By George Fels
[Reprinted from October 2005]
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same, … you’ll be a Man, my son,” wrote Rudyard Kipling, in the most celebrated of all his doggerel. That notable ethic did not exist in the world of pool hustling as I found it. Even I am not old enough to have been around for hustling’s heyday, but I did observe the tail end of that era. And the room where I learned to play was basically a friendly, neighborhood place where everybody knew everybody, and $2 was high-rolling action. Now pool and billiards, by their very nature, preclude most forms of open cheating. The most dastardly deed I ever saw perpetrated was an act genteelly known as “visiting the wire.” Straight pool was the most popular game by far, with the score kept on overhead beaded wires; players kept the score for each individual rack separate from their game total. To cheat, all they had to do was add points to their rack score from the outside and slide the same number of points over to their game score on the inside. (Thus, for a run of, say, five balls, the grifter would slide 10 points over to his rack score, and move five from that total to his game score.) But I was still not prepared for the quality of men the game attracted elsewhere, nor the lengths to which they would go to achieve victory.
The last downtown location of the fabled room Bensinger’s was roughly equidistant from all three of Chicago’s dismal Skid Row areas, no more than a mile from any one. It was fascinating to discover that men could actually eke out an existence playing a kid’s game. But the room was almost always full of bums, some of whom played and some of whom simply needed a roof over their heads, indoor plumbing for physiological relief, or both. There were plenty of suckers, too, and the playing variety of bums preyed on these, typically for 25 cents on the 5 ball and half a buck on the 9. Frequently, the difference between winning and losing equaled the difference between a night in a flophouse bed and a seat in an all-night movie. I took on one of those jaspers after I had been playing pool maybe six months, just to see how I’d do. At $1.75 ahead, he stammered, “I gotta go,” and sprinted for the door with a quickness that would have done Jesse Owens proud. But then, I had already half-made his day.
Elsewhere in that room, action was steady by dreary. For all its reputation, Bensinger’s generated virtually no high-stakes gambling. I saw spectators standing six-deep to watch a $5 one-pocket game. Because the stakes were low, there was little need for backers or stakehorses; players either stuffed the last-game stakes into a pocket liner, or into a link of chain that supported the table lights.
There was little that scufflers of that day wouldn’t do to avoid the “L” word. One of the most coveted customers at Bensinger’s back then was a straight pool sucker from South Bend, Ind., whom everyone called Fat Avery. His habits were well known: He would only make the 90-mile trek on weekends and would play nothing but 100 or 125 points of 14.1. He would bet $30 or $40, a damn good wager back then, and while he could run two or three racks when things were really going right, he knew enough not to take on the best in the house. That left perhaps half a dozen shortstops. That long a game frequently produces mini-slumps and streaks, and while all the hustlers played well enough to take Avery straight up, most of them were unwilling to trust the slumps. So, if the game was tight, the hustler would simply summon a “runner” — much like “Preacher” in “The Hustler” — to run an errand. But instead of fried-egg sandwich and J.T.S. Brown bourbon, the runners were always instructed to buy as many as a dozen White Castle hamburgers. Fat Avery would pop those ghastly sliders as though they were M&Ms … and then he’d wonder why he couldn’t make a ball. It never occurred to Avery that the blood supply needed to aid his digestive process wasn’t reaching his alleged brain. He virtually never won, although on some nights he waddled sadly back to the train station slightly better fed than on others.
Roughly six miles north of Chicago’s downtown area stood another once-fine room called Wilson-Sheridan Recreation. At one time, the establishment housed over 50 bowling lanes and 40-plus. But in its latter days, it turned nasty just as its neighborhood was doing, most of the culprits being Appalachian whites. The late Alton “Baby Face” Whitlow was beaten to a pulp in that room. But there was still action available, even at the risk of a bloodbath, and a few hardy hustlers were willing to take the chance. One was the frightful degenerate who called himself Detroit Whitey, who should have been right at home in that soulless place. One day Whitey took on a countrified opponent by the oxymoronic name of Sterling Ward. There was nothing sterling about the man whatsoever, except that he could play and would bet high. Whitey overmatched himself, and Sterling busted him flat. “Well, at least lend me $10 so I can get drunk,” Whitey pleaded, and was accommodated. He returned with the cheapest hooch he could possibly find and proceeded to let Sterling drink most of it. Then he made another game with Sterling, using his healthy change from the $10 as a stake. Whitey won all his money back. Then he won all of Sterling’s too.
“Well, at least give me back the $10 I lent ya,” Sterling bawled, remarkably remembering the event in the first place.
“Nah, [bleep] ya,” Whitey allowed. “I owe ya.”
It’s a shame Kipling did not know that way of life. Maybe he could have authored some real poetry if he had.
