Sooner or later, we all get caught in one of those strange vortexes of time. We are taken back, and for one moment we grasp at the chance to do something differently — as if our lives will be forever fixed. In the end we discover that the vortex has no more substance than a swirl in the water. We can’t keep it or change it. We just watch it disappear while our own reflection is restored, unchanged.
The Kodachrome hues of the old photo seem to intensify with age. I must be about eight. With a stupid grin, I am hanging on my friend Jimmy’s shoulders. Behind us is a sign with its shocking neon outlines of two falling bowling pins and an electric orange bowling ball. The Lucky Ten — its letters highlighted in vibrating violet. The backdrop of the smog burnt sunset in the photo always calls to me.
In 1994 the picture pulled me in. That time I went to find my old haunt.
Eerie. The same enchanting sign against a similar sun. The white brick building no longer stood by itself in a field. Small fast-food establishments and mini-malls threatened to choke it with their competing colors. The neon lettering in the sign had lost its charge in places. Instead of Lucky Ten, it read Luc-y-e. But all that was of no consequence. My wife, Jane knew by my expression that, family vacation or not, we were going to park the car and go in.
My twelve-year old son, Heath, was instantly running ahead of us toward the door. Jane and I entered. The smell of old leather from benches of ages past filled our lungs. Except for the ever evolving color of the balls, the place hadn’t changed. The wooden lanes had been polished to an amber sheen, as I always remembered. Balls sailed towards the pins in hollow rumbles.
Heath pulled at his mother’s arm. Jane flashed a helpless glance toward me.
“You two go ahead,” I said.
I just stood and inhaled the ambiance — like the healing vapor of a hot spring. I gazed at the lanes, imagining the balls going in both directions as they had in my youth — flying down the lanes to crash into the white army of pins, and then returning on the above-ground tracks which ran between the lanes. As a kid, I loved watching the balls roll back, climbing the little hill at the end.
Then I heard him. Phil. The man with the red face. Like he was back from the dead. I looked toward the counter. “What size?” he asked Heath.
Phil’s voice was raspy, as it had always been. His white hair was course, and grew from his head like a thick Florida lawn, cut to an even half inch. His face still had the penetrating color of a new basketball. His skin was a bit more leathery than before. Other than that, he seemed to have avoided the time machine that relentlessly hacked away at the rest of us. Phil tore a giant paper score sheet from the tablet, along with two short pencils. Pencils. No automatic score keeper.
He handed them to Jane. “Number Eight.” He nodded toward the wall on the right.
Jane and Heath headed toward lane Eight, bowling shoes dangling on shoelaces from their hands.
I wandered up to the counter in amazement. “Phil. Do you remember me?”
“Can’t say as I do. What size?”
I wasn’t in much of a mood to bowl. I looked beyond him to the glass door of the refrigerator behind the counter. I pointed. “A soda, please. The one on the bottom shelf.”
Phil handed me the Mountain Dew. “I guess you’re one of those kids — all grow’d up now.”
I tossed him a dollar and reached to the side of the counter to pry off the cap. I could have found the opener with my eyes closed. “How’d you know?” I asked.
“I guess ’bout every kid that’s ever bowled here has been back at one time or another.”
I leaned on the counter, watching and daydreaming, sipping my Mountain Dew like a fine wine. Heavy balls — ten pounds, fourteen pounds, looking like they were coated in candy — rumbled on hollow wood. Like distant thunder on a summer afternoon, the vibrations echoed in my stomach. My ears waited for the inevitable crash.
“Phil, you haven’t upgraded much,” I said.
Phil was assaulting a pair of bowling shoes with an aerosol can. He placed them in the bin labeled, nine-ten. The sanitary chemical permeated the air and threatened to kill all things, bacterial or human.
He eyed me. “What you talkin’ bout?”
“The place still looks the same. It is kind of nostalgic.”
“It ain’t,” he said. “See them lanes? Those are from a place down state. The Five Star. Closed nine years ago.”
“You took their lanes?”
“Paid a lot for them. But they are real wood. None of that synthetic stuff that everyone is puttin’ in. Got their bumpers and subfloor ball returns as well.”
I stared at Phil’s knit polo shirt. The color was that of a raspberry carrot malt shake. I couldn’t quite calibrate my senses to its shocking hue. “Well, it still looks the same.”
“Won’t next year.”
“How come?” I asked.
“My son. He runs the place now. He’s plannin’ on sellin’ to AMF — have them renovate it and let him run it as a franchise.”
The last of the sun crept through the window behind the counter and caught my bottle of soda, casting a yellow glow that cut into the shadow created by the edge of the cash register. “How come he’s doing that?” I asked.
“No choice. Gettin’ too expensive to run the place. League bowlers are getting spoiled now. Won’t bowl on a lane that’s not CCCC regulation.”
