Highbridge Boys

By Frederick Schneider

This is the story of two young men coming of age. One, the child of an abusive father has to emotionally support his alcoholic mother, while the other leaves the neighborhood to serve in the military during the war in Vietnam. It is a story of friendship, a search for independence, and the world of pool hustling in 1960s New York City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312544871

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Highbridge Boys

Highbridge Boys

A Novel

by Frederick Schneider

For Karen, who knows who I became. For Eric and for Alex, who have so enjoyed my Bronx tales. For Marc, who was there then and has always been my friend. For Lorraine and Miriam, and the girls who loved Highbridge Boys. And, for Jim, in memoriam.

—August, 2014

Highbridge Boys © 2014 Frederick Schneider. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-312-54487-1

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means,

except for the inclusion in a review, without permission from the author.

Contact: [e-mail]

PROLOGUE

There were plenty of poolrooms in New York City and no shortage of people thinking they could take Tommy Fallon’s money, but they were dead wrong about that—unless he let them. He had a natural gift. From the moment he picked up a cue stick for the first time, I knew he was born to shoot pool—like Mozart was born to write music or Bobby Fisher to play chess. Tommy’s visual sense of angles and distance, the near machine-like physical perfection of his stroke, his quiet confidence and a focus that was nearly unbreakable, all made him hard to beat. He loved the art of it, the psychology of it and the tactics. He could see the weaknesses in any opponent and use those to his advantage. Tommy was a hustler, but he was a decent man with modest needs, and, really, it was all just about earning a living the best and only way he knew how.

He started early, and so did I. We learned to shoot pool at age 15 or so after finding out that poolrooms were not only places to spend time with friends, but were a refuge from family problems and held the added attraction of being truant hideouts. They were places to watch the most interesting characters you could ever imagine existing outside of the movies—guys with names like The Postman, Sharkey, Staggerlee and Slow Willie. Every poolroom has it’s own vibe. The neighborhood, the location—upstairs, street level or basement—the lighting, the players, the hangers-on, the care given to the tables and equipment, the level of gambling—all make a place what it is. Rooms can feel lonely at times, or be friendly and upbeat, or become cool and serious when players get down to business. And some can get dangerous, because egos and money are on the line. Any time of the day or night, any room might turn into a tense betting parlor, where the burn to win and the frustration of loss is palpable. They are small worlds of their own, where people get to know, really know, what each other is made of.

Gradually, pool took the place of most everything else in Tommy’s  life except his mom and his friendship with me. Having a best friend, especially when things change for the worse, can really help you get through some bad times, and sure as hell there will be bad times. For me and Tommy, it was Vietnam and the misunderstandings that long distances and time away can bring. The war pulled us apart and shook our friendship to its foundation. The troubles that followed, hard as they were, ended up binding us even more tightly. That was the saving grace, I guess, though we couldn’t know that at the time. Or maybe, underneath, we did.

Growing up in the Bronx could be a mixed blessing—the good with the bad—or it could be a real curse, one you couldn’t shake that would carry you straight to some kind of personal hell depending on your luck. The streets could be tough, sure, with drugs and gangs and random evils that could grab you from behind, but they were our salvation, our respite and refuge from the really hard things in life. Like most kids, we lived in three separated worlds, and there was no question which was more meaningful and no question where our allegiances lay. It wasn’t with our home life and our parents, and it wasn’t with school. It was the world we created with our friendships on those streets. Home was where the demons hid and where the weight of life lay heavy. It was where relationships were forced and not chosen, where friendship and companionship and love had to be left outside.

Tommy’s demon was his father, a bastard ex-cop named Brian, who spent his days mostly in one chair in a living room which was always kept half dark. He was tubed into an oxygen tank to relieve a combination of emphysema and lung cancer but the s.o.b. didn’t deserve any relief; he deserved to sit in the dark wheezing and then die. He used to take a belt to Tommy on a twice a week basis when he had his breath, and then other times would spread grains of rice on the floor in the corner of the kitchen and make Tommy kneel there with his pants rolled up for a half hour until the grains seemed like they would puncture the skin on his knees and travel into his body like hot little darts. After the age of 13 or so Tommy didn’t give a fuck. He’d take the abuse and then sit in the tub massaging his knees until the last grains were out and the indentations softened and he felt less heat where the belt had slapped him. Tommy only took showers when he grew up because bathtubs always had ghost rice grains floating in them. The hell of it was, he never really did much to be punished for. He was a good kid, but Brian had taken that kind of shit from his own father and by god it had made him a better man. Love is pain: you could tell that from the picture in the living room right behind Brian’s chair; you could tell that by the look in Jesus’ spaniel eyes gazing lovingly up at heaven through the drips of blood running down from the thorny stems that ringed his head like a halo from hell.

