Nine-ball
by Sabrina Tom
Helen G. Blake, A Prowler Through the Dark, oil on linen, 18.9 x 23.6 inches, 2017. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.
Nine-ball
SABRINA TOM / OCT 2021 / ISSUE 10
There was a time, when I was still a child, when I hung around the House of Billiards every day waiting for Chris. The pool hall sat on a corner lot on an unremarkable stretch of Wilshire Boulevard two miles from the ocean. Outside, the sea-soured stucco was an invitation to wayward hearts who'd lost their shells. Inside, the place was a body turned inside out. Ugly, angry, wounded, wanting. Men and their long sticks. Stuck in the throat like gristle. Dangerous and damaged and sad.
At the time, I was hanging out with Peter. I wanted something from him but didn't know what. This self-absorption was heightened, or even brought about, by the fact that I was in love for the first time. In love with love. For me there was no difference. Everything I saw, felt and believed was filtered through this position, a state of liminality between judgment and inexperience, hunger and revulsion, risk and fast violence, all of which kept me in the dreamscape of desire and made me weak and uneasy. It was like sifting stones through a sieve. The truth was I'd never had sex, and Peter and I weren't actually friends, but my body continued to reach for his, even when it was humiliating to do so.
Then came Chris out of the blue like a song you can't get out of your head. Chris from South Dakota. Dark-skinned, light-eyed, sage-smudged, college drop-out, new-to-the-Coast, got-a-few-tricks-up-his-sleeve, hard drinker. Friendly, endearing, looking for trouble.
“I also play a mean game of nine-ball,” he said, concluding his introduction. “My father prioritized three things in a man: church, hunting, and pool. Luckily by the time I came out he'd ditched the first two. Still, if you guys want me to pray for you, or shoot someone, I will.”
Peter and I looked at each other. Then we looked at Chris. I saw fresh meat, American, grass fed. I saw rapture and rage smoldering in a crown of chestnut hair.
I don’t know what Peter saw. Maybe a chance to hurt someone. What he was always looking for.
We took a table in the back, where I preferred to be, in the shadows. At 10am on a weekday the only people around were an old man and woman who were so inconsequential to me they might as well have been dust on the wall.
“Nine-ball is better as a solo game,” Chris said, placing the balls in a diamond shape. He raised the chalk to his cue, changed his mind. He passed me the stick. I broke. The balls banged around the table, bumping against each other like refugees in flight. The nine-ball fell into the pocket.
“You’re a natural,” Chris said. Peter nodded. I felt like I’d just proven something I didn’t know I needed to prove. It made me want to rack their heads on the table and break their skull into tiny pieces.
“That really was impressive,” Chris said. He stepped toward me real close and I felt the warmth of his body. American, grass fed. He kissed me. His mouth tasted like punch. It was easy to let him linger, to protect my ambivalence with submission. Above the pool table, a naked lightbulb flashed with the urgency of a dying star.
Peter broke next while Chris and I watched, standing hip to hip on the far side of the table. The balls bumped wildly against each other and against the rails. Peter came around to our side to take another turn. We savored the angles of his torso and limbs, the smooth skin on the back of his neck where I’d recently given him a haircut. Every part of him reached out to us. Even his elbows.
Chris wrapped Peter around the waist and pulled him into us. Peter dropped the cue stick on the table with a crack. It rolled across the green felt. Chris shoved his other hand between my legs while he sucked at the back of Peter’s neck, licking up every sweet cell as I'd done so many times before. And just as I'd imagined it, Peter buckled at the knees and moaned. He threw his head back which seemed to simultaneously weaken him and bring his body into focus. He twisted around, separated himself, but only for as long as it took to draw in some air. Then he leaned back against the table and looked to Chris for more.
