The Color of Money

by Walter Tevis

  “I don’t need to play the World Open. When I finish this tour next month, it’ll be the last game of pool I’ll play. I don’t need it anymore. You’re the one who needs it.”

  “I’ve never played tournaments, Fats. A hustler didn’t do that. You didn’t want to come out of the closet.”

  “The times have changed, Eddie. Straight pool is out of style. You could stay in that closet and starve.”

  “Or sell real estate.”

  Fats looked at him thoughtfully. “The money’s in nine-ball.”

  “I don’t play nine-ball.”

  “You can learn.”

  “Nine-ball is a kid’s game. It’s what they play in those bars where you put a quarter in the table and another in the jukebox.”

  “They play for a lot of money in some of those bars.”

  “In Cincinnati you said I wasn’t good enough.”

  “You got better.” Fats looked at him. “Do you know what Earl Borchard made last year in nine-ball tournaments?”

  “No.”

  “Sixty thousand. And I don’t know what he made hustling on the side. They say he plays the bar tables.”

  “How would you know how much money he makes?”

  “In Billiards Monthly.”

  Eddie got the magazine at the poolroom but never did more than flip through it. It was mostly ads for pool-table and cue-stick manufacturers, or books on trick shots. There were “profiles” of young players—usually a few lines of praise under a glossy photograph of somebody holding a pool cue. It made him vaguely sick to look at it. There were also ads for nine-ball tournaments, in places like Asheville and Chattanooga and Lake Tahoe. “Sixty thousand?”

  “That’s in seven tournaments. About ten weeks’ work.”

  He’d had no idea there was that much money in it. “He’s got to pay expenses.”

  “You paid expenses when you were on the road. Did you ever make sixty thousand?”

  “Borchard’s the best. What does the second-best make?”

  “Don’t ask.” Fats turned back to the table. “If you don’t trust your eyesight, those bar tables are better. Smaller.” He looked at Eddie. “They play eight-ball on them too. A man can make a good living at eight-ball in bars.”

  “Eight-ball is stupid. There’s nothing to it but slopping around.”

  Fats looked at him silently a minute. Then he went to the place at the end of the table where the balls were kept, squatted down and took them out. He racked them into a triangle, with the black ball in the center. “Let’s play a game of eight-ball,” he said. He got his cue case from the bleacher and took his silver-wrapped Joss from it. Eddie watched him in disbelief. You did not think of a player like Minnesota Fats playing eight-ball. Fats tightened his cue, went to the head of the table, took his stance and blasted the balls apart. The weight behind his stroke was impressive. Balls went everywhere and two of them fell in. “In the first place,” he said, “you have to make one on the break.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “On a bar table you can,” Fats said. “I’m going to take the stripes.” A striped ball and a solid one had fallen in on the break, giving Fats his choice. “Do you know why?” He was like a schoolteacher at the blackboard.

  Eddie looked over the table. “Those four stripes in the open.”

  “Not at all,” Fats said. “In eight-ball the main thing is not to leave a shot. Not in the important games. Sometimes you let him have a few balls when it’s time to. You have to control it. I’m shooting the stripes to control the solids.” He bent down and made the thirteen ball. There was movement in the bleachers. Eddie looked up to see the half-dozen remaining people coming down to the front row to watch.

  “I’m going to shoot the nine now,” Fats said, “and I’m going to make my position a few inches off, for the twelve. The kind of thing that happens now and then.” He bent, shot the nine ball in. His cue ball rolled too far, leaving a difficult shot on the twelve. It would have to be banked. “Now, the thing about the twelve,” Fats said, “is that I don’t have to make it. Watch.” He banked the ball across the side and missed it. The cue ball rolled to one side of a cluster of balls, where the only shot was on the fourteen ball. “If I’d made it, I’m fine. If I miss it, he has nothing.”

  “I know how to play safe,” Eddie said.

  “I’m talking eight-ball safe,” Fats said. “I’m trying to tell you that if you learn how to control this game you can make a living at it.”

  “In bars?”

  “In bars, Fast Eddie.”

