Chapter 5: Trust and the Nature of Home

For the next year I drifted around the South playing pool. In some ways, life was good. I stuck to small towns and cheap motels. Life was easier in one respect: whenever I had enough money that it wouldn’t all fit in my wallet, I’d take out half and send it back to Mrs. Wertheimer, and she’d deposit into my account. I was still living on cash, but not having the shoebox in the trunk meant I wasn’t always worried about getting jumped and fretting about where the Valiant was parked. It was nice. I figured if I did get robbed, I’d just hand over the money and write myself a check at the nearest bank.

Having a checkbook was strange. They’d given it to me when I’d opened my accounts at First National, but I still didn’t write any checks. I’d take the checkbook out of the glove compartment and look at it every now and then and wonder what I’d ever need it for. All I spent money on was food, motels, and gas. Once a week or so I’d find a Laundromat. Every few months something would get so ragged I’d throw it away and replace it, or my boots would need new soles, or I’d get a hole in my jeans. Nothing cost much, and I was playing pool most days, so I was sending money to Mrs. W every week or two. She didn’t like me sending cash through the mail, and I tried to use Western Union whenever I could find one, but that wasn’t often. In the seventies there wasn’t a Western Union office in Zebulon, but there was a post office.

I began to lose my sense that the laws of the universe were crumbling at the edges, but that may have been because I wasn’t playing alone too much, and because I was just getting accustomed to the increased frequency of highly improbable events. The first time a mule talks to you, you’re surprised. The tenth time a mule talks to you, you criticize his grammar. Plus, I was alone, and I was heading for smaller and smaller towns all the time. When you’re alone most of the time, you can lose your ability to sense that what you’re thinking is strange. Nobody’s there to bring you back to the middle.

There was no intent behind my move towards smaller and smaller towns, but that was the pattern, and as the towns got smaller, I went from pool halls to bowling alleys to bars. There are pool halls in Chattanooga and Charleston, there are bowling alleys in Chapel Hill, there’s a bar in Randolph. But in 1972 and 1973, pretty much every bar at every crossroads had a pool table in the back, and the boys who played there liked to drink beer and gamble.

Just so you know, walking into a pool hall is different than walking into a bar or a bowling alley. In a pool hall, you get your balls and pick a table and start playing by yourself. Sometimes the locals notice you, sometimes they don’t. As you settle into the realm of straight lines you might end up playing by yourself for an hour or two before you get approached about a game. On a slow day, you might not get a game at all, but you have that table. It allows for lots more shots than playing nine ball against a roofer from Anniston, so you have a lot of opportunities to notice when something happens that’s contrary to expectations. In a bar or a bowling alley, it’s everybody’s table. Anyone with fifty cents to drop in the slots owns just as much of the table as you do, and it’s rare to have it to yourself. When you move to smaller towns you have less solitude at the table. so you’re moving away from seeing any disturbances in the laws of physics that the universe may be trying to show you.

In that same period I wasn’t playing cards hardly at all. To play poker or gin for any kind of money you have to get invited to do so, and I never hung around anyplace long enough to make friends. Every now and then I’d bump into a game by accident, and they’d let me ante in semi-begrudgingly. I never won more than a few hundred dollars, but it was easier money than playing pool. Pool is work. Cards is waiting for a chance.

I wasn’t lonely, but I began to find the fringes of boredom, so I began to read books. For the whole time I’d been on the road, the only book I’d ever read was the Bible. The Gideons make sure that there’s a copy of it in every hotel room, and there’s a lot to read in there. Lots of crazy stuff no one would believe. Look up the story of Tamar at the gate sometime. There’s awful stuff you’d never hear from a pulpit, too. After a year or so on the road, though, I had the Bible damned near memorized and it just wasn’t interesting any more. So I started buying books. I started by reading all of the stuff I should have read in high school English, then kept picking books from the literature section. Paperbacks only cost a dollar, and at first I threw them away as soon as I was finished, but then one day when I got finished with a book of Yeats’ poetry, I realized I didn’t want to throw it away. After that, there was a judgment every time I finished a book: keep, or toss? Moby Dick ? Keep. Complete works of Longfellow? Toss. I don’t drink, and once whoever I was playing got liquored up enough to be stupid, I had to leave, which often left a long evening in the hotel room, and for a pool player there’s not much to do in the morning except move on to the next town, so I ate up a lot of books. The trunk of the Valiant started filling up with them, which I found worrisome. One of the first things I’d read was Walden, and if you’ve read it you’ll remember how he resisted the temptation to accumulate possessions because they added to the amount of work he had to do. One day he found an interesting rock on one of his rambles and brought it home and set it on a shelf. He realized a little while later that as long as it was on his shelf he was going to have to dust it from time to time, so he threw it out the front door. That made such perfect sense to me that I’d never accumulated more than would fit in a small suitcase. I owned four pairs of pants, seven shirts, one pair of boots and one pair of running shoes, yet after a few months I was hauling around the literature section of Smith & Hardwick.

The following summer I called Mrs. W to tell her another envelope was on its way, and she told me it was time to move some money out of savings and into something else.

“Hey, Henry,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Near Wadley,” I said.

“Where’s Wadley?” she asked.

“Alabama.”

