Hustling pool in K.C. with Ricky Ketler

We had a '51 Chevy convertible, a map to adulthood, and we had the pedal down

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Anybody who’s ever shot a game of pool knows the sound of a rack being broken when a well-aimed cue ball hits and scatters the balls all over the table.  It’s one of those “you have to be there” sounds, I guess, so stick with me, because that first shot in a game of pool was the sound of adulthood for Ricky Ketler and me when we were 15 and 16 years old and lived in Leavenworth, Kansas.  We used to roll-start Ricky’s 1951 Chevrolet convertible and drive down to Kansas City on Friday and Saturday nights to shoot pool in one of that city’s classic old-time pool halls. We had to roll-start the ’51 Chevy by releasing the parking brake and popping the clutch as it rolled down a little hill on 16th Street in Leavenworth because the car never had a working battery in the years 1962 and 1963 when we made use of it as a getaway car during the commission of various felonies which comprised our mid-teenage years.  The ’51 Chevy was our chariot that we would ride into adulthood (or so we thought), adulthood being understood by us at that moment in our lives as having enough money for gas and a few games in the poolhall down on Cherokee Street, or better still, in the smoky poolhall down in K.C. which at the top of a set of sagging wooden stairs could lift you into the unknowably cool world we had seen the year before on the big screen in “The Hustler.” 

It’s difficult to describe how profound was the effect “The Hustler” had on us.  Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson.  Say it out loud.  Listen to the way that name rolls off your tongue.  Just mouthing the words “Fast Eddie Felson” made you as cool as the character in the movie.  I mean, that insouciant, crooked little grin he’d get on his face as he approached the table and looked around at the fedora-wearing men seated on the stools, their faces lost in clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke...Elvis was something else, Little Richard was a scream, James Brown was intimidating, but Fast Eddie Felson was cool.

When Ricky and I were a year younger and still living at Fort Leavenworth and were consigned to playing our games of pool at the Rec Center or the Army Brats Club on the post, we even made lame stabs at looking like Fast Eddie, wearing fly-collar long-sleeve shirts buttoned to the neck and black “dress” trousers with knife-edges creases.  Once, after Ricky turned 14 and had his driver’s license – yes, you could drive in Kansas at 14 – we push-started his dad’s Chevy and drove downtown to the poolhall on Cherokee, and for the occasion I remember we both went into our closets and pulled out suit jackets which had heretofore been reserved for Sunday school and Christmas dinners and other formal occasions.  We put them on in Ricky’s bedroom and checked each other out.  Well, we weren’t exactly Fast Eddie cool, but we agreed we were on the way.  So down to Cherokee Street we drove, the old Chevy’s broken muffler popping as Ricky backed off the gas for a light.  We were getting there.  That popping muffler and our suit jackets and our buttoned-up shirts and our clean pressed trousers…if we weren’t exactly cool, we had the map out and we were learning the way.

Ricky and I had learned to play at the Rec Center, and we honed our game on Friday and Saturday nights at the Brat’s Club on the post, but when we drove down to Cherokee Street that first night to shoot pool in a real pool hall, now that was just plain scary.  Looking back, I don’t know how we did it.  I was 13 years old.  Ricky was 14.  Leavenworth, Kansas had made the cover of LIFE Magazine in 1959 as the American town with the highest rate of what was then known as “juvenile delinquency” in the nation.  It was well known up on the post that you didn’t take going downtown lightly.  Leavenworth had gangs.  The gang members were known to carry switchblades.  Everybody knew there were fights every day at Leavenworth Senior High School.  You heard about them the way you heard about baseball scores or new hit records.  Kids got hurt.  You didn’t mess around down in Leavenworth.

But there we were in our Sunday school suit jackets and buttoned-to-the-neck shirts driving Ricky’s ’51 Chevy downtown.  We had to drive a few blocks to find a place to park on a little hill so we could get the car started quickly when we left.  We thought we were playing it safe.  If something went down, we’d be able to get out of there more quickly pushing the car down a hill than on the flat.  We were clever little bastards, pleased with ourselves.  We were prepared.

