Reflections on the Life of a Hustler

[mr3cushion]

A couple of weeks ago I started releasing pages of chapters of a book in NPR.

I'm writing before it's too late.

I figured it's time to let the more current 'Cue Games' oriented members/viewers get a peek.

BTW, I left His name blank in the pages so far. If anyone realizes/guesses/knows whom I'm referring to, try to keep it, 'On the QT for a while'!



I've had this treatment for a while for a Unique friend of mine for 60 years.
Just found it in another desk, may start working on it.
He was the Greatest Pool Hustler Ever!
He also brought the 'Sports Books' in Vegas to their Knees!



Reflections on the Life of a Hustler

INTRODUCTION:

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

I’ve lived my whole life as a hustler. I'm okay with that.

Some people probably figure hustling means I'm a crook, so what is there to be proud of? Well, I'm not a crook. I guess Nixon said that too. Maybe he really was a crook. I don't know. But I'm not a politician. I don't need to put one over on you to get elected. I don't need your vote or your approval. I'm just telling you about the way it was.

"So big deal!" you might say. “Why write a book?" Who cares about your low-life adventures with a bunch of skuzz-balls at some racetrack or playing poker or whatever?"

Fair enough. All I can say is I've lived in interesting times, and I've done some crazy things. I have this feeling that I need to tell people what I've accomplished – and where I screwed up. I want you to know what life has taught me in my case the life of a pool hustler and a sports bettor. Both, the good and the bad. So here goes.

First, I want you to know what I mean by "hustler". A hustler is a guy who lives by his wits. Usually, he doesn't have a steady job of any kind and probably never did. It's not in his nature to be bossed around or punch a time clock. If having a "career" means kissing a thousand asses to buy a row house in the suburbs and pick up a gold watch after forty years, then he's not interested.

But that doesn't mean a hustler is a lazy bum. I suppose there are lazy hustlers like there are lazy bankers and lazy taxi drivers. As for myself, I don't have a lazy bone in my body. I have always worked hard, whether it was shining shoes as a kid or hustling pool all night long or running around to Las Vegas casinos in 100-degree heat to scalp baseball bets.

Also, I am no bum. I pay my way through life, and I always have. I've helped take care of my parents and my brothers and my kids. Maybe I'm no saint, but I'm no devil either. Like most people, I hope that when I finally say "adios" I will have given more to the world than I have taken away from it. That’s all we can hope for even the hustlers.

I said that a hustler lives by his wits. In my case, that means learning how to beat people out of their money. Sometimes it means to con them. Notice that I don't say, "cheat". I have never made my living being a cheater or a thief.

By "con" I mean that I gain their confidence by means of various tricks that I will tell you about later. I take advantage of their greed and their pride and their stupidity. A good hustler knows about all the human weaknesses that come out of Pandora's box. He knows about the Seven Deadly Sins as well as any priest. The difference between the con man and the priest is that the con man isn't interested in wising up mankind to its faults. The hustler "educates" the sucker by taking advantage of his faults and relieving him of his money.

All I can say is a lot of suckers never learn.

 

[mr3cushion]

Here we go!

CHAPTER 1

ON THE RUN​

The way I figure it, I was a born hustler.

My mother told me that I was actually born in a wagon. This was in 1944 somewhere in Poland. If you know anything about history, you know that Poland in 1944 was not a place you wanted to be. Bombs were dropping everywhere. Soldiers were going up and down the country burning, looting and raping.

First it was the Nazis marching from west to east. A few years later it was the Russians marching from east to west. Same difference. Soldiers being soldiers, they mostly went nuts and destroyed everything they couldn't carry away.

My mother was driving that wagon drawn by two white horses because she was fleeing from her home in Romania one step ahead of the Russians. She was desperate to reach a safer place for her family—Austria.

Why Austria? Because our family were ethnic Germans who had settled in Romania generations ago. Over the years the ************, my father’s family, had built up a very good butcher business and were very wealthy in the Transylvanian regions where many German-speaking people lived. My family-owned land and had a prosperous life in the community.

Hitler and Stalin changed all that overnight. First the Nazis overran Romania on the grounds that they were "protecting" the German population in the country. They did the same thing in Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Of course it was mostly Nazi bullshit to justify a land grab. My family had gotten along fine with the Romanians over the years without the protection of Adolf Hitler.

After the Germans got their asses kicked trying to conquer Russia, they pulled back out of Romania. When the Russians came in behind them, they had no mercy for any "ethnic German" residents or for many Romanians either. If my family had stayed they would have all been killed or--like my father--locked up in a concentration camp. My mother wasn't waiting around for any knock on the door. She harnessed our horses, packed up what she could on the wagon and started out over dirt roads, she headed west following the setting sun. In the wagon were her two sons and in her belly was a third one—me.

When I say I was a born hustler I mean that I learned from the beginning that life could be very hard and unfair. Everything you had could be taken away in a minute. My father and his father before him had worked and saved to make a good life for their families. They'd been honest tradesmen and faithful churchgoers and tried to live by the book.

But in the end what good did all that do? Their goods and their homes were swept away like dust in the wind. The Germans betrayed them, and the Russians robbed them. Finally, the Allies--the English and the Americans---just stood by and let it happen. No government or army gave a damn about my family or any of the others caught in the same trap. We were victims of politicians and the "new world order'.

I was only a child in the 194Os, but I learned quickly, and I learned well. Except for your family and close friends, don't be eager to trust people. Especially be wary of "officials" and so- called "public servants". Don't get caught up in their politics and their bloodthirsty games. Above all else—be a survivor.

Being a newborn, of course I don't remember when that wagon finally crossed the border into Austria. My mother told me the journey from Romania had lasted many weeks over rutted, muddy roads. All the way she had followed the roads that lay alongside the railroad tracks.

From time to time, we all had to dive for cover when bombers and fighter planes strafed the trains and the roadways. My mother didn't know which air force the planes belonged to. Did it matter? The bombs and bullets didn't know who we were either.

Many a child and mule were bombed to death on those roads. Many an innocent man and many a murdering thief. Many a kindly old lady and many a filthy beggar. War treats everybody the same way. My little family in the wagon consisted of my mother, my five-year-old brother, ****, my two-year-old brother, ******, and me. Even though we all somehow managed to stay alive on the road we had almost nothing to eat. You drank from streams and ponds and puddles in the road. You ate roots and nuts and apples off the trees.

It was October and at night the weather was already turning cold. Every day there was a chance that some bozos would come up and shoot you dead for your wagon or your shoes. There was no law and no order. There was very little food and very little mercy. It was hell on earth.

Such was the state of affairs Hitler, Stalin and all their idiot followers had brought us to. That's what war always brings us to, and we never seem to learn. War is about killing, and the best killers win. Its either. You kill them or they kill you. If you are lucky to live and if you are unlucky you die.

 

[mr3cushion]

Rolling along here.


CHAPTER TWO:

AUSTRIA: A TEMPORARY HAVEN

​

Where we lived in Upper Austria, in the countryside around Attuning- Buchheim, daily life was more or less quiet. I say “more or less” because in April of 1945, a few months after we arrived, all hell broke loose. The Americans bombed the Germans'V-2 rocket test area at the edge of town. It was just a few days before the War ended. Germany, which included Austria then, was on its knees. So what? 179 American bombers flattened 12O apartments and 277 houses. Over 700 local residents (out of 5,600) were killed. Ten days later the Allies captured the town.

We'd come to Attuning-Buchheim because the family of one of my mother's sisters had a small farm in the area. They were willing to help us, but they had very little themselves. It was still wartime, so of course there was no way to earn money and very little to eat. My mother told me later that sometimes I would get so hungry | would scream and tear at her clothes for food but there was no food. Maybe I'm better off not remembering such terrible things.

The War was coming to an end. After it ended in 1945, we became part of a class of refugees known as "displaced persons”. D.P's. for short. Many thousands of Europeans were in the same leaky boat. We'd lost our homes and sometimes even our nationalities. My father was finally released from a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. He'd been imprisoned for three and a half years. He rejoined the family in Austria. My mother and we children had been through a tough ordeal. But for my father it had been even harder. He had lost his home. He had lost his family business and all of his land. Most of his earthly possessions had been ripped away from him. He had also lost his spirit in the concentration camp they had squeezed it out of him.

When I think of my father in those years, I remember a man who sat in a chair by himself and almost never spoke a word. He slept a lot. Even when awake he often closed his eyes, as if he wanted to escape from a terrifying world. I loved my father. He was a good man who tried to provide for his family. But all the human energy had gone out of him. My mother took over the reins of the family. She organized work, school and other activities as best she could. She was determined to make a life for all of us.

When I think of how hard it was for my parents, how they were decent people who didn't deserve to be abused and humiliated the way they were, I sometimes want to cry out in anger at the world. But what good would it do? What's done is done. At some point you have to decide whether you are going keep on feeling sorry for yourself or take a step forward. The name of the game of life is "survival of the fittest". I decided that I would be a survivor. After all, I had my legs and my arms and my brain. Many people were dead, but I was alive. Many were in the dark, but I could walk out my front door into the sunshine. Just get up and walk out that door.

I'm making it sound like our time in Austria was pretty dreary, but in fact it was the most beautiful time of my rife. We stayed there near what they call the Salzkammergut one of the most beautiful alpine regions of Europe--until I was eight years old. I remember the clear stream that ran past our simple wooden farmhouse. And the dark green forest all around. I wish I had a photograph or a painting of the forest, the stream, the moss, the sun shining everywhere on the mountains. And the snow.

In the winter we would go up the mountainside and slide back down onto the frozen stream on a sled. The air was fresh. There were fish in the streams and lakes. In the summer we'd float downstream in steel tubes. We'd cut twigs to make slingshots and bows and arrows. My brothers and I would spend the whole day, if we could, running around in the woods. We also went to a country schoolhouse. We had to cross a wooden bridge near the farm and walk three miles to the school. But it was no big deal. When you're a kid almost everything you do is fun and you make a game out of it. We'd pick wild strawberries and blueberries on our way home from school. If the snow got too deep in winter we'd stay home from school and just fool around in the woods. It seems like I especially remember winter. Everything was white and shining. The trees and the rooftops and the fields were sparkling with snow. At Christmas my father would go into the woods and chop down a pine tree. We'd decorate the tree and share gifts. Of course, we always thought that the greatest gift we had was to still be alive and together. It seemed like a miracle as big as Christmas itself.

My father worked on the farm. In summer he would roast a whole pig in a bonfire. We had a smoke shed where he would hang the meat and bacon on wooden spools. He'd make sausage and sell some of it. We would eat the rest and there was never a better tasting sausage in the world. We even made our own wine. We would wash our feet and stand in a big wooden barrel stomping on the grapes until we were all stained purple. My father would add sugar to the crushed grapes and let it ferment. I didn't get to drink much of the wine, but everybody said that it was awfully potent.

My brothers and I got small jobs too. Everybody had to work to make a go of it in Austria after the War. The scenery was beautiful, but you can't eat sceneries. People wandered around the country looking for work and begging for bread. Many people had lost their families or been bombed out of their homes in the towns. In a way we were lucky. We were together and we had a roof over our eads. We had food on our plates. We made money-picking baskets of cherries and apples out of the orchards. We picked potatoes, cabbages and other vegetables out of the fields.

