we went ahead with me writing a follow-up to my Express piece, which had given a handful of pot-growers fifteen months of fame and the county a huge influx of tourists and their free spending on marijuana, Bed & Breakfasts, and speeding tickets.

It wasn’t all that hard finding the Real Walter. His “cabin” in the woods, which was more Iron Man than UniBomber, loomed over a pristine valley like Gatsby’s ghost. If you couldn’t actually make out the place itself, the floor-to-ceiling windows beaconed at sunset and some of the best musicians on either coast and in between liked to stay at his place and gather for semi-regular impromptu jam sessions with amplifiers that could bounce sound waves off the incoming tide. It was the new-millenial San Simeon. Kesey buses were rigged with all-wheel drive so “elite” tourist could spend a night of semi-controlled decadence with the best and the highest.

I backpacked in with Scarlet, who wore floppy clothes and imaginary underwear. She said she heard that Walter liked that look.

“Who doesn’t?” I asked.

“Your father,” she said. “No. I take that back.”

We knocked on the back door and were greeted by the man himself.

“Mr. White?” I said.

“Who’d you expect?” he asked. “J.D. Fucking Salinger?”

“Well, no,” I said.

“Captain Fucking Fantastic?”

“No, sir,” I said, following up with the abridged version of my story.

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” he said. “You can come in but you gotta promise me you’ll stop calling me sir and Mr. White.”

“Roger,” I said.

“That, too,” he said.

“Fuck me.”

“Not gonna happen, either.” He held the door open, more for Scarlet’s benefit than my own, but I was taking my first step into the world of the Real Walter White.

A mountain of a man appeared in the entryway, two-fisting matching bongs that were designed for Hagrid and his French girlfriend.

“Bill. Scarlet. Scarlet. Bill,” said White. “Oh, and Jimmy Fucking Olsen over here.”

“Jimmy? Scarlet?” the big man said. “The pleasure of newfound acquaintanceship is so truly and deeply mine, pilgrims. You have entered the sanctuary, the church, the Fillmore West that houses the Maestro of the New Millenium, a paragon of great virtue and better weed, here on the Lost Coast, the Coast that includes and contains…”

“Don’t say it, Bill,” said White.

“Don’t say what?”

“The Conference of Fucking Champions,” said White. “Say it even once this entire weekend and you’re sleeping with the seals and I mean that as literally as I possibly fucking can.”

“A great man, “said Bill. “A snail traversing the razor’s edge.” He looked at me. “She with you?”

‘Yeah,” I said.

“I’m good with that, my friend,” he said. “An untamed beauty of the magnificence, youth and freedom, the hallowed harbingers of our great conference’s unparalleled benevolence and bounty.”

“You’re pushing it, Walton,” said White. “Get her a drink and show her where they’ll be staying. I’ll get this cat’s rundown.”

“This cat?”

“Sure, why not?” said White. “You want your first scoop, kid?”

“You betcha!”

“You know you don’t have to go along with the Jimmy Olson thing, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then don’t.”

“OK.”

“First scoop?”

“Fuck, yeah!”

“OK. And don’t worry,” he said. “You don’t have to write this shit down or record it or nothing. Any of it. Everything’s archived here. Billy Gates-designed. The individual has complete control of his/her own personal data. Try to share anything with anyone and the shit goes all Mission Impossible on you. Except worse.”

“Sounds good.” We looked at each other for a while. “Scoopy?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. My name’s not Walter White.”

“What the…?”

“Nah, it was just part of the whole PR thing. Built a tie-in with the show. I owned the cops and even the new mayor loves all the money I bring in.”

“So what’s your real name?”

“What the fuck you wanna know that for?”

“ .”

He laughed. “Just pulling your leg, son. It’s Ben,” he said. “Ben Evanston.”

“I see why you changed it.”

“What’s wrong with my name?”

”Nothing.”

“OK, we’ll move on then,” he said. “You want to find out how this business works, yeah?”

“I do.”

He put his arm around me, coughed Chivas into my ear. “I will send you to The Three. Walton there would call them geniuses, gurus, artists, all that crap, but they’re humans like you and me. Real people. You go there, to those three people, and you bring me three words of wisdom from each of them.”

“Three words?”

“Well,” he said. “It’s not a steadfast rule or anything, I guess. A couple of them are fucking talkers. Not like the Big Fella or anything, but they go all Tyson on your hearing apparati.”

“I’m in,” I said. “Who are they?”

“You ready for it?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“OK. Scarecrow. The Tin Man. And Dog Day.”

“Was there some Wizard of Ozzy kind of Pacino movie that I missed?” I asked.