“Be more precise,” she said.

“Why, what’s up?”

“You’re going to be telling me you’re going to be sending some money and I don’t like you sending it in the mail. I got Western Union to give me a catalogue that lists where they have offices.”

“Ah. Wadley’s in east central Alabama. Near the Georgia border. Between Montgomery and Atlanta, maybe.”

“Are you near Fruithurst or Pinehurst?” she asked.

“Not what you’d call close. I gotta back up on 22 for Pinehurst, wander around to US 431 for Fruithurst. They’re both over an hour away.”

“How about Lagrange?”

“Yeah, sure. The Idle Hour is in Lagrange. Some pool halls, too,” I said.

“There’s a Western Union office in Lagrange. On Whitesville Road. Take the money on over there.”

I am bad about seeing patterns in myself, or understanding that I’ve come to conclusions about things. I seem to be able to come to important conclusions without having any realization that I’ve done so. I’m ignorant of my own thoughts, in a way, and this conversation with Mrs. Wertheimer is a good example. When you send cash through Western Union they really don’t wire money anywhere. Western Union is more like a bank. You just deposit money in one office, and then somebody else can come around and pick it up later at another. Once I’d handed money over to WU, anyone with a driver’s license in the name of Linda Wertheimer could pick it up. Anyway, the conclusion I’d clearly reached but that didn’t occur to me was that I trusted her. Which was odd. I’m not really a trusting soul. Nevertheless, I was sending Mrs. Wertheimer thousands of dollars every month, and the idea that she was anything but scrupulously honest with it just didn’t occur to me. The deal hadn’t started that way, of course—originally she was just going to open my bank statements and tell me what was going on when I called. As time went on I liked not having a tempting target for crime in my trunk, and so as soon as my wallet got fat, I’d sent it off to Mrs. W, without thinking. If you’d walked up to me at the phone booth outside Wadley and asked me who was the person in life I trusted most, I would have been stumped. I wouldn’t have come up with anyone. With me as with everyone else in the world, though, what people do shows much more about what they think than what they say.

“Okay,” I said. Like I said—without a thought. Trust doesn’t think.

“Now Henry, you need to come on home for a visit.”

“Home? I am home,” I answered.

“Wadley? Wadley’s not your home, Henry.”

“The road is my home, these days.” I said.

“Very romantic,” she said. “You went to high school in Chattanooga. That’s your home until you settle somewhere else.”

What if I never settle anywhere?” Just curious.

“Then Chattanooga will always be your home.”

“I could do worse. What do you need me for?”

“I don’t like you keeping all this money in passbook savings. I want you to put some of it in some stocks and bonds. I’ve talked to my stockbroker, and he says we have some paperwork to do that,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re not 21, and apparently under the law of New York, you have to be 21 to buy listed securities. My broker says that most people in this situation arrange for their parents to buy the securities and hold them in trust for the child until the child is 21.” She paused, and I could hear her striking her Zippo over the phone. “It appears to me that you are not close to your parents.”

“Appearances are not deceiving,” I said. “Why New York?”

“Because the exchanges where stocks are traded are in New York. Can you explain your family situation? I don’t get the sense that there’s been a rupture.”

“No rupture, but we just aren’t much of a family. Both my parents are military. Dad’s a Marine. Last I heard he was in Viet Nam. Top Sergeant. He doesn’t talk much about what he does, but as far as I understand it, he jumps out of helicopters and kills people with a knife. If you talked to him for a few minutes you’d decide you weren’t surprised that he does this for a living. Mom’s a lieutenant colonel in the Army. She supervises nurses and last I heard was in Germany. They were rarely at home when I was growing up. We’re just not close.”

“They weren’t mean to you, though?”

“No. There was nothing bad, there just wasn’t anything good, either. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not resentful. It’s not their fault, there’s not just a lot of warmth in them,” I said.

“How about siblings?”

“Two sisters. We were closer with each other than with our parents, but they’re several years older than I am and I don’t know how to get in touch with either of them.”

“Where are they?”

“One’s in California, the other was in graduate school at Yale last I heard. Some math deal,” I said.

“Henry, come on back home and we’ll set up some sort of way for me to actually manage all this money you’re sending. It’s getting upwards of $200,000 now, and it’s just not right to leave it sitting in a bank account.”

“All right. I’ll head back that way. I’ll get to Lagrange tonight, and hand over the money to Western Union tomorrow. I’ll start heading back to Tennessee after that. Since there’s no rush, I won’t hurry. While I’m on my way, you can think of how to solve my latest problem.”

“What’s that?” I could hear her lighting another cigarette.

“I’m accumulating property.”

“What kind of property?” she asked.

“Books.”

“What kind of books?”

“The kind I should have read in English class,” I said.

“Well, I’ll keep them or you,” she said, with a tone of voice that suggested “all you had to do was ask.” I tend to try to solve problems by myself. It just doesn’t occur to me to ask for help, no matter how easy it might be for someone else to assist.

The hourglass whispers to the lion’s roar. The clock tower chimes the gardens day and night—how many errors time has patience for, how wrong we are in being always right.

Once more, problem solved. I headed back towards Chattanooga.

