Lately I have been rereading Iceberg Slim, one of my favorites. To Iceberg, the world is divided between hustler and sucker. You are either one or the other. The sucker has no angles on life, no sense of the art of indirection, can only make one stupid play at a time. The hustler always aims for the angles, learns how to play them, becomes an artist in the game. The following are the main distinctions he makes between the two types:
* "Chumps prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth." The sucker wants to believe certain things about life and so projects these wishes on to the real world, seeing what he wants to see, not what is. A hustler thrives on reality, ugly or unpleasant--finds his poetry in the real. He sees the whole table and plays it as it lays.
* "No point in getting upset about the unknown. Only suckers do that." A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It's part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about. They represent opportunities for new angles, new hustles. The sucker cannot stand the unknown and so either fouls up by getting impatient and over anxious, or retreats to a false world of security and the known.
* "Stop letting your mind leapfrog like a screwy sucker." A sucker's mind moves all over the place, forgetting the order of things and making chaos where there is none. Hustlers have to stay cool and focused on the chain of events as they unfold, the various angles that are being played, with the possible reactions. A hustler never forgets where the 8 ball lies and how to get to it methodically.
* "You can't learn con by memorizing words. Every mark and every play of any con game is different. You have to memorize the elements of con." A sucker wants formulas he can memorize and plug into situations. He has no flow because he is so rigid in his mind. The hustler has flow because he plays for the overall game, knows the elements, can improvise and make angles where no one else sees them.
* "I don't lag my bills like a sucker." Suckers have the wrong relationship to money. They try to save pennies here and there, or grasp for the big kill that has all the odds stacked against it. Money brings out all of their neuroses. A hustler understands money. It is a tool for power, for con, and a resource for pleasure. And he always knows the odds.
* "Don't get foxed out of your bankroll. The con is made for everyone, you know." Anyone is susceptible to being conned. The wisest hustler can suddenly fall for the worst tramp and lose all of his money on her. The hustler is aware of his own weaknesses and openings to con. This awareness is his edge. A sucker thinks he knows it all and cannot be fooled. That is his fatal flaw.
* "Never forget that a grifter's word has to be like a gold bond to his associates." Honor among thieves, in other words. Lower-level hustlers forget this and the importance of reputation. They get lost in the moment and screw the wrong person. Greed should never trump consideration for your credibility. If you don't understand the subtleties of this, you are a sucker.
* "I went to the phone to call the Goddess. I walked away from it. It was a sucker play to call her so soon." Impatience is the hallmark of the sucker, and it is never clearer than in matters of seduction. He can't wait to call, spilling out his guts with a confession of love, or trying to reveal how eager he is to impress and please. Emotion trumps strategy. Patience and time is the hustler's creed. "I play for time and see what happens," says Elizabeth I, the great hustler Queen of England.
* "...since you blew your top like a mark. You should have stayed cool and figured some con with me to separate that sonuva***** from a few grand." Anger is deadly and stupid. In a competitive and dangerous world, anger is a great temptation. But only a sucker gives into natural anger at the state of things by reacting with rants and outbursts. The hustler plays the bigger angle and gets revenge on the target by hitting him in his pocketbook, or his reputation. Anger is not repressed but properly channeled.
You must keep raising this game to higher and higher levels, as on the pool table--mastering eventually the psychological angles. Your playing is a pleasure, all the way to the end, to death, when the game is over.
