The Weekly Meat

Matchbooks

As a kid, I was a bit of a collector. I bought Topps baseball, football, and hockey cards in wax-packs with stale sticks of gum because I loved the sports, and because that's what kids collected in the '70s. My friends and I hoarded them, coveted them, traded them, and occasionally gambled for them.

During my early teens, my card consumption fell off and I picked up two new items: bottle caps and matchbooks. Both pursuits were far less social. Neither would cast me as a misfit, but I kept them to myself. It felt a bit Mad Men, which I liked — the paraphernalia of drinking and smoking — and more grown up than I actually was.

In the '70s, exotic bottlecaps were more difficult to come by than they are now, so matchbooks won out. As a collectible, you could do far worse. All the restaurants and bars had matches. They're free — not even requiring patronage — and there are always new places to eat and drink. Matchbooks are small, geographical snapshots, relics, conjuring memories and melancholy; they light our fire. In a pinch, they might even save a life.

In retrospect, the matchbooks were more to do with my interest in art and graphic design than anything else. I was taking design classes during high school, studying typesets at the local repro shops before fonts became things piled on our computer and worthy of multimedia brillance and hip documentaries. Some were clean, some ornate, some curvy. And the line art — some muddy, some art deco, some racy. My collection was a library, an encyclopedia of design — some god-awful, some outstanding.

I like all the ones below, some for admittedly personal reasons. All tell a bit of a story, be it through their design or through my stories associated with them. And many of these places are gone — one, heartbrakingly so. (Click on any pic for a closer look.)

Shooting Pool

Epigram: Gwendolyn Brooks's great poem "The Pool Players"

With the Oscars fast approaching, this seems the right time for another hero appreciation post. The Academy is sure to genuflect at the altar of Paul Newman this Sunday; nothing wrong with that. He deserved it more than most. But I'd like to take an alternate approach to the months-late eulogy. This post is about what Paul Newman taught me about shooting pool, and about life.

I had always played pool when I could growing up, but I got really interested in being good at it because of Paul Newman. I was an impressionable kid early on in high school when I saw The Hustler, and all I can think now is thank god that movie is about pool, because if Newman had played a junkie, I might have tried my hand at that instead.

Before and after Marlon Brando and James Dean there was Paul Newman. There will always be Paul Newman. The guy was just plain cool; good looking in a way that didn't try to be; killer smile, eyes like a husky. He also happened to be a great actor, a generous soul, and a classy human being. I wanted to shoot pool like him, be laid back like him, be funny like him.

In the late '70s and early '80s, Newman, with his wife and kids, used to vacation at a modest, unassuming place on one of the Lake Champlain islands, where no one made a fuss about who guests were or what they did. I know this because as it happened, that was the same place my family often stayed. No, there's no brush with fame story here. Our visits always seemed to just miss overlapping, but it was good enough even to share the same general space he had.

Movie-wise, The Sting might have been my first Newman, followed by Butch Cassidy ("Who are those guys?"), Exodus, Cool Hand Luke, Slapshot, and then The Hustler. Of all his movies, I own only The Hustler. I have seen it countless times. But that first time I saw it was special. My family had just bought a pool table to put in our basement, and I was playing a lot. I fell in love with the film instantly, and fell further in love with pool. I started shooting straight pool and badgering my younger brother into playing games up to increasingly high numbers. I couldn't run rack after rack, like Newman and Jackie Gleason, but I had my runs.

I practiced. I had a few trick shots, but more often than not, I worked on the break, on caroms, on english, on leaves. I learned. I learned it's not easy to be great. It takes a lot of work.

I played even more in college. It was something I was good at at a time when I found it important to be good at something. To show off occasionally, to feel good about myself, to drink beer, to let off steam.

There were a few tables scattered around campus, but usually, I'd play at the local bars. As a sophomore, my friend Billy and I would head into town around 5:00 nearly every Friday to get in some early games before the night began in earnest. There was a dive called the Turf Bar that had two tables and a jukebox with "Mac the Knife" on it, and a guy — Walt, I think his name was — behind the bar who was the slowest, oldest, most inefficient goddamn bartender I've ever seen. In any case, games were cheap at the Turf, and the guys who showed up could generally play.

Bar pool is almost always 8-ball, with the winner staying on the table. Folks stack up their quarters and the next challenger buys the game. If you're good, you can stay on a table for game after game and play for free. At the more crowded bars, you team up, so four people can play at once.