Chapter 4: Chaos Theory and Kind Assistance from a Purveyor of Straight Lines

$80,000 is a lot of cash. Too much to be driving around in the back of the Valiant. To open a bank account I’d need an address, and I didn’t have one of those. Letting anyone in my family know I had any money was a bad idea. Their needs would no doubt turn out to be vast and my willingness to share would be minimal, this much I knew from experience. I’d never had a girlfriend and wasn’t likely to find one. It’s not in my nature, and anyway I haven’t noticed that girls are much interested in me. There would be many who would be interested in $80,000, I knew, and would lose interest once it was gone. My real problem is that I needed a bank account and had no way of maintaining one. Once I opened a bank account, I’d have to come by every now and then and check the statements to make sure nobody was stealing it from me. I didn't even have an address. I’d gone to high school in Chattanooga, so decided to head back for there. Maybe I’d bump into somebody, or think of something.

I quit my job at the Russo yard and drifted back up north, looking for pool halls and bowling alleys, picking up a couple hundred dollars every day. With all that cash in the trunk, though, I didn’t stay more than a day in any town I came to and always moved an hour down the road before renting a room for the night. As the consequences of getting jumped by a hot-headed bunch of rednecks went up, I found myself becoming positively cautious. Moving that fast it didn’t take me but five or six days to get to Chattanooga, a characteristic I'd never noticed in myself before. Back in Chattanooga, I took a room at this old Victorian house I’d stayed in from time to time while I was in high school. It was a combination apartment house and room-for-rent place that some prior owner had painted with Army surplus olive drab paint that had peeled away in places to reveal crumbling white underneath. At any given minute three quarters of the residents were stoned and the rest were out stealing something so they could join the three quarters. It was referred to by residents and narcotics officers alike as the Green Ghetto. They had a vacancy, so I took a furnished room. My room was dusty and smelled funny and had a radiator whose sole function seemed to be to make loud clanging noises right about the time I was ready to go to sleep, but the heat was more reliable than in the Weedowee Motor Hotel in Wadley.

After I got my stuff, but not my money, moved into the room, I went down to First National Bank downtown on Market to ask what I’d need to open an account. All I needed was a driver’s license, an address, and a Social Security number. One additional obstacle: if the address didn’t match the one on my driver’s license, the bank wanted to see a lease or a utility bill addressed to me at that location. The Green Ghetto wasn’t a lease kind of place.

So. I was going to have to find, or make, a friend, a problem since I don’t have a lot of friends, and don’t tend to keep the ones I make for very long. It hadn’t been long since I’d graduated high school, but try as I might I couldn’t think of a single person I thought liked me enough to let me use his or her address for this, no one I’d trust with anything important.

I went to a bar to think about it. There’s not much to do in Chattanooga at 3:30 in the afternoon if you’re not a student and don’t have a job, and if you’re sitting around in a bar in the afternoon never asks questions of you. The only other place in the universe of which the same can be said is a public library, but for some reason I didn’t think of the library, a beautiful brick building at the corner of the university campus. So instead I went to a dive bar over in a semi-industrial part of town called the Frosty Mug. In 1972 the drinking age in Tennessee was eighteen, which meant pretty much that if you could see over the counter you could buy a drink. I first realized this when I was fifteen at the Pizza Hut on Hixson Pike and ordered a pizza and a root beer for myself and a girl named Sandy but received a pizza and real beers instead. Sandy, my age, had been there before and wasn’t surprised, and the fact that I was thrilled by this in an uncool way may have been the reason that Sandi and I never again connected in any meaningful way.

The Frosty Mug had a pool table when I was in high school. I’d played there a little when I was figuring out that I didn’t like beer but still could see a straight line, but nobody would play me for money. I can’t lose intentionally. When I see the line, I have to shoot it, and so I could beat everybody who picked up a cue in the Frosty Mug from my sophomore year on. I played lots of games, but nobody would bet any money on it. There were a few semi-good players who liked to get me up to try to learn how to be better, but nobody would bet any money on a game like that. Fifty cents maybe. And they got irritated with me if I wouldn't yield the table to them, buecause everyone else there would bet serious money against each other, just not against me. But the Frosty Mug was kind of like a refuge. I’d spent lots of time there and nothing bad had ever happened to me.

So I drove over and walked in. And there at the bar was my high school geometry teacher. Se was an old lady of maybe seventy years with a dark red up-do. She was wearing shorts and a tank top, watching a basketball game.

“Ms. Wertheimer?” I asked. She waited until Walton’s eighty foot jumper swished to look up, but her face brightened as soon as she saw me.

“Well, hello, Henry,” she said.

“Imagine my surprise,” I said. “May I join you?”

“Sure,” she said. “What are you drinking?”

“Just water,” I said. “The bartender here hates me.”

“Is this a religious thing?” she asked, puzzled. She had figured me for a particular kind of kid, and I was something else, so she was sifting through her teacher’s view of me to determine what she’d missed.”

“No ma’am, I tried whiskey once, and decided I’d best leave it alone.”

“Didn’t like it?”

“Oh, gack, no. I loved it. I loved everything about it. I loved the warm burn as it rolls down your gullet. I liked the pleasant toasty feeling after you’ve been drinking a while. I didn’t mind losing my sense of balance. I didn’t mind slurring my speech or knowing I couldn’t drive. I liked it that I thought things were funny that nobody else thought were funny.”

