For whatever reason, the lanes in New York City did not play the way they played out on the Island, and Lemon was struggling to adjust. Schlegel was noticing that, too. But, like any good businessman, he waited until after he had pocketed some of Lemon’s money before advising him of the problem. Lemon struggled just enough for Schlegel and Masarro to come out on top.
Even as he struggled, Lemon bowled well enough to keep things close. Then Masarro, who himself was a hell of a bowler, took on Lemon in a singles match. Lemon, still decent to figure out how to play the lanes in a house he had never bowled in before, eventually lost the match. Schlegel was betting on Masarro the whole time, knowing Lemon did not stand a chance playing the third arrow at Gun Post. Then Masarro got greedy and cut Schlegel out of the betting. He wanted all the money to himself. That was all Schlegel needed to hear to know it was time to let Lemon in on the little secrets of how the big boys played the lanes in New York City.
But first he tried to warn Masarro.
“Wait a minute! John, I brought these guys here! I gotta get a piece of the action,” Schlegel said. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Masarro wasn’t having it, so Schlegel turned to Lemon.
“Hey, can I bet on you?” Schlegel asked him.
Lemon looked at him like he was nuts.
“Bet on me?” Lemon said. “Why? I can’t find a shot at this place.”
“Hey, this is action. I bet on whoever I think has a chance to win,” Schlegel said. “I brought you here. They just cut me out, and I’m pissed. So now I’m betting on you. Now listen, you’re playing the lanes too far inside. Why don’t you move outside a little bit, closer to the second arrow, around the ten board, and play the lanes there. See what happens.”
Schlegel knew damned well what would happen—he was coaching Lemon to play that trusty “track” he himself manipulated against Bill Daley. The part of the lane that made Lemon money at bowling alleys in his native Long Island might not work as well at bowling alleys in New York City, but Lemon’s talent enabled him to play the track as expertly as anyone in all of New York. Once he got Lemon lined up, Masarro, good as he was, had no chance against a guy with the kind of talent Lemon possessed. Schlegel also knew that Lemon possessed the very intangibles that made him great himself; Lemon had those things people call “it factors.” He had the drive, the determination, the work ethic, the obsession, the streak of vengeance in his cool and calculated resolve when circumstances demanded that he either make a great shot or lose everything. One man’s talent is another’s killer instinct; Lemon, like Schlegel, had enough of both to spare some. If he found himself bowling a guy who was as talented, or a guy who had him nailed on a particularly difficult pair of lanes, Lemon was the kind of competitor who willed his way to victory somehow. For guys like Schlegel and Lemon, competition was a matter of pride and self-respect. It was a matter of believing that no one was better than they were. It was a matter of knowing that as surely as they knew their own names.
Lemon moved outside as Schlegel advised and proceeded to crush Masarro. Game after game, bet after bet, Masarro had no answer. The real winner, as always, was Schlegel. Schlegel had made lots of money betting on Masarro earlier; now he was making money betting the other way and advising Masarro’s opponent. Masarro knew it, and he let his fists show Schlegel how he felt about it. He took a swing at him.
Schlegel ducked. Then he pulled a knife.
“You do that again and I’ll have to fuckin’ stab you,” Schlegel said.
Masarro shut his mouth.
“Yeah,” Schlegel said. “What do you think, I come here with fuckin’ nothing?”
That knife Schlegel pulled when circumstances called for it would eventually land him in more trouble than he cared to manage. For now, though, it was one way to make sure he kept his money in the same place where Fish Face preferred to keep his—in his pocket. After that night, Schlegel took Lemon all over New York City, bowling as his doubles partner everywhere they went, and winning at every turn. Lemon was Schlegel’s secret weapon precisely because he was a weapon few had seen before. To New York City kids, bowling out on Long Island was like bowling out on Mars. It took time for people in New York City to figure out what Lemon was all about. And when they did, as was the case with Ralph Engan and would be the case with Schlegel himself, they ran out of fish. Nobody was willing to take them on. The gig was up, but the $3,000 they made in the meantime easily was enough to make their time as a duo worthwhile, brief as it may have been. In 1965, $3,000 was an embarrassment of riches to anybody (roughly $22,000 today), no less a couple of street kids barely out of their teens.
