Celia banned him from the Fish house. Charlie was no longer allowed to hang out with him. She even paid Korkis and Rothman a dollar a day to be her "spies," making sure that Charlie stayed far away from Joe Murphy.     Charlie and Joe still had their secret meeting place behind the old one-room schoolhouse. They met there every day to swap monster magazines, comic books, and lewd stories.     With Joe Murphy no longer present as "pool table enforcer," Charlie's basement became Korkis and Rothman's basement. His pool table became their pool table. They began taking bets on games. They used Charlie's father's poker chips as a cover. Celia and even Morris thought that they were playing for fun. Neighborhood kids would buy chips with their newspaper route, grocery store bag-boy, and restaurant busboy wages. Rothman and Korkis were "the house."

Every day the basement was filled with young gamblers. Rothman and Korkis began taking lOUs.    Howie Schultz, a tiny orthodox Jewish kid with curly sidelocks and a gambling problem, owed them $100. One day they dragged the much smaller boy into Charlie's basement laundry room, stuffed him inside Celia Fish's clothes dryer, and turned it on.     Charlie grabbed a pool cue, raised it in a threatening gesture, and threatened to tell his father, who was sleeping upstairs. "Get outta my house!" he shouted.     Chris Korkis laughed. He was much larger than Charlie. David Rothman sneered, "Screw you. Fish. Do you think we're here because we like you? You're a goddamn joke. A goddamn nothing with a pool table. Nobody really likes you. Fish. Your old man ain't worth a shit either. My parents say so. He's just a low-life gambler, a Mafia bagman."     Charlie howled in rage and swung the pool cue at David Rothman's head. Chris Korkis seized Charlie's arm and twisted it until he dropped the cuestick. As Korkis slammed him against a knotty pine paneled wall, little Howie Schultz scrambled out of the clothes dryer and ran for his life.     Charlie tried to kick and squirm out of Korkis's grasp. The bigger boy pinned him harder against the wall.    "Never interfere with our private business, Fish!" David Rothman growled as he slammed his fist into Charlie's gut.     Charlie gasped and sagged to the cold cement of the basement laundry room floor. Korkis and Rothman laughed and walked back into the crowded smoke-filled poolroom. They resumed their game. Players stacked their chips on the table.     Charlie was a stranger in his own house.

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