There were hunters in the forest, and they paid us a nickel to hit the trees with sticks in order to drive the deer out into the open. The hunters would shoot every deer they saw, even the fawns. Of course meat was at a premium. A few pounds of deer meat were worth plenty. But to a young boy mass slaughter can seem awfully cruel. I finally told my mother I didn't want to drive the deer out anymore. She understood. After that I stuck to picking fruits and vegetables. The forest was silent and beautiful. Sometimes, though, I'd hear strange noises and wonder what was happening out there.

We'd heard that a crazy guy was loose in the woods, roaming around alone. Who knew what he was up to? Maybe he was a deserter from the army or escaped from a madhouse. My brothers and I let our imaginations run wild, and we took turns scaring one another. What seemed safe one minute could turn into bloody murder the next. I think that the War had drummed such ideas into our heads. Once I wandered out into the forest by myself and got lost.

It was two days before some hunters found! By that time, I was half starved and frightened to death. The hunters brought me home, where my family was half crazy worrying about me. My mother grabbed me so hard that I could barely breathe. She said she'd never leave me alone ever again. I remember that day very clearly. Everybody was so relieved that I was saved—including me. That was the second time I'd cheated death. The first time was on the road from Rumania to Austria with the bombs falling. The third time came soon after.

Out in the farmyard my brother **** was swinging a rusty chain and accidentally hit me in the head. I was cut and bleeding, but my mother patched me up. Two days later I was screaming in pain. My father laid me down in the wagon to take me to the doctor in town. The doctor said if he'd waited another few hours the infection might have killed me. Of course, my mother grabbed me again and thanked God for saving her youngest child.

It all goes to show that from the day we are born we need luck to survive in this world. But if you do make it through to manhood you have to say, "Well, I made it this far, what am I going to do about it?" " What does fate have in store for me?" Luck is part of it, but after a while a man has to start making his own luck. And shaping his own future.

 

[mr3cushion]

A New Free Land

CHAPTER THREE:

GOING TO AMERICA​

As far as I'm concerned, Austria was the most wonderful place on earth. I had my family and my dog Booby. I had all the freedom to wander and play that anyone could ask for. But times were very hard in those years after the war. People were scared that the Russians might try to take over the whole country. At the time it seemed like a real possibility that the Russians would try to push farther into Western Europe than they had already. Of course, there were rumors of how badly the invading Russians had treated the Germans, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Rumanians, the Bulgarians; you name it.

The War had cost the Russians millions of civilians and soldiers. They were hell bent on revenge and ready to trash all of Europe if they got the chance. As it turned out, the Russians did get to occupy a part of eastern Austria that was far away from our home in Attuning- Buchheim. But it was a hairy time. One of my mother's sisters in Germany had contact with some people in the United States. It turned out that a family in Michigan was willing to sponsor us to come over. My mother jumped at the chance.

She didn't know a word of English or much else about America, but she had heard that there were better opportunities in the United States. After all, the Americans had won the War and were willing to accept thousands of "displaced persons" into their country with just the clothes on their backs. My father didn't seem to care where he lived. He left it up to mother, and she was willing to take the same kind of risk she'd taken when she harnessed up the wagon in Rumania.

When I heard, we were going to a place called "Michigan", wherever that was, I was upset and scared. I didn't want to leave my Austrian house and my dog. I wanted to have things go on just as they were. I couldn't understand what people meant by "opportunities". What did I really need more than what I had already? Even now, many years later, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I'd stayed in Austria all my life. Would I be a different person? Would I have become a hustler and a gambler? Who knows?

No matter what I thought about it, we were going. I was eight years old, and I had no say. My mother packed our old beat-up suitcases with clothes. That's about all we really owned anyway. That whole week crossing by steamer from Germany to New York was one of the worst trials of my young life.

First of all, I hated the idea of America, even though I'd never seen it. To me "America" meant nothing more than leaving everything I cared about behind me The Ocean itself was stormy and frightening. I felt lost on a huge black sea that seemed like a kind of hell. I thought the ocean was going to swallow us up. And I was seasick the whole time, shivering and throwing up. The whole ship seemed to stink of barf and sweat and shit. It was impossible to sleep or eat or walk around in a normal way, I buried myself down below decks for most of the voyage.

One morning my brother **** came down to tell me that they had sighted land! It was amazing, but all of the sickness seemed to fly out of my body. Like everybody else I got very excited and went out on deck to gaze at the shoreline. Finally, the big ship glided into New York harbor. Of course, I remember seeing the Statue of Liberty, although I had no idea what it stood for. A huge gray statue staring out to sea.

What really opened my eyes was seeing the skyscrapers and the great city looming up out of the mist. I'd never seen anything like New York. It was as if I'd landed on another planet. This was a once in a lifetime feeling that I share with thousands of immigrants to America. I wasn't exactly happy to be in New York, but New York didn't care if I was happy or not. The city just overwhelms you. You are immediately thrown into the rhythms and the noise of the place. It’s a whole world unto itself and you are swept up into it.

How can you think about a green field in Austria when this huge mass of buildings and humanity demands your full attention? With my family I walked the streets of New York not understanding a word anyone was saying. I couldn't make any sense of the signs and billboards. I tried to avoid eye contact with people because I was afraid somebody might ask me a question I wouldn't understand.

People nowadays would find it hard to imagine how different everything seemed to us. Cars, busses and trucks were everywhere. In Austria you rode mostly in horse drawn wagons or on a bicycle. In New York people were watching television sets. We had listened to the radio. In New York there was indoor plumbing. I was used to an outhouse and drawing water from a well. We were yokels and DPs who had everything to learn about American from the ground up. But also, we had hearts and brains. We would do whatever it took to survive. That we had already learned from the painful lessons of the past.

To be continued:

 

[mr3cushion]

The farm life again.

CHAPTER FOUR:

SOUTH HAVEN ANOTHER TEMPORARY HAVEN​

We stayed in New York only long enough to look around and get ready for the long cross-country train trip to Michigan. You might as well have said “Oregon” or “Alaska” or “Argentina”! We knew nothing about a place called "Michigan", wherever that was. We'd heard that it was awfully cold and windy there. This was one time the rumors proved to be true. It was coming onto winter of 1952. We rode the train across the Pennsylvania hills, which did look a little bit like Austria with its rolling fields and forests. We could see the lights of towns passing by in the night.

When we got farther west into Ohio and Michigan the land flattened out. From the train window it seemed like a mighty ocean of grass with farms off in the distance, like ships on the sea. It was exciting to see this mighty landscape for the first time. But it was also a bit scary, like the ocean itself. It seemed like you could get swallowed up in it and disappears altogether.

Our family of five—parents and three boys—didn't know a word of English or another soul on the train. We just sat together in the day coach and stared out the window. We had no idea what the future held for us. My mother had faith in the notion that we would be better off in America. But at this point it was just an idea with no substance.

It's amazing how people will pick up all their belongings and move halfway around the world for an idea. I guess that’s how America came to be. Some people found milk and honey. Usually, they were the strong ones, the survivors. Others found disappointment and failure. Usually, they were the weak and the confused. There was nothing to fall back on. Nobody cared who your grandfather or rich uncle was back in Europe. Nobody cared that you might have gone to a good Austrian school and spoke flawless German with maybe some Russian, Polish and Hungarian thrown in.

That was ancient history. Now you were on your own among strangers. Now you'd better learn to speak English if you wanted to get anywhere. You were just another D.P. Mike or a D.P. Joe with nothing but the clothes on your back. So far as the Americans could see, you had nothing to offer except maybe a strong back and hands ready to do hard work. And you had better be ready to work hard because nobody was going to lie out a red carpet!

When we arrived in South Haven there was no welcoming party to meet us. A cold, wet wind was blowing off Lake Michigan across the deserted railway platform. In the dark, heavy rain clouds you could smell winter coming. It turned out that our "house" was on a "farm" a few miles out in the country. I put the words in quotes because the house was really no more than a shack. The farm had no animals and no crops to speak of. When we remembered back on the big warm house and working farmstead, we'd lived on in Austrian it made us all a little sick to our stomachs.

There was no heat in the shack except for the log fires we made to keep halfway warm through the winter. And believe me the winter was cold, much colder and windier than anything we'd ever known back in Austria. Many was the night with the wind howling through the cracks in our little wooden shack, that I thought about my dog Booby and my sweet home back in Austria.

What in the hell were we doing in this God forsaken place? There was no answer to that question, except to say that here we were, and we had to make the best of it. There was no turning back. Right away my brothers and I were sent to school. Of course, we had no idea what the teachers or other students were saying to us. Nor could we communicate, except with sign language and the few words of English that we possessed. Everyone looked at us as if we were creatures from another planet. We were D.P.s who had survived the War but only barely, since we didn't seem to have a change of clothes or winter coats or the price of a haircut.

Of course, the other kids made fun of us right from the start. They weren't really cold-hearted, but when kids are faced with something strange—like a bunch of goofy-looking outsiders coming into their community—they tend to gang up like a pack of wolves. Because I was the youngest, only eight years old, I had it much easier than, say, my brother ****, who was thirteen. I was quick minded and sociable by nature.

I picked up on English fairly well and got along with most of my schoolmates. For one thing I was blessed by being good looking and a good athlete. Kids always admire that kind of physical ability. ****, on the other hand, got stuck in the third grade with a bunch of eight-year-olds. He was a head taller than everybody else and stood out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, older kids picked on and abused him.

He never seemed able to make the adjustment necessary to survive in the emotional jungle that kids experience in school. Eventually my mother gave up and took him out of classes. He never did get a decent education and had to work odd jobs the rest of his life. **** was always shy. Like my father he never said much. He tended to be sickly, and this followed him for the rest of his days. He finally died young of cancer after a life full of troubles. What can you say?

He was a good person. I tried to help him whenever I could. But he was like a fish out of water. What would have happened to John if he had stayed in Austria? Would he have had a happier life? I think living in Europe probably would have been easier on him. He wasn't strong and wasn't up to tough challenges. America—especially a big, roaring town like Chicago where we spent most of our youth—was too rough for him.

On the other hand, a place like Chicago promised all kinds of rewards for those who were bold enough to work hard and go after them. From the beginning I was determined to be one of those brave souls. I could see what the alternative was, and I didn't like it. We stayed in South Haven for about three years. The area was full of fruit orchards and truck farms, so we spent the warmer months picking fruits and vegetables to make a modest living. On days and months when there was no school we'd get up at six in the morning to work all day long in the fields. Apples, peaches, pears, berries, tomatoes, potatoes—you name it, we picked it.

That part of Michigan is famous for its orchards and notorious for the amount of so-called "Lake effect" snow that gets dumped there every winter. At times it seems as if all the water in Lake Michigan is rising up in the wind, freezing among the heavy clouds and then coming down on top of your head as sleet or snow. Partly because we had so little money, I began to pick up on some tricks to earn a few bucks. It was the beginning of my long career as a hustler!

