The Grand is a deceptive place, more spacious on the inside than anyone imagines before entering. Open its doors in North Austin and the room rolls out for you, magically, like it didn’t exist before you crossed its threshold. A long hallway divides the room, and as you walk toward the bar at the end of the space like a billiards Moses, a sea of pool tables parts to both sides. On busy nights, the racket of crashing balls sounds like you’re caught in a Texas thunderstorm. The playlist jumps from Merle Haggard to Al Green to Motörhead indiscriminately. The crowd is as eclectic, from hippies to frat boys, manual laborers to tattooed cowboys, Ph.D.s to pierced-out punks. At The Grand I’ve played—and lost—against all walks of life.
I love this pool hall most at daytime. Scott, the reed-thin bartender in the Black Flag T-shirt one wash away from falling apart, is checking inventory. Some regulars sit at the bar, watching the horror film The Thing—The Grand’s own DVD collection is curated zealously by Scott. My buddy Bill, who first brought me here, is sitting on a stool, working from his laptop. On one of the blue 9-foot tables, Ed, a retiree the size of a mountain, shoots nine-ball with a friend. There’s a group of construction workers on break, neon vests flapping as they shoot; and then me, practicing alone. I’m here most Monday afternoons, when it’s free for league players, like me, and service industry workers.
The hardest thing to learn in pool is to be still. Quiet. You strive for consistency. The pre-shot routine comes first—it should be the same each time you approach the balls. The bridge hand, where the tip of the cue rests, is steady but comfortable on the table. The only thing that moves is the hinge on your elbow that slides the stick back and forth. Your face is low, chin almost to the shaft, looking past the cue ball, beyond the object ball, and into your target pocket—like soldiers are trained to look down the barrel of a rifle. You visualize everything going right: the tip of the cue hitting the white ball, following through like you’re trying to pierce it; cue ball stopping at point of contact with the object ball, transferring all that kinetic energy into it; then the object ball rolling true into the heart of the corner pocket. Simple. It should work every time. But, of course, it doesn’t. Pool is a game of variables. One thing changes—you’re a half-tip off, there’s lint on the felt, your elbow jerks right—and the whole sequence is thrown. Pool is like life.
When I migrated to Texas from Venezuela in 2006, I thought I would return by 2012. I didn’t know what to expect—or, rather, I expected cowboy boots, American football, and chewing tobacco hitting a spittoon with the clear ring of a bell. Austin wasn’t that, or at least not all that, I would find out. Cowboy boots were for sure a thing, but they were often paired with indie band T-shirts. Longhorn football, while close to a religion, certainly wasn’t a requirement to fit in. And there were plenty of vices preferred over chew.
My partner and I got married in Venezuela and moved to Austin to attend grad school at the University of Texas—biology and advertising, respectively. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez had survived a coup attempt in 2002, and since then had been methodically and controversially seizing control of everything. Our plan was to live in the U.S. for a few years, finish our degrees, and go back. If Venezuela hadn’t changed by then, we could do our part to make sure it would.
The peace we found arriving in Austin, a place not in the throes of civil unrest, felt like a steam bath. But it was still an adjustment. The nights sounded different. In Caracas, you are lulled to sleep by a chorus of tropical toads and insects. The soporific sound is inescapable even behind thick walls. It struck me, my first nights in Austin—the eerie quiet of them, pierced only by the occasional bark or speeding car—how different my world had become.
The first bar we visited was the Crown & Anchor Pub, a north campus mainstay. Of course, there was a pool table—and its gravitational pull was immediate. I had grown up playing with my dad, on an old table at our farm. I liked it so much my mom got me a foosball-size billiards set for my room when I was 13. Then, when I started drinking beers with my friends as a teenager, one of the places that never checked for IDs was a pool bar only a 10-minute walk from school. Called Hooters but unaffiliated with the wings spot, it was dark and drab, with a TV that showed horse races. The ornery bartender flicked caps off our Polar beers with uncanny speed and complete disregard for our pimpled faces. We would spend hours playing there, thinking ourselves men. At Crown & Anchor in Austin, I didn’t think about my friends when I beat a skinny mathematician wearing his own band’s T-shirt. I hadn’t had time to miss them yet.
Three years later, divorce papers freshly printed, my partner and I piled our possessions in different rooms. She kept most of the CDs, bands she had introduced me to in her messy room in Caracas as we fell in love: Cursive, The Shins, PJ Harvey, Modest Mouse. We’d been crossing the same bands off our dream list, after hearing them live at clubs like Stubb’s or Antone’s or Emo’s, as our relationship crumbled.