The status Gun Post Lanes enjoyed as the gathering place for gamblers and gangsters from far and wide proved just as brief as Schlegel’s partnership with Lemon. Wherever the action found a new home, the cops who cleaned out the old one always seemed to come around again. The night they came around to Gun Post Lanes was one no witness would forget.
The lights that glowed through those French windows flanking the front of the place caught the attention of a couple of plainclothes cops on the beat. There is something about the sight of so many teenagers waving fistfuls of cash that catches a cop’s attention, especially when it happens to be four o’clock in the morning. One cop took a seat at the lunch counter next to Johnny Kourabas while the other had a look around. Kourabas knew there was something about the guy that didn’t belong; this was not your usual gambler waiting to arrange a match. Then he heard the other cop advising people to make sure they kept their hands nice and high in the air, and Kourabas knew the gig was up.
The comprehensiveness with which the cops dismantled the debauchery at Gun Post was that of someone who empties half a can of Raid on a roach and then steps on it to kill it again. The cops swept the place clean of cash. Then they handcuffed a scorekeeper to the table into which he scratched the names and debts of all in attendance, unscrewed the table from the floor, and took both down to the station as evidence. It was the last night of action Gun Post ever saw—and the beginning of an era’s demise.
Action bowling took its final breath at a place called Central Lanes in Yonkers, just north of New York City. Central Lanes was a long, low building that housed fifty-two lanes straight across and an enclosed coffee shop with fifteen stools and windows overlooking the parking lot. A frenetic scene buzzed in the air of that coffee shop when the action got thick late at night. Hustlers, con artists, and gamblers were brought together by matchmakers who would arrange matches as bets came in from all directions through shouts and fists full of cash. The bowlers drew their lane numbers from a pillbox full of numbers someone shook, and the match would be held on the lanes whose numbers were drawn. To adrenaline-hungry kids with dollar signs for pupils, this truly was a paradise straight out of their wildest dreams.
Gamblers trying to find the place for the first time could count on any number of signs that they had found it. They might spot the legion of kids pitching dice for cash in the parking lot. They might look through the windows enclosing the pool room at one end of the building and see the high-stakes games of eight ball raging inside. They might notice a parking lot bloated with the cars of fellow gamblers in the middle of the night and have a hard time finding a spot themselves. And if some nor’easter happened to be dumping another blast of snow over Yonkers in winter, that, too, failed to deter the circus. It was not uncommon to see cars twirling down the icy streets toward the bowling alley. Gamblers would sooner leave their cars lodged in snow piles in the middle of the street than miss a night of action at Central. A snowplow could gnash their cars into little foil balls for all they cared; Central was a place where those who placed their bets wisely could leave with enough cash to buy new ones anyway.
It also was a place where bowlers who placed bets with money borrowed from shylocks sometimes needed to be reminded of the penalties. No one at Central Lanes received that reminder more clearly than a kid known as “Checkbook” Al. Al was a skinny kid with glass
es in his early twenties whose nickname said it all. At Central Lanes, he was known as much for writing bad checks as he was known for his bowling. He nearly became known for dying, too, after he borrowed money off a feared, Jewish shylock known as Maxie. Maxie was a stocky guy with fat fingers who spoke with a voice that sounded like it came from somewhere in the bottom of his gut, and he always sat the wrong way in a chair with his chest leaning up against the back of it. At any given moment kids could hear him grunting offers from behind the lanes at bowlers whose luck was running thin.
“Joe, how much you need,” he’d say in his husky growl and Brooklyn accent. “Mikey, how much you need?”
Bowlers would walk up to Maxie and say “Gimme five,” and Maxie would snap out five crisp $100 bills. His rate was ten percent per week, and everything went fine—as long as you paid him back. The smart ones paid him back right away. One night, Schlegel borrowed about $1,200, then won that much and more in a match and paid back Maxie on the spot. That was how you handled shylocks like Maxie if you knew what was good for you.
