The next morning a fat and unpleasant man of about forty in a sheriff’s uniform with sergeant’s stripes walked me down a series of hallways that would give Icarus a headache. The reason I was given was that I had requested to meet with the public defender in advance of my arraignment.
“I don’t want to meet with the p.d.,” I said. “I have my own lawyer.”
“Then why did you request a meeting with the p.d?” asked Sgt. York.
“I didn’t. The intake officer told me I could call my lawyer, but I told her I wanted to call somebody else, and I wanted to wait ‘til the morning so I wouldn’t wake anybody up.’
“What time was this?” he asked.
“Not sure. Lost my watch. But after midnight.”
“Who did you want to call?”
“An old friend of mine. She’ll know how to get in touch with my lawyer, and she can help me out in other ways, too.”
“And Intake wouldn’t let you do that?” he asked.
“No. She got all mad and me when I told her who I wanted to call.”
“Do you happen to remember the name of the admitting officer?” he asked.
“Dot.” He glanced around without looking at me as though he now had an explanation for something he hadn’t previously understood. We had arrived at a grey steel door. He fished in his pocket and retrieved seven loose keys and two loose coins. He peered at the keys for a minute, then selected one and unlocked the door. We stepped into a fluorescent-lit room with concrete block walls painted the exact color of Crest toothpaste.
“So now you got an appointment with the p.d. Explain it, and he can explain it to the magistrate. They’ll sort it out. Your lawyer will come through that door in about three minutes. I have to wait with you here until he comes. Mind if I smoke?”
I didn’t, and just as promised, three minutes later, another cueball-shaped man opened the door that had been specified and stepped in, a stack of files under his arm. “Hi, Mike,” he said to the sergeant.
“Hi, Dick,” said the lawyer. They gave each other a brief, manly hug.
“Hey—we’re brothers. I love this guy,” said the lawyer. “Okay, bubba, better leave me alone with this miscreant.”
The sergeant left and the lawyer sat down at a steel chair in front of a formica table like my grandmother had in her kitchen. “Okay, champ. So what do we got?”
“What was that with the sergeant?” I asked.
“He’s my brother. He got me this job. Love him to death. He raised me after Mom died.”
“Got it. And it doesn’t ever cause friction at family functions that you’re on opposite sides of the law, as it were?” I asked.
“Oh, Hell, no,” he said. “He knows there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him. Plus, I’ve applied for a job with the DA’s office, and they tell me that I’ll get hired as soon as Beville quits.”
“Okay, well, sorry for the confusion, and thanks for looking in, but I already have a lawyer.”
“Oh, yeah? Where is he? And why did you ask to meet with me?”
“I didn’t. I told the intake officer that I wanted to call somebody other than my lawyer first, and she misunderstood, and set all this up over my objection.”
“Who was on intake last night?” he asked.
“Dot,” I said.
“Hmmm.” He thought a few seconds. “Who’s your lawyer?” he asked. “I’ll call him for you.”
“I really want to talk to Mrs. Wertheimer first,” I said.
“Who’s she?”
“An old friend. A high school teacher.”
“What did she teach?” he asked. Why are people so curious about this kind of thing? What could it possibly matter what she taught?
“Algebra and Geometry,” I said.
“So you want to call your Algebra teacher instead of your lawyer.”
“You got it,” I said.
“Why?”
“I’d prefer not to say,” I answered.
“Look, you don’t have to worry about talking to me. Everything you say to me is protected by the attorney-client privilege. That’s a very serious obligation,” he said, quite earnestly.
“I’m not sure if that would work if I don’t hire you as my lawyer, which I didn’t.”
“Yeah, sure it would,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that pretty much any far-out thing you tell me in this kind of context, where I’m giving you legal advice and all, would be privileged. It has to be. I think.”
“Thanks, but I still think I’d like to wait to discuss it with my regular lawyer.”
“But you don’t want me to call him?”
“No, I want to talk to Mrs. Wertheimer first.”
“Your Algebra teacher.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay, well, I’ll explain to the magistrate and see what he says,” he said. He rose and shook my hand, and with that Sgt. York’s brother left.
May I comment without overstressing the issue that spending an hour alone in a Crest-toothpaste-colored room that reeks of cigarette smoke with absolutely nothing to do, nothing to read, and no one to talk to can give rise to near-hallucinatory levels of boredom. Nevertheless, at what I presume to be a few minutes before10:00 a.m. Sgt. York returned and said it was time to take me to the courtroom. The drab, linoleumed halls ended at a varnished wooden door that opened to the court.
It was a picturesque and light courtroom, with a high ceiling and high windows, and dark wood paneling on the walls. Inherit the Wind could have been shot there.
I was shepherded into the jury box with six other young men about my age and a man in his mid-forties who smelled strongly of urine. Several of the younger men smelled of vomit, sothe jury box was strongly-aromaed. In a few minutes a man in his fifties, balding, in a black robe, opened a door behind the bench and stepped in. The bailiff stood and said “All rise,” at which we all stood, then he said “Oyez, oyez. The Magistrate’s Court for Hamilton County, Criminal Division, Superior Court Judge Pinto presiding, is now in session. All be seated and come to order.” We all sat down and the judge took his seat. Public defender York and the man I presumed was the prosecutor exchanged troubled glances. The judge didn’t notice.
“People v. Sharpe?” he called out. The clerk made a note, and one of the young men who smelled like vomit stood.
After exchanging another worried look with Mr. York, the man I presumed was the prosecutor stood up. “Your honor, I must admit we’re surprised to see you here.”
“Hello, Mr. Clydesdale,” said the judge. “Magistrate Arabian is under the weather, so he called me and asked if I could sit in for him.”
“Your honor, we’re not used to seeing Superior Court judges in magistrate session,” said the prosecutor.
“Ah. I see. This is perfectly legal and you need not worry. Judges of superior jurisdiction can sit for judges of inferior jurisdiction, and it’s perfectly legal. If Magistrate Arabian were to come and sit for me in the Superior Court on Wednesday, that might cause problems, but this is proper. Are we okay?”
“Yes, sir,” said prosecutor Clydesdale. He and York both looked down. They were accustomed to dealing with the magistrate who usually appeared in this court, and now they had to deal with someone else. “Your honor, with all due respect….” he said. Wow. What a moron. “Your honor, we think of you as a civil court judge,” said Clydesdale.
“Counsel, I am a Superior Court judge of Hamilton County and I have jurisdiction over this court. Do you have any further questions?” He had this long-ish mane of white hair and was wearing Elvis-style glasses that were clear at the bottom and shaded at the top.
“No sir, your honor.”
“People v. Trotsky,” he said. I stood up, the prosecutor sat down, York remained standing, and Sharpe, who still smelled like vomit, sat down. He seemed to have low expectations and extensive experience with chaotic environments.
“Um, your honor, this is an odd one. Mr. Trotsky has a lawyer, but hasn’t called him yet because of a misunderstanding with the officer on intake last night. He wants to make a phone call to one of his high school teachers, who will then, presumably, make the call to the lawyer. I offered to call the lawyer for him, but he refused this offer, for reasons he could not explain.” I’m not a lawyer, but everything he said struck me as too much information.
The judge peered through the shaded part of his glasses at me. “You’re Trotsky?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“And you don’t want to call a lawyer, you want to call a teacher?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why didn’t you call your teacher last night? Why are you wasting my time with this?” he asked.
“I wanted to, but apparently the intake officer thought I was making a joke, or something,” I said.
“Who was on intake last night?” he asked the prosecutor.
He stood to answer the question. “Dot,” he said.
The judge nodded. “I see,” he said.
“And you want to call a history teacher?” asked Judge Pinto.
“Geometry,” I answered. His eyes clouded and he frowned at me.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“Mrs. Wertheimer was my Geometry teacher,” I said.
“Margaret Wertheimer? He asked.
“Yes, sir.” I never called her by her first name and just didn’t think of her that familiarly, but her name had been all over those legal documents Mr. Morgan had drawn up.
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Counsel, we’ll continue this one over to the 1:00 call. Mr. Trotsky can call Mrs. Wertheimer in the mean time and make whatever arrangements he needs to make.”
“Thank you, your honor.” I sat back down.
The call to Mrs. W was a little odd. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hello, Mrs. W, this is Mr. Trotsky,” I said.
“Is it?” she answered, not sure what was going on. “Am I mistaken, or do you sound very much like a friend of mine who was once a pupil?”
“You are not mistaken.”
“And yet your name is Mr. Trotsky,” she said. I could hear her taking a drag off of her cigarette.
“Yes. This is partly due to the fact that I am calling from the Hamilton County Jail.”
“Are you now?” she asked. There was a pause while she considered this. “Did your arrest have anything to do with gambling?”
“Not really. I broke up a fight, sort of. I hit a policeman’s son in the course of doing so.”
“Okay. So what can I do?” she asked.
“You can call Mr. Morgan for me and explain to him about how he needs to look for Mr. Trotsky. If all I owe is a fine, you can help me pay it. I have been separated from my wallet.”
“Oh, I see,” she said, voice brightening. “You didn’t have your wallet when you were arrested and so felt free to exercise your imagination.”
“Since you’re not a lawyer, do you think the cops can listen in on this call?” I asked. I could hear her flick the Zippo over the line.
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll get Atchley to come on down. What time’s the hearing?”
“One,” I answered. “If I understood what they were saying. By the way, do you know Judge Morgan? He seemed to know your name.”
“Ed Morgan? Sure. He was in my geometry class. During the War. Pretty bright, but mainly really persistent. A little paranoid about the Red Menace. Look, I’ll come down and be ready to bail you or pay a fine or whatnot, but for a drifter with no i.d. who was involved in a violent affray, I’m guessing you’re looking at some jail time,” she said.
Ah, shit.
“All right, Mrs. W. Thanks for the help.”
An hour or so later, Mr. Morgan showed up, in suit and tie. I was waiting in the Crest toothpaste room, which still smelled like cigarette smoke.
“So, Mr. Trotsky, is it?” he asked.
“Yes. Thanks for coming.”
“As a lawyer, I need to tell you something about my professional responsibilities,” he said. “All lawyers owe a duty of candor to the tribunal.”
“Meaning,” I said.
“I can’t knowingly mislead the judge,” he said.
“No shit?” I asked.
“None,” he answered.
“You can’t lie in court?”
“I can’t lie to the judge.”
“Then what is it I see on t.v. all the time? Lawyers making up stories to let their clients get away with murder and all that.”
“We do not actually practice law like they do on t.v.,” he said. “Placing the known facts in the best possible light is one thing. Standing before a judge I have known for twenty years and telling him someone I know to be known as Baida is in fact Trotsky is something else.”
“So you can’t help me?” I asked.
“Yes, I can help, but I must be very careful. Why was it necessary to use a pseudonym? What did you do?”
I explained the fight. “Then, one of the patrons told me that this kind of fight happened a lot there, and that because the guy I fought with’s father was a captain with the sheriff’s department, I was probably going to be arrested. I’d just as soon not have a police record, so I hid my wallet and tried to get away. They caught me, so I used an assumed name.”
“Mr. … Trotsky, there are all kinds of other things they can charge you with if they figure out who you are. This is a very risky thing you’re doing.”
“I know all that, but I’m pretty good with odds. From what I hear, court proceedings go on and on, and I’ll be dealing with this for months, is that right?” I asked.
“Well, yeah,” he said with a shrug. “Adjudication isn’t a speedy process. Nor should it be.”
“Okay, I want to speedy it up. What would happen to me if I just pleaded guilty?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a fine of a thousand dollars. Maybe a couple weeks in jail. Why would you do that? Most of the time in an assault case, you can show you were acting in self-defense and get it busted down to a misdemeanor battery and time served.”
“But I’d have to hang around, or be back here every few weeks for arraignments and shit,” I said.
“There would need to be a certain amount of involvement with the judicial process, yes,” he said.
“Let’s just plead guilty and I’ll pay or serve and we’ll be done.” He didn’t like it. He was averse to having a client in jail, which is actually a pretty good quality in a lawyer. He sat for a minute and thought morosely.
“All right. I’ll go see what I can work out with the prosecutor.” He stood and left, and again I was left alone in the Crest toothpaste room with nothing to read. There was no paper, no pencil. Seven chairs and two tables. I re-counted the concrete blocks in each wall, and calculated the number of tiles in the ceiling. After seven years had passed, Sgt. York slammed the door open.
“Okay, pal, you’re up.” He led me into the courtroom, where I found the judge on the bench, Morgan to my left, and Clydesdale, the prosecutor, to the right. As I passed through the courtroom, I noticed Mrs. W, sitting on the back bench, smoking a cigarette. I was shown to a chair next to Morgan.
I sat. The judge looked at me sternly. “How is Mrs. Wertheimer?” he asked.
“She’s fine. Very helpful, as always.”
“I haven’t seen her since I graduated from City High forty years ago,” he said. Best teacher I ever had.” I resisted the temptation to point her out. I figured she’d wave if she wanted to catch up with him. “They tell me you want to waive arraignment and enter a plea, Mr. Trotsky,” he said. “Is that true?”
“I’m not sure what arraignment is, but I did tell Mr. Morgan that I wanted to plead guilty.”
“And why is that?”
“I move around a lot. I’d just as soon get the sentence done and be over with this, rather than have to come back for court appearances and trials and such,” I said. “Your honor,” I added, as an afterthought.
Judge Morgan looked at me and pondered things a minute.
“Were you to go to trial, from what court personnel are telling me, it is possible or even likely that the accusing witness, Mr. Reed, would fail to show up, in which case the charges against you might be dismissed,” the judge said.
That sounded just. Of course, if anybody asked around at that bar, a district attorney’s investigator, for example, he or she would learn that I was known there as Henry, and somebody would turn out to know my last name, which would lead to awkward questions. Best avoid it.
