27 A useful autobiographical portrait of the chance-taking continuously involved in the life of a slum hustler specializing in nugging may be found in H. Williamson, Hustler! (New York, Doubleday, 1965). See also C. Brown, Manchild in the Promsed Land (New York, Macmillan Co., 1965), for the Harlem version.
28 S. Moss (with K. Purdy), All But My Life (New York, Bantam Books, 1964), p. 10.
29 Much of this care, of course, is built into the environment by safety design. Chairs are constructed to limit the possibility of their breaking, stools of their tipping, etc. Even cars are coming to be designed to minimize possible injuries.
30 Suggested by Edward Gross.
31 Knight, op. cit., p. 246.
32 The distinction between coping and defense is borrowed from D. Mechanic, Students Under Stress (New York, The Free Press, 1962), p. 51. A somewhat similar distinction is employed by B. Anderson in “Bereavement as a Subject of Cross-Cultural Inquiry: An American Sample,” Anthropology Quarterly, XXXVIII (1965), 195:
Stressor-directed behavior is oriented toward removing, resolving, or alleviating the impinging circumstances themselves; strain-directed behavior, toward the assuagement of the physical or psychological discomfort that is a product of these happenings.
33 Of course, where the fate is not a matter of immediate life or death, mere apprisal of what has befallen can begin the work of adjusting to the damage, so that a failure to learn now about an eventual loss can itself be fateful. Here disclosure of fate cannot effect what is disclosed but can effect the timing of reconstitutive efforts. Similarly, if the quickness of the indi-vidual’s response to the situation is of strategic significance in his competition with another party, then the timing of his learning about the outcome can be fateful, even though the disclosure of the outcome cannot influence that particular outcome itself.
34 K. Weinberg and H. Arond, “The Occupational Culture of the Boxer,” American Journal of Sociology, LXVIII (1952), 463-64.
35 In modern society such practices tend to be employed only with appreciable ambivalence and are no doubt much on the decline. For the changing situation with respect to one traditionally superstitious group, commercial fishermen, see J. Tunstall, The Fishermen (London, Macgibbon & Kee, 1962), pp. 168-70.
36 See W. Miller’s discussion of fate in “Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency,” Journal of Social Issues, XIV (1958), 11-12. The religious roots, of course, are to be found in John Calvin and ascetic Puritanism.
37 An example is cited in Cohen, op. cit., p. 147: “The possibility of a falling back on ‘luck’ may also be a great comfort in other circumstances. In 1962, British universities rejected some 20,000 applicants for entry. Many of them reconciled this rejection with their pride by saying that the offer of a university place depends as much on luck as on merit. The rejects are described as ‘submitting applications, like a gambler putting coins into a fruit-machine, sure that the jackpot must come up at last.’”
38E. Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York, Scribners, 1932), p. 101, suggests that men of this stamp, being disinclined to calculate too closely, have their own disease: “Syphilis was the disease of the crusaders in the middle ages. It was supposed to be brought to Europe by them, and it is a disease of all people who lead lives in which disregard of con-sequences dominates. It is an industrial accident, to be expected by all those who lead irregular sexual lives and from their habits of mind would rather take chances than use prophylactics, and it is a to-be-expected end, or rather phase, of the life of all fornicators who continue their careers far enough.” Penicillin has undermined this route to manliness.
39 C. Shaw, “Juvenile Delinquency—A Group Tradition,” Bulletin of the State University of Iowa, No. 23, N.S. No. 700 ( 1933), p. 10, cited in R. Cloward and L. Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity (New York, The Free Press, i960), p. 170.
40 S. Black, “Burglary,” Part Two, The New Yorker, December 14, 1963, p. 117.
41 With some reverence, dealers cite as a reference model the blackjack mechanics in New York who worked next door to the hang-out of the Murder Incorporated mob, and daily “dealt down” to customers likely to be demonstrably intolerant of dealers caught cheating them. Surely those who could survive such work must have known themselves to be men of considerable poise, a match in that department for anyone they could imagine.
