Shot at places like these?

[bigskyjake]

Shot last night at a bar where the kitchen was closed due to the cook being arrested on drug distribution charges.

Bathroom, the size a broom closet, normally has two people coughing, wheezing, and sniffing heavily in the toilet stall.

Hand written sign on the back of the bathroom stall door pleading to "Please keep your drug habit out of our bathroom."

Questionable looking fellows normally wearing hoodies coming and going every ten minutes.

I can go on.

Damn son, you just described every place around this area.

The prison shitter thing kindof pisses me off though, i mean how goddamn expensive is it to install doors on a stall. If I'm dropping a growler I don't want every drunk asshole in the bar coming in and looking at me


Jake( not an exhibitionist)

 

[Jude Rosenstock]

That's what I was thinking. Jude is loosening up and coming around. I'm proud of him. With his insight on billiards, I'll bet he has a razor wit.

Happy Birthday

 

[Blackjack]

FWIW, I grew up shooting pool in some of the worst dives you could imagine. There were no fancy tables, no fancy cloth. More times than not the room didn't have carpet. These rooms smelled like beer and cigarette ashes. The bathrooms smelled like piss - maybe they would spray the scrubbing bubbles once every 6 months, but when most of us had to go really bad, we just held our nose and used the bathroom anyway.

I'm not really a fan of upscale rooms. If you want to pay $20 an hour in table time, that's your business. I could buy a table for what I'd spend in a week playing in some of these high dollar rooms - so it doesn't make any sense to me to justify their prices by blindly paying them. Many people feel the same way I do, and we'd opt for a home table instead of paying outrageous prices. This is why pool halls are dying all over the country. If all of us had supported the pool halls while they existed, we wouldn't have this problem.

I agree that the owners of that place should get the drugs out of there and at least clean it up - but as a former room owner I know that you can't follow everybody to the bathroom and monitor their activity. At my pool hall, I had people tag the walls in the ladies room with their own feces. I didn't ask for them to design my restroom that way - but nonetheless, it happened. The girls that did that weren't wearing hoods, nor did they look like little gangsters.

People snorting coke in the stalls? That stuff happens in the high class rooms too - it's just hidden better. If you think I'm wrong about that, you're not in touch with reality.

You can always offer to help out the room owner. When I was a kid, I would come in every Saturday morning at 9:30. I would crush beer cans, empty the trash, clean the balls, the tables, the bathrooms, clean the windows, sweep and mop the entire place. In exchange for my hard work, I would get free table time for the entire weekend. Table 12 was mine as soon as I was done with the work. It was a win-win situation for the room owner and I. That place was a dump - crappy tables - chipped balls - but I'd give my right arm to be able to walk into a place like that today. I learned a lot in that room - a lot more than what the players are learning in the sports bar/ poker palaces that you walk into today.

 

[!Smorgass Bored]

Don't Ask Me To Pet YOUR Puppy

FWIW, I grew up shooting pool in some of the worst dives you could imagine. There were no fancy tables, no fancy cloth. More times than not the room didn't have carpet. These rooms smelled like beer and cigarette ashes. The bathrooms smelled like piss - maybe they would spray the scrubbing bubbles once every 6 months, but when most of us had to go really bad, we just held our nose and used the bathroom anyway.

I'm not really a fan of upscale rooms. If you want to pay $20 an hour in table time, that's your business. I could buy a table for what I'd spend in a week playing in some of these high dollar rooms - so it doesn't make any sense to me to justify their prices by blindly paying them. Many people feel the same way I do, and we'd opt for a home table instead of paying outrageous prices. This is why pool halls are dying all over the country. If all of us had supported the pool halls while they existed, we wouldn't have this problem.

I agree that the owners of that place should get the drugs out of there and at least clean it up - but as a former room owner I know that you can't follow everybody to the bathroom and monitor their activity. At my pool hall, I had people tag the walls in the ladies room with their own feces. I didn't ask for them to design my restroom that way - but nonetheless, it happened. The girls that did that weren't wearing hoods, nor did they look like little gangsters.

