They call themselves things like New York Fats, Meanie Beanie from Baltimore, Cornbread Red, the Eagle, the Hawk, Bay Eye, Tugboat Whaley, Cowboy Weston, Wimpy, Mexican Eddie, Bignose Roberts and Rotation Slim. They hate to give out their real names, and they loathe publicity. They live in a subterranean world of stealth and anonymity, shadows and half-tones, tricks and deceptions. They are pool hustlers, and the aim of their calling, as one of them put it recently, is "to lift people up by their pockets."
It is fundamental in the pool-hustling trade to go to the men's room when somebody pulls out a camera. "If people find out my name and what I look like," says a hustler, "I won't be able to get no more action." The hustler usually poses as just another amateur player doing the best he can. He stooges from one town to another, hustling the locals into games for larger and larger stakes, then blows town fast as soon as he has made his killing, not to return until his name and his face and his stroke are forgotten and the whole routine can be repeated, maybe three or four years later, with a new set of suckers.
