Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (13 page)

Of all the factors that contributed to this decline in action bowling, one of the biggest was that the scene’s marquee stars pulled out to pursue even greener pastures. Barber went into the pro shop business and soon developed an empire of shops throughout the New York metropolitan area. His acumen as an entertainer gifted him with people skills others go to school to learn, and that big personality proved to be a goldmine in business. You did not just go to Kenny Barber to get a new bowling
ball drilled up; you went to Kenny Barber for a show. Whether he was drilling your ball or giving you video lessons and film feedback out on the lanes—an idea he conceived years before it became vogue to do so—Barber was just as likely to deliver a gut-splittingly funny stand-up comedy act as he was to show you where to stand on a given lane condition or measure your span for a new ball.

Johnny Petraglia and Mike McGrath went on to bowl the Professional Bowlers Association tour. Lichstein later followed them there and became Rookie of the Year in 1969 before taking up a gig as Player Services Director. Like many others who had lived and breathed action bowling every day of their lives for years, Steve Harris succumbed to a nagging feeling that it was time to grow up; he left his pro shop behind for a gig on Wall Street. Others, too, vanished into lives far removed from bowling, backers, and big bets. As the scene gradually lost its big names and big gamblers, it also lost its identity. Even after Harris moved on with his life, he would, on occasion, head out to one of the bowling alleys he once frequented only to find it desolate at a time of night when it once was frenzied with gamblers and the bowlers they bet on. He would ask around about where the action had gone. Some had no answer for him; others sent him to places they swore the action still could be found, and Harris would go to again find nobody there. Times had changed; that world was gone.

For Ernie Schlegel, the greatest action bowler New York City had ever seen, there was no Plan B. There was only bowling. But Schlegel’s road to the PBA Tour would be far more treacherous than the one that guys like Petraglia, McGrath, and Lichstein took. There would be knife fights and long nights, dragnets and gang wars, hard luck and hope. Most of all, there would be an enduring suspicion that nothing comes easily when you are Ernie Schlegel.

4

THE ROAD TO BUFFALO

S
chlegel knew his road to the PBA would be a tough one long before Central Lanes burned to the ground. He knew it the night he buried a blade in a buddy’s chest amid an argument over twenty bucks.

The fight began with a suggestion heard frequently at Schlegel’s haunt on Broadway and Sherman Avenue in Inwood, a bowling alley called Manhattan Lanes: “Go fuck yourself.” It was a place owned by a businessman named Emil Lence, who owned several bowling centers throughout the country. On Mondays, Schlegel watched Lence stroll through the place with a cigar in his face, a fedora, a long coat, and a bodyguard the size of a Buick on either side of him to haul his business’s cash into a truck out in the street. Just the place, then, for the kind of salty language directed at Schlegel on this particular afternoon. The person directing that language his way was a portly, Jewish kid named Mike Ginsberg who happened to be a
commendable action bowler himself. Ginsberg owed Schlegel money, and he did not take too kindly to Schlegel’s request that $20 of it be paid on the spot one afternoon. As Ginsberg would learn, most people who told Schlegel to go fuck himself did so only once.

A lot of people in Schlegel’s life found themselves in that particular company by then. It was 1962; Schlegel, now age 19, soon would be moving out of his parents’ place on Sickles Street and shacking up with a couple buddies in a three-bedroom apartment for a grand total of $150 a month. One of Schlegel’s roommates was Jerry Markey, who first saw Schlegel while attending a Boy Scouts meeting with his friend Mike McKeean one Friday night. Markey looked out the window at one point and saw Schlegel, dead-drunk and staggering with a zip gun in his hand. A kid had broken Schlegel’s nose in a street brawl, so Schlegel told him he was going to get his gun and come back to shoot him in the face. He promptly did exactly as he had promised. He went home, assembled and loaded his zip gun, and then went back out and found the kid. A riotous commotion ensued in which Schlegel was separated from his zip gun, likely saving his intended target’s life.

