Old Songs in a New Cafe (7 page)

In case you have led a life more sheltered than I care to imagine, pool tables have pockets, billiard tables do not. At least
this was true in the world in which I grew up. Billiards is played with three balls. Two white, one red. One of the white
balls has a small spot on it to differentiate it from the other. One player shoots the “clear” and the other commands the
“spot.” The object is to make your cue ball hit each of the other two balls in one shot. A carom, in other words. Sound easy?
It is not. Billiards is a game of physics, geometry, composition, skill, and treachery.

And Sammy was good, very good, at it. He covered three angles on each shot. Make the carom. Set yourself up for the next shot.
Leave nothing for your opponent in case you miss. He taught me just about everything he knew, including how to hold ordinary
pool players in infinite disdain, as I followed him around the table, night after night, dragging a cue as tall as I was.

I entered Sammy’s world through a rite of passage. All cultures have these, and mine was no different. One Sunday morning
my parents and I drove over from Rockford to have dinner with my grandparents in Charles City. After we arrived and my mother
had hurried off to the kitchen, my dad looked at me with a glint of wickedness in his eyes and said, “Let’s go up to the Elks
Club”

For an eleven-year-old boy, this was tantamount to being invited into manhood. It was the big leagues. Locked doors, a bar,
silence on a Sunday morning, rumors of slot machines in the basement, and the smell of booze, smoke, and modest indiscretion
left over from the previous night’s party. It was a man’s world. Women were invited for the parties sometimes; children were
invited never, except for the annual Christmas bash, when the place, the language, and the behavior were sanitized.

My dad walked past the bar, flipped on the light over a pool table without breaking stride, and stood before the long racks
of cues. Like a scholar gently perusing books in a sacred library, he ran his fingers lightly over the cues, pausing now and
then to turn one and look at the number engraved on it indicating its weight.

He selected two, rolled them on the table to make sure they were straight, and casually slipped a few balls, including the
cue ball, from the leather pockets. The training began. “Never, ever, shoot hard, except in special cases.” “Here, spread
the last three fingers of your left hand on the table, crook your first finger over to meet your thumb, and control the cue
by running it through the circle made by your finger and thumb. Only amateurs put all five fingers down and run the cue over
the place between the finger and the thumb.” “Here’s how English works.” “Here are some tough shots and how to handle them.”

It went on like that. For several weeks, each time we drove to Charles City on a Sunday morning, we shot pool. My dad was
a fine player. I learned from watching him. Learned the language and the moves. Learned to take it seriously.

After the training, I was turned loose at Braga’s place (we never called it “The Sportsman”). Braga and my dad were fishing
buddies, so who knows what kind of pact was forged to assure my mother that, indeed, I would be all right there behind the
steamed-over windows, lost in the thick smoke, and subject to the wild yelling and pointed oaths that came from the card room
in the back, the room that had a sign saying “No Miners” tacked to its swinging-door entrance. (I remember pondering the fact
that there was not a mine within 100 miles of Rockford.)

It was a dime a cue, loser pay, and it nearly always was crowded. My pool and fishing crony, Dennis Parker, and I headed for
there every afternoon when we escaped from school. And, of course, weekends were best. On Fridays we raced to Braga’s, put
a nickel in the pinball machine, hoisted it up on our toes when Gerald wasn’t looking, and ran up 200 free games, enough to
keep us going for hours. One of us shot pool, one played pinball, and then we traded off.

I used to sit in school and dream of the beautiful patterns the pool balls made as they rolled, contemplating strategies for
difficult shots. I kept shooting and got better. Pretty soon, I could spend all weekend in Braga’s for an outlay of maybe
forty cents, not counting the mustard-smeared hot dogs I ate from the machine that went round and round by the cash register.
Sometimes Gerald hired me to rack balls on Saturday nights. I picked up a dollar for the evening doing that and actually showed
a profit for my day,

I acquired my own cue for $5 from Kenny Govro. Kenny, it was said, had a bad heart and counted on his American Indian wife,
Snow, to support him. He claimed he was giving up pool and billiards, in a fit of anger over losing one night, and sold me
the cue.