On the speakers played Dwight Yoakam’s Purple Rain. A song for men. Chris and Peter hummed with pleasure, in harmony with cowboy music, with each other. Peter flipped over and arched his back like a bridge. A crossing. He turned his head, resting his cheek on the green felt and transforming it into something lovely and verdant. Chris held the small of Peter's back, pressing so hard the tops of his fingers turned white. Beneath his hands ten red ovals became ten wild tongues. Then he let go. He undid Peter's zipper and reached inside. Peter screamed, but only I heard it. They pulsed with a strange rhythm, slow and knowing, creating their own atmosphere in the space between them. Chris tilted his head up to the light, illuminating two baby blue puddles. All innocence and tenderness and, in the hollowed out center, derangement. I saw how deep a person could fall. It made me nervous. I wanted to hide from it. I wanted it up close.
Dwight Yoakam kept singing. Purple rain. Purple rain.
“You need a drink.” Chris sat on the edge of the table, poked my stomach with a cue stick.
“I’m good, thanks.”
He grinned. Suit yourself.
They went to the bar and returned with beer and cigarettes. Chris consumed his drink faster than he could tell stories about growing up queer in Lower Brule. He laughed about getting beat up by crazy white boys. Another about branding a hundred calves in a day, pinning their necks to the ground with his knee as their skin sizzled and black smoke billowed toward the sky. The memory made him positively jovial. He showed us the line of piercings across his upper back, talked about how he got off the res by hitchhiking from Sioux Falls to New Haven because his father had refused to drive him to college.
Peter lit a Chesterfield. He smoked and played. Chris kept talking. He was a great talker.
"My freshman year I lived with three other guys. Abdel was slow and sloppy, but could shape the world with an architect's precision. Stephane, with his sinewy arms and legs, carried himself like he'd been places I'll never see. And Max. Brown curls, jittery as a prairie dog, Maxim. His father was a physicist and had predicted Chernobyl the week before he hightailed it to America. Max didn’t have much of his father’s gumption, though. He was more of a philosopher.
"Except for this one night. We’re hanging out, Abdel, Max and I, and we’ve run out of pot, so I say let’s go into Steph's room. I knew we’d find something good there. Sure enough, inside his desk drawer is a rolled up bill and a mess of cocaine, already cut into lines, laid out on a book. Abdel leaves right away with a dumb excuse about his girlfriend visiting the next day, but Max is more thoughtful. He points to the book cover. A man on a mountaintop surrounded by red and blue flames. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He declares it a sign. He sticks his nose into the fire and snorts two lines and I can't even believe his gumption.
"I do some lines, too. Then he does more. And I do more. And now we’re fantastically high and Max is quoting Nietzsche and I ask him if I can give him head and he says yes. And it’s intense because we’re out of our minds about the death of God, but beautiful like we’re in a Russian novel. Epic and heartsore and so fucking masculine.
"Until I look up and I see Max is crying. Big silent tears hit my face like a summer storm, so I reach up and stroke his cheek. Max, I’m saying with my fingers, are you alright?
"I don’t know if it’s my words or my touch, but something breaks inside him. He pulls away and runs out. I hear the front door click. I'm hot with confusion and desire. And power. I can feel my muscles. I can feel the tendons connecting my muscles to my bones. The reason I’m standing. The reason I'm fucking still alive. And right at that moment Steph walks in, sees the white powder on my lips and another man’s heart in my mouth, and he laughs. He drops his pants and pushes me onto the bed. His skin smells sweet and musky and foreign, but his hands feel familiar. Leathery and rough. Like mine. I lick my lips until they're raw. I bite his hand. He holds my hips and rapes me. I feel the scar especially on days when it rains."
Chris and Peter wandered back to the bar. I picked up the cue stick and broke. The eruption was loud and confident. Balls collided, dropped into pockets. Like meteors into the ocean, birds returning to their nest. Nine-ball was best played alone, Chris had said. But I didn't hear him, or couldn't. Neither was a choice, and being alone only took me further away from myself, where my attractions spun in a circle: Peter and Chris, Max and Chris, Steph and Peter and Chris. How casually they forced themselves in, and through, while I could barely move. And honestly I couldn't say which was more real: the act of their bodies eliding one another which I could recall at will, or the collision of balls on the pool table.
I felt obscured and opaque. There was no part of me that could think of sex as a space of learning—flexible, fluid, uncertain. Sex was delusional and uncomfortable, unwanted and antagonizing, but wasn't it a salvific obliteration, wholly requiring an other? Yet men—these men—had erased themselves.