I looked at Morgan. What d I do? He stood.
“I think, your honor, that my client has thought this over and is ready to enter his plea. He is also ready to wave his right to a pre-sentencing probation report and be sentenced today.”
“Mr. Trotsky, you understand that regardless of whatever discussions Mr. Morgan has had with the prosecutor, I will sentence you as I see fit?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“All right, then. Do you wish to enter a plea to the charge of voluntarily engaging in a violent affray?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how do you plead?”
“Guilty, your honor,” I said.
“Plea accepted.” The lawyers looked at each other nervously, and I got the impression that the judge was supposed to have done something he failed to do. Nobody said anything.
The judge looked at his stack of papers through the unshaded part of his Elvis glasses. He cleared his throat and spoke in a loud voice. “In the case of the prisoner Leon Trotsky, which the court has every reason to believe an assumed name, the court has considered and rejected the plea suggested by the attorneys in the case, and instead imposes a sentence of thirty days in the county jail, commencing upon his admission at intake last night. Bailiff, deliver him to the jailer.” He rapped his gavel, we all stood, and he left.
Morgan turned towards me with a half grin.
“I thought you said two weeks or a thousand bucks,” I said.
“You never told me your first name was Leon,” he said. “Ed Morgan hates commies.”
Sgt. York led me away to the prison elevator. “Did you get fucked or what?” he said, shaking his head and lighting a cigarette.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Chapter 8: Bound in Jail, All Night Long
Capt. Reed didn’t haul me in himself, he called some junior officers and they took me in. He went on home. I didn’t see Willis again—I don’t know if he took a while to wake up or if he slipped out the back door, like everybody else. Either way, I was slipped into the back of a sheriff’s deputy car by a corporal and taken to downtown Chattanooga. The jail/police station is diagonally across the courthouse square from the Brass Register, a place where lots of my friends used to go. I don’t drink, so hanging around in bars is lost on me, but under the circumstances, it was likely that several of my friends were across the square having a drink as I was being fingerprinted.
The intake officer also had corporal’s stripes. She was almost as tall as I was, maybe 6”0”, and friendly, in an odd way, given our respective positions. She had a blonde poofy do and wanted me to call her Dot. Late twenties, maybe.
“So what are we charging you with?” she asked. The corporal who’d driven me in was missing. I was still handcuffed.
“Couldn’t tell ya’” I said. “I was walking out of a bowling alley and got tackled.”
“Hixson lanes?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So you’re the one who got into a fight with Willis?” she asked.
“I think so,” I answered.
“O.K.,” she said. “You’re stuck here for the night. If you had a lawyer, he might be able to spring you tonight, but without a lawyer, you’re not likely to get out on an affray charge before magistrate’s court tomorrow morning.”
“I have a lawyer,” I said.
“Really?” Her face registered surprise, then doubt. “Most guys who lose a fight to Willis don’t have attorneys.”
“Hang on. I’m not sure this matters, but I didn’t lose. Willis was out cold behind the pool table when I left.” I think this was a foolish instance of allowing masculine pride to talk. It should always hold its tongue.
“Bullshit,” she said.
“No really,” I said. “He went down like Liston.”
She frowned at me for a few seconds, and then picked up a bulky walkie-talkie from the counter. She pushed a black button and got back a squawk of static. “Kenny?” she asked.
“10-4” came back.
“What happened at the Hixson Lanes tonight?” she asked. Squawk.
“There was an apparent 10-15 discovered by Capt. Reed.”
“Gimme a break, Kenny. What the fuck is a 10-15?”
“A civil disturbance.”
“Listen, asshole, I know there was a disturbance on account of I got the civil disturber here at intake. What happened?” she asked.
“Some guy named Leon punched out Willis,” he said. Squawk. I smiled.
“Is Willis okay?”
“He’s fine, yeah,” came back. Squawk. “I called in a 10-52 but by the time it got to dispatched Willis was up on his feet again so I 10-66ed it.”
“So Willis is okay?” she asked.
“10-4,” he said. Squawk.
“Kenny, you dick-head, does that mean yes or no?” she said. Squawk.
“It mean’s ‘yes,’ under these circumstances,” he answered.
“Thank you,” she said with exaggerated emphasis. She looked up at me, as if realizing for the first time that the foregoing exchange had been witnessed. “I went to high school with a lot of these assholes,” she said, “and they’ve never stopped driving me crazy.”
“So, Leon,” she said. “You’re not only the first guy ever to knock out Willis Reed, you’re also the first guy to get arrested on Saturday night in Hamilton County who has his own lawyer. You get a call, so go ahead,” she said.
“Why are you so worried about Willis?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked. Cops are hard to read. There’s always this guarded thing about their expressions. Their eyes don’t convey much.
“Is Willis a friend of yours or something?” I asked.
She paused a few minutes. “We were in high school together.”
“Oh, you dated,” I said.
Pause. “A little. We’re friends, is all.” I decided that telling the admitting officer that her boyfriend was now dating a beautiful red-head who couldn’t play pool was a bad idea.
“Okay. Here’s what happened. He got mad at somebody for reasons that escape me. He was about to clobber a nice old guy with the fat end of a pool cue which might of killed the old guy, so I grabbed the cue, so he got mad at me. I don’t like to fight, so I decked him. Everybody else in the bar saw the Captain’s car pull into the parking lot and left. I have a strong right, but not strong enough to do any lasting damage to Willis.”
“You a boxer?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“I’ve known him for ten or fifteen years, and he’s always getting into fights, but I’ve never heard of him getting KOed before,” she said. “Anyway, here’s the phone, if you want to call your lawyer.”
“What time is it?” I asked. My watch was missing. It wasn’t expensive, I wasn’t worried. It may have popped off when I hit Willis. I’m left-handed, so I wear my watch on my right hand.
“12:15,” she said.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” I said. This confused her.
“This is your opportunity to call your lawyer,” she said.
“It’s late,” I said. “I don’t want to wake anyone.”
“You’re not going to get him,” she said. “You’re going to get an answering service or one of those machines.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t really want to call my lawyer,” I said.
“You said you had one,” she said, with rising exasperation.
“I do, but I don’t want to call him.”
“Who do you want to call?” she asked.
“My geometry teacher.”
“All right, asshole, that’s it. You’re spending the night in jail, you meet with the p.d. at eight thirty, arraigned at ten.”
“I don’t want a p.d.”
“Good night.”
And so I was led down to the jail by someone else in a sheriff’s uniform. It was after lights out, so I slept in a tiny little closet next to the drunk tank. An odiferous experience.
The intake officer also had corporal’s stripes. She was almost as tall as I was, maybe 6”0”, and friendly, in an odd way, given our respective positions. She had a blonde poofy do and wanted me to call her Dot. Late twenties, maybe.
“So what are we charging you with?” she asked. The corporal who’d driven me in was missing. I was still handcuffed.
“Couldn’t tell ya’” I said. “I was walking out of a bowling alley and got tackled.”
“Hixson lanes?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So you’re the one who got into a fight with Willis?” she asked.
“I think so,” I answered.
“O.K.,” she said. “You’re stuck here for the night. If you had a lawyer, he might be able to spring you tonight, but without a lawyer, you’re not likely to get out on an affray charge before magistrate’s court tomorrow morning.”
“I have a lawyer,” I said.
“Really?” Her face registered surprise, then doubt. “Most guys who lose a fight to Willis don’t have attorneys.”
“Hang on. I’m not sure this matters, but I didn’t lose. Willis was out cold behind the pool table when I left.” I think this was a foolish instance of allowing masculine pride to talk. It should always hold its tongue.
“Bullshit,” she said.
“No really,” I said. “He went down like Liston.”
She frowned at me for a few seconds, and then picked up a bulky walkie-talkie from the counter. She pushed a black button and got back a squawk of static. “Kenny?” she asked.
“10-4” came back.
“What happened at the Hixson Lanes tonight?” she asked. Squawk.
“There was an apparent 10-15 discovered by Capt. Reed.”
“Gimme a break, Kenny. What the fuck is a 10-15?”
“A civil disturbance.”
“Listen, asshole, I know there was a disturbance on account of I got the civil disturber here at intake. What happened?” she asked.
“Some guy named Leon punched out Willis,” he said. Squawk. I smiled.
“Is Willis okay?”
“He’s fine, yeah,” came back. Squawk. “I called in a 10-52 but by the time it got to dispatched Willis was up on his feet again so I 10-66ed it.”
“So Willis is okay?” she asked.
“10-4,” he said. Squawk.
“Kenny, you dick-head, does that mean yes or no?” she said. Squawk.
“It mean’s ‘yes,’ under these circumstances,” he answered.
“Thank you,” she said with exaggerated emphasis. She looked up at me, as if realizing for the first time that the foregoing exchange had been witnessed. “I went to high school with a lot of these assholes,” she said, “and they’ve never stopped driving me crazy.”
“So, Leon,” she said. “You’re not only the first guy ever to knock out Willis Reed, you’re also the first guy to get arrested on Saturday night in Hamilton County who has his own lawyer. You get a call, so go ahead,” she said.
“Why are you so worried about Willis?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked. Cops are hard to read. There’s always this guarded thing about their expressions. Their eyes don’t convey much.
“Is Willis a friend of yours or something?” I asked.
She paused a few minutes. “We were in high school together.”
“Oh, you dated,” I said.
Pause. “A little. We’re friends, is all.” I decided that telling the admitting officer that her boyfriend was now dating a beautiful red-head who couldn’t play pool was a bad idea.
“Okay. Here’s what happened. He got mad at somebody for reasons that escape me. He was about to clobber a nice old guy with the fat end of a pool cue which might of killed the old guy, so I grabbed the cue, so he got mad at me. I don’t like to fight, so I decked him. Everybody else in the bar saw the Captain’s car pull into the parking lot and left. I have a strong right, but not strong enough to do any lasting damage to Willis.”
“You a boxer?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“I’ve known him for ten or fifteen years, and he’s always getting into fights, but I’ve never heard of him getting KOed before,” she said. “Anyway, here’s the phone, if you want to call your lawyer.”
“What time is it?” I asked. My watch was missing. It wasn’t expensive, I wasn’t worried. It may have popped off when I hit Willis. I’m left-handed, so I wear my watch on my right hand.
“12:15,” she said.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” I said. This confused her.
“This is your opportunity to call your lawyer,” she said.
“It’s late,” I said. “I don’t want to wake anyone.”
“You’re not going to get him,” she said. “You’re going to get an answering service or one of those machines.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t really want to call my lawyer,” I said.
“You said you had one,” she said, with rising exasperation.
“I do, but I don’t want to call him.”
“Who do you want to call?” she asked.
“My geometry teacher.”
“All right, asshole, that’s it. You’re spending the night in jail, you meet with the p.d. at eight thirty, arraigned at ten.”
“I don’t want a p.d.”
“Good night.”
And so I was led down to the jail by someone else in a sheriff’s uniform. It was after lights out, so I slept in a tiny little closet next to the drunk tank. An odiferous experience.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Chapter 7: All Drifters End Up In Jail Eventually
I wanted to stop in on the Hixson Lanes. I really can’t say why. It may be the beginnings of an egotism. They were always nice to me there. I’d been there maybe six or seven times over the last year, so the regulars knew me. I couldn’t make much money there, but it was a nice place to go. So I went back.
Bowling alleys always seem like home. They’re all laid out the same. Off to the right from the main entrance is a bar/diner, and behind that is the pool table, sometimes two or three. There was just one at the Hixson Lanes, a fifty cent per game table with very few cues on the wall. When I walked in, everyone stood up. They apparently remembered the night I’d played Donnie/Hank. The two young community college students playing nine ball stood up, as if at attention, the heels of their cue-sticks resting on the floor.
This was a little weird. I don’t usually go back to places too much, so I’m not used to being recognized. Even still, as I looked around, they started to look familiar. Last time I’d been there the best player had been a blonde kid about my age named Donnie. Or was it Hank? He wasn’t there. But Ford was there, at the bar, drinking some kind of pint, and Walt, whom Donnie/Hank had said owned the place, was waiting his turn to play pool. They all seemed to be looking at me expectantly. It was weird. I took the stool next to Ford.
“Hey. Ford, right?” I said.
”Um, yes. I must admit I don’t remember having the pleasure of meeting you before,” he said.
“It was right here, several months ago. You’d misunderstood the neon sign for Jax beer, which now seems to be gone, as an ad for something you referred to as Janks’s spirit.”
“Yes. Janx Spirit,” he said. “Sorry for having forgotten.” He was English, but I had no idea where from. I could tell South Georgia from North Alabama from West Tennessee without thinking, but toff and Cockney were vaguely different variants of a local dialect to me.
“So what do you do for a living?” I asked.
“I write a sort of travel review,” he said. “Look, are you the pool player they talk about here?”
“I don’t know. I play pool.”
“I think you’re the one who beat Hank, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Well, last time I was here, there was a guy who was running the locals named Hank, although he later told me his name was really Donnie. I bought a game and beat him three times, I think. He was pretty good.”
“Okay,” said Ford, “These guys thought Hank was the best ever. Then you came in and beat him without much effort. Then for the next months or so, they thought he was vulnerable in a way that they’d never thought of before, but he still won every game. Then he disappeared. They think all of this has to do with the man who beat Hank three games straight.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.”
“So I imagine they want you to play,” he said.
“This ain’t right,” I said.
“How so?”
“I generally try to make money when I play pool, and this will be difficult here. Plus, its almost like they were waiting on me or something. And Hank/Donnie just went off to college. I didn’t kill him or anything.”
“Ah. Nevertheless, they’ve recognized you.”
A short, gaunt man with short dark hair and a grizzled beard took the stool next to me. Ford said hello.
“I’m Henry,” I said, extending my hand. “And you are?”
“Δίδιμασ,” he said.