  Eddie thought about it, about the games of eight-ball he had played with Skammer. “In the South?”

  Fats looked at him. “Winter’s coming on.”

  “You’ve been talking nine-ball tournaments,” Eddie said. “Now it’s eight-ball.”

  “You have to crawl before you can walk.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re not ready for nine-ball, Fast Eddie. Borchard would walk right over you, and so would a half-dozen others. You can play eight-ball on brains and experience, and you’ve got those.”

  “Thanks.”

  Fats started taking his cue apart again. The people behind him in the stands were watching him, fascinated. “If you do it for six months, it might put you back where you were. Then you can take up nine-ball.”

  “I hate the punks who play nine-ball.”

  “It’s that or real estate,” Fats said.

  “Where would I play eight-ball for money?”

  “When we get to the airport I’ll give you a list. Our car’s coming.” Fats pointed to the parking lot. A blue car was driving up. It had a sign on its side reading AIRPORT SERVICE.

  “Where would you get a list of places to play eight-ball?”

  Fats put his cue in its case. “How do you think I made the money to retire on? While you were racking balls in Kentucky, I was putting quarters in slots in North Carolina.”

  Eddie stared at him. “Wearing that suit?”

  “They make blue jeans in my size. It costs twelve dollars extra.”

  Chapter Five

  When he was a kid in Ohio, you never broke the balls with a jointed cue or with the white ball; you used a house cue stick and a special dull brown cue ball. Charlie taught him that, and it was Charlie who bought him his first Willie Hoppe cue, with the black leather wrappings on its butt and the brass joint. “You don’t slug them with this, Eddie,” Charlie said. “The joint can’t take it.” In those days Eddie would pick out a club of a cue—twenty-two or twenty-three ounces—and smash the rack open with it before using the Willie Hoppe. It was all different now. The balls were made of something called phenolic resin, and their colors were brighter: the old dark green stripe on the fourteen was now a bright emerald with a glow to it, and the nine was canary yellow, like something in Walt Disney. You broke the rack with the white ball now and, with a handmade Balabushka cue, slammed them as hard as you could. You couldn’t ruin the steel joint.

  Eddie took a deep swing and blew the eight-ball rack open. The three and the seven fell in, but the cue ball stopped near the foot spot and didn’t follow through to rebreak the balls the way he intended. He looked over the spread, checking out the five other solids and then the eight ball, which had to be made last. There was no problem with any of them; on a table this small, they were all simple enough. He concentrated, took care, and ran them out.

  “You shoot a good stick.” It was a different bartender from the one yesterday—a blond kid in a white apron. At four in the afternoon, two old men were huddled over boilermakers at the far end of the bar; Eddie was the only other customer.

  “Thanks.” Eddie laid his cue stick on the table and walked over. “Let me have a draft.” He tried to be pleasant and casual, although he did not feel that way.

  The kid drew one and set it on the bar. “I haven’t seen you here before, have I?”

  “I came in yesterday.”

  The kid nodded and began d
rawing a beer for himself. “You shoot eight-ball like a pro.”

  Fats had told him not to hold back, to play his best stick, or nearly. Hold back ten or fifteen percent if it seemed smart. He had been practicing for an hour without holding back at all, as he had the day before. No one had shown any interest. The only problem was the oversize cue ball; you couldn’t draw it back right, and sometimes he snookered himself and missed the next shot. Otherwise it was like child’s pool. He fed quarters into the slot, retrieved the balls, racked them up, broke, and shot them in. The main thing was the sluggish cue ball; it took getting used to.

  Eddie sipped his beer and then looked at the kid. “I understand you have some good players around.”

  The kid grinned. He was about twenty-five and had a pleasant face. “I thought you might have that understanding. When I saw your cue stick.”

  “I like to play for money.” It had been true once, anyway.

  “There’s a guy called Boomer.”

  “Boomer?”

  “His real name, I think. Dave or Dwight or something Boomer. He’ll play you.”

  “Would he play for a hundred dollars a game?”

  The kid blinked. “If he’s got it.”

