MEMOIR
Pool Hall Blues
Ralph, the pool hall, Parker Fine Pens, Toblerone, Playboy, perfume and Death
I met Ralph in Grade 7.
One of my new friends in a new school, Ralph, was loud, chubby, and fat. He had a waddle for a walk. He had blonde short wispy hair. He a seemingly constant cherubic smile, but he could be deadpan serious at times when talking about life. In those moments he became much older than the rest of us.
Ralph was bussed in from a small rural area about 20 miles south of Golden, a small British Columbia mountain town central to our area and pretty as a picture postcard. Banff, with its seven million annual tourist visitors, was an hour and a half up the highway.
After Grade 6 we rural kids graduated from our four-room schoolhouse. We were then bussed into Golden to continue our education. My bus trip was five miles, with a mile or so walk to the bus stop. Ralph was bussed in from 20 miles away from a small rural town named Parson.
Golden was 2,500 people at that time, not much bigger now. A movie was 25 cents. A coke, 10 cents with a 2 cent return. You could play a game of pool at the pool hall for a dime or three games for a quarter.
In town, we learned eight ball. We learned how to slouch just so while waiting our turn. We learned to professionally chalk a cue tip, eyeing the table, not the cue, using our finger tips, twisting just so until satisfied, then placing the blue chalk cube down, never looking at it, maintaining our gaze on our planned shot. We learned how not to be rushed. We learned to stand our ground when older boys wanted the table. We learned how to hold our face in concentration when we made a good shot, so someone else would say, “Nice shot.” Nobody said, “Nice shot,” if you celebrated your own play.
Ralph was never at the pool hall. Ralph was different.
Ralph wore a constant uniform of oversized black pants and large white t-shirts to fit his obese frame. Ralph never slouched. Ralph never had to make a stand against anyone. Everyone loved Ralph. He was immensely popular. Ralph had a personality like sunshine.
You’d never know Ralph had spent much of his life in hospitals.
Ralph had once been in hospital an entire year. He walked in special heavy boots. He had a metal pin through each foot to straighten out his club feet.
When we passed from Grade 7 into Grade 8 we moved to another school, Golden Secondary School.
There we had almost daily physical education. The only one who couldn’t participate was Ralph. He had to sit on the sidelines, on his own. It was intolerable for him.
In spite of his size and those club feet Ralph was usually in constant motion. He was always pushing the envelope, bending or breaking rules, not in a mean-kid way, but with the angelic face of a Who-Me? cherub.
Ralph was bored stting alone on the sidelines. He once talked me into holding back with him in the gym while everyone else went outside to run around the track.
Energized with the presence of a friend, Ralph explored. A plaid summer shirt in the shower room caught his attention. It belonged to the son of the local real estate king. Years later, that student, upon graduation, bought or leased a service station on the Trans-Canada strip, going into business for himself right out of high school.
Anyway, he’d hung his light plaid summer shirt on a cold light in the shower room. Ralph flicked a lighter menacingly under it. He teased that lighter under it a few too many times and a flame caught the shirt edge, turning it black.
Ralph looked at me, eyes wide.
“Well, I have to do it now,” he said.
He held the lighter under that shirt and burned it good.
“Fire! Fire!” Ralph shouted, all the way to a fire extinguisher, in the hallway, then rushed back in into the changing room- I left the crime scene and let him to it. Ralph sprayed that fire extinguisher all over that shredded black remnant of a shirt as if he was saving the school, which is exactly what he got credit for, while the rich kid’s son caught supreme hell for being so careless as to hang his shirt over a cold wall light. Ralph was hailed as a hero. Only Ralph and I knew how false that was.
Ralph was also a shoplifter.
He had huge front pockets in those constant black pants.
Into those front pockets he could slip in a massive yellow triangle-shaped box of the Swiss chocolate, Toblerone, with its massive long triangle chunks of deliciousness. Toblerone was Ralph’s favourite chocolate bar. It was everyone’s favourite chocolate bar. One over-sized Toblerone bar easily fit in a front pocket of those over-sized black pants.
Ralph was so casual about shoplifting that he once pocketed a Toblerone with the clerk at her counter right behind him and he looked up at me and said, “See? That’s how easy it is.”
He stole Doc Savage pocketbooks, he stole Playboy magazines, he stole high-end Papermate pen sets in their plastic cases, matching sets, pens with matching mechanical pencils, and he stole other odd sundry items including perfume bottles for girls at school. He laughed in an alley once, when looking through his loot, discovering he’d stolen an empty perfume bottle marked “For display only” in tiny little letters.
I was only occasionally with him in town during school lunch breaks. I never stole a damn thing. I was there to be mesmerized by a master and was.
Ralph’s young life of crime caught up with him.
One evening Ralph called me at home from his house 15 miles away- this was decades before cell phones.
Ralph begged me for a favour.
The school had called his mother. She was informed by the principal that he and local store owners would greet Ralph as soon as he stepped off the bus. He would be escorted to his locker. There he would have to open it in the presence of the principal and shop owners. His mother was rightfully shocked. She lectured Ralph that night, telling him his life of crime had been discovered and was over.
Ralph knew once his locker was open the jig was up. The evidence was there. Toblerone chocolate bars. Expensive pen sets. Playboy magazines. Doc Savage Paperbacks. Perfume in stylish little bottles for girls at school. There was only one chance he had and I was it.
