The Hustler

  He had known he would start out losing. That was natural; he was playing a great player and on his own table, in his own poolroom, and he figured to lose for a few hours. But not that badly. Fats beat him two games by one hundred and twenty-five to nothing and in the third game Eddie finally got one open shot and scored fifty on it. It was not pleasant to lose, and yet, somehow, he was not deeply dismayed, did not feel lost in the brilliance of the other man’s game, did not feel nervous or confused. He spent most of each game sitting down and each time Fats won a game Eddie grinned and gave him a hundred dollars. Fats had nothing to say.

  At eleven o’clock, after he had lost the sixth game, Charlie came over, looked at him, and said, “Quit.”

  He looked at Charlie, who seemed to be perspiring, and said, “I’ll take him. Just wait.”

  “Don’t be too sure.” Charlie went back to his chair, on the other side of the table.

  Then Eddie started winning. He felt it start in the middle of a game, began to feel the sense he sometimes had of being a part of the table and of the balls and of the cue stick. The stroke of his arm seemed to travel on oiled bearings; and each muscle of his body was alert, sensitive to the game and the movement of the balls, sharply aware of how every ball would roll, of how, exactly, every shot must be made. Fats beat him that game, but he had felt it coming and he won the next.

  And the game after that, and the next, and then another. Then someone turned off all the lights except those over the table that they were playing on and the background of Bennington’s vanished, leaving only the faces of the crowd around the table, the green of the cloth of the table, and the now sharply etched, clean, black-shadowed balls, brilliant against the green. The balls had sharp, jeweled edges; the cue ball itself was a milk-white jewel and it was a magnificent thing to watch the balls roll and to know beforehand where they were going to roll. Nothing could be so clear or so simple or so excellent to do. And there was no limit to the shots that could be made.

  Fats’ game did not change. It was brilliant, fantastically good, but Eddie was beating him now, playing an incredible game: a gorgeous, spellbinding game, a game that he felt he had known all of his life, that he would play when the right time came. There was no better time than this.

  And then, after a game had ended, there was noise up front and Eddie turned and saw that the clock said midnight and that someone was locking the great oak door, and he looked at Fats and Fats said, “Don’t worry, Fast Eddie. We’re not going anyplace.”

  Then he pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket, handed it to a thin nervous man in a black suit, who was watching the game, and said, “Preacher, I want White Horse whiskey. And ice. And a glass. And you get yourself a fix with the change; but you do that after you come back with my whiskey.”

  Eddie grinned, liking the feel of this, the getting ready for action. He fished out a ten himself. “J. T. S. Brown bourbon,” he said to the thin man. Then he leaned his cue stick against the table, unbuttoned his cuffs, and began rolling up his shirt sleeves. Then he stretched out his arms, flexing the muscles, enjoying the good sense of their steadiness, their control, and he said, “Okay, Fats. Your break.”

  Eddie beat him. The pleasure was exquisite; and when the man brought the whiskey and he mixed himself a highball with water from the cooler and drank it, his whole body and brain seemed to be suffused with pleasure, with alertness and life. He looked at Fats. There was a dark line of sweat and dirt around the back of his collar. His manicured nails were dirty. His face still showed no expression. He, too, was holding a glass of whiskey and sipping it quietly.

  Suddenly Eddie grinned at him. “Let’s play for a thousand a game, Fats,” he said.

  There was a murmur in the crowd.

  Fats took a sip of whiskey, rolled it around carefully in his mouth, swallowed. His sharp, black eyes were fixed on Eddie, dispassionately, searching. He seemed to see something there that reassured him. Then he glanced, for a moment, at the neat man with glasses, the man who had been taking bets. The man nodded, pursing his lips. “Okay,” he said.

