In my college days, I worked for a couple of years at the deli in the basement of one of the dorms. We served sandwiches and pizzas, and there was a common area with some tables and chairs, a jukebox, a couple of arcade games, and two 7′ pool tables, known to most good players as “bar boxes”. It was a place for us to hang out, and for me to make minimum wage playing pool with friends and strangers during slow times. One of my friends during that time was a guy named Pete, an electrical engineering major two years ahead of me. Pete came from money, and during the times he wasn’t outwardly flaunting it (flying the girl-of-the-semester to a resort in Cancun for spring break when the rest of us were piling 8 in a van down to Daytona, or in my case, working two jobs), he still wasn’t doing much to hide it. He had a mid-line Meucci cue in a hard leather case when the rest of us were schlepping our $30 Dufferins or Vikings in a soft pouch. Pete was charming, fun, and an entertaining guy to hang out with. He also liked
to gamble.

One night, a few people were hanging out with me in deli after closing time at 10 PM. Pete suggested we play a couple of racks of 9-ball at $5 a game. That was fine with me, as I knew I was probably a ball better than he was, and I certainly knew how the tables played better than anyone. After I won 5 of the first 6, he bumped it to $10/game to try to recoup his $20. I won the next 3, and he bumped it to $25/game. At 19, I don’t think I’d ever played for $25/game before…but I won the next three at those stakes, to be up a total of $125. I didn’t know that the condition called “tilt” had a name, but I saw it on his face and posture. His girlfriend Annie saw it too, and asked Pete to slow down a little.

No dice. “$50,” he said, and I won two more. This was quite the rush I was on…he and I both knew that I wasn’t THIS much better than he was, but there’s nights when you’re in dead stroke and the pocket looks like the mouth of a cave. Pete kept doubling up, trying to catch up. After $100/game, I was up $400. After one at $300, it was $700. $500/game, $900/game, $1500/game…it was nuts. Pete was frothing, Annie offered to do ANYTHING if he’d pay me off and go home with her, and I went to take a leak wondering when he was going to let me in on the joke and dig out a wad of Monopoly money or something, and how badly getting stiffed would fuck up our friendship.

After a few more games (he won one game out of four at $1500 per), I unscrewed my cue. It was 1 AM, I had a class in 7 hours, and since I knew this was completely surreal, I wanted to end it. I said, “Pete, you’re my friend, and I don’t like where this is going. You can pay me $1000 right now and I’ll buy the drinks the next time we go out.” Big mistake. HUGE. I had turned my engine off the moment the sentence left my mouth. Pete knew I was done, and more importantly, that I wouldn’t walk out the door. “Paul, what do I owe you, five grand? C’mon, let’s play a set for four.” He won the set by a couple of games, won a few more games at $200 per, and paid me off for the rest. It was 3 AM. I turned off the lights and locked the door behind us, leaving the keys in a drop box for the lunch crew the next morning.

We walked back to a couple of blocks back to our apartment building (he lived two floors below me) in silence.

Apart from the gambling lesson, I took one other thing from that night with me. Our friendship was never the same, but I used the $300 I won to buy my Meucci HOF-1 cue, 19.5 oz, 13mm pro-taper shaft. It’s a thing of beauty that I still have nearly 20 years later.