I was walking home from work one day when I glimpsed something interesting in the window of a bar. I lived four blocks north of the bar, and my job was four blocks south of it. I had walked past the bar for a couple of years without ever noticing any activity in it. But when I saw two pool tables in the window, I wondered how I had managed to miss them. I walked into the bar, and asked the bartender if he had my favorite beer. When he placed a Rolling Rock on the bar, I told him to set a cot up in the back for me. “Rolling Rock and pool tables: I’m never leaving.”
Reading, music and pool playing are recurring themes in my scribblings. Two of those things— music and pool tables — can be found in most of the places I frequent, but I have found few places where all three are considered normal and natural activities. In the bar, pub and tavern scene, the emphasis is generally on consumption: food, booze, jukebox, and pool tables. Reading may be fundamental, but is not generally regarded as an appropriate activity for the average joint. Coffee houses yes; pool houses, not so much. But this bar and grill on the corner of 10th and Olive Street in St. Louis proved to be a place where I could sit and read, drink a Rolling Rock and rise from the table to shoot pool.
The bar’s great windows faced two intersecting streets. Lightly tinted, the glass let in too much light for daytime pool, but the sun spread wonderful light over the tables near the entrance. On the north side of the bar was a small alcove, raised one step, that was one two top table deep, and two tables long. It was the length of one window. I would sit in that window with a book and a beer and read, sometimes until the early evening, when the pool players would begin drifting in. Blooms of raucous laughter would split the swirling murmurs of early patrons; when the jukebox was plugged in, music would fill the spaces between the silences of uncertainty. I read, listened and watched.
A short story by Ernest Hemmingway places an old man in “A Clean, Well Lighted Place.” The man has “everything,” according to one of the waiters who has served him, but he prefers, at that late time, to have what another waiter describes as “…a clean and pleasant café … well lighted.” I have been to cafés that have been both clean and well lighted, but the bars and taverns I frequent care little for lighting that is not over the felt of a pool table.
I imagine that the staff of the pub I frequented in St. Louis found me odd at first, and harmless, at last. I sat, read, drank and shot pool. I did nothing that caused concern or undue notice, and even when I became (as one bartender described me) a “regular,” I made no demands, expected no more than an acknowledgement of my beverage of choice.
A friend sent me a message recently, saying that the pub has removed the pool tables. We lamented that, for we met in that place, over those tables. I know her husband because of my reading in that place, and hope to meet her new child, because of our shared joy on the pool tables.
I do not expect to find another place that will serve me as well as that one did, a place to read, and listen and play.