Where were we…?

Ah! Yes! The last story was of the soul, the box, and the marvelous accomplishment of failure. The joy of getting exactly what you did not want and dealing with it anyway. This story is in a similar vein – finding something you were not looking for, or maybe: to both find and to be found at the same time. For those of you who grew up on classical Disney movies, more often than not, it was the Prince who played the role of ‘savior’ and the Princess, the ‘saved’. If only life was that simple, that we could wear the parts we were born with like hats and capes. I could play the role of the Prince and ride in on my trusty steed, the steadfast hero of the story in shining armor, who has everything together; financially, logistically, and morally. I would take off my hat, sling back my cape, and with one kiss from this magnificently handsome, charming Prince – her world would change.

I can hear the stomach acid clawing up some of your throats. Do your best to swallow it down, I will spare you the Disney memories from this point forward. My wife is more of a Shrek fan anyway, and I, most certainly am, and will always be, an Ogre. This is not a Disney movie, but it is a story and that story begins now…

The date was March 26th, 2010. I was twenty-one. Three years out of high school and I had completed only one semester of college with a really cool grade, a W – which stands for Withdraw. An F at least meant you Finished, a W means something else entirely. I was working on my second semester at a different college. This time, I was confident I would come out with a couple letters further ahead of W in the alphabet. Since this was attempt number two, the conditions were much different – I had to work. ‘Work’ was an interesting word for it though.

I ‘worked’ at a bowling alley as a counter operator. I was quite literally, ‘The Dude’ (‘The Ogre Dude’ if you will). This was a FUN job with plenty of perks. I got free food, the shittiest free food – nachos, pizza, hot dogs, hot dogs wrapped up in pizza and topped with nachos. I think you get the idea. I got to practice bowling for fifteen cents a game, which led to me bowling in four different leagues and as a direct result of that, I became a much better drinker. Most importantly, I got to know everyone. I started this job in September and by Christmas, I was part of the family of misfits that make up a bowling alley. I knew them all: from the family leagues bowling to raise money for the most just of causes, to the beer leagues coming together to celebrate two dollar bottles, to, my favorite, the ‘Drugs are for Everyone’ clan betting twenty dollars a game during Rock and Bowl.

I never touched the powder, the booger sugar, but trust me – there must be something special about alcohol, sugar of the nose, music, and the light show spectacle that is Rock and Bowl, aka Cosmic Bowling. That festival of humanity that is grab some smelly used slippery bowling shoes, eat, drink, dance, and roll this heavy ball down an oily lane to knock down some wooden pins. It’s human, and it will never die, because it's so us.

I cherished every night I worked Rock and Bowl because – it was a damn party. The Cupid Shuffle! Followed by Cotton Eyed Joe! Followed by the Cha Cha Slide! And then hit ‘em with YMCA! Yeh… That was my job. As terrible as the pay was, I loved it. I know I say most things in life are not that simple, but this very much was; hand out shoes, collect money, keep the tunes and the balls rolling, slip away into the back for a quick J with the pinsetter mechanics risking life and limb for your enjoyment, and grab a handful of cholesterol and grease on the way back to the front counter. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until it’s midnight and your head is spinning. Then the reality sets in that the party, that is also your job, needs finishing which involves coming down off your high, counting money, cleaning, and closing up shop so you can do it all again tomorrow.

As fun as that was, there was a downside to the job – the bookings. You only have so many lanes and, of course, everyone wants to have a party on the same night. What made the booking process so much fun, was we were still keeping it, quite literally, in a book. A book of bookings, imagine that. When we overbooked, for whatever reason, I tended to be that guy,

The

“I can’t deal with these people anymore!

You call them!

We don’t have room for them!”

Guy.

There was a reason I was that guy. Because I was ‘The Dude’. The guy that could talk to people, calm them down, and more often than not, I was also the guy that could ‘make room’. And so, on that fateful day, March 26th, 2010, my future wife’s eighteenth birthday, I made room.