“Excuse me?’
“I’m sorry, Thomas.”
“Hello, Thomas. Ford is encouraging me to play pool.”
“Yes, well, Ford knows these people better than I do. I’m just passing through.”
“As am I,” said Ford. “I thought I was just passing through here, but have been stranded here for several years.”
“Okay, guys, I’m going to go play pool, but they’re all acting kind of funny so if I get a bad vibe I’m going to bail. If I fail to say good night, no harm intended.”
I went down the step from the bar area to the pool table. It contained the pool table and three or four pinball machines, which no one was playing. I had meant to ease myself into their afternoon, but when I got to the pool table, a new game of nine ball was racked up. A kid handed me a cue.
“This is the one you played with last time,” he said. I looked at the tip. Still pretty flat.
“Okay,” I said. “Chalk?” He handed me one. “So I’m playing?” I asked the group. Everybody nodded.
“I like to play for money,” I said. “Dollar a ball?”
There was some shuffling of feet, then Walt spoke up. “We were thinking ten bucks a game,”
“Okay, but you realize that, since this is nine-ball, you’re actually raising the stakes on me by going to ten bucks a rack?”
“Yeah, but we just figured if we bet it this way we couldn’t be taken to the cleaners.”
“Really, I don’t argue against self-interest, but I promise you that sometime in the future you’re going to realize this was a slightly foolish decision. Lag?”
We lagged, I won, I broke, and I won seven straight. The next up was Walt. The owner of the bowling alley. He was a medium-sized forty-five year old wearing a button-down flannel shirt and khakis. He was smoking a Lucky Strike and had a moustache. The table was clear, except for the cue ball.
One way to test if a table is level and even is to place the cue ball on the cue spot hit it medium solid straight center with top right English. If the table’s right, the cue ball will pocket in the top right. I set the cue ball on the cue mark and tapped it top right. It sailed right into the pocket. True table.
“So tell me how to play pool,” Walt said. Everyone was still very attentive. Odd question,
“What?”
“Tell me how to play pool,” he said. “What makes you so good? All of us in here, except for Ford and Thomas, we play pool all the time. And you’re better than all of us. Why is that?”
How do you answer that?
“Okay, well, I have to say, that’s a complicated question.”
This had never happened before. Flattering, so dangerous.
I wasn’t so reluctant about answering, and not so hesitant about being truthful, which was odd. I’m a guarded guy. But what to say?
“Okay, I’m not much of a teacher. I just started off playing when I was young. Nine, I think, and I played every chance I got. So I got good.” I kind of looked around. Everyone seemed very interested in what I might say next. I just didn’t like this, yet I kept playing to it. It was quiet, amidst the cigarette smoke, so I spoke.
“I’d play sometimes eighty or ninety hours a week when I was a kid. Plus, for the last year or so, I’ve been wandering around playing for money. When you play for money, you think, ‘what do I need to do to win?’ It’s a different way of thinking.”
“What do you do to win?” someone asked.
I paused. This was odd. “Look, I’m really not much of a teacher, but pool is all about straight lines. Just pay attention to those lines. Money is something else. When you look at the table, just look at the lines. When you think about two balls colliding, the one that’s struck is going to move in a direction described by a line drawn between their two center points.” Unfortunately, they all looked baffled. I was telling them something they all knew, intuitively, but as soon as I said it they didn’t recognize it. People are strange. Or maybe I’m a bad teacher.
Everybody looked at me expectantly. They were waiting for something.
“Think about it, if you’re going to play,” I said. “When you knock one ball into another, they’ll always bounce the same way. Every time. Think about that. You’ll realize you understand it. Once you articulate—can explain it, you’ll all play better. Also, listen to guys who play better than you. Even if they’re assholes. Any time somebody beats you, you have something to learn from that guy.”
They all looked deeply distressed.
“Look, if you want to win, you have to think about how the balls are going to bounce. Once you figure out how it works, you just have to practice. Here. Watch.”
The six was just in front of the side pocket, and the cue ball was on the rail by the corner on the same side. I tapped the cue ball and it rolled softly on down to the six and took a wafer-thin slice off of it, sinking it in the side pocket. It fell in like it was going to bed after a long day. It was only barely possible to have made that shot, but it worked, like they almost always do. The table likes me. Egotistical, I know. But true. All the Hixson boys looked at the pocket. They knew they’d seen a display.
They were all expecting something next. What to do? Do it again
“Okay, look,” I said. “If that six ball had been just a half inch further down the table, I couldn’t have made that shot. So I wouldn’t have tried it.”
“What woulda you did?” asked a great big black guy.
“I don’t know. Set it up.” The big guy—maybe six four and big all over—put the cue ball back on the rail and the six a little too far past the side pocket think about rolling it in over there. “That it?” I asked.
“Yeah. Get that done,” he said.
It didn’t take much thought. I lined up and rocketed the six into the far corner with enough backspin that the cue ball came back close to the rail. Then I shot the seven, eight, and nine in succession, each time bringing the ball back to that same rail. Okay, so I was showing off.
“What else? There was a pause. They all took drags off their cigarettes.
“You never lose a bet,” said Walter.
“Not true,” I said. “I don’t lose many, but I lose some.”
“Okay, I’m curious about two things, then,” said Walter. “When do you lose, and how is it you win so often?” Practice is the answer, but he doesn’t want to hear that.
“Well, I lose when there’s not a shot on the board. That doesn’t happen much, but it does. Most players you meet in bars and bowling alleys don’t talk about table scratch rules before a game starts, but there are rules. If the six is the next ball on the table, you gotta hit that six ball first. If somebody tries to take a thin slice off the six and misses, that’s a table scratch, and I should get to place the cue ball wherever I want above the cue spot. But I never know what’s going to happen. Some people know the rules and some people don’t. If you’re in Wadley and the guy you’re playing doesn’t understand the table scratch rule and he has friends there, best let it go.”
“What’s Wadley?” asked a short guy at the bar.”
“A little town in Alabama,” I said.
“Cain’t you just talk about the rules before you play?” asked a round guy with a red beard to my left.”
“If you ask about table scratch rules before the game, everybody knows you know what you’re doing and the betting will be light. Better to leave it alone and take the risk. When it comes up, waste a shot, waste a turn.”
Long pause. It was fun to be listened to, but I wasn’t sure I knew what I was talking about. I could play, but wasn’t sure I could tell anybody else how. It was the hours playing that gave you confidence. What to say?
“I also lose when there’s no shot on the board,” I said. “If the next ball you’re supposed to sink is the three, and the it’s surrounded by a cloud of higher balls, it’s tough. If you don’t have a shot, there’s not much you can do.”
By this point, I should have shut up. I’m not sure I believe what I’m saying any more. These people want to learn, and I know more than they do, so I’m talking. They’re taking it in, but I’m not sure I have much to teach. I can play, but I learned from practice. To learn, they’ll have to practice, but what they want is an insight that will short-cut the practice, and it’s not there. So I should shut up.
“If I’m playing against somebody good he can beat me if there’s no shot on the board to get to the next ball. I have to take a shot, and will probably fuck myself by doing so. If there’s no shot on the board, rearranging the balls on the table is doing my opponent a favor. Of course, that happens the other way around once or twice a night, too, and that’s a lot of fun.” I was rambling. “You only run into this when the break doesn’t go well, and I generally win the lag, so breaks almost always go well for me. I’ve played against guys who could chip away at a break, and rather than sending the balls helter-skelter, they send one ball in somewhere with each shot. It’s pretty to watch, but I almost always beat them. I’ve never seen anyone who can reliably run the table that way, and if you can really play, the chaos of a real break is a lot of fun.”
A long pause.
“So why do you win so often?” Walter asked.
“Mainly practice,” I said. “This is my job. You run a bowling alley. Everybody else here has a job. Me, I play pool. That’s all I did since I was nine. Six, eight, ten hours a day. If you practiced at it that long, you’d be able to beat me. I don’t know—it may be that some people can’t see the lines or understand the physics and so they wouldn’t get to be good, but really, the mechanics are pretty simple. Angle of incidence equals angle of refraction. Preservation of inertia. That kind of stuff.”
“Betting,” said Walt.
“There are some funny things about that, I said.”
I was practicing lagging as I talked. I’d lagged hundreds of thousands of times before. Alone, in a pool hall, in a church basement, to start a game. Over and over and over. There’s something extremely satisfying about a lag. The smooth green felt. The crisp yet soft rails. The ball kicks back from the far rail and how close can you get it to the near rail? I was good at it, and as I shot those lags none were more than a half inch from the near rail, none hit it, and most were within a quarter inch. The locals were noticing. And yes, I was showing off. I have a good lag stroke.
“Okay,” I said. “To bet, just think about what you’re doing. So you have to have practiced to the point that you’re confident that it’s more likely than not that you’re going to make the shot when you take it. If you haven’t gotten to that point, you shouldn’t be betting. If you are at that point, start betting and see if you win or lose. If you lose, stop betting and practice more. Once you’ve practiced to the point that you’re confident you’re going to make most of your shots, there’s another thing you have to learn, and I’m not sure I can explain it.” I thought for a minute.
“What kind of thing?” Walt asked.
“Hang on, I’ll get it in a minute,” I said. I’m not very articulate. At this point in my life I didn’t really think much about things I was doing, I just did them. Intuition and common sense and a good pool game. So it really did take a minute. “Okay, look,” I said. “About gambling, most people don’t want to lose more than they want to win. They don't want to make a mistake. They’ll make stupid shots to avoid doing something that they think might look like a mistake. They won't take obvious shots for fear of screwing up. If there’s an easy shot they’re unsure of, they’ll make a terribly hard shot instead, so that their buddies will say “Well, that was a hard shot, I can see why he didn’t make it.” That’s really stupid. Always take the easier shot. Or people will pass up the shot they should make in favor of taking one that won’t do them any good but has less risk of failure. If the shot is on the board that will win the game for them, they won’t take it if there’s another shot that they can’t screw up. It’s stupid, but almost all amateur gamblers are like that, and it’s … inexplicable.”
“And professional gamblers aren’t like that?” somebody asked.
“Gack, no,” I said. “To make a living at it, you have to succeed. If your fundamentals aren’t sound, you can’t.”
There was a pause.
“Gentlemen, I must take my leave,” said Thomas, still sitting on the barstool next to Ford.
“Alas,” I said. “Your bed time?”
“No,” said Thomas. “I’ve been having premonitions that something bad is about to happen here, so I think it best if I go elsewhere. Good night. This was an interesting evening. I want you to think about right and wrong.”
“Okay,” I said. “See you around.” Odd guy. Right and wrong?
“Oh, yes,” he said. He smiled and left. Funny accent.
“Okay, so I’m about done,” I said. Long pause. Lots of drags off of cigarettes.
“I think I can beat you,” said a short-ish, attractive young woman with a highlighted shag hair-do.
“In any given game, anybody can,” I said. “Probability is like that.”
“Yeah, but I play these guys all the time, and some of them are really good. And I almost never lose.”
“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” I said, extending my hand.
Nobody seemed to know what to do.
“Um, that’s Rosie,” said Ford, from the bar. “Actually, I think her real name is Melissa, but they call her Rosie because she’s a riveter by trade.”
“Pleased to meet you Melissa,” I said, re-extending my hand. She stepped forward into the light, and I saw an extremely attractive red-head with flawless white skin. Petite and slender but with fulsome curves. She shook my hand and gave me an electric smile. A few of her teeth were a little out of alignment but somehow that added to the charm. Absolutely beautiful.
“And Rosie’s my girl, so don’t be getting’ any ideas,” said a big man in the back. Maybe 6’4”. Not mean-looking, but a guy who likes to fight. Fuck. And his girlfriend wants to play.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr.— ”
“Reed. Willis Reed.”
“Okay, I said, looking towards Melissa. Do you want to wager, or just play?”
“Oh, no. Let’s play for money. We generally play for a dollar a ball.”
“Okay. Nine ball?” I asked.
“I don’t think I know that one,” she said. “I generally play eight ball.”
Not knowing nine ball in a bowling alley is a little like not knowing cars in a parking lot.
“Okay. People play eight ball different,” I said. “What are your rules?”
“I don’t know,” said Melissa. “We always play it the same.”
“Do you lag?”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“Who breaks?”
“Well, ladies first, of course.” Of course.
“If you’re first person to get a ball in, do you call whether you’re going stripes or solids, or are you stuck with the first one that goes in?”
“Why wouldn’t you go with the one you already sunk?” she asked.
“People are strange. Do you have to call your shots?”
“Only on the eight,” she said.
“And if you get the eight accidentally, before the end?” I asked.
“You lose.”
“Scratch on the eight?” I asked.
“You lose.”
“Rack ‘em up.” I expected she’d do the honors since I had the table, but no. Willis stepped forward, plunked fifty cents into the slots and racked all fifteen balls. I wasn’t used to playing with all the balls on the table, but she had the break. Ladies first.
She had a decent break, but more importantly, it was immediately apparent why she’d been winning all those games. When she bent over the pool table, it was quite a view, and everybody present except Willis seemed to be aware of it. As she lined up her shots, all eyes were on her neckline, except for Willis, who seemed to think she had an uncanny ability with pool, and was surprised and disappointed each time she missed a shot, which she often did. Everybody else was looking at the third button of her blouse. Every now and then someone would look over at Willis to make sure he wasn’t noticing, but he really was focused on her game. I'm sure when they played her, they weren't concentrating at all on the game, and most wouldn't mind prolonging the game as long as possible. Guys are funny.
I noticed it, and I noticed her, but it was lost on me. I have the libido of a ninety year old man.
It takes a few turns longer for an eight ball game to shape up than a nine ball game because of all the clutter on the table, but pretty soon I was able to sink all the solids. It actually would have been easier if she’d been a little better and had gotten some of the stripes out of the way. After a few turns I had it.
