2000's Miles and Two Pool Halls
How I managed to keep my teeth and win a few games
It’s 5PM. Big Iron by Marty Robbins is playing in my Airpods, and I find myself once again in the café car of the Amtrak Regional (No Titto’s bottles in hand), sitting next to a man who has discovered the delights of speakerphone yet forgotten the beauty of privacy. This must be the train to New York.
Today marks my third trip to New York in 10 days. Since we last talked (I like to think of this blog as a dialog, just you and me, dear reader), I’ve been sleeping in the back of my 2010 Acura MDX, exploring the depths of Appalachia in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. In four days, I managed to cover nearly 2,000 miles, often praying my Washington, DC plates would magically convert to PA tags.
After another 16-hour day on the road, around 11 PM one night, I realized there was no food within at least 80 miles of me in any direction, truly in the middle of nowhere Appalachia. I cracked open Google Maps, found the only open establishment, and wandered into what I later learned was the local watering hole.
With a craving for a cheeseburger and a urinal (for those who don’t know me well, the cheeseburger for eating, the urinal for urinating), I pulled into a bar with quite literal steel walls. Before I walked in, I knew I was on thin ice; I grabbed my trucker hat I kept in the back of my car in case of emergency, a handful of cash (no chance this place takes cards), and opened the door to the bar. For those of you who are loyal readers and know about the wall of smoke I encountered last week when I tried to put out a fire at my parent’s lake house, this would mark the second time I cracked a door and was hit with a faceful of smoke. This time, however, the smoke was from a group of men who were chain-smoking Marlboro Reds (Real Cowboys smoke Reds), and when I say chain-smoking I mean absolutely lighting it up. These guys could not care less that they were smoking in an enclosed space, and neither could the bartender; in fact, a sign on the door to the men’s room seemed to encourage smoking inside, stating, “Please don’t throw butts into the toilets; it makes them hard to re-light,” a fact which I had never considered.
I sat next to the door, said hello to the bartender with my best Southern accent, and ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and iced water. As I picked my head up, I received looks from all four men playing pool; the message was clear: don’t. Whatever you think you’ll be doing here, you won’t be. I made clear eye contact, acknowledging the men and intentionally respected their space. About one second into sitting at the bar and making eye contact with the pool crew, I knew this was the kind of place where if you speak to “somebody’s woman” or mention Joe Biden, you might not leave with your face intact.
As I waited for my cheeseburger, I checked the men’s hips and ankles for holstered weapons, eyed my exits, and looked for the closest knife and glass bottle. I consumed no alcohol and did not stand up to find my way to the long-coveted urinal. I figured that turning my back in a place like this and heading into a dead-end bathroom, an establishment I was not welcome in as an outsider, had limited upside and a pretty significant downside; in other words, I held it. My burger arrived, I housed it in under 5 minutes, slapped $15 in cash on the table (the tab was $9; gotta love PA prices), and peeled out on the road to New York City.
Fast-forward 24 hours and a full day of in-person meetings with no natural sleep, and I find myself once again hanging out next to a pool table, this time on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For those of you unacquainted with the LES, in the ’90s, it was the mecca for hard drugs, cheap sex, and casual street violence; today, it is mostly NYU kids staring in the role of broke college student, wearing white Air Forces and racking up $200 bar tabs exclusively full of Miller Lites. Occasionally, though, the LES still has a bit of the rough and tumble from the 90s, and with my luck, I found it.
You see, I like playing pool, I grew up with a pool table, and I’m a pretty good pool player, once someone told me to fuck myself right before a game; I looked him in the eyes and ran the table from the break in under 90 seconds, needless to say, he did he not shake hand but I stayed on the table. The takeaway, you ask? I’m a very regular-looking dude, not particularly buff, and nobody would suspect I know how to play much pool. So when I put my Costco Gold Card on the pool table in the LES to signify that I was up next, I played right into that character.
A few rounds went by, and the guys around the table were a little grouchy and faux-macho, but that’s how it goes in basement pool halls. Thirty minutes in, I saw my card getting skipped. I put my hand in, showed my Costco Card was sitting for a while, and exercised my right to play. I got on the table, and the game was going well. Usually, after the first shot, I ask my opponent what rules they play by; the short, intoxicated, frustrated, and likely limited in his ability to reach items on the top shelf of a grocery store, of a man shot me a look and said, “BAR RULES.”
As you may imagine, this was entirely unhelpful as I did not know which bar rules he was playing by. A few shots went by, and then he scratched. I was already beating him when he scratched, so this made the situation quite a bit less pleasant for him. Not knowing what Bar Rules he was playing by, I generously played ball in hand, and he shouted, “BAR RULES!” I jawed back that, indeed, these were bar rules, though maybe not his.
We went back and forth, and I decided it was another instance where if I kept my mouth shut, I could leave the second bar in 24 hours with all appendages intact, so I played his rules. I put the ball behind the line and made two shots straight; as I lined up for a third, he broke, snapped, and his mind went full ballistic. He smashed his pool cue on the table and stormed off; I looked up, said next man up, and started to rack the balls; this, dear reader, I thought was the end of his tantrum.
It was about 15 seconds later, as I was speaking to a young lady who had witnessed my glorious win (by default but still a win), that the man came back, grabbed the cue ball, and smashed it as hard as he could against the table. I looked up, smiled in his direction, and said, “I think it’s time I go.” I hustled out of the basement, called an Uber, and got a bagel from a corner deli before heading to bed.
There’s no good way to end this article besides saying, I do quite a bit, many people know me as a Machine Learning Venture Capitalist, some as a fledgling podcast host, others as a substack king, a handful as a political strategist, and a few as that guy who uses a Costco Gold Card instead of quarters at the local pool hall. If you know me one way, keep reading and you just might get to know me in another.