Tommy’s mom was a good soul but damaged, and she required his compassion and protection. He confided things about her to me. I think it helped him to talk about their relationship, put it into perspective why he had to take over caring for her. A family tragedy and two decades with Brian had taken its toll on her, a toll only partly paid through a nightly bottle of wine. Margie didn’t drink in the daylight or alone in public. She could hold down a job as long as it was something that could be handled with a hangover during the morning work hours until aspirin and coffee made the afternoons more productive. That ruled out office work, so she waitressed, and although a lunch/dinner shift at a real restaurant was more lucrative, mostly she worked breakfast/lunch at luncheonettes that didn’t even serve regular dinners. There were a lot of luncheonette jobs then for a good waitress and Tommy said she was good. She treated every customer like they were an old friend or someone to flirt with and she used to be kind of pretty and moved nicely. She was blonde, tall, and slim and had full and shapely breasts. Men at her counter would watch her as she walked away with their order because she had a kind of swaying to her stride that was sexy and natural, not put on, and it got her dates. She dated men while Brian sat at home. After she got off work they would buy her drinks at some bar and offer to accompany her home on the subway. She’d never go that far. Margie’d always convince them to settle for the drinks and no promises and then she’d be able to come home alone and half bombed which made it easier to ignore Brian’s insults and maybe even be late enough so that he would have already gone to bed.

Tommy and his parents lived on a rare street (for this part of the Bronx) that was dotted with clusters of single-family houses. I went home with him once in a while in those days and always saw old Brian sitting in the half light under Jesus’s puppy dog eyes. If he spoke it was with a phlegmy growled bitching about one thing or another. Nothing was ever right with the world. He’d berate the niggers, kikes, wops and spics, lawyers, politicians and popes and when Tommy came in, there was always some shit about what Tommy should have done or what he screwed up. When Margie came home he’d pull the same thing with her. He’d say something nasty and sarcastic followed by Whattaya think, My Little Margie? Can you do that? Is it too much fucking trouble to do that? Didn’t matter if I or some other friend were there at the time, either. Tommy told me that Margie would usually retrieve a bottle from some shifting hiding place where Brian couldn’t find them and head upstairs, because he couldn’t make it up there to follow after her. Tommy would just quietly ignore it all, fry a hot dog or boil some spaghetti and punch out some ketchup over it and then turn around and leave the house again. Brian would always shuffle off to the downstairs bedroom by 9 o’clock, cursing about having to make his own goddamn TV dinner or eat hotdogs again because Margie had either come home late or chased upstairs to get unconscious. Life wasn’t so good for the Fallons until Brian croaked in his chair, alone in the dark like he deserved. Good for Brian, good for Margie, and good for Tommy.

Tommy quit going to school near the end of junior year. High school didn’t hold anything for him, no promise of anything, no reason or need. He wasn’t heading to tech school or college and the hell-pit of Vietnam hadn’t yet opened its gaping maw. Tommy didn’t have a steady girlfriend to knock up and marry. He didn’t do drugs—not even a little pot—and god knows with Margie as a role model he didn’t drink much, only a once-in-a-while beer to be sociable. He was a good kid, but the future wasn’t really a consideration. One day at a time was all life was. That spring, a painting contractor offered him a day job painting rooms in a public elementary school up in Harlem and the pay was pretty good. When summer came, Tommy was still on the job in Harlem and asked me and Heshy if we wanted to earn some money helping out. The contractor was behind schedule and didn’t mind paying unskilled kids as long as paint got onto walls by the end of August.

