Thom Forbes

Have you ever had the feeling, as you're staring across the table at P. Wolf meticulously stacking his chips, that you've seen it all before? I don't mean seeing something quotidian, like your seven Aces losing to three Royals in Grecoid. I mean in the truly metaphysical sense.

For example, the other night I was reading the last words of Bat Masterson, gunslinger and cardsharp shark turned newspaperman, and the thought occurred to me that he sounded just like our own Geoff Shlaes.

These, in fact, are the last sentences Bat wrote in 1921 before he slumped over his desk at Bobaloo's Bible, The Morning Telegraph, and passed on to the great Woolworth Fest in the Sky. 

There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter thinks things are breaking even for both. 

Now is that our Geoff or what?

If there be a gink among us who feels differently, feel free to use the comment section below to state your case. Before you do, however, I shall make one more argument for the fact that Geoff  is the incarnation of Bat. 

Pursuing my research into the wee and somewhat loony hours, I came across the following passage in the Unsubstantiated Bat Masterson. It describes a shootout involving our hero back in the day (and perhaps explains why the latter phase, up to this very day, so nettles our Geoff):

Bat pushed away from the poker table and stood, arms akimbo, glaring insousiantly at Motormouth Mike, a purveyor of patent medicines, part-time dentist and infamous cheat. 

"Sexy Sixes, you say? Why you villianous hoora, I'll cap your crown."

With that, Bat went to pull a dainty derringer from his boot, but a Penn raquetball rolled out of his vest pocket and bounded across the felt. 

Motormouth Mike was never one to back down from verbal fisticuffs. 

"You don't know with whom you're messin',"  he said in perfect English marred only by the staccato rapid-fire delivery of his Queens roots (and some observers claimed, right up to their own dastardly demise, that he really said,  "I'll have those 'shrooms with Russian dressing.") 

"I was the fourth-grade champeen at P.S. 7694," 

Agile as a quack being run out of town, Motormouth Mike swatted the ball back with an open hand. It hit its mark: the agape mouth of Bat. All hell was about to break loose when Howlin' Wolf, a.k.a. Bobaloo Bob, swaggered through the swinging doors and shouted:

"Have you heard the one about five Jews playing poker?"  

Order was restored and the game proceeded apace, and it always has and always will.