The dream of going home got paused. What did that even look like without my partner? In Venezuela, things were worse: more poverty, more crime, more protests. In Austin, I obsessed over the news, let the guilt of being safe in the U.S. wash over me like stale holy water.
I loved playing pool at Nasty’s, a now-defunct dive bar whose main decorations were old rugby playoff brackets stapled to the walls. It famously hosted a hip-hop night every Monday—led by Austin legend DJ Mel—that brought in a fun crowd of folks. But Nasty’s was mine on free-pool Tuesdays, when they would unlock the ball guard on their two ratty tables. Every week I would meet Sam, a handsome, all-American West Point dropout turned biology Ph.D.; and his lab mate Rafael, a Colombian with a hooked nose, a lightning-quick wit, and a magnetic quality that either pulled people close or repelled them. They, like me, had come to Austin married. They, like me, had divorced—our relationships crumbled within six months of each other’s, like an epidemic.
We had all lost something important, and we bonded over cheap pitchers of Shiner. I ran those tables. Sam and Raf could eke out a win sometimes, but more often I was holding the cue while they took turns sitting it out under the mini split AC. It felt like going back in time, playing pool with good friends. A grungy bar is a grungy bar, here or in Timbuktu.
In those years at Nasty’s, I was coming to terms with another loss. I was figuring out that, maybe, I would never return home—not permanently. The country I remembered didn’t exist anymore. Most of my friends had left to Santiago, Panama City, Madrid, Bogotá, Houston, Miami. If all the people you love are no longer there, can one still call it home? In the 20th century, Venezuela had become a safe harbor for immigrants but now expelled its citizens in frightening numbers.
My father, who had helped establish an opposition newspaper in 2000 called TalCual, was hit with a defamation lawsuit from Diosdado Cabello, the second most powerful man in the government. This prohibited him from leaving the country. In between racks at Nasty’s, I imagined my dad taken by masked secret police, thrown into an unmarked SUV, and rushed to the infamous Helicoide prison.
Austin had never felt so far away from home. No pool table could bring me closer. Words took its place. Ever since a creative writing elective my final year at UT, I had been trying my hand at short stories. I wrote about a depressive man in a cheap apartment complex. I rendered a bad copy of an Ignatius J. Reilly-type character roaming Austin. I had a story about a tiger escaping the New Orleans zoo after Katrina. All of them felt good to write, and all of them were very, very bad.
In 2013, I was dating a beautiful, smart, and shy ex-Mormon. Tinisha studied algae, rode bicycles, and had the most piercing blue eyes I had ever seen. We were friends before we fell in love, little by little, riding our bikes to joints like Hole in the Wall, White Horse, and Barbarella, the next day jumping, hungover, into Barton Springs. She took me on long rides and showed me what Austin looked like in perpetual motion. We made it official during Fun Fun Fun Fest at Auditorium Shores, sweaty and spent from dancing to Major Lazer. I knew the city intimately by then. I had never belonged to a place in that way. That is the magic of Austin. The summer heat—you melt into it, or it melts into you.
Then my brother was kidnapped. The call from my dad in Venezuela came on a muggy Austin evening as I was sitting in my Hyde Park home. My brother and his friend were held hostage in his friend’s house for hours. Eventually, after the police threatened to storm in, guns blazing, the men turned themselves in. My brother and his friend, apart from a few bruises, were unharmed.
I started visiting Venezuela more often, and invited Tini to come with me. Going to Venezuela together made me see the country in a different way. She courageously embraced it, game for whatever plan came up. Riding horses through swamps teeming with anaconda, eating crispy chicharrón from highway street vendors, and—most dangerous of all—walking Caracas with me. It was hard not to fall in love with Venezuela again, seeing it through the eyes of someone I loved.
Back in Austin, I took writing seriously. Exploring Venezuela fired something in my prose that felt both thrilling and painful. It brought me closer to what I had left and helped me realize how far away I was from it. My brother migrated to Austin, and we started a construction business. My relationship with Tinisha ended, partly because of my own doubts of who I was, what I meant, where I belonged.
I met Bill for the first time in 2017 at a Japanese restaurant where I would go with friends to watch fellow Venezuelan José Altuve lead the Astros to the World Series. Bill wore a stained Dallas Cowboys hat, and underneath it a thin ponytail. We talked about pool. He captained a team at The Grand. The first time we met up to shoot, I thought I was going to have him begging me to join his team by the time I was done wiping the floor with him. But Bill was methodical, ordered, surgical in his approach to pool. He had the cue ball tied to a string. By the end of my humiliation, he graciously invited me to join his team anyway. I had good form, good instincts, he said.
