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.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Chapter 2: Straight Lines and the Search for a Venue in which to Study Probability
Chapter 2
It’s a lot easier to make money playing pool than playing cards, but if you find a card game, you can make a lot of money. With cards, you just have to achieve a basic understanding of the laws of probability. Every deck of Bicycle cards you bought in the sixties and seventies had a card that specified the odds of drawing particular cards. The odds of drawing inside to fill a straight were one in 296,231. Don’t draw to an inside straight an more than you’d expect to draw a pair on a three draw. This is all math.
People who gamble are mostly stupid. They’ll decide they’re due for a win, or they’ll think they’re smarter than the guy across the table from them. All kinds of stupid shit. It’s all math, and any departure is a version of foolishness. Do you have the cards? If so, do you have the money? If the answer to either is “no,” you lose more than you win. Maybe two hundred times I’ve seen somebody bet on a pair of tens in a jacks or better game.
My dad taught me to play gin when I was in the fourth grade. You learn everything you need to know about cards and odds from gin. You just need to think how many cards there are in the deck and how many of them will make you happy. In many situations, that number is pretty small. On a Boy Scout trip to Philmont in 1965 I learned to play blackjack, which is a dumb game I can’t recommend. The numbers are obvious and you’re always playing against the house. Poker’s different.
To the extent you’re taking notes to improve you’re gambling game, here’s the first tip: don’t play poker in a casino. [1] As a matter of fact, here’s everything I know about gambling: Don’t play a skill game if you’re not skilled. Don’t bet against anybody who claims he or she can do something improbable. In cards, don’t bet on anything other than the math. Don’t play anything in a casino. Don’t play poker against people who all know each other, and bail in any game when you get any sign that two or more people at the table are cooperating in any way. Don’t shoot craps. Craps in a casino is an exciting way for you to lose money and shooting craps in the street is an excruciating way for you to get beaten and robbed. Never play anybody in any game who wants to pay you with a check. Don’t bet sports, horses or dogs. Don’t play pool in any place more than two days running. Stop playing cards at midnight, whether you’re ahead or not. Never bet money you don’t have. Never make a bet to cover another bet. In pool, it’s all straight lines. In cards it’s all math. Don’t deviate from either.
It’s easy to make money playing cards because so many people want to make mistakes, but it’s hard to get into a game with any money on the table.
In late 1972 I met a guy from
“What are we playing for?” I asked. Most of the guys had played for a few bucks a ball or twenty bucks a game.
“A beer,” he said. All the locals took drags on their cigarettes. This was odd.
I took him up on it. He was good, but I nailed him three games running. Somebody else had the next dollar up each game, but each time he let me take the game. It was fun playing him because he was so good, but even still. There were a few improbable breaks, but lines are lines and I see them better than anybody.
The last game I almost much ran the table even though a truck driver kept buying shots off me he couldn’t make. I put two tens up to cover the games somebody else hadn’t gotten to play. Hank owed me three beers. He was up for the night so he could afford it.
“Where are you from?” he asked, at the bar.
“Bud, I’m living on cash and trying not to get beat up,” I said.
“Better move on, then. These guys don’t like to lose. Any time somebody cleans them out they figure they’ve been cheated.”
“Do you know of any way to cheat at pool?” I asked.
“You mean the cons? Two Brothers and a Stranger and those things?”
“Fuck no. Don’t do any of that shit. You’ll get killed. Besides, you have to have a partner,” I said.
“Okay, freak, you’re a better pool player than me. But I’m not Grasshopper. The grifters with the cons I figure they’d just as soon con anybody, and that includes me,” Hank said. “I stay away from them and always will.”
“Grifters?” I asked. I was young. Hank and I were about the same age.
“Con artists,” said Hank. “Look, what I’m saying is, you can shoot pool better than me, but you’re not smarter than me and I’m not listening to life lessons just because I owe you three beers. Plus, this is all doing me good,” he said.
“How so?”
“I play all these guys all the time. I got like three months before I go off to college, and I’m trying to make enough bread so’s I don’t have to take a job while I’m in college. I’ve beat all these guys so often that they even know when I’m tanking to tease them into playing me again. About eight of my regulars saw me lose tonight and word is going to get around that I’m mortal and I’m going to take another hundred bucks off of each one of these sumbitches before I go off to
“I should have made you play stakes,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re not a grifter, you just shoot good.”