“Eight ball, far corner,” I said, and rifled it in. I put on enough stop English to stop the cue ball dead in its tracks.
“Well, damn,” said Willis. “Wanna play again?”
“It’s getting a little late,” I said. Besides, Thomas had been having bad premonitions. I’d never heard anybody say anything like that before.
“She just never lost before,” said Willis. He put ten bucks on the table to cover her bet.
“I’m not easily distracted,” I said. Melissa had sat down on a bar stool near Ford. She didn’t seem to care about losing and seemed just as happy sipping on a beer.
It didn’t look like there was going to be another pool game, so the onlookers started filing away. Some settled tabs with the bartender, some just slipped off. Lots of them tipped their hats to Melissa or me as they left. I wanted to go, but big Willis was staring at the table as though something unimaginable had happened, and it seemed disrespectful to ignore that.
“Damn,” he said.
“Willis, he just wasn’t distracted by her, like most of them boys is.”
“What do you mean, distracted?” Willis asked.
“Melissa’s the prettiest girl most of these boys have ever seen, and playing against her is like a thrill. They cain’t concentrate. This boy here, he just didn’t notice.”
“I noticed,” I said. Melissa smiled at me. Are red-heads the prettiest women? “It just didn’t keep me from concentrating on the game.” The guy talking to Willis was an old man I’d heard them refer to as Smiley. An ironic nickname, as he never cracked any kind of a smile.
Willis walked back to the bar, and the bartender poured up a double or triple shot of Jack Daniel’s. He shot it back in one gulp. How often had that already happened tonight? Uh-oh.
“So you think every time Melissa’s been playing pool, these people in this bar in this bowling alley have been looking at her boobs? And while they’re looking at her boobs they can’t concentrate?’ Melissa began to frown.
There was a big plate glass window on one side of the bar. It looked out over the bowling alley parking lot. In the background, a black Chevrolet Impala rolled slowly into the gravel lot. Everyone present seemed to notice, except for Willis. Willis was focusing his keen and suddenly angry attention on Smiley, and everyone else in the bar was nervous.
“Aw, come on, Willis, don’t be like that,” said Smiley. “She’s a really pretty girl, and guys just cain’t help themselves, looking at her.”
“I’m ’o’n’ tell you what I’m ’o’n’ do,” said Willis. “I’m ’o’n’ kick yo’ ass.”
As if by mutual consent, everyone in the bar got up to leave, and walked not towards the door, but towards a rear corner of the bowling alley. A few bowlers were still rolling out their lanes, with that lovely sound the ball makes striking the pins, but none of them were paying attention to the bar. Melisa put on her jacket and gathered her purse. She kissed me on the cheek as Willis glowered and growled at Smiley. “This never goes well. He shouldn’t drink. You should follow us to the rear door. “
“Okay. In a minute,” I said. I was worried about Smiley. Melissa ran after the others.
Sure enough, after glaring and stomping back and forth for a few more seconds, Willis picked up a cue stick and pulled it back over his head like a man about to split a log with an axe, intending to bean Smiley with it and maybe crack his skull. Poor Smiley was just trying to get away and protect himself. When the cue stick was at the far back end of its arc, I grabbed the fat end with my left hand. Willis was already committed to beaning Smiley, so his motion went forward and the small end of the cue stick broke off a few inches above his hands. This had the effect of immediately changing the focus of his rage from Smiley to me. Smiley got up and ran to the back door.
“You son of a bitch,” said Willis. I punched a good right jab straight at his nose and he went straight down like a brick dropped from a kitchen window. Out like a light. I have a really strong right.
“Excuse me,” said Ford, “but I’m going to visit the restroom. They never seem to find me there. Three bits of information you could use. First, the reason everyone ran away is that the black car that pulled into the car park a few minutes ago may belong to Willis’ father, Walter. Willis frequents this pub, and has a certain predilection for trouble, so his father checks in on him from time to time. Second, Walter is a captain with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department. Third, he generally blames the people with whom Willis has his fights. I’m sure you can sort it out from here. I’m in keen need of a loo.” Ford walked off.
I could see Capt. Reed at the front door. He stopped to talk to someone. I grabbed a chalk and stepped over to the nearest booth. I stood on the seat, then reached up and lifted a corner on one of the acoustic panels in the dropped ceiling, then slipped my wallet into the space. I marked the panel I’d lifted with a blue chalk mark and stepped back down. Capt. Reed walked into the bar just as I got back down, and he noticed me for the first time. “Where is everybody?” he asked. His son was sleeping peacefully on the other side of the pool table and wasn't visible to Capt. Reed.
“Gone on home, I guess,” I answered. “Where I’m going to,” I said, and headed for the front door.
I took my leave and had almost made it to the front door when he shouted out “stop that son of a bitch” and I was surrounded by bowlers.
Oh well.
And so did I come to be a resident of the Hamilton County Jail.
It would have been much worse had I not stashed my wallet.
Bowling alleys always seem like home. They’re all laid out the same. Off to the right from the main entrance is a bar/diner, and behind that is the pool table, sometimes two or three. There was just one at the Hixson Lanes, a fifty cent per game table with very few cues on the wall. When I walked in, everyone stood up. They apparently remembered the night I’d played Donnie/Hank. The two young community college students playing nine ball stood up, as if at attention, the heels of their cue-sticks resting on the floor.
This was a little weird. I don’t usually go back to places too much, so I’m not used to being recognized. Even still, as I looked around, they started to look familiar. Last time I’d been there the best player had been a blonde kid about my age named Donnie. Or was it Hank? He wasn’t there. But Ford was there, at the bar, drinking some kind of pint, and Walt, whom Donnie/Hank had said owned the place, was waiting his turn to play pool. They all seemed to be looking at me expectantly. It was weird. I took the stool next to Ford.
“Hey. Ford, right?” I said.
”Um, yes. I must admit I don’t remember having the pleasure of meeting you before,” he said.
“It was right here, several months ago. You’d misunderstood the neon sign for Jax beer, which now seems to be gone, as an ad for something you referred to as Janks’s spirit.”
“Yes. Janx Spirit,” he said. “Sorry for having forgotten.” He was English, but I had no idea where from. I could tell South Georgia from North Alabama from West Tennessee without thinking, but toff and Cockney were vaguely different variants of a local dialect to me.
“So what do you do for a living?” I asked.
“I write a sort of travel review,” he said. “Look, are you the pool player they talk about here?”
“I don’t know. I play pool.”
“I think you’re the one who beat Hank, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Well, last time I was here, there was a guy who was running the locals named Hank, although he later told me his name was really Donnie. I bought a game and beat him three times, I think. He was pretty good.”
“Okay,” said Ford, “These guys thought Hank was the best ever. Then you came in and beat him without much effort. Then for the next months or so, they thought he was vulnerable in a way that they’d never thought of before, but he still won every game. Then he disappeared. They think all of this has to do with the man who beat Hank three games straight.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.”
“So I imagine they want you to play,” he said.
“This ain’t right,” I said.
“How so?”
“I generally try to make money when I play pool, and this will be difficult here. Plus, its almost like they were waiting on me or something. And Hank/Donnie just went off to college. I didn’t kill him or anything.”
“Ah. Nevertheless, they’ve recognized you.”
A short, gaunt man with short dark hair and a grizzled beard took the stool next to me. Ford said hello.
“I’m Henry,” I said, extending my hand. “And you are?”
“Δίδιμασ,” he said.
“Excuse me?’
“I’m sorry, Thomas.”
“Hello, Thomas. Ford is encouraging me to play pool.”
“Yes, well, Ford knows these people better than I do. I’m just passing through.”
“As am I,” said Ford. “I thought I was just passing through here, but have been stranded here for several years.”
“Okay, guys, I’m going to go play pool, but they’re all acting kind of funny so if I get a bad vibe I’m going to bail. If I fail to say good night, no harm intended.”
I went down the step from the bar area to the pool table. It contained the pool table and three or four pinball machines, which no one was playing. I had meant to ease myself into their afternoon, but when I got to the pool table, a new game of nine ball was racked up. A kid handed me a cue.
“This is the one you played with last time,” he said. I looked at the tip. Still pretty flat.
“Okay,” I said. “Chalk?” He handed me one. “So I’m playing?” I asked the group. Everybody nodded.
“I like to play for money,” I said. “Dollar a ball?”
There was some shuffling of feet, then Walt spoke up. “We were thinking ten bucks a game,”
“Okay, but you realize that, since this is nine-ball, you’re actually raising the stakes on me by going to ten bucks a rack?”
“Yeah, but we just figured if we bet it this way we couldn’t be taken to the cleaners.”
“Really, I don’t argue against self-interest, but I promise you that sometime in the future you’re going to realize this was a slightly foolish decision. Lag?”
We lagged, I won, I broke, and I won seven straight. The next up was Walt. The owner of the bowling alley. He was a medium-sized forty-five year old wearing a button-down flannel shirt and khakis. He was smoking a Lucky Strike and had a moustache. The table was clear, except for the cue ball.
One way to test if a table is level and even is to place the cue ball on the cue spot hit it medium solid straight center with top right English. If the table’s right, the cue ball will pocket in the top right. I set the cue ball on the cue mark and tapped it top right. It sailed right into the pocket. True table.
“So tell me how to play pool,” Walt said. Everyone was still very attentive. Odd question,
“What?”
“Tell me how to play pool,” he said. “What makes you so good? All of us in here, except for Ford and Thomas, we play pool all the time. And you’re better than all of us. Why is that?”
How do you answer that?
“Okay, well, I have to say, that’s a complicated question.”
This had never happened before. Flattering, so dangerous.
I wasn’t so reluctant about answering, and not so hesitant about being truthful, which was odd. I’m a guarded guy. But what to say?
“Okay, I’m not much of a teacher. I just started off playing when I was young. Nine, I think, and I played every chance I got. So I got good.” I kind of looked around. Everyone seemed very interested in what I might say next. I just didn’t like this, yet I kept playing to it. It was quiet, amidst the cigarette smoke, so I spoke.
“I’d play sometimes eighty or ninety hours a week when I was a kid. Plus, for the last year or so, I’ve been wandering around playing for money. When you play for money, you think, ‘what do I need to do to win?’ It’s a different way of thinking.”
“What do you do to win?” someone asked.
I paused. This was odd. “Look, I’m really not much of a teacher, but pool is all about straight lines. Just pay attention to those lines. Money is something else. When you look at the table, just look at the lines. When you think about two balls colliding, the one that’s struck is going to move in a direction described by a line drawn between their two center points.” Unfortunately, they all looked baffled. I was telling them something they all knew, intuitively, but as soon as I said it they didn’t recognize it. People are strange. Or maybe I’m a bad teacher.
Everybody looked at me expectantly. They were waiting for something.
“Think about it, if you’re going to play,” I said. “When you knock one ball into another, they’ll always bounce the same way. Every time. Think about that. You’ll realize you understand it. Once you articulate—can explain it, you’ll all play better. Also, listen to guys who play better than you. Even if they’re assholes. Any time somebody beats you, you have something to learn from that guy.”
They all looked deeply distressed.
“Look, if you want to win, you have to think about how the balls are going to bounce. Once you figure out how it works, you just have to practice. Here. Watch.”
The six was just in front of the side pocket, and the cue ball was on the rail by the corner on the same side. I tapped the cue ball and it rolled softly on down to the six and took a wafer-thin slice off of it, sinking it in the side pocket. It fell in like it was going to bed after a long day. It was only barely possible to have made that shot, but it worked, like they almost always do. The table likes me. Egotistical, I know. But true. All the Hixson boys looked at the pocket. They knew they’d seen a display.
They were all expecting something next. What to do? Do it again
“Okay, look,” I said. “If that six ball had been just a half inch further down the table, I couldn’t have made that shot. So I wouldn’t have tried it.”
“What woulda you did?” asked a great big black guy.
“I don’t know. Set it up.” The big guy—maybe six four and big all over—put the cue ball back on the rail and the six a little too far past the side pocket think about rolling it in over there. “That it?” I asked.
“Yeah. Get that done,” he said.
It didn’t take much thought. I lined up and rocketed the six into the far corner with enough backspin that the cue ball came back close to the rail. Then I shot the seven, eight, and nine in succession, each time bringing the ball back to that same rail. Okay, so I was showing off.
“What else? There was a pause. They all took drags off their cigarettes.
“You never lose a bet,” said Walter.
“Not true,” I said. “I don’t lose many, but I lose some.”
“Okay, I’m curious about two things, then,” said Walter. “When do you lose, and how is it you win so often?” Practice is the answer, but he doesn’t want to hear that.
“Well, I lose when there’s not a shot on the board. That doesn’t happen much, but it does. Most players you meet in bars and bowling alleys don’t talk about table scratch rules before a game starts, but there are rules. If the six is the next ball on the table, you gotta hit that six ball first. If somebody tries to take a thin slice off the six and misses, that’s a table scratch, and I should get to place the cue ball wherever I want above the cue spot. But I never know what’s going to happen. Some people know the rules and some people don’t. If you’re in Wadley and the guy you’re playing doesn’t understand the table scratch rule and he has friends there, best let it go.”
“What’s Wadley?” asked a short guy at the bar.”
“A little town in Alabama,” I said.
“Cain’t you just talk about the rules before you play?” asked a round guy with a red beard to my left.”
“If you ask about table scratch rules before the game, everybody knows you know what you’re doing and the betting will be light. Better to leave it alone and take the risk. When it comes up, waste a shot, waste a turn.”
Long pause. It was fun to be listened to, but I wasn’t sure I knew what I was talking about. I could play, but wasn’t sure I could tell anybody else how. It was the hours playing that gave you confidence. What to say?
