Pool halls have always been a secret fascination of mine. Until recently, I'd never been to one. My earliest exposure to pool was at my aunt and uncle's house where they had a table in their basement. My mom's side of the family would gather there every year for Easter, and after a couple hours of normal family pleasantries, lunch and a couple minutes of post-meal relaxing I would turn to my mom and dad to ask whether it was okay that I used the table. I would then spend the rest of the day downstairs. This was before I really knew rules and just liked playing angles and making combo shots. Eventually my interest extended to spending afternoons watching nine ball on ESPN2. Though I got older, I still looked forward to Easter. I started playing matches against myself and sometimes my dad or my cousin would play against me. Win or lose I always had fun.
Eventually playing billiards became something I could do whenever I wanted. When living in apartments just outside of Ann Arbor, my friends and I would often go to Pinball Pete's and spend an evening playing DDR, Guitar Hero and team eight ball matches. My girlfriend at the time bought me my own stick as a present. Her parents had a table at their house and I didn't want to admit how often I thought about playing whenever I stayed there. When I started in the shipping department of the place where I still work, I had the evening shift and during the last couple hours of the day when it got slow, I would wander to the cafeteria where a table was set up. For a year after it opened, almost every night out in Ferndale with my friends where we had no destination in mind ended at the Loving Touch. Imagine how at home I felt in a city that opened a pool hall two blocks down from the apartment I had just moved into.
I never took a Physics class in school. All the same, angles, velocity and a lot of the other factors that are a part of being good at billiards have come naturally to me. I don't always bring my A-game to the table because one of the best things about pool is that you can simply have fun playing and hanging out with friends. One of my friends who I've gotten closer with recently I discovered grew up playing and provides quite a challenge whenever we play. Enticed by the ability to sharpen my skills, I've been inviting him over frequently to hang out and shoot some games. Initially we would just go to the Loving Touch, until one week they were having a show, and I decided it was time I visited a true pool hall. We walked into Hilton-Cue Family Billiards to find three rows of tables and a row of arcade games at the back. We spent two hours there, and I was delighted at the atmosphere. The place was practically deserted; the couple groups of us there keeping to our own corners of the room.
When we arrived there yesterday, the place seemed strange: dark and quiet. We walked to the desk for a rack of balls and the grumpy old man behind the counter flipped on the light over table #2 at the front of the building, the same table we'd played on previously. As we were racking up, a couple teenagers took a nearby table, and I realized one thing that had been missing as the radio was flipped on. I laughed to myself that the man behind the counter had been enjoying his peace and quiet, but us youngsters needed to have a soundtrack of dance songs to entertain us while we played. What amused me most about the strange atmosphere of the place last time we went there was the radio. Ninety percent of the time I listen to CDs in my car (the other ten being Tigers games), so I am completely ignorant when it comes to popular music. The first time we went there, there was an alternative rock station on, and I mused to my friend how distracting it would be if we could listen to music of our choosing. It seemed that the supervisors of the billiard hall chose to tune to whatever station it's patrons requested - or whatever they would seem to enjoy. This time, my friend commented on the innocuousness of such an element in regards to our pool playing. I commented about how often I pay attention to tiny details in situations and have a hard time focusing on what I really want to be doing. A career that values multi-tasking has inadvertently gotten me to apply the same mindset to my personal life. There's a balance that needs to be struck there, and it's something that I'm consciously working on. After we had been there for an hour, I realized the other thing that had been missing when the house lights were flipped on.
I'm a little comforted whenever a group of teenagers comes into the pool hall. Billiards seems like this lost art, kept alive by old men with cigarette-stained tables in their garages and hipsters that need an activity to center their drunken weekends around (the kind of thing that would make me a hypocrite if I didn't admit to doing myself.) The refreshing sobriety of Hilton-Cue Family Billiards is one of its nicest charms. We played about a dozen games and I only managed to win once when I missed the one ball on a break and ended up sinking the eight. We spent about half the time waxing intellectual about this and that. Every time the two of us spend a good amount of time together, my brain goes off on enlightening and satisfying tangents of thought. Maybe that's why I can only ever make short streaks of good shots that never seem to span an entire game. That's not enough to keep me from wanting to go there again and again.
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