The waitress seemed to know Hank and brought us both a new round as soon as his glass was empty. I don’t drink, so mine was still full. “I’m done,” I said, and she nodded and took my untouched beer off and put it in front of one the guys who’d been buying shots off of me, who wanted to be known as “Bruiser.” He winked at her and raised immediately raised it to his lips. It wasn’t clear whether he knew it was a used beer.
“Yeah, you’re right. Let me ask you a question, Hank,” I said.
“My name’s not really Hank,” he said. “I’m Donnie. And just because you ask a question doesn’t mean you’ll get an answer.”
“Okay. Have you ever noticed how you make the same shot over and over, but sometimes the results vary?”
“Sure,” he said. “Happens to everybody.”
“What causes that?”
“Changes in you. Changes in the felt. Changes in humidity. A thousand little variables that you can’t ever fully account for.” He was gulping on his second beer.
“And you can’t correct for that in the way you think about a shot?”
“I try to, of course, but nobody’s consistent enough to account for everything. Sometimes I miss. Don’t you?”
No, never,” I said. If I see the shot, I make it. Sometimes I can’t see it right, and those I miss.”
“What kinds can’t you see?” he asked.
“Breaks, things that involve three or four collisions, or when more than one ball is moving at the same time in the shot.”
“Look, Smooth, I didn’t see you mess up anything in a single shot tonight. Best shooter I’ve ever seen. Your confidence is inspiring. Are you in EST?”
“Oh, fuck no. That’s lunacy.” I said.
“So is what you’re saying. How about space aliens? You ever encountered any of those?” he asked. He wasn’t being dismissive, though, He was asking.
“Fuck off. I’ve just noticed something weird. You’re good, so I thought you might have noticed it too.”
“You mean how you think you’ve got it lined up but it goes just a little off? Or how you can feel you were just a little off but it rolls in anyway?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“Did you take chemistry in high school?” he asked.
“Sure. Required.”
“Remember the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?” he asked.
Sure.”
“Say it.”
“You can know the location or the velocity of an electron, but not both.”
“Right. Remember the observer effect?” he asked.
“Sort of. Looking at something changes it.”
“Okay, look. Pool is all physics,” he said. Things bounce and spin. Masses interact. When you have a number of spheres moving about in space and time, you can’t predict where all of them will move. It’s just impossible. And the more you look at it and think about it, the more you change the results.”
“Okay, Hank,” I said.
“Donnie.”
“Okay, Donnie. We’re going to leave it that you think I’m a crank and I think you’re a Baptist. But wait...”
“Can we kind of speed this along?” he asked.
“You have someplace to go?” I asked.
“Yeah, Debbie’s kinda wantin’to take me home, and I’m kinda wanting to let her do it, but I still owe you one more beer.”
“Who’s Debbie?” I asked you.
“The bartender.”
“What’s keeping you?”
“I owe you one more beer, and you don’t drink.”
“Okay, tell her to pour the third,” I said.
“Cool. We can send both mine and yours to Walt.”
“Walt?” I asked.
“Walt owns the place. You saw me play him a few times. He’s not bad, but he’s not good, and he loves to play.”
“Okay. Before you go, do you know of any poker games I could get into around here?”
“No. People in
“Okay. Who do I look for?” I asked.
“Fathers of debutantes and deckhands.”
“Got it.”
“There are a lot of J.R. Ewing types down there, too, who imagine themselves to be invincible. Easy pickings. Cards, pool, darts.”
“I don’t play darts.”
“I wish the fuck I’d known that.”
“Who’s J.R. Ewing?”
“Character on
“Don’t know it. See ya.”
Hank/Donnie gathered Debbie and left.
A funny-looking guy with a satchel say sown on the stool Hank/Donnie had vacated as soon as he’d left. He was fixated on a neon sign behind the bar advertising Jax beer.
“Is it possible to make a typographical error in a neon sign?” he asked. He had a pronounced English accent. Which one, I don’t know.[2]
“No,” I answered.
“Are you quite sure?” he asked.
“Quite.”
“I’ll ask nonetheless. How does one order a drink here?” he asked.
“I don’t know if you can,” I said. “Hank/Donnie just left with the bartender.”
“Alas,” he said, and opened his satchel. He peered into it for a minute, and pulled out a white bath towel, dabbed his forehead and mouth, then returned the towel the satchel. ”How about the proprietor?” he asked.