It was a thing of beauty. Seventeen ounces of light-colored gleaming wood, cork grip, trimmed in ivory. An arrow for the wars
that consumed me. It rested quietly in a special, locked rack fastened to a wall inside the card room, until I gently removed
it each day and began to shoot pool (“miners” were allowed in the card room to get their private cues).

My mother was worried. Remember, this was only eighteen miles southeast of River City. She could spell trouble, she knew it
started with t, and she knew what that fateful letter rhymed with. But she was overmatched. I shot pool out front, my dad
was in the card room playing pinochle, and at least she knew where I was.

The only real concession she demanded, and she stood absolutely firm on this, was that I undress on the back porch and leave
my “awful, smelly clothes out there.” Those were her words. I thought I smelled just fine, anointed as I was with smoke, mustard
stains, cue chalk, and the unmistakable musk of burgeoning skill.

At some point, I don’t remember when, I was allowed to try the billiard table. This was another step in the rite of passage,
as significant as learning to play pool. The billiard table was Gerald’s glory. He kept its smooth, unmarked surface and lively
cushions covered with light canvas when it was not in use. The balls were stored safely out of reach in a box behind the front
counter. You had to have Gerald’s permission to play on the billiard table. Perhaps twenty people held that permission at
any time.

There is a beauty about billiards that’s hard to explain if you never have played. It’s like watching a ballet, or listening
to Bach. It contains within it pure form, an aesthetic of motion, point and counterpoint, fuguelike movement, and the sense
of a small universe into which one can plunge forever.

It was a different place from the cacophony of the pool tables only a few feet away. A place of silence, of concentration,
of men who knew what they were doing. And Sammy Patterson ruled that world with a fearsome and undisputed grip.

The showdown was, I suppose, inevitable. The teacher, the student, the game. There are vectors at work out there that we do
not understand, that bring us together in particular settings at chosen times, with the outcomes known only to those curious
gods of chance and logic.

If there was a definable cause, though, it had to do with Kenny Govro. Kenny was regarded as the second-best billiards player
in town, some distance behind Sammy. Shortly after his announced retirement from the game, he decided to renege on his promise
and was casting around one night for someone to play. All he could find was the kid who had bought his cue. Oh well, a little
practice to get the rust off. I slaughtered him. Sammy’s teaching and the constant practice were working.

Kenny blamed it on the loss of his cue, re-entered retirement, and left Braga’s cursing about cues and smart-aleck kids and
life in general. My shellacking of Kenny may have convinced Sammy that it was about time to see what the kid could do.

It all came down on one of those hot, humid Iowa evenings in June, around 1953.I was in the general vicinity of fourteen by
this time. Sammy and I never had really played a serious game. Instead, he would set up shots, show me how to attack them
(“medium left English, off the left side of the red ball, hit the side cushion, then the end cushion, then the other side,
and it’ll head right for that old spot ball down in the corner”), and generally was trying to make a first-class billiards
player out of the kid who followed him around.

I can’t remember how the game got organized. There always was a certain mating dance that occurred when two good players were
going to have at it. But, somehow, the little buttons on the wires overhead where the points were kept got shoved back, and
the cues were chalked.

Word had flashed around in that mysterious small-town way that Sammy and I were going to play. Ordinarily, this would not
have meant much, but the same communication system had already disseminated the news about my easy victory over Kenny, and
a fair amount of interest was generated.

In fact, quite a lot of interest was generated. By the time Sammy and I squared off, some twenty or thirty spectators had
gathered. For a fourteen-year-old boy up against the Master, it was the Coliseum at noon, the sun and the sand, a matter of
virility and honor lined out in some distant chant about young men and old lions.

