THE TIME WE WALKED ONE MILE TO SEE A G.O.A.T.

About 30 years ago Dahna and I turned on the old Fisher TV and settled in to watch David Mamet’s “House of Games.” According to the blurb in the Ft. Worth Star Telegram’s TV guide it looked quirky enough for us so we gave it a shot. We like anything from old Bogart, Garfield and Davis/Crawford noirs to modern Kidman, Bullock and Saoirse Ronan chick flicks. Lots of stuff in between like gangsters (“Peaky Blinders”!), Leone westerns, cartoon villainy like “Sin City”, dark satire (“Slaugherhouse Five”) and just plain funny stuff like “Young Frankenstein” and “O’ Brother Where Art Thou”, thrillers (“Blood Simple”), sci-fi. And, if it’s bizarre or controversial, we’re usually in. “Videodrome”, “District 9”? You bet. 

Great movies are born in every decade like “ Top Hat”, “Blue Velvet”, or the Korean film “Poetry.” And, we’ve become quite fluent in subtitles which has supercharged our global cinema scope, so to speak. Also helpful, subtitles have crisply autotuned today’s mumbling actors except in extreme cases. Some garblings are indecipherable even to AI and are often noted as “gibberish” in the text. I remember Bogart saying Brando would be a great actor if he took the marbles out of his mouth.

Most couples I know have differences in taste not just with us but within their own private domains. In my case with Dahna that’s only partially true because I generally like anything she does. Or, I at least see the point in the thing because she has good taste as far as I know. My own tastes range far beyond good in her mind, not just the particulars but in entire realms. For instance, she won’t join me in any movie made before 1940. It’s mostly a bright red line. Even Cagney! But like any good spouse, she grudgingly makes exceptions. Walter Huston’s “Dodsworth” for example or anything based on Maugham, especially if Herbert Marshall’s in it.

She’s a little stricter when it comes to John Wayne. Not a fan. Again, there are exceptions. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” for instance. She loves it when Wayne kicks Strother Martin in the face. That happens when Strother slavishly bends over to pick up Jimmy Stewart’s steak that Lee Marvin’s Valance just threw on the floor. Martin says, “I’ll get it Liberty.” and Wayne kicks the shit out of him while barely moving. 

It’s one of Dahna’s favorite movie bits. Mine too. I love most John Wayne movies even though he skated on WWII. Bone spurs was it? Can’t remember. Anyway, I’d watch “The Searchers” or “Donovan’s Reef” and she’d walk through swaggering like Duke and rolling her eyes at the campy fight scenes. Pretty cute.

But bloody, brutal non-campy violence? Oh, hell yes! Let the faux blood splatter high. Watching a naked Viggo Mortensen whale on a couple of Russian baddies in a sauna? Pure joy lights up her face in a rapture. But funny violence? Slapstick? Absolutely not and no exceptions. A classic double eye poke like with The Three Stooges? A triple face slap? Don’t show it to Dahna because she’ll sic the IRS on you as soon as she can find her phone. It’s distastefully lowbrow, right? Indecent even. I get it, but … c’mon … the Liberty Valence thing is funny violence too, and so is that scene where Mongo decks the horse in “Blazing Saddles.” I wasn’t the only person laughing at that, or the loudest. I’m not proud of it though and I blame Mel Brooks, the bastard.

Well, we really enjoyed “House of Games.” It’s a good example of the con-within-a-con flick. The thing that still sticks out after all those years is one of the actors, a guy I’d never seen before then. He had the most hangdog, baggy-eyed non-actor look I’d ever seen. He looked like he’d been dragged to the movie set from a Queens drug store late at night while looking for a stronger laxative. But this guy wasn’t full of it. He was Ricky Jay, the G.O.A.T. of magic and sleight of hand and a friend of Mamet’s.

He died a fews years back and that’s when I looked him up. He was the greatest of all time. I’d seen him not long before he died, character acting in other movies and on YouTube videos performing his impossible card tricks and sleights of hand. These tricks so confound the rational mind that magic seems the only logical explanation, even when you know better like I’m supposed to. The pros were unsettled by Ricky Jay’s mystical touch too. 

