the good ol' days when times were rotten!
There was a pool room in downtown Ft Worth that I played on occasion
It might have been on main street,it was so rough there was a stand up urinal on the wall in the same room as the pool tables.
No doors,no wall
We used to win money from men waiting their turns at what was called a house of ill repute,a high rise hotel
Poor guys waiting their turn! They got screwed out of their money before they got screwed for their money.
Just because the local titty bar was one of the first places if not the first to let me drink hard liquor and shoot pool when I first turned fifteen I spent a lot of time in there. All the other places were on the strip across the Mississippi River with a tall narrow bridge to negotiate or ten miles or so across town at the university campus where I still got ran off as often as not.
I got shark proofed early and I learned that people trying to show off for the girls were soft action! For a teenager it was hard to beat watching naked dancing ladies for hours and leaving out feeling no pain and toting a half a week's or a week's pay I didn't have when I went in there!
I think forty a game is the most I ever played for in that joint, playing eight ball on a seven foot barbox. However, to put that in perspective, I was making minimum wage, $1.25 an hour. After tax and social security I took home a buck an hour. That forty a game was the same thing I made for a week of hard work outside in all weather. The few times I got in hundred a game action in other places, that was big action! A month's pay went back and forth across that table two or three times an hour.
The cue stick didn't show big profit in my mid-teens but it let me paint the town from one end to the other and come home with a little more jingle in my pocket than I left with. Life was good!
Hu