One day after work the three of us wandered down the block to a pool hall that Tommy spotted. There was a sign for it on the side of a building on the way to the A train at 125th St. It was upstairs in an elevator building which was kind of weird because in the Bronx all the poolrooms were at street level or down a flight of steps in some basement space. Harlem wasn’t so scary as we thought. None of us had ever been there before but the streets just seemed full of ordinary folks living their lives. They all happened to be shades of brown. Back then we called them colored people. We were on the lookout though for any groupings of teenagers, because that’s where the danger would be. But there weren’t any kids to be seen between where we were painting at PS-Whatever and the poolroom. We entered the building and took the elevator up to the second floor and when the doors opened we saw a big floor of tables, more than we’d ever seen in a room before. The place was mostly empty which wasn’t surprising, because at 6 p.m. on a summer evening there were too many other places to be, and the action would start later. There was a group of four players at one table and pairs at two other tables, and then a couple of singles. Some older men were sitting around on the highchairs watching, smoking, and looking bored. One, maybe in his 70s, was asleep with his chin on his chest, showing a short nappy helmet of rich gray hair, because his frayed old plaid newsboy cap had fallen to the floor next to him. The other players all seemed to be in their 20s or 30s except for one hard-looking character who I’d guess was maybe in his 40s and dressed like a hipster. Even though it was summertime he wore a thigh-length four-button black leather coat with a thin suit collar, much like what I thought jazz musicians wore. In fact that’s really what he looked like—Mingus or Monk came to mind. He wore a black stingy-brim hat. At least that’s what we called them, but Mingus would have called it a pork pie, as in Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, one of my favorite Mingus tunes. Under the jacket was a dark brown T-shirt and black jeans with a silver buckled belt, and on his feet were new-looking black Cuban ankle boots. Gangster? Maybe. A pool player? Not sure. I wondered what he was because he wasn’t ordinary. Anyway, we set up the rack and started playing Chicago. Chicago was a game we usually played for money. Not a lot of money, just enough to make you play seriously because the game could get raucous, since you didn’t have to call your shots and anything that went down stayed down. It made it fun for kids.

The game is played having six money balls, called weigh balls: the 1, 5, 8, 10, 13 and 15. Anyone pocketing a weigh ball puts it into the little shelving racks built into the front end of the table for counting up later. Each of the six weighs would be worth an agreed upon amount of money for that game. We usually played for a dime a weigh. If we were flush, then it was a quarter a weigh. The betting was just to keep the game from being too nuts with wild shots. You had to play in rotation, which meant you shoot to pocket the balls in sequence from the lowest number ball to the highest. As long as you hit your next-in-order numbered ball first, then it or anything else that went in with it, would be yours. So you shoot and collect weighs and then also total up the points using the numbers on the balls. The person with the most points and weigh balls wins and gets to add up the dollar values. If the loser had made any weighs, then those would be added in to discount his loss. Naturally, you’d shoot for the weighs and for the high-numbered balls whenever you could. When the game was played for serious gambling, the stakes could be five or even ten dollars a weigh, and the game was definitely not wild. There was a real beauty to it because there were so many strategies to execute. When a direct shot at a money ball wasn’t available, good players used combination shots—striking the next ball in the sequence but driving it into either a weigh or a high numbered ball and pocketing that. If you didn’t have a clean shot, then you could play a safety and hide the next sequential ball so your opponent couldn’t get to it.

We also played straight pool and sometimes nine-ball, but with three or four players at the table Chicago was our game. I learned later that outside of New York most players had never heard of Chicago. Newcomers to the city or people passing through hadn’t played it, and later that would become one of the tools in Tommy’s hustle. He’d begin his night in a room shooting straight pool or playing nine-ball by himself and then start up a conversation with somebody. After an hour or so, he would mention this game called Chicago and ask if they knew it, which at least half the time they didn’t in which case he’d offer to show them how to play. Just for fun, he’d say. After a couple of racks, Tommy would suggest they play for fifty cents or a dollar a weigh just to keep things from getting wild. Most people were up for playing because of the novelty, and since hustlers only played nine-ball, one-pocket or straight pool, Tommy wasn’t suspect. It all seemed just for fun but points and money balls would add up on Tom’s side of the shelf. He’d drop some racks by missing hard shots or by blowing combination shots—those are tough and not suspect when you blew them—and then he would try and edge up the stakes. Each rack could come up to fifteen or twenty dollars in the take, or even more.