“Who the hell is that guy?” Markey asked McKeean.

“Oh, that’s Ernie Schlegel,” McKeean said.

The way McKeean said Schlegel’s name sounded as much like a forewarning as it sounded like an answer to Markey’s question.

Schlegel had learned much from Ginsberg over the years. He watched how Ginsberg worked back at Gun Post, the way he used his wiseass mouth to cajole players like Tony the Milkman or Mike the Cab Driver into bowling him for more money than they could afford to wager. How he would give guys so much shit that they would keep betting more money out of anger. When Ginsberg finally got his opponents to bet with
their emotions rather than their minds, he knew he had them beaten. Schlegel watched Ginsberg pay his own way through college this way. It was Ginsberg whom Schlegel credited for turning him into the chest-pounding gorilla of Central Lanes, Ginsberg who showed him how to bleed money from the driest stone.

Ginsberg tutored Schlegel in the discipline practiced by the greatest gamblers. Schlegel watched Ginsberg’s opponents try to turn the tables on him, hoping to lure him into a match he didn’t care to bowl, nudge him out of his comfort zone. They called him an arrogant Jew. They called him a fat Jew bastard. Anything they could think of to get him to lace up his shoes and put some money down. Nothing worked. No one could embarrass or enrage him enough to get him on the lanes. That was the steel exterior of a guy who had his shit together, and Schlegel knew it.

“You never get on the lanes until you got an edge,” Ginsberg would tell Schlegel. “If you think you’re better, you can win.”

The smart action bowlers never allowed emotion to interfere with their judgment. The sooner a player got you emotional enough to bowl, the sooner he stuffed his pockets with your rent money. But one thing Schlegel would also come to understand was that at Manhattan Lanes, to ask for money upfront from a guy who owed it to you was to ask for the fight of your life. Eight weeks had passed since Schlegel lent Ginsberg $155, and Ginsberg had yet to pay back a dime. So one afternoon while Schlegel kicked back some brews at the bowling alley bar, he happened to spot Ginsberg. Schlegel asked him for twenty bucks and reminded him of his debt.

“Go fuck yourself. I ain’t paying you back shit,” Ginsberg said.

“Fuck you!” Schlegel said. “Man, if I had you outside!”

“Yeah? Well fuck you! Let’s go!” Ginsberg said.

Such were the means of conflict resolution practiced in the bowling alleys of New York City in 1962. This particular conflict, however, would take quite a bit more to resolve than the usual opprobrium of the street.

Now Ginsberg, too, was about to meet the Other Ernie.

Ginsberg hurled Schlegel through a plate-glass window and out into the street. Schlegel, dusted in a coating of shattered glass, got up off the ground.

“Fuck you! I’ll kill you!” Schlegel said.

But Ginsberg kept coming at him. He swung once at Schlegel and missed. Then Schlegel reached for the blade he kept in his pocket. He buried it in Ginsberg’s chest. Yet Ginsberg, as much of a stocky bull off the lanes just as he was on the lanes, kept coming at him still. He smashed Schlegel once more. Schlegel hit him with a left. Finally, Ginsberg slipped bloodily down the hood of a parked cab. A friend grabbed the knife and ran. Schlegel never saw that knife again.

Schlegel rose from the blood and shattered glass, his torn jeans revealing two scraped and bleeding knees. Then he did what any reasonable person might do after stabbing somebody: He went home, cleaned himself up, and went back to the Manhattan Lanes bar.

Which was exactly where the cops hoped to find him—and did.

“Are you Ernie Schlegel?” they asked.

Schlegel returned the question with one of his own, a not particularly wise strategy under the scrutiny of New York City cops who suspect you just tried to kill somebody.

“Who wants to know?” Schlegel said.

“
We
do!”

Clearly, the cops would be the only ones asking questions.

