The Legacy of Long-Arm Lefty: A Tale of The Sportsmen's Club

By David Seed

The Sportsmen's Club is a two-story, skid-row structure of connected buildings housing a bar, a poker room, and a Chinese restaurant. The Sportsmen's Hotel reaches across the upper floor.
Business depends on a subculture of alcoholics, hustlers, shills, gamblers, and those in need of a cheap room. Among them is Alexander Kyness who seems to have chosen the club as a place in which to live a life of obscurity. His friends call him "Kindness."
In this odd, little world of greed, deception, and predation, Kindness maintains an attitude of detachment, but his aversion to entanglement may meet its match in "Little Doll" Grey, the bar manager whose formidable wit keeps order over the misfits and malcontents in this place where something interesting always happens.
Kindness learns why Charlie's ghost will continue to guard the Sportsmen's Club and has a run-in with crooked cops.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Western Grebe Publishing
• Release date: Feb 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301890552

David Seed

###About the author:David Seed was born August 15, 1931 in Minot, North Dakota. In his eleventh year the family moved to Dunsmuir, California where he graduated high school, believing himself to be a writer. In the fall of 1949 he started at the University of California at Berkeley and did his best to learn what he could of life. He managed to graduate in the spring of 1956 and continued to follow his calling, experiencing a chaotic life as both participant and observer. He is now an old man writing books in Oregon.

Book preview

Tales of the Sportsmen’s Club

The Legacy of Long-Arm Lefty

By David Seed

Smashwords Edition

*****

Published on Smashwords by

Western Grebe Publishing

Los Osos, California 93402

Copyright David Seed 2012

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue

The Legacy of Long-Arm Lefty

About the Author

PROLOGUE

The Sportsmen's Club is a two-story, skid-row structure of connected buildings housing a bar, a poker room, and a Chinese restaurant. The Sportsmen's Hotel reaches across the upper floor.

Business depends on a subculture of alcoholics, hustlers, shills, gamblers, and those in need of a cheap room. Among them is Alexander Kyness who seems to have chosen the club as a place in which to live a life of obscurity. His friends call him Kindness.

In this odd, little world of greed, deception, and predation, Kindness maintains an attitude of detachment, but his aversion to entanglement may meet its match in Little Doll Grey, the bar manager whose formidable wit keeps order over the misfits and malcontents in this place where something interesting always happens.

THE LEGACY OF LONG-ARM LEFTY

My morning walk is full of sunshine. The sidewalks are awash with the stuff, and I stay in it until I enter the back door to the club. I walk the dim hallway and enter the bar to the sound of Uba Uba promoting a betting pool.

Five dollars a square, he says and holds up the chart. One through thirty-one, he says. Pick the day Long-Arm Lefty cashes in his chips and win what’s in the pool up to a hundred dollars.

So what happens to the extra fifty-five dollars? Limo Bob asks.

Today’s the eleventh. Uba Uba points to the chart. Nobody will pick one through eleven. Long-Arm Lefty has cancer in both lungs. He gets trucked out of here this afternoon. Nobody figures he’ll last the month.

It’s unlucky to bet on death, Tony D says in a voice that could scrape paint.

Insurance companies do it all the time, Uba Uba says.

The reply sounds somewhat dismissive and deserving of a response.

You have it backwards, I say. Insurance companies sell life insurance. They bet the policy holder will live a long life and pay lots of premiums.

Hell, Kindness, you know what I mean, Uba Uba says. It’s still the same thing. He waves a hand as if to dismiss the point.

I want to explain the difference, but Limo Bob breaks in.

"So what happens if Long-Arm Lefty