“You drank too much if all that was going on.”

“Maybe so, but I didn’t really even mind when I felt bad the next day. I enjoyed the whole experience start to finish,” I said.

“So why don’t you drink?” she asked. She put out one Benson & Hedges and lit up another with a full-sized Zippo with a Gates Corp. logo on the side. In the seventies Gates made tires.

“I hear it’s addictive,” I said.

“Not for everybody.”

“I liked that toasty feeling a lot, and I have always aspired to a line of work that requires steady hands.”

“What’s that?”

“Playing pool for money.” She frowned at that and thought for a minute.
"
“I heard a story about Stonewall Jackson once," she daid. "I think it was in one of Shelby Foote’s books. Somebody asked him if he drank. He said he’d tried it once, and never again. They asked if he didn’t like the taste, and he answered ‘No, I liked the taste very much.’ Sort of the same thing you’re saying. Of course, he was crazy. Brilliant people often are.”

“How about geniuses?” I asked.

“Almost never,” she said. “So what are you up to? Why aren’t you in class today?”

“I’m not in school,”

She reacted with a hurt look. “Henry, you have a fine mind. You’re one of the best Algebra II students I ever taught. You seemed to understand trigonometry and geometry like you’d been taught them before. You did your algebra homework while I was calling roll, and you were always right. You may be my best pupil ever. Why not develop that?”

“I do like straight lines,” I said. “But wait. We’re glossing over the larger issue. What are you doing at the Frosty Mug on a Thursday afternoon?”

“I love this place,” she said. “My husband and I used to come here when we were first married.

“When was that?”

“1920’s,” she answered, and smiled. “A long time ago.”

“The Frosty Mug has been here since the 1920’s?”

“At least. It was here when I got here, and I don’t know how long it had been here at that point. Anyway, we used to come in and get a beer when it was a speakeasy. Although ‘speakeasy’ doesn’t really do it justice. ‘Speakveryveryeasy’ might be closer. No secret words or introductions needed. Things were different in those days, and whoever owned it paid something or another to a cop and a judge and nobody ever seemed to notice that there was a bar in Chattanooga during Prohibition. Lots of them, actually, but we came here.”

“You may be surprised to learn that I’ve been in this bar before, and I’ve never seen you here before.”

“While I was teaching I stopped coming in because I didn’t want to run into my students. Then, it was embarrassing. The Frosty Mug has always served the under aged, so I knew if I came in here I might meet one of my students. As you see, it has happened, and it has happened with some frequency since I started coming in here again. Good way to keep up with relatively recent former students.”

“You’ve retired?” I asked. I had no idea.

“Yeah. Your class was the last one. I kind of just got fed up.” She looked at her empty shot glass and took a sip of her beer. The jukebox started up “Brown Sugar” and Walton swished another jumper. “Do you remember Ed Bork?” she asked, after a pause.

“Sure.”

“Did you know he thinks he’s a witch?” she asked.

“Warlock. Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Ed eats a lot of acid.”

“What?”

“He does drugs.” She nodded, as though this made sense.

“He had to have Geometry and Algebra to graduate and he wouldn’t study. So he had a barely passing grade, a D minus minus, going into the last test of the year, so he had to pass the final to graduate.” She looked up to watch the basketball game for a few seconds. “He showed up for the final, but left early, so I knew something was up. When I got to his test, he hadn’t even tried to answer any of the questions, he just wrote his name at the top and then wrote in something like ‘I have cast a spell that will give you a fatal heart attack before the grade from this test is counted so I will pass and your attempts to fail me will come to naught,’ or some such happy horseshit. I put him down for not just an F, but for a zero, so of course he didn’t pass and he shouldn’t have been eligible to graduate.” She shook her head and lit another cigarette. I had never heard Ms. Wertheimer swear before. “Two days later I got a call from the assistant principal saying he was over-riding me and letting Ed pass. I told him about the hex story and not even trying to answer the questions, and our noble assistant principal, who really is a nice man, and an ordained AME preacher, if you can believe it, said he knew Ed was crazy, but that Ed wasn’t pursuing any higher education goals and that having him around for another year would only disrupt the school further, so he thought graduating him was the best for all concerned.”

“I’m sorry it happened that way, but Mr. Cates has a point. Ed’s a pretty whacked-out guy,” I said.

“I didn’t specify which assistant principal I was referring to,” she said.

“Yeah, I know, but Cates was my home room teacher freshman and junior years, and I can’t imagine that Mr. Brewster was an AME pastor. I know Cates is. And unless there’s another assistant principal I don’t know about, you’re talking about Cates.”

“My point is that I am not confirming what you’re saying,” she said, watching the basketball game.

“Gotcha. And I can see why that might be discouraging to a teacher.”

“It was immensely discouraging, and I decided to retire. I’ve been eligible to retire for years, but just never did. I stopped teaching when my first son was born, and then didn’t take it back up until my husband died, but I liked it. I didn’t need to do it for the money, I just liked it. But for some reason, getting hexed by w boy who thinks he’s a witch, then watching him get passed despite not making even a token effort to pass the test just kind of changed things for me. I just don’t need that kind of crap. And now, since I don’t teach, I can come to the Frosty Mug and watch basketball and have a drink.”