The cops dragged Schlegel out of the bar and delivered him to Jewish Memorial Hospital on Broadway at 196th Street. There, they brought him into Ginsberg’s room.

“He stabbed me!” Ginsberg said, pointing at Schlegel from his bed.

The cops looked at Schlegel. Schlegel shrugged.

“I didn’t stab nobody,” Schlegel said. “We got in a fight. What are you gonna do?”

A skilled defense attorney, Ernie Schlegel was not.

“He stabbed me,” Ginsberg repeated.

The cops believed him. They booked Schlegel into the 34th precinct, badgering him until, they hoped, they might wear him down.

“Where’s the knife?” they would ask him.

“What knife?” Schlegel would answer.

This went on for hours. The cops charged him with attempted murder and sent him to a cell where he stayed the night. He lit his pack of smokes down to the last cigarette, one after the other, until he was left with only four unused matches. He peeled those in half and smoked them, too, as he tried to keep his mind off the swollen and throbbing hand he had crashed into Ginsberg’s skull.

“Never get arrested on a Friday night,” Schlegel thought to himself. “Especially when you have only four smokes and four matches left.”

Schlegel’s mother, Irma, who came to America from Nazi Germany just as Hitler was rising to power, proved especially unimpressed with the aftermath of her son’s blow-out with Ginsberg. Schlegel never knew if the story was true, but he had heard that his mother once spit at Hitler. She found him holed up in a jail cell with a right hand bloated to the size of a mango, a black eye from a cop’s cocked fist, and his bloodied face emblazoned with the pattern of the corduroy coat he had slept on. The shaggy, blonde hair that had earned him the nickname “Strawhead” looked like the nest of some livid crow.

“What did you do to my son?” Schlegel’s mother screamed in her thick German accent.

This didn’t look to her like something that happened in America. It looked more like something that happened in the country she left behind.

A doctor told a grand jury soon thereafter that it looked to him as though Ginsberg had been stabbed. It looked, in fact, as though Ginsberg was lucky to be alive. The knife went in right under Ginsberg’s heart, leaving a clean wound doctors sutured with a couple of butterfly stiches.

Things did not look good for Schlegel, but the streets of Inwood had a way of cultivating experts in the field of “things that don’t look good.” That expertise was about to spare Schlegel from calling the clink home for years to come. Luck may have guarded Ginsberg’s heart from the jab of Schlegel’s knife, but it would prove utterly powerless against the war of attrition that followed. Schlegel found his soldiers among the many other people who owed him a buck. They now had the chance to dissolve their debt with little more than a few well-chosen words on the witness stand. Everybody who owed Schlegel money, it seemed, found their way to the courthouse to pay their debts more handsomely than cash alone ever could. Each of them testified before the grand jury as to the quality of Schlegel’s character. By the time they were done, they had turned Schlegel into a man whose character was as unimpeachable as the Pope’s. The grand jury, however, proved rather less than convinced.

If Schlegel knew anything at this moment in his life, it was this: He was not going to jail. Few people could turn a crisis into a fortune like Ernie Schlegel. From adolescence, he could pick up the scent of a dollar as quickly as a wolf picks up the smell of blood in the woods. At age fourteen, he found the scent in nearby homes where he earned pocket money cleaning
ovens and windows for housewives. He found it in the window he broke through with friends to steal ice cream and hot dogs at a restaurant in Fort Tryon Park. He found it in the 7Up factory where he spent summers working from 7
A.M.
to midnight, and he found it in the bowling alleys where he spent what was left of his sleepless nights hustling con men and clowns. He only slept by accident in those days, and that was fine by him. By the time he was holding down that gig with 7Up, he worked so much that he never had time to spend what he made. If the money he made there still was not enough to satisfy him, then there were the televisions his friends would steal and deliver to him for $200, which Schlegel quickly turned around on the street for $225. Or the ’48 Jaguar he bought for $30 and sold days later for $75.