So mom drags me out of bed in the middle of the morning on a fine summer day and drops me at a bowling joint what used to be off of Alameda and Picacho in a flea-bitten dirt mall. She walks me in, fills out some paperwork, kisses me on the forehead and drives off. I'm like, WTF? I'd been to bowling alleys...my mom and dad used to bowl back when they were married...and I was familiar with the objective, but I'd never picked up a bowling ball. I'd asked my mom, hey, they're going to teach me how to do this, right?
Sure, she said. Of course they will. Why wouldn't they?
Well mainly because it was a youth league filled with kids who'd had parents that loved and supported them enough to teach them how to bowl in between steins of lager. Mine had just stared at me in silent exasperation as I'd begged to learn new things. I'm pretty sure I didn't speak english until I hit fifteen or so, since no-one even pretended to hear or understand what I was saying until that one day when I phoned home from jail.
Anyhow, where was I? That's right: my mom. She drove off in a cloud of dust, the Pinto screeching narrow rubber against blackhot summer asphalt. I stood in the smoke-filled airconditioned maw of bowl-o-rama, some guy with a cigar and a greasy porkpie hat beckoning me toward the counter.
"What size?!" he shouted over the sound of silence and furious smoking.
"Uh...I'm four foot..."
"No you stupid little kid. Your shoes, what size are your goddamn shoes? Goddamn kids come in here need a goddamn babysitter and I ain't no fucking...here, here's a size five."
I handed him my shoes, which he threw back at me. I had no idea, these little rituals.
Once settled into a pair of abalony white and torqoise blue tassled rental shoes, I headed to the next adult I could see. She was a fifty-ish old lady, plump, white hair contrasting wildly with her leathery tanned face. He cigarette was in one of those long black cigarette holders, like my grandmother used to use. The ones with a filter built in. I used to take them apart and stare at the brown goo in the filter and think, hey, damn, that's precisely what I want in my lungs. Then my grandmother would catch me with her cigarette and a glass of vodka, and she'd smack me, then give me a cookie and tell me to fuck off, all in under a minute.
This weathered old lady had a clipboard and a scowl the likes of which I would later recognize on the faces of any adult who dealt with the juvenile me: sheer disgust coupled with amused horror.
"What's your name, young man?" she asked, clipped, polite through alligator teeth. I told her my name, and she sighed heavily. "Your mother just signed you up today. I don't have a team for you. You'll have to bowl with the other straggler," she said, motioning toward a boy with short brown hair and a retainer. He was staring intently at the size seven shoes on his feet, bright red and black, that made him look like a disco-footed platypus.
I stammered something else, and walked toward the bench where the other boy sat.
"I guess we're supposed to bowl together," I said, and he looked up at me, smiling through braces like an innocent through a jailcell, big liquid blue eyes and dimples....
That's no boy, I thought. That's a TOMboy. Hot damn!
We sized one another up. She was spindly, that awkward girl stage where there's nothing but limbs and a face. I was a chubby nerdlinger with, like, no redeeming qualities. My jeans were home-made. My shirt was terrycloth. She smiled at me, amused.
We bowled, sort of. Turns out neither one of us was any good. She was using two hands to push the ball down the lane. I was using a ball too heavy for me now, much less the 11 year old version of me. I consistently bounced the ball into and back out of the gutter. But she (her name was Michelle) actually walked out of her shoes at one point, which caused her to slip and fall, the bowling ball crashing across the run-up, chasing away other bowlers.
I managed to knock down roughly one third of the pins in front of me. She knocked down four or five until the last two frames, where she took strikes.
"I think I got it now," she said, laughing. "That doesn't mean I want to do it again."
We finished the day laughing, eating free fries and nachos, teasing one another, and falling over with clockwork regularity. I tripped over lines of longitude. She fell flat on her face and busted her lip.
Every Tuesday and Wednesday morning for five weeks, we tried our best to kill everyone around us with a combination of bad bowling ball placement and side-splitting pratfalls. We got to know one another very well in the course of our self-immolation. She was within walking distance of my house, which was in town at the time; we would move to the Jornada later in the year. We would walk one another home and talk about being the new kid, about the school I was about to attend that she'd been at for a year, and about the world in general.
At the end of five weeks, with a month and a half to go before the start of school, Michelle moved. Her father was military, stationed at White Sands, and was being sent to some godforsaken Virginian secret military base. It was her turn to walk me home that last time (we walked one another home because she was a feminist), and we paused in front of my house.
"It was very nice bowling with you," she said. She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, a wholly unexpected surprise. I flushed deep red. She laughed and ran, waving.
I got inside, and my mom was staring at me. "Uh...Jase? Who was that boy and why did he kiss you?"
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