“Nah. I wanted to call him Serpico, but he is the stiffest motherfucker you’re ever gonna meet, so we stuck with the Tin Man.”

“So where do I start?”

“Always start with the Scarecrow, chum.”

“Noted.”

“The Scarecrow, he likes to be called El Decisor. Rhymes with Caesar, he says. “I think it’s a little deuchy myself, but don’t tell him I said that. Besides, the runners love that kind of shit and word is that he’s got Los Lobos contracted to do up a little entry song for him.”

“Sweet.”

Finding The Scarecrow/The Decider isn’t so difficult. Evanston/White gave me his address so I just have to GPS it and bada friggin. El Incisors lives on a cul-de-sac outside of Garberville. It’s a rambling ranch, or at least started out as a ranch. Backs up on a forest. A little bit Bilbo Baggins, a little bit Madam Mim. Overgrown and mossy, but when you get inside, it makes a certain kind of sense.

I ring the doorbell and I hear a familiar voice yell, “Do. Just Do. Don’t think. Do.”

“What the…?” I think. I ring it again.

A different voice, also very familiar shouts, “The buck stops here.”

I knock.

After a few minutes, I hear footsteps. “Entre vous, s’il vous plait,” says an unfamiliar voice. “Le Décideur is in the maison.”

I don’t know what that means but the door opens and a gangly man puffing on a long pipe looks down on me. “Don’t tell me,” he says. “You’re here for my Assertiveness Training Workshop, but you’re a week early.”

“Uh, no,” I say.

“You’re not delivering a pizza,” he says. “I know that because you’re not wearing a uniform and you’re not carrying a box, flat or otherwise. Plus, I don’t like pizza.”

“Yeah.”

“Hold it. I’m getting something,” he says, with his palm in my face. “You’re Steve Nash looking for a run on my indoor-outdoor. But, like Steve Nash from the Future. Because you’re old.”

“Nope.”

“You’re a seeing-eye dog salesman.”

“Closer.” I hold up my press pass. I bring it with me just about everywhere because of moments like this.

“F. B. Fucking I,” he says. “I knew it. You bastards. Let me get my suitcase.”

“I was sent by Ben Evanston, your Decisiveness,” I say. “He said to tell you that the password is “Bow down before his Wisdom.”

“Don’t say another word,” he says. “You’re the reporter from The Reporter. I can figure out things like that for some reason. It’s not psychic or anything. Or instinct. It’s just part of who I am.” He stares at my forehead for a while, then asks me in, waving his arm in a loopty loop. “Make the most of this house in your time here. Go forth and conquer.”

He leads me into the living room. It’s all enormous couches and LayZBoys. I’m all potato. “Let’s do this,” I say. I’m just about to fold myself into the Nimbus 2000 of recliners when I hear George W. Bush behind me say, “Mission accomplished. We said we were going to do this and we did it.” Then a gravelly voice says, “Lead me, follow me, or get the hell out of my way.”

I turn towards the back of the house to see a tiny bird with an inordinately oversized noggin walking like John Cleese across the top of an open cage. “Who or what the fuck is that?”

The bird thing looks sideways at me with nothing but malice in the eye that I can see. “Do duh name Ruby Begonia ring a bell?”

“That’s not his name,” says The Decoder. “That there little cutie is my Elvis.”

“Well, since my baby left me,” Elvis as Elvis croons. I wonder if I was poisoned when I touched the doorbell.

“So, Ben sent me here to gather wisdom.”

“What kind of wisdom?”

“Well, I think he wants me to see what makes this whole thing work,” I say.

“You want to see the books?” El Improvisor asks.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting anything like that,” I say. “That seems like it’s pushing it a bit. Wouldn’t that be like a little too much sharing? Couldn’t that get you in trouble?”

“I laugh in the face of trouble,” he says. “Ha HA! Nah, follow me.”

We walk into the den. There’s a fireplace, a rug that’s half tryptophan, a wall of windows full of forest, and books. Walls of them. I know there are only three walls remaining now that the window occupies one of them, but it feels like they are everywhere. And breathing. The books are faded, earmarked, unopened, untouched, pillaged, bewildered, pampered, stained, sat-on, written-in, skimmed-over, drooled-on, ignored, cherished, each and every one of them loved in its own way. I walk toward them like Mia Farrow in See No Evil, my hand leading me like the Pied Piper. The Decider decides that he’s seen enough.

“Don’t touch the…,” he begins.

“Boy,” I hear Foghorn Leghorn behind me. “Don’t touch the, I said, don’t touch the books. That’s a library, boy, not a, I said, not a newsstand.”