Topdog/Underdog

“You gonna call yrself something african? That be cool. Only pick something thats easy to spell and pronounce, man, cause you know, some of them african names, I mean, ok, Im down with the power to the people thing, but no ones gonna hire you.”

Lincoln is thinking about Booth’s ability to assimilate. A name that sounds African will mark Booth as black, making it difficult for him to get a job in white-dominated society. The name Booth does choose, 3-Card, is more of a street name. It takes him further from legitimate employment. However, even changing his name does not counteract the legacy of the names that the brothers were given.

“Every Friday you come home with your paycheck. Today is Thursday and I tell you brother, its a long way from Friday to Friday. All kinds of things can happen. All kinds of bad feelings can surface and erupt while yr little brother waits for you to bring in yr share. I got my Thursday head on, Link.”

Money is a big part of the rivalry between the two brothers. When Lincoln brings home his paycheck, the two men are flush with possibilities. They can spend money on a phone line because it is possible that a woman might be interested enough to call. But Booth’s reliance on his brother’s money is a point of shame. He has to ask Lincoln for money for his date. When money is scarce, Booth is more desperate. In the end, however, it isn’t lack of money that is the issue but Lincoln’s ability to earn more.

“Here I am trying to earn a living and you standing in my way. YOU STANDING IN MY WAY, LINK!”

This statement epitomizes Booth’s issue with Lincoln throughout the play. Lincoln isn’t stopping Booth from finding a job and earning a living, but he is holding the spot of the top dog and standing in the way of Booth’s desire to be more successful and masculine than his brother. 

“Dressing up like some crackerass white man, some dead president and letting people shoot at you sounds like a hustle to me.”

If hustling is lying to bilk people out of money, then Booth is not technically incorrect. Lincoln’s whiteface makeup is convincing. His customers may or may not know that he is black. Lincoln’s “Best Customer” questions what is real and what isn’t. But Lincoln describes the experience of being “shot” as real—if only for a moment, and although they are shooting him, he never feels like they are shooting the real Lincoln.

“You play Honest Abe. You aint going back but you going all the way back then when folks was slaves and shit.”

Booth’s assertion that Lincoln is going back to the slave era brings up complex issues. Lincoln is playing a white man, a person in power. However, he is also playing Abraham Lincoln at the moment that his power (and life) were taken away. 

“Daddy told me once why we got the names we do. […] He was drunk when he told me, or maybe I was drunk when he told me. Anyway he told me, may not be true, but he told me. Why he named us both. Lincoln and Booth. […] It was his idea of a joke.”

Booth’s explanation of their names makes them seem arbitrary. And while the names are certainly not the cause of their lifelong rivalries, the mother and father who gave them the names bear the responsibility for leaving them to fend for themselves without proper parenting. The names are symbolic, however, representing the quest for dominance not only of Booth over Lincoln but between the North and the South in the Civil War.

“They say the clothes make the man. All day long I wear that getup. But that dont make me who I am. Old black coat not even real old just fake old. Its got worn spots on the elbows, little raggedy places thatll break through into holes before the winters out. Shiny strips around the cuffs and the collar. Dust from the cap guns on the left shoulder where they shoot him, where they shoot me I should say but I never feel like they shooting me.”

Lincoln claims that clothes don’t actually make the man, but they do make the perception of the man. The Abraham Lincoln costume makes Lincoln look like a man who has lost his fight. The costume is ragged with evidence of the violence enacted over and over against Abraham Lincoln—violence that Lincoln must sit and accept. 

“Worn suit coat, not even worn by the fool that Im supposed to be playing, but making fools out of all those folks who come crowding in for they chance to play at something great. Fake beard. Top hat. Dont make me into no Lincoln. I was Lincoln on my own before any of that.”