Even though they have only a few nickels to spend, kids always like to gamble at their little games—marbles, cards, pinball, whatever. By the age of ten I’d become an expert at lagging coins. You try to see who can get a coin to stop closest to the mark—a wall, a crack in the sidewalk. Whatever the target I won plenty lagging coins, enough to buy cokes and malts for my special friends, especially of the female variety.

Nobody seemed to begrudge me my skill at coin lagging. I had a special calling. That plus the free sodas made me a popular guy. I even regularly beat my brother **** out of his spare change. It was like taking candy from a baby. I suppose that I should have felt sorry for him, I did, in a way. But then I figured that if I didn't take his money somebody else would. Better to keep it in the family, right?

 

[mr3cushion]

The 'Windy City' breathes hope


CHAPTER FIVE:

THE BASEMENTS OF CHICAGO​

South Haven was a small town of about 5,000 people on Lake Michigan with tidy farms on the outskirts. That was the best thing about it, because we'd been used to that kind of slow-paced living back in Austria. We were poor but we were country-poor not city-poor. When we moved to Chicago I got educated to the difference in a big hurry. Once again, my mother got us on the move. In South Haven she sometimes wondered if coming to America had been a smart idea. We seemed to be worse off than we were in Europe. But she'd heard about Chicago, which was less than 100 miles away.

Chicago people would come up to South Haven in the summer for vacations on the beach. They seemed to have more money and dress better than the locals. To hear people talk about it, Chicago in the 1950s was an exciting city with plenty of jobs. The steel mills were booming, and the factories were hiring. Once again, my mother figured that it might be worth the gamble to pick up our meager belongings and relocate to the big town.

I was ten years old when we came into Chicago on the train. Coming to the city reminded me of when we'd arrived in New York. Chicago was full of noise and confusion. People jostled and rushed past you in the street and the air full of all the industrial smells you could imagine. There were rich people with fancy clothes and fancy cars. There were black people milling about everywhere. It seemed to me that once again we were drifting on a wide ocean, but this time it was an ocean of humanity tossing us this way and that way.

My mother found us a basement apartment on the North Side. To call this gloomy dump an "apartment" was a stretch, but it was all we could afford. The idea was to get to working, get to school, and climb up out of the slum to a better future. My father got a job as a butcher. I, and my brothers pitched in with whatever little jobs we could find. My mother labored at holding it all together.

Meanwhile, an army of rats was running around the place. When I got bitten on the arms and feet my mother took me to see a doctor. 'What should I do?" she asked. "Move into a better neighborhood!" was all he could suggest. We did move, several times. But we landed in other basement holes just as bad as the first one. The neighborhood streets were dirty and dangerous. Bums and winos staggered along the sidewalks. Nobody seemed to notice or care how much filth and stench he or she was living in. It was as if everybody had come to accept poverty as the normal state of affairs.

To me, that's what a slum is. It’s not the construction of the buildings, which very often is quite good. If you just fixed them up a bit, took care of them, they'd be fine. Living in a slum means not giving a damn what kind of mess you make or walk around in. It’s a state of mind. Country-poor are bad enough, with its emptiness and the freezing winds blowing right through your miserable shack. But at least you have open land and growing plants. You have nature. City-poor is different because it’s everywhere and it covers you in a kind of scum that seems to be impossible to wash off. You can't walk off into the forest with the birds twittering or down by the riverside with your dog to get away from all the people and all the filth. In the city slum there's no place to hide. So, you have to decide I'm going work myself out of this mess or I'm going to lie down in this shit for the rest of my life.

I started out doing the same things I did in South Haven. I began making friends with the right kind of people--guys who seemed alert and energetic and were usually good athletes. Right away I started hustling for a buck in the streets. I collected pop bottles for the deposit. I scavenged for anything—valuable-pieces of iron and wood, old furniture, rags, whatever—anything in order to turn a profit. I lagged more coins. I shoveled snowshoes and ran errands. I had a paper route. Later on, I picked up the old newspapers in my red wagon to bring down to the junkyard, where they paid you by the pound. "I will work harder than anyone else!" I told myself. “I will run faster than anyone else!” I swore.

I was determined to pull myself up and out. When I was twelve, I entered a yo-yo tournament. I practiced doing tricks with that Duncan yo-yo until I got blisters on my hands. First prize was a new Schwinn bicycle. I won it. My mother was shining with pride. She began to prepare a bowl of strawberries that she would put on my bed for when I'd come home tired late at night. Nobody else would touch those berries. They were a special treat just for me. Who else in the world would have thought of such a gift?

Things started looking up when we moved into our first real home, a second-floor apartment at Melrose and Greenview. It was in a German neighborhood that was kept up very well. There were thousands of German American families living on the North Side. Many of the German families had come over to America a hundred years earlier and set up their schools and business and social clubs, some had arrived like us, DPs and refugees from recent wars. Even families, who had been in the states for generations still spoke German at home, ate German food and drank German beer in little German taverns.

Of course, both of my parents felt more comfortable dealing with people in their native language. My father found a job in one of the butcher shops. My mother got part-time work cleaning houses. She saved every penny she could, with the goal of eventually building up enough capital for a down payment on a modest apartment building. That was her dream, her idea of success in America. My mother scraped up enough money to send me to a German Lutheran grammar school, St Luke's. She was a devout woman who went to church every Sunday and hauled the whole family along with her. She put her trust in the pastor. He rewarded her by forcing me to leave school just a few months before my graduation.

I had attended that school for nearly four years and made many friends there. The pastor, however, told my mother she had not contributed enough money to the church. So, I had to leave St Luke's school. In reality my mother had given every dollar she could possibly spare, not to mention all the sweat off her back. Here was a woman who would walk eight blocks in a snowstorm to save bus fare. She would do anything to help her family to a better life. But I guess the pastor had other priorities.

 

[mr3cushion]

PART TWO: LEARNING THE TRADE


CHAPTER SIX:

SCHOOL DAYS, FOR WHAT THEY'RE WORTH​

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I'd stayed in school and worked through the system. Maybe I'd have wound up as a doctor or lawyer. Maybe I'd have run a business or piled up a ton of money flipping real estate. I do believe that I had the intelligence and work ethic to be a success at whatever I tried. But that was not to be my fate. From the beginning I was a maverick.

Probably it all started on that escape route from Romania to Austria. I was born on the road in a wagon, like some kind of gypsy. My family had been splintered by war and its goods had been strewn away to the winds. We had nothing left but our instincts for survival and for holding onto the family unit as a barricade against an indifferent world.

When I was a child, I liked school. Why not? I was bright and learned quickly. I was always sociable and got along well with the other kids. I was singled out by my teachers, who could see that I had promise. Doing well in school is mostly a matter of confidence. I had plenty of confidence, even to the point of cockiness.

As I got older that may be where I got in trouble with school, because I was always wary of authority. I was like one of those wild horses that refused to be broken and trained; I wasn't ready to be mastered by anybody. I wasn't ready to slip into the harness and submit myself to the discipline of the system. Maybe it was because the champions of the system--the principals, the pastors, the coaches and so forth—sometimes seemed to be a bunch of phonies who were only interested in feathering their own nests.

There are always such people in positions of authority. They get to that level because they have learned to use all the rules and regulations and red tape to their advantage. They spout off about importance of the "rules", but really what they care about is exploiting those rules to make themselves more important or 676 powerful or rich.

In the 1950s my heroes were the guys who didn't give a rat’s ass for the system. They were movie stars like Marion Brando or James Dean. They were the jazz and rock musicians who broke loose from the traditional ways of playing. Like Brando, I wanted to be a rebel. I wanted to be like "The Wild 0ne”, the handsome leader of the motorcycle gang, who road free over the highways and scoffed at conformity. Meanwhile the chicks and their ponytails and tight sweaters would all be swooning over me.

My bad feelings about the school system probably started with that experience in grammar school at St Luke's. After all the sacrifices my mother had made, after all the good faith she'd shown, the headman bounced me out of the school a few weeks short of graduation.

Here was a so-called "pastor”, a shepherd who was supposed to protect the flock, a leader whose job it was to find a way to help people over the rough spots. But apparently, he cared more about the church treasury than in helping a powerless person like my mother. As if she was trying to cheat the school! So, I went on to Lake View, a public high school on the North Side at Irving Park and Ashland, where I majored mostly in sports.

I'd always loved to play games. I was a good athlete and easily picked up the American sports like basketball and baseball. Basketball was my particular favorite. In the winter I'd shovel snow off the court at Hamlin Park and endlessly practiced my dribbling and shooting. When school was out the kids would get together and choose up sides. We'd play day and night, going home only to eat and sleep. I'd been part of a recreation league team out of the Hamlin Park area that won an all-city championship. We got to shake hands with Mayor Daley, who presented us with the trophy.

Once I started playing on the Lake View teams, though, things were never the same. My first problem came in my freshman year, when I tried out for the baseball team. I had no problem making the squad-l was a good outfielder and pitcher. I had plenty of experience playing in the sand lots and deserved a spot in the starting lineup. The coach, however, decided otherwise. "***********, you're going to sit on the bench this year," he told me. “Why?” "Because I say so, that's why.” On this team we give preference to the seniors and the upperclassmen.

Whether the seniors and upperclassmen were better players or not seemed to make no difference. Of course I was just a fresh kid, and I couldn't understand his point of view. It seemed unfair. I figured that if you were good enough, you should play. So, I quit the team. Maybe you'll say I was just letting my pride get the better of me. But that's the way it was. A good systems person probably would learn to swallow his pride and patiently wait his turn. He'd buy into the seniority model, figuring that someday the system would work in his favor.

But for better or worse I just didn't have it in me to go along with the crowd. I was a mustang that didn't want to be bridled, saddled and ridden around like a show pony to please some goddamned cowboy who might ship me off to the glue factory as soon as he got bored. If anybody was going to do the riding, it was going to be me. Then again, I had a talent for putting people's noses out of joint—especially school official types. Once I dreamed up the idea of giving one of my favorite teachers a fifth of his favorite whiskey as a Christmas present. All the students in our drafting class chipped in, and I was chosen to buy the whiskey. Of course I was underage, but I had my connections.

To make a long story short, I get caught with the whiskey and the principal calls my father down to Lake View to take home both me, and the whiskey. Not to be denied, I sneak into school again with the whiskey and give it to the teacher in front of the class. Much applause. But not from the principal. Little capers like that tended to put me in Dutch. I suppose you might say I was asking for it.

I didn't think much about using high school as a stepping-stone to college. There wasn't going to be much money around our house for college educations. In school I studied the subjects that interested me and tended to forget about the rest. In any case, I was getting impatient to step out on my own. I'd been working for years in my off-school hours, going back to the days in south Haven. I liked the idea of hustling for a buck; figuring things out free style as I went along. Formal education seemed kind of stuffy and ponderous compared to learning about life on the streets of Chicago. I was born to hustle like a sheep dog is born to run in the hills, and as soon as I was old enough, I began to light out on my own.

 

[mr3cushion]

Getting down to business

CHAPTER SEVEN:

SHOE SHINE *****​

I started my first real job and my first real hustle at the simplest kind of work there is. At the age of twelve I opened up my own shoeshine business. It might not sound like much, wandering the streets of Chicago with a footstool and rags peddling a shine and a smile, but if you worked it right the money was good. Very good. In fact, after years of shining a million shoes and saving practically every nickel, I was able to put up a down payment on a four-flat apartment building!