“I had no idea you were a basketball fan,” I said.

“Oh, God, yes. Every shot from the field cuts a perfect conic section on its way to the hoop. Geometry and gravity in action. Every bounce pass shows angle of incidence and angle of reflection. All sports are like that. Aaron hits one out, it arcs a perfect parabola on its way to the bleachers.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Curves. I play pool. The lines are mostly straight.”

“Mostly?” she asked. She was a perceptive woman.

“Maybe always,” I said. “I’ve been noticing something odd, but people who should know tell me it’s all in my head.”

“What have you been noticing?”

“Well, sometimes when I do exactly the same thing a hundred times, once or twice I’ll get a variant result. Not always, but it’s pretty consistent at one or two percent.”

She thought for a minute. “I don’t know. There’s a new field of study in math that’s getting lots of talk in the journals, called chaos theory.”

“Chaos?”

“Yeah, they’re trying to explain and quantify things that I’m not sure can be explained. How turbulence works, for example. We have these elegant mathematical models that seem to describe the amount of lift created by air flowing across the top of an airfoil, but to explain what happens to the little curlicues of air after they’ve flowed over the airfoil, nobody understands. Mathematicians and engineers can’t describe it, and pilots just learn to figure out where wingtip vortices are likely to be and avoid them.”

“I don’t understand. All I know is straight lines.”

When you get down to it, Geometry, Newtonian physics, and algebra only describe a tiny fraction of what you see in the world. Physics can tell you about the moment of s pendulum, although from what I’m reading now the calculations are only approximately accurate because of some strange compensating errors, but you poke your finger into the path of that pendulum and disturb that regular arc and its path jitters and sways and changes in a way that nobody can predict, much less calculate or describe mathematically. There’s a group of mathematicians who are trying to figure out how to crate mathematical models for that kind of turbulent, chaotic condition.”

“Based on probability?”

“No, that’s the interesting thing. Based on fractals.” She lit another cigarette.

“What’s a fractal?”

“A fractal is an object, or an object-like thing thing that resembles itself at all levels. You know how if you slice a nautilus shell in half longitudinally it shows the same pattern over and over, down to the tiniest visible detail?” I nodded. “That’s a fractal pattern, but they also repeat in more complicated ways, and in more dimensions. Anyway, if you were to look at a fractal pattern through a microscope you’d see the same pattern as if you looked at it through a telescope.”

“Hmmm,” I said. I couldn’t remember what we were talking about.

“See when Bill Walton shoots a shot, it’s all geometry. A loose sphere moving through air will experience no turbulence to speak of and no chaotic influences come to bear. Even if somebody goaltends, the loose sphere responds to that pressure by immediately cutting another conic arc. If the ball were suspended from a string, like a pendulum, goaltending, slapping the ball in mid-arc, would have a much more chaotic effect. The players wouldn’t know what to expect. They’d stand back and watch until the ball settled down. And I’m thinking that spheres that respond only to two forces, such as momentum and gravity, like in basketball, behave differently than spheres that have additional constraints, like pendulums and pool balls. Once you have that third force, the potential for chaos is there.”

“What’s the third force in pool?” I asked.

“The table,” she said. “I’m wondering if the table doesn’t have the same effect, in a slightly different way, as the string does to a pendulum. Interrupt the normal swinging, and it bounces all over the place in an apparently chaotic way. I’ll have to think about this. It might account for the aberrant responses you’re noticing.”

I didn’t think so, but didn’t understand the math, and knew it.

“Anyway, that’s not what we need to talk about,” she said. “Why in the world aren’t you in college? You have a fine mind. One of my favorite pupils in the last fifteen years. Why aren’t you going on?”

“I just got tired of school. Plus, I really didn’t have the money. So I decided to go with what I was good at.”

“And what is that?” she asked.

“Shooting pool. Playing cards.”

“Henry, that’s never going to make the kind of money you could if you get a college degree.”

“I don’t know. I’ve been doing okay for the last few months.”

“Henry,” she said, “what seems like good money now may not actually be enough to live on. How much are you making?”

“Since graduation, maybe ninety or ninety-five thousand dollars, if you add it all up.”

“What? You’re shittin’ me!” she said.

“No, ma’am. Really.”

“How in the hell?” she asked

“Well, most of it in a poker game in New Orleans a few weeks ago. The rest of it playing pool.”

“What are you doing with it?”

“Ma’am?”

“What are you investing in?”

“Well, what I do with my winnings is something I don’t usually discuss in bars.”

Eventually she got it out of me that the money was hidden in a secret location and that I was having trouble getting a bank account established because I didn’t have an address. She volunteered to let me use her address as my home address, and would keep tabs on my bank accounts without having any kind of access to them. I could call any time and she’d let me know what the balances were. So the next day I went down to the Highway Patrol office in Tiftonia and got me a new driver’s license showing Ms. Wertheimer’s address as mine. This was easy in Tennessee in 1972. A Tennessee driver’s license was a green piece of heavy stock paper folded in the middle with no picture. They printed it up on the spot. I then took my new driver’s license and about twenty thousand dollars in cash, a good shoebox full, and Mrs. W and I went to the downtown branch of the First National Bank and opened an account. They weren’t used to handling big wads of cash and we had to wait while they counted it.

