The Color of Money

Sorry for the hiatus. I’ll get back to the trilogy shortly.

You know what I find ridiculous? Pool halls. In general only really good pool players go to pool halls and there’s really only two reasons for you to be good at pool: you grew up with a table in your house or your hang out bar in post high school/college had a table and you chose to play pool instead of hit on chicks, unless of course you played pool to hit on chicks, in which case you’re probably living in a trailer now, you consider Free Bird to be the best song ever written, and your eight kids are all named with some derivative of your or one of your wives’ names.

I am not one of those people. I play pool like a one-armed 4-year old who lost his good arm. I’m terrible and I hate it. I find pool halls to be the most judgmental places on earth. So what if I can’t hit a combo shot in the corner pocket? Or a straight shot into any pocket? I always feel people staring at me like some sort of anomaly like not being able to play pool is on par with having your eyelid pierced. Anytime someone asks me to go somewhere to play pool I’m like, “Maybe we could just go to a male strip club instead; it’ll be less awkward for me.”

To make matters worse I really should be good at pool. I took geometry; I studied physics; I know the laws of motion (whenever an object A exerts a force on object B, object B exerts an equal and opposite force on object A) yet I can’t make the stupid fucking white ball exert an equal and opposite force on any other ball on the table to make it fall into any pocket except the 8 ball, which I can somehow sink with expert efficiency at any time except when I’ve actually cleared all the rest of the balls from the table. It’s bullshit.

Obviously I’m bringing this up because I went to a pool hall tonight, or more appropriately, a bar whose only purpose was pool. One of the guys at work asked me to go so I told him I play pool like a one-armed 4-year old who lost his good arm. He insisted and I couldn’t find any male strip clubs in the area.  It was terrible. I lost every game. By a lot. In most cases I’d have all my balls on the table and he’d have to wait for me to sink a few just to free up some space so he could get to his last ball. After the first game I ran out of all my standard excuses: “This stick is all bowed; I don’t think this table is level; man, my shoulder is still sore from [insert some ridiculous activity that I obviously didn’t participate in].”

We played like 9 games. I have a goddamn blister on my finger, that’s how much we played. After every game I’d be like, “Well… that was fun but…”

Then he’d be like, “Let’s rack ‘em up again!”

Shit!

I don’t even know how to rack. I watch these people throw all the balls in the triangle then spend the next ten minutes switching them around into some very precise order that somehow lets them win every time. Worse than racking is breaking. I don’t think there is a more stressful situation in any leisure sport than breaking in pool. At one point I broke and all the balls moved like 4 centimeters so he was like, “Uh… maybe we should rack again.” Fuck you. Maybe I’m not playing well because this pool stick isn’t jammed up your ass.

I’m never playing pool again.