I learned as a young man, that it's not what you do that counts but the process of doing it. You have to develop a method and a discipline. You have to figure out a clear goal and a way of achieving that goal. For me the goal was a no-brainer making money. The way to achieve the goal? Hustle the streets; find the best spots to nab customers, charm the customers into having their shoes shined, and then shine, man shine! Whip out the rag, snap that rag, and talk up The Man with a smile on your face and shine, man, shine! Shine till your knees are worn through your pants and your hands are so black with polish it takes a half hour of hard scrubbing to get them clean again.

It sounds like awfully hard work, but I loved it. I learned to hang around spots where people congregated and were ready to spend their dough. Bars, nightclubs, movie houses, wherever a crowd was likely to gather. My favorite hunting ground by far was the area around Wrigley Field on the North Side at Clark and Addison. From April to October this was the home field of the Chicago Cubs, and then from October to January the Chicago Bears took over. Fans swarmed into the Wrigley area not only for the games but to spend time before and after the games eating and drinking at the nearby restaurants and bars.

It was a holiday atmosphere, especially on autumn Sunday afternoons for a Bears game. Imagine 40,000 people, men, women and children stomping around on a wet November day. Mud was everywhere. 40,000 pairs of shoes begging for a shine! Half of those 40,000 readies to plop down after the game in a nice warm restaurant or bar to talk over the action. They were making a day of it and ready to blow a few bucks on making themselves feel good.

I had learned just how to appeal to such people. "Hey mister, how about it? Bears win! Bears win! Let’s celebrate with a fine spit shine! And one for the lady too? Sure, I got white polish! I got brown polish, red polish, and black polish. Suede shoes? I got a suede brush to make 'em look like new." Or: "Bears lose? Aw. C’mon man. You're going to feel better with a snappy shine! You know it! A fine shine today sends those black clouds away!" I could make $150-$200 on a good day shining shoes. It was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. And reading people. You learn to hustle by making a good impression.

People are naturally suspicious of strangers trying to get money from them, even a nickel or a dime. If you make them laugh, they'll let their guard down. Make them feel important. Make them think that you're just a hard-working kid who'll be eternally grateful for whatever small change you decide to toss his way. "Yes sir, I'm saving up all my shoeshine money for college!" That line was 801 usually added another two bits to the tip.

Of course, some guys are a waste of time, they're either broke or such hard asses you'd that never make a dent in them. They throw nickels around like manhole covers. You learn to ignore these cheapskates and focus on the free wheelers. You can read it in their faces. Some of them are generous and others just like to play “The Man". Either way their money is good. After a while I had plenty of regular customers too, "Hey, Shoeshine *****!" they'd sing out when they saw me coming their way. I was one of the few white kids who worked the shoeshine business. Maybe they felt more comfortable with me, since most of my clientele was white guys from the North Side.

Women also liked a good shine and maybe a bit of a foot rub to go with it. I let them know that I was putting away every dime for medical school. That usually got their motherly instincts flowing and a good tip coming my way. Of course, some of these ladies' instincts weren't exactly motherly. Shining shoes was a good way to hit on girls. I had more than one ask me to come home with her. Men, too, for that matter. I wasn't offended. When you're shining his shoes, the customer has a right to make conversation however he wants. Either way, his money is good.

To be continued:

 

[mr3cushion]

Getting down to business

CHAPTER EIGHT:

CARNEY KID: RIVERVIEW PARK

​

For most kids, the teenage years are the ones you remember as school days. You mostly run with the herd or with your clique of friends. You play sports or act in the school plays or take up a musical instrument. You fantasize about orgies and worry about blotches on your face. It's a time to learn the basics about a lot of things, from science and history to drinking beer and the mysteries of the opposite sex.

Most kids, however, are a little bit older maybe out of college even before they feel the need to start earning a steady buck. I was different that way. By the time I was ten I was already picking fruit, lagging coins and busy figuring out how to survive in a world of money. Probably it was because we were dirt-poor immigrants who'd been through the trauma of a world war. We were shell-shocked and scared. The only way to survive was to focus your heart and mind on one thing--scraping up every dime that would help pull you and your family out of the muck of poverty.

I got my first real job in the summer of 1959 at Riverview Park. Riverview was one of the greatest amusement parks in the world. It was huge, covering more than 70 acres and whole square blocks around Western and Belmont on the North Side of Chicago. The midway featured a ton of terrific rides. There were roller coasters, tilt-a-whirls, bumper cars, you name it. The usual freak shows and fun houses were always popular. But there were also restaurants, beer gardens and picnic grounds catering to the ethnic communities, which were such a big part of life in Chicago.

Riverview was a blue-collar heaven. It was full of sailors and soldiers and shop girls out for a lark. The place swarmed with kids. I was just a kid myself, fifteen. My brothers both had picked up summer jobs at Riverview. John was guessing ages and weights at a concession and run by a guy named Murray Goldberg. Gerhard worked a ride called the Water Shute. You were supposed to be sixteen to work at Riverview, but they finagled me in a year early.

At first, I was assigned to the Monkey Races. "Alive! They're all alive!" the owner would roar into the microphone. It was true. He owned about a dozen live monkeys, which he kept in a little house behind the tiny racetrack. I and a few other kids were put to work selling race tickets and taking care of the monkeys. We put clothes on them, fed those fruit and set them down behind the wheel in the little racecars that spun around the tracks. The idea for the customer was to bet on the winning monkey. The winning ticket holder got a stuffed animal. The whole business amounted to giving away spoofer’s heap stuffed animals for a fraction of the money we collected selling tickets.

The Monkey Races was a popular show and a solid concession. The only bad part was getting bit handling those damned monkeys. When they got mad, they could be ornery and vicious. The second summer I moved onto the rides, like the Wild Mouse, the bumper cars and especially The Bobs, which was one of the wildest roller coaster rides in the country. Here's where I started to pick up some "extra change" literally. For one thing, all the fast movement of the thrill rides meant that valuables were always flying out of people's pockets. You might be surprised at how many coins, wallets and pieces of jewelry would be left in the seats and around the platforms.

After the rides closed at night, we'd scavenge all sorts of stuff in and under the cars. Of course we were supposed to turn it all in, but somehow quite a bit of stuff wound up in our own pockets. Working the rides is also where I learned how to shortchange customers. I found out that the art of shortchanging people is mostly a matter of environment. It works best in a place like Riverview, where there is lots of noise and distraction. Customers are getting into cars, getting out of cars, laughing and babbling to their friends. Some have had a few drinks. Some are still dizzy from their last spin on the Wild Mouse. Lines of impatient people are pushing ahead to get onto The Bobs.

The typical customer just buys a ticket and stuffs the change in his pocket without counting it. A moment later maybe he does take out the change and count it, but by now he's already been shoved along onto the ride platform. He can't easily work his way back to the cashier who shortchanged him. Even if he could get back, the cashier would just shrug. "Too late now, pal. You should have counted your change at the window!"

Of course, shortchanging amounts to petty theft. But it's easy enough to rationalize because the whole scene is just a shower of nickels, dimes and dollars being thrown around by people looking for a good time. When their money runs out, they go home. They've had a great time shooting the chutes and barfing up their hotdogs and cotton candy. If they had a couple more bucks in their pockets, they'd just blow it on some other goofy game. They'd try to win a stuffed bunny by throwing baseballs at a row of bottles. They'd go broke and head home five minutes later than they would have otherwise.

Another good moneymaker was scavenging around for unused tickets. Late at night you could find hundreds of them lying in the grass of the picnic grounds and elsewhere in the park. These tickets amounted to cash, for the un-torn tickets could be resold at a discount, black market style, to anyone who wanted to use them.

Personally, I had no interest in riding things like The Bobs. Why would you want to make yourself dizzy and sick flying around in the air? It wasn't my thing. But there were always plenty of folks who wanted to ride them again and again. Just like there were guys who wanted their shoes shined once a week or who thought they could beat you at a pool game. I was learning how to accommodate them all for a price.

Riverview Park was also a good place to pick up chicks. If they weren't with boyfriends, they came along in twos and threes looking for a little excitement. I considered myself pretty hot stuff at the time a cool young guy in the Brando/Dean mold with a touch of Elvis. When it came to attracting women, I was a legend in my own mind. And the truth is, if you look sharp and can talk a good line of bullshit there are always plenty of ladies willing to give you a spin. Even at this young age I probably could have had all I wanted, but I was still carrying the image of my mother as the ideal woman. She had sacrificed so much for me. She was a heroine, and I never wanted to do anything that would really disappoint her. In some sense all the women I met fell into this category, and I politely respected them unless they gave me reason to think otherwise.

I managed to keep myself free of serious entanglements with women, even though they seemed to be everywhere in front of my eyes and in my dreams. Meanwhile I was hustling every angle I could in the park. Maybe I pushed it a little too hard. That's been the fate of my character from Day One. I've got a strong motor that won't quit. That helps me pass up the other cars in the race. I'm always a contender for the checkered flag.
But the fact is that sometimes I've had trouble turning the motor off. I’ll get further into this business later on in the story.

For now, I’ll say that eventually my days at Riverview were numbered. I pushed the shortchange racket as far as I could until one day the company happened to put a spotter on me. The guy gave me a five-dollar bill at The Bobs and his change came up seventy cents short. An hour later he comes back in a different set of clothes and the same thing happens. I didn’t have a clue what was happening, nor did the manager of the ride. He would have tipped me off if he knew anything.

So, the bottom line was they fired me. I went up to talk with Will Smith, the owner of the park. He was a German, like me and felt some sympathy for my situation. But rules were rules. I got caught and I paid the price. I don't hold any hard feelings for people who play by the rules. Sometimes you just have to shrug your shoulders and move on.

 

[mr3cushion]

Wrapping up a wild lifestyle

CHAPTER NINE:

CARNEY KID ON THE ROAD​

Around this time a young guy named Jack Kerouac wrote a book called "On the Road". It was about bumming around the country and meeting all kinds of strange dudes along the way. It was about getting baptized into life beyond the family and friends and street corners you'd always known. It was about heading out across the big land of America and finding your own way. It was about freedom.

If there had been a movie, Brando should have played the vagabond hero. Or maybe James Dean. Or, later on, maybe Steve McQueen. My own version of "On the Road" was called the Royal American Shows. It was the greatest travelling carnival in the world. I swung a job with them through the manager of The Bobs at Riverview. After that spotter fiasco, maybe he figured he owed me one. "Go see this carney guy Muscles" he said. "Don't worry. I’ll tell him you're OK. I'll tell him you're 'with it’.

So, Muscles got me in with Royal American, which was a Canadian outfit 973 that had contracts to set up midways at a whole slew of state fairs every summer. I was only sixteen, but suddenly here I was travelling around from Milwaukee down to Louisiana and all points east and west. It gave me a chance to see the country and meet all different kinds of people. Mostly it gave me a good basic education in the art of hustling because, except for the rides and the food, a carnival midway is pretty much one big swindle.

