“Take Ogden Avenue,” he told Benny. “A guy there owes me money.”
It was about 7 A.M. by then. Harris and Schlegel were half asleep in the back seat. Benny pulled up to an Ogden Avenue deli. Sammy got out. Moments later, he stormed back into the car and screamed, “Hit it!”
Benny peeled out and said, “How much did you get?”
“One hundred and sixty dollars,” Sammy said.
Benny headed back for the Major Deegan.
“Ernie, we got one hundred and sixty bucks to play with!”
Harris woke up.
“Did you just hold up that place?” he asked.
“What do you care?” Benny said.
“Ernie, these guys just held up a deli,” Harris said.
Harris saw mug shots and prison pajamas in his immediate future. He told Benny to stop the car and let them out right there and then. They did, and Harris and Schlegel—who was still nervous from his near miss with the Ginsberg stabbing—walked home together in the blue-black dawn, broke and desperate for a bed to help them forget the night. The farther Schlegel travelled in pursuit of an anonymity he no longer enjoyed in the five boroughs, the more his life reminded him that it was time to move on. Schlegel was getting older; he was watching friends find glory on tour just as he struggled just to find willing challengers in a fading action bowling scene; and he was certain that the life of a bum awaited him, a long nightmare of squandered talent, thwarted ambition, and dead-end jobs.
If Schlegel had any notion of pursuing a career in bowling, he would have to flee the underworld of action for the legitimacy of the pro tour. But thanks to Esposito, that would not be happening anytime soon. Bowling, the one skill Schlegel had mastered so thoroughly as to squeeze some kind of living out of it, teased him with dreams he once took for granted. He had no money now after giving it all up to cleanse his record of attempted murder charges. He was smoking dope and dealing it. He no longer saw any future in bowling, and that hurt most of all. It hurt watching buddies bowl on national TV while he was kept off the tour by bad breaks, bitter men, and his own temper/impulsive decisions. Schlegel descended into the driftless life of a dope dealer hawking stolen TVs and old Jaguars. He dumped his bowling ball and bowling shoes off the George Washington Bridge; maybe if he didn’t have to look at them anymore, it would be easier to smudge out the hurt in his heart.
Only the streets would welcome him now—streets whose story Schlegel knew too well. In the late 1950s, when Schlegel was in his mid-teens, they were streets where gangs like the Hearts, the Vigilantes, and the Alleycats convened around their territory’s candy stores with leather coats and thick hair greased into a duck’s ass. Schlegel ran with gangs of German and Irish friends from around the block. They ran down Bennett Avenue armed with clubs and knives. They ran from maniacs in rival gangs who chased them out of Fort Tryon Park with axes. They ran through yards and alleyways and jumped fences to evade dragnets. Sometimes they ran from their own mistakes.
But that was then. Now, as America entered its post-Kennedy delirium in Vietnam, the ducktails and gang wars gave way to the spectacle of kids coming back from the war hooked on heroin. One of Schlegel’s best friends, a local kid known as “Tiny,” died on the roof of his Sickles Street apartment building. Tiny had been shooting up with some friends when a few of them came banging on Schlegel’s door.
“What the hell are you doing?” Schlegel shouted when he opened his door.
“Tiny’s OD’ing! Tiny’s OD’ing!” they screamed.
They told Schlegel to get some salt. They wanted to shoot salt water in his veins, thinking it would dilute the drugs in Tiny’s body and save him. Somehow, they succeeded in bringing the kid back to life, but he died two weeks later. The New York City Schlegel knew in the mid-1960s was a place where the madness of the times claimed many other friends who were just as acquainted with the forces that drove Tiny to his death—the needle, the bottle, the war—and how easily those forces withstood injections of saline on the rooftops of Inwood. One was killed in Vietnam. Another survived Vietnam only to die drunk in a car accident soon after coming home. One drank himself to death at twenty-five and was found in a Harlem alley. Two others overdosed on heroin. Still another was sent to jail for heroin and came out crippled.