“I also lose when there’s no shot on the board,” I said. “If the next ball you’re supposed to sink is the three, and the it’s surrounded by a cloud of higher balls, it’s tough. If you don’t have a shot, there’s not much you can do.”
By this point, I should have shut up. I’m not sure I believe what I’m saying any more. These people want to learn, and I know more than they do, so I’m talking. They’re taking it in, but I’m not sure I have much to teach. I can play, but I learned from practice. To learn, they’ll have to practice, but what they want is an insight that will short-cut the practice, and it’s not there. So I should shut up.
“If I’m playing against somebody good he can beat me if there’s no shot on the board to get to the next ball. I have to take a shot, and will probably fuck myself by doing so. If there’s no shot on the board, rearranging the balls on the table is doing my opponent a favor. Of course, that happens the other way around once or twice a night, too, and that’s a lot of fun.” I was rambling. “You only run into this when the break doesn’t go well, and I generally win the lag, so breaks almost always go well for me. I’ve played against guys who could chip away at a break, and rather than sending the balls helter-skelter, they send one ball in somewhere with each shot. It’s pretty to watch, but I almost always beat them. I’ve never seen anyone who can reliably run the table that way, and if you can really play, the chaos of a real break is a lot of fun.”
A long pause.
“So why do you win so often?” Walter asked.
“Mainly practice,” I said. “This is my job. You run a bowling alley. Everybody else here has a job. Me, I play pool. That’s all I did since I was nine. Six, eight, ten hours a day. If you practiced at it that long, you’d be able to beat me. I don’t know—it may be that some people can’t see the lines or understand the physics and so they wouldn’t get to be good, but really, the mechanics are pretty simple. Angle of incidence equals angle of refraction. Preservation of inertia. That kind of stuff.”
“Betting,” said Walt.
“There are some funny things about that, I said.”
I was practicing lagging as I talked. I’d lagged hundreds of thousands of times before. Alone, in a pool hall, in a church basement, to start a game. Over and over and over. There’s something extremely satisfying about a lag. The smooth green felt. The crisp yet soft rails. The ball kicks back from the far rail and how close can you get it to the near rail? I was good at it, and as I shot those lags none were more than a half inch from the near rail, none hit it, and most were within a quarter inch. The locals were noticing. And yes, I was showing off. I have a good lag stroke.
“Okay,” I said. “To bet, just think about what you’re doing. So you have to have practiced to the point that you’re confident that it’s more likely than not that you’re going to make the shot when you take it. If you haven’t gotten to that point, you shouldn’t be betting. If you are at that point, start betting and see if you win or lose. If you lose, stop betting and practice more. Once you’ve practiced to the point that you’re confident you’re going to make most of your shots, there’s another thing you have to learn, and I’m not sure I can explain it.” I thought for a minute.
“What kind of thing?” Walt asked.
“Hang on, I’ll get it in a minute,” I said. I’m not very articulate. At this point in my life I didn’t really think much about things I was doing, I just did them. Intuition and common sense and a good pool game. So it really did take a minute. “Okay, look,” I said. “About gambling, most people don’t want to lose more than they want to win. They don't want to make a mistake. They’ll make stupid shots to avoid doing something that they think might look like a mistake. They won't take obvious shots for fear of screwing up. If there’s an easy shot they’re unsure of, they’ll make a terribly hard shot instead, so that their buddies will say “Well, that was a hard shot, I can see why he didn’t make it.” That’s really stupid. Always take the easier shot. Or people will pass up the shot they should make in favor of taking one that won’t do them any good but has less risk of failure. If the shot is on the board that will win the game for them, they won’t take it if there’s another shot that they can’t screw up. It’s stupid, but almost all amateur gamblers are like that, and it’s … inexplicable.”
“And professional gamblers aren’t like that?” somebody asked.
“Gack, no,” I said. “To make a living at it, you have to succeed. If your fundamentals aren’t sound, you can’t.”
There was a pause.
“Gentlemen, I must take my leave,” said Thomas, still sitting on the barstool next to Ford.
“Alas,” I said. “Your bed time?”
“No,” said Thomas. “I’ve been having premonitions that something bad is about to happen here, so I think it best if I go elsewhere. Good night. This was an interesting evening. I want you to think about right and wrong.”
“Okay,” I said. “See you around.” Odd guy. Right and wrong?
“Oh, yes,” he said. He smiled and left. Funny accent.
“Okay, so I’m about done,” I said. Long pause. Lots of drags off of cigarettes.
“I think I can beat you,” said a short-ish, attractive young woman with a highlighted shag hair-do.
“In any given game, anybody can,” I said. “Probability is like that.”
“Yeah, but I play these guys all the time, and some of them are really good. And I almost never lose.”
“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” I said, extending my hand.
Nobody seemed to know what to do.
“Um, that’s Rosie,” said Ford, from the bar. “Actually, I think her real name is Melissa, but they call her Rosie because she’s a riveter by trade.”
“Pleased to meet you Melissa,” I said, re-extending my hand. She stepped forward into the light, and I saw an extremely attractive red-head with flawless white skin. Petite and slender but with fulsome curves. She shook my hand and gave me an electric smile. A few of her teeth were a little out of alignment but somehow that added to the charm. Absolutely beautiful.
“And Rosie’s my girl, so don’t be getting’ any ideas,” said a big man in the back. Maybe 6’4”. Not mean-looking, but a guy who likes to fight. Fuck. And his girlfriend wants to play.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr.— ”
“Reed. Willis Reed.”
“Okay, I said, looking towards Melissa. Do you want to wager, or just play?”
“Oh, no. Let’s play for money. We generally play for a dollar a ball.”
“Okay. Nine ball?” I asked.
“I don’t think I know that one,” she said. “I generally play eight ball.”
Not knowing nine ball in a bowling alley is a little like not knowing cars in a parking lot.
“Okay. People play eight ball different,” I said. “What are your rules?”
“I don’t know,” said Melissa. “We always play it the same.”
“Do you lag?”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“Who breaks?”
“Well, ladies first, of course.” Of course.
“If you’re first person to get a ball in, do you call whether you’re going stripes or solids, or are you stuck with the first one that goes in?”
“Why wouldn’t you go with the one you already sunk?” she asked.
“People are strange. Do you have to call your shots?”
“Only on the eight,” she said.
“And if you get the eight accidentally, before the end?” I asked.
“You lose.”
“Scratch on the eight?” I asked.
“You lose.”
“Rack ‘em up.” I expected she’d do the honors since I had the table, but no. Willis stepped forward, plunked fifty cents into the slots and racked all fifteen balls. I wasn’t used to playing with all the balls on the table, but she had the break. Ladies first.
She had a decent break, but more importantly, it was immediately apparent why she’d been winning all those games. When she bent over the pool table, it was quite a view, and everybody present except Willis seemed to be aware of it. As she lined up her shots, all eyes were on her neckline, except for Willis, who seemed to think she had an uncanny ability with pool, and was surprised and disappointed each time she missed a shot, which she often did. Everybody else was looking at the third button of her blouse. Every now and then someone would look over at Willis to make sure he wasn’t noticing, but he really was focused on her game. I'm sure when they played her, they weren't concentrating at all on the game, and most wouldn't mind prolonging the game as long as possible. Guys are funny.
I noticed it, and I noticed her, but it was lost on me. I have the libido of a ninety year old man.
It takes a few turns longer for an eight ball game to shape up than a nine ball game because of all the clutter on the table, but pretty soon I was able to sink all the solids. It actually would have been easier if she’d been a little better and had gotten some of the stripes out of the way. After a few turns I had it.
“Eight ball, far corner,” I said, and rifled it in. I put on enough stop English to stop the cue ball dead in its tracks.
“Well, damn,” said Willis. “Wanna play again?”
“It’s getting a little late,” I said. Besides, Thomas had been having bad premonitions. I’d never heard anybody say anything like that before.
“She just never lost before,” said Willis. He put ten bucks on the table to cover her bet.
“I’m not easily distracted,” I said. Melissa had sat down on a bar stool near Ford. She didn’t seem to care about losing and seemed just as happy sipping on a beer.
It didn’t look like there was going to be another pool game, so the onlookers started filing away. Some settled tabs with the bartender, some just slipped off. Lots of them tipped their hats to Melissa or me as they left. I wanted to go, but big Willis was staring at the table as though something unimaginable had happened, and it seemed disrespectful to ignore that.
“Damn,” he said.
“Willis, he just wasn’t distracted by her, like most of them boys is.”
“What do you mean, distracted?” Willis asked.
“Melissa’s the prettiest girl most of these boys have ever seen, and playing against her is like a thrill. They cain’t concentrate. This boy here, he just didn’t notice.”
“I noticed,” I said. Melissa smiled at me. Are red-heads the prettiest women? “It just didn’t keep me from concentrating on the game.” The guy talking to Willis was an old man I’d heard them refer to as Smiley. An ironic nickname, as he never cracked any kind of a smile.
Willis walked back to the bar, and the bartender poured up a double or triple shot of Jack Daniel’s. He shot it back in one gulp. How often had that already happened tonight? Uh-oh.
“So you think every time Melissa’s been playing pool, these people in this bar in this bowling alley have been looking at her boobs? And while they’re looking at her boobs they can’t concentrate?’ Melissa began to frown.
There was a big plate glass window on one side of the bar. It looked out over the bowling alley parking lot. In the background, a black Chevrolet Impala rolled slowly into the gravel lot. Everyone present seemed to notice, except for Willis. Willis was focusing his keen and suddenly angry attention on Smiley, and everyone else in the bar was nervous.
“Aw, come on, Willis, don’t be like that,” said Smiley. “She’s a really pretty girl, and guys just cain’t help themselves, looking at her.”
“I’m ’o’n’ tell you what I’m ’o’n’ do,” said Willis. “I’m ’o’n’ kick yo’ ass.”
As if by mutual consent, everyone in the bar got up to leave, and walked not towards the door, but towards a rear corner of the bowling alley. A few bowlers were still rolling out their lanes, with that lovely sound the ball makes striking the pins, but none of them were paying attention to the bar. Melisa put on her jacket and gathered her purse. She kissed me on the cheek as Willis glowered and growled at Smiley. “This never goes well. He shouldn’t drink. You should follow us to the rear door. “
“Okay. In a minute,” I said. I was worried about Smiley. Melissa ran after the others.
Sure enough, after glaring and stomping back and forth for a few more seconds, Willis picked up a cue stick and pulled it back over his head like a man about to split a log with an axe, intending to bean Smiley with it and maybe crack his skull. Poor Smiley was just trying to get away and protect himself. When the cue stick was at the far back end of its arc, I grabbed the fat end with my left hand. Willis was already committed to beaning Smiley, so his motion went forward and the small end of the cue stick broke off a few inches above his hands. This had the effect of immediately changing the focus of his rage from Smiley to me. Smiley got up and ran to the back door.
“You son of a bitch,” said Willis. I punched a good right jab straight at his nose and he went straight down like a brick dropped from a kitchen window. Out like a light. I have a really strong right.
“Excuse me,” said Ford, “but I’m going to visit the restroom. They never seem to find me there. Three bits of information you could use. First, the reason everyone ran away is that the black car that pulled into the car park a few minutes ago may belong to Willis’ father, Walter. Willis frequents this pub, and has a certain predilection for trouble, so his father checks in on him from time to time. Second, Walter is a captain with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department. Third, he generally blames the people with whom Willis has his fights. I’m sure you can sort it out from here. I’m in keen need of a loo.” Ford walked off.
I could see Capt. Reed at the front door. He stopped to talk to someone. I grabbed a chalk and stepped over to the nearest booth. I stood on the seat, then reached up and lifted a corner on one of the acoustic panels in the dropped ceiling, then slipped my wallet into the space. I marked the panel I’d lifted with a blue chalk mark and stepped back down. Capt. Reed walked into the bar just as I got back down, and he noticed me for the first time. “Where is everybody?” he asked. His son was sleeping peacefully on the other side of the pool table and wasn't visible to Capt. Reed.
“Gone on home, I guess,” I answered. “Where I’m going to,” I said, and headed for the front door.
I took my leave and had almost made it to the front door when he shouted out “stop that son of a bitch” and I was surrounded by bowlers.
Oh well.
And so did I come to be a resident of the Hamilton County Jail.
It would have been much worse had I not stashed my wallet.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Chapter 6: Lawyers who bear a slight resemblance to priests
I got back to Chattanooga in the fall. Mrs. W took me to her lawyer, a handsome short man with a good head of hair. Maybe my father’s age.
“Well I can’t do that,” he was saying. “It might be a conflict of interest.”
“I know,” she said. “Just tell me who to go to.” The lawyer looked surprised. I had gone to high school with his daughter, I think. Pretty girl.
“Oh,” he said. Not quite surprised, but her answer wasn’t what he’d expected. He paused to consider.
Mrs. W had decided several things, and she was right, as always. She had figured out that I was making money. She wanted it to get a good rate of return. The way we’d worked out of investing it, depositing it all into passbook savings, seemed to her a wasted opportunity. She wanted to invest it in other things, but to do that other documents had to be signed. I was too young to buy stocks, and even if I were old enough, my interest in money and things having to do with money was about as low as neap tides can go. I like having it and would find it extremely fretful not to have any, but I just can’t work up much of an interest in it. Wish I could. But Mrs. W could and she wanted to put my money in places where it would do me the most good. And the fact that I had no interest whatsoever in helping her do what was good for me wasn’t going to deter her from doing what was right. So she’d brought me to her lawyer, John Warmblood, knowing he couldn’t advise me about what to do, to get a recommendation from Warmblood about who I could go see about giving Mrs. W pretty much complete control over my money.
I really didn’t much care. I was a pool player who liked to play cards.
Mrs. W waited patiently while Mr. Warmblood thought through the question of who he was going to recommend I go to for advice to make sure Mrs. W wasn’t cheating me. I watched Mr. Warmblood as he thought about this and then he may have realized that Mrs. W was pretty much several steps ahead of him throughout the entire visit.