I learned my trade in what carney people call the "flat stores". These are the various game booths that you see on either side of the Midway at any state fair or small-town carnival. They are all set up for one purpose only to take your money. No matter what the game guessing the string that has the monkey on it is a winner, finding the pea under the shell, knocking over the bottles with a baseball, shooting ducks in a gallery, you name it they are all designed to create the illusion that you can win. In reality, they are all fixed so that you can never win, except if the guy running the flat store allows you to win. Of course, he does that only to con you or somebody else further into the game, so that he can take even more money out of your pocket. "There's a sucker born every minute," P.T. Barnum said.

Once you start working the flat stores, you'll believe the old man was being conservative. It’s amazing how foolish people can be when they think they can get something for nothing, even if it's just a big stuffed teddy bear. First for all you "gaff” the customer. In other words, you draw his attention 995 with a line of patter intended to suck him into the game.

"Come on, man. Bring that little gal over here and win her that nice big fluffy panda. She wants it. You know she does! Now you see these three pieces of string? All you have to do is guess which one has the monkey on the string. Now how hard is that? It only costs you one measly dollar to choose. Shoot, the law of averages says you'll pick it at least once in three tries. Little lady, you can win a 100-dollar stuffed dog for 5 dollars. What a great deal. Win a big teddy bear for your love affair.”

I started out on the "string game" and made money hand over fist. Of course, the strings were fixed so that you'd never pick the string with the monkey on it. There was no monkey on the string! The local yokels could never figure out how they were so unlucky, why they never picket the string with the monkey on it. Every once in a while, you did let somebody win, just to lure in more customers to give it a try themselves.

It was a simple controlled game, which is the trick to all the flat stories or choosing a card in three card monte or picking the string with the monkey on it. All flat store games are controlled, and nobody can win unless they let you win. Whatever you might say about the moral code of carney swindlers, the Midway was still a pretty nice place to spend an afternoon or an evening. What else are you going to do on a summer day in Kansas?

On the Midway you could wander about eating hot dogs and cotton candy and enjoying the sunshine. Nobody forced you to play at the flat stores. Even if you did play, you usually dropped just a few bucks and had some laughs. Compare that to a place like Vegas or one of those Indian casinos around the country where you sit around all afternoon in a dark, smoky room half hypnotized in front of a slot machine! At least the Midway gave you and your date some exercise walking around in the fresh air. And kids all love the carnival.

The carney life is a world all off its own. Carney people are like a pack of gypsies. They have their own slang, their own mysterious gestures, and their own codes of behavior. They stick together like a desert tribe. Their attitude is "us against the world". Everybody outside the group is fair game to be gaffed and swindled. Everybody outside the circle is a mark, a sucker, and a local yokel or a dressed-up fool.

Nowadays, this carney life has pretty much disappeared. Disneyland, Six Flags and the other permanent amusement parks have taken over the business and cleaned out the old-time, disreputable carney crowd. The flat stores and 1031 whack out joints of the old Midway mostly are only a memory.

I suppose most people might say: "Good riddance to bad rubbish!" But I think a lot of colorful characters and scenes have been swept away in the bargain. Of course this is the trend everywhere in our society. The idea is to make everything wholesome and cheerful. The old honky tonk neighborhoods and pool halls give way to urban renewal. Las Vegas caters to "family fun" in place of the old sawdust joints and neon signs of Glitter Gulch.

Some will say that this is "progress,” that you can't go back in time. In a way they're right. You have to live in the present. Put the past will be remembered. And who would argue that it was better in the old unsanitary days when people were being crippled by polio and dying from TB and diphtheria and cholera and the plague?

But I think we do lose something important when the goal is to make every business follow a corporate model and every street comer as antiseptic and bland as every other one. We lose some of our individuality and our quirkiness. Life naturally has a kind of rough texture to it, and if you try to smooth all that away you wind up with something less than you started with. Maybe someday I’ll write another book about all the strange characters I’ve known in the carnivals and dingy bars and roadside diners of America. I have vivid memories of so many of them. If s a regular Hall of III Fame that deserves not to be swept away by time and forgotten.

In the chapters that follow, I'm going to talk about one particular gang of characters the hustlers and suckers and hangers on who congregated in the pool halls of Chicago and around America. They all belong to a kind of fraternity a brotherhood of rogues, a family of misfits. I'm one of them myself, and I lived among them for many years. I made my living off quite a few of them from the time I quit Royal American Show and returned to Chicago at age eighteen to start playing pool for a living. It was the beginning of a crazy ride.

 

[mr3cushion]

PART THREE: A BENSINGER'S BOY



Never play if you can’t win. The name off the game is to win. I was the main man who people feared and lost their money too. I beat hundreds of people playing pool. I was the king and the best hustler. Nobody was in my class. And I won 95% off the time. I was in on the scores and I ran the whole hustling game and the hustling pool players. I would tell them who to play and how much and what game. Nobody could out maneuver me.


CHAPTER TEN:

I DISCOVER MY GAME​

People sometimes ask me how I became a pool hustler. I have to say that the hustler part came naturally to me. I was born a hustler because of what happened to my family in the War. I learned that power and money ruled the world. You were either a wolf or a lamb. You ate the meal or you were the meal!

At the same time, I knew that I was more than a predator. I was a human being, not an animal. I had feelings for my family and friends. I loved my dog, and I felt pity for the weak. I took pride in shining shoes better than anyone else, in doing a good job at whatever I did. My mother saved my money I earned and bought me an apartment building.

Still, I knew that nobody was going to give me anything for free. You had to compete, and you had to play to win otherwise you'd be shuffled to the back of the pack and stay there for the rest of your life, wondering what you might have done if you'd tried harder or taken a few more chances. Pool was my game.

Way before I was old enough to go into a pool hall I used to peek inside the door. It looked mysterious and dark inside, except for the bright lights shining down on the green tables. It was fascinating to watch the colored balls roll around on the green felt. I heard the ivory balls going click-click the way they do, and that was a wonderful sound. I heard the players laughing and swearing and running around the table waving their cue sticks and making shots. They were doing their thing, and I was just peeking in. They were men, and I was just a kid who wanted to be one of them.

At age eighteen, when I was old enough to enter the pool hall, I came through that door and started to learn the game. First came stuff like holding the cue, making a solid bridge and stroking the cue ball. Plenty of guys were happy to teach a newcomer the fundamentals. I'd always been a good athlete. I was blessed with good hand-eye coordination and sharp vision. So, the basics came easily enough.

All I had to do was practice. And keep practicing. I practiced day and night. If they would have let me, I would have slept in the pool hall. I became totally fixated on learning to play the game. It was just in my nature to grab a thing and hold onto to it and chew on it like dog's chew on a bone. I did the same thing when I shined shoes or went scouring around for tickets at Riverview. I was determined that nobody was going to outwork me.

I started out playing at a second-floor bowling alley with pool tables on Lincoln Avenue North Center. This is what we called a mooch poolroom, where people came in mostly to play for fun. I graduated from there to a bigger room on Howard and Paulina in East Rogers Park. They had thirty-two tables.

Rogers Park was a well-to-do Jewish neighborhood where a lot of rich kids liked to hang out gambling on pool and football games. None of them had a clue how to hustle pool, though, so it was easy pickings for me even while I was still learning to play. I beat the best player they had, Bill Romaine, who also worked there as a counter man. Bill put me on to Bensinge’rs, “Why don't you go down there to play? That's where you'll find the big money players."

It didn't take me long to figure out that quite a few guys had mastered the physical skills of shooting pool. Like in any sport, there are always gifted athletes around waiting to kick your ass if you aren't careful. The question is do they have the brains and the guts and the patience to beat you if you play smart, if you'll do anything it takes to win?

So, besides being physically gifted and tough minded, what else do you have to be? The "what else" is part of what makes the difference between a pool player who plays games like straight pool and competes in tournaments a guy like Willie Marconi, for example, who is probably the best straight pool player who ever lived and a pool hustler like me.

A hustler is not a competitive athlete in the sense that Mosconi is. Willie was a sporting gentleman who loved to compete for a prize with worthy opponents. A hustler has a different idea, which is to win as much money as he can from his mark. And everyone will lose their money if they think they can win. Or think they have the best off the game.

The pool hustler couldn't care less if his opponent is a pool playing wizard or a duffer who can barely sink two balls in a row. Remember the old dame on TV who bites into the crummy hamburger and asks, "Where's the beef?" The pool hustler is like that old lady, except with him it's “Where’s the money?" And how much can he extract from the pocket of his mark.

 

[mr3cushion]

Honing His craft


CHAPTER ELEVEN:

THE BASICS OF POOL HUSTLING​

To get at the money the hustler requires a different set of skills. He has to watch people. He has to be a kind of amateur psychologist analyzing people's strengths and weaknesses. He's always on the lookout for a likely mark. Sometimes the mark is a big mouth bragger type who thinks he's hot shit and wants to prove it to everyone around. Plenty of such cowboys hang around pool halls. Other times the mark is a free spender, like the Great Lakes Navy boys we used to see at Riverview. They've got money to throw around and they're damned well going to let it fly. If they're going to throw it away, why shouldn't I be the one to catch it?

Then there are wise guys who think you're an idiot and figure they've got you conned. You just let them go on believing that until they've coughed up their wad. Another type are the drunks who can play well enough when they're sober but who have a self-destructive streak, for some reason they need to drink, and they need to lose. So why shouldn't they lose to me? When the rain starts to fall, you have to be there with a bucket to catch the water.

That's lesson number one for a hustler. You have to work at it. You have to put in your time at the pool hall. You have to be shrewd about other people and about yourself too. You have to know your own weaknesses and work on them. If you have trouble with a certain kind of shot, you must practice it until you're cross-eyed. If you tend to drink too much while you're playing, it will blur your judgment and plays tricks with your coordination. It will cost you. So, you always have to be in control of yourself. You can't be too tight, and you can't be too loose. Being drunk or on drugs is an example of being too loose, Pool halls seem to attract such guys, and a good hustler will gobble them up.

Lots of booze and drugs in your system make you think you're a better player then you really are. You lose concentration. Your mind wanders. Even if you're usually a pretty good shot maker, playing drunk will reduce your abilities by plenty. If you're up against a sharp hustler, you're begging to be taken. You can also be too tight, you see this in many sports, where an athlete gets so uptight he can't relax and do his job. Sometimes in baseball a guy is in a slump and the crowd is booing him. He's gripping the bat so hard sawdust is dripping out the end. He tiles so hard to get a hit that he winds up striking out time and again. The more he tries the worse it gets. Or the boxer who is so nervous before the opening bell that he forgets everything he's supposed to do and gets knocked out in the first round. Maybe he gets so excited he rushes in wide open and gets cold cocked. I've seen it happen a hundred times, which is one reason why betting on sports is such an iffy proposition. There are smart ways to bet on sports, but I’ll get into that later.

Anyway, being too loose or too tight at the pool table will screw up your game. Against good opponents it will beat you. So, you have to use your head. Brain power and control of your emotions is just as important as physical skill in any sport. People who can't control themselves—or who refuse to control themselves are losers. The job of a good hustler is to smell out these guys and work them into a money game. It's like being a hunter going after his prey. You're the hunter. You've got the weapon which is your knowledge and poise. You track your prey, wait for the right shot and pull the trigger. Except in hustling pool, you don't kill anybody. Maybe you wound the guy a little, in his wallet and in his pride. Sometimes the mark doesn't even know he's been hit. That’s the best kind of mark, because he's always ready to come back for more. I started playing for a dollar a game, and it felt good when I won six dollars a night. From the beginning I would only gamble with people I knew I could beat. In a way, this is not really gambling.