People snorting coke in the stalls? That stuff happens in the high class rooms too - it's just hidden better. If you think I'm wrong about that, you're not in touch with reality.

You can always offer to help out the room owner. When I was a kid, I would come in every Saturday morning at 9:30. I would crush beer cans, empty the trash, clean the balls, the tables, the bathrooms, clean the windows, sweep and mop the entire place. In exchange for my hard work, I would get free table time for the entire weekend. Table 12 was mine as soon as I was done with the work. It was a win-win situation for the room owner and I. That place was a dump - crappy tables - chipped balls - but I'd give my right arm to be able to walk into a place like that today.

I learned a lot in that room - a lot more than what the players are learning in the sports bar/ poker palaces that you walk into today.

AND, with everything that you learned, you couldn't post one little picture of a PUPPY ? Oy-Vey !

Doug
( when will they EVER learn ? )

 

[ribdoner]

The second.........the guy that sat in front of Pee-Wee Herman.
Sorry ,back to the topic at hand.

hair saturated in greasy man stuff hasn't been in vogue since the sixties

 

[Gregg]

FWIW, I grew up shooting pool in some of the worst dives you could imagine. There were no fancy tables, no fancy cloth. More times than not the room didn't have carpet. These rooms smelled like beer and cigarette ashes. The bathrooms smelled like piss - maybe they would spray the scrubbing bubbles once every 6 months, but when most of us had to go really bad, we just held our nose and used the bathroom anyway.

I'm not really a fan of upscale rooms. If you want to pay $20 an hour in table time, that's your business. I could buy a table for what I'd spend in a week playing in some of these high dollar rooms - so it doesn't make any sense to me to justify their prices by blindly paying them. Many people feel the same way I do, and we'd opt for a home table instead of paying outrageous prices. This is why pool halls are dying all over the country. If all of us had supported the pool halls while they existed, we wouldn't have this problem.

I agree that the owners of that place should get the drugs out of there and at least clean it up - but as a former room owner I know that you can't follow everybody to the bathroom and monitor their activity. At my pool hall, I had people tag the walls in the ladies room with their own feces. I didn't ask for them to design my restroom that way - but nonetheless, it happened. The girls that did that weren't wearing hoods, nor did they look like little gangsters.

People snorting coke in the stalls? That stuff happens in the high class rooms too - it's just hidden better. If you think I'm wrong about that, you're not in touch with reality.

You can always offer to help out the room owner. When I was a kid, I would come in every Saturday morning at 9:30. I would crush beer cans, empty the trash, clean the balls, the tables, the bathrooms, clean the windows, sweep and mop the entire place. In exchange for my hard work, I would get free table time for the entire weekend. Table 12 was mine as soon as I was done with the work. It was a win-win situation for the room owner and I. That place was a dump - crappy tables - chipped balls - but I'd give my right arm to be able to walk into a place like that today. I learned a lot in that room - a lot more than what the players are learning in the sports bar/ poker palaces that you walk into today.

Sorry to hear that. I guess you would have to throw out every patron in the bar or hall to get rid of them all. A tough spot, really.

Yea, the coke thing is rough.

As for the location, I do come in contact with the guys, and don't want to air dirty laundry.

 

[Johnnyt]

I use to love to hustle pool in those kind of places. Bars where biker gangs hung out (not weekend bikers or clubs), drug dealers, and criminals of all types. They didn't work for their money. As far as getting hurt in one of those places...to me that was as big a rush as the pool hustle. Johnnyt

 

[selftaut]

I used to play in a place that had 1 tilted bar table and no running water in the bathroom, it had a horse troth with ice to piss into. Every farmer in there had hands the size of baseball gloves. They used to run bands on the weekends on the rickety dance floor. I used get there early and take the table down at $2 a game until the band started (the bouncer was a best friend of mine, he was bigger than them), get $40-$50 ahead then use that to buy the wimmins drinks all night. 20 years ago, what an era!