He could throw a playing card a long distance and embed it deep into the thick rind of a watermelon. A  mere mortal wouldn’t even be able to hit the damn thing much less stick a card deep into its flesh. An interviewer once bought him lunch and handed Jay his credit card before paying up. He asked him if he could kill a person by throwing it. Jay carefully examined the edge of the card and finally said that yes, he thought he could and gently handed the card back.

Another interviewer and Jay sat down across each other for lunch in a sun-filled cafe and both perused the large menus from the waiter before ordering. When Jay lifted his menu his companion was flabbergasted to find a large, one cubic foot block of ice sitting on the table before her. No wet spot anywhere on the floor, no rational explanation how it got there. Nothing. Just a huge block of ice melting in the sun streaming through the plate glass windows. It wasn’t any kind of satanic conjuring, just a master at work gifting the lucky woman one of the most dazzling moments of her life. 

It’s easy to imagine that briefest of  moments when time seemed to stop and magic itself table danced for her. 

He compiled the most thorough historical archive of magicians and oddball characters and carefully detailed their outlandish accomplishments in several books. His obituaries were found in the best national rags and they all suitably honored the great man. My curiosity piqued, I started clicking on the links I found about him. You can too if you’d like to take an amazing and fun joyride with Ricky Jay, G.O.A.T. of magic. The most expert man ever with a deck of cards, his “Fifty Two Assistants”, or any number of other simple objects he casually brought alive with his sorcerer’s touch. Seriously, read about him and check out the videos. 

Along with Ricky there are suddenly G.O.A.T.s all over the place. Simone Biles with her gravity-defying gyrosaults? Sure. Or Tom Brady with his 7 Super Bowl rings? Yep. Babe Ruth or the recently departed Willie Mays? Looks like it might be Shohei Ohtani, the young Dodger superman. Who knows? The beautiful powerhouse, Serena Williams? She’s got my vote and I know squat about tennis. Never even figured out the scoring. Ali? Is that really in question? Anyhow, this particular accolade seems to apply mostly to athletes or various guitarists or game players of some sort. Pinball wizards for example. 

You might say that Einstein is the G.O.A.T. of theoretical physics and most hotshot nerds would reluctantly agree if forced to think of him that way. Or that Shakespeare is the one for literature, at least for us English-only-speaking provincials. Really though, top line prodigious thinking might win you the superior Nobel Prize but probably not a G.O.A.T. laurel. It’s just not prestigious enough somehow for people like Albert and Will. And, there are no G.O.A.T. artists are there? No. Art’s too big for it. A lot of people could be described by this paradoxical acronym though, and that’s a nice thing for us peasants with a slight touch of greatness.  No doubt even you could be a recipient of the moniker if you tighten up the parameters a little.

You might have been the Hopscotch G.O.A.T. of Balsam Street in Boulder at one time until some smooth new girl skipped off with your title. My cousin Denny was a marbles G.O.A.T. of North Shore Drive, Jacksonville and had a small barrel full of cat eyes and steelies he won from the hapless wannabes. I think he worried I might steal some of them, but I just liked to run my hands through them and that barrel was the only place I had access to a thing like that. It could make you feel rich if they were yours, and he felt it.

I hate to brag, but even I was a G.O.A.T. at one time. It’s hard to believe now, even for me, but I once set the Houston city record in the high jump for a 14 year old. We used the relatively new and improved eastern roll technique which supplanted the old western roll. My little record probably didn’t last long because I lacked the imagination to invent the vastly superior Fosbury Flop. When Dick Fosbury revolutionized the high jump with his backward flop, I was off patrolling jungle trails and rice paddies in Vietnam. I was surprised to find I could still jump pretty damn high.

