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21 Pool Hall
- Wesleyan University Press
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21 Pool Hall In the untenable tenanted heat we hone our skills at pool since Amsterdam Billiards is the coolest place I know this June in Manhattan and brings me back to Akron (where I have never been) (or: only passed through) and my school-mates' stories of just how tough and cool you had to be to hang in Akron's pool halls, manhood's consummate test!— consummatum estunless your nerves were match for your skills; (the pool hall groupies, girls—enterable if you won— beat somebody whose reputation etcetc . . .) but only passing through Akron on my way west did I "get" why the McMann brothers, hipster-greasers, chose to spend their youth indoors: because for dust and wind, absence, flatness, and slums, for howling nothingness without the grandeur of desert or sea, Akron could not be beat. I was surprised that my hand/eye . . . was active this five-in-the-afternoon, 82 taking fast aim,playing quickly, though not so fast as my—until this instant—tight-handed son who, playing lefty, knocks balls in from all distances and angles . . . "Let's not keep score, let's just shoot, the little boy offers in his—catastrophic—leap toward wisdom. 83 ...