The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories Read online

  But $500 is a far cry from the sums his barroom game used to earn him. In 1962, for instance, when he beat Bob Miles out of $22,000 at the Park Inn Diner in Buena Vista, Calif. That was the match that notified the shuffleboard world that Texas Billy Mays was a force to be feared. Five years later, Billy told Sports Illustrated about it:

  “We played for 30 hours,” Billy says. ‘“Let’s play for $100,’ Bob Miles said. ‘Let’s play for $200,’ I said. ‘Make it $300,’ he said. ‘Make it $400,’ I said. There were 120 people in there betting, and only three were betting on me. I won 18 in a row—19 out of 21. He went busted five times and had to go get money. While he was gone, I played $500 freeze-out with Mexican Tommy—he’s an interior decorator who has the most beautiful shot in shuffleboard, it’s poetry in motion—and K.C. Chuck. K.C. started betting on me after I busted him. Won $4,800. Another boy won $4,000. Some nights you throw those weights up there, looks like someone stops them with a string.”

  For 25 years after he fell off the oil derrick, Billy never worked at what most people would call a regular job. Sometimes he would sell and repair shuffleboards for the National Shuffleboard Co. From time to time he would come back to Dallas and toil awhile as a carpenter. But most of the time he was on the road, playing shuffleboard in glitzy big-city lounges and fly-blown roadside honky-tonks from Philadelphia to Los Angeles and Detroit to Houston for whatever money the locals were willing to bet on their hometown heroes.

  He once bet $1,000 a game in Pasco, Wash., and walked out with $10,000. He once won $10,000 in Stockton, Calif., too, “but that was mostly hot checks,” he says.

  In the Gay ‘90s Bar in Hollywood, he played Rock Hudson for $100 a game. “I beat him three games in a row,” Billy says. “Then, as I usually did, I tried to jack up the stakes. I said, ‘Well, let’s play for $200 a game now,’ and Rock Hudson said, ‘Naw, $100.’ And I said, ‘Well, if you won’t play for $200, I quit.’ I was trying to bluff him, see. But he said, ‘Damn, I’m sure glad you quit, because I’d hate to have to stay here until I won a game.’”

  The best pickings, though, were in the small towns of the West and Midwest, those with 500 souls, or 1,000, one of whom regularly beat everybody at the local beer joint and thought of himself as God’s gift to shuffleboard.

  “In those little places, I could always get a game,” Billy says, “because the town people would force their local hotshot to play me. They would say, ‘Aw, come on, Jimmy,’ or whatever the guy’s name was, ‘I got a $100 bill that says you can beat him.’ The longer we play, the more determined the guy is to beat me, and pretty soon I’ve really got a hustle going.”

  In the popular mind, a hustler always allows his opponent to win a few games to set him up for the kill, then raises the stakes and destroys him. But Billy never did it that way.

  “I always went in and beat them as bad as I could right off the bat,” he says. “That makes them want to play more. See, if you play somebody and let them win, they’ve got your money in their pocket, and they can quit. A lot of times, that’s the reason they’ll play you, thinhing you’re a hustler and you’re going to let them win a few. But I just went in and beat them as bad as I could, and then I’d laugh at them a little bit. If you laugh at a man, he’s going to want to play you again. His pride makes him do it.”

  As Billy’s reputation grew, he sometimes had to resort to deception to lure someone into a game. “One time I was coming from Canada into Denver,” he says, “and I didn’t think I would get much action there because I had beat them a couple of months before out of a couple of thousand. So I stopped at a drugstore and bought an Ace bandage and wrapped my right hand in it and put my arm in a sling. Boy, they just jumped on me, and I beat them out of about $1,200. So the next day, I wrapped my left hand, just to see if anybody would notice. Not a soul noticed that I had changed hands.”

  Robbie Gann of Visalia, Calif., remembers him in those days. “He used to come through the door bragging that he was the greatest shuffleboard player that ever lived,” she says. “And if they didn’t want to play him, he would say, ‘Well, I’ll play you one-handed.’ And if they said no, then he would say, ‘Well, I’ll tie one hand behind me and wear a blindfold.’”