“Well, Margaret,” he said. I know that sentence continued to go somewhere else, but I didn’t really follow. I know everyone has a first name, but I’d never thought about Mrs. W’s and really didn’t like this yo-yo addressing her so familiarly. He should have respect.
Apparently he told us to go to a lawyer named Fieldey Atchling, but I didn’t hear it.
I was at his office the next day, in the afternoon. Mr. Atchling was a man in his late twenties who was wearing, against all probabilities, a Nehru suit. The Nehru suit was a fashion phenomenon of 1966 or 1967. I remember seeing Johnny Carson wearing one in one of those years. I also remember seeing a department store ad flogging them just a few months later and realizing that as soon as it had come, the Nehru suit had gone. It was a suit with a jacket that was supposed to be worn buttoned. The lapels were tuned up, in a way, and it was designed to be worn over a thin turtleneck rather than a coat and tie. It looked fine, it just didn’t catch on. So people had worn them in 1966 and 1967, and here was this lawyer wearing a black Nehru suit over a bright white turtleneck. I wanted so very much to be dismissive, but he has some sense. As I recalled, Nehru suits included bell-bottomed trousers, so I was craning my neck to see if Mr. Atchling was wearing bell-bottoms, too, but he was behind an enormous altar-like desk that hid his pants legs.
“So you’re coming to me for advice about how to structure a power of attorney so that the holder can’t cheat you, is that right?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. I wasn’t used to this kind of question. “I want Mrs. W to be able to invest my money however she sees fit, and I want you to write us up the documents that make that possible.”
“I know you don’t know me, but I actually have a role in this process,” he said, “And my role now is to advise caution.” He was leaning back in his office chair, left leg over right, figure four fashion. He looked almost like he might blow a smoke ring, only he wasn’t smoking.
“Look, Mr. Atchling, I appreciate the advice, but I just need to get some documents drawn.”
“So how much money are we talking about?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand dollars.”
“Wow. A lot of money,” he said.
“Thanks.” Where were we going with this?
“Where did it come from?” he asked.
“I made most of it playing pool. A big chunk came from playing cards in New Orleans.”
There was a pause while he thought about this. First both of his eyebrows went up, then the left one by itself, then, after it went back down, the right one by itself.
“I guess if I’m going to be giving you legal advice, I ought to advise you that gambling is illegal,” he said.
“So I’ve heard,” I said.
“It doesn’t worry you that making money by gambling might get you arrested?” he asked.
“That’s not the way it works. I’ve played thousands of pool games and hundreds of poker games. Nobody ever calls the cops. If they’re mad, they try to jump you in the street afterwards, but nobody calls the cops.”
“What do you think about that?” he asked, contemplatively
“That I want to learn more karate.”
“A very pragmatic response.” He paused for a few minutes and looked me over. “Okay. You don’t know me, but I’m a good lawyer. Actually, I don’t even know that. I’m just a lawyer who takes his position seriously. Warmblood sent you over to me because he represents Mrs. Wertheimer and you’re looking for a power of attorney that would allow her to invest your money however she sees fit. Is that about right?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“I can’t do that without talking to you about it.”
“Why not? All we want you to do is draw up a couple of documents.”
“I know, and I understand that it seems odd that I won’t just do that. But I’m not just a scribe; I’m a lawyer, so I can’t just write down what my clients want. I need to ask questions and make sure that my client is making good decisions.”
“Why? Mrs. W and I just want a service for an hourly fee.”
“The law’s not like that.”
“Why not?”
“The law is an institution. Like church. Like school. Like college. It has its rules and requirements. It plays a role in the way society and politics play themselves out. By becoming a part of that institution, I agreed to play my appointed role. And that role includes not doing anything that will traduce the system.”
“Traduce?”
“Tend to lower expectations. Degrade.”
“Okay. So what do I need to say to convince you I’m not traducing your institution?”
“Oh, answer a few questions, I think. One advantage of an established institution is that there’s always a book that tells you what questions to ask.”
“What other advantages are there?” I asked.
“Institutions change slowly, so last year’s questions are probably just as valid as this year’s questions.”
“Why is slowness to change an advantage?” I asked.
“Because everyone knows what to expect. Most people are resistant to change and the institutions around them make them feel secure. Banks. Schools. Churches. The United States Senate. All of them change slowly. If they evolved rapidly no one would know what was going to happen next, and most people wouldn’t like it.”
Why a Nehru suit?
“Okay, let’s start talking about this,” he said. “First, I need a complete name and address.”
“Henry Baida.”
“Middle name?” he asked?
“Don’t have one.”
“That’s odd.”
“My father was superstitious about numbers. His birthday was June 3, 1927, and mine was March 6, 1954. There’s some funny stuff about the number nine involved, but he wanted my name to relate to the number 72. My mom says he thought would be lucky for him and for me. He thought having middle initial would mess it up,” I said. He was the kind of guy who stuck with an idea once it lodged in his head and the fastest way to get out was to answer his questions.
“How does ‘Henry’ relate to the number 72?” he asked.
“The Greeks used their letters to express numbers. The seventh letter of the Greek alphabet looks like an H.”
“I see. And the first letter of your last name is the second letter of the Greek alphabet.”
“That’s it. Plus, my mother said I could choose a middle name at confirmation if I wanted.”
“Ah. I’m not Catholic. Is that common?” he asked.
“Well, you’re given a confirmation name, but it doesn’t stick. It’s not legal.”
“And what is yours?” he asked.
“Thomas.”
“Would you like to make it legal? It’s a very simple procedure,” he said.
“No, thank you.” I look at interactions with lawyers kind of like interactions with surgeons: I’m not a fan of elective surgery or elective lawyering either one.
Mr. Atchling was a contemplative, excruciatingly slow and thorough man, but he got everything done in one visit. He took notes in tedious detail, but at the end of it, he pulled a book off a shelf, handed it and his notes to his secretary, and a few minutes later handed me a “General Power of Attorney” giving Mrs. W authority to invest my money however she saw fit. His secretary was a notary, and came in with a seal before I signed it.
He stood up behind that great big desk and looked very seriously while the secretary and I sat in our chairs. Mrs. W had rejoined us, and looked like she was getting itchy for a cigarette. Back when she was a teacher, one day at the beginning of geometry class she had a white mark on her lipstick, and I was convinced she’d absent-mindedly tried to take a drag off of her chalk.
“Before we execute this document, Mr. Baida, I want to say before you and your attorney in fact, as well as Ms. Chat as a witness that this is a risky document to give to someone, and that as your attorney I advise you to carefully consider what you are about to do, and that if you do execute it, that you monitor and audit all of your accounts carefully.
“Did you say ‘Chat’? I asked.
“Yes,” he said, with a look that suggested that my question was vaguely irritating.
Ms. Chat smiled brightly at me. “It’s French for ‘cat’,” she said. Pretty girl. A few years older than me.
“Thanks,” said. “So where do I sign?”
We signed, Ms Chat notarized it, and I immediately handed it to Mrs. W. “Do I need another one for the bank?” she asked Mr. Atchling.
“No, don’t bother with that,” he said. “Banks, as institutions, don’t like dealing with powers of attorney. Just change the accounts into joint accounts. It will be far easier and cheaper for you, too.”
At the end of it, she had control of my money. I’m really not interested in money.
A good feeling, to be taken care of.
After we were done, we went out for a drink. She had scotch and soda, I had ice water. She enjoyed a cigarette.
“Henry, I want to thank you for trusting with all of this.”
“You’re doing me the favor. You’re doing all the work. I’m driving around playing pool.”
“I enjoy it,” she said. “I’ve also been looking into chaos theory. Are you still noticing anomalies when you play pool?” she asked.
“Not so much as a few months ago, but that could be due to several things.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“I don’t know for sure. I seem to have been visiting smaller and smaller towns the last few months. They don’t have pool halls, so it’s harder to practice alone. Usually when I play these days I’m playing against somebody else. I don’t make as many shots, so there aren’t so many chances for an observation.”
“Well, I thought chaos theory might give me a way to think about what you were talking about. I’m not sure it does that, but it still reminds me of you, in a way.”
“That whooshing noise is the sound of everything you said going over my head.” She smiled.
“There’s an MIT professor named Lorenz. He programmed his computer to create a kind of simplified climate. He has a group of I think it was twelve equations that governed things like ocean temperature and wind speed and that kind of thing, and it would print out numbers that showed what the weather was like each few hours. It fascinated everybody. They thought if they could refine the equations enough, it would be possible to make long-term weather predictions. He found something else entirely, though.” She paused to think, and looked at her cigarette in the ashtray. Teacher as she was, she was thinking of how to introduce a new concept to a student. She looked back at me. “He discovered instead that tiny differences are extremely important. He discovered that if he fed in the numbers for a starting point in the slightest bit off—say he put in an ocean temperature as .309160 instead of .309162, that within a few cycles the computer would reach a completely different result that wasn’t just a little off from the original, but completely off. It wouldn’t resemble the original at all. That wasn’t what people were expecting.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It turns out this notion we have of the law of large numbers just doesn’t apply to complex systems.”
I think I followed that. We tend to think that small variations don’t matter. She was saying they do.
“ Lorenz thought of it as being like turbulence,” she said. When a seagull flaps its wings, it creates turbulence in the air, and Lorenz came to the conclusion that the tiny bit of turbulence in the air was like the difference between .309160 and .309162.”
“So a seagull can cause a storm?” I asked.
“Sort of. No, not really. People in the years since have talked about the butterfly effect—the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Georgia can cause a hurricane in Louisiana, but that’s not really it, I don’t think. It’s an oversimplification that saps the truth out of the math. The seagull doesn’t cause the storm, but all elements of a complex system are interrelated, and billions of tiny, immeasurable forces, acting together, cause storms. A seagull alone doesn’t cause a storm, but all kinds of things that look unpredictable acting in concert do.” She took a drag off her cigarette and put it back in the ashtray. “Look at the smoke rising from my cigarette,” she said. “It rises from the coal in a steady stream but it gets to here, and the streak of smoke dissolves into a cloud. It doesn’t dissipate gradually, like a river delta or a tree branch, which is what you might expect. It gets to here and it turns into a disorganized cloud. You can see the little curlicues start to form, then almost immediately it turns into a cloud, a haze. Nothing organized about it at all.” She signaled to the bartender for another S&S. “Cutty this time,” she said.
“The seagull’s flapping wing is just one of these little curlicues in the smoke, and the cloud is the storm.”
“Okay, I said.” So can chaos theory predict the cloud? Or the storm?”
“Not exactly. What Lorenz did was to plot the divergences. It was too complex to graph the entire weather system, I think, but he found analogues in convection of heat within heated fluid cells, and I think that led him to the water wheel. There’s an old problem that Archimedes noted but didn’t understand. If you have a bucket style waterwheel, and water is introduced at the top—“
“Aren’t they all like that?” I asked.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Water coming to the wheel from the top.”
“Oh, no. That’s what a millwright would call an overshot wheel. That’s the most powerful kind of waterwheel, but also the most expensive to make, and it requires an enormous dam. They’re hard to site. Most are breast-shot wheels, where the water comes in about halfway up. If you don’t have any elevation at all at the mill site you can build what ought to be called an undershot wheel but is in fact called a tub wheel, because the mechanics of the flow are different. Anyway in ancient times people sometimes built waterwheels with actual buckets. A millwright would refer to the enclosures on a traditional waterwheel as buckets, but actually they’re blades, or paddles, constructed to capture both the weight of the water and its kinetic energy as it flows. Both then move the wheel. Back in Archimedes’ day waterwheel construction was more primitive, and sometimes waterwheels were made from actual buckets suspended from spikes driven into cart wheels at regular intervals. Everyone knew, in ancient times, that once the buckets became leaky, the waterwheel would sometimes reverse itself for no good reason. The Greeks and Romans avoided this by offsetting the water source slightly to the right or left—for the wheel reversal to happen, the water source pretty much had to be top dead center.”
She shrugged. “I’m sure this must be boring.”
“Not at all. I got good grades in your classes because I was interested in everything you had to say.”
“Henry, you got good grades because you understand math unlike anyone I’ve ever taught. You also have a memory like a steel trap.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Define the trigonometric functions,” she said.
“Sine equals opposite over hypotenuse, cosine equals adjacent over hypotenuse, and tangent equals opposite over adjacent, but that’s not really a fair test of my memory.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“That born-again student teacher you had with you for second semester of trig told us this really great mnemonic device.”
“Saddle our horses, canter away happily, to our adventures?” Mrs. W asked.
“Yes ma’am. That’s it.”
“Henry, every trigonometry teacher for the last two hundred years has told her students that mnemonic device and you may be the only student I’ve ever had who remembers it.”
“Oh, Mrs. W. I’m sure most of them remember it.” Surely so. It was so easy to remember.
“Back up a minute,” she said. “You’re referring to Miss Coombs, I expect. How did you know she was born again?”
“Oh, well, she was a pretty good teacher, so you used to leave us with her once you’d made sure all of our homework was done, every now and then. I think you went back to your office to take a smoke break.” She smiled and nodded. “On her last day, when she was saying goodbye to us, she told us that the only way to be happy was to be right with Jesus.”
“Ah, Hell,” Mrs. W said. “She shouldn’t have been doing that.”
“It really didn’t do any harm. It meant a lot to her to say it.”
“Yeah, well, I wonder what it meant to Sharmen Steinberg and Janice Shapiro,” she said.
“Nobody should be offended at that kind of thing. She wasn’t forcing her beliefs on s, she was just expressing hers. I’m a heretic and I still got an ‘A’. But wait a minute. We got sidetracked. Go back to chaos,” I said.
