(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. I was probably fresh out of 8th grade.
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 once 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. My first cue was a carefully considered investment I made one day after another of my runs through the sports department of The Emporium, a glorious downtown department store on Market Street, right across from the cable car turn platform. The store was a throwback to San Francisco’s post earthquake glory days, with its huge glass dome, and was the place my family purchased a good many of our necessities over the years.
The Cue that became the object of my lust was displayed in a glass case there. The first time I saw it I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. And, with every passing visit, my desire grew and grew until it could not be denied. Somehow I scrimped and saved the $29.00 ransom the store wanted for the cue -- with its own faux leather luggage-style case, with red flocked interior (of course), and which showed off the cue to best advantage -- and sealed the deal one memorable weekend.
The Cue was a transcendent thing of beauty: polished brass joint; rich polyurethaned walnut forearm; red and black specked nylon wrap (genuine); and a butt plate of iridescent multicolored rings. I thought my Mom and Dad were going to kill me when they found out I had squandered most of my meager funds on “a pool cue?!” and I did suffer some withering words, offered in fatherly counsel, about “wasting” my money. But I did not care. It was worth it all.
I remember frequently locking myself in my room and lovingly wiping down the forearm of The Cue, using several paper towels and much of my Mom’s can of Pledge. To this day, like catching the wafting scent of a perfume favored by an old flame, a whiff of lemon-scented Pledge still reminds me of that cue and our first summer together. After a few months I came to realize that the black luggage-style case (with red flocked interior) made my look of aspiring hustler somewhat less than credible and I switched over to a soft plain black zippered case.
And so, cue in case in hand, I would make the 20 minute walk from my home on Winding Way to the pool room. There, 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 off 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, mustached, long brown hair parted in the middle, and who favored leather jackets. There was also a whole cast of other supporting players, like the two black brothers, (no, really, they were related) Sammy and Fred, who took to calling me “Mr. Serious” (a nick name which can still elicit a chuckle from those that 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’ sum gun.
I can’t remember exactly how it came about, but there was an older Italian gentleman at The Billiard Palacade 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, wore black-rimmed glasses, and sported a 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 seemed to take some sort of crazy pride in it all and never said an unkind, or mean-spirited word, while my younger insensitive self poured repeated beatings 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.
Lou Figueroa