It was the perfect con. He didn’t make as much money as the pros would with their tournament prizes or fees from exhibition game play, but Tommy was never going to go pro. He’d get good enough to be a pro but he didn’t want fame, just the opposite. He only wanted to make a living and in the process enjoy the con, the tease and the tactics. Tommy would become a real hustler, and that life started on 128th St. in Harlem on a summer night in 1963. He wasn’t quite through being sixteen.

CHAPTER 1

East of the poolroom, on the Bronx side of the Harlem River and about a mile north, Margie Fallon walked up the short concrete walkway that led to her house on Shakespeare Avenue in the district called Highbridge. At the sound of a woman, a mother, calling down for her child to come up for the night, Margie turned around to face the apartment building across the street. She caught a glimpse of the small bust of William Shakespeare that was neatly tucked into a niche designed for it at the corner edge of the building at the second floor level, put there by the builders to mark the patron saint of the street. Behind the half-raised window the voice called, Hey, Margie! You see Maureen down there?

Margie looked down the block and then called back, Yeah she’s in the courtyard next door, and pointed to the next building down, which had a low brick divider on either side of the entryway. There was a neatly trimmed privet hedge in front of it from behind which a small head of rust-colored hair had just poked up. A freckled face followed, and then a grin appeared but that quickly turned into a disappointed frown with the understanding that it was time to go upstairs, the evening play time over.

Margie smiled over at the girl across the street and pointed up to the windows to communicate to her that she’d been called up. The girl laughed brightly and ducked down again. Turning away, Margie realized that now she smelled privet blooming in the soft summer air and looked at the wilder, untrimmed shrub and its small white flower clusters that was growing in front of her own house. It was one of four freestanding but nearly touching three-story private homes made of wood and brick that stood anachronistically amid a thousand apartment houses in this hilly little Bronx neighborhood. My house, she thought dully. The little front yard was only 15 feet wide but it was lush with foliage. A privet and an azalea bush, each on its side of the walk—one bright green and the other dark—had in their turn bloomed gloriously as they did every year. Fallen petals, curled and brown, were scattered at the base of the azalea and fresh new yellow-green growth was spiking up from the privet towards the summer sun in unruly bursts. The bushes should be trimmed and then the trimmings and the old petals raked up, Margie thought. She pictured her father doing that. For a time she had continued his seasonal chore, but in recent years she left the bushes to do whatever they might.

It was 8:30 and the sun was down behind the Washington Heights horizon across the river but still cast a warm summer glow underneath the silver-blue evening sky. Margie was carrying a small bag of groceries from the Fedco Foods supermarket six blocks up on Ogden Avenue and another bag with two bottles of port wine from the liquor store on 167th street. The bags were heavy and she kept shifting them into different carrying positions and hand holds. Margie was hungry but had gotten used to ignoring it. She had always been slim but now she was too thin. Her light blue Scandinavian eyes weren’t as clear as they once were and there were slightly darkened hollows around them. She wore a pale green-gray summer dress—not new but still fresh looking—that hung loosely at her hips as she moved. She was not getting enough rest, not getting enough decent food and drinking too much. Her routine of nightly sweet port, which had started when her husband became housebound, was now taking a toll.