You knew a lot of things as a kid on the streets of Inwood back then, and not all of them had to do with drugs. You knew to stay away from the food at Al’s Candy Store, where “Dirty Al’s” oily hair had a habit of finding its way into your bacon and egg sandwich. You knew to stay away from Father Martin, whose altar boys were as likely to cross themselves as they were to get a hand down their pants. You knew to stay clear of Clancy the Cop, a sadist who fell in love with the sound his stick made when it cracked the skulls of kids in his precinct.
Another thing Schlegel knew back then was that he had friends who would not let him give up the dream he surrendered after his misadventures with Ginsberg and Esposito. One friend in particular, an action bowler named Pete Mylenki, showed up at the door of Schlegel’s apartment one night. The place looked like a bomb had hit it. Schlegel himself looked like a guy who lived in a taxi. He had not shaved in weeks, his clothes were disheveled and soiled, and he kept his strawberry-blond hair long and wild.
Schlegel had won a lot of money with Mylenki. Mylenki was such a clutch action bowler that Schlegel often found himself picking up the money from the score table anytime Mylenki needed to strike in the 10th frame for the win, so certain was he that Mylenki would come through. He always did. Unlike most other action bowlers, Mylenki was a clean-cut kid who showed up to bowl in a white, button-down shirt and big, black, horn-rimmed glasses. Most of the other action players showed up in jeans and T-shirts. They looked the part; Mylenki didn’t. Schlegel picked him up as a doubles partner because no one knew who he was, and a kid who dressed like that in the action looked an awful lot like a fish to the scene’s usual suspects. Until he started bowling.
The Pete Mylenki who showed up at Schlegel’s apartment a few years later wasn’t looking for a doubles partner. He was looking to pay back a friend in a currency far more lasting than money—the currency of friendship. Mylenki locked eyes with Schlegel through a vaguely blue and chalky haze of weed that thickened the air inside the place and altered the direction of Schlegel’s life forever. He looked over the devastation of the apartment and shook his head.
“Ernie, this ain’t you. You gotta straighten out,” Mylenki told him. “I got a job for you in Jersey. I got you a place to live out there, too. You start Monday.”
Mylenki had landed Schlegel a job cleaning air-conditioning units out in Hackensack.
“I don’t even have a car,” Schlegel told him.
“You can find one when you get there,” Mylenki said before leaving.
Mylenki may not quite have understood at the time that the haze of hydro hanging over the obliterated and rollicking apartment he entered that night was as much a part of Schlegel as the fabled “Other Ernie.” As with that latter, morbidly violent half of him, the Schlegel that Mylenki found in that Inwood shanty also needed to be saved from himself. Mylenki’s connection with an air-conditioning technician in Hackensack who happened to want an assistant was all he needed to make that happen. Naturally, Schlegel and his friends found a way to turn Mylenki’s miraculous intervention into another occasion for sordid debauchery.
“Guys!” Schlegel shouted as he turned to his friends upon Mylenki’s departure, “I got a job starting Monday! Toga party!”
It was the last weekend that Schlegel would live with his roommates, Dicky Bott and Jerry Markey, the final party he and his friends would host in that apartment, and the last time many of them would see each other for fifty years. But they made sure, on their way out, that the landlord would never forget who lived there. He came banging on the door to yell at them about the noise. Markey opened the door and said “We’re leaving Monday!” Then he slammed the door in the landlord’s face, and the party went on. The apartmen
t quaked with the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” on full blast; Schlegel and the boys flipped up the volume fast every time they heard the word “Shout” and screamed it together.
Schlegel moved to Westwood, New Jersey and bought a beat-up station wagon for $125. He would spray the air conditioning units of Hackensack looking for air bubbles that betrayed the spot at which Freon leaked out. Their boss also had an account at one of the YMCA’s in New York City. There, Schlegel and Chuck installed air-conditioning units in the windows in May and removed them come October. He did this work for several years.
Thanks to this period on the straight and narrow for the first time since elementary school, Schlegel returned to bowling. Mylenki would not leave him alone until he did. He saw the dream in Schlegel’s eyes, however much Schlegel himself tried to turn away from it.
“You have to follow your dream, Ernie,” Mylenki told Schlegel.
“I tried everything,” Schlegel said. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” Mylenki said. “You have to. This is not the way you want to live the rest of your life. You weren’t born to fix air-conditioning units. You were born to bowl.”