“Please,” Ralph pleaded to me over the phone. “Please. I’ll do anything.”
He gave me his locker combination and begged me repeatedly to go to school early, open his locker, take out his stolen loot and get rid of the evidence before the posse greeted him in the morning.
“Get there before the buses,” Ralph pleaded. “You have to empty my locker.”
So I did.
I walked the five miles to school the next morning, the first time I had ever done so. I did it a few times after that, at least two or three times every school year just for the walk and for the pleasure of being the first one at school.
Years later, in Grade 12, our principal, Norm Webb, loudly called out to me from the end of a hallway. It was more than an hour before anyone else arrived in the school.
“Lawrence!”
I turned.
“Do you sleep in the foundations?”
It was an easy walk. We were used to walking. It was two miles to Don and Len’s place by the railroad track. We each walked that often. It was three miles to the general store. We walked that often. We walked the power line above the school, sometimes with a .22 to shoot grouse that would flap noisily out of the bushes as we walked. Walking five miles was just a bit further.
I arrived well before the school busses. I opened Ralph’s locker. I was surprised by the amount of loot in it. The boy definitely had a kleptomania problem.
I looked for a garbage bag lining a garbage can and eventually found one. I took out Ralph’s loot and tossed it into the bag, then carried it outside the school where I thought no one would run across it. Our school was next to a large park where we held track meets. Right alongside our school was the Kicking Horse River. Across from the school in the middle of the river there was a small island.
Ralph told me later he was greeted by the principal and shopkeepers as soon as he stepped off the bus.
They were determined to nail this chubby student robbing them with such impunity. They marched him to his locker and the principal quietly demanded he open it.
Ralph said he had obediently opened the locker, somewhat trepidatious, but with a hopeful confidence his friend had come through for him.
As soon as the locker was opened a shop keeper leaned forward and ruffled a hand through it. All Ralph had in his school locker were text books, notebooks and Bic pens, just like every innocent student would have.
Another knowing friend, Don, helped me bury that black plastic bag of loot on the island across from the school- without a couple prized Toblerone chocolate bars- my price for the long walk that morning.
Don and I waded across the Kicking Horse River from the school to the island. Before the loot was buried Don retrieved a Playboy magazine for himself. His price.
Decades later I read someone built a home on an island in the middle of the Kicking Horse and thought, ‘You have got to be kidding,’ and wondered if it was the same island.
When we were 15 and approaching driver’s license age we male students- no female student- had to watch a school film, a black-and-white motion picture, filmed, if I remember right, by an American highway patrol. It featured a series of gruesome highway mishaps in black-and-white blood and gore, dead people in the still-fresh motor vehicle messes, corpses sprawled in their seats, and even one hanging in a tree. That vehicle must have been travelling at terrific speed before the collision for that man to be flung up into the tree and be stuck up there like a rag doll.
The objective, of course, was to scare us silly and slow us down before we got our licenses.
Most of us had driven already. It was common for our fathers to let us drive the family truck on forested back roads during hunting trips while they provided fatherly guidance from the passenger seat.
While some of us were genuinely stunned by the deliberate graphic nature of the film presentation, Ralph laughed through that whole film like it was a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Then Ralph was hit by a car and killed.
Don and I were to go to his funeral.
We met on the highway. We saw we had both dressed for the occasion, white shirt and a borrowed black tie. Our blue-collar fathers each had one black funeral suit and one black tie to go with it.
We hitch-hiked the five miles into town.
We went to the same place a woman had dropped us off on a previous hitch-hiking trip, one of a hundred rides we had into town over the time we had begun hitchhiking.
We both remembered her well, though we never saw her before or after. Her husband had just died. She told us to be good to one another, life was short, you never know. Her tone made us take serious notice, but she never had any attitude of self-pity. She was simply resigned. She had an I-have-to-do-this vibe. Sadness and acceptance.
When she had pulled up to the funeral home, she’d let us out, saying to us, “People are just dying to get here.”
At that time we had mentioned our ride to someone in the pool hall. We were told that was Mrs. So-and-so, her husband just died. We hadn’t known.
Now we were here. On the steps of the same town funeral parlour. People were just dying to get here.
Don waited as I knocked on the funeral home door. When the funeral director opened the door I had no idea what to ask.
So that’s what I said.
“I have no idea what to ask.”
“Well, you just ask,” the funeral director said. He seemed pleasant and understanding.
“Is Ralph here?” I asked.
He opened the door and had us come in.
He said we could “view” Ralph.
He led us into a room where a wax-like Ralph slept in a coffin. He then let us alone. Makeup couldn’t hide a bruise on the left side of Ralph’s forehead. The car or the pavement must have smacked him there.
Don and I fell into a long silence with the just-as-silent Ralph.
We took in our youth, Ralph’s sudden and forever death, the randomness of the universe, and what life meant, if anything. We said nothing. Ralph said nothing. There wasn't much to say.
We eventually left Ralph. We walked down the steps of the funeral home, taking off our ties without saying a word.
We let Ralph’s family and friends have their church service. We’d said our own silent goodbyes to our close friend.
Instead, we went to the pool hall, wizened somehow, deeply affected by some impact we couldn’t explain. We shot pool in our church clothes, ties in our pocket. We hardly spoke. People left us alone.