In the years since meeting Bill, I’ve found a cast of pool mentors: Cory, Micah, Spencer, Alex, Don. One night, when I was starting out and still ranked a 3—the American Poolplayers Association’s amateur ranking system goes from 2-7, 2 being a beginner and 7 an expert—I squared up against Josh, one of the few 7-ranked players at The Grand. He was a realtor in his 40s, handsome in an elfin kind of way. He boasted of playing better when drunk—his order was Chardonnay, double, served in a pint glass. Per the rules, to even the playing field, I only needed to win two games for the match, while he needed six.
Initially, I tried to outshoot him, which was impossible, so at 0-4 I changed tactics. I played defensively, taking easy shots when I had them. When I didn’t, I opted to miss but left the cue ball in a difficult position for him. I didn’t win the fifth game, but what had been routine for him became challenging. During the last game, I still had a few balls on the table when Josh was down to just the eight ball. I opted to lock it up, hitting one of my striped balls very softly and freezing it to the eight ball so it would make it tough for him to take his next shot. Josh just looked up at me and smiled.
After he dismantled me 0-6, Josh bought me a drink. He invited me to practice with him on Monday afternoons. For months we drilled together, practicing cue ball control, defense, and shot preparation. I went from a 3 to a 5 ranking. He was a big Star Wars fan and called those Monday afternoons at The Grand “Dagobah”—the swamp-covered planet where Yoda turned Luke Skywalker into a Jedi. We stopped shooting together when the pandemic hit, and I texted him a couple of times during it, just to check in. He never responded, and I haven’t seen or heard from him again.
I had been single for over a year when I met a tall, redhead writer at a party—and then ran into her again on a dating app. Brittani and I, rapidly, frighteningly, fell for each other. I was in love as soon as I finished her novel, Home Leave, a tale of autofiction about growing up a third-culture kid and losing a sister—which I had started reading before we met. It’s strange to get a preview of a person at their most vulnerable, while getting to know them in real time. Like me, she was previously married. But unlike me, she knew what she wanted out of a partner. I was still dealing with the fallout of a relationship, and my failings as a person, as I entered this new, creatively lush moment of my life.
The nights I wasn’t hanging out with Brittani, I was as at The Grand playing pool.
When I practiced by myself, I thought about what I wanted my book to be. It had a difficult structure, with different characters crossing paths in complicated moments of Venezuelan history. Figuring out how to braid these stories was a challenge. The calm of pool practice let me connect with Stanislavo, María, Eloy, Wili, Emiliana, characters who were springing to life for me in very real ways. Presiding over a pool table was like participating in a séance, polished balls instead of candles, Venezuelan ghosts visiting while I worked on my draw shot.
When the pandemic hit, Brit and I had just moved in together. Pool halls closed their doors. My novel was half-written and at times felt completely unimportant.
Creatively, it was a chaotic experience. But it also brought Brittani and me closer together. We rescued our dog, Penny, and started seriously thinking about our shared life. Marriage? Children? I was resistant. I thought that settling in Texas would mean resigning my Venezuelan identity. I was writing a book about what it is to be Venezuelan. I wanted to become more Venezuelan, not less.
When the world reopened, I’d finished the first draft of my novel, and Brit and I were engaged. The pandemic had served as a cocoon for my new life, love and career both emerged out of quarantine.
Today, Brit and I have a toddler. My novel, Freedom Is a Feast, came out last summer. These two life-consuming projects have made pool take a back seat. Playing in a league is hard when there’s a crying baby waiting to be put to bed. I still shoot some afternoons.
Pool made me weave myself into the fabric of Austin. In countless games—played everywhere from the beer-crusted tables at Frazier’s and Sam’s Town Point to the pristine ones at Slick Willie’s, Clicks, and The Grand—I felt increasingly like this was home for me. It also doesn’t hurt that when I step into a pool hall it feels a little like returning to Venezuela. Like I’m playing with my dad at the farm. Like I’m 16 in Altamira, playing hooky from school and crushing on a girl, with no idea that in a few years I will leave Venezuela and never come back.
If I squint, bridge hand on the felt, I can be anywhere. Austin, Caracas. The crashing of balls sounds the same, my hands stained with blue chalk look just as they did, except for the wedding ring. The satisfaction of sinking a ball into the heart of the corner pocket brings it all back. I’m glad it has happened this way, missed balls and all.
