The book starts by introducing the two main characters: Gerry, a 35 year old excellent snooker player, and Bobby, 23, who's his 'sidekick'. All good pool players have sidekicks and their main task is to handle the money, that is, the gambling. The story is situated in Montreal, it's the dead of winter and the year is 1967. Bobby runs away from an orphanage and winds up in Pete's Pool Hall. This is when he meets up with Gerry. 10 years go by and they are still together. Gerry looks upon Bobby as his son, but Bobby doesn't share the same sentiment. He doesn't consider Gerry as a surrogate father. Bobby does play the part of the son somewhat, but he's always been quite independent as well as resourceful. To Bobby, Gerry is his very good friend if anything. However, with time, Bobby begins to realize what he does feel for Gerry, and that's a sexual attraction. Bobby is growing up in a world before gay pride or parades or awareness or Stonewall. He grows up in a pool hall surrounded by men whose only concerns are to shoot pool and gamble, an arena where the discussions are about odds and games. He's never met anyone who is like him, that is, who has this affinity for other men the way he does. He knows that his attraction for men goes beyond the regular male bonding he witnesses in the poolroom. Well, he finally does meet someone who's like him, when he turns 20, and it's a head mobster by the name of Stephano Trevietti. After that initial meeting, Bobby's life is never the same. If I were allowed to theorize about this... even though this story is situated in 1967 and there isn't a gay culture awareness yet, this story could very well be told today. I try to capture the confusion we men undergo growing up 'different'. We don't have the girlfriends and we lack that confidence (or arrogance) that comes with it. We're brought up that a man should love a woman and everything else is undesirable, and for any man who is attracted to another man, this is something that is very hard to live with. The reason why I chose 1967 is because it's a time just before this gay awareness. I didn't want to deal with gay culture within the novel. The story isn't about discovering gay pride. Once you decide to claim you're gay today, then bam, you're tagged with this neat little label and you almost become compartmentalized within society. Once you're gay, then you have to deal with oodles of stereotypes (positive and negative, yet mostly negative). I wanted to write about a man learning he loves men before gay pride existed. In 1967, the sexual revolution was just on the cusp of getting started. At the time, homosexuality was a sickness, a clinical ordeal. Society knew of their homosexuals but it was an invisible society. It's that ambiguity that I wanted to capture. Bobby discovers he's likes men but there is no gay collective yet, so everything he discovers has meaning only to him, and not through the images our gay culture has dictated. But there is another important factor to take into account about this homosexual cum gay thing: his world has been this pool hall, which is void of academic and clinical hyper-intellectual banter and rhetoric. These guys don't know Freud nor sexology nor homosexual clinical treatment. All they care about is pool playing and gambling while having their woman and drugs on the side. This has been Bobby's world for the past 10 years. Bottom line, it's about love. Bobby knows he loves men but he doesn't understand it because there's no gay cultural markers yet for him to fall back on. He doesn't know how to voice his love or to whom, not until he meets up with Stephano, an very important and well known mobster who is also very good at hiding his own desires for men. Once Stephano comes into Bobby's life, he finally realizes he's not alone.