“He’s the one on the other side of the bar with three beers lined up in front of him,” I answered.
“Again, alas. Perhaps you could answer a question,” he said. “Is it at all possible that Janx Spirit is available at this establishment?”
“Never heard of it. That sign refers to Jax beer.”
“Ah well.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“It’s unlikely you’d have heard of it,” he answered.
“I get around,” I said.
“Someplace near Betelgeuse,” he said.
“What?”
“Near Betelgeuse,” he said, irritated and ready to leave, since he wasn’t going to get a drink.
“The star?” I asked.
He was startled. “What?”
“Sorry. The only Betelgeuse I know is the star. In Orion.”
“Ah. Well. I’m from a village in central
“Gothca. Nice to meet you. Gotta go. I’m Henry,” I said, extending my hand.
“Ford,” he said, shaking my hand somewhat tentatively.
[1] I can’t remember if I’ve said this before because I wrote this in fits and starts over a looong stretch of years, but never fucking never play poker in a casino of any sort. Look for a game with people who know each other. They aren’t used to cheating each other, and so won’t know how to cheat you. They won’t like you taking their money but won’t know what to do about it. Casino poker players work in teams and they’re looking to take money from other teams, or better yet, strangers who wander in. Like you.
[2] I assume it is vaguely insulting to Englishmen and Englishwomen for non-Englishpersons to refer to an “English accent,” based solely on the fact that a
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Chapter 1: Pool Cues and the Margins of the Universe
In late 1972 I was living on cash, hustling nine ball in small-town pool halls and bowling alleys all over. All over the South, anyway. I lived out of my car, a rusty
I wasn’t a shark, anyway. I was just good with a cue stick. It’s all straight lines, and straight lines always make sense. Always.
“Time to go” meant time to go another hundred miles down the road to another little town that still had hand-painted Saxon’s pecan log billboards by the roadside and an old-fashioned motel with 24 rooms in a square U around a gravel parking lot. When you won big, you had to leave immediately because as many people as you’d taken all their money from were mad as hell and convinced they’d been cheated. People don’t like accepting the fact that they’ve failed and so cook up some way of convincing themselves they’ve been cheated. They convince their friends or a cop and you’ve got trouble. So I was packed and ready to go every day, even if I thought I’d be going back to the same motel that night. You never know.
I never learned the cons, anyway, no need, and kept moving for that next year or so. I made a good chink of change. I’m not sure how much—I was afraid to count it until after I started spending it.
I’d started playing pool when I was little, when my Dad was still in the Air Force. Three was a recreation area with a pool and a rec room at Keesler in
The Keesler rec room was supposed to be off limits to kids after 5:00 so the enlisted men who didn’t drink could use it, but the airmen noticed the way I played and would keep me around and make bets with each other about who could beat me. If I stayed too late, Mom would send Dad down to get me. On the way back he’d ask me how I’d shot, and I usually had won. I’d get home and Mom would send me to bed without any supper which was a pain because I’ve never liked being hungry.
When Dad got transferred to Eglin—not too far away and just as hot and humid—there was a pool table at the church Mom took us to, and another one in the base enlisted men’s recreation center, but kids weren’t allowed in there except on weekends and holidays. The church didn’t mind me coming in in the afternoons to play, but I could tell they all thought it was a little odd that a fifth grader wanted to play pool by himself for hours every day. It was in that church basement that I started noticing something odd.
When you get good at something you notice really small details. When I make a certain shot, the same thing happens every time, only it doesn’t. It should, and it usually does, but it doesn’t always. It’s hard to explain, partly because so much of what I think and do is self-taught. Not all of it. But nobody ever showed me anything about playing pool. I don’t know any pool lingo. It’s Greek to me. Well, not exactly. I picked up some stuff from watching the way other people played, over the years, but nobody ever taught me how to play. I can play as well as anybody, but if I make a good shot, I can’t explain to another pool player what I’ve done using language that pool players use. What I know is that things tend to bounce off of flat surfaces at the same angle they came in, and that round things bounce off of other in the direction of a line that connects their respective center points at the moment of impact. In optics, we say “angle of incidence equals angle of refraction.” Much of Newtonian physics is an oversimplification, but it yields some elegant phrases.