  “He was the undisputed champion for like 15 years,” says Robbie’s sister-in-law, Charlene Goldsmith. “He would step up to the board, and he would play anybody. He never told nobody he wouldn’t play them. My husband said the classiest thing about Billy that’s ever been said. He said, ‘Billy’s talent is surpassed only by his ego.’ And after he won, sometimes he would have to fight his way out of a bar, he made everybody so mad.”

  “I’ve always been a good loser,” Billy says, “but I’m a bad winner. I like to rub their nose in it.”

  Charlene and her husband, California Bob Goldsmith, own Mr. G’s in Visalia. In 1967, their bar was sponsoring a shuffleboard team in a Sacramento tournament, and they went to watch.

  “I had heard and heard about Billy Mays this and Billy Mays that—world champion, you know—and I was really looking forward to meeting Texas Billy Mays,” Charlene says. “But when we got to Sacramento, somebody told us Billy was in the hospital having stomach surgery. He had ulcers, I think. Well, all of a sudden everybody’s twittering, you know, saying, ‘There’s Billy Mays!’ and he walks in the door, and he’s all bent over. Bent almost double. The doctor wouldn’t release him out of the hospital, but he had left anyway. And he walks over to a board and starts playing a game for $100 an in. Back in 1967, $100 an in was pretty good money.”

  Billy remembers that tournament. “I won the triple crown,” he says. “I won the singles, I won the doubles, and I won the team event.”

  He burned up 100,000 miles of highway and three or four used cars a year in those days, getting from bar to bar and tournament to tournament, and sometimes circumstances forced him to depend on the kindness of friends.

  “Billy used to come to our house and spend the night,” Charlene says. “We never knew who he was going to show up with. One time it was a Canadian. One time it was an Indian. You just never knew with him. It was always ‘Hello, Billy, and who is she?’ He traveled like a Gypsy all the time, him and whatever wife or woman he was with. A shuffleboard player can resist anything except temptation.”

  Billy acknowledges that his marital record is smudged. He has had seven wives, four of them before he was 21. “My first wife was Sue,” he says, “my second wife was Sybil, my third was Sandra, my fourth wife was Jean, my fifth wife was Myrna…. Naw, my fifth wife was Sheila, my sixth wife was Myrna and my seventh is Doris. Me and all my wives but one get along real good.”

  Billy and Doris have been married five years. Jean lasted fifteen years, Sybil only 90 days. “Sybil was one of them whirlwinds,” Billy says. “That was back when I was drinking a little bit, and a bunch of us got drunk, and the next thing I know I was married.”

  “Sometimes,” Charlene says, “Billy would call and say, ‘Bobby, can you send me a couple of hundred? I’ve had a bad run of luck.’ And it wasn’t that he had shot bad and lost, it was just that things had happened, you know. So Bobby would send him the money. And the very next time we would see him, Billy would come up and pay Bobby that money back. We never failed to send it to him because he always paid it back.

  “One time when he was at our house, our little boy wanted to play him. He wanted to play the world champ. So Billy played him. You think he would let that kid win? You know what Billy said to him when they got through? He said, ‘You’d better work on your left, kid.’ Billy never let anybody win anything.”

  About seven years ago, Billy gave up the road and came home to Dallas and settled down. “It got to where nobody would play me,” he says. “It got to where I couldn’t make a living no more.”

  Billy often calls himself “the world champion shuffleboard player.” Other players call him that, too. Still others say he used to be the world champion but isn’t anymore. Asked who has replaced him as world champion, som
e just shrug. Others name another player, but no two are likely to name the same player.

  How a player becomes “world champion” isn’t clear. Billy used to promote a competition in Las Vegas called the World Championship Shuffleboard Tournament. He won it the last time it was played, in 1984, so maybe he’s the reigning champion until another tournament with that name is played.

  If the title is based on the number of tournaments won over the years, few would question Billy’s right to it. “I haven’t kept a count of them,” he says. “I’d say I’ve won seven or eight hundred. Back when I played all the time, I won about 75 out of 100.”

  Or maybe Billy’s personal way of determining who has the right to the title is the best. It’s certainly the simplest. “If you beat everybody,” he says, “you’re the world champion.”

  He still plays some friendly round robins in bars around Dallas, and every now and then he’ll enter a tournament in Houston or Austin or Fort Worth, somewhere close at hand, but he admits he’s getting rusty. And then there’s that broken finger, still bothering him.

