English 151

The English Lesson
L.L. “Doc” Randolph


The English that Sony Baxter was familiar with, actually quite good at, wasn't going to be much help in Mrs. Van Buskirks' Eng. 105. While I am certain that she was up on pool in so far as its connection, however weak or fictitious, with the one and only Willy Shakespeare, I woulda had ta been a real tuna, not to bet the farm on her knowing anything about the defensive strategies in three handed golf. If played on a regulation golf table, nearly extinct these days, it is a game that transcends sport or art or life in general and takes the players to somewhere that had been called the zone, the ether, the groove and many other things through out the centuries.

I been watchin' Sony Baxter play since he was just tall enough to lean over the rail and shot that goofy thumb- under cigarette bridge he uses as much as possible, even if it means stroking three to five inches fat on the bridge. I've preached to him about it until I’m blue in the face. He still uses it and refuses to think about the math involved with percentages of miscues per inning. I mention his Eng. 105 because it’s the one class that he can't seem to sink his teeth into, no matter what. If writing words came as easily as his speed control or his low english, he might have thought of school as being more to his liking but as it was he scratched consistently in that class.

I know I sound a little like a whining, excuse-laden parent but I'm really just "The Watch."
I come in to Tuffies Playmore Smoke House five to six times a week and watch the various groups of players. I have my favorites, the one who love the game and really work at improving and I get involved with them on a very personal level. Over the years I have learned that the way a players life is going is the way he approaches his game, whether its golf, snooker, billiards or pool.

I've been a fixture here for a long time and one real old timer joked that he set his watch by my arrival. The name just seemed to stick. I even found myself a t-shirt with Rembrandt’s "Night Watch" on it and I wear it during the nine- ball tournaments ever year. The players that I like and respect make up my family. They kinda represent my kids and I guess that's why I treat them that way. Everyone who is even a semi-regular at the Playmore knows who I am, what I eat, drink, and dozens of other things about me. It’s kinda like livin' in a small town for a long time. You become a creature of habit and everyone learns those habits. You either gotta accept it as fact or you feel sorta naked all the time. Since I kinda like having my jeans on, I learned to go with it.







"Sony comes to mind because he was in earlier on number five, a snooker table, called the Crane. Each table is numbered, but they have also gotten names over the years. The portraits of the shooter whose name is given to a table hangs on the wall by that table, high above the nicked and beer-stained wainscoting. Walter Crane was a world billiards champion many times
so he ended up getting picked for table number five. Table one, the best in the house, is named Willie, for the most obvious of reasons, while two, three, and four are Wimpy, Miz, and Pearl. The first four tables past the cigar counter are so old that the squares of very thick, heavy weight black and white tile are worn all the way thru to concrete that was poured prior to nineteen hundred. I have to say that at one time I contributed my share to the aforementioned honing of the tiles but not since my spine finally gave it up for what would seem to be a very long vacation. I now only contribute to the destruction of the tiles on the way from chair fifty-two, (named for me), to the bathroom and possible the trip to the grill if I don't feel like being waited on. I always feel up to playing but my body won’t let that happen for very long.

Over the years we had all had a hand in naming the tables, names that sometimes change, except for table one. That will never change cause we all know sacrilege when we see it.

Wally "Fat Man" Wagner was the one to come up with the idea about naming the chairs. (These chairs were bolted to a platform two steps from the floor level to afford a better view.) We had been raggin' on each other for days about the way in which the tables had gotten names. His final contribution to the discussion was the idea that since "I lived in chair 52, his words, not mine, it should be named after me. Sure enough when I arrived at my usual destination the following Saturday, there hung the plaque above the chair, all bronzy lookin, with my handle cut right into it. Tuffy furnished me with a burger and a beer, followed by one of his good cigars, all on the house and a tradition was born.

The day the chair was named after me was also the day that Sony played in a match with two shooters who looked to be what we used to call brothers-in-law. Playing for the money with people that you don’t know the skill level nor the integrity of is something that needs to happen once in a player’s life. After that you shoulda learned your lesson.








The three-handed golf game started up about eight thirty. These two dudes sauntered in and hung at the bar thru two rounds of short beers and matched quarters for the tab. Their ride didn't say much about them but then if you don't have a blue book in your head, rides don't say a lot, rentin's easy these day, with plastic and all. Sony had been in the house about fire minutes and wasn't properly warmed up, another item on the long list of things that we talked about on a regular basis. The problem, at least as far as I could see it, was that the list never seemed to get any shorter. Had he taken several of the more important things to heart, we coulda cut the list in half, no sweat.

