GIANT BETS

My grandfather was a book maker. When my mother was growing up, she helped him and learned how to make book. It's actually from this foundation, I think, that she developed her sense of bookkeeping which allowed her to grow into a professional accountant. My father liked numbers too, but he wasn't particularly endowed with any intrinsic academic ability, he just liked to gamble.

So I come from gamblers. There was always gambling in my house, I can still remember quite vividly all those Sundays when my grandfather would come over to eat tacos or my mother's gumbo, and they would play cards and dominoes into the wee hours of the morning. If I close my eyes I can see them all sitting around the kitchen table, my mother's virginia slim cigarettes stinking up what parts of the house that didn't smell like my father's IW Harper whiskey.  We had a beautiful, large house with a fish pond in the patio and wrap around backyard, and we even had a game room with a pool table and dart board. And after we ate the tacos or the gumbo, and after my mother was too drunk to play more cards, I'd get to have my grandfather all to myself on that pool table. 

Growing up an only child, I drew a lot, and I fantasized about horror movies a lot, and I played a whole lot of pool. I can do more with a pool cue than I can with a pencil or a paintbrush, that's a fact. I'm a decent artist but I am an excellent pool player. My pool game is 100. Since my earliest memories of childhood, throughout many subsequent years, I have crushed the self esteem of many grown men. My pool game has left men wrecked beyond repair, psychologically scarred for all time. 

Whoever you are, you can’t beat me on a pool table. Although I never seemed to be able to beat my grandfather, every other man or woman who has been brave enough to face me on a pool table have all been summarily dispatched with relative ease. We can play nine ball. We can play eight ball. We can play straight. We can even play with both my eyes blindfolded and Sean Hannity whining in the background. Don't matter to me. I don't lose when I shoot pool. 

You can turn up the Hannity until every dog is barking at the moon, you could throw thousands of dollars on the table, it doesn't matter. I don't rattle. I don't lose when I shoot pool. 

I am Skip 2 My Loop and I created everything you see here. So I am many things, but chief of which, I am most assuredly a pool player. And that as much as anything else, explains what inspired me to create King James Pool Hall.

Gangsters. Clowns. Pool. A bizarre alternate reality ruled by tommy guns. It all sounds like some twisted fantasy from some grown man who never quite grew up.

Yep. That’s about right.

- Skip 2 My Loop