“$21,220,” said the clerk, about an hour later, after they’d counted it.” The bank officer who had just opened the account looked at me somewhat confused.

“Where’d you come up with this kind of money?” he asked.

“I’m a gambler,” I said.

“I thought you said it was more than this,” said Mrs. W, fishing in her purse for a cigarette. You could smoke in banks back then.

“Yeah, I do.” The rest was still in the trunk of the Valiant, parked just off of Market Street. “Look, I’ve got a little more cash. Can I bring it in right now?”

“Well, yes, feel free,” the officer said.

“Be right back,” I said.

“Why don’t we do that tomorrow?” said Mrs. Wertheimer.

“Now’s better. He’s got most of it, anyway.” She rolled her eyes slightly at the nuisance, but resolved herself to the chore and stood up.”

“Why can’t we do this tomorrow?” she said. “Let’s go have a beer.”

“I have a lot of money to deposit. If I tell him I’m coming back tomorrow to deposit it, he might have some friends who know what I look like wait for me and waylay me on the way. He doesn’t look like that kind of guy, but you never know.” She wasn’t happy, but then she went along. Then, when we got to the car and I pulled out my box of money, her eyes got big. “No shit,” was all she said.

The people at the bank were worried about me. This was before the times when you had to report large cash transactions to the IRS, but counting it all was a problem, and took a while.

Turned out I had a little over $115,000 in the bank, at the end of a long day. Sorry for the imprecision on amounts. I was always superstitious about counting it.

“A gambler, huh?” asked the bank officer, while they were counting my bills.

“Yep.”

“At what?”

“Pool and cards.”

“Want to play cards with my poker crew on Saturday?” he asked. People are like that. They want to be taken by a pro. They want the thrill of getting beaten by somebody who’s really good. I don’t get it, but I see it all the time.

“Thanks, but I need to be headed on down the road,” I said. “I’ll look you up next time I’m in Chattanooga and take you up on it.”

“You call me if I can do anything for you,” he said, handing me his card. Mark Whittington, Vice President of Depository Accounts.

“Actually,” I said, “give Mrs. Wertheimer here a card. She’s going to be watching my money while I’m out of town. Help her out, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay,” he said, and handed Mrs. W. a card. “Look, you guys, I’m not in this position a lot, but your deposit today exceeds the FDIC insurance amount. If this bank were to fail you’d lose everything over $100,000.”

“Is the bank about to fail?” Mrs. W asked.

“No, it’s fundamentally sound,” he said.

“I trust you,” I said. Sort of true, I guess. I trusted that there was no way he could really fuck me up, so there was no real need to think about it in any depth.

Time to move on. I bought Mrs. W a drink and headed back the Green Ghetto. I packed up to be ready to leave first thing in the morning.

Problems solved.

Question

How do you like this one, Linda?

Chapter 3: Life on the Mississippi

I don’t describe things much, anyway, but even if I did, describing 1972 New Orleans would involve lots of adjectives and adverbs. Eating and drinking were all anybody cared about. You could have a better meal at a sandwich joint in New Orleans that you could have in a four star restaurant in New York. Parasol’s, Acey’s Pool Hall, Central Grocery. Best meals I ever had. I was there to try to break into the poker business, though, and I didn’t have much success. Hank/Donnie said to look for the fathers of debutantes and deckhands. In my rusted-out ’60 Plymouth Valiant and welder’s clothes, I figured I wasn’t going to be meeting many debutantes, but I tried. I went over to Tulane and wandered around for a few days. It was an obviously ineffective strategy. Those Newcomb girls were so far out of my league that no amount of self-deception could persuade me I had a chance at meeting their fathers.

Finding a job as a deckhand was surprisingly easy. I went down to the wharves and hung out with longshoremen and stevedores for a few days and got directed to the Russo Towboat Company just uptown of Audubon Park and all those streets that weave around it.

Russo was a junkyard. Everything was rusted, like it was about to fall apart. I asked the first fat man I ran into who talk to about getting a job and he pointed to a shed made of corrugated metal built on top of telephone pole stilts. Home office.

When I got up the steps I was in the break room with a lot of guys smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee who looked at me waiting for me to say something.

“I wanna apply for a job,” I said, after a pause.”

“Got your ABS card?” the least threatening of them asked, after another pause.

ABS card? What the hell was that?

“No,” I said. Since I didn’t know what it was, it was unlikely I had one.

“Then you want to talk to Scotty. Two doors down that hall on the right. Name's on the door. Scottie Herrold.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I went down to Scottie's office and the door was open. He asked me a lot of questions that seemed to suggest that there was no reason in the world that anyone would want to hire me.

Let me, the narrator, interrupt the narrative here. I’m having a hard time with this. There are interesting stories from this month about Mr. Murphy, welding, being a deckhand, how cold it is on the Mississippi in January, and all kinds of other things, New Orleans is a book of its own. But I need to get to a story about a poker game, so all that local color is dispensed with forthwith. Fuck.

