100 on my mind...

I usually go to Sacco's three times a week, and each one is a different mental event. On Saturday afternoons, I go to practice for three or four hours -- the place is usually pretty dead, no one around but Roger at the desk. On Sundays, I play in my weekly league. But the third event is the one that's probably the most purely enjoyable: my weekly appointment with Frank to play straight pool. Frank is a retired petroleum engineer who now works at his second career as a crime analyst for the Somerville Police Department, and works for fun a couple nights a week at Sacco's from 6-10.

I usually arrive a little before six, and try to park on the street because the meters quit running at 6:00 instead of the 8:00 of the public parking lot across the street. I can tell if Frank is already there or not by looking for his black Cadillac STS. I park, put a quarter or two into the meter, and then pull my cue case, set of balls, and water bottle out of the back seat and walk inside.

The first thing I do is to listen for the sounds that will tell me whether the place is busy or not. If I hear bowling, then I know there'll be a lot of folks around; if not, then I can either hear a pool ball or the TV behind the desk, and I'll know there's hardly anyone in yet. The hallway is covered with decades of news clippings and old bowling photos, but I hardly see those at all any more; I walk right by. When I first started going there, they were one of the elements that drew me in -- the whole place is a kind of candlepins museum, and the foyer is an introduction to that history. But now I just go past them all.

I come around the corner and see Dave working behind the desk, usually with his laptop open. I put my cue case down on the side table next to the microwave, carry the ball case to Table 1, and scatter balls across the cloth. Opening the cue case, I pull out the butt of my playing cue and the older of the two shafts that fit it (since we're playing straight pool, there aren't any opening break shots, so I leave my break cue in the case, unlike Saturday and Sunday). I take the joint protectors off the two halves of the cue, screw the butt and shaft together, and lay it on the table. I put the protectors into the small pocket of the case, pull out the three cubes of chalk, and put those on the rail. Once I pick up my cue, Dave turns on the table lights -- the meter only runs when the lights are on, so Dave's saving me a dime or so by waiting until I'm ready to start playing.

I look over the pattern of balls on the table, looking for shots where I can stop the cue ball dead and have a shot at a subsequent ball. At the beginning of a rack, I'm usually trying to see four or five balls ahead, so I'm thinking eleven side - four corner - six corner, with a couple of inches of draw - ten opposite end - fifteen side. Okay, so 11-4-6-10-15. Once I get through the six ball, I'm now looking a ball or two past the 15 that I'd already identified as the end of my opening sequence. "That's blocked... that's blocked... looks like the 9 is next, so how can I get there? Probably a drag shot, about a foot of run..."

Don't worry that you don't know what I'm talking about here. I'm just narrating what's in my head...

Stop. Stop. Draw. Stop. Drag. Stop left. Miss.

When I miss, one of three things has almost always happened. The first is that I've shot harder than I wanted to, and the pocket has rejected the ball. The second is that I've had a shot that had to run almost parallel to the rail, and I have a hard time seeing those -- I often over-cut those so that the ball rolls exactly parallel to the rail, which isn't what I want. But the third reason for missing is what pool players call "going blind:" I've stopped looking at my contact point on the target ball and I'm thinking ahead to what I want to do next. You really have to focus on strategy when you're standing, and then leave that all aside and think about nothing but that one shot when you're down.

A word about aim. When I'm playing well, what I'm seeing is an imaginary line that runs from the center of the pocket through the center of the ball I'm aiming at. To make the shot, I have to put the cue ball at the tangent point where that imaginary line would emerge from my side of the ball. I really do see a kind of faint line, about an eighth of an inch wide and almost the same color as the cloth but a little lighter. There's no line there, of course, but when I'm playing well, I see it almost as though someone had drawn it on the cloth.

One of the new league players, a local music teacher, arrives to practice. One of the unspoken rules of pool halls is that if the place has enough open tables, you never take one that's adjacent to one in use. The three tables that are in the best condition are 1, 2 and 7, so this player takes 7, which is diagonal to mine.

Frank comes in a couple of minutes before six, and we toss the coin to open the match. I win the toss and make Frank break (breaking is a huge disadvantage in straight pool). He leaves a ball open. I make it, and play a safety. Frank and I trade safeties for four or five shots, and he makes a loose ball. Then he thinks he sees a combination in the rack, a "dead shot" that can't go anywhere but into the pocket. I'm not so sure, but he feels brave and takes a go at it. Turns out I was right, and now that the balls are opened up around the table, I run out the last twelve to take a 13-1 lead.

We play for a couple of hours before Frank decides it's time for a smoke break. We put the cues down on the table, Dave turns off the table light, and we grab a couple of chairs and sit on the front step. That's when we catch up with what we've each been doing for the past week -- the presentation he does once a month for the Mayor, the classes I'm teaching, his son's band playing at the Middle East. Just friends staying friends.

After his White Owl burns down, we head back inside and rejoin the game where we'd left off. I'm leading 57-47 in a game to 100. (If either of us were any good, two hours would be more than enough time to get to 100. But that presumes that one or the other of us would regularly pull out a run of 30 or 40... I think Frank's high run is eleven, and mine is 14. I have a video of a tournament in which the German player Rolf Souquet comes to the table down 39-30, and stays at the table for a little less than an hour and wins 150-39.)

The second half of the game is where things usually are determined; if I'm playing poorly, we'll stay close, but if I'm pretty loose, I'll open up a lead. And so too for tonight, in which my ten-ball lead ends up as a 29-point win. Frank and I shake hands, I unscrew my cue, and reverse the sequence of storage that I started with three hours earlier. Once everything's packed away, I usually go into the bathroom and wash my hands; the heel of my bridge hand is grimy from all the chalk dust imbedded into the cloth of the table, and my cue hand (which I also chalk with) has a heavy layer of green chalk dust between my fingers.

Out to the car (it's dark now), put things away, and drive home. If I had to describe to you my route to get from Sacco's to my apartment a mile and a half away, you'd never find it. I do it with no conscious thought except for watching the traffic.