Apart from singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in a Major League stadium, the most quintessentially American thing you can do is go bowling. Whenever possible, I like to do the quintessentially American thing, which is why I found myself standing across the counter from a twenty-something in a red bowling shirt last Saturday night. His name was probably Mike. He just looked like a Mike. Mike who works at the bowling alley.
Mike is busy looking at the cash register when I arrive at the counter. I know he senses me—because I have a presence—but he keeps looking at the register. Not typing, just looking.
After a few long seconds, I put a hand on the counter, which gets his attention. I’ve entered his space. This is Mike’s counter. But he still doesn’t say anything. It’s like he’s wondering what on earth I could be doing standing at the counter in his bowling alley.
So finally I just come out and say it: “Can I get a lane for four people, please?”
Mike seems relieved that this is all I want, but then turns a bit smarmy. “Lanes’re full till 9:30. You can pay up front to reserve a lane or come back later.”
He’s wrong. The lanes are not all full. There are 50 lanes in this alley, and there must be a dozen open. But it’s clear by the number of really, really bright matching shirts and the smell of sweat that league play is happening now and isn’t to be interrupted. It’s also clear that Mike would rather die than let us bowl before 9:30. I confer with the friend I’m with, then have a back-and-forth with Mike, explaining that our whole party isn’t here yet. Is that a problem?
“Pay up front or come back later,” Mike says. “Pay or wait. Pay or wait.”
“We’ll reserve a lane.”
“Okay. Fourteen bucks for three games and shoes. You need shoes, yeah?”
I’m afraid I do look like a person who doesn’t own his own bowling shoes.
We go through the shoe exchange, the most important ritual of the whole night, during which I request a shoe size, receive a pair that’s way too big and has between them barely half a shoe lace. In most other circumstances I would resist wearing another person’s shoes, especially when that person has disproportionately long, thin, clown feet. But this is a bowling alley. This is what we’ve come for, to wear moderately uncomfortable, ill-fitting footwear that’s been worn by literally hundreds of others before, to spend a half hour trying to untie these shoes, and to smile while we do it.
The wait that follows gives us time to scope out the kind of people we’re dealing with here. Normal people. Weird people. Really weird people. Families and youth groups and drunks. Bad bowlers—the sort you hear from the other side of the alley because they throw the ball so high it nearly cracks the lane. Good bowlers—the kind who wear wrist guards, clean their balls (plural) the way the Jesus character does in The Big Lebowski, and curse profusely when they don’t get the split. That creep can roll, man.
When Mike gets on the intercom and announces that we can go to our lane, we find on one side an expectant mother, father, and toddler son. On the other side we have Jack Diesel and his team of wrist guard-wearers. We find lots of residue on our table—beer and pizza and other unidentifiables. We find that our names have already appeared on the screen, presumably entered by Mike, and presumably to stop young troublemakers like us from entering inappropriate aliases into the computer. My name is misspelled. It’s also apparent that nearly every bowling ball that 1) weighs more than eight pounds and 2) has fingerholes in which grown humans might actually fit their fingers is already claimed by the eight thousand others who’ve decided to be good Americans and go bowling. After an exhaustive search, I find a ball that will get me made fun of because it is violet and, when tipped upside down, dribbles small streams of sweat from the holes, but weighs the right amount and promises not to break my knuckles by getting stuck on my hand.
We get two frames into our first round—necessarily deemed A Practice Round to avoid embarrassment for gutter balls—when, suddenly, the lights go out. Only, not completely out. The pins are glowing a psychedelic pink. Occasionally a strobe or a laser will flash in my eyes and blind me. A DJ’s wildly technified version of “Burn” starts blaring. And, best of all, a fog machine begins to pump clouds from the end of the alley, which is very inconvenient for us because we’re on lane 49 of 50, and therefore get the brunt of the fog machine’s undissipated power. We cannot see anything. “It’s Cosmic Bowling, now!” Mike says on the intercom.
Five thousand years of bowling tradition, and my generation had to go do this to it: Cosmic Bowling.
But we bowl. Sometimes well. Most of the time not. Some of us spend a game doing something called “crazy bowling,” which apparently consists of hurling the ball down the lane from bizarre, uncomfortable, and always unsafe positions—backwards, sideways, eyes closed, between the legs, between someone else’s legs. I come very close to throwing a ball into my own ankle after a wayward backswing. I also come close to a Turkey, but alas.
Everything is dirty and everything is loud. Many of the people make me wonder if I’ve entered the set of a sci-fi movie being directed by Seth Rogen—sort of smoky, sort of trippy. Mike continues to stare at the register and abuse his intercom privileges. “Burn” plays eight more times over the next two hours. Whenever I get a spare, a ridiculous, irrelevant clip of a snowboarder flashes on the screen behind a superimposed “SPARE!” The group to our right drinks a lot and gets a lot of strikes and swears a lot. And the young boy on our left does a very excited dance whenever he knocks a pin down.
And I love it. This is exactly what we came for. This is loose, hilarious, gritty, smoke-infused, cosmic bowling.
Also, I rolled a 152 in there, haters!
After a few years spent correcting grammatical errors and writing subtle, clever headlines in a Chicago newsroom, Griffin Paul Jackson (’11) now does aid work with refugees in Lebanon. He writes about that, God, and, when the muse descends, Icelandic sheep. Read him here: griffinpauljackson.com.
