The Pool Hall Kid

 

       I went to work at the pool hall one afternoon, straight from school.  Ol' Jim and Ol' Bill were there and they could tell I was pretty despondent. I was 13 years old and had just got my first pair of glasses.  I wanted a girl friend awfully bad at that time and those glasses made me uglier than I had ever been.  One of the older girls called me ‘four eyes’.

  

       Now ‘the pool hall kid’ wasn’t my only nickname. Now I was gonna be called the “four-eyed pool hall kid”.  I told my old friends there on the front bench that I was thinking on quitting school and just staying there in the pool hall forever.  Ol’ Bill asked what brought that on and I told him.  I was born too ugly to ever get a girl friend and now I was uglier because of those glasses.

       Ol’ Jim tried to comfort me.  “Onc’t when I was a kid,” he said, “me an’ some a my cousins all found a mirror on a wall in the barn an' we stood in front of it makin’ scary faces to see who could be the ugliest an’ they all said that no matter what I did I couldn’t look no uglier then what I already was.”

         He used his foot to pull the spittoon over a little closer to his range, and then went on.  “But by the time I was 20 years old,” he smiled,” girls was crazy about me.”

       

       “I learnt the way to get a girlfriend,” Virgil Halstead chipped in from his end of the bench. When I was a kid, I cut up some catalog pages to the exact size of a dollar bill and rolled it all up with a dollar bill around it and let Lucy Johnson see it and she spoke to me for the first time in years.  And when I put a five dollar bill around that roll of catalog papers… by dang, she wanted to marry me!!”

       At that everyone on the front bench laughed and slapped their knees and nodded their heads as if they knew what he was talking about.

       But it was pretty clear to me that if I stayed ugly much longer then my only option for a girl-friend was a girl as ugly as me, and I didn’t know any! As to the girls in my school there were just various grades of pretty, and my chances with any of them was comparable to the chance of me killing three ducks with three shots.

       It is rather amazing as I look back on my years working in my dad’s pool hall that I was around a number of World War I veterans, including my Grandpa Dablemont.  Few of them talked about being overseas as young men, fighting the Kaiser. Most of the time, life on the front bench was a joyous collection of hilarious hunting and fishing stories.  I think some of them were true.  They were the best outdoorsmen I have ever known and I treasure the memories they gave me.

       It was hard for me to understand, as a kid, the problems old men faced.   Ol’ Bill said that he had got to a point where he had to get up twice during the night to pee. He, like most of them, had no inside plumbing.  He said that one night when he went out to answer the call of nature he was watering the flowers just off the front porch when it began to rain. Ol’ Bill said he heard the water running off the roof and stood there for nearly ten minutes thinking he wasn’t done yet.

       But Ol’ Jess Wolf had come up with something that made life easier for most of the front bench regulars. He had drilled a hole in the bottom of the wall in his old house, stuck a length of water hose through it from the outside and attached a funnel to the end inside his bedroom, right next to his bed.

       Jess didn’t have to go out on the porch in the cold anymore. He just sat up on the edge of his bed and reached for that funnel. Many years later when I was in college one of the professors there at M.U. told me that I’d never learn much from those backwards old men I had grown up around in the Ozarks, because I was so much like them. I  thanked him for that.

  

       Now, as I look back on my boyhood, I cannot remember a thing that intellectual professor ever said, but I can remember all the advice those old men in the pool hall gave me.

       I wrote a book about those old men I grew up with in the pool hall.  The name of it is… “The Front Bench Regulars… Wit and Wisdom from Back Home in the Hills.”  It is one of my best sellers out of my ten books about the Ozarks. Four or five times a year I publish a great 120-page magazine about the outdoors and the Ozarks together. You can see all of these books and nearly 100 of the magazines on the computer at www.larrydablemont.com.  To get one of any of them, or some of all of them, just call me.

       The publication entitled, “The Truth About the Missouri Department of Conservation” is back and is being mailed.  It is a free publication, all we ask is that you pay the $3 postage!  To get a copy, call 417-777-5227. You can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.