for Graeme Stephen
As to the lesson we’re supposed to derive, it’s an open question. Ditto the more scholastic matter
of the difference between a scam and brilliancy. Take away what you need to. It’ll cost you a Jackson either way.
And one really learns only that which one already knew. Me, I was reminded that everything is continuous.
A tool may look like an object, but its borders are illusory. If you cannot see your instrument in the flow of phenomena,
as a mere phase between agent and action, it remains precisely half-understood. Take that new guitar of yours,
Donald, which you were sold as a ‘great guitar’. What is it you want it to do? What kind of air does it move?
You spend all that dough, stick a forty-buck mic in front of it and an idiot behind it, then do nothing but bitch.
I hustled in the sixties. The blend of advanced geometry and low-level criminality appealed to me. One January afternoon
me, Wimpy Lassiter and Boston Shorty were stood round a table in Jansco’s Showbar, Johnston City,
trying to figure out how, from a particular dead spot near the back of the kitchen, we could make a hanger off four rails.
After three hours, we’d decided it was impossible. Let me explain. One miracle of multiple-cushion strokes
is that the trapezoid of angles self-corrects: by the third rail, the cue ball will start to cleave to a common route.
Off four, it feels like fate, as if there were precisely one path to choose in life, and your smaller decisions
counted for nothing. This may be true. It’s certainly my instinct. Anyway, whatever adjustment we made
it always ran a full half-diamond off, and nothing – no English, no easy or hard stroke, no draw or follow –
could make up the shortfall and pocket the damn ball.
Then the Knoxville Bear walks in. He was in town for a bank pool exhibition at the Cue Club.
He asked what we were up to, and we told him. Eddie bet us five hundred bucks that he could make it.
Of course we agreed, though it was no bet: we knew not to doubt him. We were paying to learn. Like you.
Eddie said he had a hangover, and the overheated, suds-and-cigar fug of Jansco’s was making it ten times worse,
and he wanted a clear head for this one. While I admit Shorty didn’t smell too great
after three days up on bennies – the guy had turned into a baloney sandwich –
Jansco’s didn’t seem funkier than any other day of the year, but Eddie insisted he open the fire-door a crack
on the howling Illinois winter, until his head cleared. (It was eight below, and a storm was brewing.)
So we stood there freezing our asses off while Eddie chalked up and stalked round the table,
figuring the angles, doing the math, chalking up some more. After a full five minutes of this
he took his Balabushka and smashed the cueball round the rails like a light beam round a room of mirrors.
Of course he made it, first time. It lost pace, weirdly, at the very end, but had just the legs to make the hanger
and drop the nine ball in the hole like a nudge into a lift shaft. He closed the fire-door and bought a round.
For weeks we argued over it, tried to replicate it, figuring Eddie had slipped a roll of quarters into his paw
or had somehow switched cue balls to a black-dot Gandy, which we were all convinced ran off,
or – given he was the only man on earth who could make the object ball, goddamn it, curve into the pocket –
maybe there was some voodoo shit, some off-centre compression when he’d blasted it into the first rail.
(I asked him to teach me that curve trick once. ‘Just hit it high and hard’, he told me.
The advice of gods is always simple, and useless.) OK, here’s what you paid for:
Rookies learn how to bend the rules and cheat the pockets, and get to know their limitations.
A bad player who knows himself is more dangerous than a good one who doesn’t. He prices in his own risk.
Sophomores learn to play safe with their own money, loose with someone else’s, and how to hide the difference.
They also know how the object ball takes on a fraction of the spin of the cue ball, and how this applies
to malign influence. We are all sealed narcissists, but about five per cent of the ill will of our enemies
is always transferred, either by their deliberate spin or the glancing blow.
You already know transferred spin is inverted. Right English turns to left, follow to draw, and so on.
Just so their casual authority turns to your shame, their recklessness to your overcaution,
their deliberate error to your misplaced confidence. (The answer? Remember that dirt works like a gear.
Keep the cue ball filthy, but never skip a shower.)
Hustlers learn to play the man, and his feelings about himself and his money, and at that point
you are a mere student of human nature. And here, we learn to love the art of the loss.
I spent six months figuring how to throw games until the serious dough got put down,
to dog it like it was my goddamn living, day after day, to scratch on the money-ball, to rattle the eight in the jaws
and curse my luck. It was like a monastic abasement. After that nothing could touch me.
But Eddie Taylor? Eddie made a game of the game. They said he could put follow on your billfold
and English on the rain. We should have listened to them. Years later, Shorty came up with the solution.
He called me from Chicago, mid eighties, on the bar phone at Chris’s, in the melting heat of summer.
He’d just seen Cesar, this new Filipino kid, pull the same shit in reverse. Bitching about the aircon
and how the cold was messing with his head, and could he open the back door for a few minutes. The door. Of course.
No one had seen the Bear take more than two seconds to reckon an angle in his life. It was pure stall:
Eddie just needed time for the winter to crawl in, to chill the cloth until the rails were damp enough
to play a fraction short. Over one rail, it would make no odds; but added over four, he bent the path of fate
enough to steal that extra half-diamond. Like I say, take from that what you will. Either way
you owe me a fifty. Yeah we said fifty.