As she approached the lock with her key she was imagining that her husband Brian, still alive and in his chair, was waiting for her, ready to wheeze out something mean and malicious. Her hand trembled at the lock until she remembered that he was dead and silent, and that the air in the house wouldn’t reek of sickness and half-burned TV dinner. The realization that he wouldn’t be there and the immediate rush of freedom she felt buoyed her into the small foyer where she placed the bags on a tall, mirrored coat stand. She even started to smile. She dropped her keys on the shelf and then her mind went dark again, when for a moment she thought she heard the familiar hissing of the oxygen machine in the blackened living room that was through the door frame to the right, and her nascent smile vanished. The tanks were long gone and it wasn’t a living room any more. In fact it hadn’t been in many, many years. This room was where Brian sat in half-death in the dark for two years and it was never used for anything else during that time. When Tommy was little there were Christmas trees with presents under them, a train set and toys on the floor, Monopoly games left for days at a time still in progress, coloring books and toy robots scattered here and there, but after Brian’s cancer took hold, the place was never anything for anyone. If Margie hadn’t owned the house she would have left it—left the city entirely maybe. So great was her hate for this house now that she even dreamed a dream of burning it down. She wasn’t sure if she believed in ghosts, but if any house could be haunted with the sheer meanness of the dead then this place would be, and it ought to be burned. She had a dream of Tommy playing with his toys on the floor, of turning on the valve of the oxygen tank and taking a cigarette lighter to the hem of the drapes, the hiss of the escaping oxygen, a fiery explosion, the privet and azalea bushes torching into blackened twigs. She shivered and shook her shoulders to clear herself of the unwanted pictures then picked up the bag with the two bottles of wine in it and went quickly to the kitchen. It was time now for a little peace. That was how she thought about her drinking. It brought peace. She only drank in the early evening, although she had been tempted to drink before leaving work so that she’d be dulled to whatever Brian would say when she arrived home. Once she took a small Thermos of port to work so she could have some at the end of her shift, but the raw realization of the wrongness of her need kept her from doing it and she knew that the customers at the restaurant counter as well as the people near her in the subway car going home would be able to smell it on her breath. It would be embarrassing. It just wasn’t possible to sink to that and if she were caught she could lose her job. Besides, being sober in the daytime gave her something to look forward to at night. She needed the peace it brought. Other than that, all she needed was Tommy. It used to be that Tommy would have been there in the house waiting for her to get home, and he would have already prepared some kind of dinner for Brian. She thought about little boys being told that they would need to be the man of the house when there wasn’t a father around, and Tommy had that role since he was 15 when Brian had become housebound and couldn’t work.

Margie made $37.69 a week salary at the restaurant, plus tips. She was a good waitress and tips could amount to another hundred. When Tommy was little, most days Margie would come home, hang up her coat, go upstairs and throw her handbag on the bed, and Tommy knew that was the signal for counting up her tips. Her change purse would get dumped out and the coins sorted and stacked into little paper sleeves from the bank, but first Tommy had to check each dime and penny. He had started a small coin collection, and he’d look through all of Margie’s coins for the date and the mint mark, hoping to find the right ones to fill the spaces in the dark blue cardboard folding cases that held the collections of Mercury dimes and Lincoln pennies. They’d both cheer happily and laugh when he got one he needed and Margie watched as Tommy carefully fit the coin into the little round depression made for it.

Margie taught Tommy how to cook. From the age of eight or nine he’d make scrambled eggs or French toast for his own breakfast on the weekends and put sandwich lunches together to take to school on the weekdays. Then at age ten or so he’d help with preparing dinner. He loved making potato pancakes. He’d set up the old cast-iron meat grinder by tightening its clamp to the kitchen counter and putting a big glass bowl under it. Unscrewing the holding cap at the exit opening, he’d place one of the ricing disks into the cap and then screw it back on. Cutting the potatoes into small chunks, he’d feed a few chunks at a time into the horn of the grinder, turn the long, wooden-handled crank arm and watch as the chunks were driven screw-fashion into the machine until they squirted out the ricer end in little shreds. He’d break a couple of eggs into the bowl, spin them around with a fork until the greenish potatoes turned yellow and then add a cup of flour and some shakes of salt. Mixing it all up with a spoon, he’d pass the bowl over to Margie for the frying.

