Smoke filled the room as I walked around the green felt. My right eye shut tight as my left eye squinted to a narrow slit in a last minute attempt to line up my shot. Sweat forming on my scalp as the body heat radiating from my head was trapped with my white UCLA baseball cap. I felt nervous. This was the most important shot of the game. I had to sink the eight ball. I looked down the narrow sight line at the white cue ball and then the shiny black marble like material that seemed to be moving in all directions, yet going nowhere. I noticed my hands shaking as if they .
were about to have a seizure all their own. I closed my eyes and stood straight up in order to calm myself down. I walked over to the table where two ladies were sitting watching the game. The one on the left offered me a drag of her cigarette to calm my nerves. I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, forming a cloud of smoke under the lantern hanging over the table. The smoke filled light made the bar look eerie as if this was all a dream. I puts my clammy hands together, crossing all .
of my fingers and pushed out and then in. Everyone in the bar could hear the cracking sound of my tense knuckles. I walked back over to the green felt that had become my worst nightmare. The 300 dollars I had already lost kept running through my brain, repeating like an insane man singing the same song over and over. I shook my head to release it of the sound and focused on the shot that could determine if I would eat that coming week. I powered my hands and chalked .
up my pool stick for the last time. Leaning down and lining up my shot, my eye all of the sudden became a sniper rifle as I looked again. There was a thin red line starting at the blue chalked covered tip of my slightly askew pool stick all the way down to the cue and then a second red line connected the cue ball to the top loop of the eight. It looked like a target with majority of the ball covered with black, then a white small circle that encircled the black eight, and within the eight were two white circles.