By Ted Kleine
A few feet from Seven is the “Kool Gent,” V103 radio personality Herb Kent. Kent’s standing in the DJ crow’s nest, looking sharp in a salmon sport coat, black cowboy hat, and gold chains. He’s spinning dusties, the 70s R & B hits the senator and her friends love.
“She got game,” he says. “Just the way she carries herself. She ain’t bragging or anything. She’s just mellow. You know who else got game in here?” He nods at the crow’s nest, at Herb Kent. “He’s just one of those old-school people who can do everything natch. He can step, he can play bid whist, darts.”
Whist, the common ancestor of bridge and bid, “got started in Scotland and then it came here during slavery times,” says Seven. There was no bidding to whist, and trump was established by turning over a card. “The slaves decided it was too boring, so they said, ‘Let’s play it this way.’ The whist style was constructed to fit our style of living and our style of doing things.”
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Like in bridge, bid whist players bid the number of tricks they think they can win beyond a six-trick “book.” Unlike bridge, they bid high or low, depending on whether they’re “running uptown” (holding high cards) or “running downtown” (holding low cards). The highest bidder sets the trump suit and wins the kitty, which counts as a trick and which he can use to replace cards in his hand. The highest bidder throws out the first card, then the other players follow with a card of the same suit. If they don’t have one, they can play a trump. High card in the suit led wins–unless the bid was “low,” in which case low card wins. Better yet is a high–or low–trump card. High or low, the ace wins the trick–unless it’s topped with a joker.
Despite the senator’s call to exuberance, Tina isn’t expecting to see the kind of rowdy, down-home bid whist she learned in the lounges of the south side, the kind where players taunt each other with loud, spicy insults like “If you keep acting like a pussy, you’re going to get fucked” and slam down winning cards with a pop like a pistol shot.
“I can see an Annie Lee in my house,” Seven says.