  Eddie knew it, could feel it, that no one had ever played straight pool like this before. Fats’ game, itself, was astonishing, a consistently beautiful, precise game, a deft, quick shooting game with almost no mistakes. And he won games; no power on earth could have stopped him from winning some of them, for pool is a game that gives the man sitting down no earthly way of affecting the shooting of the man he is trying to beat. But Eddie beat him, steadily, making shots that no one had ever made before, knifing balls in, playing hairline position, running rack after rack of balls without his cue ball’s touching a cushion, firing ball after ball into the center, the heart of every pocket. His stroking arm was like a conscious thing, and the cue stick was a living extension of it. There were nerves in the wood of it, and he could feel the tapping of the leather tip with the nerves, could feel the balls roll; and the exquisite sound that they made as they hit the bottoms of the pockets was a sound both there, on the table, and in the very center of his own soul.

  They played for a long, long time and then he noticed that the shadows of the balls on the green had become softer, had lost their edges. He looked up and saw pale light coming through the window draperies and then looked at the clock. It was seven-thirty. He looked around him, dazed. The crowd had thinned out, but some of the same men were there. Everybody seemed to need a shave. He felt his own face. Sandpaper. He looked down at himself. His shirt was filthy, covered with chalk marks, the tail out, and the front wrinkled as if he had slept in it. He looked at Fats, who looked, if anything, worse.

  Charlie came over. He looked like hell, too. He blinked at Eddie. “Breakfast?”

  Eddie sat down, in one of the now-empty chairs by the table. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” He fished in his pocket, pulled out a five.

  “Thanks,” Charlie said. “I don’t need it. I been keeping the money, remember?”

  Eddie grinned, weakly. “That’s right. How much is it now?”

  Charlie stared at him. “You don’t know?”

  “I forgot.” He fished a crumpled cigarette from his pocket, lit it. His hands, he noticed, were trembling faintly; but he saw this as if he were looking at someone else. “What is it?” He leaned back, smoking the cigarette, looking at the balls sitting, quiet now, on the table. The cigarette had no taste to it.

  “You won eleven thousand four hundred,” Charlie said. “Cash. It’s in my pocket.”

  Eddie looked back at him. “Well!” he said. And then, “Go get breakfast. I want a egg sandwich and coffee.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Charlie said. “You’re going with me. We eat breakfast at the hotel. The pool game is over.”

  Eddie looked at him a minute, grinning, wondering, too, why it was that Charlie couldn’t see it, never had seen it. Then he leaned forward, looked at him, and said, “No it isn’t, Charlie.”

  “Eddie…”

  “This pool game ends when Minnesota Fats says it ends.”

  “You came after ten thousand. You got ten thousand.”

  Eddie leaned forward again. He wasn’t grinning now. He wanted Charlie to see it, to get with it, to feel some of what he was feeling, some of the commitment he was making. “Charlie,” he said, “I came here after Minnesota Fats. And I’m gonna get him. I’m gonna stay with him all the way.”

  Fats was sitting down too, resting. He stood up. His chin jerked, down into the soft flesh of his neck. “Fast Eddie,” he said tonelessly, “let’s play pool.”

  “Break the balls,” Eddie said.

  ***

  In the middle of the game the food came and Eddie ate his sandwich in bites between shots, setting it on the rail of the table while he was shooting, and washing it down with the coffee, which tasted very bitter. Fats had sent someone out and he was eating from a platter of a great many small sandwiches and link sausages. Instead of coffee he had three bottles of Dutch beer on another platter and these he drank from a pilsner glass, whi
ch he held in a fat hand, delicately. He wiped his lips gently with a napkin between bites of the sandwiches and, apparently, paid no attention whatever to the balls that Eddie was methodically pocketing in the thousand-dollar game that he, sitting in the chair and eating his gourmet’s breakfast, was playing in.

  Eddie won the game; but Fats won the next one, by a narrow margin. And at nine o’clock the poolroom doors were opened again and an ancient colored man limped in and began sweeping the floor and opened the windows, pulling back the draperies. Outside the sky was, absurdly, blue. The sun shone in.