Beneath the costume, Lincoln is his own man. He is Lincoln independent of his namesake. When he takes the costume off, Lincoln becomes himself again. The idea of shooters who want to “play at something great” suggests that they see shooting Lincoln as a great act because it is a famous act that occurred in history. Even by stepping into the shoes of the story’s villain, they are changing the course of history, something that most people never get the chance to do.

“Thats a fucked-up job you got.”

For all of Booth’s hotheaded aggression, he seems to recognize the deeper implications of Lincoln’s job. It requires placing himself in a submissive position, sitting and accepting each person who pays to shoot him in the back of the head. When Booth tries to help him, he gives him tactics to make Lincoln fight back, become harder to kill, or at least display the agonies of violent death. Although not all of the shooters are white, the job largely amounts to giving his black body for white people to enact simulated violence upon. 

“Lucky? Aint nothing lucky about thuh cards. Cards aint luck. Cards is work. Cards is skill. Aint never nothing lucky about thuh cards.”

Lincoln makes throwing cards look easy. Part of the con is convincing marks that winning or losing is a matter of luck. If they understood that it was a skill to be practiced and learned, no one would ever agree to play. This is what makes Booth such an easy mark. Although he practices over and over, he still seems to think that the game is about luck.

“She wants me back so bad she wiped her hand over the past where we wasnt together just so she could say we aint never been apart. She wiped her hand over our breakup. She wiped her hand over her childhood, her teenage years, her first boyfriend, just so she could say that she been mine since the dawn of time.”

Considering the eventual fate of Grace and her relationship with Booth, his claims about her in this quote are likely a lie. But it points to a larger idea of history and the way history affects the present. Booth wants a woman with no history before him. But as Lincoln demonstrates with his reenactments of the assassination, history continues to reverberate and cannot be ignored. Even a forgotten history echoes over time.

“Im around guns every day. At the arcade. They’ve all been reworked so they only fire caps but I see guns every day. Lots of guns.”

Knowing about guns is a marker of masculinity for Booth, and Booth’s discovery that Lincoln may know more, even though he is not working the streets anymore, is a challenge. But to Lincoln, those guns are a way of acting out aggression and anger without consequences. While he was throwing cards, guns were a legitimate threat, as evidenced by Lonny’s death. 

“You ever wonder if someones gonna come in there with a real gun? A real gun with real slugs? Someone with uh axe tuh grind or something?”

Booth’s question foreshadows the final moments of the play when he will shoot Lincoln in the back of the neck, imitating the assassination with a real bullet. For Lincoln, the customers are strangers. He sees their faces in a distorted reflection, but he does not know who they are, and they do not know who he is. Booth, like the historical John Wilkes Booth, is the one with an axe to grind, and ultimately, he is the one who shoots Lincoln.

“I can’t be worrying about the actions of miscellaneous strangers.”

As Lincoln suggests, the actions of miscellaneous strangers are unpredictable. Even as they play out their aggressions on Lincoln, they are only pretending, regardless of whether it feels real for a moment. Booth is the one who carries a real gun and uses it to enact his aggression, and Booth is not a miscellaneous stranger.

“Winter or summer thuh gun is always cold. And when the gun touches me he can feel that Im warm and he knows Im alive. And if Im alive then he can shoot me dead. And for a minute, with him hanging back there behind me, its real. Me looking at him upside down and him looking at me looking like Lincoln. Then he shoots.”

The coldness of the gun contrasts to the warmth of Lincoln’s body, and the enactment of violence, even fake violence, becomes more real when committed against an actual live person. The gun, even if it has been altered, is a real gun. At the end of the play, Booth presses the gun against the back of Lincoln’s neck and the experience is the same, right up to the moment Booth pulls the trigger and a real bullet kills him. 

“Bunches of kids, little good for nothings, in they school uniforms. Businessmen smelling like two for one martinis. Tourists in they theme park t-shirts trying to catch it all on film. Housewives with they mouths closed tight, shooting more than once. They all get so into it.”

