...I remembered how to play pool?

Ah, Rock Bottom Brewery -- where the beer has amusing names and is almost as good as the real thing. I haven't been to a RBB in ages. But duty called last night, in the form of two of LPB's buddies who, by virtue of having been there all afternoon, had free pool-table privileges. And I am not one to turn down any opportunity to make an ass of myself in public.

Now, a brief history lesson entitled 'Pool and Me: an Uneasy Past'. My life is not a dramatic one, and I am not as a general rule an overly competitive person. My pickup team loses? I call next and hit the bench. My little silver top hat lands on Marvin Gardens with two hotels? I hand over the cash politely, in neat little stacks.

But sometimes it gets personal. And sometimes -- sometimes -- it gets epic.

Epic. As in the stuff that heroic sagas are made of. The story of my youthful affair with the sport of pool could only have been directed by Sergio Leone: a lone man (well, a high school kid) against the cruel world (five or six other high school kids), with the sixteen-year-old equivalent of lives and souls on the line. You have to understand: we had a pool table in the student lounge at my high school. A pool table, some couches, and a really lousy TV. And that's it. So really, a man (high school kid) had a choice: he could just pull up a seat and watch fuzzy daytime television, or he could try for a place at the table. The safety of boredom or the exhilaration of self-humiliation. Guess which I picked.

(Cue Ennio Morricone music)

Now, when it comes to the student lounge pool table, there are different circles of in-ness. At the center are the True Shooters -- sultans of the slate, barons of the baize, who can play whenever they want because they are actually good. They are a breed apart, nonchalant table-clearers who make trick shots to win rather than to look cool. They partner only with each other, and play only against each other. When four of them are around and look interested in the table, whoever's using it finishes up quickly and hands over the cues.

Beneath the True Shooters you have a much larger and more turbulent subset: the Cool Competents. These guys can play, not fantastically but well enough, and moreover they have some measure of student-body status. Jocks, rich kids, and the one member of the school rock band who defied convention by actually coming to school occasionally.

Looking out another circle, you have the Tolerated Novelties. This grab-bag category included hot-girls-looking-for-an-excuse-to-bend-over, a foreign kid who everybody sort of liked but who hardly ever spoke, the school dealer, Lardy Miller (an astonishingly fat kid named Miller who could send balls squirting across the room with deadly accuracy by sitting on the table) and my fresh-out-of-college biology teacher who hated the rest of the staff and hung out with the students, looking peevish.

And that ... is about it, really. Outside the TNs you have only the Dregs, pathetic sub-human table watchers who never get to play but can't stay away. They're there as a warning: this is what becomes of those who try and fail.

Me? My career on the cloth was a brief but storied one. I went two years without so much as a smear of blue chalk on my sleeve, content to seek diversion elsewhere while the upperclassmen monopolized the table. My junior year, however, I found myself presented with a decision. Without meaning to I had maneuvered myself squarely into the Tolerated Novelty class: a varsity player in an unpopular sport, I certainly didn't rate either of the top two tiers. Nevertheless, I found myself occasionally tapped to partner with CCs or other TNs when table traffic allowed.

As the year progressed, I found the cue more and more often in my hand. Although I could never aspire to CC-ness, I was about the best player among the TNs, and hence a popular charity-pick. A few notable wins, one of which prompted a losing CC to hurl his cue javelin-like through the open student lounge window, and my stock was riding high. I couldn't ever be a Cool Competent -- class mobility was nearly unheard of. But maybe, just maybe, I had a shot for greatness. The inner circle. True Shooterdom.

My chance came one stormy afternoon. It was a half-hour until my next class, and the student lounge was nearly deserted. No CCs in sight. Just three True Shooters, leaning on their cues and idly practicing bunny hops. I walked in. I got the nod. The game began.

Now, although the universal public pool table protocol dictates that all games must be doubles, with the True Shooters that didn't always mean much. It wasn't unheard of for the breaker to clear the table, and since I was last in the rotation (the other side broke) it seemed entirely possible that the game might be over before it got to me. Indeed, the breaker sunk a stripe immediately, and proceeded to pot four additional balls before handing control to my partner. My partner, for his part, was having an off day; although he knocked down a few, a misjudged double gave the cue ball back to the other side with very little work left to do. Sure enough, every last stripe hit the bottom of a pocket. That left only the eight ball. I was going to lose my chance for glory without ever even blowing the chalk off my cue.

Then, fortune smiled. In a twist of fate, my partner's unusual ineptitude bought me a new lease on life: with five solids left on the table, the black was completely surrounded, and though the opposition did a nifty little jump to avoid the scratch the eight ball remained on the cloth. All eyes turned to me.

I looked at the table. This was it. Not only did I get my turn, I was sitting pretty; the table was so choked with solids that my first few shots practically made themselves.

Line up, stroke, in.

Line up, stroke, in.

Line up, stroke, in.

Three down, two to go. The next was trickier; I had to either double a ball on the far side of the table (and I can't double to save my life) or else try to dig my other option out from behind the eight. I chose the latter, whispered a prayer, and went for it.

Line up, stroke, in.

Well then. Four in a row -- three gimmes and a moderately challenging shot. And now the cue ball was much better positioned: my last ball was lined up prettily against the corner pocket, and I banged it home with alacrity. This was it: an empty table, just the white and the black. Not an easy shot, not easy at all; if I didn't want to have to try to double against the cushion, and I didn't, I'd just have to kiss the edge of the eight to spin it into the pocket.

Line up. "Eight in the corner."

And then Lardy Miller came in, dumped his backpack on the floor, and planted his mountainous rear on the table. The eight ball shot off the table, the slate cracked, and that was the end of the student lounge pool table.

That was the last time I played pool, until today.

Still got it.