Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for the "Know Otis" experiment. I took a stab at answering a few of the questions in a short narrative. Not sure it's worth anything, but after the jump you'll find the answers to...
Five years ago, did you see yourself where you are today (poker,life, work, etc...)? --TripJax
Chronicle for us your teens to adulthood by telling us what has been and now currently is your drink of choice. --BG
Have you ever uttered an obscenity on the air? If not, can you recall a time when you were very, very close? Sincerely, Riveted in Rancho Cucamonga --Speaker
Have you ever gotten in trouble for cursing loudly at a live shot location when you weren't even there?
When was the last time you played 7-Card Stud-Follow the Bitch-Low Cincinnati, and how much did you lose? --Team Scott Smith
My parents, I think, never expected me to be a drinker.
The summers in southwest Missouri were 100 degree saute pans, sizzled in 100 percent humidity and spent on my grandparents' slab concrete porch. Nearly everybody drank iced tea saturated with cheap sugar, the likes of which made for a syrup that would slide over a young boy's tongue and propel him up into a backyard tree. It was shade and it was cool and it was a sense of place.
Grandpa drank Busch beer, though, and drank just enough of it that it seemed there were always enough pull tabs to fill a small bowl. Uncle Randy looked like he was drinking coke, but when he let his nephew take a pull from the bottle, there were a lot of laughs. It might have been my first taste of whiskey, an imperfect compliment to the occasional sip of beer my smiling Grandpa allowed.
I was fine with iced tea, though. It cooled me enough to walk past the Indian's house, past Purple Lady's house, and down to the corner store to pick up some baseball cards for me and cigarettes for the adults. Back then, all you had to say was, "They are for my dad," and the store clerk wouldn't think twice.
My parents didn't keep booze around the house. Much later in my life, I'd ask my dad why he didn't drink more than the occasional scotch. He said, "One day I realized I needed a drink at the end of the day. And I didn't need that." And that was it.
I drank my first full beer in 1990. While memorable, the effect of seeing my mom's face when I came home with the beer on my breath made it an unhappy memory. It wasn't until the summer of that year that I tasted my future. The parking lot of the Ozark Empire Fair grounds was filling up. Two girls, one blonde, one brunette--both with natural breasts as good as you'd find in the Ozark mountains--were taking money from people in need of a parking space. And they were drinking beer in huge plastic cups full of ice. Later in life I'd find the idea of beer on ice ridiculous. That day though, it was cold, it was illicit, it was sex, and it was the best thing I'd ever tasted.
I would be a beer man.
***
September 8, 2000 was the first time I lost $50 in poker game. It was a Friday night. Through college, I'd remained a beer man, fancying everything from Stag to hip microbrews (unfiltered wheat being both my savior and executioner). I went through a scotch phase. I went through a gin phase. I always came back to beer. On that night, I was sober as a judge. The game mixed up everything from five-card draw to insane bastardizations of seven-stud. It was rotating game that lasted for years, but spawned only a few posts on Up For Poker, most notably my failed creation of a game called Timebomb Poker.
For that game and many of the next several years, I packed candy and Diet Mountain Dew to get me through the night. It was a different time for me, one in which $50 wouldn't break the bank, but felt really, really bad. In those years, I was working in television and getting paid in the neighborhood of $26,000 a year plus overtime. I wasn't bad at my job and gained the respect of my then-employers. I rarely disappointed them.
One afternoon, my boss called me into the office.
"We have had some complaints about your behavior," he said.
I'd been up late the night before on the scene of a horrible interstate car crash. People were dead, the interstate was shut down, and I was in the middle of it all. I'd seen some bad, bad stuff that day, but didn't think my behavior had been out of line.
"Okay," I said.
"People said they heard you use the word 'fuck' several times last night when you were on the scene," my boss said.
Again, I likely muttered it a few times to myself, more in the manner of, "Fuck, I can't believe what I'm seeing here," but never screaming.
"When was this?" I asked.
The boss read off of his notes and said, "Somehwere between 10pm and 11pm."
It didn't make sense. I'd been off the scene during that time, back in the office working on the story.
Eventually, I put two and two together. Team Scott Smith, a man who would one day become a friend, was working for the same TV station at the time and had managed to knock the power out to an entire neighborhood after raising live truck equipment into a bunch of power lines. He was reported to have said at the time, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck."
Somehow, in the darkness, the people had heard the words uttered by a Gene Wilder look-alike and attributed them to me.
The worst thing I ever did on the air was identify the president of a ritzy homeowners association (an old white dude) as Priest Holmes.
It was football season.
***
And that was just a little more than five years ago.
I was about to play poker at the Bellagio for the the first time. I had not yet started playing poker online. Though I'd been playing for years, I think I can admit, I wasn't very good. Five years ago was the end of my old life, the time when I spent four nights a week in a bar, three days a week getting some sort of exercise, five days a week seeking out truth and justice, and maybe two nights a month playing poker. Back then, poker wasn't something that affected my mood. It was a pleasant diversion that, on a bad night, cost me $50.
Five years ago, I wouldn't have imagined that in 2007 90% of my recreational time would be spent playing poker. I would've laughed if you'd told me the kind of stakes I'd be playing for at times. Nor could I have imagined I would soon be making all my money writing about poker.
The are people who stay in the same job their whole life and there are people who bounce around and take risks. I'm not sure who is better off. A lot of people look at me and shake their head at how good my life must be. And, truthfully, most of the time it is.
These days, though, I am a vodka man. I still drink beer on most occasions, but if you give me a chance to have one drink with a friend, I'll more than likely order what I like to think of as a Dirty Goose.
It was in the middle of one of these drinks that a good friend and I had a long discussion about the pitfalls of defining one's self by what he does to earn a living. This friend is one of the people I know who puts in his eight hours and then leaves to live what he considers his real life.
I've not yet been able to do that.