  Fats turned his head toward the janitor and said, his voice loud and flat, across the room, “Cut off that goddamn sunshine.”

  The black man shuffled back to the windows and drew the curtains. Then he went back to his broom.

  They played, and Eddie kept winning. In his shoulders, now, and in his back and at the backs of his legs there was a kind of dull pain; but the pain seemed as if it were someone else’s and he hardly felt it, hardly knew it was there. He merely kept shooting and the balls kept falling and the grotesque, fat man whom he was playing—the man who was the Best Straight Pool Player in the Country—kept giving large amounts of money to Charlie. Once, he noticed that, while he was shooting and the other man was sitting, Fats was talking with the man with the pink cheeks and with Gordon, the manager. The pink-cheeked man had his billfold in his hand. After that game, Fats paid Charlie with a thousand-dollar bill. The sight of the bill that he had just earned made him feel nothing. He only wished that the rack man would hurry and rack the balls.

  The aching and the dullness increased gradually; but these did not affect the way his body played pool. There was a strange, exhilarating feeling that he was really somewhere else in the room, above the table—floating, possibly, with the heavy, bodiless mass of cigarette smoke that hung below the light—watching his own body, down below, driving small colored balls into holes by poking them with a long, polished stick of wood. And somewhere else in the room, perhaps everywhere in the room, was an incredibly fat man, silent, always in motion, unruffled, a man whose sharp little eyes saw not only the colored balls on the green rectangle, but saw also into all of the million corners in the room, whether or not they were illuminated by the cone of light that circumscribed the bright oblong of the pool table.

  At nine o’clock in the evening Charlie told him that he had won eighteen thousand dollars.

  Something happened, suddenly, in his stomach when Charlie told him this. A thin steel blade touched against a nerve in his stomach. He tried to look at Fats, but, for a moment, could not.

  At ten-thirty, after winning one and then losing one, Minnesota Fats went back to the bathroom and Eddie found himself sitting down and then, in a moment, his head was in his hands and he was staring at the floor, at a little group of flat cigarette butts at his feet. And then Charlie was with him, or he heard his voice; but it seemed to be coming from a distance and when he tried to raise his head he could not. But Charlie was telling him to quit, he knew that without being able to pick out the word. And then the cigarette butts began to shift positions and to sway, in a gentle but confusing motion, and there was a humming in his ears like the humming of a cheap radio and, suddenly, he realized that he was passing out, and he shook his head, weakly at first and then violently, and when he stopped doing this he could see and hear better. But something in his mind was screaming. Something in him was quivering, frightened, cutting at his stomach from the inside, like a small knife.

  Charlie was still talking but he broke him off, saying, “Give me a drink, Charlie.” He did not look at Charlie, but kept his eyes on the cigarette butts, watching them closely.

  “You don’t need a drink.”

  Then he looked up at him, at the round, comic face dirty with beard and said, surprised at the softness of his own voice, “Shut up, Charlie. Give me a drink.”

  Charlie handed him the bottle.

  He turned it up and let the whiskey spill down his throat. It gagged him but he did not feel it burn, hardly felt it in his stomach except as a mild warmness, softening the edges of the knife. Then he looked around him and found that his vision was all right, that he could see clearly the things directly in front of him, although there was a mistiness around the edges.

  Fats was standing by the table, cleaning his fingernails. His hands were clean again; he had washed them; and his hair although still greasy, dirty looking, was combed. He seemed no more tired—except for the soiled shirt and a slight squinting of the eyes—than he had when Eddie had first seen him. Eddie looked away, looking back at the pool table. The balls were racked into their neat triangle. The cue ball sat at the head of the table, near the side rail, in position for the break.

  Fats was at the side of his vision, in the misty part, and he appeared to be smiling placidly. “Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie,” he said.

  Suddenly, Eddie turned to him and stared. Fats’ chin jerked, toward his shoulder, his mouth twisting with the movement. Eddie watched this and it seemed, now, to have some kind of meaning; but he did not know what the meaning was.

