The Hustler

1

Henry, black and stooped, unlocked the door with a key on a large metal ring. He had just come up in the elevator. It was nine o’clock in the morning. The door was a massive thing, a great ornate slab of oak, stained once to look like mahogany, ebony now from sixty years of smoke and dirt. He pushed the door open, shoved the door stop in place with his lame foot, and limped in.

There was no need to turn the lights on, for in the morning the three huge windows along the side wall faced the rising sun. Outside of them was much daylight, much of downtown Chicago. Henry pulled the cord that parted the heavy draperies and these gathered in grimy elegance to the edges of the windows. Outside was a panorama of gray buildings; between them, patches of a virginal blue sky. Then he opened the windows, a few inches from the bottom. Air puffed abruptly and small eddies of dust and the aftermaths of four-hour-old cigarette smoke whirled and then began to dissipate. Always by afternoon the draperies would be drawn tight, the windows shut; only in the morning was the tobaccoed air exchanged for fresh.

A poolroom in the morning is a strange place. It has stages; a daily metamorphosis, a shedding of patterned skins. Now, at 9 A.M., it could have been a large church, still, sun coming through stained windows, wrapped into itself, the great tables’ timeless and massive mahogany, their green cloths discreetly hidden by gray oilcloth covers. The fat brass spittoons were lined along both walls between the tall chairs with seats of honest and enduring leather, rump-polished to an antique gloss, and, above all, the high, arched ceiling with its four great chandeliers and its many-paned skylight—for this was the top floor of an ancient and venerable building which, squat and ugly, sat in eight-story insignificance in downtown Chicago. The huge room, with the viewers’ chairs, high-backed, grouped reverently around each of the twenty-two tables, could have been a sanctuary, a shabby cathedral.

But later, when the rack boys and the cashier came in, when the overhead fans were turned on and when Gordon, the manager, would play music on his radio, then the room would adopt the quality that is peculiar to the daytime life of those places which are only genuinely alive at night—the mid-morning quality of night clubs, of bars, and of poolrooms everywhere—the big, nearly empty room echoing the shuffling of a few feet, the occasional clinking of glass or of metal, the sounds of brooms, of wet rags, of pieces of furniture being moved around, and the half-real music that comes from radios. And, above all, the sense of the place’s not yet being alive, yet having now within it the first beginnings of the evening resurrection.

And then, in the afternoon, when the players began to come in in earnest, and the tobacco smoke and the sounds of hard, glossy balls hitting one another and the squeaking sound of chalk squares pressed against hard leather cue tips would begin, then would start the final stage of the metamorphosis ascending to the full only when, late at night, the casual players and the drunks would all be gone, leaving only the intent men and the furtive, who watched and bet, while certain others—a small, assorted coterie of men, both drably dressed, who all knew one another but seldom spoke—played quiet games of intense and brilliant pool on the tables in the back of the room. At such times this poolroom, Bennington’s, would be alive in a distinct way.

Henry took a broad broom from a closet near the door and began, limping, to sweep the floor. Before he had finished, the cashier came in, turned on his little plastic radio, and began counting out money into the cash register. The bell on the register rang out very loudly when he punched the key that opened it. A voice on the radio wished everyone a good morning.

Henry finished the floor, put the broom away, and began taking the covers from the tables, exposing the bright green baize, now dirty with streaks of blue chalk and, on tables where the salesmen and office clerks had played the night before, smeared with white talcum powder. After folding the cover from each table and placing it on a shelf in the closet, he took a brush and rubbed the wooden rails with it until they glowed with a warm brown. Then he brushed the cloth until the chalk and powder marks and dirt were gone and the green was bright.