Jungle Rules Read Online Free Page B

Likewise, gamblers and junkies were no better, but sometimes proved easy pickings with a sucker’s game of eight-ball.
    The guys at Robbie’s Pool Hall on the southwestern edge of Kansas City, where Brian spent his time after dropping out of high school, took to calling him Small Change, because he would start a mark off with a two-bit bet on his eight-ball game and let the sucker win. After each loss, he would throw another quarter on the table, and rack again and again, letting the chump build up a large head of superiority. He would pal right up to his prey, asking him for tips on how to shoot a better game. A seemingly innocent boy just learning a seasoned man’s sport.
    After dropping a couple of dollars in small change, luring the fish onto his line, Brian would then start to shoot a little better, and rave on and on about what an amazing shot he had just somehow accidentally made. What a streak of luck!
    “Thanks for the help with my game. How about a dollar bet?” he would then ask the sucker, who nearly always laughed and confidently threw down a bill.
    “Hate to take your money, kid,” the mark often said.
    “My dad’s a dentist over in Shawnee,” Brian would then lie. “I get fifty bucks a week allowance, so a dollar is nothing. Don’t sweat the small shit.”
    “Make it five bucks then, rich boy,” the sucker would many times follow through.
    “How about ten?” Brian would come back with a cocky grin, and throw a Hamilton greenback on the table.
    Sometimes the mark backed down, and begged off on a five-dollar bet. Most often, however, the sucker took the ten-dollar bait and played for blood.
    Although he could have easily done it, Brian Pitts never ran the table, but barely won each folding-cash game. Just by a hair. Close enough to keep the sucker wanting to get back on his winning streak, and confident that he could play to even money with his next rack. Losers love to bet big, and ironically the more most of the marks lost, the greater each one bet, doubling his stakes as the hole got deeper from ten to twenty dollars, and sometimes even fifty.
    With often a hundred dollars or more wadded in his jeans pockets, while letting the mark rack one more last game, Pitts would finally excuse himself to the can, and then duck out the backdoor. He would never let the sucker see him leave. It took only one ass whipping to teach him that rule of pool hustle life.
    He learned the hard lesson after a sore loser had followed him out of Robbie’s front door and caught him as he stepped around the corner to where he had parked Aunt Winnie’s car. It took six stitches across his right eyebrow to close the gash after the angry mark had slammed the boy’s head against the front bumper of the 1958 Ford Fairlane coupe.
    If Brian ever saw a hustled player again, he would lie a tale of getting sick with the squirts, and heading out the backdoor, embarrassed, because he had accidently crapped his pants. Then with his clean-faced innocent smile, the boyish shark would offer the guy a fresh chance to play him and get even. This time Brian would win a few and lose a few, and leave his victim only a little short, but never quite even, certainly never on the plus side. The youngster the old Kansas City pool hall pros called Small Change always finished out ahead with at least a few newly won bills folded in his front pocket.
    In the summer of 1963, Brian Pitts turned eighteen years old, and dutifully registered for the draft with the Johnson County, Kansas, U.S. Selective Service Board. A few weeks later he got his official Selective Service registration card in the mail that had the letters 1-A typed next to classification, just below his name. Three months later, he got a letter from the Johnson County draft board that began “Greetings,” and ordered him to the U.S. Armed Forces Induction Center in Kansas City to take a physical examination to determine his fitness for service in the armed forces of the United