A Dog Named Snooker

Publicist Bob Gibson may be reaching a little when he says billiards will replace sex in the ‘90s.

True, billiards, like sex, is a game of challenge and excitement, and both require a certain degree of skill.

Among billiards’ many advantages, Gibson maintains, is that it’s cheaper to play and less emotionally involving. Also, you do not have to wear a condom to play billiards.

But there is no . . . well . . . elemental satisfaction in billiards of the type that accompanies what the French call le sport.

I may get argument on that from someone who has just sunk an eight ball in a corner pocket, but we’re talking normal people here, not pool junkies.

The reason I mention this today is that Gibson has introduced me to a new game in town. I mean billiards, not sex, which is an old game in town.

The 66-year-old Hollywood Athletic Club has been remodeled and reopened, but not as a private playpen for hedonistic movie stars, as it once was.

It has become an upscale combination billiards palace-bar-restaurant that welcomes everyone from cool, jeans-clad rock singers to intense, irritable, high-achieving poor losers in their cruel middle years.

That’s me on the right, without the guitar.

The 41-table Hollywood Athletic Club (they kept the old name) isn’t the only pool hall in L.A., of course, but it’s different enough to rate attention.

To begin with, it does not smell of beer and urine, which often characterizes those establishments of lesser standards, and it does not offer “Okie From Muskogee” as a background music selection.

That may be disappointing to those of you from Arleta who are more . . . er . . . traditional in your tastes, but you’ve got to remain open to new concepts in recreation.

The cuisine at the Hollywood Club is similarly different from usual pool hall fare. Not “Gimme a ‘burger wit’ fries,” but “Gimme some sauteed seafood cakes wit’ mustard sauce and some o’ dat grilled seafood with braised leeks and champagne.”

Comin’ right up, dude.

I used to shoot a little eight ball in an East Oakland place run by Raincoat Jones that served neither sauteed seafood cakes nor braised leeks.

It was probably the scroungiest establishment I have ever entered before or since, habituated primarily by pool hall cowboys, many of whom had not bathed or been bathed since infancy.

I remember that particularly because Raincoat owned a dog named Snooker who, oddly, was bathed every day and managed, despite his environment, to smell better than most of the customers.

I got to be a pretty fair pool player in those days and was delighted when Gibson called last week to say there was a new billiard parlor in town and maybe I’d like to try it out.

I was accompanied by my wife, Cinelli, and two friends, Dorothy Dells of the Famous Dancing Dells, and Mark Roberts, an actor and writer who, unknown to me, had been a pool hustler in Baltimore.

The place is owned and managed by Tom Salter, a clean and well-mannered Brit who, unlike Raincoat Jones, requires that his customers not offend the olfactory organs.

What I mean is, they can’t stink.

He has no real dress code for the Hollywood Athletic Club, however, because it is often difficult to distinguish between bums and rock stars, or even hookers and starlets, all of whom abound in Hollywood.

Salter was once a roadie for rock stars himself, by the way, as well as a power boat driver, the owner of a London boutique and a kind of dharma bum.

Two years ago, having tried everything else, he opened a billiard parlor in New York that became a hangout for Manhattan’s cognizanti, which, by New York standards, includes anyone who can read and write.

His newest venture, the L.A. club, is closer to that than to Raincoat’s old place, but a pool hall is a pool hall, I always say, so rack ‘em up.

Cinelli had reminded me beforehand that I was a poor loser and should control my temper in the event that I was humiliated by Dancing Dorothy or Baltimore Fats.

I smiled and said there was no way that was going to happen, but you know what? It happened. I got wiped out six games in a row by Roberts, and Cinelli lost to Dorothy Dells, of the Famous Dancing Dells.

I managed, however, to keep my temper and so did Cinelli, because we had a good time even losing. I said to her later, “Well, I may not be good at pool anymore but I’m still pretty good at sex.”

Funny thing, she didn’t say a word, but I heard her sigh wistfully as we left the pool hall. The woman’s crazy about me.