The Pool Room

I wrote this description of the pool room in early 2000 for a college class. Unused for the most part due to all the kids being mostly grown up, the storage has overtaken it (at last count, 13 laundry baskets full of stuff, my brother's seats from his Camero, a painting I did in college, various mattresses, and lots of clothing). Here it is - the story of the pool room.

My family has a large room in our basement that we affectionately refer to as “the pool room.” This is because we have a pool table in there, which was in the house when my parents bought it some 23 years ago. My brothers and I have had many adventures in this room throughout our lives. Some of them have gotten us into severe trouble with our parents, and others are just kind of bizarre.

I suppose I should start off by describing the room. It is an extremely peculiar room or, at least it was, before my mother decided that its hideousness had to be remodeled into normalcy. First off, I want you to keep in mind that this room is in the basement, meaning there are other floors above it. I say this because the ceiling is, or was, paneled with Styrofoam. Upon describing this, I have had many responses of, “But doesn’t it leak in there when it rains?” To these remarks I simply restate the words “basement” and “paneled.” I then go on to explain that the walls of the pool room are paneled with bamboo, and no, the wind doesn’t blow through the cracks because there are cinder blocks between the bamboo and the outside, thus I again use the word “paneled.” I suppose this is confusing to people because bamboo and Styrofoam are not exactly what you would call home décor. So, I imagine that already you have a strange picture in your mind of what my basement looked like. It gets worse.

There is a bar in the pool room as well. Behind it, the wall used to be covered in mirrors. There were also ends of two barrels sticking out of the mirrored area, and attached to each was a weird, wooden, African-looking mask thing. It was some pretty horrid decorating, but since it had all been there when my parents first moved in, I grew up with it and thought it was pretty normal.

I spent a lot of time in the pool room, since it was like a playroom to my brothers and me. But around the time I was six years old, the tacky paneling and the presence of the pool sticks created too much temptation for my younger brother Stephen and me. It’s not that we were bad kids; we just didn’t think before acting. So each of us began jumping, armed with a pool stick pointed straight into the air. The sound of the pool sticks poking into the Styrofoam ceiling was very satisfying, and the bits of foam that began drifting down out of the holes seemed like snow to us. So we continued jumping and poking, until the ceiling was rather full of holes the size of pool stick tips. Stephen and I were having a blast, until our parents discovered what we had done.

The ceiling remained this way until we refinished the basement ten or more years later. In the meantime, it provided a conversation piece and an opportunity to get into more trouble. Paige, our neighborhood friend, was a great trouble-getter-into-er. She thought it was cool to make some of the holes above the pool table a little larger so that pool balls could fit inside. We had a few big holes that we could roll the pool balls between, like a giant pinball machine in the ceiling. The holes were pretty close together, all being above the pool table so that we could stand on it to reach the ceiling.

Did I mention that we lost one of our pool balls for a long time? For years, the whereabouts of the fifteen ball was the biggest mystery of the pool room. I was convinced that it had rolled behind the ugly green piano (also left in the house when my parents first moved in), a place we couldn’t look because of the impossibility of moving the massive piece of furniture. By the way, this is the piano in which Paige managed to get stuck while playing Hide and Seek. But I’m not here to tell Paige stories, so you can ask me about that later.

Remember how I said that we refinished the pool room? My dad bought some dry wall from Home Depot and brought it home to re-panel the walls and ceiling. I wasn’t too happy about the destruction of my childhood playroom, but my mother was determined to have the basement look un-seventies. So my father pulled all of the bamboo paneling off the walls, and then he started on the Styrofoam. As he removed one of the panels above the pool table, he heard a strange rolling sound followed by a loud clunk as the pool ball that had narrowly missed his head hit the floor behind him. Now, by this time we had stopped hanging out with Paige, but she had still almost managed to give my dad a concussion ten years later.

Those are a few of the funnier memories of the pool room. There are many more things that happened there: It was the site of Stephen’s model train set, where we played a game called “Chris and Emily” with Froster the polar bear. It was where Paige’s sister Holly got stuck in our laundry chute. Also located in the pool room was the old refrigerator that began to make poodle-like barking noises right before it died. And I won’t ever forget the half-missing ceiling panel from where my cat fell through the Styrofoam and landed in the Barbie swimming pool (which was being used by the My Little Ponies). And my brothers and I never tired of building dark haunted houses that went throughout the entire room. The pool room is the place where many of my childhood memories were made.