The words fit him about as well as a rented tuxedo.
“Gotta use certified oil compound and lay it down to spec, for thickness and pattern.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Racket, if you ask me. Could have bought an island in the South Pacific for what it costs me to oil them lanes for a year.”
He grabbed another pair of returned bowling shoes from the counter. “Hear that?”
“Hear what?” I asked.
“Number Eight. Each lane has a different sound, you know. Most people think they all sound the same.”
“The lanes?”
He continued. “But I could have my back turned, getting a pack of cigarettes for a customer. And I can hear it. Clear as day. Number Eight.”
Number Eight. He had a way of saying it. It was like lane number Eight was one of his children. I looked at Heath standing on lane Eight — ball in hand, concentrating on the pins. It could have been me standing there. It was about thirty-five years ago that Jimmy and I stood in the parking lot for that picture. Jimmy was about Heath’s age. I was a little younger.
Lane number Eight. I remembered it like it was yesterday. I thought Phil was going to explode when he yelled at me and Jimmy. I had never seen such a red face. I guess we deserved it. Jimmy and I had been scientifically studying the timing of returning balls, after each bowler’s attempt at a strike…
“Twenty-three seconds.”
“Twenty-three? You’re on drugs. That lady’s last one took over a minute.”
“The ball was stuck.”
“Well, it usually takes almost a minute.”
“Twenty-three.”
“Fifty.” I aimed at the pins — bright and vulnerable under the hidden spot lights.
“C’mon…”
I aimed some more.
“My sister goes faster than you.”
Jimmy’s snide remarks about my technique were wasted. I was impermeable. The picture of concentration. I stumbled toward the pins, the heavy ball swinging me as much as I was swinging it. I released, dropping the ball from waist level. The loud thud could be heard above all the others. I had no thought of the dent that I probably left on the alley surface. I felt like a pro. The ball glided toward the pins, announcing its power in seismic vibrations. I guided the ball with my eyes. This is it, I thought. Yes — yes!
But fate took another path. Two-thirds of the way down the alley the ball made its characteristic, magical swerve. I braced myself for Jimmy’s caustic punishment. I could hear the word forming in his throat — Gu-u-tter! He had a way of driving the word into my temples and then pounding on it.
But the barb didn’t come. Instead, Jimmy was lost in concentration.
“Mississippi-one; Mississippi-two.” Jimmy approached the cradle of returned balls. Each was now resting, having made its climb up the momentum-reducing incline at the end of the ball return track. “Mississippi-Eight; Mississippi-nine”
“No!” I whispered. My desperation froze as I glanced toward the distant counter and the red faced man standing behind it.
“Mississippi-thirteen.” Without taking his eyes off the other end of the ball return track, Jimmy picked up one of the balls.
“Jimmy!” I tried to get his attention without drawing the notice of the red faced man.
“Mississippi-seventeen.” Jimmy set the ball at the top of the incline of the track.
I glanced again. The red-faced man caught my eye as he slammed a pair of bowling shoes on the counter.
“Jimmy, don’t!”
My words were ignored.
“Mississippi-twenty-three!” He released the ball. It rolled down the incline and was now traveling of its own inertia.
Fate, or perfect scientific estimation was with Jimmy. At the end of the lane between the sets of pins another ball popped out of the opening, like someone spitting out a jaw breaker. It rolled down the little incline at the other end, picking up speed, and glided toward us on the track. The two balls approached each other. Our eyes were fixed on the impending impact.
“Hey!” It was the man with the red face.
The balls got closer.
“Hey, you creeps on Eight!”
Closer… Finally, a dull thud. Disappointing. Not even as loud as the sound of pins crashing. It was as if the balls were under water. The balls recoiled and rolled in opposite directions. I turned to see the man with the red face hurdling over a bench and over the three carpeted steps that led to our alley.
“Look!” Still gazing down the lane, Jimmy wasn’t even concerned about the approaching doom.
I refocused my attention to our experiment. Another ball was shooting down the track at the end of the alley, approaching the two stunned balls…
“You listenin’?”
“Yeah.” No more photo in my mind. Just Phil’s face, red as ever. “Lane Eight,” I said, stuffing a couple more barbecued potato chips into my mouth. “What does Eight sound like?”
“To the untrained ear, they are all the same. But number Eight has its own sound. If you listen to a ball rolling down number Eight, it changes. The sound. It gets quieter. Just a smidgen. But quieter.”
“I never noticed.”
“What do you expect? You kids never notice anything.”
“Well, I am a little older now. I have a kid of my own.” I wondered if Phil looked the same to my son as he did to me when I was his age. “That’s my son, Heath — over on lane Eight,” I said. “Next to his mom. I guess I’ll have to tell them about the sound.”