What I began noticing in the teen lounge of the First Christian Church of the Disciples of Christ in
But I was. I could do the exact same thing in repetition and not be assured of the same result. You don’t believe me but it’s true. The only lesson I took away from that at the time, though, was that I could never bet my life on a pool game, no matter how tempting the prize. I didn’t know it, but this was the first sign I had that the margins of the universe are crumbling. The first I recognized, anyway.
I got in trouble that fall with the church and my observations on the inherently unreliable nature of the laws of physics were suspended. The church janitor, a big black man named Mr. Morris, suspected me of smoking Marlboros while I played pool in the rec room when he wasn’t around, and had been trying to catch me. But what got me was Eddie Finch. He was my Sunday School teacher and my nemises the whole time we lived in
When I was around thirteen this interest in religion kicked in that I really can’t explain. I started listening to what they wee saying and analyzing it. I was too critical, of course, and too prone to doubt that which was taught to me. But still. This is religion. There are holes everywhere and only fools and those who render themselves intentionally ignorant fail to see them. Eddie Finch was incapable of intentionally render himself anything but was nevertheless a fool and a man of great faith.
Not just a garden-variety fool, but a world class fool. He decided he was a painter for a few years and proudly tried to sell paintings that looked less impressive than the Paint-by-Numbers Indian chief I’d done in the third grade. He had managed to marry an attractive woman, had fathered a daughter, and bought a house on the G.I. Bill before he found Jesus in his mid-thirties with a fervor that surprised his pretty, petite wife Jane, who, even to me, a grammar schooler who knew nothing of the ways of grownups, could see often seemed to be looking at her husband with bewildered dismay. Eddie signed up to be a Sunday school teacher, and, not satisfied with hectoring me and my classmates about burning in Hell for our sinful ways, he also signed up for a prison outreach program. As a result he started bringing recently-released felons to church on Sundays, which had some comical results. One special ex-con, a man named Frank Jones who, like a caricature of who he was, had beady eyes, a broken nose, and a crew cut, joined our church, confessing his faith before the congregation one hot July morning. A few weeks later I heard my parents say with some concern that Frank was moving into the spare room at Eddie and Jane’s house, and a few weeks after that, my parents heard tell that Eddie had co-signed the note on Frank’s new car, a used Cadillac with tail fins. A few weeks after that, of course, Frank disappeared, and surprisingly, Jane disappeared with him, leaving Eddie and little Mamie E. Finch in
I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Frank came later. In the summer of 1965, Mr. Morris was trying to bust me smoking in the rec room while I was playing pool while my mother kept the books at the new hotel. The following Sunday, Mr. Finch was teaching us about the passage from Matthew in which God is supposed to have said “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased” following Jesus’ baptism by
ME: (Hand raised) Mr. Finch?
FINCH: Yes, Henry?
ME: I have a question.
FINCH: Yes?
ME: If Jesus and God are the same person, like they teach us about the Trinity and all, why is God saying that? About being well pleased and all. Isn’t it kind of like talking to Himself? I mean, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
FINCH: Now you listen here, young man. I’ve just about had it with your questioning me in class and refusing God’s Word. God has a plan for your life and the sooner you shut up and start following it, the better off you’ll be.
ME: But it doesn’t make sense.
FINCH: It makes all the sense in the world. Now you be quiet.
Sometime later I got summoned to Pastor Leslie’s pastoral study, which I liked. The room, I mean. Full of books. Bibles in Greek and Hebrew. He was a nice guy in some ways but stuck on himself. I don’t remember how I got summoned to the pastoral presence, but knew when I got there I was in trouble because Eddie Finch had complained about me.
After I was seated he lit his pipe and filled the room with a heavy, rich-smelling smoke that pleased me at the time but would horrify me today.
“I hear you have been crossing swords a little bit with Ed Finch,” he said.
“I guess so.”
“He says you challenge his authority,” said Pastor Leslie.
“No, sir. I just ask questions. And I really want to know the answers. I’m not trying to cause trouble or anything.” I had friends who asked clearly stupid questions to make trouble or jokes. In ninth grade science class, after Mr.
“So Leonard tells me he’s been finding cigarette butts in the basement after you play pool there.”
“Leonard?” I asked.
“Mr. Morris. The Negro who takes care of the church,” the pastor said, puffing on his pipe. People used the word “Negro” with no self-consciousness in 1965. That this was true, that there was no self-consciousness of it, seems one of the most improbable facts of my life.