  But he entered January’s Pacific Coast Shuffleboard Association’s Shuffleboard Extravaganza II in Las Vegas just to prove that he isn’t as far over the hill as rumor is beginning to say.

  “You need to play a competitive game every week or two to stay in top form,” he says, “and I haven’t done that. It’s kind of like dancing. You dance a lot, and you keep a real smooth rhythm. But if you don’t dance much, you lose that step. I don’t have any idea how I’ll do in Las Vegas, but I want to give it a try.”

  He mails in his entry fees—$400 for singles and $200 for doubles competition—but the PCSA notifies him that they weren’t received by deadline. His name will be added to a list of alternates who might get a chance to play if some of the entrants don’t show up.

  Billy is fit to be tied. “Thirty of the best players in the world are going to be there,” he says. “It’s the biggest tournament there is. There won’t be two people in it who aren’t capable of winning. But it looks like they don’t want to play me.”

  Nevertheless, a week before the tournament is to begin, he and two friends start toward Las Vegas by car. In Big Spring, they stop to play a little shuffleboard. They win $100. They stop again in Odessa and win $200, and again in Phoenix and come away with $500, more than enough to pay their road expenses. “And the whole town would come out to see us,” Billy says.

  Billy’s room at the Showboat Hotel is free. So are his meals. The PCSA informs him that he won’t be allowed to play in the singles competition, but Freddy Thuman of Auburn, Calif., who has known Billy for years, invites him to partner with him in the doubles.

  The Showboat Sports Pavilion, where the tournament is to be played, is a warehouse-size room just upstairs from the bowling alleys, where the Professional Bowlers Association also is playing a tournament. The room has been fitted out with a dozen ordinary barroom shuffleboards—so ordinary that quarters have to be fed into them to activate their scoreboards.

  The atmosphere of the pavilion is more akin to a saloon than a sports arena. At tables and in seats about the shuffleboards, players from all over the United States and Canada swap tales about past tournaments, difficult boards they’ve played, taverns where they spent memorable nights. A blue haze of cigarette smoke lies over the room like smog. Loud music blares. Bars at each end of the room do a steady business.

  It’s a double-elimination tournament. No one is out until he has lost two matches. A match is two out of three games. Before tournament play begins, the players are sold to “sponsors” in a Calcutta auction, which is similar to an ordinary sports pool except that the players are sold to the highest bidder. At the end of the tournament, the “owners” of the winning players are paid the contents of the Calcutta pot.

  One doubles team—Darrol Nelson of Springfield, Ore., and Jim Allis of Seattle—are sold for $2,800. Billy and Freddy go for $400.

  “Darrol and Jimmy are probably the best doubles team in the world right now,” Billy says.

  But he and Freddy get off to a fast start. Halfway into the first game, Billy has memorized the board and starts placing his weights with the precision of a diamond cutter, moving about his end of the board with an easy grace, like a dancer in slow motion. From time to time, he meets Freddy at mid-table to discuss strategy. Billy always does the talking. Freddy listens and nods.

  When he isn’t shooting, Billy pays no attention to the game. He walks about the crowd, waving, shaking hands, smoking, exchanging stories with old friends and foes until it’s his turn to shoot again.

  Freddy, on the other hand, is a wad of nerves wrapped in a bundle of emotion. Every shot to him is exquisite pain or ecstasy. He rants, groans, paces, punches at the air with his fists.

  They win the match easily in two games. While most matches in the tournament are requiring two to three hours to complete, Billy and Freddy are finished in an hour and 20 minutes. That afternoon, they win their second match as easily.

  The day’s third match—the quarter-final round—isn’t so easy. Chuck Nooris of Portland, Ore., and A.Z. Turnbolt of San Jose, Calif., win the first game, 15-8.

  Freddy’s face flushes. He moans, he rails. The second game becomes a tedious war of attrition. Two hours and 15 minutes after it began, Billy and Freddy win, 15-13, then win the third one quickly, 15-8, at 12:30 a.m.

  Freddy dashes to the wall where the brackets are posted, to see who their opponents will be in the semifinal round. Billy doesn’t bother. “You have to beat them all to win,” he says. “It don’t matter to me what order they come in.”

