(This story was originally posted on reddit. I wrote it. I figured it needed to be preserved for posterity)
Uptown got its hustlers, the bowery got its bums, and the first time I heard that Jim Croce song, I knew it was really about my daddy.
Dad was an MP at Da Nang, so while he wasn’t actively a target most times, he saw shit. He was there for the Tet Offensive. He was at the gate when the nearest barracks took a direct hit from rockets and he watched as the guys came out in pieces and on fire. Little kids would run up to eat the bugs the spotlights attracted and he got to decide if these were just kids or really young Charlies about to shoot the idiot gate guard (they were just kids). He was patrolling the armory when that took a direct hit, so he got to see a couple million bucks of artillery go off all at once from really close up. All in all, he did not have a good time.
When the military cut him loose, the landing resembled the wet bar on the Hindenburg: visible, catastrophic, and filled with copious amounts of alcohol. He eventually came up for air shortly before he met my mother. He didn’t just have bark on him, he had the whole damn tree. He wasn’t too sure why the pretty blond hippy lady wanted to date him, but he was gonna try the best he could not to fuck things up. He really wanted to impress her AND her family.
Unfortunately for Daddy, my mother’s family most closely resembles a sack of rabid cannibalistic cats halfway through dining on each other. My mother was and is the only sane one. He did not realize this at first, but oh God did he learn.
Now, despite being sober, my dad frequently took my mother to bars. Not for the booze, but for the pool. In the unemployable stage of his alcoholism, Dad made his living snookering suckers at the pool tables. He kept his hand in once he sobered up because figuring out the necessary English to hook one ball around another helped the world make sense. He hated disco because all the good clubs took out their pool tables and put in dance floors, and that was just unforgivable. When he and Mom went out, he ordered tonic water so the bartender would ignore him, restrained himself for a couple games with Mom, and then mopped the floor with anybody dumb enough to challenge him.
So Dad didn’t quite understand what was going on when the Queen Cersei of my maternal lineage, my aunt, invited him and my mom to a bar so they could “visit”. Dad knew academically that most people socialize via alcohol consumption (One of the things about an alcoholic is they lose that concept of recreational boozing. You're either doing it to get shlitzed or you've got no business being in a bar). He figured they were gonna shoot a couple friendly games while they got to know each other. Mom, sweet summer child being her default setting, assumed the same thing. But my aunt invited her sister's recovering alcoholic boyfriend to a bar specifically so that he would have to watch as she and my uncle, the Ultimate Dipshit, attempted to drain it of intoxicants. Her goal, which remained unchanged for the next twenty-five years, was to get my father drunk. The Ultimate Dipshit was glad to help her because it meant he could drink, and to him alcohol was the one true meaning of life.
Dad caught on real quick, ‘cause when your hobby is fucking with people, you recognize when someone wants to screw you. He ordered his tonic water and stuck to the parts of his life appropriate for polite company. Cersei and Dipshit weren’t polite, of course, but Dad really wanted to impress my Mom and didn’t think eviscerating her family was going to do the trick.
Then the Dipshit, for some reason, became fixated on Daddy's pool skills. He decided that Dad was not as good as Dad claimed, and basically began poking him with a verbal stick. Why don’t you show us how good you really are? How about a nice game? Man to man? Cause you a man, right, dude? I mean you got that nice military record and that makes you a man, right, dude? Right?
Dad did not have enough sobriety or distance from Da Nang to respond. He knew that beating the Dipshit in pool wouldn’t give him enough satisfaction, and beating the Dipshit into the bar would get him and the cute blond lady he was dating thrown out. He was kind of used to getting tossed out of bars, but he really wanted my mom to like him. So he drank his tonic water and did his best to be a very sober rock.
And then the Dipshit did it. He pulled on Superman's cape. He spit in the wind. He made his play for the lone ranger mask and he chewed on my Dad's last goddamn nerve. He pointed at the piece of shit pool table in one smoky corner and said “You liar, I bet you couldn’t even clear that table over there.”
Daddy looked at the piece of shit table and registered that it was seriously a piece of shit. Improperly leveled. Plywood bed at best. Pilled felt, stained and nasty. He drained his water, turned to the Dipshit and said, “I bet you everyone's drinks tonight that I can clear that table with a broomstick.”
Dipshit said, “you just go do that, then.”
Daddy smiled.
He politely asked the bartender for the pool balls and the broom. After he racked ‘em up, and somehow managed to get the cue ball to stay put, he unscrewed the broom head and chalked up the blunt end. Sight the ball. Adjust for warp and the fact that this is an unbalanced broomstick. Commence play. Daddy spanked my uncle’s drunken little ego into the ground by sinking every single ball, with a final little flourish on the 8 ball at the end.
He walked back to the bar, screwed the head back on the broom, gave it to the bartender, got my mom a beer, and then ordered another tonic water on the Dipshit's tab.
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