Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (3 page)

Schlegel enjoyed the fruits of this development himself when Manhattan Lanes, a massive, 62-lane bowling alley, opened on Broadway and Sherman Avenue in Inwood. It was one of the larger bowling alleys in the country at the time. Many other bowling alleys speckled his neighborhood; he
hardly could walk a few blocks without passing at least a couple of them. With their abundance and proximity, bowling alleys fulfilled a craving that was not always easily satisfied in an era before Atlantic City casinos or OTB. They ensured that the next bet always was just a block away, if not right across the street. And in the bowling alley, unlike a game of dice or cards, you truly were in charge of your own destiny. You could arrange to bowl a match against a guy you knew had the same average as you; or you could hustle an opponent into underestimating your skill and then bleed the sucker’s pockets dry. It also helped that bowling offered a particularly cheap option for gamblers—a game of bowling was just fifty cents in 1962. A pair of rental shoes might set you back twenty cents.

By the time Schlegel discovered Manhattan Lanes around the corner from the Sickles Street apartment he lived in with his parents, bowling was becoming the way for him to live up to something his father told him in 1958, something that would stick with him for the rest of his life.

“The Schlegel name is
our
name! It is your mother’s name! And you better not ruin it!” Schlegel’s father told him after standing beside his son in court while a judge administered jail terms to his pocketbook-snatching friends. Schlegel had been caught hanging with the wrong 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, “Ernie, we got a fish in Philadelphia!”

A “fish” in action bowling parlance was a sucker whose money was easy because he either didn’t know his competition or he
had an exaggerated sense of his own abilities. And if he did know his competition and chose therefore to keep his money to himself, well, there were remedies for that: You could ask him to please confirm he still had a pair of balls between his legs, show up on crutches and say you had the gout to put on the airs of easy prey, or start a match with a few thrown games before stunning the poor bastard with enough strikes to make him beg to keep enough money for the bus. You did whatever it took to get him on the lanes and make his money yours. That was the bottom line. Schlegel’s bait to catch these fish included the shot of bourbon he downed and the extra splash he rubbed behind his ears, and the long-sleeved shirts he wore to perpetuate rumors that they concealed heroin tracks. And then there was the crooked mouth and the thing his friends called “the twisted eye.” Schlegel’s vision was so poor in one eye that he tightened it into a kind of contorted squint when he bowled. It made him look a little crazy to the unsuspecting. Despite his impaired vision, Schlegel was the most accurate bowler in New York, an asset that made him not just a good bowler, but a great bowler. He threw a much straighter ball than most; a lot of bowlers at least hooked the ball a little, some a lot. Schlegel preferred a straighter shot because he knew that he never would miss his target, while bowlers with big hooks will not always be able to predict where their ball will end up as it makes its way toward the pins. There is a narrower margin for error when you rely on hook instead of accuracy. When you throw a straighter shot you remove that uncertainty; and when you know, too, that you rarely will miss the target you are looking at, you are a fearsome competitor.

But for Schlegel, action bowling was as much about hustling as it was about physical ability—the way a stench of bourbon or a twist in the eye consumed more of his opponent’s focus than the match itself. And that was exactly the point: You
wanted the guy on the other side of the ball return to think about anything but how to get out of the place with money in his pocket, anything but what he had done to succeed in this spot before. You had to convince the fish that there was something wrong with you, afflict him with the delusion that he had the upper hand. If you played your part well, your prey would get angry—so angry, in fact, that he would bet far more money than reason advised. The double-or-nothings, the big bills he would lay down to recoup those small bills his buddies had just watched him lose, the machismo that gnawed at him as his humiliation grew. That’s when you made the real money; that’s when you were playing a game Schlegel liked to call “the spider and the fly.” By the time Schlegel’s opponents found themselves down a couple hundred bucks, they knew they were caught.

The roommates Schlegel would soon live with knew he played the role of the spider well enough to send him bowling whenever they needed some rent money. They knew about the night Schlegel and his chain-smoking doubles partner, Johnny Campbell, took on the most fearsome duo in action bowling, a pair of bowlers known as Fats and Deacon, in a 12-hour match that culminated in a tie at dawn. Both teams piled their cash on the score table for one last game to settle it all. With fingers so raw by then that the finger holes in their bowling balls were stained with blood, they once again battled down to the 10th frame, when Schlegel needed all three strikes to win the match. He stepped up and threw what Campbell would describe for years to come as the best three strikes he ever saw in his life. The money was theirs.

But Schlegel and his act found fewer takers by 1962. After a while, even the fish came to know your shtick well 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 trying
his 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 betrayed
the brazenness within were his eyes. Schlegel’s eyes seemed to have a kind of cast about them, a mean pair of reptilian squints that looked like two crude gashes in a jack-o-lantern. Paired with a nose vaguely gnarled by the blows that broke it in street brawls and dragnets, and those paying attention might have known better than to put their money at risk.

Most who hadn’t heard Schlegel’s name or just did not know any better—and there were enough of those types to keep the money coming in, especially outside New York—happily agreed to take him on. They sized him up as an easy target. There always was a fish who took him for just another drunk or druggie with nothing better to do with his money than lose it. They smelled the bourbon and saw the rags that passed for clothing; they did not look hard enough to find the man behind them. It never took long before Schlegel opened up his back pocket and let them fill it. If the fish didn’t have a dollar, Schlegel would find one.

Schlegel found more than a dollar down in Philly the night he went fishing there with Nagai and Harris, thrashing the man who said he’d bowl anybody and banking a quick $200. And that, in hindsight, is where his Philly exploits ought to have ended. But when that bottom line is yielding just enough cash to pique your hunger for more, it’s awfully easy to talk about what should have been. Here in Philly, in 1962, the money flowed like beer from a tap, and home was more than two hours up the road. You don’t just drive from New York to Philly to bowl four games and leave, even if staying meant risking it all.