We began. The match was to 500 points. I was on top of my game, running off strings of 20 or more points as my turn came.
Sammy was not playing well. Perhaps it was the heat, perhaps it was because he had been conversing intently and at length
with his flask while we warmed up. After a while, though, the magic welled up within him, and he began to make some long runs.
It worried me. He was capable, I knew, of running off 75 points in one turn. I faltered, lost my confidence for a bit, recovered,
and got back into it.

To this day, I can feel what it felt like then—-the heat, the sweat, the smoke, the quiet murmuring of the men gathered around,
and the old words of my father and Sammy flowing with clarity through my mind (“shoot easy,” “high right English,” “four cushions
and get the red ball back up in the left corner,” “if you are going to miss, don’t leave him anything”).

I began to see that I actually could win. I smelled and tasted the possibility. Teetering there on the brink of manhood, I
got down hard and tight and mean. One or two long runs, and I had it. It was over. I couldn’t believe it. Sammy looked tired,
but I cared only that I had won.

I remember sprinting for home, bursting in and yelling, “I beat Sammy, I beat Sammy.” My dad seemed surprised, went downtown
to check out the facts, came home and didn’t say much, except to congratulate me in a quiet way.

I didn’t play much after that. Somehow, it wasn’t the same. Mostly, I just strutted around with “Champ” written in invisible
letters on my chest. I talked incessantly at home about the victory, and my father kept agreeing that, yes, it was quite a
triumph.

A few weeks later, I strolled into Braga’s. Dad was lounging against the counter talking with Gerald on a quiet Tuesday night.
He grinned at me, “Son, want to play a little billiards?” Now, my dad was not a billiards player, just pool. Oh, he knew the
rules and so forth, but he never played much. Cocky, I grinned back, “Sure.”

Only Braga was there to see it. We chalked up, cleared the wires, and started. It was no contest.

My dad was a peculiar guy, good at anything requiring hand-eye coordination. He had worked something out with Gerald about
practice time and had been bending over that green cloth for scores of hours, unbeknown to me. There was no letting up this
time, as he sometimes did when he was beating me at pool in my learning days. He really went after it.

I was both rusty and rattled. He just kept grinning. Gerald watched, jingling coins in his change apron. I got mad and played
worse. Dad played better. He scalded me. I refused his offer of a ride home and came sulking in a few hours later.

Other things took over my life. Basketball, falling in love, working. I never played much, if any, pool or billiards again.
I came home from college once, went into visit Gerald, walked around, and saw my old cue out in the public racks. It was battered
from being slammed down on the pool tables when the “slop” players missed easy shots. I looked at it. It looked back dolefully,
a mistress cast away for prettier things. Like the lovers that we were in an earlier time, we gazed softly at one another
for a moment, sharing the memories rich and warm before I turned and walked away.

The lessons come slowly. Sammy died twenty years or so after that night of thunder and victory in Braga’s place. Then Gerald
went. Then my dad. The four of us were involved in a complicated dance, unchoreo-graphed and intricate, unrehearsed and precise.

They taught me rhythms I have only recently begun to sense, melodies that escaped me until now—that Zen and precision are
not at odds, that small universes exist if you acquire the discipline and skill to enter them, and that grace, passion, and
an elegance of spirit are all that really matter, whether you’re shooting billiards, making love, playing the guitar, winning,
or losing.

You see, Gerald Braga didn’t run a pool hall in a small Iowa town. He was the keeper of an academy. Sammy Patterson and my
dad were among the faculty, and I, God love them all, had the good fortune to study there in the times when I was small, and
tender, and wondering what it was like to be a man.

______________________________________

I
n his apartment in Calcutta, there was a grand piano. He wore khaki then, walked the bazaars and tapped away at the piano
or played lawn tennis during his leaves from upcountry. After a week or two, he was ready when the call came for the return
to Dinjan.

He carried only a small suitcase for the journey, his “laundry” as he called it, and looked forward to getting back to the
jungle and the mountains, away from the sterile and crumbling world of the British raj. His flight left Calcutta, climbing
northeast over the Khasi Hills toward Assam, the secluded province that curls off main India and lies snuggled up on the left
shoulder of Burma, just short of the Himalayan rise.