I hadn’t thought much either way about going to Vietnam, but Uncle Sam thought it was a great idea. In the spring of ’65 LBJ committed full combat units there for the first time. It turned out that Charlie was a damn good soldier, very slick, and Lyndon soon thought he needed more and more troops to deal with him. Escalation big time. So, in the late Fall of ’66, my Sophomore year in college, I go to my little P.O. Box #316 and find an official government note…

It said that my II-S student deferment had been changed to 1-A, instantly rendering my pink, All American ass into prime U.S. built cannon fodder. In those days the draft was jerking 1-A guys out of class right and left, friends of mine, some of them. Seeing the writing on the wall, I joined the Marines to beat the draft and get out of the Army and yeah, I know. Since I certainly knew where I was headed, I figured I’d maximize not getting killed by getting the best training available. Iron clad logic and not all that bad from a callow kid new to logic of any kind.

I discovered the tiny flaw in my thinking when in boot camp the bayonet instructor told us to look left, then right. He said with a growl, “In 6 months one of you is going to be dead, so it might be smart for you fuckin’ shitheads to pay attention.” It turns our that not getting killed is not the highest priority of the Marine grunt. The tough training does give you an edge though.

I know you’ve heard that war is mostly boredom punctuated by brief moments of extreme violence or something like that. That’s true. There’s nothing like the racket of explosions and gunfire in your personal vicinity to put you deep into the moment. No wondering about this or that, no doubts, no fear, just focusing on nailing the dude that’s trying to get you first. That’s it. But in between the ambushes and firefights you do muse about things. Things like back home.

Back in the world. 

The contrast of my life in college a few months earlier was too vivid not to think and wonder about. How did I go from tooling around campus in my old topdown MG and going to interesting classes taught by smart people with PhDs to walking point and trying hard to avoid stepping on a mine? Think of the psychological distance between shooting the youthfully high-minded bullshit in your dorm room, later an apartment, with your pals to that of desperately clearing your jammed rifle to shoot back at Charlie from a muddy rice paddy dike. 

I often thought of how I drove home from school on weekends to see my pretty high school girlfriend, Sally. She was easy to remember after salting down a leech stuck to my face or sitting still all night in an ambush without sleep. How did it change so fast? Simple. Pool hustling. Instead of going to class in my Sophomore year, my roommate Woody and I’d go down to Tarleton’s Student Center basement and hustle pool. 

We were pretty good, not G.O.A.T.s by any means, but good enough to be in the money more often than not. We’d take our winnings down to Jake and Dorothy’s and have one of their thin, flat steaks with waffle fries and A1 sauce. Other days it was peanut butter and scraping up enough change to get back in the game, buy gas and run for beer.

In those days of huge troop call ups, your GPA was directly tied to your draft status. My GPA followed me down the basement steps where those big beautiful Brunswick pool tables beckoned like the Sirens of Odysseus. Maybe if someone had chained me to my desk, but alas. Back then if your school bounced you out because of your grades, Uncle Sam had the perfect landing spot for you. We called it an LZ in the Marines. Landing Zone, and I hit a few of those in a hard run. Then, a couple of years after getting discharged from the Philadelphia Naval Hospital I first heard Rod Stewart’s great song, “Maggie May.”

You know the lyric where poor Rod is trying to leave Maggie and considers whether to go back to the drudgery of school or “… steal my daddy’s cue and make a living out of playing pool.” My own dad used to remind me that, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.” Rod chose neither and joined a rock and roll band and I’m glad he did. I put my money down on the pool table. That was my choice. Don’t get me wrong. Nobody could be prouder to be a U.S. Marine than I am, and no one is luckier to live in this country than me. Always worth fighting for, however you do it, and now is a fine time I might add.

I guess it was about 1960 or so and I was 12 or 13 when I answered the door. There stood my friend Greg from down the block. He was a year older than me, and we’d been glued together at the hip since we were 6 and 7. He wasn’t an athlete of any sort because he got a dose of polio before I knew him. But he moved smoothly and had a cool kind of control over himself; that and a first rate sense of humor that still makes me smile when I think of it. He said, “Hey, Willie Mosconi’s shooting pool down on Long Drive. Wanna go?” 