When Schlegel looked in the mirror, he saw a broken-down young man with nowhere to go. Mylenki saw someone else; he saw a dreamer who still had a shot. By 1967, he was essentially running Schlegel’s life. He placed Schlegel in several bowling leagues. Schlegel would put in a day’s work in Hackensack and then, two or three nights a week, he would head off to bowl a few games of league. He started getting a taste of what he had left behind. He started feeling the itch he hadn’t scratched in years—the itch of the gambler, the itch of that chest-pounding gorilla who lorded over Central Lanes years ago, the itch of a guy who just wanted to be somebody.
Then Mylenki got in Esposito’s ear. He wanted Schlegel to bowl an upcoming PBA Tour event. Toru Nagai, Schlegel’s old cohort from his very first days in the action, agreed to sponsor him.
“Well, can you can you clean him up a little?” Esposito asked Mylenki.
“Oh, Frank, come on,” Mylenki said.
“No, I mean it. Clean him up and we’ll let him bowl—otherwise, no.”
Mylenki must have gotten Schlegel looking clean enough for Esposito’s taste, because Schlegel bowled a PBA regional event in Newburgh, New York, soon thereafter. The regionals are the minor leagues of the PBA, local tournaments for less money where the area’s aspiring pros lock horns on the lanes. Those who dominated their regions would be ready for a taste of the national PBA Tour. Some had success there. Others—most others—learned it was time to find a day job.
To Esposito’s chagrin, Schlegel led the tournament first game to last and walked away with the top prize. Mylenki pushed Esposito a little harder, leveraging Schlegel’s victory. Esposito let him bowl again—this time, a national stop, the 1967 PBA Camden Open in Camden, New Jersey, in late November. Schlegel led the first round, then finished in 9th place in a field dotted with future Hall of Famers. One of those future Hall of Famers—Mike Limongello—finished ten places behind Schlegel, at 19th.
There was no way Esposito could justify his opposition to Schlegel’s desire to become a PBA member now. That knife fight with Ginsberg was a distant memory as the calendar turned to 1968. And as for those kids who smudged Esposito’s carpet with the smokes at Paramus Lanes, Schlegel had not seen any of them in years. He was holding down an honest job in Hackensack. Esposito finally agreed to let Schlegel become a PBA member.
In the winter of 1969, at the Greater Buffalo Open, Schlegel finally broke through. He qualified as the fourth seed to bowl the nationally televised championship round on ABC. He had survived 42 games of competition against the greatest bowlers on the planet. After eighteen games he was in the top five. He maintained his position for most of the tournament, but it was close. His middle finger was sore, so he kept opening the finger hole with a bevel until it was large enough to keep the pressure off. It worked, and now, finally, here was the future he had been waiting for.
But this was Ernie Schlegel, so there had to be something more to overcome, some additional adversity that would give him the chance to prove to himself that his dreams could only deny him as long as he allowed them to. No one was burying knives in anyone’s chest this time; no one was tossing his dreams off the George Washington Bridge. No, this time—for once—the obstacle Schlegel faced was not named Ernie Schlegel. Rather, its name was Mother Nature, and she was sporting her full winter regalia as Buffalo found itself in the throes of a blinding blizzard. In March, no less.
“Why would anybody live here?” Schlegel thought as he toppled an Everest of snow off the windshield of his car. Man-sized snow drifts flanked the roads. Schlegel dug the driver-side door out of the snow it was caked in, pulled the door free of the ice that had frozen shut the lock, and headed to the bowling alley.
Schlegel could not sleep the night before. So he borrowed a page from the days of toga parties and the Isley Brothers: He rolled himself a fatty and fell asleep sitting up in bed.
The trouble Schlegel faced at Fair Lanes in Buffalo the following day was that in any given week on tour, Schlegel faced hundreds of other Ernie Schlegels, men who also grew up in the tough terrain of bowling alleys and proved that they were the best bowlers anyone in town had ever seen. They, too, had dangled by their fingernails from the cliffs of their egos and clawed back to the top often enough to believe that nothing could bring them down. Every bowler on tour believed that, but most of them had headed out of town for the next tour stop by show time that week in Buffalo—most, that is, except for the five bowlers slated to compete before a national audience on ABC.