“Oh. Well, I’m surprised,” I said.
“I think we need to think of a way to keep you focused,” said Pastor Leslie, and continued talking. I could not, unfortunately, continue listening. I had too much experience ignoring him to abruptly change course now. Trains leave stations. The Universe expands. People ignore Pastor Leslie. He gave these Godawful sermons that he would repeat on special occasions. He had this sermon about a hunchbacked kid named Zia or Zeah whose hump magically disappears when he meets the Christ Child. It’s basically Amahl and the Night Visitors without a crutch or music. It was awful, and he did it every year at Christmas. Luckily we moved on to
Pastor Leslie eventually asked me a question, and since my mind was wandering in all sorts of non-church directions I had no idea what he was talking about and that was a problem because Pastor Leslie always wanted to be listened to. Telling me something important was his role and being educated was mine and the fact that I didn’t know my lines convinced him that Eddie Finch was on to something.
“Focus, yes,” he said, filling the room with rich smoke. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Your pool privileges at the church are suspended for this week. Next week I’m going to ask Ed how he felt your Sunday School experience was, and if he thinks it was good, your pool privileges will be reinstated. Thereafter, as long as Mr. Finch thinks Sunday School is going well and Leonard doesn’t find any more cigarette butts, your pool privileges will continue. All right?”
“Ah, Hell.”
“What was that?”
“Oh, well.”
“What do you think of this arrangement, Henry?” he asked, with a smug look that only a pipe-smoking protestant preacher can have.
“Well, I guess I’m never going to shoot pool again, because Mrs. Leslie comes down to smoke a Marlboro three or four times a day during the week. She always shoos me out, but it always smells like smoke after she’s gone,” I said.
There was an awkward pause.
“You are mistaken,” he said. “My dear wife gave up smoking almost a year ago.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Smoking cigarettes is sinful. Injurious to the body, and so, indirectly, injurious to the soul.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I would know if my dear June were still smoking. I could smell it on her clothes. Plus she would never lie to me,” he said.
“Hmm.” I said. I was forcing him into trouble with his wife. Foolish. Change gears.
“Yes?” he asked, black eyebrows arched.
“Have you noticed how things don’t always work out the same?”
“How so?
“How you do something the same way and get different results some of the time?” oddly, he was completely content to have me redirect the conversation completely.
“Well, Henry, I like to think of this as God’s way of adding nuance to the universe, and of reminding us to be grateful for the world He has created. I repeat some of My most popular sermons from time to time, and I have noticed, as you say, by the differences in the way My flock has reacted to them over the years.” He pulled on his pipe several times in rapid succession to get it burning good again, filling the study with smoke. He formed his bearded lips into an O and blew a perfect smoke ring that descended softly to the floor and then bounced up towards the book cabinets, still turning axially around its own tiny radius. I jumped in surprise. He didn’t notice. “Over the years,” he said, “I’ve come to think of it as another one of God’s many blessings. Small variations in the stresses I give different parts of the sermons, and larger variations in the mood and composition of the individual members of My congregation, yields big differences in reaction. Some years Mrs. Jameson cries when Zeah stands up straight, and sometimes she doesn’t. It’s rewarding either way. You see?”
“Dr. Leslie, I’m sorry, but that’s not right.”
“Mrs. Jameson crying at my Christmas sermon?” he asked.
“No, that makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make sense is what just happened to that smoke ring,” I said. It just wasn’t right. Really.
“How so?”
“It sailed ten or twelve feet from your lips then bounced off the floor without losing its spin. That’s just not right.”
“They all do that,” he said.
“No they don’t. They dissipate a few feet from your mouth and won’t even bounce off of a pool table, much less off a floor with shag carpeting.”
“I would be interested to know how you came to these conclusions, but am more interested in why you think Mrs. Jameson’s reaction to my Christmas sermon makes sense. Perfect sense, I think you said,” he said. I waited, hoping he’d blow another smoke ring, but no.
“If I tell you, will you blow another smoke ring?” I asked.
