Ok, It’s been a while since I’ve written anything on this be-fangled website, but it’s also been a while since I’ve enjoyed playing a game of pool. At the start, I had a lot of fun being Karol’s guide and mentor but after a while, standing around a table having to listen to her complain about [her perfect life] got old. What a whiny bitch. So I took a short break from her and from Billiardsburg and started hanging out with my replacement best friend, Maia Raposo. Maia is pretty much the greatest person in the world, except for the fact that she wasn’t really into billiards, so I forced her to play with me a few times. The games went well, she had fun, and I felt that little spark in my heart that I felt when I first brought Miss Lu to the table oh so many years ago.

She told me she wanted to get better. “Maia,” I said, “I will show you the way.”

She was all I needed to get back into the swing of things. My A game returned. I would show up to The Levee and own the table for hours until I got sick of winning, and Maia would stand beside me with those big, starry eyes taking in as much as she could. We started going to Boulevard (my new favorite joint) and I’d give her lessons there. She was such an impressive student that I decided it was time that I brought her to Karol, and so one fateful night (due to the rain-out of “Blue Velvet” at McCarren Pool), we found ourselves walking to the Lazy Catfish. On a Tuesday. Free Pabst night.

Tuesday nights, the Catfish becomes a magnet for those kiddies who have fake ID’s and are otherwise too poor to afford beer in bars. It’s a cramped, crowded, noisy affair, but you get really drunk really fast because you try to consume as much free beer in the one-point-five hours the happy hour runs for and the whole experience generally becomes worth the hassle, if you were to do a proper cost-benefit analysis.

This night, however, was a bust. Maia was getting hit on by this gross red-headed man-child who kept talking to us about prison food, and I was playing shit for pool. All the young sluts and shitheads were just too much to deal with, and Karol decided we’d never go there ever again. We stayed until the happy hour was over, of course, but afterward we decided we’d better head on over to the Alligator Lounge to soak up all that free beer with some free pizza.

It came as no surprise that other people had the same idea, and we sidled up to the pool table with many of the same players we met at Catfish. I was so drunk by this point that I don’t really remember what had happened. We won some games, maybe. The bartender was playing a block of Pavement songs so I asked him to play Brighten the Corners for us start to finish, which he obliged most earnestly; I tipped him a finsky for doing so. Alligator is not a bad place when all the weirdos are missing. Catfish, however… THROW IT BACK.

(bad fishing pun).

xo