The older couple were now at the very next table. I don't know when or how they got so close. Perhaps I'd closed my eyes, and they'd decided to move then. In any case, they were near enough I could smell detergent and cologne, which reminded me of the obscenity of public bathrooms. Their appearance, too, was dark and roughened. The old man wore blue jeans and a flannel button down, which sagged from his sickly frame. Metal glasses such as the kind you pick up at the 7-Eleven checkout squared his eyes.
They hung out around the edge of the table, sipping drinks, in no apparent hurry. Every once in a while the man reached over to pinch the woman's neck, at the place where her skin, tautened and freckled, was exposed by the vee of her red t-shirt. His limbs looked unhinged from their sockets. Maybe he'd recently been in an accident. His smile revealed his toothlessness.
The woman herself smiled foolishly at his slow, ridiculous movements. She held her body in surrender to gravity, arms relaxed by her side, the flab of her triceps nestled cozily into her outer ribs. Her eyelids drooped. Fat beads of sweat glistened above her lip and at her hairline, which she mopped up with the hem of her shirt, exposing a sagging abdomen and a fleshy horizontal scar. As if called forth by this pulpy gesture, two little children suddenly emerged from beneath the table—twins, judging by their identical size—and chased each other around the table in pre-verbal exultation. Waddled more like, as they'd not yet grown used to their legs.
A lackadaisical laugh came through the gaping mouths of the man and woman. And although no words had been spoken between them, I began to piece together a story, a circle of questions which they seemed all too careless and impotent to contain, flinging about the contents of their family like darts without direction, every sexual body their target. I saw the man take a chip of ice from his glass and slide it down the woman's neck, where it melted into the unfathomable chasm underneath her shirt. A shiny trail remained as evidence of this intimacy, making her laugh. Then the little agendered children laughed, too, with their pink toothless mouths, their stubby fingers gesturing nonsensically at her wet breasts. The man smiled, the way a dog smiles at his food, and cast his gaze hungrily about the room. He even looked at me, to include me. I dared not look away. I wished them all dead.
Then the twins waddled over to the old man who, with the same mixture of delight and embarrassment as one who receives an expensive gift, swooped them both up in the air. He tucked one child underneath each of his arms and flew them around like missiles, their dense elliptical bodies swimming through the squalid sea of the pool hall, all the while making exaggerated war noises. The little children moaned with pleasure.
Peter returned for his cigarettes. He and Chris were leaving. With these words, delivered with violent indifference, I felt the space between us collapse. We looked at each other. His eyes squinted slightly. I moved toward him, slow and deliberate, without warning. Even now when I let my thoughts close in on this memory I can feel his trembling chest, his naked arms, the force of his ambivalence pulling me closer. I knew what I needed to do. I took his face, kissed him. I held his lips open until I was satiated and molten inside. I sliced my nails into his cheeks and let his blood's slow drip cool my mouth.
That was some time ago. I remember going back to the House of Billiards the next day and the next day and the next, always when it was empty and degraded. Each time I imagined seeing the man I loved leaning over the pool table, the tender back of his neck luminous under the lamplight. I could even imagine him looking up, two blue vacant puddles, the dark hole of his mouth smiling at me, then through me, untamed and unprotected.
Sabrina Tom is a writer based in Venice, California. Her work has appeared in The New Orleans Review, Redivider, Hyphen, Contrary Magazine, and is anthologized in The Kartika Review and Overkill. She also co-wrote the screenplay for the short film Moving Into Sunlight.
Helen G. Blake is a painter whose practice focuses on colour; engaging with rhythm and formalism, chance and deliberation. Using a working method where process and contemplation are both allowed guide the evolution of the work, she constructs overtly hand-made paintings which record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms. Blake grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated with an honours degree in Visual Art from Aberystwyth University, Wales. Recent solo shows include: Recent Works, The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (2021, 2019, 2017); Choir, Limerick Museum (2019); and New Paintings, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2018). She lives and works in County Wicklow, Ireland.