“They won’t hear it.”
“Maybe not.”
“You know why it sounds different?”
I noticed the tan lump behind his right ear. A hearing aid. Phil had a hearing aid. I guess it was supposed to blend with his skin tone. It didn’t. Did he have that thing when we were kids?
“It’s because of the extra supports we had to put underneath. Water damage. 1962. After that down-pour. Rained buckets the whole weekend.”
“Yeah. I remember,” I said. “The roof leaked.”
How could I forget? Jimmy and I were there that day. We loved it — at least before Phil closed some of the lanes. There were puddles on the lanes. We would aim for the puddles and try to create rooster tails — water spraying off the balls.
“How come you never opened lanes One and Two when you closed the other three for repairs?” I asked.
“They were for the teams.”
The teams. I ran my finger across the polished wood of the counter, through the ring formed by the condensation from my can of soda. The teams. The league bowlers. Phil closed three lanes for repairs and still kept two lanes closed to the public. Five lanes shut down for most of the summer. Sometimes we had to wait an hour or more to get a lane.
“Seems to me that you had plenty of business,” I said. “You could have kept those lanes going all the time.”
“Open my good lanes to you kids? Do I have stupid written across my forehead?”
“Vince Watkins was a kid,” I protested. “He wasn’t much older than us. You let him use those lanes.” Vince Watkins, the skinny snob. I could still see him marching past us with his brown suede leather bowling ball case and wearing his stupid yellow and brown bowling shirt. Vince never had to wait in line with us humans.
“Vince Watkins. Good bowler,” Phil insisted. “Now he was a model for you kids to follow.”
Model, my ass. He was the high school superintendent’s son. Spoiled rotten. Wore that bowling shirt everywhere. What was it with those things? Straight out of the 1950’s. No normal kid would be caught dead in a bowling shirt. And bowling shoes. My god. Who designed those things? Of course, Vince — we called him Little Vincey — he had his own shoes. Jimmy and I were convinced that Vincey had picked them out of Modern Clown magazine. Little Vincey would march to lane Two, making sure all of us kids got a good look at his monogrammed leather scorecard holder. He would sit on the bench to change his shoes. And magically, lanes One and Two would light up. He would open his bag. His ball was yellow. Yellow, for God’s sake. With a marbled finish that looked just like his daddy’s Porsche.
“Damn shame, what happened to him.” Phil’s eyes lost their reflection. Like the shades were suddenly drawn. “Damn shame.”
It was a shame. Somehow, it was easier to dwell on Vince’s nerd-like behaviors than to contemplate the meaninglessness of his death. The carnage of the Vietnam War gave new meaning to the term, waste. But Vince’s death was especially untimely. 1973. The war was almost over. They were withdrawing troops. Six more months and Vince might never have had to go.
“I was at his funeral, you know.”
“Were you?” I asked. As if I didn’t know. Of course he was. Phil and the local Veterans of Foreign Wars, the VFW tried to throw Vince a proper funeral, complete with a seven gun salute and a folded flag for his mother. But the town mayor played it down. Afraid of protests. After all, the papers still had giant pictures of the anti-war riots at the university a few months previous.
“He should have gotten a better tribute,” he said. “I tried. But Frank had no back bone.”
“Frank Watkins? The mayor?”
Phil seemed not to hear me. “I don’t know what side he thought he was on. Would have been easier arguin’ with Chairman Mau.”
In the end, both sides won — sort of. Mayor Watkins finally gave in. The VFW planned a patriotic funeral. But they didn’t have enough willing veterans to make up the honor guard. So they completed it with cops carrying deer hunting rifles. The synchronized volley blasted on schedule. But it was met by a thirty second stream of fire crackers in the nearby woods.
“Damn shame,” Phil muttered. “I guess you weren’t there.”
“The funeral?”
“No. Vietnam.”
An unexpected twist of the knife. I lost more than one friend in Vietnam. I didn’t need to be reminded that I was one of the ones who stayed home.
“No,” I said. “I lucked out in the lottery.”
“Lottery.” Phil chewed on the word like he was getting ready to spit it back out. “We didn’t need any lottery in my day. Had the draft. But didn’t need it if you ask me.”
“The Vietnam War wasn’t like other wars,” I insisted — as if I was some sort of authority. “People felt we had no business being there.”
“Nonsense. When freedom is at stake, you step up. People don’t need to be drafted — or lotteried. I didn’t. I enlisted. Waited in line. I wasn’t even old enough. But that didn’t stop me. Didn’t stop Vince either.”
Twist it some more. Call me unpatriotic. Or a chicken. Hell, I almost did enlist. 1971. My Senior year of high school. It wasn’t really for patriotic reasons. I wanted to fly jets. The high school counselor, Mr. Carpenter was going to help me. He had it all figured out….
