Straight Pool

"The Hustler" was released in 1961, starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, and The Great One, Jackie Gleason, playing Minnesota Fats. What ensued in this country, and possibly much of the world, was a rediscovered craze for pool, or more technically, "pocket billiards." Playing pool had become popular again, though the atmosphere of the pool hall and its connection with organized crime, unsavory types, and gambling, ranked it only one notch above the race track as a place you wouldn't want your child to be hanging out in.

By the mid-1960s I was hanging out in such a place, but the poolroom was on the premises of a bowling alley, and bowling was a more socially palatable sport and entertainment. A local crime family had a hand in the business (see "Unwitting Runners" M.H. February, 2011) and they usually allowed my friends and I to shoot pool when the tables weren't occupied even though we were under age. You had to be 18 to step inside the poolroom, and during business hours the management normally enforced the rule in one of two ways: Either you watched any games while standing behind a 4-foot cinder block wall that separated the poolroom from the bowling alley, or if you'd been paying you could continue to play until an 18 or older adult needed to use a table. Then you had to stop playing and cede your table to the grown-up.

If you were playing straight pool, the objective, as in "The Hustler" was to run out the rack, and the next rack, and so on until you missed a shot. I think that when playing alone, practicing, I'd gotten well into a second rack before missing (maybe 20 shots in a row). However, when playing an opponent, my high run was 13. 

On the rack end of the table there were notched plastic counters for keeping score. Bills of various denominations were stacked on some of the tables, and if management got wind of a pending, or "surprise" inspection, any money in sight had to be immediately removed. Nine ball was a money game and not easy to play. You had to play each ball 1-9 in sequence and bet on each ball, usually starting with a modest amount on the One ball and then doubling for each ball with winner taking all on the Nine.  

Not infrequently I watched the best young (though older than me) players run up to 100 or more shots in some of the games. Guys wearing Guinea-Ts, or wife beaters, with slicked down hair and goatees, and sharp creased pants from Robert Hall, and socks and sandals. Guys who carried their cues in long shellacked cases, and then carefully removed the cue from the case's velvet lining, and screwed the cue together and chalked it with an air of ritual to impress their opponent or challenger. The sounds were hypnotic: the swift pock of a corner shot, the graceful kiss of a side pocket shot, the crack of an exploding break shot or a defensive break of the pack to leave your opponent with no shots, the clack of the cue ball moving backwards in draw (hitting low), freezing in connect (hitting in the middle), following when hit high, which was all about table position for the next shot. There were mazze' shots, and bank shots, and geometrically precise double bank shots, and combination shots. And you needed strategy to leave your opponent with little or nothing if you thought you were going to miss. 

Although the younger late-teens/early twenties players were impressive, I was largely fascinated by two accomplished older players, in their 60s, whose close games against one another reminded me of billiards tournaments. The first gentleman was Italian-American, overweight, and mostly bald. He usually smoked a cigar during a game. His rival was a fastidiously dressed  Anglo-German, also balding, who wore wire-rimmed glasses and wing-tip shoes. It was fascinating to watch them play, not simply because they were incredibly good, but more so for the aura of infinite patience and respect they showed for the game and each other. These two hardly spoke while playing, maybe an occasional sentence or a few words. They were gentlemen to a fault but also possessed a Zen-like quality in their play. Sometimes, when one of them failed to show, the other would play alone or go up against one of the young hustlers. Sometimes they would lose to a younger player, but they never let the loss bother them. And though it hadn't made for great drama, like Newman versus Gleason, the younger players, win or lose, always treated the older men with deference and respect.

Later, in the 1970s, I mostly played pool in bars or taverns--- the game always 8-ball, never straight pool, because other people wanted to use your table (you couldn't play unless you put a quarter in). It didn't matter a great deal if I was good anymore: 8-ball was a game of luck as much as skill, except for the final 8-ball shot in which you needed to call your pocket. In this stage of my life, pool had become entertainment on your night or two, or three out, and there wasn't anything wrong with that---aided by a pitcher of beer, ones' shooting sometimes improved. But I missed the older pool room, frequented in my teens, and the dedication and gravitas of those inspired players, young and old. . . .

By the '80's I'd taken up darts. . . .

Mal-de-mer

When I was a boy nine or ten-years-old, I joined my father and uncles and grandfather in piloting their 21-foot boat, “The Nereid,” from Little Ferry, New Jersey to the Manasquan Inlet. We started down the Hackensack River, crossing Newark Bay, and then connected to the Hudson River which flowed to the Narrows separating the upper and lower bays between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and then sailed down the Atlantic Ocean until reaching the inlet. It was 1962, the boat launched annually from dry dock, and this nautical journey undertaken, in early to mid-April, depending on the weather.

For a boy a few weeks shy of his tenth birthday, it was an almost mystical experience watching smaller tributaries and currents merge with larger bodies of water and ultimately a very large body of water. I remember crossing the Verrazano Narrows into the lower bay, a great liquid expanse glittering in the April sunlight under a mottle of blue sky and clouds, so that the quicksilver flashes on its surface moved and shifted as the boat scudded through the emerging swells.

