October 9, 2001 — Richmond Eustis didn’t know what he was getting himself into.
Back in August, I e-mailed him the following question: “How long of a road trip would you be willing to make for a bumper pool table?”
Richmond had just returned from a long vacation in Turkey. Perhaps he was still jetlagged, his mind still in a trans-Atlantic trance. Because his reply was quick and left much open to my interpretation: Richmond was willing to travel as far as I thought “prudent” for a bumper pool table. And I now had it in writing.
Richmond did, however, go on to warn me that his truck had “limited capacity” and “chancy reliability.”
“By the way,” he wrote in closing, “this is one of the most ominous questions anyone has ever asked me by e-mail.”
Ominous. An interesting word choice, no? And Richmond wrote it long before we were stranded in Toomsuba, Miss.
I’m not sure what exactly prompted my pursuit of a bumper pool table. But the seeds were likely planted back in my hometown of Bloomsburg, Pa. Most seeds inside me were planted there.
My first introduction to the game came at the Pursel family farmhouse. The Pursels were my next-door neighbors growing up, and I attended many a family gathering at their big house in the country. There was a bumper pool table there. I’d often play on it — but only after sweating through several hours of “kill” on the Pursels’ low-enough-to-dunk-on basketball hoop outside.
It was at the Painted Pony Saloon — located in the basement of Hess’ Tavern on Main Street in Bloomsburg — where bumper pool became a serious endeavor for my group of friends. We’d spend many a school break around that table during college, many a Christmas break there after college.
The table at the saloon is gone now, however, and the Painted Pony painted its walls purple. Going home will never be the same.
This summer, I decided I wanted — no, needed — a bumper pool table of my own. I cleared a spot for it in the back room of my house by selling the exercise equipment that was gathering dust there. Then I made a few phone calls, and realized that a new bumper pool table was way out of my price range.
A used one would be better anyway, I thought. More character. More like the tables I grew up playing on.
I bid on a couple on eBay. I was out of my league. I concluded that most bumper pool aficionados were either wealthy or obsessed, or both.
On to the online classifieds. I almost bought a table for $10 from a lady in Wilton, Conn., back in July, but couldn’t find an affordable way to get it packaged and shipped down to Gainesville. I went and looked at a table in Cumming, but the price and the product weren’t to my liking.
Then, in late August, I happened upon apparent perfection. The classified ad said the table’s playing surface was felt-covered slate — what any billiards buff demands. The table was rectangular — some folks try to pass octagonal tables off as legitimate (they aren’t, by the way). The table was affordable — just $100.
One problem: The table was in Baton Rouge, La. Is a 600-mile, one-way trip “prudent” for a bumper pool table? In my world it is.
To inspect the table, I enlisted an LSU student named Ian. He gave it a thumbs up.
And so, early on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 15, Richmond and I were off, heading west from Atlanta on I-20 in a 1991 Chevy S-10 pickup truck.
Some of you may remember Richmond as a Times reporter. He covered city government here, and now has the Georgia Supreme Court beat for the Fulton County Daily Report, Atlanta’s legal newspaper.
If you have a chance to catch ESPN’s “Sports Century” piece on Ray Lewis — Baltimore Ravens linebacker and one-time post-Super Bowl murder suspect in Atlanta — Richmond is one of the show’s primary commentators. He was interviewed at length, with the gold lighting, the fake bookshelf in the background, and everything.
Richmond and I were making very good time. Too good, it turned out. Roads were eerily empty. It was just four days after the terrorist attacks on the United States. People were holed up in their homes. There were no Southeastern Conference football games to travel to.
We entered Alabama at 8 a.m., and then it was 7 a.m. all over again. We passed our first fireworks store at 7:05.
We hammered through the Yellowhammer State. At this pace, we’d have the table in the truck and be at Richmond’s parents’ house in New Orleans for dinner. We decided to stop for gas at an exit marked “Toomsuba,” just across the Mississippi line.
It was just after 10:30 a.m. We’d still be in Toomsuba when the sun went down.
I stepped out of the truck, and immediately knew I was no longer in Gainesville. I couldn’t understand a word that was being said around me. I’m pretty sure it was English, but it was all bells and whistles on my end.
There, at the Toomsuba Food Mart Texaco, I gained an understanding of Times sports writer and Alabama-native Robert Watson. There actually are other people out there who speak like him.
I finished pumping the gas, and Richmond started the car. Well, he tried to start the car. It squealed. It lurched. It took a spastic skip forward. And then it did nothing.
In the hours that followed, Richmond and I went through a strange series of starts and stops similar to that old S-10. Our prospects would at once look promising, and then profoundly grim.
Richmond called AAA — and found out that his membership had expired. I called AAA — and was told that I had gone over my limit of emergency calls for the year.
So we sat there at the Texaco in Toomsuba and tried to determine our next move. Turns out it was determined for us. A truck with its hood up draws a crowd in Smalltown, U.S.A.
We were first approached by James Nance, a jolly little man known as Pee Wee No. 1 (his co-worker at the Chester Fried Chicken restaurant inside the Texaco station is Pee Wee No. 2). He showed considerable concern for us.
“It’s going to be tough to find a mechanic working on a Saturday around here,” Pee Wee No. 1 said. “Everybody is hunting or fishing or watching football. But I think I might know a guy who can help y’all.”
He went back in the store, to get us a phone number, we assumed. He came out with Lawrence Lard, a man with large forearms and a paper bag containing two cans of beer.
Lawrence went to his car to get his tools. His wife stayed in the passenger seat the entire time. Seemed like she was used to Lawrence doing this sort of thing.
First, Lawrence thought we might have air in our clutch. He tried to “bleed” the line. So I could better understand the process, Pee Wee No. 1 described bleeding the line to me in Toomsuba terms.
“It’s like when you get bit by a snake,” he said. “You slit your wrist and bleed the venom out.”
Both concepts were equally foreign to me. And, it should be noted, I’ve been told by snake experts that bleeding is no longer the preferred method of treating venomous snake bites.
As it turned out, our problem required more than just bleeding the line. We needed a new slave cylinder, Lawrence diagnosed. Still, that didn’t appear to be a major problem. Pee Wee No. 1 had the whole plan worked out.
Pee Wee No. 2 would drive Richmond to the Autozone in Meridian, about 14 miles away. Then the husband of the girl working behind the counter would put the new part on for us. Simple as that.
“That guy is going to take y’all to get your part,” Lawrence said. “And another guy is going to put it on for you. Y’all are going to get back toward New Orleans today. How ’bout that?”
We paid Lawrence $40 for his help — seemed like a bargain at the time — and he headed back to his car, and his wife.
“How ’bout that?” Lawrence repeated through his car window as he drove off. “Y’all in business now.”
That’s what we thought at the time, too.
Richmond and I were in agreement: If you must have car problems while driving through the Deep South, hope that it happens in Toomsuba. It will reaffirm your faith in human kind.
But Richmond was having second thoughts about one thing: road-tripping with a newspaper columnist.
“Bad things seem to happen to columnists,” Richmond said. “Just so they can get a story.”
“Not bad things,” I corrected. “Colorful things.”
It only got more colorful from there.
Part Two: Baton Rouge or bust