It's not like playing poker or the horses. In those games you win some and lose some. After everything shakes down, you try to come out on the plus side. You try that's the big word. If you're playing games like poker in a casino or playing horses at the track you've got a built-in disadvantage. One way or another, you pay juice money to the house for setting up the game. So, you've got to be either a very smart player or play people who can’t win. To come out ahead. Nobody can win with the worst off it. To win you have to have the best off the game or bet. In pool, it’s just you against the other guy. There's no middleman to pay, no juice unless you count a backer who might be bankrolling you in a big money game or a steer man who might have helped set up a mark for you. In that case you are splitting your profits or losses with him.

From the beginning I approached hustling pool games the same way I did shining shoes or running flat store games at the carnival. The first step of the hustle is to identify a mark, because without a mark you have no game. So, you find somebody you can beat. Then you have to convince the mark to play against you. You do this in a variety of ways. For example, you might play a few friendly or low wager games with him at low speed so that he thinks he can beat you.

Of course, you never show him your real speed, your real ability, once the bets become serious, you play just well enough to win, sometimes even making it look like you slopped in some lucky shots. That way you keep the sucker on the hook, and he'll come back for more, like shining shoes, slowly you build up a clientele. You do this by always staying friendly, knowing how to tell jokes and build up the other guy's ego. After you put a sparkling shine on somebody's shoes, he feels good. A week later he wants another shine from you. Hustling pool works the same way. If you can make your mark, feel good about losing his money or at least not feel that you've destroyed his pride, you're on the way to setting him up for another session.

After a while, word gets around and you start to build up a reputation as a good player, still, you never want to show people your true speed. You have to think of your reputation as a business card. Some suckers may eventually get tired of losing and quit playing you. But as you develop a rep, other players will see an opportunity to challenge you in money games. They've watched you play your half-speed game, and they think they can handle you.

As you go up the ladder, you must always be working to improve your game in private. Practice, practice, practice. And always be willing to learn. If you happen to lose a game, always try to learn from your mistakes. Everybody is human. Everybody has faults. Your job is to recognize your own weaknesses and minimize them. If you are unwilling to do this, you are a loser. Losers are better off in some regular job where they won't get themselves into trouble. The last place I would advise a loser to be is in a big money pool game. Unless he's playing against me, that is. Then I want him right there at the table with a big roll of bills in his pocket.

When I started playing against good players, players as good as or even stronger than I was, I had to learn how to get the right spots, the right handicap. Whoever you play or make a game with you have to know what you need to win. A great player can be beat also if you have the right game to beat him at. Maybe in a game of straight pool I would ask for the opponent to spot me thirty or forty balls before the game started. Or maybe I'd ask him to spot me a ball and the break playing one pocket.

Whatever advantage I claimed, I would not play for money unless I got the game I needed to win. This sometimes takes a bit of negotiating and talking tell you get the spot you want or need to win the money, but you have to stand your ground. It's like in any sports bet. If you are betting some palooka against Muhammad Ali, you need to get steep odds. Even if you are betting Joe Frazier against Ali you need to get 7-5 or 8-5 before you risk your money.

In man-to-man betting, you must hold out for odds or points spreads advantageous to you. In reality, most gamblers want to bet. For many degenerate gamblers being able to make some kind of bet any kind of bet is more important to their gambling addiction than winning or losing. The way to beat such people out of their money is first to identify them and second to play the waiting game with them, always looking for an advantage. If you are patient and clever, in the end you will succeed more times than not. The problem with many good pool players, even some decent hustlers, is that they lack the mentality to be consistently successful.

When I first started playing, I worked with a player named Mexican Johnny Vazquez. He was good and I backed him in games, even when I was still in high school. He'd wait for me in the afternoon outside of Lakeview High School so we could go find somebody to play. Now Johnny was one of the best investments I ever made, and I learned a lot from him about how to shoot pool. He looked like a mob enforcer. He scared people just looking at him. But he could really play, and I don't think I ever backed him in a losing game.

The problem with Mexican Johnny was that every nickel he won hustling pool he would lose back at the racetrack. He didn't seem to care, really. He was a classic degenerate gambler. He had a craving for action. Guys like that will always lose out in the end because in the long run you can't beat percentages unless you have the best off the odds. Like sports bets or games like casino craps or blackjack these games are there for you too loose. And without the best off the odds, you cannot win. And they have the best off every bet. And just like in a pool game if you have the worst off the game you will lose.

 

[mr3cushion]

Moving on up


CHAPTER TWELVE:

BENSINGER'S
​

Back in the 1960s when I started playing on the North Side of Chicago there were dozens of pool halls. But there was one pool hall that had a reputation for being Number One, the place where you had to go if you wanted to find the famous players and the biggest money games. This was Bensinger's at Clark, Diversey & Broadway. The old Bensinger’s pool rooms in the Loop had been famous all over the country. Back in the 20’s, thru the late 50’s. Players like Willie Hoppe, Willie Mosconi, Ralph Greenleaf and many more had come in to play big money matches.

Norman Bensinger had moved "The Room" up North in the early 60s, and that's where I found it. Norman was getting older then, ready to retire. So, in the late 60s I bought the place from his wife. I'd won a lot of money there and took the joint off his hands for about thirty grand. A year later the lease came up for renewal, so I sold it for $100,000. Couldn't see much future in owning a pool room. With no lease the business was going downhill by then and it ended up closing for good in the Mid 70s.

I don't mind admitting that when I first started going into Bensinger's the place scared me. To enter you went down a flight of stairs into a dark basement that seemed like a dungeon. Inside were rows of old five-by-ten pool tables. The air was thick with smoke from cheap cigars and the smell of stale beer. Old timers who sat around in the wooden grandstands ("sweaters") we called them that, because they loved too sweat pool games peered at you out of the gloom. So did the hustlers who hung around waiting for a sucker or easy mark to show up.

The first-time l walked into Bensinger’s ten people had their eyes on me like I was a T 'bone steak. You could hear rats running around in the corners. They had a hunch-back sweeping the floors and a cross-eyed guy cleaning the toilets. The man brushing the tables was an old alky who for some reason wore a black mask, like a stick-up artist. Pimps were staring into their coffee at the lunch counter. Druggies were shooting up heroin in the back room. The whole place belonged in a movie one of those old Dracula pictures with cobwebs and dust everywhere.

Nevertheless, Bensinger’s was the pool capital of Chicago. For hustler games like One Pocket and Bank Pool, it was the capital of the whole world. In addition to the five-by-ten tables, they had ivory inlaid three-cushion billiard tables, which today would cost a fortune to make. These were reserved for the gentlemen who would come in to play one another. They dressed in coats and ties and spoke softly in perfect English. And some were Judges and lawyers and very rich. Compared to the billiard players, the rest of us seemed like a pack of savages. But that's the way it was at Bensinger's. Nobody seemed to think it was strange that such different kinds of people rubbed elbows in a dingy poolroom.

Even celebrities would drop into the joint. One day here comes Bo Belinsky and Dean Chance, both famous no-hit pitchers and Bo's starlet girlfriend Mamie Van Doren. Bo had a rep among the sportswriters for being a pool shark. I suppose the writers believed what Bo told them. It made for good copy. Among the sweaters and hustlers in Bensinger's, Bo Belinsky and Dean Chance were interesting visitors. But Mamie Van Doren was a sensation. Everybody crowded around to get a good look at Mamie, who herself looked a little scared to be rubbing elbows with a bunch of grubby characters in a basement poolroom. But Belinsky had brought her there to show off what pool hustlers were and his skills as a straight pool player. He had plenty of money and was looking for action. He has like a three-year-old against Joe Louis.

So, Isadore (Pony) Rosen takes up the challenge with Belinsky. Pony just happened to be one of the two greatest Jewish pool hustlers I've ever known (Bunny Rogoff is the other). By this time Bensinger's was packed to the rafters, half the people drooling over Mamie and the rest waiting to see Pony Rosen taking Bo Belinsky apart in a straight pool match' And Bo Belinsky made a bunch off bets on the side. He was throwing a big party. Bo had no chance against an artist like Pony and lost three straight games by a big margin. But Bo had fun anyway. The money was nothing to him. After the games he and Chance and Mamie stuck around to sign autographs, and a good time was had by all. And Mamie seen how real pool hustlers Hustled.

On the other side of the room were 12 Brunswick Carom tables, where faithful 3 Cushion players, businessmen dressed in ties and suits came in everyday for lunch and a few games of Billiards. Some of the Notables from the entertainment industry were, John Ringling North (Ringling Brothers Circus), Milton Berle (Comedian TV Star), Phil Weintraub (Cubs Pitcher), David De Winter, when in town came to Bensingers to play. All considered Bensingers for ‘Decades’ the place to be, for Pool and Billiards!

Another time a movie crew rented out Bensinger's to make a film called "Tough Guys" starring lsaac Hayes. One day the whole crew went off to lunch leaving thousands of dollars of film-making equipment unguarded in the pool room. When they got back all their equipment and gear had taken a walk. Of course we all knew who stole the stuff but nobody would rat. It was no big deal to these Hollywood guys. They’d doubtless insured the whole works. Anyway, they seemed to have money to burn. Which brings me to the subject of movies about hustling and cons.

Of course, the most famous movie about pool is "The Hustler'' with Paul Newman as a hustler named “Fast Eddie Felson.” As a movie about human characters it is interesting. Newman is a great actor and so is George G. Scott, who plays the greedy money backer. Also Jackie Gleason is very good playing Minnesota Fats, who in real life was a pretty good straight pool player. Gleason himself shot a nifty game. Piper Laurie is very good as Felson's girlfriend. The movie pictures the dingy world of poolrooms very accurately.

But as a movie about hustling pool, "The Hustler” is totally inaccurate. Fast Eddie Felson is supposedly a great pool shark, but in the film he is anything but a real hustler, He does several things a real hustler would never do. He played the part off a champion straight pool player who got drunk and went off. First of all, a hustler would not walk into a poolroom with a two-piece Balabushka cue in a leather case looking for Minnesota Fats or some other great pool player to challenge at straight pool.

Hustlers look for marks, not Minnesota Fats. Straight pool is a game for tournaments, not hustling. It is a slow game where hundreds of points are racked up before you get a winner. Hustlers prefer quicker games like One-Pocket and Nine-Ball. So, when Eddie Felson plays Minnesota Fats, he has to show his real speed. He wants to show it and to brag about how good he is. This a smart hustler would never do. Not only is Felson a foolish braggart, but he is also unable to hold his booze. He gets drunk and loses to Minnesota Fats. Some hustler! His backer, whose job is to pull Felson away from the table when he's had too much to drink, does nothing. Some backer!