  The semifinal round is to begin at 8 a.m. the next day. At 7:30, Billy breakfasts on M&Ms and jogs around an island of cars in the parking lot with Freddy. Then they go inside and demolish their opponents in an hour.

  Their next match—the final match of the winners’ bracket—is to begin at 6 p.m., against Darrol Nelson and Jim Allis, the $2,800 Calcutta auction babies. To kill the daylight hours, Billy wanders downstairs to the card room for a game of poker.

  Darrol and Jim are as good as Billy said. They begin the match with a 6-0 lead. They’re very serious, very calm. They play the board like they own it. They win, 15-6.

  Billy and Freddy manage to win the second, 15-14, but their shooting is erratic, and Freddy is a basket case, screaming and shaking his fists in the air. They lose the final game, 15-3.

  They’ve clinched third place. But to win the championship, they now must beat the winners of the losers’ bracket, then beat Darrol and Jim in two matches. They must do it all right now.

  “They’re saying you’re over the hill,” someone says to Billy. “Are you?”

  “I tell you how you can find out,” Billy replies. “Go find somebody that’ll play me a game for $500.”

  The best of the losers—Glen Davidson of Oklahoma City and Sparky Sparkman of San Diego—demolish them, 15-2, in their first game. But Billy and Freddy win two, 15-10 and 15-14.

  They’ve clinched second place. Their two matches against Darrol and Jim are the only matches in the tournament still to be played. A couple of dozen spectators—all that’s left of the crowd—are gathered at one table now.

  Billy and Freddy win the first game, 15-13.

  “I’ve been trying to explain Billy Mays to my friend here,” says a man sitting directly behind Billy, “but I can’t. There’s no way to explain a Billy Mays. He’s the kind of guy you love to hate. He’s nothing but a hustler, but if there was a shuffleboard hall of fame, he’d be the first one in it.”

  Billy and Freddy win the second game—and the match—15-12.

  “I’ll guarantee we’ll win the next match,” Billy mutters to a friend. “Jim’s getting drunk and Darrol’s struggling.”

  Billy and Freddy win the first game, 15-11, and rack up a 4-1 lead in the second.

  “Put them out of their misery, Billy!” Freddy shouts.

  “Billy Mays has returned!” yells someone in the crowd.

>   But Darrol and Jim recover and win, 15-14.

  At 1:25 a.m. the last game of the tournament begins. The players have been on their feet for almost eight hours without a break. The crowd has dwindled to the hard core, and most of them are drunk.

  But Billy seems as fresh as if he were beginning. His movements are silken. His words to Freddy are calming. His shots are sharp and exact.

  Finally, at 2:04 a.m., Freddy scores a three-point shot and wins the game, 15-10. He falls to the floor and kicks the air like a dying rabbit.

  Billy and Freddy split the $3,105 first-place doubles prize money. Freddy wraps Billy in a hug. “I love you, you old son of a bitch,” he says. They shake hands and say goodbye.

  Billy also had bought part of himself in the $18,000 Calcutta auction pot. His share of the winnings is $2,785. After the stack of bills is counted into his hand, he announces that this has been his last tournament. “Tournaments are getting to be too much hassle,” he says. “I’m getting too old for it. Let somebody else have it.”

  The people laugh. “Sure, Billy, sure,” somebody says.

  He sleeps until noon, then begins the long drive home.

  March 1990

  WHERE HAVE ALL THE HORNY TOADS GONE?

  One day I was visiting with my friend Robert Hart, a photo editor at the Dallas Morning News. I don’t remember why, but we got to talking about horny toads, and soon realized that neither of us had seen one around Dallas in a long, long time. “I think you ought to find out why and write a story about it,” Robert said. So I did.

  HE WAS SITTING AT THE JUNCTION WHERE ONE OF THE ANT HIGHWAYS entered the huge ant metropolis in our back yard. He was still as a stone and could have been mistaken for one, or for a dead cactus or a lump of rotten fence post.

  But his beady eyes were watching the ants move along their highway, struggling under their loads of grass seed and bits of leaf. Every now and then his tongue would flick and one of the ants would disappear into his mouth. It happened so quickly that the other ants didn’t seem to notice. They didn’t even know he was there.