  “Does he have a backer?”

  “A stakehorse?”

  “Yes. A stakehorse.”

  “There’s a man with him sometimes who only watches.”

  “Is he likely to come in soon? I mean tonight?”

  “I don’t know.” The kid set his beer down and walked to the pass-through that led back to the kitchen. “Arnie,” he said.

  A thin black face appeared at the opening.

  “This guy wants to play pool with Boomer.”

  The head nodded and glanced briefly at Eddie.

  “Isn’t there a number to call?”

  “In the register. Under the checks.”

  “Okay.” The kid went to the register, opened it, lifted the bill compartment with one hand and shuffled through papers with the other. He found a folded sheet of notepaper and turned to Eddie. “Do I call him?”

  Eddie felt a tightness in his stomach. “I’d appreciate it.”

  ***

  “Son of a bitch!” Boomer said when he saw Eddie’s Balabushka. “I was dragged from the comfort of my home to play a man with a stick like that. May the Lord deliver me!” He took a red bandanna handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Protect me from men with Balabushka cue sticks.” He looked at Eddie’s face for the first time, squinting at him. “I bet you do trick shots.” His face was broad and red and heavily lined; he looked like some kind of wild-eyed field hand. A drug-crazed sharecropper. He wore a faded tan military shirt with epaulettes, and baggy corduroys that fell over the creased insteps of cowboy boots. It was hard to tell what his age was—anywhere from thirty to fifty—but he had a potbelly and wrinkles around his eyes. The eyes were a pale, unreal blue, and cold as ice. “I bet that Balabushka makes them balls dance around like agitated molecules.”

  “It’s no better than the man behind it,” Eddie said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Boomer said, “you look serious.” A few people in the crowd laughed. In the hour since the bartender called, fifteen or twenty people had gathered.

  “Why don’t you get your stick out,” Eddie nodded toward the leather case Boomer was carrying, “and we can shoot pool.” He held his cue in one hand and had the other in his pocket; he hoped fervently that his nervousness didn’t show. He had forgotten how it was to play a man on his home table with his home crowd around him. And Boomer had taken possession of the tavern the moment he came in, with his loud voice and his boot heels clacking on the Kentile floor.

  “If this stick don’t wilt for shame when it sees yours,” Boomer said. He opened the top of the case and slid out a two-piece cue. It looked plenty good enough—a Huebler or a Meucci. Probably a three-hundred-dollar cue. When he screwed it together he did so deftly, with a light and accurate touch that contradicted the roughness of his appearance. Eddie had seen that before in the old days. Rough-looking country men with soft hands and, when they bent over a pool table, the light touch of a jeweler.

  “Eight-ball is what we play here,” Boomer said.

  “A hundred dollars a game.”

  “Oh my god,” Boomer said, “I am lying in my king-sized bed watching a rerun of ‘Magnum PI’ and the telephone rings and now here I am talking to a stranger with an upscale cue stick who wants to play pool for a hundred dollars. There’s no comfort in life.”

  “Do you want to play?” Eddie said quietly. The man was getting what he wanted; Eddie was beginning to feel rattled.

  “Wayland,” Boomer said to the bartender, who had been watching all this attentively, as had everyone else in the place. “Let me have a Drambuie on the rocks and a dish of potato salad.” Then, to Eddie: “Put a quarter in the table.”

  ***

  They flipped a coin for the break and Boomer won it. He used a heavy house cue to smash the balls open, the way Charlie had taught Eddie to when he was a kid, and pocketed three of them. Then he switched to the jointed and ran the balls out. Eddie handed him two fifties. It was six o’clock. The crowd was getting larger; they leaned against the rails of the tavern’s other two tables and stood in the space behind them. The bar stools had filled with men who were now turned toward them, watching.

  Boomer shot quietly, as Eddie expected he would, and almost as gracefully as Fats. His stroke was eccentric, swooping the cue stick over a long, wavering bridge, but he hit them solidly. And he was used to the heavy cue ball; on one shot he drew it back lightly by three feet.