She worked through quite a few of her simpler recipes with him, the ones passed down from her mother. Margie was born in Denmark. Her family name was Carlsson and her given name Margareta. Her mother Anita ran a small bakeshop in a coastal city and had a real way with flour and butter. Sten, her father, was a mason and cooked too. His big, unruly hands weren’t suitable for rolling out delicate, flaky pastries, but they were very adept at searing and stewing a delicious pot-roast with a sour sauce and making various kinds of sausages. They always ate well but in the 1920s, Denmark’s economy was becoming less stable, along with the inflation-ridden European countries that had been ravaged by the Great War. The building trades were beginning to suffer. No large masonry projects were being undertaken in their area, even in Copenhagen which was fully a day’s train ride from their town. Sten’s work became more sporadic and customers didn’t come to Anita’s shop as frequently, and when they did they bought the breads but not the pastries which were more expensive. The global publicity about America, its armies of brave young soldiers that had saved Europe, it’s Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age and Coca-Cola were well known even in rural Danish communities. America’s industrialists and manufacturers and rich bankers and its growing cities with taller and taller masonry buildings all seemed promising to Sten, and he saw a new future there for the three of them. He made up his mind that they would move. Anita was able to sell her shop and her recipes to an eager young couple from the country, and Sten borrowed money from his family as a beginning stake in a new life. They and 4 year-old Margareta left Denmark in the summer of 1929, beginning their long journey first by train to Copenhagen, then a ferry to Germany and another train through Germany and France to Le Havre, where they caught a steamer to New York. Sten had pre-arranged a place to live in New York City in a building owned by a distant relative which was located in a Scandinavian enclave in a neighborhood of Brooklyn called Sunset Park, which was atop a high hill and afforded a view of the towers of Manhattan and the busy, welcoming harbor of a new world.

Within three months of their arrival in America the stock market crashed and all the promises of a better life came into question. Sten got lucky though, at least for a while. The city was still rising higher and higher, albeit more slowly, and he easily found work in construction. He was a big powerful man and was needed on building sites that in spite of limited capital were still in evidence all over Manhattan. He even worked for a short time on finishing the Empire State building. In four years he had stored away enough money at the Emigrant Savings bank to combine with his borrowed funds and use to buy a house, and so the family moved from their cramped one-room Brooklyn apartment to a small but pleasant little home of their own in the Bronx. Margareta was happy at her new school and enjoyed that her classmates Americanized her name. She would be Margie. Life was sweet for all of them. Margie made friends easily and her bright personality served her well both at school and in the neighborhood.

The sidewalks of Highbridge were safe and fun places to play and even young children could roam a bit on their own through the neighborhood without fear of danger. With few people owning automobiles and little traffic, even the streets themselves were for playing. White chalk-lined hopscotch squares were drawn onto the macadam and games of tag and kick-the-can and punch-ball and stick-ball scattered kids throughout the narrow streets whenever the weather was warm.

Sten bought Anita a good quality used sewing machine on the Lower East Side and she took in tailoring. Her baking skills came into play when she made pastries for all of her customers at Christmas time, an effort which served to bring in more work by recommendation. The family was doing well and had been living their dream for a decade but were beginning to hear of the tragedies befalling their families back in Europe. Denmark was occupied by the Nazis in 1940 and Sten’s younger brother killed while participating in the resistance. Anita’s mother had died, and her father was ill, so she wrote letters each day to him to help ease his sorrow, even though she didn’t know if they would ever be delivered since the postal service was disrupted and censored. Anita saddened and longed to see what was left of her family.

Margie, 16 in 1941, was already a beautiful young woman, tall, long legged and lithe, blonde and blue-eyed. She was desirable and pursued by the boys at William Howard Taft High School where she was a student and by the neighborhood Catholic boys who went to the new Cardinal Hayes High School on the Grand Concourse. She had a close group of girlfriends who often spent their weekend nights in sleep-overs at the Carlsson’s home, which had more space than most of the apartments in the big buildings. She was also on the verge of dating, although Sten, if he had known, would have forbidden it. There was one boy who kept after her and she liked his attention. He’d find ways to catch up with her on the street but knew better than to go too near to her house. He was as tall as she was, and that was tall for an Irish boy. His name was Bobby Fallon. He was two years older than Margie and was planning on joining the Marines so that he could go and get even with the Japs for Pearl Harbor. He didn’t have to enlist though, since shortly after the attack and his 18th birthday, he received his draft notice from the Army and left for boot camp and parts unknown. Margie wasn’t sure if she really cared a lot that he was gone, but she didn’t want anything to happen to him in any case.

The following year Margie’s entire world came apart. Sten was killed suddenly on his work site from a crushing blow to the head when a bucket loader swung hard in the wrong direction, his massive body providing no protection at all. He was pronounced dead at the side of the loader and with the notifying phone call to the house, Anita, in shock from this new loss following the death of her mother and her father’s illness, fell into a deep, retreating depression. She emptied out and all but disappeared, closing herself in her room. Margie wouldn’t leave the house now for anything except school and grocery shopping, and unable to get her mother to come out of