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

enough to call it bullshit. It was time to take that act on the road, away from New York City. Philly seemed as promising a stage as any.No matter where the scent of fish happened to lead, Schlegel followed it the way a coyote follows the trail of a dying animal. From Queens to Connecticut, from Paramus to Pennsylvania, no destination was too far off if it promised to bring in the cash. Toru Nagai and his Cadillac made sure of that. In his mid-thirties, Toru was older than Schlegel and the boys by nearly twenty years. To a cadre of degenerate gamblers too young to drive but desperate to follow the scent of money wherever it took them, a guy with a car was a precious commodity. And to hunt for fish in a Cadillac, no less? That was a teen gambler’s dream.
    Back then, the closest Schlegel and Harris came to having a car of their own was by stealing one. Harris’s brother had a car, and some nights Harris waited around for him to fall asleep so he could steal his car keys. The only stop he made on his way to the nearest action was to pick up his walking jackpot—Ernie Schlegel. Then the night, and the money it promised, was theirs. All Harris had to do was make it back home by the time his brother had to get up for work, and pray no one had taken his parking spot in the meantime. Somehow, no one ever did.
    On this particular night, Schlegel found his fish in the form of a hotshot down in Philly who said he would bowl anybody who dared to show up at his home alley. Harris did the man the favor of informing him that a fellow by the name of Ernie Schlegel would be quite happy to oblige his offer, but that before agreeing to bowl him he might want to consider the very real possibility that Schlegel would hand him his ass and charge him for it. Harris could talk that way by then. He had just watched the guy challenge his buddy Richie Solomon to $25 a game and bowl him to an even draw after several hours. A bowler of Schlegel’s caliber this was not. If the man could not get the best of Richie Solomon after three hours of tryinghis damnedest to do so, then he sure as shit would not get the best of Ernie Schlegel.
    “You’ve got to be kidding me! You’re not that good,” Harris told him.
    “I am telling you, I will bowl anybody,” he said.
    “Well, Ernie’s really good. I mean, he’s much better than you,” Harris warned.
    “I will bowl him,” he said.
    Harris told him Schlegel would be quite happy to drop by the following weekend and see if the guy was as good as he thought he was. And come the following weekend they did, pulling up to the joint in style with Nagai’s obsidian Caddy.
    No one could have blamed the fish if he thought he had found a fish of his own the first time he laid eyes on Schlegel. With a head of long, strawberry-blond hair so unkempt it might have looked like home to passing crows, a wrinkled set of clothes that gave off a vague whiff of having been worn at least for the past several days, and a face he hadn’t shaved in weeks, Schlegel did not exactly cut the figure of a kid in possession of any particular skill, much less a prodigy. And thanks to an infection in his gums caused by a dentist’s botched attempt to fill some cavities as a child, he also had lost most of his teeth. Action bowling winnings soon would help him replace them, but for now their absence helped harden his disarming facade.
    In short, Schlegel looked more like a hobo who lived in an abandoned taxi than like a hustler. And that, of course, was how the hustle worked. That was the bait. Gone were the days of pool hall hustlers in three-piece suits who powdered their hands between matches. Here was a hustler who looked like the kid that emptied Fast Eddie Felson’s ashtray, who was remarkable only for the extent to which he looked so unremarkable. The only physical attribute that betrayedthe brazenness within were his eyes. Schlegel’s eyes seemed to have a kind of cast about them, a mean pair of reptilian squints that