We all lived in Walltown that winter. Moon and his wife Jan lived in a duplex on Clarendon. Tom and I and a third roommate split the rent for a three-room apartment on Lancaster Street. The shotgun apartment was in a white frame house that some jackleg carpenters had carved into thirds.

How cold was that winter? The water mains froze, and the sidewalks in West Durham were covered in ice that was hockey-rink thick. The fire department laid out hoses to get people water.

How cold was it? Jimmy Carter was elected President.

Fortunately, our apartment had steam heat, with a ticking, gasping radiator in each room. The oil-fired boiler in the basement was controlled by a single thermostat, which was located next door, in the Old Lady's apartment. She kept the thing cranked, and in the coldest winter anyone could remember, we could have raised orchids on the kitchen table.

Our rent was $110 a month, heat included. We were all unemployed, of course. Who could get up in the morning and leave a warm bedroom, to go to work in that kind of weather? We'd be mobile by the early afternoon, though, and that's when Tom and I would walk down to Clarendon Street to collect Moon. Then we'd walk to Broad Street and our daily dose of culture.

The pool hall was in a store-front near the corner of Club Boulevard, in a block that was also home to a gas station, vacuum cleaner store, a very large funeral parlor, and another long-departed West Durham landmark, the Top Hat Bar and Grill. Across the street was a new sprouts-and-tofu restaurant called Somethyme.

This was what we had instead of Ninth Street - and I'd take it any day.

The owner, Mr. Whit (short for Whitman, if I remember correctly), had once been a foreman at Erwin Mills. Long after the mill had shut down, but long before it had been condo'd, he still lived in the foreman's house, a square brick manse that at some point was moved to Anderson Street.

To breathe the air in the Sport Shop was to take in the distilled essence of pool halls the world over. The place smelled of sweat, talcum powder, onion breath, and tobacco in every form. Not just the aroma of Chesterfield smoke freshly exhaled, but also the butts crushed into the floor and the cuspidor in the corner. The sound track was a soothing mix of clicking ivory balls, their thunk into leather pockets, the chalk squeaking against a corked cue tip, and the now-extinct noise made by a detachable pull-ring being snapped and then torn off the top of a cold can of beer. (A reformed drinker, Mr. Whit didn't sell the stuff, but he had no objection to our carrying it in from the Top Hat. He would even put it in his drink box for us, to keep it cold.)

The players kept up a running patter, punctuated by groans over missed shots and the sharper cries of "Rack!" Most of Mr. Whit's guests observed the "No Profanity" signs that decorated the chipped plaster walls just above the dark stripe of chair rail. The signs carried a second prohibition, against gambling, but that taboo was religiously ignored.

"Remember the skinny kid, Russell?" When Moon mentions the name, I can see the dirty blond hair, the slight build made possible by a diet of Moon Pies, RC Cola, and Lucky Strikes. The kid shot a pretty good stick.

"Russell talked a better game than he played," Moon corrects me.

With further prompting from Moon, I remember Bonnie, who was a high-dollar nine-ball player, and the big black guy everybody called Blue. Moon tells me that Blue was a parole officer, something I never would have guessed.

Without question, the sentimental gentleman from Georgia was the best player in our trio of the unemployed. Although he could have held his own with most of the guys who played in the Sport Shop, Moon was content to hang with his buddies, playing casual eight-ball on one of the two regulation-size tables in the center of the room. From that vantage point we would keep one eye on the snooker table in the front of the house - where the real players spent their time - and the other eye on the Keno table in back, which was where the real gambling went on.

Keno is to pool what HORSE is to basketball. One end of the table is covered with an inclined slab of wood, into which ball-sized depressions have been bored. Each hole is numbered, and of course each pool ball has a number. With such a promising array of equipment to work with, you can easily see how resourceful men might figure out a couple of dozen ways to bet on the outcome. As if that weren't enough, the game began with each player blindly drawing a small number marble - a "pill" - out of a half-sized plastic milk bottle. Every now and then we would hear balls cracking and then the crowd around the Keno table would erupt in cheers and moans as somebody hit his number. Side bets were part of the game, and a working man could lose his paycheck without ever picking up a cue stick.

"Remember the day," Moon asks, "that Pete snatched off Russell's tip?"