From the standpoint of hustling pool, the whole movie is a disaster. After losing to Fats, Eddie goes into a barroom to hustle some yokels. Again, instead of playing smart, barely beating the suckers and taking the money home with a smile for everybody, he shows his real speed in thrashing the locals. So they take him out and break his thumbs. Instead of calling the movie "The Hustler" they should have called it "The Shark versus the Champ,” because it’s really a movie about what a hustler should not do.

The same thing is true about movies like "The Cincinnati Kid" and "The Sting". They are very entertaining stories with great actors like Newman, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson and Karl Maiden. But as far as showing how great poker players operate or how to work a "Big Con" they are next to useless. In "The Sting", for example, Newman and Redford con a vicious gangster, played by Robert Shaw, out of millions with an elaborate race book betting scheme. The whole story is very amusing, except for one thing no con man with any sense would try to swindle a powerful gangster!

Remember, a hustler is always on the lookout for an easy mark, someone who will lose his money in a predictable and orderly fashion; someone who may be willing to come back later and lose some more. Conning a cold-blooded killer like Robert Shaw's character is asking for trouble. The guy is a homicidal maniac, and you don't know what he might do to get even once he figures out that he's been conned. A good rule to live by for any successful hustler: make sure that you are alive to hustle another day!

 

[mr3cushion]

Growing up


CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

A LIFE ON THE EDGE​

My chosen profession was Hustler. I earned advanced degrees in that discipline, so if I wanted to show off my knowledge I could rightly call myself “Doctor ***********”. But since no true hustler wants to show off his real game we'll forget about the "Doctor” part.

I suppose that every profession has its downside. If you're a medical doctor maybe you have to get up in the middle of the night or work long hours in a hospital. Sometimes lawyers have to page through books and papers until their eyeballs fall out. The good thing about hustling is that you have the freedom to keep your own hours and to be your own boss. You meet lots of interesting people. You can travel around the country. If you know what you're doing, the money isn’t bad either. One bad thing about hustling is that it can be very lonely. Family life and hustling do not mix very well. A hustler may keep his own hours, but they are usually not 9 to 5.

Another bad thing is that hustling can be downright dangerous. Some "interesting" guy you are playing might have a shiv in his pocket and no second thoughts about robbing or even killing you. One way or another, many of the characters you run around with are a little bit bent out of shape. It goes with the territory. Maybe they can't lay off the booze or the coke or the horses. Maybe they need to fight or chase skirts every night or beat up their girlfriends. There are a thousand ways for people to run off the tracks, and sometimes they want to take you with them.

When I was younger, I had to struggle with my own demons. For one thing I found myself drinking way too much, and when I drank, I could get a little crazy. One time flying back to Chicago from Jacksonville Florida I got so drunk and unruly they had to make a special landing on a none stop flight in Mississippi to but me off the plane, another time in Chicago I got so blasted I fired a whiskey bottle into a bar mirror, shattering the whole works. For that little episode I was arrested and had to go to court to pay for the damages but that’s another story. I had some real beauties stories that are very entertaining.

Let's just say that I was a happy drunk. But nobody can handle too much alcohol. In the end I had to give up alcohol altogether. I could handle many challenges in life, but booze was not one of them. I would go overboard. When you find out that something like that has got a hold on you when the tail is wagging the dog you just have to quit cold turkey. It’s all about survival. Some people would rather die than give up booze or drugs or even tobacco. That's their business. I'm just thankful not to be one of them. On the other hand, when sober I was never an aggressive or violent person.

My motto was always to get along with people and have them like you. It made life easier, and it made hustling easier if you could bring down people's guards. Although I could never fight a lick, I was smart enough to pal around with people who could duke it. Rory O'Shea, one of my best friends ever and a terrific pool player, was a professional boxer and a great street fighter. Rory and his brothers the “Fighting O'Shea’s of Chicago” saved my ass in many a scrape over the years.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s when being rebellious was all the fashion. The big movie heroes were guys like Marion Brando in "The Wild One" or James Dean in "Rebel without a Cause". There were the new rock music and anti-war demonstrations. Cassius Clay changed his “name” to Muhammad Ali, became a Muslim, and was I telling everybody he wouldn't go fight in the Vietnam War. What a change from the old days when the heavyweight champ, Joe Louis, said he would be happy to go fight in World War II because "We have God on our side," God does not pick sides,” Ali said, "I ain't got nothin' against them Viet Congs.” That sums up a lot about the different attitudes toward authority in two generations.

In a way I fit in with the rebels and the misfits because I had a grudge against the world of privilege. My family had been screwed over by the war and the politicians. We’d been kicked off the field and told we couldn't play the game anymore. To some people we were D.P. shit who didn't belong in their precious ail of American society and their nice orderly suburban existence. We were too rough. We didn't speak very good English.

The war was over, and people wanted to watch television and eat steak and buy a new car and forget about nasty realities like war-torn Europe or segregation in the South. I just couldn’t see where I belonged in that picture. So, I left school early and 1535 started hustling. I was drawn like a magnet to street life and poolrooms and gambling joints filled with oddball characters that didn't belong either. Many of them didn't know what they wanted. They lived day to day strung out on booze or drugs or playing the horses. Some of them were common criminals or gang bangers. Many were Hispanic or Black.

Luckily for me, I'd had a good mother and father who for all of their troubles and disappointments had instilled in me a basic sense of decency. I might have to struggle with wild sprees of drinking and with a taste for living in the fast lane, but I was not a self-destructive junky, nor a heartless criminal. True, I wanted to con people out of their money by hustling carney games or card games or pool games. But that was just money. I did not want to terrorize or murder anybody. In the long run, I had to get out of Chicago and the pool hustling. I was 1548 running out of action and I was destroying my health and peace of mind. Living on the edge all the time it might look attractive and cool in a movie. In real life it can take too much out of you. But that's a later part of the story, which I will get to in good time.

 

[mr3cushion]

Really, a cast of characters


CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

A GALLERY OF ROGUES​

I've been a successful pool hustler for most of my life. I've won tons of money. I won't go into exactly how much because I never kept track. But what I remember even more than the money is the people I won it from. Their faces are clear in my memory, even after thirty or forty years. You might find it hard to believe when I tell you about some of the crazy scrapes we got into together. But it all happened.

Many of those old-timers, hustlers, suckers, bite men, steer men, backers, and sweaters are long dead. Their world of dingy pool halls and floating crap games has mostly faded away. Now we live in a squeaky plastic world of technology and corporations where individuals don't count for much, especially not the kinds of eccentric characters who used to hustle pool for a living. Nobody has bothered to write a book about him or her, but I do want to say something about these people because they were flesh and blood human beings who, especially the great players deserve to be remembered. There are so many guys I've wound up playing with over the years. It's hard to know where to begin. I've decided to start back in the 1960s, when I first took up game, and go on from there.

I've divided up the players into what I call a "Rogues Gallery" of strange and sometimes dangerous characters, and secondly the "Hall of Fame" of players who were masters of their trade. Occasionally the two categories overlap, especially with players who had great talent but somehow lost their way. I’ll never forget my first big hustle. It's like your first girlfriend, the first time is always special. The guy I marked was a professional dancing teacher who hung around one of the poolrooms on the North Side of Chicago. He always had a wad of bills and kept egging me on to bet with him. At the time I was still a young player but good enough to wipe the floor with a third rater like him and smart enough not to show him my speed at the tables. "Let's play for ten bucks a gamer" he kept pestering me. "No way," I told him. "I can't handle ten, I’ll go for a dollar, maybe, but ten is too rich for me."

I suppose he figured I was some kind of pansy-ass who would start shaking when there was money on the line. Of course, when I started playing him for small stakes, I put on an act to make it look like he was right. One day he came in flashing a big roll. He'd won $7000 at the racetrack and wanted everybody to know what a smart horse player he was. Right away he wants to play me for $100 a game. “No way,” I say. “I’ll play you the usual way. You've got all the money,” etc.

For weeks a pal and I had talked about how to set up the dancing teacher when the time was right. Now, all of a sudden, the fish was ready to bite big time. All we had to do was bait the hook. I phoned this friend to come right over to the pool hall. We agreed that he would wander over to our table, casual like, and start watching us play our dollar game. The dancing teacher thought nothing of it. He'd seen my friend hanging around before, often asking me if I needed anything, like a few bucks if I happened to be short. He’d seen refuse or maybe take some loose change for a beer and a sandwich.

So, my friend watches the game for a little while, and then starts into his act. "I'm tired of listening to you bully ***** around!" he starts hollering, pretending to be mad at the dancing teacher. "To hell with you, big mouth,” he keeps on jabbing at the dancing teacher. “You know ***** hasn’t got any money. But listen, I’ll bet my own money against you. $300 a game says ***** can take you. I don't give a damn!"

Of course, the dancing man starts licking his chops. He's already won big at the track and figures this is his lucky day. So, I start out methodically beating the guy not beating him too badly or too quickly but just enough to run up a $1500 profit in a couple of hours. Now the dancing fool is pissed off. I'm just slop lucky he figures. He wants to bet $500 a game. By the time the evening is over we’ve lifted his entire roll of seven grand!

You'd think the chump would have learned his lesson, but he was an egomaniac. He'd convinced himself that he'd just had a bad night. So, we lured him back in for more, the next day and the day after, for even bigger money. I'd let him win a few games to keep the hook baited, then reel him in when the stakes were raised. By the time we'd finished with him, the dancing master was danced right out of his shoes. He's lucky we left him his socks to walk home in. Making the right move at the right time. That's what hustling is all about.

The dancing teacher was a prime sucker, but he at least knew enough about shooting pool to qualify as a third rater. Another kind of hustle is called "lemon pool", and in this case the sucker doesn't have to have any skill at all. I learned the basics of lemon pool from Ray Maples, who was a rough necked old Navy sergeant. Like most pool hustlers, he was no Cary Grant. Ray's favorite expression was "l swear on my dead mother’s pussy!" I've seen him piss in spittoons in the middle of a crowded poolroom. But the man had a knack for separating lemons from their money.

His favorite gaff was a two-man operation that worked this way: Ray and I would agree to play Nine Ball or whatever for $100 a game. We'd ask a stranger to hold the stakes. "Hey, wait a minute!" Ray would yell. "How do I know this guy isn’t some broken down rummy who's going to run off with my hundred bucks?” So, we'd ask the stake holder to prove that he wasn’t broke. If it turned out that he had no money or wasn’t willing to show it we'd drop him and look for somebody else. If he did show us a roll, we'd start to set him up. Ray would start out playing the fool. Sometimes he'd make believe he was drunk; sometimes he'd say that a rich uncle had just left him a big chunk of money. He'd shoot pool like a complete duffer who couldn't make a ball. He'd lose game after game and flash a big roll of bills. Of course, the idea was to make the stranger believe that even he could beat Ray, and why shouldn't he join in feasting on the carcass of this poor drunken sailor? When Ray staggered off to the bathroom, I would proceed to set up the mark. I told him that I had to leave soon, but it looked like there was plenty more dough to be taken from this guy who couldn't shoot straight If he took the bait I would leave, and Ray would proceed to work him over at the table. After a couple of hours Ray usually walked out with the guy's roll and we'd meet to split the proceeds. It's a simple trick but you'd be surprised how many people fall for it. Why? Because greed tends to overcome good sense. Give people half an idea that they can make big money by doing very little work and they will beat a path to your door.