42 Field Study, 1949-50.
43 E. Hillary, High Adventure (New York, Dutton, 1955), p. 14.
44 Dean MacCannell has suggested that there are jobs that holders gamble with, as when a night watchman takes time off to go to a movie during time on and enjoys the gamble as much as the movie. However, these jobs are characteristically “mere” ones, taken up and left rapidly by persons not specifically qualified for them and not qualified for anything better. When these jobs are subjected to only spot super-vision, gambling with the job seems to occur.
45 Thus, Ned Polsky in “The Hustler,” Social Problems, XII (1964), 5-6, suggests that a pool game between skilled players for a small bet will take second place to one between lesser players who are gaming for higher stakes.
46 The capacity to perform tends to be imputed to the individual, but there are situations, as in gang molestations, where this capacity clearly derives from the visible backing he can readily call on. Further, there are some situations whose action arises because a set of actors have committed themselves to closely coordinated acts—as in some current robberies. The sheer working out of the interdependencies in the face of various contingencies becomes a source of action.
47 It is quite possible for an individual to be more concerned about his reputation as a performer than for the objective value of the pot at stake. For example, casino dealers, especially in the “break-in” phase, can find it more difficult to manage dealing to a big bet during the shift than to manage the placing of the same bet as a customer after work.
48 Similarly Polsky, op. cit., p. 5, reports that certain pool halls are nationally identified as “action rooms,” and within one hall there will be one or two tables informally reserved for the action.
49 Suggested by Howard Becker. The Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo, ed. H. Goldin, F. O’Leary, and M. Lipsius (New York, Twayne Publishers, 1950), defines action: Criminal activity. “Shape up (be present) tonight, Joe, there’s action—a Brooklyn score (robbery).”
50 San Francisco Chronicle, August 7, 1965.
51 Ibid., July 22, 1965.
52 Ibid., September 24, 1965.
53 Las Vegas Sun, February 10, 1965.
54 Ibid., December 4, 1965.
55 Ibid., April 20, 1965.
56 Newsweek, September 6, 1965.
57 Look, August 24, 1965.
58 California Living, November 7, 1965. Action figures in other unexpected parts of the body too. My liquor merchant, pushing a cheap Dutch imported beer, opens a trial bottle for me, puts the bottle near my face and says: “Taste that action.”
59 Ibid., February 13, 1966.
60 Calif ornia, April 17, 1966.
61 Lloyd Watson in San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 1966.
62 Boston Traveler, August 22, 1966.
63 San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 1966, front page, under the lead “A $40,000 Piece of The Action.”
64 Driving often becomes a form of action, and the relation of everyday driving practices to the ideally dangerous world of track racing and the ideal-pushing world of car advertising is an important social topic, perhaps sufficiently appreciated only by those who have a professional interest in decreasing the accident rates. See, for example, Mervyn Jones’s article, “Who Wants Safe Driving,” in The Observer, Weekend Review, August, 16, 1964, p. 17; Cohen; op. ext., chap. 5, “Gambling with Life on the Road”; and J. Roberts, W. Thompson, and B. Sutton-Smith, “Expressive Self-Testing in Driving,” Human Organization, 25, 1 (1966), 54-63.
Driving so as to “make time” saves a remarkably small amount of time but does generate a current of
underlying action; often it seems that time is being saved so that risk can be experienced. Some persons enjoy air travel for the same reason. They time their departure tor the airport so as to minimize wait when they get there, and incidentally ensure some danger of missing the flight, and once on the plane they welcome for the duration or the flight a sense of slight danger to life.
65 Along with action and blowing it, we must count the phrase “having it made,” this being a source of income, whether deserved or undeserved, which allows a life of little work and considerable spending, and one sense of the phrase “to have something going for oneself,” namely, an edge of some kind, as when a casino employee says that he never plays 21 unless he’s got something going for him with the dealer—a condition of play, incidentally, that is very hard to stop from developing. I will not consider here a term used by casino employees in many contexts: the term, “to hustle.” This is an adopted member of the casino’s family of terms, having originated in an older business.