Maxie always wore a rumpled suit. He had a balding bull’s head of gray hair and always kept a lit Camel pinned between two tobacco-stained fingertips. Many presumed him to be a gangster, but he always carried himself with an avuncular manner that disarmed those who otherwise might have feared him. The shylocks knew as much about catching flies with honey as the hustlers did. You didn’t get customers by scaring them anymore than you caught fish by letting on how good you were. Even when some customers needed to be scared because they hadn’t paid up, Maxie issued his threats gently enough that it was almost possible to believe he was kidding.
“You don’t want me to have to hurt you,” Maxie would tell them.
But Maxie wasn’t kidding, especially not the day he sent one of his goons to find Checkbook Al. When the goon found him inside the coffee house at Central Lanes, everyone knew from that moment forward that Maxie never was kidding. Checkbook Al rushed in one day as kids hunched over their hamburgers at the counter. He pestered each of them for money.
“Hey, ya got forty bucks?” he asked.
“Get the fuck away from me,” one kid told him. “You owe me money!”
Then the goon arrived. He was a ruddy-faced moose of a man with broad shoulders who looked like he played left tackle for the New York Giants. The strange thing was that as tough as the guy looked, he nonetheless was wearing a bright pink, fuzzy, pullover sweater. No one quite understood what to make of that bizarre detail.
The goon walked up to Checkbook Al.
“OK, your time is up,” he said. “You got Max’s money?”
“No, I don’t have it,” Checkbook told him.
The goon grabbed Checkbook with one arm and hoisted him up in the air. The two paused nose-to-nose for a second, Checkbook dangling limply in the air. Then the goon tossed him like a football. It was like he had shot the kid out of a cannon. Checkbook went blasting through the windows of the coffee shop and out into the parking lot in a hail of shattered glass. That was all it took to separate the rest of the crowd from their hamburgers. Everybody promptly got up and left. No one looked back. They did not even look left or right. The point was to get the hell out of there. No one bothered to see if Checkbook was alive or dead, and nobody ever talked about it. That was how it went when you took money off a shylock. You weren’t just borrowing money; you were also borrowing time. That night Maxie returned to his backwards chair with his suit and his Camel, barking offers to those in need as though nothing had happened.
Many bowlers sent their opponents off to borrow from Maxie more often than they would have liked. Few bowlers put people in that uncomfortable position more frequently than Schlegel. By the time Central Lanes became established as action bowling’s new gathering place, Schlegel exhibited the raging brazenness of a gambler who knew he couldn’t lose. He sported a T-shirt that said “World’s Greatest Bowler,” pounding his chest like a gorilla and challenging all comers. Gobs of Vaseline from his duck’s ass hairdo melted down his face on muggy summer nights. The proprietor of Central Lanes kept a giant trophy on display beside the check-in counter in front of lanes 17 and 18; it was reserved for the first bowler to shoot a 300 game at Central Lanes. Schlegel claimed the trophy in a match against a brilliant, seventeen-year-old talent named Dewey Blair.
Blair was the phantom of the action bowling scene. Everybody had heard about this high school kid nobody could beat, but no one ever saw him. Blair’s home house was a place called Dutchess County Lanes, about 50 miles north of New York City. There, he took on, and nearly always beat, all challengers. He made a name for himself when he stepped out of the cushy confines of Dutchess County Lanes and went down to nearby Skytop Lanes in Hartsdale, a place made famous by the legendary Ralph Engan. There, he got on the microphone at the front desk one night and challenged everybody in the house. He bowled Engan’s protégé, a bowler named Hank Burroughs, and dominated him. News of his destruction of Burroughs quickly spread to the city.
The word on the street was that Blair had a backer named Dobber, another beefy, strapping shylock like Maxie, who funded Blair against all challengers. If he wasn’t putting his money down on Blair, he was betting it on a hand of cards or at the horse track—any place where he thought he could leave with more money than he had when he arrived. But the difference between Dobber and Maxie was that Dobber was known to be as cunning with his fists as he was with his money. The streets taught him enough about how to throw a right hand that he became a fighter while honing his craft as a professional gambler. Dobber never sent in any goons; his fists were the goons. And if his fists were not fearsome enough, many believed Dobber packed heat wherever he went. Blair knew that was not true, but he also knew it was best to let those fears fester in his opponents.
