There was of group of writers gathered at a table with laptops and notebooks sprawled across the bench table.  I have to attest that there is nothing unusual about writers having a meeting at a bar on a Saturday afternoon.  The booth by the window was occupied by several women in their early thirties.  All in all, it was a pretty typical day.  At the bar, there were three high-school girls with their homework in front of them, along with their sodas and water.  Two of them were engaged in very intimate conversations with men who were easily twice their age.  Fathers helping them with their homework?  No.  Fathers don't straddle their daughter's legs like that.  The lone girl had her head in her arms as she dozed in and out of sleep.  That seemed a little weird to me.

We played a few good games, but I have to admit I was more concerned with what was happening at the bar.  An old, white-haired woman was tending the bar and she was tacitly ignoring the three girls who, by law, should not have been anywhere near that place, sodas or not.  The lone girl groggily got off of the stool and went to the bathroom, but she soon returned to her bar top slumber.  Both men engaged with the other girls were there without any other people, and both of them, if I am allowed to make this sort of judgment, seemed like the type who would solicit underage girls--scruffy, anti-social, thirty-eight and dressed like they were eighteen.  I did allow myself to consider I might have been prejudiced, but something didn't seem right.  By this point I had stopped playing the game and had focused all my attention on the scene that was unfolding.

It was right then that the lone, sleepy girl toppled over to the ground.  She fell the entire distance from the top of the tall stool and smacked her head straight on the barroom floor.  The bartender glanced up once at the sound of the skull against the wood and then promptly resumed ignoring her.  The two other girls watched their fallen comrade with great interest as she struggled to her feet, but neither of them got up from their seat to help her.  The group of women at the booth in the window were the only ones to come to her aid.  From my vantage point, all I could discern was that the girl wanted to leave, but she couldn't find her back pack.  She then remembered she left it at someone's house down the street.  One of the women accompanied her out the door in search of the missing back pack.  Weird.

Karol was terrified by the whole ordeal (Karol is terrified of everything, to be fair.  She was getting dressed the other day and a sock fell from the shelf and she shrieked because she thought it was a mouse.  Once she realized what it was, she continued digging through the shelf and another sock fell, and she shrieked again.), but I was uniquely enamored by it.  There are no child prostitution rings that I know of in Williamsburg.  Maybe that sort of thing happens in Bay Ridge, but we are rather sheltered out here in our hipster haven, which is sad.  Sometimes we need to revisit the darkness of humanity to better appreciate the wonderful aspects of it.  It's scenes like that one on Barrow St. that make me glad I live in this wonderful hell-hole called New York.

We stumbled drunkenly across the bridge to the part of town that was not plagued by surf shops and restaurants owned by old English couples and I saw it there plain as day--a seven-foot Valley table in perfect condition peeking out from inside a charmingly small open air bar.  I demanded that we play a game since it was the only table I had seen in the entire town, so in we went.  She didn't really play much pool, but she was not one of those bores who refuses to play because she doesn't want to be embarrased.

I speak the worst tourist Spanish and for the entire trip I had relied on my more fearless companion to do all of the awkward Spanglish bantering in order to secure what we wanted.  But neither of us knew the words for 'pool' or 'play', and I was shy about sounding like a fool when asking to get in on the next game.  Of course, the only people at the table weren't even Mexican and spoke English well enough.  I'll admit I was a little disappointed, but hey, if I want to go play a game with people who speak only Spanish I'd just go to San Loco on North 4th.

They were more casual about the game than I'm used to.  We played an odd version of team play (three versus two) with slop allowed.  They asked me if I played ball-in-hand and I gave them a firm response in the negative.  Ball-in-hand is a bad rule for bar pool, in my opinion.  If it was possible to replace balls on the table after a foul shot, then maybe ball-in-hand would be fair. 

Of course the game took forever.  The other foreigners, middle-aged with the disposition of rowdy teenagers, were a few more Pacificos into the night than we were.  They were starting to get obnoxious.  My partner and I played valiantly, and at the end I had put down the 8 ball in a relatively easy shot, but of course the cue ball managed to squirrel its way slowly into the opposite side pocket.  Go figure.