When there’s nothing to do, there’s bowling. After five minutes of futile brainstorming on a Friday night, someone inevitably suggests, “We could go bowling?” in the same way they’d say, “I burned these cookies. Do you want one?” The response for either is the same. “Sure. Why not.” Bowling is for when there’s nothing better to do. Eating out has momentarily lost its appeal, the idea of finding some sort of live show is painful, and the only movies out are Fast and Furious 45: Parallel Parking and Fast and Furious 46: Everyone Dies Even Vin Diesel. Bowling is for rainy days, December 26th and when home feels claustrophobic. Even when I was six I remember sighing, “Well, anything to get us out of the house.”
I regard bowling the same way that I do Chili’s or Claire’s - meant for the late ‘90s. I’m talking about your basic bowling alley here. Not the Dave & Buster’s-type thing, which is a club for 14-year-olds with rich parents and a date spot for 31-year-old men dating 19-year-old women. (I recoil at my one memory of Dave & Buster’s - a birthday party for a girl with loud parents (you know the type - they’ve had coffee and been to the gym before daylight.) They bought us an embarrassing amount of game tokens which even then I found tacky. After the sleepover the next morning, the mom found out we’d watched an SNL sketch called Food, Sex or Cars and scolded me for not turning it off because I was the oldest. I wasn’t old enough to buy my own toasted ravioli but because I was five months older than her daughter I should have been screening the evening’s programming for adult content? Low blow, Susan, even if you do make a killer goody bag.) My kind of bowling alley is your basic mom and pop and creepy uncle bowling shop. Humid and dark, like an iguana cage for humans with no other plans.
Whenever I’m near a designated smoking area in an airport I’m like, “What? There’s a bowling alley here?!” Besides the front steps at family Christmas parties, where my uncles clustered in the cold and shared messed up jokes, erupting into tobacco-stained laughter, quieting down only when one of us children appeared, the smell of cigarette smoke instantly takes me back to the bowling alley. Bowling alleys are so assuredly smoky that if I were to ever walk into one that wasn’t smoky, I’d wonder, “What are those people doing rolling those balls down that floor to hit those things?” In college my friends and I had bar coats that we exclusively wore to smoke-filled bars. Unable to wear them to class due to their perpetual reek, we had to take shots to even stomach putting them on, which was always a fun challenge. People need bar coats for bowling alleys.
I imagine auditions for porn are held in the room designated for birthday parties. Little Cody turning 8, opening dinosaur presents and only eating the frosting, is sweetly ignorant of the previous night’s depravities. It’s a good thing the galaxy-themed carpets hide stains. The room has a decidedly hidden camera vibe. Its dank, fluorescently-lit atmosphere would be better suited for a criminal interrogation or a gathering of moths. The chairs are sticky and smeared with fingerprints. Cody’s Mom is exhausted and Cody’s baby sister is screaming. What the party room lacks in ambience, it makes up for in pizza grease. It coats the table, the presents, the children. If a bougie candle were to capture the scent of this hellscape it’d be described as pepperoni, Virginia Slim, Legos.
Bowling shoes are the great equalizer. America could solve its problems if we all got on the same level in our bowling shoes and just talked it out. If a supermodel were to wear a pair, she’d look like a dork. Not a cute dork or an ironic dork, but a dork dork. They humble everyone. Because Covid spreads through the soles of the feet (THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE NOT TELLING US. WE ARE BEING LIED TO), bowling shoes risk endangerment which makes me sad. They have the power to change the world.
The most exciting part of bowling is choosing your ball. So many fun colors and, “Whoa, now this one is heavy!” To find the best fit, you get to put your fingers in all the holes where your town has put their fingers. If I smoked, which I practically do as soon as I step into a bowling alley, I’d stash my cig in one of these spare holes while I bowled my little heart and plaque-filled arteries out. Another fun pastime is trying to fit your name in a limited amount of characters on the screen. Sometimes I could only be MOLY. Roly poly moly. Occasionally I’d just be MO, which was super sick. It felt incredible to see my name in lights, up on the big screen for all to see my final score of 86.
The last thing you want to do when you’re sad is bowl. The last, last thing you want to do when you’re sad is bowl 3 strikes in a row. I was 24, and as of the previous 48 hours, single. I knew bowling with my family wouldn’t make me feel better, but it might make my parents feel better if they thought they could make me feel better, which made me feel better. After my first strike, I cheered along with the rest of them. Life isn’t so bad. After my second, I grew suspicious. Was this some sick joke? It was only natural then, when my ball cleared each and every pin for the third consecutive time, that I burst into tears. Winning big days after losing hard created perfect conditions for an emotional breakdown, turning forced family fun into forced family feeling.
Even when you’re happy, bowling a strike is embarrassing. You have to turn around to face the adulation and can’t help but feel like a preschooler showing her Mom a drawing - “Look what I did today!” When I was a child, I believed you could call any Holiday Inn a “Minnesota” because I had been to a Holiday Inn in Minnesota. I knew this to be true, with the same conviction that I knew the Fraggle Rock characters lived in the bowling alley behind the pins. I grew to learn what a silly idea that was, until three years ago when I spotted, working the bar at a bowling alley in Brooklyn, a Fraggle. The man looked like he’d been born there, had never left and had already died there. He had long, yellowed nails and long, yellowed hair. You couldn’t see his ears through his wooly chops so his glasses just disappeared back there, like two twigs into peed-upon snow. With his paunchy forehead and belly, he called to mind Ben Franklin, and the deftness with which he poured a jack and coke made me suspect he’d invented it. You didn’t need to ask to know that he didn’t accept credit cards, but in his presence even cash seemed too modern, so I was prepared to order a beer by bartering with salt, cattle or grains. A gold ring adorned his pinky, which made sure to touch the rim of every glass.