» Diane McEachern discusses her book Big Green Purse.

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Diane McEachern

Big Green Purse

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I was doing an interview with The Big Wild, a syndicated radio program out of Madison, Wisconsin, and pretty much thought I'd gotten through unscathed until Big Red and Gundy asked if I hunted and/or fished and would I care to relate a story or two. I'm afraid I went all Oprah on them and confessed to being a victim of PTFD, or Post Traumatic Fishing Disorder. Yes, I am a victim of PTFD but, with treatment and the support of loved ones, I have partially overcome my symptoms, reduced the painful memories, and moved on with my life.

To help explain this anxiety disorder I have to tell you about my traumatic childhood and a father who, if you sat a water-filled, five-gallon bucket out on the ranch road, would have a bobber in it within twenty minutes. The weekends of my tender and impressionable youth were abused by a chronically compulsive and obviously obsessive fisherman who would crack open my bedroom door, and my brother's, well before dawn and deliver the curt, "All right, let's go." Whereupon we would be expected to spend the next twelve hours standing on the bank of some stream or lake to watch a red-and-white bobber in hopes that it might move-or that lightning would strike us and put us out of our misery. You weren't allowed to talk (scares the fish), you didn't eat (we never brought anything because we were going to catch fish), and you couldn't have anybody along (they were all too sane and at home in bed).

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I've gotten myself booked on a literary radio talk show where recent topics include genocide, the Weimer Republic, Eliot Spitzer, and contemporary poetry. To say that 52 Ways to Cheat at Poker doesn't fit the mold is a bit of an understatement, which is why I'm approaching the topic from odd angles, via mythology, folklore, and the commonalities among deceivers.

One idea is that card cheats and con men, especially the pros, share attributes with mythic and folkloric tricksters, like Anansi, the spider god of Africa, Coyote in Native American lore, and the wily Odysseus. All trickster energy is creative energy. It's also problem-solving energy, directed at the immediate goal of getting the sweet, winning the war, taking down the pot, tricking crow into dropping the grape into sly fox's mouth. Trickster is shameless, greedy, and amoral and will do whatever it takes to win the prize. This naturally gives him an edge over those who take a more blinkered approach to life. Nothing is out of bounds for trickster because there are no boundaries. Which is why trickster figures are often described as liminal figures who move easily between one world and the next; just as card cheats and con men live double lives, straddling the straight world with its rules and regs and underworld where rules are for suckers.

"Give me an effect," said the great English magician and trickster David Devant, "and I'll figure out a way to do it." Thinking magicians attack magical problems from all angles, devising multiple solutions and then choosing the best method for the conditions at hand. Card cheats attack the rules of the game in the same way, seeing how many ways the rules can be subverted. That explains why there are so many ingenious solutions to the same basic problems: how do you overcome the cut, how do you shuffle without changing the order of the cards, how do you discover what cards your opponent holds?