In case you missed it: Bowling, pt. 1
For two weeks during my junior year of high school, we hosted a French foreign exchange student named Manon. She was what the poets called wan and what my family called extremely boring. She didn’t seem to have any feelings or opinions and rarely spoke at all, which had nothing to do with her proficiency in English and everything to do with her likeness to a pet rock. We tried to engage her, peppering her with questions like, “Have you ever had shredded cheese?” or “Can you pronounce Chanel for us?” and “Isn’t it cool how Walgreens doesn’t close for lunch?” She responded to everything in one word answers and shrugs, so we were shocked to learn that she’d cried at the airport before returning home. What? She cried? I didn’t even know she had eyes! Shockingly, it wasn’t despondence over leaving such a cool American family; she cried because the TSA confiscated a souvenir she’d won on a group outing. “They took it!” she howled. “They took my booling pin!”
Bowling is where day disappears. If you ever want to not have a day, go to a bowling alley. By the time you come out, even if you arrived when it opened, it will be dark outside. If you go during summer, you’ll leave when it’s fall. If you go during fall, you’ll leave in March. It’s kind of like that movie Interstellar - time on earth goes faster than it does in space, because of gravity pushing books off a shelf and a red-haired girl who loves her Dad, or something. A bowling alley defies the logic of time, its inhabitants suspended in a smoke-filled purgatory (name of my new punk band, come check us out).
As a child, when it wasn’t your turn to bowl, you played the arcade games if you had $40 in quarters. The crane game was busted so you never won, but if you had, you would have lost, because your prize would be a furry turd of a creature with plasticy matted hair that smelled of motor oil. In college I got an automated phone call saying I’d won a trip to Branson, Missouri. When I called my Dad to tell him the great news, he said, “If you ever win a trip to Branson, you lose.” Skee ball was the gateway drug to gambling. You always thought you’d do better next time. The car racing game was the only good one, and to be honest I’d have one in my house now if there was even a slight chance of Cribs stopping by.
While waiting at the ball return makes you hate yourself (more on that below), waiting on people to come back for their turn makes you hate them. You feel a lethal dose of impatience coursing through your veins as someone yells, “TIFFANY?!?! WHERE’S TIFFANY?!” Where. Is. Tiffany. It was even harder to locate her if bowling happened to be cosmic that day. Cosmic bowling was an excuse for tan kids to show off how good they looked in white, as if they couldn’t do that under regular old halogens. When I showed up at a cosmic bowling party, on the other hand, my whole body glowed like a ghost. Tiffany eventually returned, shouting, “Sorry! The game ate my money and the bottom of my shirt! And then I slipped on pizza grease and had to patch myself up in the bathroom where I slipped again on piss and mop juice!” At the end of the game, when everyone randomly gets like seven more tries, it will be Jeremy who vanishes. “JEREMY, WHERE’S JEREMY?! JEREMY, YOU’RE STILL UP!”
For this reason, I think I would like bowling more if it were a solo activity. One lane in the comfort of my own home to put the day behind me and bowl it out, wearing socks I didn’t have to buy for $10 because I’d worn sandals that day. Just me and the wonderful rippling sound of the ball crashing into pins, as gratifying as the crescendo of my spine cracking after sitting all day. The alley part is not necessary. If bowling wanted to class it up, it should stop calling itself an alley. Nothing good happens in an alley - it’s all stabbings, rotten watermelons, and entrances to desperate speakeasys. It’s Wall Street for rats who trade in filth. The bowling alley mimics the floor of the NASDAQ - suspended monitors showing wins and losses, and people milling around, waiting, yelling, high-fiving and losing to the seemingly less adept. But while traders can go home with more money, bowlers go home with less money and needing a shampoo.
Hell is waiting for your bowling ball to emerge from the ball return. It’s the most unnatural that standing ever feels. Hands in pockets or no? Organize the balls so that the finger holes face up or no? Ponder the placement of the dots in the lanes or no? You just have to stand there in your humanity, peering into the dark abyss and wondering if you’re being punished for taking the last mozzarella stick. “Here, boy! C’mon little 8 pounder!” you plead. Even though you know the Fraggles underground are funneling him along the assembly line as swiftly as possible, it doesn’t prevent you from thinking, What if my ball never comes? What if I stand here for the rest of my life? I once waited so long that I ordered something on Amazon and it got delivered to my doorstep before my ball re-appeared. A whole 18 seconds.
The wait is so agonizing that it warrants further psychotherapy (thank you for creating this space for me). If you knocked down all but one pin on your first attempt, you try not to wait around like you’re hot shit. Or if you got a gutter ball, you try not to act like you’re sad that you just got a gutter ball so you overcompensate and act all jocular, so that people think you’re overcompensating and acting all jocular because you’re sad that you got a gutter ball. It’s not a dissimilar feeling to when I walked past the security guards for work every morning at the Sears Tower and tried to act like I didn’t have a bomb, which might have made them think that I did have a bomb. (I didn’t. I didn’t!)
The time when you’re waiting for your ball to pop out is too short to go back to your people, and too long to stand there and not look like your Dad forgot to pick you up after practice.
Arguably, your coach wanted to babysit you in that parking lot even less than you wanted to be babysat. His traitor of a daughter was drinking a Capri Sun in the car, lounging in a captain’s chair with her cleats off, knowing full well how excruciating it was to stand next to a generic dad at the ripening age of 12.
This was where you learned to bullshit for your eventual office job. “I was under the impression that Diane would be sending those reports” has its origins in, “I was under the impression that my Dad knew to pick me up.” When in reality you had no idea. You were just buying time and trying to clear your name, holding on to a hope that was dwindling with every second.
As you stared off into the horizon, pre-smartphone, the van came into view, and while you despised him for leaving you, you loved him for coming back to you.
It was him, he was your ghost.
Matthew & Murph in Matthew’s home state