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A FEW HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A FIVE-YEAR-OLD POOL PLAYER by Francine Rodriguez
A Few Hours In The Life of a Five-Year-Old Pool Player by Francine Rodriguez
The parking lot in front of King Drew Place of Family on Central Avenue, was nearly full that morning in 1994. I didn’t recognize any of the cars filling the lot, stacked one behind the other. Gangster cars, black Suburbans, Escalades, and lowriders, like the ones in my neighborhood, like the 61 Impala my Dad left when he died. The one I drove for two years and didn’t know it was stolen until I tried to sell it. They all sported the same metallic blue or red paint jobs that gleamed in the sun, and the same prized twenty-inch rims. All chrome trim. But none of the homeboys from my neighborhood came up here. The great relocation of the Latino community to South Central was still in its infancy. To the west the population was almost all African American, all the way up to the Jordon Downs Project. Things hadn’t changed yet. Place of Family was an outpatient clinic where substance abusers were sent by the courts for treatment between stays in jail, or a place where they ended up after being released from the hospital, dead broke without any resources. It was also a place where counseling was provided to pregnant teens, most of them HIV positive, a lot of them homeless.
I worked there part time as a counselor to supplement my full-time job. It was Monday, so I was on my way to start Monday Morning Group, an exercise in absorbing the flood of anger, fear, and confusion that the women released when they shared the horrors of their daily lives.
That day I had my youngest with me because he had a doctor’s appointment in a few hours, and I didn’t want to drive back home to pick him up. He was about five years old, and we were armed with his picture books, a coloring book, crayons, and a paper bag filled with an apple, an orange, a granola bar, and a bottle of water. Enough entertainment and food to last an hour during the group session.
Usually by the time I got there the lobby was empty because most of the participants had moved on to the group rooms. But it was different that day. A large sign on the wall said, “Gang Summit, Grape Street, Rolling Eighties.” Young men stood around the lobby eyeing each other carefully or sat in the recreation room on opposite sides surrounding the pool table. The air hummed with tension. The music that generally played over the PA system was missing, so was the sound of laughter and muted voices.
“What’s going on?” I asked the receptionist who sat behind a glass screen.
She pointed to the sign. “Gang Summit. Some new thing they’re trying. They’re coming from all over the county, all the way down to Long Beach. Some bigwig called it, so the words out on the street. They aren’t allowed to come strapped, they check what they’re carrying with the security next door and get patted down.”
“Are we still having group today?”
“Yep, as far as I know. The women are all in there.”
I looked around. I hadn’t planned on bringing my son into the group room. He didn’t need to hear the kind of things we talked about. I’d planned to leave him in the recreation room since it was always empty at this time of morning. Now I didn’t think it was such a good idea.
Suddenly my son spotted the pool table and ran over to it, ignoring the guys standing around the table. The Rolling Eighties on one side and Grape Street on the other, arms folded across their chests, wearing dark glasses, sagging pants, do-rags, and huge tee shirts that hung to their knees.
“Look, Mom, a real pool table, like on television!” He touched the green felt in reverence.I ran after him and snatched his hand back. “Don’t touch the table, you might scratch it. It’s very expensive.” I remembered that some politician had donated it to the Center.
He stepped back, looking sad, and then hopeful, as he saw a pool cue lying across the side. “Could I play, just for a minute. Please!”
“No. No. You don’t know how to play, and you’ll scratch the table. You come with me, and we’ll find a place for you to wait.”
With his head down, my son backed away from the table defeated, his shoulders slumped.
“Hey, just a minute there. If the little homie wants to play. He can play! I’ll teach him. We got time before the meeting.”
I heard a few murmurs of agreement from both sides of the table. Bent down next to the table tying the laces on his Timberlands, was one of the largest guys I’d ever seen. He had to be over six foot six and must have weighed in the high two hundreds, easily the size of two offensive linemen. He had a black handkerchief tied across his forehead, a large diamond in his ear, and wore the requisite black shades that seemed to be part of a dress code.
“That’s okay,” I said. “He’s too little, and he’ll probably scratch the table.” I was speaking from experience since I’d scratched the table the first time I tried, and several times after that too. “I’ll take him with me. I’m running the women’s group today.”
The guy with the black handkerchief stood up to his full height. “You wanna play Little Homie?”
My son nodded eagerly. Looks were exchanged between the guys around the table. They all turned to my son, a red-haired, blue-eyed, multi-racial Mexican child, about forty-three inches tall. Most of them smiled. My son looked around at all of them and smiled back.
“You hungry Little Homie?”
“Oh, he had breakfast, and I brought him food.” I assured the guy with the shades.
“I think it’s time for a morning donut? You think so, Little Homie?”
Of course, my son nodded in agreement, not quite believing his good luck. Apparently the guy offering was the leader of Grape Street. He asked one of the members of the Rolling Eighties if he would go and buy donuts, and graciously handed him a folded bill.
“We’ll take care of him, and feed him too,” he reassured me.
I watched for a few minutes while the members of Grape Street and the Rolling Eighties took turns lifting my son up to the table and helping him line up his cue to make a shot. They all applauded when he managed to touch the ball.
“You can go to work, Mommy, I have a lot of babysitters,” he told me.
And so, I did. When I finished my group and came back to the lobby, chairs, two deep, had been arranged around the table. Their meeting had started and a gang worker was moderating. At the corner of the table, my son sat in one of the nicer chairs that somebody had brought in from the director’s office.
He sat in between the leader of the Rolling Eighties and the leader of Grape Street, like a smaller version of the reigning monarchs. He’d obviously had a donut because his mouth was smeared with powdered sugar, and apparently whatever they were talking about had lulled him to sleep.
One of the guys carried my son to my car and told me to bring him back again any time I wanted.
Before their meeting someone had snapped a polaroid and pinned it to the bulletin board. In the photo, a smiling little boy stands on top of a pool table surrounded by two gang factions. He has his arms outstretched hugging the guys on either side of him. Everyone in the photo was smiling. I fully intended to take that photo the next time I was there. As a memento for my son, so that one day he could recall that he was accidently part of one of the first gang summits in Los Angeles, and without knowing or understanding it, he became a small part in what happened that day.
Sadly, like a lot of things that pass through our lives, the photo that froze that day in time and place wasn’t there the next week I came to work. Sadder still, sometime later King Drew Place of Family was torn down because they weren’t able to get the grants they needed. A lot of the people that were helped there returned to the streets.
But every time I handled mediations in the government facility located on Central Avenue, I always looked to the empty lot where the building once stood and remembered my son standing on that pool table with some of the roughest looking dudes I’d ever seen with some of the worst reputations preceding them.
For that moment at least, they were all smiling.
