Loganthinks

Peterson Insurance gives us a handicap of 185 pins. This is pretty much equivalent to giving our team an extra man for the night - one who is a full 50 pins better than our next highest bowler. This ghost man is represented by a little number at the bottom of the score screen above the lanes; a number which initially seems indomitable, but which flounders as the game goes on and the gap between our score and that of our opponents narrows. A good frame of reference for how well we’re doing is whether we’re still in the lead by the 8^th frame. If our opponents have caught us before then, it’s over. Otherwise it’s a race to the finish, fueled by beer and a quiet, persistent need for us to assert ourselves in the strange context of a weeknight men’s league - a world populated by middle-aged chainsmokers and leather-skinned retirees in which we represent the distant bottom slot of a 10-team food chain.

I smoke socially because of the league. The smell sticks on our skin and our clothes, down to the underwear, so that the smoke comes with us to other parts of our lives outside of this little bunker hidden out in the fields on the south side of the airport. Cigarettes are shared; the pack stays on the table with the beers and the boots and the wet winter jackets. Sometimes I catch myself smelling the crook of the joints between my middle and forefingers in class.

Dodson is the head of the Peterson Insurance team. A morose, stoop-shouldered guy, maybe in his 50’s with a salt-and-pepper moustache and eyes without whites, he bowls with a plastic device strapped to his wrist. He was the league secretary last year, which put him in charge of the day-to-day operations: scorekeeping and records, matchups and scheduling, money collection and rules disputes. A teammate of mine calls him ‘the mumbler’. He has a kind of tiredness that pulls at the space around him like gravity. It’s tiring to be near him. He sags when he stands, and I often get the impression that our presence in this league of men twice our age is a part of that weight, that we are pulling him down even as he hands me our score sheets for the week with eyes downcast and voice hidden somewhere in the wiry forest of his moustache, each of us pulling the other way, hoping to get out of the immediate sphere of each others’ company.

Dodson is a fucking prick, says Jeffe. Jeffe is a cabdriver who is round and stocky and who eats his dinner from the counter that sells jalapeño poppers and mini-corn dogs over by the bar. The lady who runs the counter brings her kids, and they spin on the stools while Jeffe eats. Jeffe’s average is one of the lowest in the league, but his roll can be measured at pitcher’s speeds. His ball lands halfway down the lanes with a hollow boom and scatters the pins like a bomb going off. His backswing makes me think the ball is going to come out at the wrong moment, flying back and lost somewhere in the atmosphere of smoke before splitting a hole into the vinyl-coated boards behind us. Like us, Jeffe drinks when he bowls.

The problem with Peterson Insurance, Jeffe says, is that they act like they don’t give a fuck.

Down the lanes, Lester picks up a split and his team cheers. Lester nods his wrinkled head and gives a stiff high five, moving with soft steps in the slow-motion speed of septuagenarian time.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dodson smile when he hits his rolls, Jeffe says. He rolled six strikes in a row a few weeks back and hung his head each time like he was pissed off about it.

He does that with us too, I say, but he hates our team. He didn’t count a few of our make-up games last Christmas, and he still hasn’t counted the last four wins we had against the Testrake Brothers.

In a corner by the vending machines I see Dodson sitting alone at a table, his face a mask as he pulls at the straps of his wrist device and watches the lanes.

Fucking prick, Jeffe says.

We are squeezed each Thursday night into the bar lanes, between the regular lanes on the left and the mini-golf course on the right. League starts at 9, and in the distance, on the regular lanes, open bowling begins for families with screaming kids, jittery high schoolers drinking Wild Cherry Pepsi, and 20-something toughguys who react with hyperbolic acrobatics each time their girlfriends beat them. Where the regular lanes stop there is an invisible line striped into the musty red carpet. While I drink and wait for my turn to roll, I watch the balding backs of heads in our section turn in slow and un-self conscious movements with the swaying hips of young girls as they stand up and sit down in the distance. I have no illusions about which side of the line we are on.

Returning with beer, I see Kevin Hotz through the glass doors leading out from the bar and counter to the lanes, and he is headed my way. Hotz is the heaviest man in the league, cartoonishly wide and dressed in stretch pants and a gray shirt with a cow on it that says Solon Beef Days. He sports a close-cropped haircut that curls around his ears, and his face is like a child’s face inset on the larger head of an adult, with shiny tight eyes, a tiny nose, and an elfish semi-smile that seems permanently stuck in the same position. Hotz bowls for Peterson Insurance, and besides that I know nothing about him. Holding a pitcher in one hand, I maneuver to keep the glass door open, and say how’s it going, Kevin as he passes by. Eyes fixed ahead, as if the door were automatic and had opened simply because it had sensed he wanted it to, Hotz saunters by me in silence, the tips of my shoes touching the frame of the door and my heels pressed hard against the wooden wall.

We tried to get our team sponsored once by a local falafel place. The guy who runs the restaurant is tall, and he stood in an apron stained with hummus and purple cabbage, hand-on-hips and head cocked to one side as we pitched the idea. Finally, he agreed to let us have free t-shirts, but we’d have to cover the cost of adding our logos ourselves. We drew out some ideas, but the cost was steep. We never agreed anyway. Some of us wanted names on the shirts. Some were fine without any lettering at all. One of our teammates wanted his shirt to say we clap for spares.