The participants in shooting in the arcade are a combination of two groups: people who want to enact a moment from history, living in a greatness that they will never achieve in their small lives, and people who want to perform violence and aggression. For the kids, it’s a game. The shooting is normalized as a part of history and life in the United States. For the housewives who shoot more than once, it’s about repression and rehearsing acts of violence they cannot get away with in their lives. 

“People are funny about they Lincoln shit. Its historical. People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.”

As Lincoln describes, the Abraham Lincoln story has been sanitized and mythicized for a general audience. Schoolchildren learn about the assassination with very little gory detail. Of course, much of history is soaked in blood, and there is a tendency to make history clean and safe. In the arcade, the shooting clearly does not involve any sort of fake blood or gore. There is only dust from the cap gun, and Lincoln is ready to be shot again.

“Hustling. Shit, I was good. I was great. Hell I was the be all end all. I was throwing cards like throwing cards was made for me. Made for me alone. I was the best anyone ever seen. Coast to coast. Everybody said so. And I never lost. Not once. Not one time. Not never. That’s how much them cards was mines. I was the be all end all. I was that good.”

Throughout most of the play, Lincoln rarely asserts dominance. He gives Booth the shrimp dinner, he gives in to Booth’s demand to pay the phone bill, and he does not challenge Booth for having raped his ex-wife. But in this moment, Lincoln is showing that the spot as top dog is his. He is the best hustler in the game, and Booth can’t hope to measure up. The fact that he says this while Booth can’t hear him suggests that his appeasement of his brother does not negate the fact that he sees himself as much more than a stooge in a Lincoln costume.

“Somebody shot him. They don’t know who. Nobody knows nobody cares.”

Lincoln’s description of Lonny’s death contrasts the Abraham Lincoln shooting—John Wilkes Booth was hunted down, and his name went down in the annals of history. But unlike Abraham Lincoln, Lonny was deemed expendable, shot while risking his life in illegal activities. Although making controversial decisions as a president is tantamount to risking one’s life, Abraham Lincoln’s life was treated as much more important. The anonymity of Lonny’s death suggests that Lincoln’s and Grace’s deaths will probably be treated in a similar manner. 

“First thing you learn is what is. Next thing you learn is what aint. You dont know what is you dont know what aint, you dont know shit.”

Lincoln’s statement sounds like senseless patter, but it describes his hustle accurately. Booth builds an illusion around his life. He steals suits and champagne to create the façade of a man who has money, class, and style. He describes his relationship with Grace as if Grace is madly in love with him and willing to forgive his transgressions. But Grace isn’t fooled, and neither is Lincoln. Part of the hustle is knowing what is real and what isn’t. In the final scene, when Lincoln loses the first two hands, his disappointment and embarrassment are an act. Since Booth doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t, he takes the act at face value and loses.

“The world puts its foot in yr face and you dont move. You tell thuh world tuh keep on stepping. But Im my own man, Link. I aint you.”

Booth tries to fight back when it feels impossible to advance his life. He sees every failure as a transgression by others—a boot on his face. When Grace doesn’t want him, he kills her instead of understanding and finding another woman. Lincoln only seems like he is letting the world step on his face. In the end, he shows that he is in charge and has the ability to manipulate and finesse. 

“No matter what you do you cant get back to being who you was. Best you can do is just pretend to be yr old self.”

Booth convinces himself that the old Lincoln, the “real” Lincoln he describes when they put on their stolen suits, is gone. But throughout the play, Lincoln alludes to the real Lincoln underneath the costume. Booth underestimates his brother, and ends up killing him and then regretting it. 

“Thuh cash. Its just bullshit without thuh money. Put some money down on thuh table then itd be real, then youd do it for real, then Id win it for real.”

The last three-card monte game at the end of the play is the final showdown between the brothers. If Booth can win the money, he believes that he can finally take his place as the top dog. Without money, they are just playing a game, but money makes it real. When Lincoln wins, it becomes apparent that Booth has fallen for the hustle.