So I got assigned to a harbor tug called the Melissa. All the Russo tugs were named after female members of the Russo family. The crew who worked on the boats just accepted it that the boats they worked on had wimpy names. It was part of their lot for being poor. My assignment to the Melissa wasn’t a permanent berth; I was just assigned to her because one of the regular deckhands called in sick. Or stoned. Or sleepy. Or just too fucking indifferent to show up for work.

In the tug yard universe, there weren't many classifications. There was a stratum of management people whose jobs didn’t really matter, at least not to us. They could all tell us what to do, and we did whatever they said. Then there were these four or five highly skilled guys. They worked full time in the yard weren’t looking for berths on tugboats. Mr. Murphy was one, a machinist of the highest caliber, a man who could weld, lathe, and machine anything you needed out of metal. There were three or four mechanics who were geniuses who could fix anything, plus one who pissed the others off. Ivy was his name, a mechanic who had been trained at some earlier point in life as an electrician. He expected to be paid extra when he did electrical work, and the only time I saw the workers and management united was when they disagreed with Ivey on this point. There were a few other journeymen around the lot, but skill wasn’t always obvious. So the yard had six or seven guys who knew what they were doing, mechanics and machinists and carpenters, working at any one time. Those skilled people stay in the yard for the whole workweek. At the same time there are fifteen or twenty other guys working in the yard, helping the skilled guys and sometimes learning from them, or going with the mechanics to fix problems on tugboats. We were called yard dogs. Sometimes yard dogs stick with the machinist or the welder they’re working with. Sometimes they move on to be deckhands.

I got sent to the Melissa because one of the regular deckhands didn’t show up.

A tugboat has a crew of four: a captain, an engineer, and two deckhands. The captain steers, the engineer keeps the engine running, and the deckhands do everything else. Nobody played any kind of cards on tugboats.

On tugboats that stay in port, there are three types: three, five, or seven day boats. The number refers to the number of days they stay out. On a three day boat, you’re on the boat for three days, you’re at home for three. You get paid a shitload of money for the three days you’re working, but then you aren’t paid anything for the three days you’re off, so it evens out. Captains make the most, then engineers, then deckhands, who are pretty much riff-raff. Deckhands can grow up to be engineers or captains, but most don’t.

When I got to the Melissa she was tied up at the Desire Street Wharf and I had to climb down the ladder embedded in the cement wharf to the deck of the tug. I had a vinyl suitcase with a change of clothes and a toothbrush and climbing down that ladder suitcase in one hand was semi-daring. I’d never done this before so I wasn’t sure what to do when I got on board. I opened he cabin door and Warren was lying on the couch. Warren had a bad reputation on the Russo lot. A long-term deckhand, he was also a twice-convicted murderer, having done two life terms at Angola. Parole rules were different in 1972. He killed his second wife with a hammer.

“Next time, drop your suitcase and come on down,” said Warren.

“What?”

“Drop your suitcase from the top of the wharf. You have the right kind. Soft. Won’t nothing break in there if you drop it from the top of the ladder. Then you can use both hands to climb on down.”

“Thanks,” I said. There was an enormous blast from a horn overhead.

“That’s Cap’n Clark,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Cap’n Clark’s wondering why you didn’t come talk to him when you got on his boat,” Warren said.

“So he’s honking the horn at me?” I asked

“Yeah. You better go on up and see him.” Warren never took his eves off of the Sid Caesar Show. He never laughed, but he didn’t look way, either.

I worked my way up to the pilot deck. I opened the port and was about to introduce myself to Captain Clark, an extremely old and extremely portly man, but he barked at me first.

“What are you doing on my boat?” he demanded.

“Scottie Herrold told me to report here,” I said.

“Well, those portside boys can say what they want, but when you come on the water, you ask the Captain’s permission to come aboard. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wash off that window.”

“Yes, sir.” There was nothing in the pilot house to wash windows with, so I slid down the rails to the crew deck, where Warren the murderer was still watching Sid Caesar.

“Where are paper towels?” I asked.

“Did he vomit?” Warren asked.

“No. He just wants me to wash the windshield, I think.”

“There are paper towels over the sink and Windex in the cabinet next to the trashcan,” he said. I gathered them and headed back upstairs.

I cleaned his windshield, but Captain Clark had already decided he hated me. I was on the Melissa for the next several weeks, and he constantly delighted in waking me up and keeping me busy. He would make me chip paint when it was raining. The windshield was never clean enough. Even so, somehow I got permanently assigned to the Melissa.

I want to tell, but will forgo, to story of how Warren threatened to kill me because I got spaghetti sauce on his raincoat. It doesn’t move this narrative forward, but would nevertheless have been a good story.

One night I was tying up an Itoman container ship down at the anchorage. Warren didn’t like me any at all, but by that point he left me alone, and I was handling most of the deck duties by myself. I was trying to throw a lead line up onto Itoman’s deck to draw up a cable when a bag came sailing down from the ship’s deck and landed about fifteen feet to my left on the fantail. A black plastic garbage bag. I wasn’t sure what to do. My hands were full. Warren appeared out of nowhere and picked up the bag.

“What the fuck?” I asked, sensibly.

“Those Japanese, they throw their garbage on our boats,” he said.

