bigcloset

Fatboy and the Nineball

Added 2025-01-25 00:28:18 +0000 UTC

One time, Fatboy played nine-ball for his life with some outlaw bikers from California in a roadhouse on the Oklahoma line. A woman named Maylene Wheeler owned that roadhouse and she was maybe Fatboy's cousin and maybe his ex-wife or maybe both.

The roadhouse sort of put one in the mind of Maylene herself--sturdy, roomy and handsomely curved. The original building had been a No. 4 military surplus Quonset hut, thirty-two foot wide and eighty foot long with a seventeen-foot ceiling in the middle. A square twenty by twenty foot kitchen stuck out the back, midway down one long wall, with a walk-in freezer and enough deep-fryers to reduce the chicken population of the county by one-third in a single night.

Up top and visible for miles sat a neon sign that said, "Eat Pool Dance" and a lot of people thought that was the name of the place. A smaller painted sign had the right name, State Line Casino--even though it weren't on the state line and weren't no casino, neither....