“I would have gotten to it eventually,” she said. “The waterwheel will rotate first clockwise, at a given speed, then will slow, then will speed up again, then will reverse, and will reproduce the pattern over and over again. It won’t ever settle into a pattern that exactly repeats itself, but will kind of alternate between one state and the next. So what Lorenz did next was to graph out the leaky-bucket waterwheel’s movement. It took a three-dimensional grid to represent it. I think he mapped out a couple of other simple equations that have similar properties, and they all produced graphs of this strange figure—a kin of lazy, folded figure eight. Because of the characteristic pattern that graphs out, it’s been described as a butterfly, or an owl’s mask. Anyway, this type of equation is known in the literature as a “Lorenz attractor” or “strange attractor,” because there will be two points of attraction, but nothing ever completely converges.”
“Why strange?” I asked.
“Because however many times you repeat it, it never scribes the exact same path twice.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“I have a fanciful theory that chaos is reflected in human behavior, but I’m not making much progress.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Say you were a strange attractor—that a strange attractor equation described part of your personality. Some of it would make sense. On the other hand, strange attractors seem to have two focus points, and you seem to be alone. I’ll keep working on it.” She smiled.
“Well I can’t do that,” he was saying. “It might be a conflict of interest.”
“I know,” she said. “Just tell me who to go to.” The lawyer looked surprised. I had gone to high school with his daughter, I think. Pretty girl.
“Oh,” he said. Not quite surprised, but her answer wasn’t what he’d expected. He paused to consider.
Mrs. W had decided several things, and she was right, as always. She had figured out that I was making money. She wanted it to get a good rate of return. The way we’d worked out of investing it, depositing it all into passbook savings, seemed to her a wasted opportunity. She wanted to invest it in other things, but to do that other documents had to be signed. I was too young to buy stocks, and even if I were old enough, my interest in money and things having to do with money was about as low as neap tides can go. I like having it and would find it extremely fretful not to have any, but I just can’t work up much of an interest in it. Wish I could. But Mrs. W could and she wanted to put my money in places where it would do me the most good. And the fact that I had no interest whatsoever in helping her do what was good for me wasn’t going to deter her from doing what was right. So she’d brought me to her lawyer, John Warmblood, knowing he couldn’t advise me about what to do, to get a recommendation from Warmblood about who I could go see about giving Mrs. W pretty much complete control over my money.
I really didn’t much care. I was a pool player who liked to play cards.
Mrs. W waited patiently while Mr. Warmblood thought through the question of who he was going to recommend I go to for advice to make sure Mrs. W wasn’t cheating me. I watched Mr. Warmblood as he thought about this and then he may have realized that Mrs. W was pretty much several steps ahead of him throughout the entire visit.
“Well, Margaret,” he said. I know that sentence continued to go somewhere else, but I didn’t really follow. I know everyone has a first name, but I’d never thought about Mrs. W’s and really didn’t like this yo-yo addressing her so familiarly. He should have respect.
Apparently he told us to go to a lawyer named Fieldey Atchling, but I didn’t hear it.
I was at his office the next day, in the afternoon. Mr. Atchling was a man in his late twenties who was wearing, against all probabilities, a Nehru suit. The Nehru suit was a fashion phenomenon of 1966 or 1967. I remember seeing Johnny Carson wearing one in one of those years. I also remember seeing a department store ad flogging them just a few months later and realizing that as soon as it had come, the Nehru suit had gone. It was a suit with a jacket that was supposed to be worn buttoned. The lapels were tuned up, in a way, and it was designed to be worn over a thin turtleneck rather than a coat and tie. It looked fine, it just didn’t catch on. So people had worn them in 1966 and 1967, and here was this lawyer wearing a black Nehru suit over a bright white turtleneck. I wanted so very much to be dismissive, but he has some sense. As I recalled, Nehru suits included bell-bottomed trousers, so I was craning my neck to see if Mr. Atchling was wearing bell-bottoms, too, but he was behind an enormous altar-like desk that hid his pants legs.
“So you’re coming to me for advice about how to structure a power of attorney so that the holder can’t cheat you, is that right?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. I wasn’t used to this kind of question. “I want Mrs. W to be able to invest my money however she sees fit, and I want you to write us up the documents that make that possible.”
“I know you don’t know me, but I actually have a role in this process,” he said, “And my role now is to advise caution.” He was leaning back in his office chair, left leg over right, figure four fashion. He looked almost like he might blow a smoke ring, only he wasn’t smoking.
“Look, Mr. Atchling, I appreciate the advice, but I just need to get some documents drawn.”
“So how much money are we talking about?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand dollars.”
“Wow. A lot of money,” he said.
“Thanks.” Where were we going with this?
“Where did it come from?” he asked.
“I made most of it playing pool. A big chunk came from playing cards in New Orleans.”
There was a pause while he thought about this. First both of his eyebrows went up, then the left one by itself, then, after it went back down, the right one by itself.
“I guess if I’m going to be giving you legal advice, I ought to advise you that gambling is illegal,” he said.
“So I’ve heard,” I said.
“It doesn’t worry you that making money by gambling might get you arrested?” he asked.
“That’s not the way it works. I’ve played thousands of pool games and hundreds of poker games. Nobody ever calls the cops. If they’re mad, they try to jump you in the street afterwards, but nobody calls the cops.”
“What do you think about that?” he asked, contemplatively
“That I want to learn more karate.”
“A very pragmatic response.” He paused for a few minutes and looked me over. “Okay. You don’t know me, but I’m a good lawyer. Actually, I don’t even know that. I’m just a lawyer who takes his position seriously. Warmblood sent you over to me because he represents Mrs. Wertheimer and you’re looking for a power of attorney that would allow her to invest your money however she sees fit. Is that about right?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“I can’t do that without talking to you about it.”
“Why not? All we want you to do is draw up a couple of documents.”
“I know, and I understand that it seems odd that I won’t just do that. But I’m not just a scribe; I’m a lawyer, so I can’t just write down what my clients want. I need to ask questions and make sure that my client is making good decisions.”
“Why? Mrs. W and I just want a service for an hourly fee.”
“The law’s not like that.”
“Why not?”
“The law is an institution. Like church. Like school. Like college. It has its rules and requirements. It plays a role in the way society and politics play themselves out. By becoming a part of that institution, I agreed to play my appointed role. And that role includes not doing anything that will traduce the system.”
“Traduce?”
“Tend to lower expectations. Degrade.”
“Okay. So what do I need to say to convince you I’m not traducing your institution?”
“Oh, answer a few questions, I think. One advantage of an established institution is that there’s always a book that tells you what questions to ask.”
“What other advantages are there?” I asked.
“Institutions change slowly, so last year’s questions are probably just as valid as this year’s questions.”
“Why is slowness to change an advantage?” I asked.
“Because everyone knows what to expect. Most people are resistant to change and the institutions around them make them feel secure. Banks. Schools. Churches. The United States Senate. All of them change slowly. If they evolved rapidly no one would know what was going to happen next, and most people wouldn’t like it.”
Why a Nehru suit?
“Okay, let’s start talking about this,” he said. “First, I need a complete name and address.”
“Henry Baida.”
“Middle name?” he asked?
“Don’t have one.”
“That’s odd.”
“My father was superstitious about numbers. His birthday was June 3, 1927, and mine was March 6, 1954. There’s some funny stuff about the number nine involved, but he wanted my name to relate to the number 72. My mom says he thought would be lucky for him and for me. He thought having middle initial would mess it up,” I said. He was the kind of guy who stuck with an idea once it lodged in his head and the fastest way to get out was to answer his questions.
“How does ‘Henry’ relate to the number 72?” he asked.
“The Greeks used their letters to express numbers. The seventh letter of the Greek alphabet looks like an H.”
“I see. And the first letter of your last name is the second letter of the Greek alphabet.”
“That’s it. Plus, my mother said I could choose a middle name at confirmation if I wanted.”
“Ah. I’m not Catholic. Is that common?” he asked.
“Well, you’re given a confirmation name, but it doesn’t stick. It’s not legal.”
“And what is yours?” he asked.
“Thomas.”
“Would you like to make it legal? It’s a very simple procedure,” he said.
“No, thank you.” I look at interactions with lawyers kind of like interactions with surgeons: I’m not a fan of elective surgery or elective lawyering either one.
Mr. Atchling was a contemplative, excruciatingly slow and thorough man, but he got everything done in one visit. He took notes in tedious detail, but at the end of it, he pulled a book off a shelf, handed it and his notes to his secretary, and a few minutes later handed me a “General Power of Attorney” giving Mrs. W authority to invest my money however she saw fit. His secretary was a notary, and came in with a seal before I signed it.
He stood up behind that great big desk and looked very seriously while the secretary and I sat in our chairs. Mrs. W had rejoined us, and looked like she was getting itchy for a cigarette. Back when she was a teacher, one day at the beginning of geometry class she had a white mark on her lipstick, and I was convinced she’d absent-mindedly tried to take a drag off of her chalk.
“Before we execute this document, Mr. Baida, I want to say before you and your attorney in fact, as well as Ms. Chat as a witness that this is a risky document to give to someone, and that as your attorney I advise you to carefully consider what you are about to do, and that if you do execute it, that you monitor and audit all of your accounts carefully.
“Did you say ‘Chat’? I asked.
“Yes,” he said, with a look that suggested that my question was vaguely irritating.
Ms. Chat smiled brightly at me. “It’s French for ‘cat’,” she said. Pretty girl. A few years older than me.
“Thanks,” said. “So where do I sign?”
We signed, Ms Chat notarized it, and I immediately handed it to Mrs. W. “Do I need another one for the bank?” she asked Mr. Atchling.
“No, don’t bother with that,” he said. “Banks, as institutions, don’t like dealing with powers of attorney. Just change the accounts into joint accounts. It will be far easier and cheaper for you, too.”
At the end of it, she had control of my money. I’m really not interested in money.
A good feeling, to be taken care of.
After we were done, we went out for a drink. She had scotch and soda, I had ice water. She enjoyed a cigarette.
“Henry, I want to thank you for trusting with all of this.”
“You’re doing me the favor. You’re doing all the work. I’m driving around playing pool.”
“I enjoy it,” she said. “I’ve also been looking into chaos theory. Are you still noticing anomalies when you play pool?” she asked.
“Not so much as a few months ago, but that could be due to several things.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“I don’t know for sure. I seem to have been visiting smaller and smaller towns the last few months. They don’t have pool halls, so it’s harder to practice alone. Usually when I play these days I’m playing against somebody else. I don’t make as many shots, so there aren’t so many chances for an observation.”
“Well, I thought chaos theory might give me a way to think about what you were talking about. I’m not sure it does that, but it still reminds me of you, in a way.”
“That whooshing noise is the sound of everything you said going over my head.” She smiled.
“There’s an MIT professor named Lorenz. He programmed his computer to create a kind of simplified climate. He has a group of I think it was twelve equations that governed things like ocean temperature and wind speed and that kind of thing, and it would print out numbers that showed what the weather was like each few hours. It fascinated everybody. They thought if they could refine the equations enough, it would be possible to make long-term weather predictions. He found something else entirely, though.” She paused to think, and looked at her cigarette in the ashtray. Teacher as she was, she was thinking of how to introduce a new concept to a student. She looked back at me. “He discovered instead that tiny differences are extremely important. He discovered that if he fed in the numbers for a starting point in the slightest bit off—say he put in an ocean temperature as .309160 instead of .309162, that within a few cycles the computer would reach a completely different result that wasn’t just a little off from the original, but completely off. It wouldn’t resemble the original at all. That wasn’t what people were expecting.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It turns out this notion we have of the law of large numbers just doesn’t apply to complex systems.”
I think I followed that. We tend to think that small variations don’t matter. She was saying they do.
“ Lorenz thought of it as being like turbulence,” she said. When a seagull flaps its wings, it creates turbulence in the air, and Lorenz came to the conclusion that the tiny bit of turbulence in the air was like the difference between .309160 and .309162.”
“So a seagull can cause a storm?” I asked.
“Sort of. No, not really. People in the years since have talked about the butterfly effect—the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Georgia can cause a hurricane in Louisiana, but that’s not really it, I don’t think. It’s an oversimplification that saps the truth out of the math. The seagull doesn’t cause the storm, but all elements of a complex system are interrelated, and billions of tiny, immeasurable forces, acting together, cause storms. A seagull alone doesn’t cause a storm, but all kinds of things that look unpredictable acting in concert do.” She took a drag off her cigarette and put it back in the ashtray. “Look at the smoke rising from my cigarette,” she said. “It rises from the coal in a steady stream but it gets to here, and the streak of smoke dissolves into a cloud. It doesn’t dissipate gradually, like a river delta or a tree branch, which is what you might expect. It gets to here and it turns into a disorganized cloud. You can see the little curlicues start to form, then almost immediately it turns into a cloud, a haze. Nothing organized about it at all.” She signaled to the bartender for another S&S. “Cutty this time,” she said.
“The seagull’s flapping wing is just one of these little curlicues in the smoke, and the cloud is the storm.”
“Okay, I said.” So can chaos theory predict the cloud? Or the storm?”
“Not exactly. What Lorenz did was to plot the divergences. It was too complex to graph the entire weather system, I think, but he found analogues in convection of heat within heated fluid cells, and I think that led him to the water wheel. There’s an old problem that Archimedes noted but didn’t understand. If you have a bucket style waterwheel, and water is introduced at the top—“
“Aren’t they all like that?” I asked.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Water coming to the wheel from the top.”
