Sometime back, when the always intrepid Mr. Z, aka Azazello, finally turned an old talking point of ours, the Brotherhood of the Green Felt, into an actual DKos group, and wrote an inaugural diary about his personal downfall into our brotherhood, I promised I'd write a diary about my own. So here goes.
I'm sitting here listening to David Bromberg, from some old concert way back when, but I'm really thinking about events fifteen or so years before.
If you heard Robert Preston (We got trouble, trouble, right here in River City) you know that a young boy can fall prey to the lure of the green felt, moreso to the click of balls falling into the pockets of a pool table, I'm not here to talk bad about a reputable billiards table or it's players. I mean Pool, with a capital P, that rhymes with, . . . , well, you finish that one for yourself.
At the tender age (aw, jeez, by then I was anything but "tender") of fourteen I first ventured into Scottie's Pool Hall, on Fordham Road in the Bronx, up above Mme. Baldwina's Bridal Shop, right across the street from the only Sears, Roebuck's in the Bronx.
Trying to remember, there were perhaps twenty tables (maybe I've added a row, it's a long time since 1960), all but one of the "pocket billiards" variety, you know, pool. In the far corner was a pocketless table, where some fellas of questionable habitual means of support played billiards, the three cushion variety, but it was always plain to us youngsters that our participation wasn't welcome. Or appreciated. Especially not tolerated.
Later, I learned who those billiard players were, but at the time they were just some guys about my Dad's age.
Anyway, the game at Scottie's was straight pool, some folks call it fourteen and one or some name like that. Shoot any ball you think you can make, no "solids and stripes" eight ball kind of stuff. The score was kept on beads on a wire that extended over every table, four light colored beads, a dark colored bead, four more light ones, a numbered bead, kind of like a rosary.
During each rack each player's beads were held out from the accumulated beads, a moveable feast. Every scratch, i.e., putting the cue ball into the pocket, caused one bead to be subtracted from the total. It really was possible to go backwards in total score. I've seen it done. I've done it.
There were fifty beads on the wire. First one to get his fiftieth bead slid over won the game. Sometimes, of course, that didn't matter all that much. Scottie charged for the use of his tables by the hour (forgive me, BoGF), when I started it was sixty cents an hour. So there were any number of arrangements possible; you and I might choose to play "loser pays," or "split time," or perhaps something more creative.
In any case, Scottie was a wizard when it came to keeping track of what was happening on each and every one of his tables. He saw everything. He only spoke of any of it when it might damage his interests, more particularly the cloth on his tables. He always, always, heard the calls "off and on," which meant that whoever was paying for the time was no longer responsible, and someone else was "on."
Once, I can literally call it as the night of the NBA All-Star Game in 1962, two Black guys waltzed - well, maybe not exactly waltzed, but doing a step that lily white joint hadn't seen, into Scottie's and, commanding the center of the pool room, announced "I'm (so-and-so) and my partner is (so-and-so). We're from Detroit. I play pool, he plays three cushion billiards. We'll be back next Tuesday night to play anybody in the house for any stakes they care to play for, up to a thousand dollars a game." And then they walked out.
Turns out our pool players weren't nearly good enough, and the games the next Tuesday hardly got beyond $300 per. Which the Detroiter pocketed all of. The three cushion games were far more interesting. I hadn't realized how good our resident three cushion players were, or how much they were willing to gamble. The story ends with the Bronx money headed toward the Motor City.
Later, I heard they'd accomplished pretty much the same thing at the Ames, in Times Square.
Sometime later, at a sporting event in Madison Square Garden, almost surely a Knicks game, I saw the afternoon three cushion billiards players at their real job. Sitting some rows back in the mezzanine, they kept accepting pieces of paper, much of it U.S. currency, and handing it back out.
And then I knew how they could afford to hang out in Scottie's all afternoon.