66 For example, the Corvette participation in the 1956 Sebring race, as described by the driver John Fitch (with C. Barnard) “The Day That Corvette Improved the Breed,” pp. 271-86 in C. Beaumont and W. Nolan, Omnibus of Speed (New York, Putnam and Sons, 1958): “I knew that failure at Sebring would probably mean the end of Chevrolet’s interest in racing sports cars” (p. 286).
67 It is characteristic that risky recreational sports are “worth watching,” that they will often be watched, and that the performer must accept this watching. He should be able to perform while being watched; yet he should not perform just in order to be watched and should perform in spite of having no watchers. No matter how big a crowd a sportsman gets, nor how much he is enthralled by their enthrallment, their role is unratified; they can’t demand that he schedule his performance or complete it once begun. They have a right to have their watching overlooked by him, but a duty to accept his overlooking them.
68 M. Balint, Thrills and Repressions (London, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1959), p. 23. Balint goes on to make this interesting comment (pp. 23-24): “Let us briefly examine in what way other thrills resemble those offered in funfairs. Some are connected with high speed, as in all kinds of racing, horse-riding and jumping, motor racing, skating, skiing, tobogganing, sailing, flying, etc. Others are connected with exposed situations, like various forms of jumping and diving, rock climbing, gliding, taming wild animals, travelling into unknown lands, etc. Lastly, there is a group of thrills which are connected with unfamiliar or even completely new forms of satisfaction, either in the form of a new object or of an unfamiliar method of pleasure. The obvious new object is a virgin, and it is amazing how many thrills claim this adjective. One speaks of virgin land, a virgin peak, or a virginal route to a peak, virgin realms of speed, and so on. On the whole, any new sexual partner is a thrill, especially if he or she belongs to another race, colour, or creed. The new forms of pleasure include among others: new food, new clothes, new customs, up to new forms of “perverse” sexual activities. In all these phenomena we find the same three fundamental factors described above: the objective external danger giving rise to fear, the voluntary and intentional exposure of oneself to it, and the confident hope that all will turn out well in the end.”
69 The necessity of considering this mode of action was recommended by Howard Becker.
70 Services in such places must be priced high if this kind of action is to be facilitated. Proprietors accommodate, but for other reasons.
71 In a feature article on “The ‘Secrets’ of Air Hostesses” (San Francisco Chronicle, April 4, 1966), under the heading “Those Cupcakes in the Sky,” we read: “What we want in our hostesses is understated sexiness,” says Nancy Marchand, a statuesque blonde in charge of PSA girls. “In choosing a hostess, we pay particular attention to her figure.”
Passengers, said Lawrence [the President of Braniff, and a current leader in airline merchandising] are entitled to more than a safe, comfortable journey. They are entitled to a little fun.
Lawrence’s definition of fun aloft included painting Braniff*s fleet of jetliners a variety of Easter egg colors and wildly re-decorating the aircraft interiors, ticket offices and waiting rooms. But he reserved the company’s hostesses for the most fun of all. He hired famed Italian dress designer Milio Pucci, the inventor of stretch pants, to create a hostess costume with “flair, excitement and surprise.”
72 No clearer case of the indulgence overlay is to be found, I think, than The Harry’s Shoeshine Palace, San Francisco (as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, July 26, 1966), which provides topless shoeshines for $2.00 and an ID card. De Sade would have been impressed by this merchandising of his principles.
73 Suggested by Sheldon Messinger. The garden variety, as popularized by Damon Runyon, is the small-time Broadway gambler who perceptually reconstitutes the immediate environment into a continuous series of soon-to-be-determined bettable outcomes on which propositions can be offered. The culture hero here is John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates, the barbed-wire king, who, in 1897 en a train between Chicago and Pittsburgh, apparently won $22,000 by betting on raindrop races, a window-pane serving as a course. (See H. Asbury, Suckers Progress New York, Dodd Mead, 1938], p. 446.)
74 Suggested by Nancy Achilles.
75 The various kinds of gambles with life indulged by the suicidally inclined are considered in N. Farberow and E. Schneidman, The Cry for Help (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1961), esp. pp. 132-33.
