Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (4 page)

Harris would soon have every reason to worry, but for now the vanquished local stunned Schlegel and the boys with a flourish of class they rarely encountered in smoke-filled bowling alleys after dark.

“It was a pleasure bowling you guys,” he said. “If you want to really make some money, there’s a bowling alley out on
Route 1 in New Jersey called Federal Lanes. And the manager there will bowl anybody for any amount. He’s like a
superstar
in that bowling alley, but you’re better than him and you can take him. So why don’t you go there?”

Call it the voice of greed. Call it the voice of the devil himself. But whatever force compelled that Philadelphia fish to lure them down Route 1, Schlegel and the boys heard it loud and clear. Down Route 1 they went in the pitch darkness of night. They would find the fish they went looking for at Federal Lanes, but they also would find the kind of people who only come out at night, the ones who will just as soon plant a blade in your eye as they will shake your hand.

It was one in the morning by the time the Caddy pulled up to Federal Lanes. They found the manager closing up shop for the night. But they didn’t come to help the guy mop his floors and turn out the lights; they came to relieve him of his cash. They asked him if he wanted to bowl, told him they heard he liked action.

“Sure,” he said.

Then they started bowling. That, as Schlegel and the boys were about to learn, was their first mistake.

Once again, Nagai’s prized pony performed well enough to recoup every dime of gas money he spent to take him there and much more, besting the “superstar” for hours on end until the first glow of dawn blanched the bowling alley windows. This guy was no pretender like the one who couldn’t even take down Richie Solomon back at Jimmy Dykes’s place back in Philly. This was a real bowler, a good bowler. Still, Schlegel was better. By five in the morning, the manager called it quits.

Then the chumps walked in.

They were a gang of kids in their mid-to late teens looking to keep the match going by putting their money on the manager.
Harris knew a fish when he smelled one, and these kids reeked of it. But he also knew exhaustion when he felt it. By the time the kids arrived, Harris had fallen half asleep in the settee area behind another pair of lanes, spent by the long day of traveling far and wide to find places where the fish dwelled. Schlegel decided he would indeed resume the match. Harris told this new school of fish he would cover whatever bets they had.

The kids started putting up seven bucks here, three bucks there. They were the kinds of small bets Schlegel wasn’t used to back home, but there were at least eight of these kids, and between them all plus what the manager was betting it was an okay bet.

After twenty-four hours of shutting the biggest mouths in bowling alleys from Philly to South Jersey without so much as a minute’s sleep in the meantime, all it took was “an okay bet” to rouse Steve Harris from his half-conscious slumber. That’s all it ever took when you were in on the action. After all, it was gambling that sent Schlegel and the boys down Route 1 to Jimmy Dykes Lanes, gambling that sent them deep into south Jersey on the trail of the fish they smelled there, gambling that roused Harris from his sleep the moment a pack of hoods with change to spare emerged from the night. Schlegel laced up his shoes again, Harris tallied all the money the kids dared to spare on a man who had no answer for Ernie Schlegel, the machine set yet another rack of pins, and the games, once again, began. By now the “superstar” that Harris and Schlegel heard about back in Philly looked like little more than a super sucker. His next few games did nothing to demonstrate otherwise. Schlegel beat him again. The guy called it quits, and the night, finally, was over.

Or so Harris thought.

Some of the bowlers Harris knew back home might take a bad night of losses in stride and try their luck again the
following night, but the boys Harris did business with down in Jersey were the kind that did not wait until next time to get their money back. No, these were the kinds of gamblers who only lost when they agreed to, who only went home with empty pockets if the other guys brought bigger knives than they did.

Schlegel packed his ball and shoes again. Harris slipped back into the half-sleep he’d fallen into before these kids came around looking to score. And that is when the night they never would forget began. Harris heard the sound of kids slamming bowling balls into the floor and damning to hell the “New York hustlers” Nagai had brought to town. Only feigning sleep now, Harris listened as the kids openly discussed the speed and trajectory at which a bowling ball must be thrown to blow open a grown man’s head like a butternut squash at a shooting range. That, of course, was the end of even the pretense of sleep. That, perhaps, was the moment Harris found himself more fully awake than ever before. A realization that the next time you do catch some sleep may in fact be the last time will tend to do that to you.

Harris stood up.

“What’s your problem?” he asked the kids. “We’re not hustlers. We didn’t come in here pretending we didn’t know how to bowl, asking if you will teach us how to bowl like they do in a pool hall. We came in and Ernie said ‘Do you want to bowl?’ That means he’s good! We know the manager’s good, and Ernie’s good. That’s not hustling. Ernie beat him fair and square!’”

Mere reason may have been enough to get them out of jams back in New York City, but down in south Jersey, reason was no match for a knife. The shortest kid among them busted out a blade. Switchblade knives were popular in those days, but this was something closer to a box cutter. When the kid pushed a button, the blade came straight out, and it was half-an-inch
wide like a razor blade. He pressed the blade against Harris’s belly and explained exactly what he intended to do with it.

“You’re gonna die, motherfucker,” the kid told him.

Harris shut his mouth; this was new territory for him. Schlegel and Nagai were gathering their belongings several lanes away with their backs turned, oblivious.

