I remember rolls of hundred dollar bills, in a time when a hundred bucks would pay rent for a couple of months. I rarely saw the old men playing pool with strangers. They gambled mostly with each other, so the money must have just circulated. The nicotine walls in the pool hall were spattered with warning signs, such as "NO GAMBLING!" Back then it was as logical to me as "NO PRAYING" signs in church.
I was a couple years short of eighteen, and that was 40 years ago. My recollections have had plenty of time to morph into something more exciting than facts. Maybe I didn't see hundred dollar bills. Maybe they were ten dollar bills. Maybe.
I do know that there was more than pool going on in that place. It had a back room I never entered. I was there every day after school, but those old men never let me see what was in the back room. They always seemed nervous about it. There was a drink machine in the pool room that opened like a trunk. The bottles were strung by their necks on tracks, and had to be pulled through a clanky trap door at one end. I don't recall if there was any food or candy there. I don't think so. But the place was downtown in the middle of everything and if something was needed it wasn't far away. They didn't seem to want anything. I never saw one of those old men come or leave. They were just there, like the chairs and tables. I liked those old men a lot. They liked me too, and taught me to play pool.
In those days, just after the Korean war, everybody smoked. In order to find someone in the pool hall, it was necessary to bend over and search beneath a layer of smoke that hung from the ceiling. I was too young to indulge, but I smoked what everybody else exhaled until I was old enough to steal, or occasionally buy a pack of my own. A new pack would last me a year or two, and I kept them, along with my Photoplay magazines, hidden from my parents, who would have stripped me of my flesh had they known. They were wise, if blind.