Pete's bird cage was probably the Sport Shop's most memorable feature. It hung on the north wall, above the cigarette machine and a sign that read: V.I.P. - Very Important Parrot. Pete's importance was beyond question, but, as parrots go, Pete was not an especially vocal bird. He was so laconic that Mr. Whit would occasionally sprinkle cayenne pepper on his birdseed, to encourage him to talk. Even then, the bird's conversation rarely went beyond the phrase, "Rack 'em, Larry!"

Larry was the guy who stood on the sidelines with a wooden triangle hanging around his neck, ready to rack for 25 cents a game. I believe he may have been a member of Mr. Whit's family.

As a V.I.P., Pete was seldom confined to his cage. His normal perch was on top of the open cage door, where he had a clear view of Keno, snooker, and everything in between.

On this particular occasion, what Pete saw was me, watching Moon and Tom play a game of eight-ball on one of the middle tables. In the back, Blue and some others, dressed in the polyester Sansabelt slacks and Banlon shirts of the time, were in a hot game of keno. Mr. Whit was standing by in his white shirt, watching everything that Pete saw, and possibly a little more. He might have been telling a story, about his morning of hell on the beach at Normandy.

At the snooker table in the front window, the blond, skinny, wannabe hustler was playing a game called Golf. Golf is a gambler's game, a form of one-pocket in which the object hole moves around the table.

"Lot of lawn to mow," Russell said to his opponent, who was lining up a length-of-the-table shot across the grass-green felt. "Too much of the long green," he said, hawking the poor man mercilessly.

As his rabbit-eared mark finally sighed and missed the shot, Russell went to the cigarette machine. And that's where the trash-talking kid made his mistake. Because when he bent down to pick up his smokes from the tray, he held his cue vertically, the butt on the ash-strewn linoleum floor and the tip within range of the taciturn Pete's hooked beak. With his green head cocked to the side and his all-seeing bird eyes shining, the parrot bent down and pecked the tip cleanly off of Russell's cue, then spat the circle of cork right back in the young hustler's face.

"Goddamn!" the boy yelped, in clear violation of the rules.

When everyone realized what had set off Russell's outburst, the Sport Shop erupted with twice the volume of glee that any Keno score had ever provoked. Blue laughed, Mr. Whit laughed, the guy losing at golf laughed, and Moon, Tom, and I joined in. We howled and we chuckled, we guffawed until tears ran down our faces.

Nobody cared that it was the coldest winter in memory.

"You remember the guy with the wooden leg?" Moon asks, on the phone.

I was only 22 that year, my daughter's age today. I was unemployed, reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and hanging out in a pool hall. At the same age my daughter, Grace, is in an Ivy League graduate school. Maybe, as they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree; but sometimes the fruit rolls for a distance, out of the tree's shadow.

The mid-'70s in Durham were a frivolous, loony time. But, looking back, there's no denying that the Bull City was an important crossroads. People I met at that intersection have been with me ever since.

Today, Moon and Jan Mullins are both educators in Athens. Their son, Will, spent last summer at Duke, in a special program for talented high school students. He wants to make films.

Our third eight-ball player, Tom, never got a chance to grow up. He died in an Ohio pasture 20 years ago, for reasons I'll never understand.

I mentioned that Tom and I had another roommate. Her name was Debbie, and she not only contributed her $36.67 toward our monthly rent, but in some months she paid mine, too. Three years after we left Lancaster Street, Debbie became Grace's mother.

I don't recall that my wife ever actually entered the Broad Street Sport Shop, but she knows its place in history. Last year, on my birthday, Debbie gave me a two-piece Lucasi pool cue. With its birdseye maple shaft, an Irish linen handle, and mother-of-pearl inlay, it is surely the finest gift I've ever received.

On the phone, I promise Moon Mullins that when he comes to town I'm going to take him to Oscar's, the pool hall in Chapel Hill where I play every week. I warn him that with my new stick, I may just whip his ass.

"Better pack a lunch," replies the sentimental gentleman from Georgia.

Bill Morris graduated from Duke University some time ago and is now a freelance writer in Chapel Hill. His story "Winter in the Bight" was published in the September issue. He is the father of Grace Morris, whose story "Elias Turned 5 Today" begins on page 27.

The author wishes to thank David Southern, whose historian's memory, and side-pocket bank shots, are much better than his own.