Despite the abundance of cash gamblers tossed around in the biggest action houses, muggings were still virtually unheard of. Maybe one heard about matches that began with bowling balls and ended with guns, but you never saw it happen yourself. You knew where the dangerous bowling alleys were and you stayed away. Nonetheless, if you were an action player in New York City, you knew the stories.

You knew about the night Kenny Barber, one of the greatest action bowlers of all time, found himself caught in a tough match against a local legend named Mike Chiuchiolo. How Barber had to walk up to the mobsters who put their money on him and tell them he thought maybe he just didn’t have it that night. The fear he felt when they told him they “weren’t losing tonight,” his realization that they were packing enough guns to hold the place up if Barber lost their money. You knew the relief that came to a seventeen-year-old kid who was only looking to leave the place with some extra money and instead thanked his lucky stars to be leaving with his life.

And then there was the night Jim Byrnes headed down to Green Acres, Long Island, with some buddies to bowl a night of action.

Byrnes showed up with his friend Billy Spigner and a kid named Brian Hayes, an up-and-coming action player whose
talent was as formidable as his addiction to blow. Some kids bowled during the day so they had money to throw down at the racetrack at night; others bowled because it was the only thing that made them feel alive. Hayes bowled so he could make the money he needed to buy his next fix.

After a few back-and-forth matches that did not yield much in return, Hayes suggested they bowl for $700 a game. In the early 1960s, that was as much as some people earned in three months at their day jobs. Byrnes said, “Okay.” A couple frames into the next game, Byrnes realized that might prove to be one of the last things he would ever say.

In the second frame, Spigner walked over to Byrnes, who was sitting at the score table. He leaned in and whispered, “If you lose the match, run to the lot! We don’t have enough money to pay them.”

Byrnes knew the gangsters betting in the back did not take kindly to kids who had the balls to bet with money they did not have. He knew these were the kinds of guys who sent bodyguards to toss debtors through plate glass windows, humorless troglodytes with fingers thick as cannolis. And he knew there were dozens of them putting their money down on his opponent, a guy named Tommy Delutz Sr. If Byrnes lost the game, the possibility that he also might lose his life was significant enough that his bowling ball felt like somebody had glued it to his hand when he tried to let go of it—a problem known in bowling as “squeezing” the ball. The more you let your nerves dominate you on the lanes, the tighter you grip your bowling ball and it feels as though the ball will not come off of your thumb at the release. More often than not, the squeezers turn out to be the losers.

Byrnes needed all three strikes in the 10th frame to win the game, or the first two strikes and then nine pins to tie.
The way the ball was coming off his hand, his best shot was to fire it directly at the pocket as hard as he possibly could. On the first shot, it worked. The ball took two revs down the lane and landed in the pocket for a strike. Then it worked again.

“Please, God, give me nine!” Byrnes thought to himself. “Let us tie so I can get the fuck out of here!”

Then he threw another strike.

“Those were the greatest shots you ever threw!” Spigner told him.

“Yeah, seven hundred dollars and our lives? That ain’t bad!” Byrnes said.

Then he threw up.

But it was not good enough for Hayes, who suggested they bowl again.

“Brian,” Byrnes said, “let me swallow my stomach first!”

But they did bowl again, and they went home a couple grand richer by the time the night was through. But it was clear to them that the world of action bowling was moving in a deadlier direction.

Steve Harris knew the stories as well as anyone. As he stood in Federal Lanes with a blade pressed against him, he knew this was not the first time an action bowler had ended up on the wrong end of a gangster’s knife, and he knew it would not be the last.

Before the kid made good on his promise to send Harris on a one-way trip out of this world, he had a question for him.

“Are you a Jew?” the kid said.

This was a question Harris had heard too many times before. He thought of the winter mornings he descended
into the subway station tunnel on his walk to school to avoid the cold in his native Inwood, then a predominantly Irish neighborhood, and the Irish Catholic kids who would wait on the other side to beat him because their parents told them the Jews killed Jesus. He remembered how petrified he was to walk those streets with the velvet bag that contained his tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl he received on his bar mitzvah which he took with him to the temple up the block on the High Holy Days. How he would hold it close to his body so the neighborhood bullies would not see the Star of David embroidered on it.

Jewish kids growing up in the Inwood of Harris’s youth knew they were in for a beating if they dared enter any of the neighborhood’s seventy-three Irish pubs. Good Shepherd Church near the bustling intersection of 207th Street and Broadway hosted no less than fourteen masses packed with Irish Catholics every Sunday, and a xenophobic paranoia thickened the air with rumors about the “negroes” moving in and the jobs and homes they would steal from Irish families who had lived there for generations. The black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish children of Inwood grew up with a nagging feeling they were some foreign presence discourteously taking up residence on somebody else’s turf. To be different from the rest on those streets, and especially to have had the audacity to be born a Jew, was to live your life as a marked man. And now, a couple of hours down the road from all that, here was a south Jersey hood with his knife pressed to Harris’s gut and a question all too familiar to a kid from those angry streets back home. Maybe, for the first time in his life, he found himself yearning for those days when the worst thing he had to worry about was what to say to his mother when he made it back home just before dawn. Maybe that freedom he went chasing when he left her house for good also was something to fear.