I get this a lot. Some guy I knew centuries ago sees me playing forty-eighty hold’em and says to me, “what are you doing here?” I sigh.
Stuff like this has gone on most of my life. When you’re a hustler, you end up losing most of the time for the big win at the end. You play the fool. You can never show how good you are. There’s no applause here. You do your job and end up counting money in some hotel room, splitting it with your backers if you have any. Then, you wait for the girls, or the drugs, or the liquor to kick in. Most of the time I would watch TV thinking about all the mistakes I had made. There were always mistakes.
There were dreams too. Hustlers have their personal very unconventional nirvana. Mostly they want to make enough to never have to do it again. Mostly they hate the game they played. Like me. I hated that fact that I could never shine. Never show my stuff.
Heres how it goes. You play bad. Lesson number one. Your backer, who is a former hustler or money guy who likes action shows you. He picks up a few dollars and says this is what you get if you always play good; then he takes out the c-notes wrapped in a rubber band and says this is what you get if you play bad right up until the end. Okay chief. You get the message.
The hustlers are the little wizards of the world. They have the gift. They do something in one particular thing better that almost anyone else and the money rolls in. Still it is never enough. It is too easy. That is the trap.
Of course, the little wizards almost always fail in the end. Their window of opportunity is narrow and short. They never see until its way too late. It’s a peculiar sadness I’ve witnessed many times. The little wizards are in their own universe and this universe is alien and foreign to them and equally scared of …
