The Tenth Circle of Hell

Those of you who know us know that the only thing we spend more time on than comedy is poker. Ordinarily I wouldn't bring these two subjects together, but an experience that I had this weekend forced me to make these worlds collide. This post has nothing to do with the VFW we frequent every Wednesday, with its patriotic flare and thick clouds of smoke, nor does it pretain specifically to our Sunday cash game full of strange characters and soon-to-be college dropouts. No, this is about the Chauncey (pronounced CHANCE-ee) game that Miller and I visited Saturday.

Allow me to start by telling you how we got to this particular game. What we did was we drove up route 33 towards Columbus and turned off the The Plains-Chauncey exit and turned right at the intersection. Once you have done that you have, as far as I am concerned, left planet Earth and landed on the planet Stereotypical White Trash Wasteland. Most of the things seen from my car while in Chauncey were what I once thought to be unfair and biased charicatures of white trash America, but there they are in their full-on rundown splendor in front of me. On your left you see the shell of what once must have been a house, but now resembles an army training facility in that it looks like nothing but a bombed-out series of cinder block walls with a full grown tree poking out where the roof once was and underbrush flourishing inside. On your right is what appears to be the scene from Stand by Me when they were walking down the railroad tracks, but instead of Keifer Sutherland and River Phoenix I see people who more resemble the fat kid from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Joe Dirt. Further down the street is the house that matches the pick-up truck parked outside: half-white, half-blue with primer in patches. Abandon all hope, all ye who enter Chauncey.

The list goes on, but I'll cut to the peice de resistance.

This poker game used to take place at the Chauncey Am-Vets which was ridiculous in its own way, but per the Ohio regulation of not being allowed to serve alcohol and hold a gambling event in the same building it was moved to the Lions' Club down the street. Trust me, whenever the directions include 'turn off the paved road' you know you're in trouble. So what did we do? If you said 'we turn off the paved road' you are right. You get a gold star. We made our way to the 'new' building, new used here meaning new to us, because it was quite obvious at the sight of it to be as old and worn out as every line of dialogue in every episode of 'Friends.' Not twenty yards from my parking spot is the remnants of a two story house fire that no one has seen fit to replace or even bulldoze. Parked next to it is a semi truck with a trailer. Maybe that's their new house, I wouldn't know. I didn't go and ask. Anyway, the Lions' Club itself is located in an old train station set far back from the street. The building can only be forty or so feet long and at most fifteen feet wide, directly next to active train tracks. It has two rooms. Two rooms make up the entire Lions' Club. Surrounding me on all sides is typical blue-color Bush supporting goodness. How out of place do I feel in my '98 Mercury Sable covered in alternative rock bumper sticker and wearing college t-shirt? Very.

Nothing really went down at the game. The trains went by three or four times and shook the whole building and Nascar was on the tube whole time we were there. Of course the players were terrible. That's about it.

This post kind of petered out toward the end. It was building, building, building, and then bupkis. Maybe I should've made fun of Larry the Cable Guy or said that, "we could all learn a little from Mao Tse-Tong," to make this post more exciting. I'll try to start a hick-fight next time.