A Betting Man In Little Aleppo

The Main Drag was in mourning, for whom it did not know. The pickpockets had streamed out (casually, of course) from the Seven Bells that afternoon; each had black armbands stuffed in pockets and stashed in shirts and ferreted up sleeves, and soon the ebony garters began to bloom on every street in Little Aleppo. The event was not without precedent: the armbands appeared, and a week later the Cenotaph would run an obituary for an “appraiser, procurer, and broker in previously purchased jewels,” or someone who enjoyed “art and efficient travel,” or an “boundlessly competitive amateur statistician,” along with a line–conspicuous and acontextual–about how the subject had never been indicted. By then, the funeral would have already taken place, along with debts settled, and properties transferred, and stashes re-stashed. But for now, just the armbands. The pickpockets also collected for the wake while they were making their rounds, but never from someone they snuck a cuff on. Bad luck. Worse: bad form.

The Seven Bells was packed tight, and its occupants relaxed. No crime had ever occurred in the building, though thousands had been planned, and a slightly smaller number celebrated; there were rules about that sort of thing. The card games were, paradoxically, the only honest ones in the neighborhood, and a stranger at the bar who told you about a rich sister locked away in a Catalonian jail cell could be trusted completely. Gloria Daio owned the joint and made the introductions, and she clanged an iron triangle behind the bar and there was quiet as she raised her pint of Arrow. The sharps and the sharks and the flim-flammers and the floozies who were not as floozified as they appeared; the cold readers and the backdoor bandits and guys with white vans and promises of high-fidelity; long conners and short changers and middle-deckers: they all raised whatever they had, too.

“To Big Daddy Don Dandy,” Gloria called out.

“To Big Daddy Don Dandy,” the crowd answered.

Big Daddy Don Dandy could be found at the Betty’s Perfect 10 on Frewer Street when he wasn’t on the road. New lanes had opened up on the Upside, place called Shooby-Doo’s, one of those vintageous joints with an aesthetic throughline: neon and waitresses in poodle skirts that came right to your seat with your ceviche and the housings for the ball returns had tailfins on them. Betty’s Perfect 10 was actually built in the 50’s and, so, was much shittier. You stuck to most of it, first of all, and there was no ceviche. A guy on parole would make you wings, maybe. There was a bar which did not feature any draft beers, and a bartender who should not be asked for anything complicated. There was a high desk, and behind that were shoe-filled cubbyholes and Betty. Her last name was Gow and her husband Max named the establishment after her when he opened it in 1956. Ten lanes across, and Max always called Betty his perfect ten. Max called a lot of women that. Died on top of one. Betty got over it, and she got the bowling alley, and she got Big Daddy Don Dandy.

He was the greatest bowling cheat in the world.

Within the genus cheater, there are many and varied species. The familiar card sharp, the wily dice palmer, the pug taking a dive in the third: all branches of the same tree. The bowling cheat had one advantage over them all, which is that the vast majority of their marks didn’t believe you could rig a bowling match. No Western has ever featured a scene where a guy got shot after being caught with a hidden bowling ball up his sleeve. The Clash didn’t write a song called The Bowling Cheat. Fixed? Bowling? Not a thing, the public believed. Bowling cheats liked that just fine.

It was a small fraternity, but worldwide. Sully Sprat worked out of Worcester, Massachusetts, and specialized in candlepin; Jocko Warnocke was from New Zealand and made a living off indoor bowls; Le Gordie Magnifique rolled five-ball in Montreal; Joey Tilt-A-Whirl played skee-ball down the shore in Jersey, and everyone liked him so he was allowed to subscibe to the newsletter and attend meetings even though they were certain skee-ball was not technically bowling. Big Daddy Don Dandy had the West Coast. All of it. The king needs his lands.

He rolled at lane #2–“Never roll next to a wall. One day, you’ll know why.”–starting in mid-morning and continuing through the afternoon and into the evening. Some nights, Betty would leave the keys on the high desk, shut all the lights except the ones over his lane, take off home as he spun his ten-pounder down the oiled-up plank. Hit the six. Hit the six with no hook, just glance it off the sheerest splinter of the ball. Hit the six with no hook, just glance it off the sheerest splinter of the ball a hundred more times. Hundred more. Now do it lefty. This is what the marks did not know. All cheats are masters. It was no good having an ace up your sleeve if you didn’t know the math that told you when to take it out. Hit the six a hundred more times.

The door to the bookstore with no title went TINKadink and Mr. Venable, who was in his customary seat, smiled and said,

“Big Daddy Don Dandy.”

It had been decades since anyone had called Big Daddy Don Dandy by anything by the fullest of names. Even after a few drinks when people couldn’t quite pronounce it–Bin Danny Don Andy, Bog Diddy Wah Diddy–no one would ever think to address him as “Don” or even just “Big Daddy.” Mr. Venable enjoyed saying the name. Also, Big Daddy Don Dandy was a buyer in a neighborhood of browsers and shoplifters, so Mr. Venable smiled doubly.

“Venable. That a new suit?”

He was wearing his customary suit.

“It is not.”

“No shit. You look like a J.C Penney’s that killed itself.”

“You’re sunshine on a cloudy day, Big Daddy Don Dandy.”

“My presence is a present. I come seeking incunabula.”

“Just woke up on the incunabula side of the bed?”

“Something like that.”

Big Daddy Don Dandy had eyes like poached eggs, and a mustache the shape of a slice of bacon; his whole face was breakfastish. His hair, in his youth, had been thick and brown and was now jet-black and thinning. He was wearing the shirt you’d expect, and it had his name written in white cursive over the left breast.

“Something has come in, I believe, that may pique your interest.”

“My interest is not that piqueable.”