I remember walking for the first time into the poolhall on Cherokee Street like it was yesterday.  Rows of pool tables lined the left and right sides of the room.  Fluorescent lights hung low over each table.  Older men --they must have been in their 30’s, or even 40’s! – were hanging around smoking.  We had no idea whatsoever what to do, but Ricky was a cocky sort, and he walked straight up to a counter in the front and asked how much for a game.  A dime a rack.  Take your pick of tables.  Ricky pulled out a quarter, and I pulled out a quarter and we put them down.  We were good for five games.

We walked through the poolhall to a free table in the back and chose a couple of cues from a rack on the wall.  The balls were already racked.  Ricky broke.  We played a game of 8-ball, then another, then another. There was a wire strung from a couple of ceiling beams alongside the table with round, wooden discs you slid from each end to keep score in straight pool.  We couldn’t resist.  It was my turn to break.  I shot the cue ball into the rack with my stick.  It was a great break, the cue ball taking a little hop as it slammed into the rack.  One of the object balls actually went in on the break! 

Ricky and I shot two games of straight pool, went back to the front counter and put down another couple of quarters, and shot five more.  I can’t recall who won.  Probably Ricky.  He was better than me…not by much…but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.  Throughout our Cherokee Street adventure, Ricky and I had been looking warily at each other across the table.  Was something going to happen?  Was some guy going to challenge us for a game?  If he did, what would we do?  You could have cut the tension between us with a proverbial knife if you could have found the tension in the cumulus clouds of smoke that hung over the table.

But nothing happened.  We shot a dollar’s worth of pool and walked out into the night.  We walked the few blocks to the car, gave it a push down the hill, and drove off.  Ricky and Lucian – 1.  Leavenworth – 0.

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to say a few words about Ricky Ketler.  He was my best friend.  We had gone to junior high school together on the post – get this – at George S. Patton Jr. Junior High School.  I think Ricky was already in high school the night we first went downtown to play at the poolhall, and I was in 9th grade, back on the post.  Ricky was one of those kids who had figured out a way to be apart from the crowd in junior high, but just enough in it to enjoy a kind of mysterious, free life.  He would be my role model when I went to high school the following year.  Ricky’s girlfriend was a cheerleader at Immaculata, the Catholic high school in town.  She was a townie, so when I got to be a sophomore, I got a townie for a girlfriend, too.  Her name was Fern, and she lived in a shotgun house in the slum over near the river.  Her father was doing time for fraud at Leavenworth Federal Pen, and her mother took in laundry and ironing and cleaned houses.  She was so stunningly beautiful, my mother was afraid I’d elope with her before my father got back from Korea. 

For Army brats, having a townie girlfriend was cool.  The girls on post we had gone to junior high with had never even met our girlfriends, adding to our mystery.  Ricky and I stopped going to the teen club on the post, the Army Brats Club, and started hanging out at Teen Town, a run-down joint in downtown Leavenworth with a Coke machine and a listing, cigarette burned pool table.  There was a dance floor of cracked linoleum next to the jukebox.  The place was such a dump, it should have been condemned. The kids from the post didn’t dare go there. It was where we met our girlfriends from town, thus it was cool.

Ricky was – and I say was, because he’s gone now, killed in a car accident in 1963 on the Autobahn when his father was assigned to Germany the following year – anyway, Ricky was what you’d today call a piece of work, even at age 14 and 15.  He was good looking on a level that should have been illegal.  I mean, he was beautiful, with dark hair he kept in a kind of modified flat-top, and a sharp nose and wide shoulders and arms that seemed to ripple with muscle.  He got his whole strong-arms thing from his father, who was the All-Army shooting champion for the .45 Caliber service pistol.  Ricky’s father’s arms were so strong that when we were in 7th and 8th grades, he would extend his right arm straight out from his body, and we would hang from it and do a pull-up.  Ricky’s arms were like that, smaller of course, but they made him look like a guy you didn’t mess with.  He had the look of a tough guy, and it was a good thing, too, because he had a short temper. The thing about Ricky was that he had a reputation as a nice, easy going guy until you pushed him.  Then look out.