  And then he leaned back in his chair and said, the words coming almost without volition, “I’ll beat you, Fats.”

  Fats just looked at him.

  Eddie was not sure whether or not he was grinning at the fat man, at the huge, ridiculous, effeminate, jeweled ballet dancer of a pool hustler, but he felt as if something were going to make him laugh aloud at any minute. “I’ll beat you, Fats,” he said. “I beat you all day and I’ll beat you all night.”

  “Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie.”

  And then it came, the laughing. Only it was like someone else laughing, not himself, so that he heard himself as if it were from across the room. And then there were tears in his eyes, misting over his vision, fuzzing together the poolroom, the crowd of people around him, and the fat man, into a meaningless blur of colors, shaded with a dark, dominating green that seemed, now, to be actually being diffused from the surface of the table. And then the laughing stopped and he blinked at Fats.

  He said it very slowly, tasting the words thickly as they came on. “I’m the best you ever seen, Fats.” That was it. It was very simple. “I’m the best there is.” He had known it, of course, all along, for years. But now it was so clear, so simple, that no one—not even Charlie—could mistake it. “I’m the best. Even if you beat me, I’m the best.” The mistiness was clearing from his eyes again and he could see Fats standing sideways at the table, laying his hand down toward the green, not even aiming. Even if you beat me…

  Somewhere in Eddie, deep in him, a weight was being lifted away. And, deeper still, there was a tiny, distant voice, a thin, anguished cry that said to him, sighing, You don’t have to win. For hours there had been the weight, pressing on him, trying to break him, and now these words, this fine and deep and true revelation, had come and were taking the weight from him. The weight of responsibility. And the small steel knife of fear.

  He looked back at the great fat man. “I’m the best,” he said, “no matter who wins.”

  “We’ll see,” Fats said, and he broke the balls.

  ***

  When Eddie looked at the clock again it was a little past midnight. He lost two in a row. Then he won one, lost one, won another—all of them close scores. The pain in his right upper arm seemed to glow outward from the bone and his shoulder was a lump of heat with swollen blood vessels around it and the cue stick seemed to mush into the cue ball when he hit it. And the balls no longer clicked when they hit one another but seemed to hit as if they were made of balsa wood. But he still could not miss the balls; it was still ridiculous that anyone could miss them; and his eyes saw the balls in sharp, brilliant detail although there seemed to be no longer a range of sensitivity to his vision. He felt he could see in the dark or could look at, stare into, the sun—the brightest sun at full noon—and stare it out of the sky.

  He did not miss; but when he played safe, now, the cue ball did not a
lways freeze against the rail or against a cluster of balls as he wanted it to. Once, at a critical time in a game, when he had to play safe, the cue ball rolled an inch too far and left Fats an open shot and Fats ran sixty-odd balls and out. And later, during what should have been a big run, he miscalculated a simple, one-rail position roll and had to play for defense. Fats won that game too. When he did, Eddie said, “You fat son of a bitch, you make mistakes expensive.”

  But he kept on making them. He would still make large numbers of balls but something would go wrong and he would throw the advantage away. And Fats didn’t make mistakes. Not ever. And then Charlie came over after a game, and said, “Eddie, you still got the ten thousand. But that’s all. Let’s quit and go home. Let’s go to bed.”

  Eddie did not look at him. “No,” he said.

  “Look, Eddie,” he said, his voice soft, tired, “what is it you want to do? You beat him. You beat him bad. You want to kill yourself?”

  Eddie looked up at him. “What’s the matter, Charlie?” he said, trying to grin at him. “You chicken?”

  Charlie looked back at him for a minute before he spoke. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe that’s it. I’m chicken.”

  “Okay. Then go home. Give me the money.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Eddie held his hand out. “Give me the money, Charlie. It’s mine.”

  Charlie just looked at him. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a tremendous roll of money, wrinkled bills rolled up and wrapped with a heavy rubber band.