A successful hustler has to know something about sucker psychology even if he can't spell "psychology" nor has ever taken a college course in the subject. He comes to learn that most suckers are addicts they are addicted to losing. They feel comfortable only when they are losing. Of course, the sucker would never admit that he’s a loser either to you or to himself. Even though he may not know, he wants to give you, his money. But also, he wants to be entertained. It's as if he's buying a ticket to a magic show. He thinks that what he wants is to figure out how the magician does his tricks, but in reality, he wants to be fooled. Being fooled and not being able to figure out how it’s done, is what gets him excited. It gets his juices flowing, which is what he really wants. This kind of excitement is like a drug to him. The price of the ticket for the exciting entertainment he receives that price is what he pays the magician or the hustler who feeds his addiction.

In his day, Joey was known to pass a few counterfeit bills. Lord knows where he got them! Other hustlers would complain about being stiffed by Joey, but for some reason he always paid me off in real money. Freddie the Beard, who used to hustle at Bensinger's, went nuts watching Joey and I play One-Pocket, "How come Joey keeps playing with you? You got him hypnotized or something? With everybody else he's fighting and arguing. He's stealing balls and passing out bum paper." Poor Joey. Eventually he got three-to-five for counterfeiting. Soon after he got out of jail, he died of cancer at age thirty-four.

To be continued:

 

[mr3cushion]

Part 2

One of the best showman hustlers who worked his trade around Bensinger’s and other Chicago pool halls for many years was a guy named Lee Kaplacki. But everybody called him “Reno”. Reno usually showed up in the pool hall dressed like a house painter. He'd have a painter’s cap and overalls with white splotches all over them. Occasionally he changed up a little and came as a garage mechanic with greasy shirt and oil under his fingernails. If he really got bored with those roles he would sometimes put on a swishy gay act with tight pants and the whole works, which really got a place like Bensinger's into an uproar. But that was Reno. If all this whacky stuff didn't lure the marks, he would suck them in with crazy game props he dreamed up.

He'd offer to play Nine Ball straight up using the butt of his cue, even a broomstick or a mop handle for a cue. He'd play one handed or with only one leg on the floor. He'd play without ever chalking his cue or taking shots with his eyes closed. He'd also offer you a variety of spots: he'd play One Pocket where he could shoot only at one pocket but give you all the other five to shoot at. He'd play Eight Ball spotting you all the balls. All you had to do to beat him was make the eight ball. He smoothed talked and spieled like a Hollywood actor, and the suckers along with the rest of us soaked it up. It was a great show.

Although I've already had my say about the movie "The Hustler”, I probably should add a few words about another showman hustler who was played by Jackie Gleason in that film. Of course I'm speaking of Minnesota Fats, who may have been the best talking and self-promoting pool player who ever lived. By any other standard he certainly was not one of the best players. As I am categorizing memorable players into either "rogues" or "Hall of Famers", Fats definitely belongs in the group of "rogues". In "The Hustler” Jackie Gleason plays a straight pool player, whereas the real-life Fats was a hustler who made his living playing games like Nine Ball, Bank Pool and One Pocket. The game of straight pool where you try to run as many balls as possible, even into the hundreds is not a game for hustlers. It is too slow. One game can go on for hours!

Hustlers want to play quick turnover games like One Pocket, which maximize betting opportunities and profit in the shortest possible time. Another problem with straight pool is that in trying to pocket many balls in a row you are forced to show your true speed. A hustler never wants to show his real ability unless there's no other choice. After the movie came out in 1961 Fats claimed that he was the model for the Gleason character. WaIter Tevis, the author of the "The Hustler”, claimed to his dying day that RudoIf Wanderone sometimes known as "New York Fats" or "Chicago Fats" or just plain "Fats" for an obvious reason was not the model for the character he called "Minnesota Fats". But something as unimportant as the truth never bothered Rudy Wanderone. Fats had never even been to Minnesota, but he borrowed the moniker and claimed the story was about him. From this ruse he went on to make a million bucks appearing on TV shows, selling books about pool and peddling T-shirts featuring his big fat face. What a promoter!

Fats showed up now and then at Bensinger’s in the 60’s when I was still an up and comer. Of course I challenged him to play me, but he always laughed me off and refused. That was wise of him, because even then there was no way he could have beaten me at any type of pool game. Eddie Miller, the manager at Bensinger’s, used to cringe whenever Fats showed up because everybody would stop playing and crowd around him, He was like Muhammad AM, full of brag and funny stories, and Occasionally Eddie would actually run Fats out of the joint. “Get outta here, Fats! I’m running’ a business here, not a god-damned stage show!” As a showman, Fats was good for the pool hall business because he got himself on TV and helped promote the game.

But Willie Mosconi, who was probably the greatest straight pool player who ever lived, thought otherwise. He disliked Fats because the guy was "nothing but a hustler''. Willie was an elegant gentleman who played the game as a sport, in tournaments and exhibitions. He figured that lowlifes like Fats showed people only the sleazy side of pool and thus hurt the image of a beautiful and challenging competition. I won't take sides in this dispute, except to say that everybody has to make a living as best he can. Of course, a few of the "rogues" like Ray Maples, Reno and Fats make for entertaining stories, but if you're a hustler you also run into some pretty rough characters, It's the nature of the business. You have to learn how to take care of yourself around such people.

I've had guys who lost money pull guns on me to get their dough back or threaten to blow me away if I ever tried to hustle them again. I've had sore losers come after me with broken bottles and knives and cue sticks. As for myself, I learned very early that I was not a fighter or a violent person. The only time I might get belligerent is if I drank too much, so I had to be careful not to drink on the job. Luckily, I was friendly with some excellent street fighters, who over the years helped me out of quite a few scrapes.

 

[mr3cushion]

Part 3


On the North Side of Chicago some of my best friends belonged to an immigrant family from Ireland. In the 1950s the newspapers started calling them "The Fighting O'Shea’s" because they were all great amateur boxers. Tom O'Shea later became a great boxing coach around Chicago. He's even trained some top Olympic fighters. His brothers were all tough guys who, if you were their friend, would do anything for you including cover your back in a scrap. Mike O'Shea saved my bacon many a time. He was the type of guy who would fight at the drop of a hat. I swear he was a cat with nine lives. Mikes favorite saying was, “Nobody can spot me the first punch.” He knocked one guy out so hard that the guy started snoring. Once he got shot in the head at point blank range. He lived the rest of his life with a bullet in his head. Another time he was in a terrible car accident, which killed several people, and it was a miracle that he survived.

One night I was with Mike hustling in a motorcycle gang bar, and I'd had a few too many. Before long I started trading a few wise cracks with some leather jacket types. First thing you know they're ready to jump us, and Mike grabs the butt of a cue with the idea of braining a couple of them before they nail us. Two of us against eight of them and I've never had a fight in my life! Which is pretty amazing considering the company I kept. Luckily, the gang leader walks into the bar. ’What the hell is going on here?" he asks nobody in particular. Mike thinks fast. “My buddy’s drunk and doesn’t know what the hell he's saying! He's a good kid, but when he gets drunk, he sort of loses his mind. He probably should be in a hospital! He's got these pills, but when he gets drunk, he forgets to take his pills!" For a minute everybody in the joint is taken aback by this whole story, so Mike jumps right back in, "My buddy wants to offer everybody a drink. If you want, we can still play a little pool for drinks only." Later on, as we're walking out of the bar the gang leader pulls us aside. "You're a couple of lucky sons of bitches that I came in when I did." I agreed with him, and I never went back to that bar again.

Mike's brother Rory O'Shea was a professional boxer and a good one. He fought in Angelo Dundee's stable when Angelo had Muhammad Ali. Rory was also a good pool hustler and the best street fighter I ever saw. He knew Judo wrestling and all kinds of below the belt techniques as well as straight boxing. Any time I went out around Chicago or on the road with a fellow hustler named Peoria Joe. Peoria Joe was one of the roughest, craziest guys around. He was a little bit on the sadistic side in that he liked to get into fights and 1819 instigate fights.

One night the three of us are drinking together at a North Side bar. Peoria Joe spies a guy named Cotton McGuire, who just happens to be one of the toughest street fighters in Chicago. Well, it's not long before Peoria Joe is trying to egg on Cotton into a money street fight out back in the alley with Rory O'Shea. Now Cotton McGuire is about 6’3" and weights maybe 234. He's got shoulders on him like an NFL linebacker and a neck like a tree trunk. He's in great shape and he's mean. Rory goes maybe 150 pounds if you put him on the scale right after dinner. To look at him, you figure he’s a sweet Irish lad who'd be more ready to sing "Danny Boy" to a roomful of widows than start anything with his fists. But Peoria Joe knew his man. Once the money is down, Gorge Walker says take them out back and let them loose. Rory lights into Cotton McGuire with a quick flurry of lefts, rights, kicks, chops and elbows. Cotton can hardly see Rory let alone hit him, and before long the big guy is down flat on his back. You had to see it to believe it.

Everybody was afraid of the O'Shea’s, so maybe I was able to get by with a little bit more lip than the next guy since they knew I had some muscle to back me up. Either you know how to fight, or you'd better know some people who do. Or maybe you just try to keep your big mouth shut. I was good at that when I was sober. So as time went on, I learned to stay sober as much as possible. I knew a lot of tough people. Chuck Maddox Chucky Worman, who was the toughest guy in Chicago.

Another hazard of the pool hustling trade in Chicago was being a white man. Once Bensinger's closed in the 1970s some of the best local action was in the black belt on the South and West Sides, or down in Hammond, Indiana just over the state line. This was just a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King when blacks were still rioting in the streets. It was not the best time for a white guy to be wandering around in those neighborhoods, especially not with a roll of bills in his pocket. I once had a narrow escape from some tough hombres South Side gangsters who had backed their man, the great Bugs Rucker, against me in a series of One Pocket games at Bensinger's. It was a great match, but I managed to beat Bugs out of eighteen grand by playing my usual patient position game against his dazzling Power game.

Bugs took the loss in stride, but some of his backers and side-bettors were plenty mad. They couldn't believe that I beat Bugs on the square, so they followed me and Bugs around for two days in the snow in two different cars. And if we would have hooked up and split the money, we were both two dead ducks. l heard this later from them that they were waiting for me to hook up secretly with Bugs in order to split the take. If I had so much as invited Bugs for a cup of coffee, they were ready to kill both of us!

Luckily, I have always gotten along well with black folks. Black hustlers respected me for my ability on the table, and I always respected them for theirs. I was always sympathetic to the cause of civil liberties for blacks. I knew what it was like to be looked down on for the way you talked or the poverty you had grown up with. But there were times when black friends would warn me to stay away from certain areas for my own good. Since I did not have any kind of death wish, I usually took their advice.

 

[bbb]

^^^^^

 

[ShootingArts]

Looks like you are off and running!

Good Luck!

Hu

 

[maha]

is he currently writing this bill. or is it done. and i guess he has a ghost writer as he hardly can write it himself if you know what i mean.

it can be an interesting book if he goes away from just him to more of the things he has seen. good luck to your friend on this.