He deliberated. “Perhaps,” he said. Asshole. Wouldn’t even commit to a smoke ring, and he’s always trying to sell me eternal life. People truly are fractal and resemble themselves at all levels. Nietzsche was right: look more redeemed. I don’t like these things where the Universedoesn’t follow its own rules and wanted to track this one down. Except for the errata I was noticing on the pool table the only examples I’d noticed up to that point were a few times when I thought I could see through my big sister when she came home from college (I never could see through her when she was in high school) and a few occasions when I seemed to be able to see through my own eyelids when half-asleep.
“Okay,” I said. “Mrs, Jameson is an alcoholic, but she keeps it under control by only allowing herself to drink on the weekend. When Christmas Eve falls on a Saturday or Sunday, she’s been drinking by the time she gets to your candlelight service, which is when you preach Zeah, and she cries. If Christmas Eve is on a weekday, she shows up sober and doesn’t cry.”
For a kid to be honest with an adult is always risky, and this one didn’t seem to go well. Pastor Leslie frowned and sat up and pulled on his pipe. He looked into the distance in a troubled way. He blew a smoke ring, but I think it was an absent-minded smoke ring not intended to satisfy me. I followed it with rapt fascination as it bounced first off of a wall , then a glass-fronted book case, then disappeared into the thick cloud of smoke over Pastor Leslie’s head. Damn.
“How can you be sure about this kind of thing?” he asked. Amazingly, the smoke ring came sailing down out of the cloud, having apparently bounced off of the ceiling. Unfortunately, as it sailed towards the floor it hit the toe of his expensive-looking semi-wingtip, which was bouncing all of a sudden, and broke up. Smoke ring entropied, I could answer his question.
“About Mrs. Jameson,” I said. “Her step-son Mark Ralston is a friend of mine,” I said. True. We always played at his house on weekends and my house on the weekend. One Saturday when I was over there she’d been putting out cigarette butts in the front right eye of the electric range in the kitchen under the misapprehension that it was an ashtray.
Pastor Leslie gazed off in the distance some more and pulled pensively on his pipe.
“So will you blow me another smoke ring?” I asked.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he responded. “Your pool privileges are suspended for a week.”
“Aah, shit,” I said.
“Mind your tongue,” he said. “I’m going to talk to Mr. Finch next Sunday. If he believes you were appropriately involved with your Sunday School class, then your pool privileges will be reinstated. If your pool privileges are reinstated, it will only be on your word of honor as a gentleman that you will not be smoking inside the church. Agreed?”
“When did I ever claim to be a gentleman?” I asked.
“Agreed?” he asked.
“All right,” I said.
“I’m going to give you something else to occupy your time,” he said. He reached behind his desk and pulled out a Prussian blue book titled “Gospel Parallels.”
“What’s this?” I asked, leafing through it. Each page listed three columns, labeled “Matthew,” “Mark,” and “Luke.”
“It points out the similarities between the three synoptic Gospel narratives,” he said. “Some of the stories in the Gospels appear in all of them, some in two, some in only one. This book is designed to point up the similarities.”
“What’s synoptic mean?” I asked. I was fascinated. Immediately. Completely.
“It’s from the Greek. It means they all look the same,” he said.
“Why Greek?”
“The New Testament was originally written in Greek,” he said.
“Really? Are you sure? Not Hebrew?”
“Quite sure.” He got up to open a window. “Sorry, getting a little stuffy in here,” he said. Putting his pipe aside. “In
“There are four Gospels,” I said. “This only has three columns. What happened to John?”
“He’s not synoptic. The Gospel according to St. Johm doesn’t have many narrative details in common with the other Gospels,” he said.
“Why not?” The world that had been opened to me was one would vex me for the rest of my life.
“You will be able to figure this out for yourself in time, Henry. Now I really must be getting to the fellowship hall. Do you understand our agreement?”
“I guess. When Mr. Finch says I can, you’ll let me use the pool table, but until then I read this book.”
“I think it’s in there somewhere. I’ll talk to you next week.” He smiled.
It was a mug’s game, of course. I didn’t ever get to use the church pool table again. Mr. Finch consistently told Pastor Leslie that I interrupted him, or squirmed in my chair, or did something wrong. But that was okay. Eddie Finch’s pain-in-the-assedness led me to the Niceville Poolhall where I reacquainted myself with some friends from Biloxi, and also resulted in weekly conferences with Pastor Leslie about my conduct, and when that was done, about the synoptic Gospels. He was a pompous blowhard, but he really did know Biblical textual criticism.
How did I get here from 1972? I need to go back. Excuse me.
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