“Your grades are good. But remember, Smart kids don’t have to go at all.”
Even then I knew what he meant: middle to upper-income white kids don’t have to go.
“If you enroll in college now you can probably get a college deferment. The war will be over by the time you graduate from college.”
I studied the framed picture on his desk. It was supposed to display him proudly standing on his fishing boat and showing off his trophy catch. But the camera caught him with his eyelids just opening or closing, making him look a bit like an axe-murderer holding a dead fish.
“But if you still want to go over there, it is better to enlist,” he continued. “If you wait, and they call you to serve, you will end up in the General Infantry – front-lines. You don’t want that.”
I didn’t. I watched the body counts on the nightly news like everyone else. I had already received my draft card. I was 1-A — prime material for being called to serve after my graduation from high school. The only chance anyone had against being called up was the lottery.
“You can enlist early. Officer’s Academy. Or better yet, ROTC.” he said. “You can take classes as part of your high school or college curriculum. Then you can go right into flight school, if you still want to fly. Navy or Air Force.”
College ROTC it was. That is, until I found out that I would have to wear my uniform to classes. Not a popular option in those days. I had images of anti-war protesters throwing rocks at me. I had a choice to make. Did I want to be treated like a leper in order to serve my country? Or did I want to drink beer and chase women, like any other self-respecting college male? I asked Mr. Carpenter about the lottery.
“The war’s winding down,” he said. “Even with the draft, they aren’t going to take everybody. Who they call is determined by the lottery. They draw three-hundred sixty-five balls from a jar. One for each day. Everyone who is 1-A has a birthday which matches one of those balls. Everyone gets a number. It depends on what order they draw them. If the ball with your birthday is the tenth one drawn, you are number ten in the lottery.”
“Great,” I thought. “A crap-shoot for the chance to get your head blown off.”
He went on. “From what I hear, they will take about a third or less. In the last lottery, they took the first one-hundred twenty-five birthdays drawn. This year they may even take less, unless the war gears up again. So my guess is that you got a one in three chance of being called up.”
The lyrics of the song, Teenage Wasteland, were running through my mind…
“I almost went,” I said.
“Almost doesn’t count,” said Phil.
“I was ninety-seven in the lottery. I came within two of going.” I had convinced myself that this defense covered any possible inferences of cowardice.
He looked away. “Vince knew the difference. He had it on the inside.”
That was it. It was time to leave. I didn’t want to blow Phil’s bubble but the way I had heard it, Vince was drafted. Furthermore, there were two possible stories behind Vince’s demise. And neither of them warranted a hero’s funeral, in my book. The most prevalent rumor said that someone in Vince’s unit had gone crazy and shot up the unit with a machine gun. Some said three people died along with Vince.
I gulped the last third of my Mountain Dew. So much for savoring the bouquet.
“Guess I better get over there and do some bowling.” I looked at the shoes in the bins. “Nine and a half.”
Phil grabbed a pair of shoes from the bin and slapped them on the counter. “You ain’t gonna get very far without a ball.”
I nodded and walked over to the rack of balls. I must have held every one, looking for that perfect weapon for making war with pins. That’s what I told myself. But I really didn’t want to bowl. I was still under the spell of Vietnam.
There was another rumor about Vince’s death, though nobody wanted to believe it. I guess I didn’t, either. It hurt too much. It reinforced the futility of that war. It said that Vince was the one who went crazy and shot up his unit – then killed himself.
I turned and looked at my son taking aim at the pins. I wondered if he would be aiming down the sites of a rifle in a few years — and whose head he would be aiming at. Except for the color of his hair, Heath was the spittin’ image of my old pal, Jimmy — dropping the ball from waist level. I waited for the boom as it landed. It came. Louder than all the other sounds. Reverberating. Like the single blast that heralds the end of a fireworks display — the kind of blast that sucks in all the air for an instant and then punches you in the chest with it. It had ignited on lane number Eight, all those years ago — and was just now striking my ear drums.
I stare at the picture. Behind Jimmy and me is my bike, leaning on its kickstand. Five little American flags are proudly mounted on the handlebars. So much has changed. By the time I graduated from college it was hard to find a store that sold American flags. The specter of Communism was losing its ability to rally American pride.
Then in 2001 another picture changed all that. It is burned into the psyche of all Americans. Two towers in New York crumble to the ground. In the course of a few months, our enemy changes from Communist to Terrorist. And American flags are again flown with pride.
But how much has really changed? The lottery kept me out of Vietnam. But not out of reality. Jimmy’s oldest son is fighting in Iraq. And my son, Heath is going to enlist.
Copyright © 2015 David Lindstrom. All rights reserved.
