Last night we played poker at Rafi’s. Sitting around the white foldable table were Rafi, Yossi, Adrian, Jonah, Eric, Jona, and Nik. Apologies to people whose nicknames I’ve forgotten. Rafi made a very tasty chicken dish and some good oven chips. Drink and crisps were bounteous.
So much happened last night. The most notable event was, of course, when Jona (of whom more later on) fell off his chair. It all started so innocently. He had knocked over a cup and was leaning over to his right to pick it up off the floor. However, he tipped his chair off balance and fell to the floor. The fall was quite quiet, and Jona landed reasonably elegantly on his backside. It was very very funny.
Later in the evening (or it might have been earlier, but who cares?), when we were playing the game with four cards, Jona folded before the flop. He then showed us his cards, to demonstrate how wise his decision had been. Except what he had in his hand was an ace, a three, a king, and something else. How we shouted at him. Especially me. It was good fun.
I was hoping this whole blog would only be about Jona, but another large Mancunian (that’s English for “person from Manchester”, for our foreign chums) ought to be mentioned. Yossi was last night’s big loser, taking an extra 120 shekels from the bank in order to carry on playing. The fact that he only finished 74.5 shekels down is more due to Rafi’s humungous betting on his one off the nuts hand, and his erroneous assumption that Yoss and Jonah (who salvaged his evening with this hand) were going to quarter the pot. It should be noted that there were quite a few hands with lots of money, which made for some exciting poker.
The best bit of the evening, though, was after we had all gone home. Did I say “ALL gone home”? I mean, after MOST of us had gone home. While the other Poker Kings were tucked up in bed, Jona was chatting away to some chump in the you ess of ay until the battery on his phone went dead. By now it was very late. I’ll go home now, thought Jona to himself. Little did he know that Orly was worried. Worried enough to call the police, who tortured Adrian until he agreed to call all the Kings to see if any of us were holding Jona in our dungeons, slowly picking bits of flesh of his body with red hot pincers. I think I heard the phone ring and receive two text messages at 2.30 in the morning, but I didn’t get out of bed to have a look. If it’s really important, I said to myself, they’ll ring again. And again. Until I answer. That didn’t happen, so it can’t have been that important, I reasoned. Rafi did speak to Adrian, and was told that Jona was missing! Rafi almost put on some clothes and went to look for Jona in the streets of Tel Aviv (almost went to look for Jona, notice). Jonah also almost went looking for Jona, who was pleasantly oblivious to all the balagan going on around him.
Jona eventually arrived home to find a police car outside his house and Orly in tears. She was fearing the worst of all. When Jona got out of his car and saw the police and Orly in tears, he too feared the worst of all. Orly ran up to him screaming, “where have you been, where have you been?”, beating her clenched fists on his chest. “I hate you, I hate you!” she screamed through her copious tears, before hugging Jona and crying “I love you, I love you!”. Jona could not hold his emotions back and he too started crying. “The kids…” he stuttered, “I thought… the kids”. His relief came out in streams of tears. One of the policemen, so moved by the scene, sobbed a little bit too. His partner gave him a hug. This broke the sexual tension that had been building up between them and they both resolved to leave their wives and move to Mexico together. Anyway. Jona eventually realized the source of Orly’s heightened emotional state, and apologized from the bottom of his heart for making her worry so. Never again would he let her think that he had been brutally murdered by terrorists and left dead (not to say, dismembered) in a Tel Aviv gutter. Or decapitated in a horrific accident, his car crushed by a lorry being driven by a man with 3,583 driving convictions (note political satire sneaking in, there. Topical stuff). Everyone was so relieved that everyone else was safe and sound. Jona and Orly retreated into their house and kissed passionately. Jona thought fondly of his grandmother.