More cheers from down by Lester’s team. They’re playing the Banana Splits, and everyone is smiling. The Splits are baby-faced undergrads with trendy haircuts, and we look at them like a cancer that is ruining the league. Like us in previous years, they enjoy the role of youngest team in the league. It doesn’t help that they are all good bowlers, and have taken every match we’ve had against them.

Lester’s white head bobs as he talks. Another guy who is even older than Lester has just bowled, keeping his arm outstretched and his right leg kicked out to one side as he waits for the ball to make it to the pins. When it hits, he drops his pose and pumps his fist with a tiny motion. A kid from the Splits high fives him on his way past, and I light a cigarette, feeling suddenly sad.

Before our last game, I sit and chat with a friend on Team From Outer Space. Team From Outer Space is rolling against a makeshift team of regulars that are sponsored by a transmission repair shop on highway 6. Back at the tables, the transmission repair team sits in a semicircle around a barrier of beer pitchers. They draw from a deck of pornographic playing cards, the deck greasy and bent with little rips and tears that sometimes censor a breast or an ass or an elbow from view.

Playing with them, set off a little to the left so that he’s almost sitting at a different table, is a guy whose name I’ve forgotten but who is famous for having lost his temper during a match last year against us. We’d managed to bowl well that night, and thanks to the beauty of the handicap league, this meant that despite their higher scores, the transmission team would all have had to bowl well above their averages to beat us. Instead, this guy missed a few of his rolls and then got frustrated and tried to quit with one game to go. When his teammates urged him to bowl again, he walked up to us, pulled his bowling ball out of his bag, and threw it as hard as he could against the floorboards at our feet. The ball made a cracking sound and stayed where it landed. Then he stood a few inches away from my face, looked directly at my eyes, and nobody said anything for a while.

I see that guy sometimes in the bar, my friend says, but he’s usually alone playing the Megatouch machine. He asked us if we needed a sub a few months ago too. I think they kicked him off their team.

My friend laughs and gets up to bowl. Standing up, I glance back at the guy who is now sitting with his chair turned around, piecing through some dirty cards while hunched over the seat back, looking through the cards in front of him towards his team’s table, his eyes squinted like he is peering across a shimmering distance.

Dodson is up to roll but I am not watching him. My teammates are slouched around me on the benches down by the lanes, each with one eye on the scoreboard above us and the other on Dodson. We are in the 3^rd and final game. We have been blown out twice, and a familiar sense of pessimism has set in, pulling us each into our personal dark silences.

Despite the grim atmosphere, we are holding on to a tenuous lead in the last frame of the night. Many of the teams around us are packing up, and the crowds in the open bowl section have thinned out. Behind us at the tables, the waitress is collecting glasses and telling a story and someone keeps shouting that’s hilarious. I hear the sound of Dodson’s first roll, but I am looking back over my shoulder, starting at Peterson Insurance as they watch the game wind down with disinterested expressions and grind their final cigarettes into ash.

A teammate leans over to me and follows my gaze. If we win this I am going to dance all around their fucking table, he says.

Why, I say, not fully listening.

Because we’re fucking due, that’s why, he says. There’s something beyond the expletive and the late-night slur in his words, a kind of hiss.

I hate losing to them as much as you do, I say.

My teammate shakes his head. He looks back at the scoreboard.

Look at them, he says. They act like this is practice. Like they are that much better than we are. Like it’s a chore to waste their valuable goddamn time bowling against us.

I almost say they are that much better, but Dodson picks up a strike and around me I hear a soft exhalation of breath like a drum beat. I turn back to the table, and I catch a glimpse of Hotz coming out of the bathroom.

He is walking in a shuffle, his stubby legs moving slowly and his arms lifted a few inches off his sides, as if for balance. Around him, the last stragglers from the open lanes are headed for the door; a big guy with his arm around a girl and a middle aged couple wearing jean jackets. Hotz walks without seeing them, his head down, body turning slightly with each step, almost like a waddle, and I feel a strange sensation as I see this balloon of a man make his way back to our side of the lanes. I wonder where he lives. I wonder who he goes home to, if someone cooks his favorite meals for him when he gets there. I wonder what his voice sounds like. I wonder if he went to Solon Beef Days, and if he wears the shirt as part of some connection to a different life outside the league and the lanes and the iron faced moustaches of Peterson Insurance.

Dodson hits his last strike, sealing our fate.

Fuck that asshole, says my teammate.

I am watching Dodson now too, as he raises his hand with the plastic casing strapped to the wrist and pokes his glasses back to the rim of his nose. His eyes are on the floor as he walks, and when he steps down from the hardwood lanes to the carpet, his body sags like an old spring. He doesn’t look at us as he passes with heavy steps, and suddenly I find myself thinking, why would he? What does he possibly owe us, a team of babies who walk around his lanes like it’s their secret clubhouse, a team that gets too drunk to bowl and who is maybe a month’s worth of wins behind 9^th place? I wouldn’t look at us either. Perhaps this is the one night of the week he gets to relax in a place where he can smoke and be quiet and not have to talk to anybody. Maybe this respite is the one thing he can enjoy being good at, quietly and on his own time. Maybe that gravity that sucks at the space around him isn’t about us at all; he could have bedridden wife, an invalid mother, a child with cancer. Where does he go after league, and who does he go home to?

Around me my teammates are angrily packing up their gear, and I feel a hollow kind of warmth as I watch Dodson trudge the last few feet to the table. You guys can have it, I think, as Dodson and Hotz pass by each other, two slumped shapes in the smoke. And right then, they each coolly turn and slap hands, that permanent smile on Hotz’s face twitching just a little.