In the Crystal Palace, Mood Is Twilight and Life Goes by the Rails

It’s always dusk at the Crystal Palace.

Outside the pool hall, regiments of cars charge in tight formation through the sunny haze on Imperial Highway and Hawthorne Boulevard.

Inside, time moves at the speed of cigarette smoke uncurling over billiard tables.

At the edge of a prairie of vacant lots where Hawthorne meets Lennox, the Crystal Palace billiard hall gives sanctuary to an assortment of refugees from the sunlit world. It offers the communal solitude that authentic, old-fashioned pool halls have in common with cathedrals.

Best on Weekdays

It does a brisk business at night and on weekends, but according to poolroom philosophers such as Oscar, a construction worker, the tough charms of the Crystal Palace are best appreciated on weekdays.

“To tell you the truth,” Oscar says, speaking in Spanish, “what I really enjoy is playing pool during the day. Alone.”

At 1:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, about a third of the 18 tables are occupied. The red-papered walls are lined with tall arched mirrors and posters of smiling Asian movie stars, reflecting the hall’s Japanese ownership. The jukebox repertoire reflects an ethnic melange, with artists ranging from Marisela and Los Jokers to Al Jarreau and the Rolling Stones.

While his father shoots pool, a boy just tall enough to fight on a video battlefield wanders among the 10 machines in one corner. He retreats occasionally for more quarters.

A teen-age Vietnamese couple play carom billiards, a game involving three balls on a table without pockets. The girl is pretty and stylishly dressed. The youth adjusts his brimmed cap, then delicately takes his companion’s elbow to guide her through a shot.

On the railed platform that serves as a small eating area, a man slumps in a chair, asleep.

The clientele includes people who stop by before going to night jobs and people who unwind after early-bird shifts.

“We come in a couple of times a week,” Miguel Zacarias says in Spanish. He is accompanied by fellow Lennox residents Jesus Montes and Lorena Zaldivar. They have just finished the 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift in the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant.

Zaldivar says that the fact that she has awakened before sunrise catches up with her by evening. If she and her friends want to go out, the time to do it is early afternoon. They have been coming to the pool hall for several months.

“The truth is that we haven’t been playing that long,” Zacarias says. “We’re just learning.”

Then there are regulars with more expertise.

Like Duke, a burly and stolid youth from south Los Angeles who is accompanied by his neighbor, Elbert. Duke and Elbert invite a visitor to share a pitcher of beer and shoot a couple of racks.

Duke says he is between jobs. He perfected his game “when I was locked up” in a state Youth Authority camp.

“This is the best place around,” says Duke, who first spotted the Crystal Palace years ago while attending automotive mechanics classes in the area. “Only one I know of. Bowling alleys got tables, but you gotta wait too long to play.”

It costs from $3.50 to $5 to rent a table for an hour, depending on the number of players. Balls are furnished by Ain Go, a weary Vietnamese counterman who also serves beer and wine cooler and tends the grill.

Working Knowledge of Spanish

Ain Go allows that he does not speak much English--”Don’t have time to study.” But he has evidently picked up Spanish.

“ Cuatro dollares, senor ,” he tells a customer. “ Muchas gracias, senor .”

The players circle the tables like languid matadors. It is a ritual of simple aesthetic pleasures: the expanse of green felt beneath the hanging lamp, the configuration of colors after the break, the percussive shock of ball against ball and ball into pocket.

A pastime for some, a living for others.

“I’m making maybe $30 to $40 a day,” says the Puerto Rican they call New York.

In Search of Work

A recent arrival in the city he calls “Haw-thawn,” New York is lean and bearded. He describes himself as a professional salsa musician in search of a gig. He tells his story in staccato riffs.

“I learned pool when I was a teen-ager at the Miami Pool Hall in Paterson, N. J.,” he says. “They let me clean the tables and I played. I learned from the great Miami hisself. He was a Cuban guy.”

New York says he played with such Latin music greats as Azuquita y su Melao on the New York club circuit before coming to Los Angeles “to slow down.”

“I can play anything, man,” he says. “Piano, percussion, guitar. Trumpet is harder for me right now because of my wind. . . . I had a federal scholarship to study music, man. At Kings College in South Carolina. Reagan cut it.”

While he continues his hunt for a band or studio work, the Crystal Palace is a frequent stop. The competition at the pool hall is pretty good, New York says.

‘Games You Never Heard Of’

“They play eight-ball, nine-ball, straight pool. They invent games, man, games you never heard of. I’ll play for two or three dollars a game. I’ll play chess for $2 a game. I’ve only met one guy can beat me in chess.”

New York says there is more money to be made at night. The hall is open from 11 in the morning until 2 a.m., 4 a.m. on weekends.

According to Hawthorne police, while trouble at the Crystal Palace is rare during the day, police have gotten calls during the late hours about fights, gangs, drug problems.

The daytime patrons like Oscar say they generally play in peace.

Oscar wears mud-stained boots, jeans and a baseball cap. Humming along with the jukebox ballad, “ Muriendo de Amor “ (“Dying of Love”), he stalks along the table, stiff from the waist up. He hovers with the cue stick poised, figuring angles, making decisions. He crouches quickly and shoots.

‘You Have to Work’

There have been family and immigration problems of late, Oscar says. He has not been able to play as much pool as he used to. Oscar uses the Spanish word filosofia (philosophy) a good deal; the game puts him in a meditative frame of mind.

“It’s always been my philosophy that you have to work,” he says. “No matter what happens. No matter who you are. I’m working on a road crew and one of these young guys comes up to me, bigger than me, healthy, young. He asks me for a dollar. I told him my philosophy: You want money, you work. Here’s my shovel; shovel dirt for 10 minutes for a dollar. He did it.”

It’s too bad that billiards sometimes attracts an unsavory element, Oscar says. Because for him, the game is, above all, an escape.

“Es un juego puro,” he says. “A pure game. Just you and the balls and the table. It relaxes me.”