Having Ricky for a best friend was what you would call a two-edged sword.  In a town where if you were a teenage boy, you had to know how to fight, Ricky knew how to fight, and for that reason, I felt safe around him.  But if he got into a fight and you were there, you were automatically in the fight with him, so being around Ricky definitely had a dangerous side, too.

That’s not to say he went around looking to pick a fight.  He didn’t.  Mostly, we hung out after school at a drug store on the east side that had one of the best pinball machines in town, or at the Leavenworth bowling alley, which featured the other best pinball machine in town.  When we weren’t playing pinball or pool, we would cruise down to a new drive-in burger joint on the southside called Smaks, where we could put the top down on the ’51 Chevy and eat fries and show off our girlfriends.  All of this at age 14 and 15, you understand.  On the cusp of adulthood, as it were.

Somebody at the poolhall in town told us about a poolhall down in Kansas City that was known as the best place to shoot pool between St. Louis and Denver.  It was frequented by pool hustlers and was said to be visited regularly by the kind of pool hustler who traveled “the circuit,” shooting often enough and well enough to make a living at it.

Naturally, Ricky and I had to try it out.  So in ’62, when I was a sophomore and Ricky was a junior – a junior! – we decided to drive down and play a few games.  We were living in town by then, both of us on 16th Street.  My father was on a “hardship tour” in Korea, so we had to move the family downtown, and Ricky’s father, who was a Major, didn’t qualify for housing large enough to hold a family with five boys, so they moved off-post into a cheap house they found just down the street from our cheap house.

It was a Saturday night in early fall.  We pushed the Chevy down the hill on 16th Street, got it fired up and popping, and drove the 25 miles south to the metropolis of Kansas City.  The city, which was technically in Missouri, or most of it anyway, had a thriving jazz scene back then, and I can’t recall the name of the street, but there was a brightly-lit boulevard that had several jazz clubs and other bars right in downtown.  The pool hall we had been told about was off that boulevard on a side street, and it was on the second floor. You entered a door on the street and walked straight up a set of creaking wooden stairs and emerged toward the middle of the room, almost exactly like the poolhall in “The Hustler.” 

Are you getting the picture here?  There we are, Ricky Ketler and yours truly, in our Sunday suit jackets and buttoned-up white shirts and knife-edge trousers and black leather shoes, standing at the counter and putting down our quarters to play pool.  “Fifty cents a game, boys,” the grizzled old guy said through a fog of sour cigar smoke.  Wow.  Between us, I think we had a dollar each, which was a lot of money.  A dollar would get you five pinball games, a coke, a burger and fries at Smaks, with enough left over to play four games of pool.  Fifty cents.  Four games.  We put down a dollar each and the man pointed us to an empty table at the end of the room.

Same deal as the hall on Cherokee, with the low-hanging lights and the smoke and the wire of wooden discs to keep score.  But down in K.C. the guys on the stools along the walls were wearing fedoras and snap-brim hats and most of them were in suits and ties.  There was one guy a few tables down wearing a sharkskin suit with narrow lapels and a snap-tab shirt and he had a stick-pin in his tie, so it made a little bulge out from his shirt.  There was a crowd around his table, and we could see money changing hands, paper money.  He was a hustler.

Ricky and I drew out our four games as long as we could.  I don’t think either of us had ever taken so much time between shots.  We knew we were in someplace special, witness to the  seemingly ancient ritual of gambling at pool.  We could hear a gasp as someone made a great shot.  A cheer went up, followed by applause.  Bills were slammed on the table.  Someone stalked to the entrance and disappeared down the stairs.

Ricky and I finished our last game and slowly made our way past the other tables, too intimidated to pause to watch.  The soft whoosh of a ball crossing the felt on the table, the crack of a hard shot, the thunk of a ball hitting a leather pocket…both of us could still hear the sounds of the K.C. poolhall as we drove back to Leavenworth that night.  To say it was magical is to miss the point.  We had now seen adulthood.  We knew the way.

But back in Leavenworth, we were still a couple of teenage punks, and that world waited for us with all of its dark corners and dangers you couldn’t see coming.  Ricky talked me into skipping our last classes one day, so we could take the Chevy and get downtown early enough to play a new pinball machine we had heard about at the bowling alley.  Sure enough, we made it down there before any of the other kids were out of school and put our change on the glass top of the machine and started to play.  It was a good one.  We were glad we had skipped out. 

