I went to play pool this week in Stockholm with one of my friends. I haven’t played in a while, so it was fun, plus we were evenly matched, which is to say we were both quite terrible.
Playing in this extremely clean, smoke-free, empty pool hall in Stockholm (with pop 80s music on the speakers) got me thinking about where I usually play pool once a year – at a dark backwoods marina in east Texas.
This place is located on the bayou near the border of Louisiana. We always arrive by boat. You can get a great hamburger at this place if you don’t mind that the guy cooking it smokes cigarettes, is 300 lbs and has a stained shirt that probably hasn’t been washed for at least 4 days. (It just adds extra flavor.) While you wait for your hamburger to arrive, you can borrow a bag of marshmallows to feed the alligators in the bayou. Always a treat for the kids. Or you can play a little Ernest Tubb on the jukebox, which is only loaded with old-time country, while you play a game of pool.
You might think it’s nicer to have a smoke-free pool hall all to yourself, but I say it’s missing the ambiance of the little Texas marina. If I ran the Stockholm place, I would make it where you can only arrive by sled, a 300 lb man chewing tobacco with stains on his shirt would make meatballs, and you could feed the moose with marshmallows out back. Now, that would be a real Stockholm pool hall.
What is the address of the Swedish pool Hall?
It’s by Skanstull. Near the Muffin place, between Skanstull and the beginning of the bridge. Pretty cheap and empty!