Bowling, Gambling and Clanton, Alabama

“The capacity to enjoy: so few people have it. Most citizens live lives of such routine and drudgery and are so concerned about security that they cannot imagine how delicious uncertainty is. A gambler may have as many periods of pain and frustration as he does exhilaration, but at least he knows he’s alive.”   

— Andrew Beyer

 

August 2018

 I waved a Steno notebook about 10 feet from my father’s face.

“You recognize this?” I asked.

Yellowed and not much younger than me, the notebook told countless tales—some good, some bad and some worthy of enshrinement in the WTF Hall of Fame—about my dad, Michael E. Allsup.

“Lemme see,” he said, reaching out with a skinny right arm.

Christ, he looked old. His skin looked whiter. The grays on his chin wispier. The room wasn’t helping and neither was the gown. It was as if the quarters and a sheet of raggedy cloth had teamed up and hustled him out of 10 pounds. Problem was, he couldn’t spare two. No matter how creative your calculus, it all added up to nothing but bad news.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s one of my betting books. Baseball, poker, you know.”

I did know, of course. I’d dug it out of a creaky drawer the night before. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d laid eyes on the thing, but I knew it well. I knew it because I’d flipped its pages 1000 times. And I knew it because similar books litter the corners and shelves of my bedroom as I type this sentence. They’re detailed records of our biggest wins and our baddest beats. They’re documented proof of how smart we could be and how compulsive we always were.

Yet despite the twists, turns, laughs and tears, a single, solitary theme came screaming off the page. The gambler's endless, often soul-crushing grind. Anyone who’s gambled for keeps will tell you: in the steep, action-rich hills of risky propositions, the quest for the best of it never rests. And the lonesome, blood-and-guts truth was written all over that notebook. 

It’s all poker results and math problems and Michigan plus three. It’s horse racing from Arlington Park and it’s the Braves visiting Pittsburgh, Perez versus Rhoden, the Bucs listed as 5:7 favorites. It's indeed chapter after chapter—a litany of baseball, football and basketball teams, both college and professional, alongside countless strings of numbers—of long-forgotten losses and scores he'd never forget.

My old man was never mistaken for Amarillo Slim but no matter. This wasn’t some weak-ass script riding coach on the Shitpile Express. This thing had meat. A fun, meandering plot, a dynamite cast, and, best of all, a house of games David Mamet would kill for.

“I know Rick and Greg and Val,” I said, referring to a few of the book's many names. “But who’s Gus?”

“Herderhorst,” he replied. "Gus Herderhorst."

“He play poker?”

“Nah.”

“Where’d you know him from then?”

“I don’t know. Just a guy I knew, I guess. Gambler, you know.”

I nodded my head. 

“He didn’t play poker," my dad added. "But that fucker would bet anything. He’d bet the sunrise, the sunset and everything in between.”

We both laughed.

“Now what about Red?” I said. “Is that Red Callaway? From bowling?”

“Right.”

“Wasn’t that the guy you’d ride with to the bowling alley? When you’d stand me up in the front seat to watch for cops?”

Mike—that’s what I always called him—laughed a real laugh. And just that easy, the ledger had booked its first winner since 1982.

“Shit,” he said. “They’d gimme the gas chamber today.’

He laughed again.

“You couldn’t have been older than 3. Jesus Christ, your eyes. I mean, son of a bitch, your eyes. Ted Williams would’ve killed for your eyes. Outta nowhere, you’d point and say, ‘Peace, Da. Peace, Da.’ I swear you could spot a cop two miles before the motherfucker was in sight. But then, sure enough, there he’d be. Goddamn we used to make good time.”

Okay, so maybe I hadn’t always called him by his first name. More importantly, the notebook had done precisely what I’d designed it to do: get him thinking and talking about something other than how he felt. Anything but what tomorrow held.

“Speaking of bowling,” I said. “Remember that good score you made down in Alabama? Dothan was it?”

“No,” he said. “I mean, yeah, I do. But not Dothan. It wasn’t Dothan.”

He paused for a few moments.

“Lemme see now. I think it was halfway between—I’m thinking it was halfway between Montgomery and … Something. But I'll be damned if I know what it was. What was the name? Fuck. I don’t know. I can’t remem—Clanton. Goddammit, that’s it. Clanton, Alabama.”

“Okay,” I said. “Clanton. Not sure where I got Dothan. Like ’65, ’66?”

“Yeah, somewhere in there.”

“You beat the guy outta good money, right?”

“Yeah. Shit. Real good for them days. Four, five hundred, I think. Clay Carroll. Pitched for the Reds. He owned the house, too.”

Mike was in his mid-20s then and gambling every day. That day, as he had before and would again, he bet on his ability to accurately roll a bowling ball. On a “tour” of the Southeast—just him and his ball—he spotted a prospect soon after arriving in Clanton proper. The shitty little 10-laner would do just fine for a weeknight. Sure, the joint was near empty, but that’s part of the deal. “Long hours spent waiting for action” was right there in the job description. So, he picked a lane, laced up his shoes and got down to business.

He rolled several warm-up frames at one end, but something was off. It was just a tick, but off all the same. So, he took a break and wandered down to the other end to watch the guy connecting on one bomb after another. After dissecting the man’s path and release, Mike returned to his lane and got back to work. Soon enough, there it was. He found his groove. Most importantly, he knew it was time to gamble.

No problem—the big-league pitcher came to him.

“Looks like you got it figured out now, huh?”

“Might be, yeah.”

“Okay,” Carroll said. “Whaddya wanna do?”

Mike threw a 780-series to get the money. And believe it or not, he needed damn near every pin. Somehow still live in the 10^th frame of the third and final game, Carroll fell just short of the action freak from East St. Louis, Illinois.

Mike—my dad—pocketed the money, walked to the parking lot and hit the road.

That was on a Thursday. That day in the hospital room with my dad. Nine days later, he was gone. Bowling and gambling and Clanton, Alabama would be the last meaningful conversation we ever had. It was a good one.

P. S. Clay Carroll is credited with having pitched 15 seasons in the big leagues; most with the Cincinnati Reds.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/carrocl02.shtml