 

[Stones]

Been in a place where a guy and two girls were chopping up lines of white powder on the drink rail right next to the table I was playing on. Being the gentleman he was when he saw me looking, he asked if I would like a hit.
All I said was, No, thank you. No one else said a word to them.

Been in a place with a sign inside the door that said, "Check your attitude and your gun before you take another step."

Been in a place with a sign on the wall by the pool tables that said, "We really don't like pool hustlers here."

As far as cleanliness, I've been in a few places that a bio level 4 containment suit wouldn't have helped.

But, I have to say, over the years, these kind of places are where all the good action was.

Stones

 

[8ballEinstein]

Been in a place with a sign on the wall by the pool tables that said, "We really don't like pool hustlers here."


Stones

I've actually been in a place that had a sign over the pool table that said, 'No Gambling". The sign might as well said, "No Fun Allowed".

 

[elvicash]

I agree the rougher places usually have the most action

One memorable place had a pisser made with a garden hose coming out the bottom of a cut down 30 gallong barrel. The garden hose went out the wall and dumped straight on the ground.

However, you could get action there and bet the rail too.

 

[bagofpaper]

I started playing pool in Baltimore (25th and Howard) in a bar filled with coke heads, coke dealers, and the nastiest women I have had the unpleasantness to see with my own eyes. Lot's of thugs and hos and what not.. and then there were the coked up punk rockers. I liked the place though. The drinks were cheap. The bartenders treated me good because I tipped. And noone really screwed with you in there. Anyhow, the back room with the barbox was an old shower room with the front wall knocked out. Every sound echoed in there. Completely tiled with graffiti all over. Kinda looked like that room in Saw movies where the guys have to hacksaw off their chained feet. The bathroom urinal never flushed just slowly evaporated the years old piss. The best action I ever saw in that place was a thug offered to play me a game of 8ball for his fake gold teeth which he popped out of his mouth and claimed were worth $1800. Oh, and some magazine rated it one of the worst bars in the US.

 

[ShootingArts]

I'm a graduate too

Started playing seriously in 1970. The first place I played in, somebody got stomped or cut, folks would walk around them on the floor until somebody got tired of them in the way. Then they might get a little help, or they might get drug out the way or pitched out a door, front or back.

I moved on from there to a ratty old pool hall that was a pool hall and is dearly missed. I also played anywhere there was a table. A cajun bar at the end of the world where dogs(of the four legged variety) wondered in and out and everybody from babies to great gran'merre were welcome. You mostly couldn't drink until you were old enough to hold a beer can by yourself though, they had standards. A riverfront bar that was a topless joint, when it turned into a gay bar the action was still good and I kept right on coming in and hauling out the cash. As others have mentioned above, biker bars when bikers were lifers, and the redneck bars, honky-tonks, and dance halls where there were sure to be some offers of a hair cut. If there was something resembling a pool table and cash changing hands I was home.

After years in these places, what most people consider sharking is a joke. One of the nicer places I played, the trick was to see if I could finish out a run after a gunshot which was happening three or four times a year while I was there. Of course I did have to take a quick look to see who was shooting and why first!

Funny thing, like most I do miss the good ol' days when things were rotten. I was young and immortal and the whole world was fun and games then.

Hu

 

[ez2h8]

Yup, I grew up playing 8 ball in bars in my teens and early 20's that were down right horrible. Bad neighborhoods, nasty people but always lots of pool and action if need be. I grew up in a rough area so I didn't find the bars offensive. Then I moved to Atlanta and realized corner bars did not exist there. For a night of drinking, we had to go to a sports bar or TGIFriday's type of place. Plenty of pool rooms though that did keep the place tidy in Atlanta. I did miss the corner bars back here in Cleveland. When I came home on vacation. I made it a point to visit the old dumps. Some are gone, some are worse off, none have improved, but patrons still show up. The people are a bit more shady now and the risk is not worth the reward as I get older. Fun memories while they lasted.

ez