Water pollution was evident and rampant almost from the time we left the marina in Little Ferry but grew worse as we approached Newark Bay. I remember laughing at the yellow-white foam of Sulphur-based chemicals smelling like rotten eggs, or laughing at red dyes or blooms of plastic waste bobbing like strange jellyfish in the Nereid’s wake and sometimes clinging to the river banks. I was young, and my glee over pollution was somehow tied into the death wish, pretty normal for boys that age, like the drawings of skulls and monsters and ghouls in the margins of my school notebooks. But the polluters and despoilers of the planet still seem to have those 10-year-old boy brains, consumed by the death wish in their worship of Mammon and insatiable lust for power and world domination. Despite my young age, I now look back on those feelings with shame. My father and uncles also tossed beer cans and their lunch bags into the river. It would be eight years until the first Earth Day, everyone was littering and polluting, and there’d been little to no awareness or consciousness regarding ecology and the environment. I’m still stunned and amazed when I recall how different the waterways had been, the places you were no longer allowed to fish or swim in again until years later.
            My father and uncles were drinking beer, my father inhaling his Marlboros with cork-tipped filters, his older brother smoking a pipe, younger brother drinking but not smoking. Everyone looked a little rough and unshaven. I understood that part of my making the journey with them encompassed this vicarious initiation into “man stuff,” and I did want the beer and cigarette for the sheer sake of imitation. I had a few years to go before handling alcohol and tobacco, especially on a cabin-cruiser rocking back and forth. As soon as we reached the ocean I felt an incipient nausea and couldn’t understand the reason for it. My father stopped the boat for a while and everyone fished, and the rocking boat rocked more violently. My grandfather fished with a hand line and said it was a more natural way to fish. He was regarded as a bit eccentric, though he’d captained large merchant marine vessels in two world wars and the Korean conflict. I couldn’t stand the up-and-down rocking motion of the boat and headed into the cabin to lie down, but then the creeping illness grew worse in a confined space as I stared at the lures and tackle and life preservers and tarps rising and falling the same as me, and I soon raced from cabin, leaned over the starboard bow and threw up into the ocean, the ugly spatter of half-digested food, bile and peptic acid borne away quickly and easily on the salt tide. I felt that I was going to die, but the men didn’t seem all that concerned. They were long familiar with mal-de-mer and began to employ abundant vernacular language in characterizing my episode of regurgitation. My grandfather genteelly stated that I had “yipped my groceries,” which triggered a round of laughter, not at my expense necessarily but over the phrase that he’d used. “Throw up” also seemed a bit tame as well as the Latinate “regurgitate.”  “Puke” “Barf” “Upchuck” “Retch” “Vomit” better described the sensation of my insides erupting like Vesuvius through my nose and mouth. “Hurling chunks,” or “Ralphing,” favorites among millennials, had not yet come into fashion. Oh, what the hell, you’ll find more brilliant and hilarious examples here---339 of ‘em in fact. http://www.c4vct.com/kym/humor/puke.htm

My uncle told me that I would feel instantly better as soon as the boat docked, the moment my feet touched terra firma. I was incredulous, having never experienced the horror of seasickness before, but the prediction turned out to be true. The weirdest sensation, though, was the gentle rocking that occurred for hours after the boat had docked. The sensation was especially acute when sitting still in a chair, or worse, when lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I felt that I was back on the boat and believed I heard the sound of the bow planks creaking with this rocking motion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verrazano%E2%80%93Narrows_Bridge

Passing through the Verrazano Narrows I looked upwards to see the unfinished construction of the famous bridge. The work had started in 1959 and the upper level was finished in 1964, and the lower level would not be completed until 1969. I remember seeing a red crane and a truck on the bridge and from my vantage they were like Matchbox toys. The perspective gave you an idea of how long and high the Verrazano Narrows Bridge would be when big construction equipment looked dwarfed from our 21-foot cabin cruiser named “The Nereid” as it passed underneath the bridge.

James Braddock, the mid-1930s heavyweight boxing champ, had worked on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and my father and uncles had known Braddock. When they were building their boat in a rented garage in North Bergen, they’d bought boat equipment from Braddock who owned and ran a marine junkyard in the neighborhood. They referred to him as a “junk man.” I hadn’t known there were wrecking yards for boats as there were for cars, but it made sense.

Although you will never quite control it, I’ve learned a few rules over the years about seasickness that definitely helped and either led to a good day of fishing or at least mitigated the symptoms and their severity.

1.    If possible, take a seasick pill the night before, or even better, 24 hours before going on a boat.

2.    Do not drink alcohol the night before.

3.    Get a good night’s sleep.

4.    Eat a light breakfast and don’t drink too much coffee.

5.    Keep moving when on the boat, do stuff and look at the horizon often.