Table Legs Author:Paul Blumenau Lyons, Paul Lyons He doesn't have his brother's height for basketball, nor his brother's theatrical good looks and social graces. But he has two gifts that can help him find trouble. One is his highly developed sense for "the fascination of what's difficult." The other is a keen appreciation of what used to be called "low life," and is probably the same as life.... more » A busboy, he invents an ideal: "The Heifetz of Busboys." In his mind he works out the appropriate discipline for such a paragon, to that he may achieve balletic precision of movement, a soldierly, musicianly "attack," and courtesy exquisitely honed for cutting away the crass assumptions of flesh and blood. And in an actual crisis, a set-piece of real-life restaurant battle, he shows generalship of the highest order and a tact that would put his shining brother to shame. Again, where Ishmael said, "The whale ship was my Harvard and Yale College," he can say, "The pool room was my education for life." For he has apprenticed himself to the pool player's art under masters who show no indulgence because their ideal - sometimes achieved in reality - is to transcend physics through the spirit. After just such a miraculously privileged performance, in the stillness that follows a miracle, one of those heroes announces, "All I want is one session of nine-ball with God." The dramatic interest of the passages-at-arms in the pool room, the description of a world of losers, some of who elects to face the world without a safety-net - all this adds up to an extraordinary literary debut. (53/4 X 83/4, 196 pages)« less