At any rate, Sony was about half-assed warmed up on the Crane when these two at the bar wondered over and asked if he knew anyone who wanted to play some low-end golf. "What's your definition of low end," he asked the taller of the two who had been the one to start the conversation. "1-5-10, you know, small change", said the kid with the Jack Daniels ball cap on backwards. His tall companion nodded in agreement and the look that passed between them told, in advance, lots of the story that Sony should have seen coming but was about to learn. He'd already broken rule number one. "Always look at your opponent when you talking about the setup of your particular game. House rules vary from place to place and town to town. If you're about to get "Oreoed" you should be able to spot the intention by the expressions or body language.

Maybe at nineteen, I expected Sony to know more about the world and the people in it, but even if he doesn't, he's supposed to be awake enough to look at me for a call on the situation and at least take it into consideration. Nothin doin'. He'd already lagged for place, picked the black seven as his ball and marked up the board before he even bothered to look in my direction. Sometimes ya just wanta smack that stupid grin right off his face. Don't get me wrong, he's a good kid but it wasn't necessary to be such a gill-breather when it was so easy to see brother-in-law written all over these two.

Just so you know, in golf each player shoots only one ball, his "golf" ball, into a succession of six pockets in order to win. 1-5-10 means that when one player "gets out", or makes his ball in the sixth and final pocket, the rest of the players cough up one dollar for each "hickey" on the board, five dollars for every hole that they have yet to make and ten dollars because the game is over. For the truly uninitiated, a hickey is a mistake made during your





turn, or inning, as it is known. You can be forced to commit a huge amount of mistakes during a game and each one costs you in the end, but only if you lose. When playing 1-5-10, running out on your opponents, something that I had the good fortune to do on several occasions pays rather well. If you were playing three handed, you, as the winner, would collect twenty for the game bite and another sixty for the pocket total. Eighty dollars for five minutes of your time ain't too shabby, but, the real money is in getting’ the other players into the game and then helping them rack up a tonna hickeys. I've seen a player still going for the third hole when the game ended. That's nothing to be embarrassed about as the third and the sixth are the two middle pockets on a snooker table and therefore the hardest to get shape on for an easy in. The rub came from the forty-three hickeys that the guy had racked up. That’s 43.00 in damages, the three, four, five and six at a fiver each and a sawbuck for the game bite. 73 dollars paid out for the pleasure of frustratin’ yourself to the point of humiliation.

Now that you kinda got a feel for the action, lemme tell ya more about Sony’s game that particular evening. As I said before it was a hustle to start with but hell I figured the kid would snap to it before it went on too long. Think again. Marty, the taller of the two shooters and his partner, who insisted on being called Tank, were reasonable golf players but their intention was to play smart, not so much good. After four games Sony was down 104 and starting to wonder what had happened to his game. (It wasn't your game, you tuna. It was their game and all you were doing was playing bankroll for them.) After a rather dull fourth game the next rung of the ladder was suggested. Tank was down 144 and started whining about his luck and the table conditions and what not.


"Let's jack this up a little, I need a shot at getting even at least," he whined. That suggestion was immediately seconded by Marty and both then looked at Sony to see if he would chicken out early or if he might stick for the full ride. "Ok by me," he shrugged." I did everything but slap myself to keep from yellin, "way to think fish, can't you flail your fins any faster", but somehow I kept that thought to myself, not easily mind you, but I did it. The jack up that Tank suggested turned out to be the third or fourth rung not the second. These guys were really in a hurry. No, I take that back. They were just acting stupid and inexperienced. The bite went to twenty-five a game and ten a hole but the kicker was the multiple of five they laid on the hickeys. A short list of only twenty hickeys pops you for an even hundred on top of the 2- 5 you shelled for the game and an easy thirty or forty more for dry



holes. Not exactly Donald Trump but certainly better than welfare. The "Oreo twins" laid off of Sony until he was just under three hundred out and once again it was "Jack Daniels" that wanted to get even. You'd have thought the little turd had alimony to pay the way he was gold minin'.

