Realizing that many of these people are still alive and kicking and those that have passed on can’t come back to bite me in the ass, I will still relate the Montana Poker Tales to the best of my memory.  If anyone out there, living or dead, or living dead, or dead while they are living disagrees, simple leave me a comment.  This is, after all, my story and I can tell it however I want but hearing your side of it would be great for my poker memory archive. 🙂

One of the first players that sticks in the best part of my memory of those days was Red Gilman.  I will definitely be forced to dig through the old photo albums but it won’t happen until I return from the WSOP November Nine colossal goings on. Red was a tall cowboy, always seen with a gray or light colored stetson hat, long sleeve shirt – the kind that has snaps like the real cowboys wear (hahahaa), jeans, and cowboy boots.  He had a very kindly face that spread easily into a seamless smile that played over his whole appearance.  He never appeared to have a bad day and he loved to play poker.

I first remember him as a 5 card stud player.  He was exceptionally kind to me and we became friends.  He told me once that he liked to call someone that raised when their up card was the same as his down card.  No, he apparently had never heard of dead cards or drawing live or anything else that went with being a good player, but like many of the people that hit the tables in those days, he was there to gamble.  He had lived in Drummond or just outside of it and had children, divorced (maybe not when I first met him but later on as I became more aware of the people and their history, I knew it was so) and his children were grown.  Red just wanted to gamble.  He had two favorite sayings, one was, “Gotta go!  Here comes Hank Snow!”  Really…I have no idea, it rhymed I guess.  Or he was getting ready to give his chips away and leave or…or…or.

The other one was when he wanted to raise, “A cow and a calf.”  That is extremely humorous to me now because for quite some time I had no idea what it meant, it was just a ‘Redism’ type of thing.   We had 25c chips and it wasn’t until years later when I went to Vegas that I realized how ridiculous it was to pay 34c or something like that to have a clay chip made that was worth 25c cash in value.  In Vegas they used silver on the tables, like quarters and halves, it all made perfect sense.  And over the years Red’s Cow and a Calf made sense, he was raising it $1.25.   Big stakes!

Norma Kiley was a very small framed woman with narcolepsy.  At one point she smoked, at another point later she had her voice box removed due to throat cancer.  Norma’s skin resembled the cracked bottom of a dried mud river bed in late August – possibly more like alligator skin.  Her hair was thin and limp and never looked good – it’s just the way it is, I’m not making it up.  She never did anything to change her appearance and somehow she stuck a hook in Red.  For a long time she came and stood a few feet away when he talked to me, as if I was going to steal her comfort zone from her.  What arrangements she had with Red I do not know and do not care to know.  I’m not making her out to be a bad person, I really never knew her well enough to even place my thoughts about her into any kind of niche.

I do remember her standing and falling asleep right where she stood, never twitching or even tilting like she was going to fall over.  One time, years later, when I worked at the Palace Hotel, Norma dealt a break for someone out of necessity and as she brought the card off of the deck to send it face up to the next player, she fell asleep, her arm extended in the air with the card in it, her other arm down on the table holding the deck.  Of course they woke her up, there was poker to be played.

Red told me had a ranch down south and that he had nothing left except retirement income because he had blown off over $40,000 he had in savings on the poker tables.  In those days $40K was such a tremendous amount of money I couldn’t even begin to fathom having that much, let alone losing that much playing poker.  Now…yah…go figure, it’s a drop in the ocean of poker bankrolls.

Red apparently had a drinking problem but I only witnessed it once.  A few years later after other poker rooms opened in Missoula, Kim and I were out terrorizing the games around town one night and came into the OX through the back door.  By that time the pool table,  shoe shine stand, and dead pecker row were long gone and a 10 handed holdem table sat in the spot the pool table once held.  Red was laying on the floor in fetal position in the corner, tucked up against the wall with the poker table at his back, hat off lying beside his head, singing at the top of his lungs.  He was completely oblivious to anything in the world that I was walking through at the time.  That was also when I found out he was bald.

It was such a funny sight that Kim and I busted out laughing.  Tammy Sheets (she’s another story) heard us and got pissed at us, telling us it was sad that Red fell off the wagon and we should be ashamed of ourselves.  Well…maybe we should but if you had any sense of humor, you would just have to laugh your ass off over it.

Outta here for the day.