The kind of pressure that a twenty-five-year-old Ernie Schlegel faced under the steaming lights of TV cameras that snowy afternoon was not the kind relieved by a mere loosening of the finger holes in his bowling ball. Busting the budgets of Jersey kids at Paramus Lanes on Friday nights was one thing five years ago, but trying to do it against the greatest bowlers in the world with the nation looking on was quite another. With only a handful of channels available to viewers in 1969, nearly ten million people carved time out of their Saturdays to make room for the pro bowling telecast on ABC. That was quite a stage for the first-generation American son of a superintendent to leap onto for the first time in his life.
The Ernie Schlegel that announcers Keith Jackson and Billy Welu introduced to the nation at the start of the show had the pensive countenance of a president reading a Soviet telegram threatening nuclear holocaust. They introduced the five contestants one at a time; each got up and threw one shot as his name was announced to the applauding crowd. Schlegel was the only one of the five to whirl through his one shot about as quickly as a bullet blows through a cake. He was already halfway through his hurried approach to the foul line when his name was called, and unlike the other four contenders, he hardly paused to watch his ball strike the pins before darting back to his seat at the pace of a jogger getting chased by a slobbering Doberman.
Schlegel’s polo shirt was buttoned to the chin. His hair was greased to the consistency of glass and parted cleanly off to the right—a rigidity that belied the storming spirit inside him. For now, he was merely the kid from Sickles Street in New York City who, as Billy Welu said in his introduction, was “completing his first full year on the tour.”
Welu’s partner in the booth was Keith Jackson. Jackson’s beady eyes were pinched into his round, doughy face. His dark tie was flawlessly knotted in the center of a collar so tight that the flesh of his neck looked like a pot of steaming milk about to boil over.
“If it sounds like I’m carrying the rigors of winter on my back, you’re right, I am,” he said to apologize for his haggard voice.
It was 1969, after all; you could still say things like that and expect to be taken seriously. Jackson would cover sports for ABC for the next thirty-seven years. His voice would become synonymous with college football, and he would rank among America’s most beloved sportscasters. Here in the snow
s of Buffalo in 1969, that was all decades away, and there was a pro bowling show to get on with. The crowd was decked with horn-rimmed glasses, beehive hairdos, women sporting the wool dresses that Jackie Kennedy made famous, and men lighting cigarettes as casually as kids watching the afternoon pass by from a buddy’s stoop. Nearly every man wore a suit and tie and was freshly shaven. These were men who were not too far removed from the days when no man left the house without his fedora.
Everyone’s eyes turned toward the pair of lanes where the afternoon’s matches were about to unfold. Steve Wallace, the fortunate son of wealthy parents out of Houston—and Ernie Schlegel’s opponent—stepped up to throw the first shot of the game. A nineteen-year-old psychology major out of the University of Houston who dropped out to try his luck on tour, Wallace’s wiry frame prompted Welu to joke that Wallace weighed “one hundred twenty-five pounds soaking wet, with bowling ball,” during his introduction. His clothes hung from his body like a shirt left out on a laundry wire in the wind. He looked as if he were nothing more than a cadaver dressed in a young man’s shirt and pants—bowling’s own Ichabod Crane. His jet-black pair of Buddy Holly glasses contrasted so sharply against his snow-white complexion that he looked like he had the eyes of a raccoon. Even at the tender age of nineteen, a receding hairline broadened his forehead.
Wallace’s opening shot was a bad one. He spared, took his seat, and left the lanes to Schlegel. Schlegel now prepared to throw his first shot on national television. He hid his wildness well with manners so staid as to be supine—just the way Esposito and the boys wanted it—despite the $6,000 top prize. But the one place where he could not conceal the wild man within him was his eyes, which narrowed into a reptilian squint as he stared down his target on the lane. He looked like a lizard closing in on a fly.
Schlegel lost the war with his nerves and left a split. He sauntered back to the ball return, then turned toward the split he left as if checking to see if that really just happened. Seeing that in fact it had, he frowned with a mixture of embarrassment and disgust. Here he was with the jewel of his dreams more within reach than ever before, and he was blowing it right out of the gate.
Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion Page 11