To make a long story shorter, the final five games were played at 10-20-50. Going into game four of the last five, my soon to be penniless pool protege finally began to see the light. So now he looks at me, after two and half hours. What? You can't look up once in awhile, especially when you're gettin you ass beat like a cheap drum. Wake up and smell the stale beer. Sony had finally gotten to the place in the series where he can now see the intention behind the easy leaves and the fouls that are helping clog the game up with hickeys, each now costing a ten spot per. I signaled with a shrug in answer to his looking askance at me. What'm I supposed to do, call their mothers? I wouldn't even know what to call them.

By now Sony is dipping into my pocket to play. Let me explain that a little. We have an arrangement for me to play small time bank when the need arises and I get taking in on any big score. It's worked out well for both of us cause he usually shoots better on my money. That night he would have had better luck in the Lit 105 class. By then his timing was off, he's shootin’ everything uphill and they're smokin him in tight on the clusters for each pocket. Finally I couldn't take it any longer so I signaled and through the switch. Sony was awake enough to catch it the second time I signaled. He mentioned that I thought I was a pretty good golf player and in a somewhat conspiratorial tone suggested that they could fish me in and have a little fun at my expense. This is something that heavy losers sometimes find an attractive, another fish to provide the company that they say misery loves. The other two didn’t act as though they were any more with it than Sony had originally been and damned if they didn't let me in.


I whined about not being warmed up and the stakes being too high and the table now too filthy from excess chalk. Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dumb were chalk miners of the first water. A pickaxe would have cut about as deeply into those little blue cubes. The table now looked as though several dozen babies has been powdered and diapered on its surface. I called for Fry to come and dress the table down, especially the rails and pocket bottoms, which were caked. During this operation introductions were made, as if I hadn't just watched them for a little less than four hours. Even a complete idiot could tell Mutt from Jeff. It did give me the opportunity to settle my main -man back down and provide suppression fire and ambush to help pay back some recently accrued karma. Just to shake things up a bit I demanded




that Sony give me the black seven as my ball, since he got the habit of using it from me in the first place.

I didn't even ask for the first tee off, I just acted like it was rightfully mine as the new kid on the block. Our m.o. was for me to run several pockets as if I was getting lucky but by then I was just a little pissed so a ran a quick four then started doggin’ my stoke and droppin’ some rail huggin’ shape on Tank, since he followed me in the rotation. He immediately started harpin’ about such bad leave and that was fine by me, cause the more bitchin’ he did the less concentration he had for leavin’ Sony. After one more step up the ladder, it was even money that theses two wouldn't stick very long so we went for the long shot. Sony accused me of hotdoggin’ and sellin’ out and demanded that we play for a bigger bite if it was going to be that kind of a game. The other two got really weird cause they had us figured for buds but the fight looked too real. They jumped at the chance to do a three game freeze out of 151. That's ten for the hickeys, fifty per hole and a c-note for the game. The 151 came from the rum by the same name and was just about as powerful. If you don't regularly play for that kind of money you rattle pretty easily and being caught in the middle of our ‘fight’ had already rattled the twins. The mood at the table was very tense for a while; at least we worked on our part of it. The would-be sharks were already starting to choke in the first three holes of the first of the three games. This was starting to look promising if I could keep Sony from overreacting. He loved to dish out the stuff when he started to win and that could have caused some real problems, not just the fake one we had goin' on. I bought a round then another after I won the first game and with it $1180. Sony won the last two and ended up 650 to the good minus the bail out fee I was gonna bite him for and the Bobsey twins paid the piper for the 1830 to square the game. Sony couldn't help grandstanding a little and picked up the tab for the table, all 68 dollars of it. All in all it was a reasonable save but one that should not have been necessary. Tuffy just laughed and winked at us when we left.

As was our habit we headed to Ace's Truck Stop for early, early breakfast and some conversation. I was most interested in the conversation. After we ordered and had gotten some orange juice, I started to decide how I wanted to approach the subject of Sony’s stupidity. He surprised me before I could begin. "That was pretty damn dumb of me not to see that sandwich way before I did. Sorry that I had to drag you in for the save." I just sipped my juice to help cover my surprise. The kid was actually growin’ up on me and learning to take a little responsibility for his actions. He went on taking about the obvious signs that he either missed or ignored and I was feeling fairly proud that he had remembered as many as he did. He still hadn't




mentioned the warm up problem but I wasn't about to let it slide. He took a break when the massive, grease laden green chili omelets arrived and asked for another order of whole-wheat tortillas. When his mouth was so full that talking wouldn't be sanitary or fun to watch I decided to recap what I thought had gone wrong. I ran down the warm up problem, he lack of team spirit by not watching for signals between friends and especially his getting in so deep without checking on the bank. Hell, I don't always carry that deep of green with me. He could have dumped two big ones the way things were shaping up.