Sometimes Dobber took Blair on the short drive from Dutchess County into the five boroughs to see if he could catch some fish with his seventeen-year-old bait. Dobber marched Blair into bowling alleys in the Bronx or Manhattan and asked the locals which of them had the balls to bowl his boy. This was no hustler like Russo or Schlegel; this was a kid who didn’t mind letting others learn the hard way that he was better than they were. Blair almost never lost. His accuracy on the lanes was that of a kid that would have tried to fit a spitball through the eye of a needle from a few feet away. The kid never missed his target.
Then Dobber started taking him down to Central. Schlegel and Limongello could not believe their eyes the moment Blair walked in. His presence whipped the place into a buzz about the arrival of the great but largely unseen prodigy, and Schlegel had to have first dibs. If this truly was the best bowler anyone had seen, he would have to beat Schlegel to prove it. Schlegel battled him for several games, one of which culminated in his 300 over Blair’s 268. Scores of that magnitude were almost unheard at the time. A bowler who averaged a mere 195 back then was a bowler who rarely lost.
All the “smart money” in the house was on Blair. His reputation was enough to convince the gamblers and shylocks where their money ought to go. But when Blair stepped up to bowl Lemon man-to-man after bowling Schlegel, the contest yielded perhaps the most anticlimactic match in action bowling history. Lemon won the first game 269-268. Then he started the next game with six consecutive strikes. So did Blair. Lemon got up and blasted yet another strike. Blair returned the favor, tossing his seventh straight strike of the game. And that was when the match ended just as soon as it began. Blair’s thumb ripped open on that seventh strike, and he had to withdraw from the match. Any number of factors could cause a bowler’s thumb to rip open. Sometimes the ball was drilled poorly—maybe the span was too long, or the finger holes were measured improperly. Sometimes the way a bowler released the ball caused the thumb to grate against the thumbhole at the release. Sometimes the skin on a human thumb can only take so many games before it gives way. Whatever the reason, Blair’s thumb ripped open that night, and Lemon was furious. There was too much money on the line here, too much of an opport
unity to claim the kind of street cred that came with beating a kid who commanded so much respect that every gambler in the joint rushed to put their money down on him.
Lemon never saw the kid again. Blair enlisted in the Navy shortly after graduating high school, leaving a legend in his wake.
While Lemon had Blair to contend with, Schlegel’s arch rival in those days was a kid whom he described as the Joe Frazier to his Muhammad Ali. He was also one of the most corrupt shysters to roam Gun Post. His name was Kenny Barber, age 20, better known as “The Rego Park Flash” after his hometown of Rego Park in Queens. Barber’s game already had earned him enough of a reputation that writer Jim Kaull produced a feature story about him titled “The Restless One” for the April, 1963 issue of a premier bowling industry magazine called Bowlers Journal. Barber’s name appeared on the cover. Kaull described Barber as “hanging around street corners, racing around in hot rods and having a good time at society’s expense. He never got arrested but he admits that it wasn’t because he shouldn’t have been.” Barber started bowling at age 15. He dropped out of high school by age 16 intent on pursuing a life on the lanes as ardently as he pursued life on the street corner. His father, a great bowler in his own right as well as a traveling musician who played bass and tuba with the likes of Louie Armstrong, Arthur Godfrey, and Tommy Dorsey, had hoped music might be his son’s ticket out of the streets and into a life. Barber told Kaull he liked music, too, but “couldn’t stick with it.”
He spoke with a thick Queens accent and a peculiar lisp that made him sound like he had a mouth half-filled with water. One year, Barber bowled a three-game series of 666 at the American Bowling Congress tournament, one of the most prestigious events in which a bowler could compete. When he got back home, his friends were fond of asking him to tell them what his series was. Barber, who never minded a joke at his own expense, would say “666” with that lisp, and he and his buddies would fall on the floor laughing. That lisp never hampered his skill with the ladies, however. A handsome, bronze-skinned Italian kid with grease-slicked hair and jewel-green eyes, Barber rarely slept with the same woman twice.
Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion Page 8