The Canonical Penguin: Exploits of the 215th Street Gang – The Pool Hall

If you are going to have a good gang, you need some illicit stuff to be part of and the 215th Street Gang had that in our pool hall and athletic stadium. Let me explain…

The pool hall was a 7 foot pool table in our basement. It was great down there because it was cool in the summer and warm in the winter and we could get in and out without being seen, using the basement door on the back of the house. My father’s tools were nearby so whenever we were into mischief, it was easy to have the proper equipment. When we tired of pool, we had a wooden top to place on the table and if you add a net, you have a neat ping pong table. I could not even estimate the time we spent there doing that stuff. Eventually we got into motor sports and this table top is where the car racing set went. Even back then we were multitasking!

(Our buddy Tom, playing ping pong like a Chinese pro!)

Most of our gambling empire was connected to our illegal card games on Friday and Saturday nights. We played penny poker till all hours, usually topped off by several great pieces of VIP Pizza, a local place with the best pie in the neighborhood. We couldn’t call it an official game until Tom wiped his fingers on the pizza box cover for good luck. Again, much too much fun. I did a VIP Pizza entry in the post before this one...

We also used this table top for the Bayside Gerbil Olympics. We had several of the little critters and many an afternoon was spent making obstacle courses and climbing areas for them on the table top. We even would let them wander around the racetrack which created “giant rats attack cars” scenarios which we took pictures of. I have no idea if any of the pix survived but they were great. It also was a gerbil that led to my brother’s marriage. I’ll let him tell the full story. We will let it suffice to say one crawled up his pants leg and when his pants hit the ground, his future wife saw that from her house window.

(These are stories about things that actually happened with plenty of witnesses. It has passed from the apocryphal to canonical in nature. Wiki says of canon – “material that is considered to be "genuine", "something that actually happened", or can be directly referenced as material produced by the original author or creator.”)