Bar Pool

Manhattan cocktail lounges and bars are notable for their lack of anything for the customers to do. Except drink, of course. And a drink can cost you a buck and a half or three dollars if you drink doubles, long a habit of mine as I crave the substantial in life. So you sit there if you are unlucky enough to be alone and perhaps pretend to be someone interesting like a spy, a lesser celebrity, a solitary businessman concocting a deal that will make a lot of people truly sorry. To your untrained Midwestern eyes the bartender always looks like a criminal or at least a pimp. But there is finally no real reason to be in a bar in daytime except to booze and look out the window at the burnt and umbrous haze that is New York air.

Way up in Michigan, officially known as the “Winter-Water-Wonderland,” there are admittedly no French restaurants, very little theater, and the first-run movies are a few months late, but the bars serve as local clubhouses and there are games to be played. To be sure, it's not like Elaine's, where you can drop twenty bucks and pine away hours trying to exchange a single glance with a fritzee brunette in a transparent blouse. Hereabouts such costumes would cause a riot of bumpkinry. In most northern Michigan bars there is a shuffleboard, often a bowling machine, frequently a pinball machine, and always a pool table, bar-sized, usually about four by seven feet. And in many bars that table will be continually busy from late afternoon until closing time at two A.M. and kick-out time at two-thirty.

It is a game of infinite variables: after you break the rack the configuration of balls and the stratagems necessary to clear them never precisely repeat themselves. It is a game of inches and the calibration of stroke and English on a small table require even more patience than the larger table of the pool hall. True excellence is rare and vanities are punished. Gambling for a game of pool is illegal in Michigan but some sort of harmless “I'll play you for a drink” action goes on and in the downstate urban areas it gets a great deal more serious. With all those lovely auto factories they have more money to play with. It is a benign though demanding sport. You won't see the Johnson City big-time act with tuxedoed players owning the temperaments of concert pianists. A very few players like to surround pool with the aura of the badass; it's not unfair to portray their hokum in all of the shabby colors of nickel-dime evil right down to the cue case with a decal of a cobra stretched along its length.

I first came to bar pool as an unhappy graduate student who picked up his grocery money teaching English to foreign students in mixed lots, with as many as fifteen language backgrounds in a single class. My car trunk was stuffed with uncorrected papers. My heart was heavy. Each day was a fresh hemorrhoidectomy. The proctoscopic years. But in a half-dozen bars around East Lansing I began to learn to play pool, which quickly replaced bridge though the mania for both shares similarities. And with both learning is miserable. “You didn't finesse, you fool,” your partner says as you slump down in your chair like a sick turtle. Or in front of thirty people in a bar, some of them pretty girls, you scratch an easy eight ball shot and the subsequent giggles fill your ears with blood. You always lose when you're learning and as Woody Hayes would have it, only losers are good losers.

It is obvious to me now that the earlier one starts the better, especially if good coaching is available. You see people who have played a dozen years using an open rather than a closed bridge on the cue, affording much less control of the stick. Most bar pool is incredibly clumsy. There might be one or two local dudes who beat everyone else quite consistently but they would usually be utterly lost against an average player in a pool parlor. A good large-table player can easily adapt himself and a snooker expert is deadly on a bar table. A three-cushion billiard player can rarely get used to the soft stroke required.

It is easy to stay on the same plateau of skill for years, even drop one or two steps for periods of time. The belter players are able to shut out the world other than their immediate querencia, their place of strength which is described by the circle of light cast by the lamp above the table. Those who lack this self-absorption and ability to concentrate never improve appreciably. You can usually connect very bad evenings to a cause, the most obvious of which is that you had too much to drink. You were playing with a good friend and neither money nor pride was at stake. One of those rare miniskirts was sitting at a stool humming. And a raft of other possibilities: general depression, excessive happiness, an argument, a tranquilizer that removed your aggressiveness. A dispute with a wife or friend can throw your grouse shooting totally out of whack and the damage on a pool table is even more direct. But sometimes as with so many other sports the faults are inexplicable: a few years ago I led the local tournament for eight weeks, only to blow up in the final two matches, dropping the contest and purple bowling trophy to a bluegrass banjoist from New Haven, Connecticut. A foreigner got the apples. I brooded darkly.

Though I had played for a long time I didn't begin to understand the subtleties of the game until I met Benny Boyd a few years ago. At the time he was a college instructor and one day I caught him unloading several cases of liquor out of the backseat of his car. An unlikely act for a college instructor. He said he had won five hundred bucks in a pool game at a local bar and was stocking up. That seemed like a lot of money then and still does now, especially for an afternoon in a bar where one might be spending the afternoon anyway. I found out that he had won the Michigan Pocket Billiards Championship in 1966 and when in college had taken second in a national tournament run by the NCAA. After that he played professionally for a while. When Benny lost his teaching job in the economic bite put on universities he moved north and got a job bartending. Watching him play I learned that the trip between good or average and excellent was an impossible one. You simply can't beat a good player like Benny when he's on “dead stroke” as they call it. You might pick up a game or two by accident but you simply haven't paid your dues and in this case the dues are literally thousands of hours of intelligent practice.