  “Winner breaks,” Boomer said, and went to the bar for a mouthful of potato salad and a drink. He came back wiping his mouth with a paper napkin, jammed the napkin into his hip pocket, took his cue and broke the balls. The table was three and a half by seven; after a solid break shot, the balls were distributed evenly all over it. Eddie had never played on a table like this before; he wasn’t sure how many games a man could run on it.

  Boomer bent and sank his first ball, and then looked at the crowd around him. “I got to keep making these little fuckers,” he said. “If I give that Balabushka a chance, it’ll put me in the County Home.”

  “It’s only a pool cue, Boomer,” somebody in the crowd said.

  “Don’t sweet-talk me,” Boomer said. “That cue has radar and microcircuits in its tip. With a cue like that a man can stay in bed and send the cue stick out on Saturday nights. ‘Bring in five hundred, Balabushka’ is what you say. I know about them high-technology pool cues, come from Silicon Valley with a college degree.” He shook his head, bent and shot, cutting the seven ball into the side. His cue ball rolled a few feet for perfect position.

  Eddie remained silent. He had seen routines like this before. The best thing to do was stay loose and not try to enter the spirit of it or make a fool out of yourself. So far, it was impossible to tell just how good Boomer was. Fats had said there were three or four professionals in this town—men who made their-livings entirely by hustling on bar tables—and apparently Boomer was the best among them. Eddie leaned against the empty table a few feet from the one Boomer and he were playing on, and tried to relax. Boomer was funny; but there was threat in the way he talked, and in the cold-eyed look he flicked toward Eddie from time to time. Eddie watched, and kept quiet, and waited for him to miss.

  When Boomer had two more balls to make, he overshot a long cut and his cue ball rolled too far, leaving him out of position. He shrugged, banked at one of the remaining balls, missed it and rolled the white ball into a perfect safety. It was an “if-I-miss” shot of the kind Fats had demonstrated back in Denver.

  Eddie tightened his cue stick and looked at Boomer. “What’s the house rule if I don’t hit one?”

  “I get the cue behind the line,” Boomer said. “Same as a scratch.”

  That was a pisser. If Eddie didn’t hit one of the stripes, Boomer would have an easy run out. And the cue was s
nookered behind the six. He studied it a moment. The thing to do was bank off the near rail and try to tap into the eleven ball and hope for a safety. It was the only smart thing to do.

  But the twelve, down at the far end of the table, was a few inches from the corner pocket. The cue ball could be banked two cushions out of the corner, down the long diagonal. A very difficult shot. If he missed it, Boomer would own the table. It was a one-in-ten shot, a two-rail kick-in. Eddie looked at the bartender. “Let me have a Manhattan, on the rocks,” he said. He stepped up to the table, adjusted his glasses, carefully spread the fingers of his left hand in a high bridge over the snookering six ball, elevated the back of his cue, looked once behind him at the twelve ball and shot, hard, smooth, and angry.

  The cue ball bounced out of the corner, rolled the diagonal of the table and clipped the twelve ball sharply. The twelve rolled briskly into the pocket. “Son of a bitch!” Boomer said. “Goddamned microchips.”

  “Printed circuits,” Eddie said, going to the bar for his drink. The men on the bar stools stared at him silently. He waited while the bartender put the cherry in, took a long swallow and came back to the table feeling, at last, relaxed.

  ***

  Boomer was good, but nowhere as good as Fats. He couldn’t bank well, and his main strength was in easy runs. He would have been a good straight-pool player if hustlers played straight pool anymore, and he was certainly good enough to make a living at eight-ball in barrooms. Eddie held himself steady, and by ten o’clock he was seven hundred dollars ahead.

  When Boomer gave him the last pair of fifties, he looked at Eddie coldly and said, “If you want to play me anymore, my friend, you’re going to have to give me some weight.” He had dropped the wild-country-boy act and spoke quietly.

  Eddie was finishing his supper—a bacon and tomato sandwich. He took the paper plate over and set it on the bar and then came back. The crowd silently made way for him. “What do you need?”