The names of those pool halls really bring back some memories.
(insert flashback music)
My first pool room was The Billiard Palacade, near the corner of Mission and Geneva, in San Francisco. I probably spent two or three of my formative years there, sort of like a recently spawned baby salmon who stays in the tidal pools before attempting the run upstream.
It was a great room. You’d walk in and there was a snooker table off to the right in the front window, where “the big boys” played pink ball. The counter was to the left. Perhaps a dozen or more Gold Crowns. The room had huge vaulted ceilings, a reminder of the vaudeville theatre it was in a past life. I remember a blonde woman who ran the place who helped me procure my second cue, an Adams if I recall.
At The Billiard Palacade, somehow I automatically fit in, immediately accepted into the fraternal order of pool players that populated the joint. I used to favor a table on the right side of the room, perhaps three or four tables in. To this day I can still recall the pure, almost orgasmic joy I felt when I ran my first full rack of 15 balls off that table.
The two best players in the room were: a guy called “Big Bob” and who looked like Robert Goulet dressed as a lumber jack, and Jim, mustache, long dark hair parted in the middle, and who favored bell bottom jeans and leather jackets. There was also a whole cast of other supporting players like the two black brothers, Sammy and Fred, who took to calling me “Mr. Serious” (a nick name which can still elicit a chuckle from those who currently know me). Eventually I’d get to a level of play at which I could beat Sam, but not Fred, who was a straight shootin’ sumgun.
I can’t remember exactly how it came about but there was an older Italian gentleman there who befriended me and we began playing 25 point games of straight pool together. His name was Guido and he was built like one of those basketed Chianti bottles, glasses, with a big thick shock of pure white hair and a matching mustache. Over the course of the two or so years we played, I improved, and improved, and improved a little more until I was beating Guido 25-2, 25-3, 25-0 and somehow, he would continue to rack the balls for me, always smiling, as if he took some kind of crazy pride in my improving play and never said an unkind or mean spirited word while my younger insensitive self poured it on him.
Eventually, after I got my first car, I became an adoptee of Town and Country Billiards in Daly City, a few miles up the road on Mission Street. But I still fondly remember my first pool room.
Swimming upstream (almost literally) I came to my new home-away-from-home “up the hill” on Mission Street, a hollowed ground known to local pool players as “Town & Country Billiards.” I’ll never forget the first time I wandered in one night out of the foggy Daly City cold.
It was an old bank building that sat on its own corner, sort of like a miniature Flat Iron Building in New York -- it had that sort of triangular shape, just one story, though. You’d walk up a short set of concrete steps, through glass doors and walk into the room, tables to your left protected by a black iron railing that curved around up to the front desk on your right. It was a pretty gaudy looking place, with red velvet wall paper, white-sided National Shuffle Board tables covered with beige cloth, and Tiffany-style lamps over each 4 ½ foot by 9 battlefield.
Arriving at the desk you’d usually be greeted by the owner, Stan Cleaner, a New York transplant who had seen it all and done it all. On one of the first evening forages I made into the room I was challenged by a young short haired blonde guy, playing with a Gina. He wanted to play 9ball. I went up to Stan and asked, “Do I have a chance?” And Stan, who had somehow already divined my place in the substrata of pool players in his room, said in a very non-committal but totally committal way that my challenger was, “the best in house.” That I had no chance was left unnecessarily unspoken. I passed on my opportunity to play Steve Votter, probably at the time, one of the best players in California.
Memories of daytime visits there, with the large windows along one side of the room allowing the afternoon sun to filter in, are still vivid and magical to me all these years removed. One day I was playing on a table near the center of the room and was surprised to see the legendary Tugboat Whaley walk into the room. Ancient, slightly bowed, but still rosy-cheeked, with pure white hair, suspenders in place, he confidently shuffled in, opened up a beat up old black cylindrical leather case, pulled out his brass jointed cue and start hitting balls with a soft easy grace. Shortly thereafter, I was again surprised when I saw Dorothy Wise, then several times Women’s U.S 14.1 Open champ come in. Trim, grandmotherly, and coiffed, she put her own cue together and they began to spar, stopping occasionally for Tugboat to impart some bit of wisdom to Ms. Wise. I probably made two balls that afternoon, as I strained to listen in above the juke box and glean whatever crumbs of knowledge fell from their table. On other days Tugboat would often play Dennis in the alcove behind the desk that had two tables -- only one of them, the one nearest the desk, was “the” table -- and they’d be on it playing a refined game of 14.1 for hours on end. Watching these two elegantly manage and dismantle rack after rack was possibly the incipient start of my love affair with straight pool.
As time went on, I came to know and assume my role amongst the whole cast of motley characters, most near my age, that chose to rush to the pool hall each day, rather than participate in other, more serious life-endeavors. Well I remember being overjoyed to be at the pool hall the Friday night of my senior prom. After all, pool was a lady whose company you could enjoy, savor, and didn’t have to buy a corsage.
Jerry, Dale, Devlin, Rico, 10-Speed, Bob Babba, Dennis, Vince, Steve, Jeff, Eugene, Bob Langstrom, and the rest now lost to memory... It seemed that for several years of my life it all revolved around getting to the pool hall as soon as humanly possible, being heartily hailed by my compatriots, and staying up until I could put off sleeping no more, or the demands of real life -- school, family, job -- could no longer be held at bay. Without any doubt I can categorically state that my major source of calories for more years than I now care to recall was the Landshire Sandwich Company. In particular, their “Special Hoagie,” which as a regular, I was allowed to go behind the desk and cook myself in the pool hall’s min-oven. I had it down to a science: taking it out of the pool hall frig, carefully removing the plastic wrap, placing it in the oven, just so for a precise amount of time, removing the piping-hot said culinary jewel from the mini-oven, slathering it with a golden brown mustard and chasing it down with an ice cold cup of root beer. Life could not possibly get any better.
Over the eight or so years I spent living there the troupe that hung together survived countless adventures and, statistically, many of us should be dead or permanently maimed now (or at least done serious jail time). But through the grace of God or pure dumb luck we survived intact and without judicial punishment.
My second pool hall was a ceaseless fount of knowledge and life lessons. We would play endless hours of tonk, gin rummy, or liar’s poker at a café table along the rail, or in the office behind the desk, or play $5 9ball until closing, sometimes under less than ideal conditions. And through all of this silliness, there was the constant undercurrent of serious, serious pool all around us. I’ve mentioned Tugboat and Dorothy, but over the years I spent there, there was almost never a Friday or Saturday night when I didn’t get to watch countless match ups or ring games involving such legendary players as Filipino Gene, Hawaiian Brian, Dalton Leong, Dee Hulse, Tony Annigoni, Steve Votter, Denny Searcy, Junior Goff, and Ronnie Barber. Occasionally there’d be breakfast at 4 am afterwards at Denny’s, or at a little diner up the street, and I was sometimes allowed to participate, quietly eating my eggs and soaking up the road stories. Eventually life, a wedding, and the military came calling. But at the time I just didn’t know that, in so many ways way back then, I was enjoying the sweet spot in time.
Lou Figueroa