76 Suggested by Dean MacConnell.
77 Polsky, op. ext., p. 6, suggests that in “action rooms” games are selected and even modified in order to increase the action rate, which might otherwise be too low. However, five minute plays still seem to be the shortest time except when individual shots are bet on.
78 In American society at large, horse-racing, “the numbers,” and the stock market provide means by which an individual can have one or two things “going for him” every day. Keno has a somewhat similar overlay character, but each play takes only a few minutes.
79 E. Hemingway, “The Dangerous Summer,” Life, September 5, i960, p. 86.
80 Hemingway, Death, op. ext., p. 91.
81 Moss, op. cit.9 p. 22. “The fastest driver is the one who can come closest to the point at which the car’s tyres will break adhesion to the road and let the machine go into an uncontrolled slide. (‘Uncontrolled’ is the key word. Much of the time, the driver has deliberately broken the car loose and is allowing it to slide, but under control.)”
82 Improvement in roads and in driving qualities of cars of course merely allows the driver to be “expressive” at higher speeds; whatever the conditions of road traffic, the other’s territory will always be there to be pressed.
83 B. Gilbert, “The Moment-of-Truth Menace,” Esquire, December 1965, p. 117. Gilbert’s article is a description of how far sportsmen go to find a piece of nature that can be transformed, with proper equipment limitation, into a challenge. Cave searching and rapids-running are described as examples.
84 Hemingway, “Summer,” op. ext., September 12, p. 76.
85 Typically, contest arrangements require contestants to be face to face, but there are, for example, courtship contests between two suitors for the same hand wherein the opponents never meet; there are contests in the letters-to-the-editor column, and there are others (as Hemingway suggests), where the record of one party, who may be absent at the time, becomes the context of action of the other (“Summer,” op. cit., September 5, pp. 91-92.): “Bullfighting is worthless without rivalry. But with two great bullfighters it becomes a deadly rivalry. Because when one does something, and can do it regularly, that no one else can do and it is not a trick but a deadly dangerous performance only made possible by perfect nerves, judgment, courage and art and this one increases its deadliness steadily, then the other, if he has any temporary failure of nerves or of judgment, will be gravely wounded or killed if he tries to equal or surpass it. He will have to resort to tricks a
nd when the public learns to tell the tricks from the true things he will be beaten in the rivalry and he will be very lucky if he is still alive or in business.”
86 E. Goffman, “Fun in Games,” p. 67 in Encounters (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1961).
87 Masculinity seems especially important as a value in Latin society, and as a value can hardly be dissociated from its basis in the biological aspects of sex. See “Honour and Social Status,” by J. Pitt-Rivers, ch. 1, p. 45, in Honour and Shame (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1966, ed. J. Peristiany): “Thus restraint is the natural basis of sexual purity, just as masculinity is the natural basis of authority and the defense of family honour. The ideal of the honourable man is expressed by tne word hombria, “manliness”. . . . Masculinity means courage whether it is employed for moral or immoral ends. It is a term which is constantly heard in the pueblo, and the concept is expressed as the physical sexual quintessence of the male (cojones). The contrary notion is conveyed by the adjective manso which means both tame and also castrated. Lacking the physiological basis, the weaker sex cannot obviously be expected to possess it, and it is excluded from the demands of female honour.” Presumably the female counterparts of the classic male virtues involve modesty, restraint and virginity, whose display would seem to comprise anything but action.
88 R. Baldick, The Duel (London, Chapman and Hall, 1965), ch. 11, “Women Duellists,” pp. 169-78.
89 A close statement is found in Sherri Cavan, Liquor License (Chicago, Aldine Press, 1966). See also J. Roebuck and S. Spray, “The Cocktail Lounge: A Study of Heterosexual Relations in a Public Organization,” American Journal of Sociology, January 1967.
90 Although the notion of action is certainly relevant to heterosexual contacts, it seems even more relevant to homosexual ones. Gay society apparently features the one night stand (or rather, part-of-the-night stand), much more so than straight society, with a correspondingly high rate of contingency and chance-taking regarding relationship formation.
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