You might thing that green would be money, which it is, but, in this case the name comes from Mike Green, my old stake horse when I used to shoot pool in a whore house across the tracks in the tiny Kansas town when I was a kid. Mike had been a Mike Tyson look-a-like with 6 or 700 dollars in his hatband and a nine-millimeter in his waistband. This Mike didn't box and he didn't bullshit, he just threw lead, with more than reasonable accuracy. These days I always think of my stake as Green in honor of the first person that thought I played good enough to back me. I figure it’s the least I can do for his memory. He was killed in a barroom brawl one night when someone shoot a hole in a propane tank with a steel jacketed slug from some hog -leg and seventeen people paid the price for that stray shot.

Sony had covered the main points that needed to be talked over and I got the remainder between bites of my chow and so the rest of the meal was peppered with small talk about the usual, pool, school, women, cars, money and our up and coming road trip.

I worked on getting Sony to open up about Lit 105 but he seemed to think that it was a lost cause. I tried to get him to understand the importance of school in general but also the necessity of learnin’ good communication skills, something that his Lit class was meant to help with. He started to say that he couldn't see the need but when I pointed out his obvious lack of communication earlier that evening, until it was almost too late, he looked at me kinda funny and then shut up on the subject, point taken. I let him pay the tab and give me 5 c-notes for the save.

He didn't say anything but I knew he got the message. After we left Ace's I dropped him off at his low rider style VW parked behind the pool hall and he headed for his dorm. It had turned out to be a lesson well learned for him and I was pleased.





When I was satisfied that he was really headed home, I popped the drivers side door and dismounted from my pickup. Gently closing the door behind me I went back into the Playmore thru the side entrance, the private one. Tuffy was laughing about something when I slid into the big overstuffed chair that sits directly opposite the door. Marty and Tank were grinnin’ from ear to ear and enjoying what must have been the last of several drinks judging from the empty bottle in front of them. I took out the green and repaid the "losses" to them both plus what we had agreed on and thanked them for doin’ their part in getting’ my man ready for our little road trip, nothing like some "real" competition to help sharpen your wits and get your shooter to pay attention to what he is supposed to be doin’.

All in all it had been a good night and one that Sony and I both would remember, all-be-it for different reasons. As Tank and Marty left I thanked them again and asked that they not show back up in town any time soon, at least until Sony and I had left.

When we heard them drive away I took one of the two Havana’s that Tuffy had extracted from a finely tooled silver box on his cluttered desk. I manicured the tip with the antique brass and steel cutter fixed to the small table to the side of the desk and ceremoniously lit it off with the eternal flame that burned languidly next to the cutter. I savored both the smoke and the unspoken conversations that he and I had had over a great number of years. Nothing really needed to be said. I was simply teachin’ what had been taught to me many years earlier. Tuffy had been my schoolmaster and he had done for me what I was workin’ on doin’ for Sony. Tuffy had seen the same thing in me that I saw in Sony.

When I finally got up to leave we simply shook hands and nodded our mutual respect and understanding. Nothing more seemed necessary.

I walked slowly across the nearly deserted parking lot still savoring the cigar and the evening’s experience. Nice to be able to pass on some things that can’t be learned any other way.

The morning sun was not yet strong enough to have taken away the entire chill left by the previous evening but I didn’t really feel cold. Rather I felt certain warmth born of satisfaction and an adherence to certain rituals.

I eased by tired body into my pickup’s custom red leather seat, placed the still smoldering Havana into the little custom chrome cradle attached to the driver’s side door and fired off the ignition. The quiet, familiar purring of the motor blended nicely with the rumble of the leg pipes and they had their



usual soothing effect on me. Many places in this world may have their problems right now but this didn’t seem to be one of them, at least not right now. I picked through several selections on CD and the cab was soon pleasantly filled with the Nylons’ “Seamless”.

As I slowly backed out onto the stilled street, quietly humming along to the strains of “Up on the Roof” my last thought before heading home was that I wished for Sony’s sake that Eng. 105 could be handled as easily. But then to tell him would mean spoiling a perfectly lesson in English 151.