Mr. Venable took his feet off the cluttered table that served as his desk and slid papers around until he found the one he was looking for. Took a sip of cold coffee, grimaced, took another. Reading glasses.

“A pamphlet. From Bamberg, I believe, and dated to 1481. 40 pages. Excellent condition for what is essentially a 500-year-old magazine. Illustrated with six engravings.”

“Is there an author involved?”

“Mm. Fellow named Hoggoth.”

Big Daddy Don Dandy didn’t say anything, just smiled but it looked like a smirk.

“I see piquing.”

“And the title?”

“It’s in Latin. Shall I translate for you?”

“Placere legit.”

“On the Sapping of Ball-Strength as Related to… I have no idea what this word is.

“Todesstift?”

“I believe so. Is that the vulgate?”

“Very much so.”

“It’s down in the Rare Section. No, wait. One floor up. Medium-Rare. Go through the annex until you see the bust of Shakespeare. Flip the head back and press the button. No, the other button. Something will happen, and it shall be very obvious what you should do. Do that thing. If you see a mirror, run the other way: the Candymen and Bloodies Mary have been cross with one another for weeks and you don’t want any part of it. Oh, and don’t enter Genetics under any circumstances.”

“Why?”

“Time warp.”

“Again?”

Mr. Venable shrugged and Big Daddy Don Dandy disappeared.

There are no secrets in this world, just books you haven’t read. Big Daddy Don Dandy had read ’em, though. Spin and her Counter-Aliases, plus an Illustrated Essay on Hidden Weights and Measures by Rapsin–that one was 1711 and had the politesse to be written in English–and A Guide to Drag Coefficients for the Perplexed by Natan Natansky, which was from 1872 and required several different maths to understand and also included some dirty woodcarvings in the index. And he’d read the owner’s manuals for every piece of equipment in your average bowling alley, and all the ones from the above and below-average alleys. Did you know that ramping up the speed on the ball-return could scar–almost invisibly to the naked eye–a ball, and throw off its balance? Big Daddy Don Dandy knew that. He read it in a book. And the code for the automatic scorer program. Just a little fiddling and it would register your opponent’s point as a .9 instead of a 1. Cost him ten percent of his game. Big Daddy Don Dandy knew that, too. Amazing what you could learn from a book.

If you played him at Betty’s Perfect 10, well, you lost before you unzipped your bag and polished up your balls. Didn’t matter which lane you picked, and Big Daddy Don Dandy would always let you choose the lane as long as it wasn’t #1 or #10. You’d do no better at your home alley, either. Big Daddy Don Dandy was an expert at pretending he’d never been somewhere before. And when he was on the road, he used a less conspicuous name. He was Earl or Eddie or Dick or something beer-and-a-shot like that. Only the big money games.

Only one way to cheat in dice, really, when you boiled it down. Change the suckers out, replace ’em with a more obedient pair. Roulette had two points of attack: the wheel and the ball. Cards, well, you were back to one avenue of chicanery–the deck itself–that was being fiercely guarded by every eye at the table, and others above. But not bowling. Big Daddy Don Dandy insisted that there were 119 different junctions at which the game could be fiddled with, and over 40 of them took place behind walls or under the floorboards. Hell, if you were the unscrupled sort, you could wedge a hitch into the ball return that replaced your opponent’s ball with an unbalanced replica. If you were that sort.

The bowling cheats called them “cracks,” and there were thousands. There was the Orange Peel, which took two guys and a plunger, and the Stamp Act, which no one thought was possible and so worked every time, and the Mangy Mutt, which Big Daddy Don Dandy hated doing because of the strain on his thighs, and Mercy’s Cap, which, was fast and reckless and depended on the weather, and Punctuated Equanimity, which required learning French. Or you could just wing an ice-cube under your opponent’s heel as he made his approach. Big Daddy Don Dandy love that one. It was honest; it was how he beat Jerry “Delicious Cantaloupe” Mutze back when he was coming up.

But now he was at Betty’s Perfect 10 and leaving the 7-10 split standing. You think knocking those pins down is tricky, try leaving them up on purpose. And then he hits a strike, which he did not mean to do, and so therefore should not have happened, and his left arm is…

Betty runs out from behind the high desk.

It had been 18 days since it rained in, so it was raining steady on the windows of the bookstore with no title when the bell went TINKadink and Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, walked in. She was wearing a new dress which was a happy shade of red ; she had bought it for the rains; she made it a point to be as bright and cheerful as the spectrum would allow when it rained. Her galoshes were yellow like a child’s, and her umbrella was sky-blue just to remind everyone what tomorrow would look like. She shook it off and left it with two others, both black, on the warped floor board where customers had been setting their wet umbrellas forever.

She had that day’s Cenotaph in her hand.

“Was this the guy who the armbands were about?”

“Seems so.”

Mr. Venable was in his customary seat, and that day’s paper was pushed to the side of the cluttered table he used as a desk. It was open to the same page that Gussy’s was. Obituaries.

“He used to come in here a lot. Randy Andy Panda Bear.”

“Big Daddy Don Dandy.”

“He was sweet.”

“A lovely and learned man. Just shouldn’t wager with him.”

“Apparently,” she said, and found a phrase in the article. “What does it mean when they say he ‘rewrote the rule book?'”

“He was a cheat.”

“At bowling?”

“Mm.”

“You can’t cheat at bowling.”

Mr. Venable took a sip of his coffee and waved towards the machine to offer Gussy a cup.

“There are moving parts and humans are involved. You can cheat at it.”

“How?”

“While wearing funny shoes, I would imagine.”

The rain slid down the windows of the bookstore with no title and puddled on the sidewalk of the Main Drag, where black umbrellas bloomed like funeral armbands in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

 

For Ricky Jay.