Ricky was playing the machine and had won several free games, which appeared in a little counter showing the number on the display above the glass surface of the machine.  The way the rules worked was, if you wanted to play a game, you walked up to the machine and put your nickel on the glass and waited until the player had either finished his current game or played out the wins he had accrued.  That’s where Ricky was when a gang of kids walked in from the street straight up to where we were playing the machine.  The lead kid was known to us, a drop-out who had been to Boys Industrial School, the prison for minors over in Topeka.  He had done a couple of stretches and was old enough to be a senior in high school, but he was on parole, and had been put in junior high as a 9th grader.  He was older than both of us, and bigger.  So were most of the other three or four kids. 

“That’s my machine.  Get off,” he barked at Ricky, who was busy thwacking the ball with the paddles of the machine.  I could see he was well on his way to another win.  He already had three free games on the counter.  “You can play when I’m finished playing the games I won,” Ricky said without looking up. The bigger kid pushed Ricky away from the front of the machine.  “Get the fuck out of here,” he said. 

That was all it took.  Ricky came around with a right hook and caught him on the jaw, stunning him.  He grabbed the kid’s jacket and dragged him backward out the glass doors of the bowling alley.  In the literal blink of an eye, Ricky had him on the sidewalk, pounding his face and head.  I came alive and ran after him.  The other kids were right behind us.  I threw a block on one of them, knocking him into another kid, and they went down.  Ricky was still pounding on the big kid.  The others were gaining their feet and coming at us.  I yelled to Ricky, “We’ve got to get out of here!”         

Ricky pushed the kid into the gutter and we started running.  The whole gang of them were chasing us at first, but the further we ran, the more of them dropped out.  We went around a corner and ran a block and rounded another corner and turned into an alley.  We stopped, leaning over with our hands on our knees, catching our breaths.  We didn’t smoke, and we knew that most of the punks in town smoked, and we had outrun them.

Suddenly two of them came around the corner of a building into the alley.  One of them was the big kid Ricky had badly beaten.  His lip was bleeding and blood ran down his face from a cut over his eye.  Ricky looked over at me.  “I’ll take asshole there,” he said, pointing to the big guy.  “You take his brother.”

They were brothers, part of a gang their oldest brother usually ran, but he was doing time in the minimum security prison down in Lansing.  They were not the kinds of guys you wanted to have trouble with, but there we were.  Ricky had already beaten one of them practically senseless.  It seemed like we didn’t have a choice.  It was either fight, or get beaten.

The big one took a couple of steps forward and Ricky hit him a straight shot in the nose, stunning him.  His nose spewed blood.  Ricky grabbed the kid’s arm and twisted it around behind his back and held him in a hammer-lock.  “You give up?” Rickey growled at him.  “Say it.”

“Fuck you.  You’re dead,” the kid said.

I heard a crack.  Ricky broke his arm.  The kid was screaming now, crying out in pain.  The other kid just stood there in shock, staring. 

“Let’s go,” Ricky said.  We walked out of the alley and looked around, trying to remember where we had left the Chevy.  We walked a few blocks, found it, pushed it down the hill, and drove away.

A few days later, Ricky was gone, off to Germany with his family.  I got a letter from him informing me that the crop of girls over there was primo.  You could buy beer in the German towns without an ID, and it was cheap, 15 cents.  He was settling in.  Life was good.

Back in Leavenworth, one of the guys in my ROTC squad pulled me aside and told me I shouldn’t show my face downtown for a while.  The older brother in the gang had been released from Lansing and was back in town.  If they found me walking around, they’d beat me.  I drove the family Volkswagen back and forth to school and stayed away from Teen Town. Without Ricky to play pool with, I didn’t go near the poolhall on Cherokee.

Then one day when I got home from school, my mother told me Ricky had been killed in an accident on the Autobahn. There were five boys in the car.  All of them died. 

My best friend was dead.  I was 16.  I didn’t need the map anymore.  I had found adulthood.  I was there.