Longer term members will recognize this tale but it is an odd one. Sometime in the seventies things were slow. I had two mortgages to pay and the other bills associated with a home and business and the business was dead and jobs not to be found. I had been making a little money with my circle track car driving carefully to maximize cash and minimize repairs and some cash off of the pool tables but the racing season was over and I had been doing odd jobs here and there to make a buck and hitting the pool tables nightly, grinding instead of the usual playing for fun. Pool was my primary source of income.
Purely by accident I found out a friend that I had been racing cars with and partnering with on some brutally hard and dangerous odd jobs could play pool. He was a genuine flake and could get things stirring anywhere he went, good or bad! Took us over twelve hours to drive to Houston from West Baton Rouge one night, probably shouldn't have started a serious business trip at night. It took us ten hours to make the fifty-sixty mile trip from Baton Rouge to Lafayette with "a few stops" along the way.
We had banged balls around on a pool table when drinking beer a couple times but neither had shown any real speed. One day we had been working under eighteen wheelers all day in a gravel parking lot for peanuts and stopped to have a beer. As I was fixing to stick a couple quarters in a table two guys came up wanting to play partners eightball for a beer each against me and my partner. I figured I could carry Bobby enough that we won a lot more beer than we lost so after checking with him the game was on.
We lost the flip and one of the other players broke. Bobby got up and ran the table out with an old house cue from their break, stone cold after busting knuckles all day turning wrenches. Then he ran seven more tables from the break while I sat there stunned that we had been working like dogs to make a hundred or two a week. When we were done we had thirteen beers in front of each of us and I had shot twice.
We hadn't made it to the truck before I told Bobby, "We gotta talk." Two days later we started our first little road trip and we didn't do any more hard labor for little money. Got air barreled anyway after working two and a half days around the clock wrenching on eighteen wheelers in the daytime and hauling wheat with them all night which sucks a lot more than getting air barreled on a pool table!
A few months later Bobby and I are just doing a little local prowling. We might be gone six or eight hours or a week, we might drive twenty miles or a thousand, things were kind of fluid. It was a week night and we stopped in a country honky-tonk with a pool table that was about fifty miles east of us, away from my usual haunts south and west in cajun country. It was a happening place on the weekend, there were bands and hundreds of people put on their finery and boiled out of the piney woods for many miles around. This was before dark during the week though and the place was dead. As usual I let Bobby lead the way about five minutes and then I ambled inside. Twelve or fifteen men in the place besides the bartender and two female type ladies sitting alone. Bobby was already on the challenge table and I saw money changing hands so no rush to get over there and stir things up.
I walked over to the ladies and inquired if I could buy them a drink. "Oh yes, little Millers please!" Not what I had meant but nothing like cheap dates. I grabbed a can of beer and two little Millers and set up shop with the ladies for an hour or so. I was watching Bobby stick a five in his pocket every few minutes which wasn't bad when minimum wage was $1.25 an hour and that was what most of the guys playing him worked for. Most of the guys in the place were around the table now and there were about a dozen challenges staying on it. The pool game was the only entertainment in the place aside from the ladies whom I seemed to be the only one interested in this early and I have to admit I was mostly killing time.
Bobby wasn't the best at splitting the cash sometimes so I decided I might want to get involved over on the pool table. I put my challenge up and when it made it's way to the top Bobby missed a ball about halfway through his run. When Bobby missed a ball playing me I always took it as an indication it was time for me to take over and I took the table. My hair was the longest in the place although barely over my collar and my beard was full, a beard which meant hippie to all good country boys at the time although I was a lot more country than hippie myself. There were plenty of challenges on the table and I went to chopping wood. I got greedy and dropped my normal stall in such situations and just won game after game as fast as I could.
The more I won the more the challenges on the table grew. Soon I couldn't lose or I would have been done for the night. Some guys were putting down ten to twenty challenges at a time so the table would have been tied up for hours. At one time the challenges one twenty-five cent piece wide lined one entire side of the eight foot table except the pocket irons and three-fourths of the other side.
The country boys were mad and insulted that a damned hippie stranger had came in and was cleaning their clocks. Each one wanted to be the one playing me when I lost although there were maybe three that had any thought that they had a decent chance of beating me. The rest, which grew to close to thirty sometimes, were just hoping to be the one playing me when I gave away a game.
I didn't play anything close to perfect pool but most of the other players were bangers and I did tighten up when I was playing one of the few that could run a few balls. They finally gave up after daylight the next morning when some had to go to work, straight from the bar! I hadn't lost a game and every pocket was crammed with fives won, aside from a handful or two I had given to Bobby since it was no secret we were together after the first few hours. That was one thing that set off the strange dynamic I believe. Normally somebody would have wanted to fight a stranger taking their money but while Bobby wasn't big he was known in the place as a scrapper and willing to get in a whittling contest with anyone. I was a little bigger and no stranger to fighting myself so with Bobby covering my back nobody really wanted to party.
Finished the night or actually started the new day by Bobby and I escorting the two ladies to my truck, the only two who had been in the place all night. In turn we were escorted by the remaining men that had been left in the place. We took their money and their ladies but they didn't quite want to tangle with us so we rode away in peace.
No real count on the total but I had two shirt pockets, a t-shirt pocket, and all four pockets of my jeans stuffed tight with fives and a folded wad in a boot where I had dumped most of what I had won in the first hour or so when I made a pass by the bathroom mostly for that purpose. I gave Bobby one front pocket of fives without counting it along with all he had taken before I started playing and what I had handed him during the night. Three or four days later I still had big wads of fives left after using a good bit of the money.
As mentioned Bobby had a gift for being in the middle of things. It was a rare trip when we didn't wind up in real danger of being shot, arrested, or mobbed, didn't matter how innocently things started. When my business picked up I gave up the trips with Bobby. Good fun at the time but there was a cold wind of caution blowing through me even as young and wild as I was. One of our running partners got killed in the wrong woman's bed and Bobby was investigated for a murder which I don't think he was involved in. The man was toting a lot of money and Bobby had been playing pool with him a little before he was robbed and killed. Having a less than sterling reputation Bobby was a prime suspect and was hauled in and questioned for hours over and over until he left Louisiana for years. Just luck I wasn't caught up in that mess as they had been playing in the same place where I first learned Bobby could play pool.
Other than Bobby I traveled alone or with one of several big guys that didn't really play pool whose main purpose was to see that I got out of a place in one piece. One regret is that I turned down a chance to travel with a top road player but my business was doing good at the time, I had a home, and he was sleeping in his car.
Hu
