LEONARD AND I were shooting pool with John at the LaBorde Rec Center, which in spite of its name is not for kiddies. It was a place where you could buy a beer, shoot some pool, see football games and boxing matches on a huge television, and watch guys scratch their nuts and try and pick up women. And from time to time guys try to pick up guys and women pick up women.

The bartender, Marlie, was a bull dyke with a flattop and a body the size and shape of a small sumo wrestler, or if you prefer, a three-hundred-pound potato. Fortunately, she didn’t dress like a sumo wrestler or a potato. She always wore gray coveralls with the sleeves cut out, so you could see her big biceps and tattoos, like: MOTHER NEVER LOVED ME, AND SO WHAT?

Marlie owned and ran the place. She was noted for her uneven temperament. I had seen her use a taped axe handle to subdue rowdy customers, and she had a mean left hook and she didn’t mind kneeing a man in the balls either. Saturday nights, the Rec Center could get pretty rowdy, and so could Marlie.

Marlie always looked as if she were about to break out into a string of obscenities. Which, of course, she often did. Stuff like: “Quit fuckin’ up that pool cue, you limp-dicked cocksucker,” and “Do that again, motherfucker, gonna wake up peein’ through a tube.”

She had a girlfriend who looked like a Vogue model.

Leonard and I were the lousiest pool players ever produced. We were playing colored and stripes. I was stripes, Leonard was colored. He thought that was funny.

I took a shot and knocked my last striped ball in the hole, eased around to shoot in the black one. Leonard had two colored balls left, red and green, and neither in a good position. I grinned at Leonard as I lined up the shot, an easy one.