“Oh, no. That’s what a millwright would call an overshot wheel. That’s the most powerful kind of waterwheel, but also the most expensive to make, and it requires an enormous dam. They’re hard to site. Most are breast-shot wheels, where the water comes in about halfway up. If you don’t have any elevation at all at the mill site you can build what ought to be called an undershot wheel but is in fact called a tub wheel, because the mechanics of the flow are different. Anyway in ancient times people sometimes built waterwheels with actual buckets. A millwright would refer to the enclosures on a traditional waterwheel as buckets, but actually they’re blades, or paddles, constructed to capture both the weight of the water and its kinetic energy as it flows. Both then move the wheel. Back in Archimedes’ day waterwheel construction was more primitive, and sometimes waterwheels were made from actual buckets suspended from spikes driven into cart wheels at regular intervals. Everyone knew, in ancient times, that once the buckets became leaky, the waterwheel would sometimes reverse itself for no good reason. The Greeks and Romans avoided this by offsetting the water source slightly to the right or left—for the wheel reversal to happen, the water source pretty much had to be top dead center.”
She shrugged. “I’m sure this must be boring.”
“Not at all. I got good grades in your classes because I was interested in everything you had to say.”
“Henry, you got good grades because you understand math unlike anyone I’ve ever taught. You also have a memory like a steel trap.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Define the trigonometric functions,” she said.
“Sine equals opposite over hypotenuse, cosine equals adjacent over hypotenuse, and tangent equals opposite over adjacent, but that’s not really a fair test of my memory.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“That born-again student teacher you had with you for second semester of trig told us this really great mnemonic device.”
“Saddle our horses, canter away happily, to our adventures?” Mrs. W asked.
“Yes ma’am. That’s it.”
“Henry, every trigonometry teacher for the last two hundred years has told her students that mnemonic device and you may be the only student I’ve ever had who remembers it.”
“Oh, Mrs. W. I’m sure most of them remember it.” Surely so. It was so easy to remember.
“Back up a minute,” she said. “You’re referring to Miss Coombs, I expect. How did you know she was born again?”
“Oh, well, she was a pretty good teacher, so you used to leave us with her once you’d made sure all of our homework was done, every now and then. I think you went back to your office to take a smoke break.” She smiled and nodded. “On her last day, when she was saying goodbye to us, she told us that the only way to be happy was to be right with Jesus.”
“Ah, Hell,” Mrs. W said. “She shouldn’t have been doing that.”
“It really didn’t do any harm. It meant a lot to her to say it.”
“Yeah, well, I wonder what it meant to Sharmen Steinberg and Janice Shapiro,” she said.
“Nobody should be offended at that kind of thing. She wasn’t forcing her beliefs on s, she was just expressing hers. I’m a heretic and I still got an ‘A’. But wait a minute. We got sidetracked. Go back to chaos,” I said.
“I would have gotten to it eventually,” she said. “The waterwheel will rotate first clockwise, at a given speed, then will slow, then will speed up again, then will reverse, and will reproduce the pattern over and over again. It won’t ever settle into a pattern that exactly repeats itself, but will kind of alternate between one state and the next. So what Lorenz did next was to graph out the leaky-bucket waterwheel’s movement. It took a three-dimensional grid to represent it. I think he mapped out a couple of other simple equations that have similar properties, and they all produced graphs of this strange figure—a kin of lazy, folded figure eight. Because of the characteristic pattern that graphs out, it’s been described as a butterfly, or an owl’s mask. Anyway, this type of equation is known in the literature as a “Lorenz attractor” or “strange attractor,” because there will be two points of attraction, but nothing ever completely converges.”
“Why strange?” I asked.
“Because however many times you repeat it, it never scribes the exact same path twice.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“I have a fanciful theory that chaos is reflected in human behavior, but I’m not making much progress.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Say you were a strange attractor—that a strange attractor equation described part of your personality. Some of it would make sense. On the other hand, strange attractors seem to have two focus points, and you seem to be alone. I’ll keep working on it.” She smiled.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Chapter 5: Trust and the Nature of Home
For the next year I drifted around the South playing pool. In some ways, life was good. I stuck to small towns and cheap motels. Life was easier in one respect: whenever I had enough money that it wouldn’t all fit in my wallet, I’d take out half and send it back to Mrs. Wertheimer, and she’d deposit into my account. I was still living on cash, but not having the shoebox in the trunk meant I wasn’t always worried about getting jumped and fretting about where the Valiant was parked. It was nice. I figured if I did get robbed, I’d just hand over the money and write myself a check at the nearest bank.
Having a checkbook was strange. They’d given it to me when I’d opened my accounts at First National, but I still didn’t write any checks. I’d take the checkbook out of the glove compartment and look at it every now and then and wonder what I’d ever need it for. All I spent money on was food, motels, and gas. Once a week or so I’d find a Laundromat. Every few months something would get so ragged I’d throw it away and replace it, or my boots would need new soles, or I’d get a hole in my jeans. Nothing cost much, and I was playing pool most days, so I was sending money to Mrs. W every week or two. She didn’t like me sending cash through the mail, and I tried to use Western Union whenever I could find one, but that wasn’t often. In the seventies there wasn’t a Western Union office in Zebulon, but there was a post office.
I began to lose my sense that the laws of the universe were crumbling at the edges, but that may have been because I wasn’t playing alone too much, and because I was just getting accustomed to the increased frequency of highly improbable events. The first time a mule talks to you, you’re surprised. The tenth time a mule talks to you, you criticize his grammar. Plus, I was alone, and I was heading for smaller and smaller towns all the time. When you’re alone most of the time, you can lose your ability to sense that what you’re thinking is strange. Nobody’s there to bring you back to the middle.
There was no intent behind my move towards smaller and smaller towns, but that was the pattern, and as the towns got smaller, I went from pool halls to bowling alleys to bars. There are pool halls in Chattanooga and Charleston, there are bowling alleys in Chapel Hill, there’s a bar in Randolph. But in 1972 and 1973, pretty much every bar at every crossroads had a pool table in the back, and the boys who played there liked to drink beer and gamble.
Just so you know, walking into a pool hall is different than walking into a bar or a bowling alley. In a pool hall, you get your balls and pick a table and start playing by yourself. Sometimes the locals notice you, sometimes they don’t. As you settle into the realm of straight lines you might end up playing by yourself for an hour or two before you get approached about a game. On a slow day, you might not get a game at all, but you have that table. It allows for lots more shots than playing nine ball against a roofer from Anniston, so you have a lot of opportunities to notice when something happens that’s contrary to expectations. In a bar or a bowling alley, it’s everybody’s table. Anyone with fifty cents to drop in the slots owns just as much of the table as you do, and it’s rare to have it to yourself. When you move to smaller towns you have less solitude at the table. so you’re moving away from seeing any disturbances in the laws of physics that the universe may be trying to show you.
In that same period I wasn’t playing cards hardly at all. To play poker or gin for any kind of money you have to get invited to do so, and I never hung around anyplace long enough to make friends. Every now and then I’d bump into a game by accident, and they’d let me ante in semi-begrudgingly. I never won more than a few hundred dollars, but it was easier money than playing pool. Pool is work. Cards is waiting for a chance.
I wasn’t lonely, but I began to find the fringes of boredom, so I began to read books. For the whole time I’d been on the road, the only book I’d ever read was the Bible. The Gideons make sure that there’s a copy of it in every hotel room, and there’s a lot to read in there. Lots of crazy stuff no one would believe. Look up the story of Tamar at the gate sometime. There’s awful stuff you’d never hear from a pulpit, too. After a year or so on the road, though, I had the Bible damned near memorized and it just wasn’t interesting any more. So I started buying books. I started by reading all of the stuff I should have read in high school English, then kept picking books from the literature section. Paperbacks only cost a dollar, and at first I threw them away as soon as I was finished, but then one day when I got finished with a book of Yeats’ poetry, I realized I didn’t want to throw it away. After that, there was a judgment every time I finished a book: keep, or toss? Moby Dick ? Keep. Complete works of Longfellow? Toss. I don’t drink, and once whoever I was playing got liquored up enough to be stupid, I had to leave, which often left a long evening in the hotel room, and for a pool player there’s not much to do in the morning except move on to the next town, so I ate up a lot of books. The trunk of the Valiant started filling up with them, which I found worrisome. One of the first things I’d read was Walden, and if you’ve read it you’ll remember how he resisted the temptation to accumulate possessions because they added to the amount of work he had to do. One day he found an interesting rock on one of his rambles and brought it home and set it on a shelf. He realized a little while later that as long as it was on his shelf he was going to have to dust it from time to time, so he threw it out the front door. That made such perfect sense to me that I’d never accumulated more than would fit in a small suitcase. I owned four pairs of pants, seven shirts, one pair of boots and one pair of running shoes, yet after a few months I was hauling around the literature section of Smith & Hardwick.
The following summer I called Mrs. W to tell her another envelope was on its way, and she told me it was time to move some money out of savings and into something else.
“Hey, Henry,” she said. “Where are you?”
“Near Wadley,” I said.
“Where’s Wadley?” she asked.
“Alabama.”
“Be more precise,” she said.
“Why, what’s up?”
“You’re going to be telling me you’re going to be sending some money and I don’t like you sending it in the mail. I got Western Union to give me a catalogue that lists where they have offices.”
“Ah. Wadley’s in east central Alabama. Near the Georgia border. Between Montgomery and Atlanta, maybe.”
“Are you near Fruithurst or Pinehurst?” she asked.
“Not what you’d call close. I gotta back up on 22 for Pinehurst, wander around to US 431 for Fruithurst. They’re both over an hour away.”
“How about Lagrange?”
“Yeah, sure. The Idle Hour is in Lagrange. Some pool halls, too,” I said.
“There’s a Western Union office in Lagrange. On Whitesville Road. Take the money on over there.”
I am bad about seeing patterns in myself, or understanding that I’ve come to conclusions about things. I seem to be able to come to important conclusions without having any realization that I’ve done so. I’m ignorant of my own thoughts, in a way, and this conversation with Mrs. Wertheimer is a good example. When you send cash through Western Union they really don’t wire money anywhere. Western Union is more like a bank. You just deposit money in one office, and then somebody else can come around and pick it up later at another. Once I’d handed money over to WU, anyone with a driver’s license in the name of Linda Wertheimer could pick it up. Anyway, the conclusion I’d clearly reached but that didn’t occur to me was that I trusted her. Which was odd. I’m not really a trusting soul. Nevertheless, I was sending Mrs. Wertheimer thousands of dollars every month, and the idea that she was anything but scrupulously honest with it just didn’t occur to me. The deal hadn’t started that way, of course—originally she was just going to open my bank statements and tell me what was going on when I called. As time went on I liked not having a tempting target for crime in my trunk, and so as soon as my wallet got fat, I’d sent it off to Mrs. W, without thinking. If you’d walked up to me at the phone booth outside Wadley and asked me who was the person in life I trusted most, I would have been stumped. I wouldn’t have come up with anyone. With me as with everyone else in the world, though, what people do shows much more about what they think than what they say.
“Okay,” I said. Like I said—without a thought. Trust doesn’t think.
“Now Henry, you need to come on home for a visit.”
“Home? I am home,” I answered.
“Wadley? Wadley’s not your home, Henry.”
“The road is my home, these days.” I said.
“Very romantic,” she said. “You went to high school in Chattanooga. That’s your home until you settle somewhere else.”
What if I never settle anywhere?” Just curious.
“Then Chattanooga will always be your home.”
“I could do worse. What do you need me for?”
“I don’t like you keeping all this money in passbook savings. I want you to put some of it in some stocks and bonds. I’ve talked to my stockbroker, and he says we have some paperwork to do that,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re not 21, and apparently under the law of New York, you have to be 21 to buy listed securities. My broker says that most people in this situation arrange for their parents to buy the securities and hold them in trust for the child until the child is 21.” She paused, and I could hear her striking her Zippo over the phone. “It appears to me that you are not close to your parents.”
“Appearances are not deceiving,” I said. “Why New York?”
“Because the exchanges where stocks are traded are in New York. Can you explain your family situation? I don’t get the sense that there’s been a rupture.”
“No rupture, but we just aren’t much of a family. Both my parents are military. Dad’s a Marine. Last I heard he was in Viet Nam. Top Sergeant. He doesn’t talk much about what he does, but as far as I understand it, he jumps out of helicopters and kills people with a knife. If you talked to him for a few minutes you’d decide you weren’t surprised that he does this for a living. Mom’s a lieutenant colonel in the Army. She supervises nurses and last I heard was in Germany. They were rarely at home when I was growing up. We’re just not close.”
“They weren’t mean to you, though?”
“No. There was nothing bad, there just wasn’t anything good, either. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not resentful. It’s not their fault, there’s not just a lot of warmth in them,” I said.
“How about siblings?”
“Two sisters. We were closer with each other than with our parents, but they’re several years older than I am and I don’t know how to get in touch with either of them.”
“Where are they?”
“One’s in California, the other was in graduate school at Yale last I heard. Some math deal,” I said.
“Henry, come on back home and we’ll set up some sort of way for me to actually manage all this money you’re sending. It’s getting upwards of $200,000 now, and it’s just not right to leave it sitting in a bank account.”
“All right. I’ll head back that way. I’ll get to Lagrange tonight, and hand over the money to Western Union tomorrow. I’ll start heading back to Tennessee after that. Since there’s no rush, I won’t hurry. While I’m on my way, you can think of how to solve my latest problem.”
“What’s that?” I could hear her lighting another cigarette.
“I’m accumulating property.”
“What kind of property?” she asked.
“Books.”
“What kind of books?”
“The kind I should have read in English class,” I said.
“Well, I’ll keep them or you,” she said, with a tone of voice that suggested “all you had to do was ask.” I tend to try to solve problems by myself. It just doesn’t occur to me to ask for help, no matter how easy it might be for someone else to assist.
The hourglass whispers to the lion’s roar. The clock tower chimes the gardens day and night—how many errors time has patience for, how wrong we are in being always right.
Once more, problem solved. I headed back towards Chattanooga.
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.
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.
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