Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion Read Online Free

crowd in Inwood. One day, he joined a few neighborhood kids as they waited in the subway tunnel at 190th and Broadway. As soon as they spotted an old lady, one of the kids Schlegel was with—a guy named Charlie who was known as “The Beak” thanks to a sizable nose—would do his best to scare the shit out of her. Then two other kids, Wally and his sister Holly, would grab her pocketbook and they all would run.
    “What the fuck am I doing here?” Schlegel thought. “What the hell am I doing?”
    But there was nowhere left to run the day Charlie scared one old lady well enough to give her a heart attack. They ran all the way to Sherman Avenue and Broadway, down to Jimmy’s Candy Store. And that is where they ran into the cops who were looking for them. Charlie got a year-and-a-half. So did Holly. Then the judge turned to Wally. Those sentences might have been a lot longer had the woman not survived.
    “You should be ashamed of yourself, teaching your little sister to behave this way!” he said. “I should take you out back right now and whip you myself.”
    Wally got three years; twice what his sister received. Then, as the judge turned to Schlegel, Schlegel’s father had a word for his son.
    “No Schlegel has ever gone to jail,” he said.
    Schlegel’s father was a barrel-chested superintendent of the apartment building where they lived, a hard-working man stuffed into a stocky frame of five-foot-six known to treat the local garbage men to a free shot of scotch when the weather got cold. He had a thick, German accent and bulging biceps he liked to flex once in a while just to make sure Schlegel knew he could kick his ass. One day he discovered a particularly subtle way of discouraging drug use in his son’s life. He opened a closet that contained a shotgun, pointed at it, and explained the following:
    “You see this gun,” he said in his gruff, German accent. “It’s got a two-round load. One for each eye. I blow your fucking brains out if you ever touch drugs.”
    That was the father Schlegel feared in court that day, the one who made eminently believable threats involving guns and brawn. He had met with the judge beforehand and persuaded him that he could hand down no justice in court worse than the justice his son would face at home.
    “It seems your father will be taking care of this himself,” the judge said.
    The judge probably had a good ass-kicking in mind, too.
    But it was the shame that hurt Schlegel more than any ass-kicking, this negative way of seeing his family’s name that meant something more than skin deep. That was the way Schlegel’s father had of “taking care” of things—making Schlegel feel ashamed of himself. For Schlegel, no ass-kicking could hurt more than that. From that day on, he had a notion that to bear your family’s name is to bear the responsibility of representing it with honor and dignity. That day, perhaps, was the first day he saw himself not just as another kid on the streets, but as a Schlegel. It would be years before Schlegel fully appreciated the extent to which his father spared him that day from the life that might have awaited him had he been hauled off to Juvie.
    By then, Schlegel and Harris were on their way out of their parents’ apartments and into the lives that awaited them. They both had figured out that they would butter their own bread in life, and that the type of talent Schlegel possessed was not the stuff you put on a resume. No, this was the kind of raw gift that either made you or broke you. This was survival. Now, as life nudged them into their twenties, they had no needling mothers to answer to, no one back home worrying about where they were and asking questions when they finally returned. Here was the freedom they had waited for forever. And tonight, that freedom would be found at a Philadelphia bowling alley just off Route 1.
    Hours before Harris hopped into Nagai’s Cadillac to head down to Philly, he called up Schlegel and said,