When I was just warming up to the crowd at Speeds’ pool hall (I don’t think I’d met Prof. James Acquaintance yet), I spent a good bit of sitting at the bar, letting my eye drift around the room to see what was going on and developing a huge crush on a waitress named Lisa. There will definitely be more on her in another blog, sometime. One night, over in the far corner, I saw a guy buried in the Sports section of the Dallas Times Herald, glancing from time to time at a biker-looking guy playing 9-ball with a midget. Well, at first I thought he was a midget. He reminded me a lot of my friends and I learning how to play pool in my basement as grade schoolers, a 57″ cue being 4 inches too long to comfortably handle, unable to make a proper stance without standing on the balls of your feet.
Eventually, the biker departed for the electronic dart boards. The midget got a dollar bill from the guy reading the paper and came across the room to feed the jukebox. As he came closer, the midget morphed into a short 14-year-old (I didn’t know he was 14 at the time, he looked younger). Finding just the right music proved to be a time-consuming chore: the jukebox not only had both country and western, but Skynyrd too…so many choices! While the kid was flipping back and forth, I motioned Tom the bartender over and asked who the guy in the corner was.
“Oh, that’s Big J. He takes some book and other action. Can’t play anything but 9-ball, and is too smart to try otherwise.”
“Lemme guess…the kid’s Little J?”
Tom laughed a big belly laugh (he didn’t have another kind), and replied “You got it!”
I can’t claim to be any great paragon of virtue when it comes to gambling or being where I probably wasn’t supposed to. I used to go with my great uncle to the track when I was a kid…he worked the windows and cage at Arlington Park and Mayfair, and used to let me go back there with him from time to time. I remember explaining to all my friends in junior high what the “6 1/2 - 6″ and “+140″ meant after each baseball game in the newspaper. And I didn’t have a problem taking lawnmowing money from high school guys in their basements on Friday nights.
But I was momentarily repulsed by the idea of letting a 14-year-old hang out in a pool hall. I mean, there wasn’t anything dangerous or nefarious about the place. I don’t remember ever seeing a drug deal or a fight. But c’mon! It’s a pool hall! Drinking, smoking, gambling!
As the evening wore on, I thought of all the kids I knew that didn’t have any father-son time at all in their teenage years. For Little J, it was “Take Your Son To Work Day”, all year long. Could be worse.
October 18th, 2007 at 5:29 am
I struggle with this one often. My kids sometimes come in when I am playing online poker and I am conflicted about it. Just today I was telling the story of Absolute Poker to my sister and law in front of my kids and I wonder if that was a good idea.
October 18th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
I go through this a lot as well. My 7-year-old loves to play card games with me, including poker. He knows that I play and wants to go to Vegas with me every time he sees it on TV (which on Travel Channel, is about 23 hours a day). If I’m careless, I’ll leave note sheets lying by the computer upstairs with betting lines and trend notes scribbled on them, and he knows what they are.
I learned how to play draw poker from my grandmother at about the same age that he is now…and I think I grew up OK. But there’s a part of me that’s still uncomfortable with how much gambling he’s exposed to at a very impressionable age. It’s a hard line to draw and balance.
November 9th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
[...] couple of blogs ago, I introduced you to Big J and Little J, a father-son duo who used to spend a good amount of time at Speeds pool hall in Dallas. In [...]