Shark
Franklin Moss
Birmingham, Alabama
Signature move: The friendly squeeze — still grinning while your safe cards run out
“Don't be mad at me. Be mad at the deck.”
Franklin Moss will ask about your mother, remember your kids’ names, compliment the potato salad, and then take six books off you without the smile ever leaving his face. He learned the game from his uncles in Birmingham, men who taught him that warmth and mercy are two different things and only one of them belongs at a card table.
The squeeze is his art form. Somewhere in the middle of a hand you realize every safe card you had is gone — spent, one pleasant trick at a time, while Franklin chatted about his garden. Now he’s leading, still grinning, and everything left in your hand is a donation. “Don’t be mad at me,” he says, sweeping the book. “Be mad at the deck.”
Mother Hazel, who runs the same gentle-then-gone hustle with peach cobbler, calls Franklin “my student” — a claim he disputes exactly never. You don’t argue with your professor.