Billy and I were a great team. If I missed a shot, he'd make the next one. If he missed, I'd cover for him. We were comfortable playing at the Turf, and comfort breeds confidence, which bodes well.

The best piece of advice I've heard about pool came via Mark Ruffalo's character in the movie You Can Count on Me, when he tells a young kid something along the lines of "Don't take the shot until you know you can make it."

Once you have down some degree of technique, pool becomes far more mental than physical. For me, it has always been a game of confidence. If I think I can beat you, I will find a way to do it. And I often found that I played better at bars, after some (but not too much) of the liquid courage. It gave me an outlet for teenage aggression and a bit of a short man's complex. The thinking was simple: I'm not a big guy, I'm not looking to start a fight, but if I think you're a lout, I'm gonna kick your ass on this pool table.

When I had the confidence of finding the groove and rhythm ("fast and loose") to my game, born of the right buzz and years of playing, I could just go and go. Once, at a bar outside Jackson, Wyoming, my brother-in-law and I got on a table and nearly stayed all night. We played some outstanding games against tough competition, and we beat them all. The bar didn't close till late, but by 2:00, I'd had my fill, and though the table was ours to lose, I told my brother-in-law I was done for the night. He was full of buzz and excitement and was ready to play a few more hours. He said, "It's our table." I said, "You don't understand. We are not going to lose tonight. We'll be here till morning. Let's just give the table to someone else and go crash."

Grudgingly, he agreed. I was tired and ready for sleep. And when you're just playing for fun and bragging rights — as opposed to being into Minnesota Fats for big money (Jackie Gleason's greatest role) — you can just pick up and leave.

Paul Newman usually played the alpha male in his movies, exuding a disturbingly quiet and occasionally even humble confidence that he arguably felt in real life, where he had little need for pretense or the trappings of fame. His genes made him good looking, but that confidence was the result of hard work. Whether it was acting, or race car driving, or running a successful charity, or being a good husband and father, the guy knew how to work at it.

Shooting pool taught me that much about him.

Paul, we'll miss you. Your movies and your charity will live on. But now that you're gone, we can say with even better certainty, "Nobody can eat 50 eggs."

Four-Letter Word

I pride myself on bringing the weekly meat like Sam the butcher, but lately, work is kicking my ass like I'm Chuck Wepner (at least I've got my health...), and I need a flier this week.

Please accept my apologies with a side of hard-working inspiration, courtesy of mister James Brown, and come on back next week for more tasty vittles.

Being Sick

I. For the second time in my life, I have handed over to a lab samples of my blood, urine, and yes, stool.

I returned home last weekend from far away, and it would seem that I did so with something in my small intestine. Not large intestine, mind you — not Maria, Full of Grace — but rather, something evil of a viral, bacterial, or parasitic origin. You don't need the details, but the upshot has not been anything approaching fun.

II. When we're sick, we tend to pine for chicken soup, and the creature comforts of our youth (The Rockford Files, cereal for dinner, say), when a day of missed classes was an adventure and the house ours for the taking. We allow self-indulgence, wallow a bit, try to catch up on sleep.

And then maybe we become worse off. A bad flu, say. We forego basic hygiene, don't check email, and begin to develop a vague sense of wanting our mom, though you know there's no adult equivalent of the comfort mom could provide when you were sick as a child, and you believed her when she said everything would be OK — because then it soon was.

But being really sick (malaria, Dengue fever, etc.) scares the crap out of you. It makes you feel helpless, and transports your emotional core back to past experiences of utter misery, childhood high-fever nightmares, and physical pain. For me, it means June 1990, and my summer of salmonella.

III. Any time food poisoning or local toddler-spread norovirus sets in for more than a day or two, I'm holed up again, alone in a dingy one-star hotel in the garment district of Paris. For more than a week, as the parasites went about their business, I was delirious and dehydrated and went without food for long stretches (days, not hours). I alternately burned and shivered, slept and could not. Looking back on it, it seems far less like salmonella and far more like what a long heroin withdrawal must be. In many ways, it was the most frightening and defining period of my life.

IV. And so I sit in the hopefully brief misery of now, keeping my distance from the kids, while eating their applesauce and toast — my sick somewhere between worse off and salmonella — and starting to finally write a 20-year-old story, while in a petri dish of a Quest Diagnostics lab somewhere, my shit begins to tell this one.