I've only really gambled at pool once and didn't like the sensation. I mean gambled so that my pocket hurt as the fivers vaporized. It is similar, say, to a time-limit poker game where you are perhaps playing for a dollar, three raises to a man. There's only a half hour left and you agree to temporarily raise the stakes. The winners agree because they feel arrogant and in control and the losers quite simply want some of their money back. There's an almost palpable ozone in the air, acrid and suspenseful. Now people can be hurt. The pots are mountainous and the feeling of safety is gone. A pleasant evening of cards has exploded into something else and when your flush loses to a full house you are sitting in a bathtub into which some masked man has just dropped a radio which he neglected to unplug. I'm not geared for that sort of excitement in either poker or pool and doubt I ever will be.

I was playing eight ball in a bar in Livingston, Montana last summer with country-rock, singer Jimmy Buffett, whose appearance is a bit bizarre for even the new west. He was leaning far over the table for a stretch shot when the witty bartender threw a firecracker at his feet. The blast was accompanied by a truly wonderful freak-out but it was hard for Buffett to get his stroke back so we watched the bartender toss some more firecrackers at two sleeping drunks at the end of the bar. Only one of them woke up, though the blast within the confined walls equaled a twelve-gauge magnum. We decided the other was dead but were afraid to check. Actually the bartender is a nice guy with an elfin sense of humor. He told us a story of how his Arabian stallion mated a mare over a picket fence and when she moved away the poor stallion was hung up over the fence and the fence had to be destroyed. “That's what can happen in love,” said Buffett, I thought not too appropriately.

I don't find it strange that bar pool is openly and stupidly male. Games of skill often are and bar pool is transparently so with its definite pecking order in any single location. You don't mind getting burned by Benny but if some cretinoid hod carrier beats you badly you want to hide out in your bedroom in a penance of Dagwood boredom. In a hotel outside of Salinas, Ecuador, down near the Peruvian border, there was a bar table. And for a week a photographer and I would spend the evenings playing eight ball. I had an edge on him and could salve my poor hands and spirit, blistered by fighting marlin. The photographer would right his marlin standing up while I required the strapped-in security of the chair. It was a very small thing to get back at his superb angling on the pool table with all of that warm, liquid equatorial air pouring in over the table through the open doors, the crash of surf in the background, and the moisture so heavy from the spray in the air that you would wipe your cue stick with your shirt after every shot. We played for drinks and unobtainable women and riches. It's fun to announce “This one's for Ava Gardner” and then swiftly win. “This one's for Annette Funicello” doesn't have the same Bogartian resonance.

Boston bars tend to resemble those in Manhattan. Once after moving my family into a new apartment I checked out the local tavern. No pool table. But there were several pay phones. Why all the pay phones? I even asked the bartender who looked at me as if I were Mortimer Snerd made flesh. Better to drop your change on pool than dialing a number for the horses across town, I thought. Telling the booky I wanted twenty on Marmalade in the seventh was a trifling pleasure compared to running seven stripes against that sea green felt.

And you see some funny things happen. Down in Key West one evening I watched a game in a freak bar only recently torn down. There was a large shaggy crowd of players evidently wired on downers, probably Seconal, and each game was a somnambulistic nightmare with all the shots requiring minutes of meditation and endless practice strokes with the cue. Then pensive reconsiderations. It was a hopeless, slow-motion game until a Cuban shrimper came up and ran successive racks with hyperthyroid speed. There was much mumbling and a general desertion of the table.

Huston Cradduck, who operates the grain elevator in Lake Leelanau, told me a story about a game that took place in Peach Orchard, Missouri. A hustler friend of Huston's daddy had spent a whole afternoon dropping games to the local sharpies, pretending to be very drunk and a total sucker. He dropped a number of hundred-dollar games, even fell against the table, cracking open his lip, until he drew in a high roller for five grand at which point he ran the table. He left with his money in a hurry to save his life. I thought that must be a record for a bar game but Benny said that a few years back he had watched a two-day match downstate where thirty-five grand changed hands in a bar mostly in one direction: toward a nationally famous player and his backer.

Violence in bar pool is a rare thing. The issues are settled on the table. I have had the 600-pound table moved during a game by some people having a friendly argument over a euchre game. After a lot of bluish epithets the older man, a plumber, called the younger a “college student.” And the younger man called the plumber a “charlatan” which puzzled the spectators. While the plumber began to thrash the young man I looked in despair at how they had jostled my perfect setup on the pool table.

1973