DOWN BY THE OLD POOL HALL (NYC, 1967)

83. DOWN BY THE OLD POOL HALL (NYC, 1967):

Her name was Carla Manners and I don't think she had any and she had an Oedipal flash with the pool cue (it was said) but I never knew what that meant and most of the other fools misunderstood it anyway and they always seemed to think - as they watched her contort and stretch over the table to make various shots - that what it was was that she had an 'edible ass' with a pool cue or something and NO ONE ever got to the bottom of all that and it was usually decided anyway that girls and women weren't meant to play pool but since they couldn't accept that why not let them and that was enough for all the lechers to just sit and gawk - and it never made sense to me and I never liked pool let alone watching it but this place was a haven in its way for the sort of distorted fools I'd taken to being with and it was winter time and all - and I always figured what the philosophers of the pool room were trying to say was that maybe she wanted to KILL her daddy with a pool cue but I just never asked and let it go at that and right next to this place up the stairway and next door over was a jazz loft which was always frequented by be-bop types and slick black dudes and wan white (and I mean w-h-i-t-e) dudes with a terrible pallor and their music was slick fast and progressive too and it always made me nervous to hear - as did any jazz - with all that peripatetic staccato flash and speed notes and crazy drumming on half-beats and all that and I never enjoyed jazz in any way especially when they mangled and speeded-up and twisted-up current pop standards - it just never made sense to me - and I always thought (much like in pool when someone 'cleans the table') that someone ought to have had 'cleaned the slate' too with all that jazz crap but it never happened they just went on and on and some of them did get famous a bit or for a while at least until they died of something stupid or horrible or whatever and others lingered a tiny bit and died right there never leaving the loft - so to speak - and their sound was just as quickly diminished but you know then how JAZZ acquired its legend and without so much as a definition or a credo it became a reference point for hipness and music and coolness and score - and that too was all stuff I never understood if you can dig me daddio there too - but the days of real jazz were numbered : short sweet stiff staccato and soon severed but the stupid pool table lingered and even into the late 70's they were still making documentaries about pool halls and the real leftover remnants of real old life and living New York in them and NO MATTER WHAT it was all bullshit and crap because most of the time there was someone getting their face or ass pasted or whipped in one of the corners or some two or three guys forcing someone else to jerk them off or blow them or some girl to let them fuck her over and over on a rotating basis while the hustler's game of filthy pool went on in the center rooms and everyone occasionally visited the side office where Carla or Marlene or whomever was sure as shit stretched out like a turkey and getting her rock solid cunt fucked to smithereens for 85 bucks or whatever it took and that's how it went and that's sort of what the documentary Jew bullshitters always avoided mentioning and the crap they peddled about NYC and its wondrous underground of pool halls and jazz dens was always pure bullshit death crap lying mother-fucking greed merchants errands to Hell but it went on and I was here and there privileged to witness whatever of it I wanted 726 W. 29th Street 1812 W. 31st Street Porcine's Palace 41 W 21st - I can name you ten places just like that and all the same and they're ALL gone now probably wiped and finished and coated over in today's plastic muck of daring and derring-do and bullshit some more but WHATEVER the sailors are the same the hookers the whores and the runaways too and 'nothing ever changes either in Hell or Hades or Harlem or here' as Eddie Brinckmann had been heard to say cleaning up tables ten times a day.