It took him a half hour of walking to find a liquor store. Before he found it he passed a poolroom, closed. He bought a fifth of Scotch, took it back to his hotel room with him and, before he went to bed, set it, unopened, on the green metal dresser.
8
He awoke, sweating from the heat in his room, at seven-thirty that evening. After dressing, he went downstairs, out to the bus station, getting his suitcase from the locker but putting in another dime and leaving the pool cue. He would not be needing that for quite a while. It might be several weeks before he would want to advertise himself.
Before he left he looked, on a long-odds gamble, into the lunchroom. The girl was not there. Then he went back to his room, shaved, and changed his clothes. Coming out he left a bundle of dirty shirts with the woman in the lobby, telling her to send them out for him. He made a mental note to buy himself some new socks and underwear. He hadn’t brought enough.
Then he went looking for a poolroom.
He found one on a street named Parmenter, a hole in the wall called Wilson’s Recreation Hall, the kind of place with green paint on the windows. There were three beat-up pool tables, green-shaded incandescent lamps, and an old man to rack the balls. There were a bar and a back room—for booking race bets or for a card game. The door was open and he could see a round table and some chairs, but nobody was in the back room. Up front a small, indecently wrinkled man was sitting behind an ancient cash register that squatted, its sides decorated in phony rococo, on the bar. He looked up as Eddie came in.
It was a crummy place, a filthy, crooked-looking place, but Eddie felt at home in it. There were probably ten thousand poolrooms in the country, identical, down to the back room and the old man with the corrugated face, to Wilson’s Recreation Hall on Parmenter Street in Chicago, and Eddie felt as if he had played in at least half of them.
There was one game going on. On the front table two men were playing one-pocket, a desultory, early-evening game of one-pocket. Eddie sat and watched them for almost an hour before one man quit and Eddie, grinning his very best, most personable grin, invited the remaining man to play for a while with him. Maybe for a half dollar on the side, just to pass the time…
And thus, easily, with hardly a second thought, Eddie Felson came full circle, starting where he had begun, scuffling, charming himself into a fifty-cent game of pool. He won seven dollars. He worked for that; spending three hours at it, in hope of getting the man to raise the bet, trying to prod him into playing for a dollar a game, or, with luck, two dollars. But the man quit and left him with seven dollars and in an empty poolroom. Eddie shrugged his shoulders. You have to start somewhere….
He found a restaurant and ate a steak. Then he wandered in search of another poolroom. This one he found by recognizing the familiar dull crash of a rack of balls being broken open as he walked by it on the street. The place was on the third floor of a building, above a hardware store; and he would have missed the small BILLIARDS sign if it hadn’t been for the sound of the balls.
He did not have to wait long before he got into a game of snooker with three petty tout types, at five cents a point. Snooker is a game played with small balls and on a table with very tight and bouncy pockets; it is impossible to play it in a fast, loose style—Eddie’s style—the balls will not stay in the pockets unless they are shot with care and precision. It was not Eddie’s kind of game, but the other players were so poor that he had to hold himself back in spite of this.
The other men were feeling good and Eddie mixed with them, buying a few rounds of drinks and telling an occasional joke. They seemed to think he was a great fellow. His feeling for them was not exactly contempt—although he knew they would have robbed him if they had a chance—but he found no remorse in taking them for forty dollars. It would have been more if the poolroom hadn’t closed at two in the morning.
He figured his profit, after the drinks, at about thirty-two dollars. It would pay the rent; but he wasn’t worried about the rent.
He was worried about at least a thousand dollars, which he needed very badly. He needed a thousand dollars so that he could get his little leather satchel out of the locker at the bus station and walk—no, take a taxicab—over to Bennington’s Billiard Room and play straight pool with Minnesota Fats. Not with Jackie French or George the Fairy, but with Minnesota Fats, the fat man with the jerky chin, the little eyes, the rings, the ballet steps, the curly hair, and six thousand dollars of Eddie Felson’s money. And all of Eddie Felson’s pride.
Eddie put his cue stick in the rack. As he left, the proprietor said, “Come back, mister,” but he did not reply to this. He figured that he would be back, however.
He was not accustomed to staying up all night; but he had got his hours badly twisted. He would have to get the landlady at the hotel to wake him earlier next time; maybe in three or four days he could get on some kind of reasonable schedule. He could start hustling around the rooms at noon, try and get to bed by three in the morning.
Also he would have to make some contacts, try finding ways of getting some bigger money; he would get nowhere by scuffling indefinitely. And once he got himself a reputation as a winner, in the circuit of local small poolrooms, winning even thirty or forty dollars would become hard to do. He could not go back to Bennington’s, not without capital. Probably no one there would play him anyway, no one except Fats. They had already seen him play his best stick, knew what he could make happen on a pool table. He was not certain yet what he had already done, in the first, staggering game at Bennington’s—but, whatever it was, he would have to make money. And, not only that, he would have to find some action, some important, high-money action. That was something he needed, in many ways.
For this night, now that the poolrooms were closed and there was nothing for him to do, he had already dimly formulated the framework of a plan involving something else that interested him: the girl. Thinking about her he had become aware of possibilities. He needed a girl, and he was beginning to feel that he needed this one.
Putting the plan into effect required first that he go to his room, clean himself up and change his clothes. He did this, and also straightened the room a little, smoothing out the half-made bed and filing some miscellaneous things away in a drawer of the bureau. He liked a room to be neat, in order. Then, leaving the fifth, he went out, bought a pint of Scotch, and slipped this into the breast pocket of his sport coat. There was a mirror in the liquor store and he examined himself in it. He looked good—neat and quietly dressed. Unlike a good many gamblers, Eddie liked dark colors, and he was wearing a dark gray coat, gray slacks, and plain black shoes. The only thing about him that could have said “Hustler” was the gray silk sport shirt, buttoned at the neck. He did not like the idea of carrying a bottle in his pocket—incredibly, he had never carried a bottle into a poolroom in his life—and he adjusted its weight so that it could not be noticed.
Outside it was becoming chilly. He walked briskly, with his hands in his pockets, until he came to the bus station. It was three o’clock. The lunchroom was roped off as before; there were two empty booths this time. The girl was not there. He sat down, ordered scrambled eggs and coffee. Immediately he began to feel foolish. What were the odds against the girl’s coming in? It was too long a long shot. Maybe he should go by her place; he knew where it was. But what would he do when he got there? He didn’t even know what apartment she lived in; and he didn’t think she would take it very well even if he did know which door to knock on. But waiting in the bus station on the off-odds chance that she might come in was a stupid gamble.