I asked just a few questions and Warren mentioned that it would be very easy to elbow a fellow deckhand into that narrow space between the tug and the ship on a dark and rainy night.

Oh well.

Next time I was in port I asked Scottie Herrold if he could explain and he said “Son, if you can learn to look the other way, there are all sorts of things you might learn as a result.”

So on the night of November 17, 1972, I was chipping paint at the stern of the Melissa wondering where the poker games were going to show up and then Scottie showed up. This is odd. Scottie doesn’t show up on a boat, he stays at home office. The only other time he’d come out with us was that time we’d brought back a tug from Mobile, but I think he had a girlfriend of some sort in Mobile.

So weird as it was, we were tied up over in Algiers and I was chipping paint when Scottie shows up with another deckhand, Johnnie, who is a hell of a nice guy and the brother of Spike, whose wife gets him there each week for his seven day ride, dead drunk, but then he sobers up a little. Johnnie is this long tall skinny kid with long blond hair who can call a coin toss every time. I mean 100% of the time. I tested this hundreds of times over months. He never missed once. But he says it’s not anything supernatural, he can just see the coin as it lands. Really, 100%.

I digress. When Scottie shows up he has this purple ticket and he says “Captain Billy gave me this ticket to his private party and I knew you’d want to go, so we’re going to put Johnnie here onto this boat and you can go home.” Captain Billy was the owner of the company. I’d never met him and knew nothing about him except that he was rumored to be fucking his secretary.

What was going on was that something was going to be thrown over one rail or another that they didn’t want me to see, of course. They didn’t know me, and they did know Johnnie. Asking Scottie questions seems to have limited my career.

“I really want to work this shift. I’m poor,” I said.

“Not gonna happen,” said Scottie.

“I understand that, but you have to understand that I need to get paid,” I said.

“I’m sending you to a party,” he said.

“I need a paycheck,” I said.

“Okay. A full day,” he said.

“Fuck that. A full berth, through Tuesday. And the purple ticket.”

“Got it. Get out.”

I got.

The purple ticket got me into an Uptown party I didn’t really like. Lots of well-dressed boys and girls my age drinking more than they could hold were doing lots of stupid things.

“Hey,” said a beautiful young girl. “Why aren’t you partying?”

“Not used to this kind of party, I guess. I’m a country bumpkin.”

“Well, country bumpkin, what brought you to New Orleans?”

“Honestly, I was looking for a card game.”

“Ah, shit,” she said. “You look cute, but you’re just another one of those.”

“Of what?” I asked.

“Gamblers. Card game’s in the back. Third door on the right, I think. Tell my father I said ‘fuck you.’” She stormed off.

Third door on the right I could follow.

I found it. There were about six men in their fifties and sixties with cigarettes and drinks sitting around a table. They looked up when the door opened, then looked back down dismissively. They didn’t give a shit about me. There were stacks of bills everywhere, and there was no way to know how much money was on the table.

“Can I play?” I asked.

Prolonged silence.

Somebody eventually ooked up. They were supposed to be there to make sure their daughters weren’t getting into trouble. "Hundred dollar ante, boy. You got that?”

“Not on me, but close,” I said. They all looked up at that. I was a skinny kid with long curly hair and under dressed for a Rex Crewe party, and they all knew without asking that they didn’t know who my father was.

“How old are you?” a cigar smoking Scotch drinker asked.

“Over eighteen,” I said.

“I’ll be glad to take your money boy,” said a tall skinny man in a smudged seersucker suit and Panama hat. Maybe 85 years old.

The Valiant was right around the corner, so I pulled $4,000 out of the shoebox and went on back. They’d pulled up a chair for me and I sat in it. Everybody else had drinks. I was looking around to see if there was a glass of water when a card landed in front of me. I looked up, and everybody was looking at me.

“Ante,” said the old guy in the hat.

“I forked over a hundred bucks. The game was something peculiar I’ve never played since involving 5, 7 and 9 cards, and I can’t remember how it worked. I didn’t understand it at the time. Nevertheless, I seemed to be doing okay and I kept bumping the raises, and it turns out I won.

The thing is, I won $2,800 dollars on that hand. On a game I didn’t understand. $2,800 might be chump change for the bankers and lawyers at the table, but I wouldn’t make $2,800 out of a week of pool playing in Wadley or Anniston, and the bankers and lawyers were far less likely to try to jump me afterwards. I thought about getting up then and walking out, because you should always quit while you’re ahead, but I didn’t.

Let me interject here that that may be the only time I ever bet on a card game I did not understand. Never do that. Certainly not for serious money. I wanted in on a big stakes game, they dealt me a card trying to fuck with the new guy on a really strange game, and the cards liked me. But don’t ever count on that kind of crap. The laws of probability are laws in ways the laws of the State of Louisiana can’t dream of. The laws of probability are all math—there’s no legislature involved.

I’d like to have a good poker story, for you, but I don’t. Eventually the old men around the table realized I was doing well. After that they figured out that I was the only one at the table who neither smoked nor drank, and they offered whiskey and tobacco repeatedly. I didn’t bite.

Really, I’d like to have a good story for why it is, but I don’t. I won $80,000 in that card game. $80,000. What the fuck do you do with $80,000?

Time to leave.