I think one of Greg’s older brothers must have told him about this, but we both knew who Mosconi was. We didn’t call him the G.O.A.T. because America wasn’t abbreviated like that yet, but that’s what he was. We’d been shooting pool regularly for the last several years at the east end’s YMCA and got pretty good pretty quick like kids do. We were too young but figured we could slip into the pool hall and not get kicked out if we just kept our mouths shut. We had plenty of practice sneaking into the Santa Rosa Theater. The pool hall was about a mile away, and it was getting dark.

We walked the two and a half blocks west down Buena Vista past Reveille to Telephone Road. We crossed over to the Black Cat Lounge’s parking lot and walked north past the old cars and rank trash barrels smelling of cigarette butts and stale beer. The Black Cat was just one of several disreputable beer joints known for the afternoon trysts bored housewives arranged with the local mugs they’d pick up. The Four Palms just north was the most infamous, but there were others scattered up and down Telephone. Steve Earle wrote a good song about that old road.

We got up to where Park Place turns into Long Drive and walked a couple of blocks west again to the pool hall set back a little. We went up to the glass door and, with a ‘what-the-hell’ attitude, slipped inside. Less than a dozen men were standing around a table toward the back. We sauntered up without incident, quiet in our dirty Keds. Leaning down to shoot and talking to the small crowd was the great Mosconi himself. The only guy that could beat Minnesota Fats and any other stick in the whole wide world who dared take him on. Here in this dive. Willie Mosconi, right here in the flesh!

He was “playing” against a local shooter who was looking on with the rest of us. This guy was a big red haired fellow and he dwarfed Mosconi. I was surprised to literally be rubbing elbows with the world’s best pool player and that so few turned out to see him. He was traveling the country at the time putting on exhibitions trying to popularize the sport and wean it away from its grimy reputation. But, griminess was a lot of the attraction for me and Greg and provided the ambient pathos for the “The Hustler.” That movie came out a little later and helped put Paul Newman on the map. Willie was the technical advisor on set and taught Newman how to shoot.

Anyway, on this particular night Mosconi was playing Straight Pool, moving around the table explaining each lie and going over several alternative shots best able to gain advantage down the line. Then he’d bend to take the shot, inevitably sinking the ball in the pocket he called out. Greg and I referred to this game as Call Shot and played to 125. When we first walked in Willie had already sunk around 25 balls according to the abacus strung from the ceiling. He sank another 40 or so consecutively while we watched. The whole time he gave us a masters class in this addictive game of concentration and subtle touch, explaining his every move in advance. Everyone was rapt.

I know he could have run the game out without giving Red a single shot. But he was a gentleman, so he scratched in order to let the guy play a little too. Then he stood back with us while Red looked the table over, chalked his cue and carefully lined up his first shot. What you’re looking for is a smooth rhythmic stroke followed by a soft ‘puh’ when the tip of the cue strikes the cueball. What you’re not looking for is what Red got when he took his first shot that night.

Instead of the sweet ‘puh’, he got the tinny, soul-crushing, ‘clink’ of the miscue. The white ball lifted off the green felt and took flight in a high arc sailing over the rail. Several guys quickly stepped out of its way, and the quiet shock of the catastrophe amplified the loud ‘clacks’ as the ball bounced hard on the concrete floor. Every man there was stunned into silence, but not me. No sir, not me.

I tried, really tried, to stifle a rising belly laugh with a little fake cough, but then I snot-snorted when the ball hit the wall with a thud. It was still rolling away when I felt Greg’s hand tighten around the back of my neck, turning me forcefully toward the door. Polio or no, that kid could move when he had to and he got me through that door and outside fast. I really let it go then becoming a blubbering mess, body-heaving in near terminal preteen mirth. 

I was laughing so hard I had to sit down with my back against the brick wall of the entrance. Greg crossed his arms and leaned against it with one foot propped up in the classic cowboy pose, minus the hat and cigarette. When the paroxysm in my chest finally began to subside, and I was still wiping my eyes and nose with my soggy sleeves, he said, “You finished? We better git before somebody comes out.” I was starting to realize how bad that could be.

I got my feet under me to stand up and looked at Greg, but he stared straight ahead and started walking into the dark toward the street. He was just enough older than me, and I tagged along huffing like a little freight train until it stopped.