I picked up the phone, dialed my future wife’s grandmother, and proceeded to tell her that we did not have a lane for her grandchild’s eighteenth birthday party. There was no ‘not having a lane’ for this woman. I knew this already from the horror stories leaking like panicky sweat from my co-worker, who was a woman in her sixties dead set on not letting this other woman, also in her sixties, come anywhere near a solution to her grandchild’s birthday party. That didn’t stop me from telling my future grandmother in law the truth – we screwed up, we were human, and this damn book is a piece of shit way to reserve lanes. There it was, the truth, but that doesn’t make it right, it just makes it human. She eagerly awaited my solution, and I said, as calmly as I could, “Maam, come on in, I will make it work.” She was taken back by that, relieved, and excited all at the same time. All of those emotions waterfalled out of her on the phone because someone else told her ‘no’, over and over again, each ‘no’ adding salt to the wound of her reality of having to cancel her grandchild’s eighteenth birthday party. Then, she talked to me, and I told her two truths: We fucked up, and – I knew a way to fix it.

The solution came from me knowing a little bit about everyone, no matter how much I agreed or did not agree with their life choices. It was a strategy that began in September when I started the job, and in March, seven months later, allowed me to enact a master plan I never knew I would need. Someone I became very close with, who worked in the back on those limb threatening pinsetter machines, was the critical piece to solving the puzzle. I’m not joking about these things, he was very much missing a digit on his right hand from them. Along with working at the alley, he was a member of my favorite group, the ‘pot’ bowlers. The twenty dollar a game junkies that were just as much addicted to gambling as they were every other drug they could get into their system. These guys, when they decided tonight was the night to empty their pockets and party, they reserved two lanes. They bowled league style, occupying both lanes, because it was for money and that’s what you do when it counts in bowling.

Tonight, they would not get both lanes. Something was more important than their pot games. I was the only person who could tell them this without causing an uproar, because a lot of them saw me as one of them, especially my friend who worked in the back. I bowled with them. I gave them deals when I could. I shared my free food. I would drive them up to the casino when their drugs impaired their ability to drive, since that’s kind of what drugs do. Tonight, I needed them to slide over, because someone needed to have their birthday party. My friend, the one missing a digit, the one who you could very obviously tell by the dilation of his pupils when he was in need and when he was needlessly content, agreed. If I agreed and he agreed, they all would agree, and so that was that. On lane twenty-one, I placed my future wife and her family, and on lane twenty-two, right next to them, every degenerate within a thirty mile radius of that bowling alley.

And so, they arrived at Rock and Bowl, my future wife’s family. Her grandmother, mother, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, and her two cousins. Her grandmother was ecstatic, over the moon, as anyone would be to salvage their grandchild’s birthday party at the last minute like she did. Then, I saw her, and my first thought was… DARK. She was an old school EMO, black shirt, black shorts, black necklace. She had these oversized arm warmer sleeves that provided a splash of color in some triangle pattern crawling up her two twig like arms. She looked straight out of Beetlejuice, the 1988 version. A one hundred and fifteen pound, Lydia Deetz, that very much looked capable of stabbing you, and in no way was she trying to hide the knife. Bold, dark, and confident. She knew the music she liked, she knew the culture, she wore it as a badge of honor; not as a blanket. The first words I said to my future wife was, “What size shoes?”. The twenty-one year old, three hundred pound, ex football player Ogre Dude, asking this Dark Witch, not much larger than the broom she rode in on, her shoe size. That was the first interaction, but it would not be the last. The final, most important part of the story is where most love stories begin – in the music.

As a counter operator, I was in charge of the music requests, and my future wife’s lane I so masterfully secured from the ‘DrugsЯus’ factory was right in front of the counter. One thing was clear, this girl wanted to hear her songs. After dancing to the Cupid Shuffle, which she surprisingly enjoyed as much as, if not more than, all the other girls, she came up to the counter and asked for KoЯn, Slipknot, and some crazy bands I had never heard of. The requests just kept coming and we went down the rabbit hole of how far we could push the envelope and still consider this a ‘family oriented' affair. I eventually gave in, opened the door to the counter and said, “You find it, as long as it has the ‘safe’ checkmark, you can play it.” And with that, I relinquished my job as disk jockey for the night.

It was, undoubtedly, a great night. It ended with me getting her number twice, thankfully from her first, but oddly enough, also from her mom. A first for me, a mom willing to give out her daughter's phone number. Getting it from my future wife first was the key. I would have felt genuinely embarrassed texting her if the only source I had was the number I received from her mother. This made for a great first text conversation, “So… I got your number from your mom, after I got it from you, what’s up with that!?”

This brings us to the end of our origin story.

I told you it would not be like Disney. I was no Prince, I was an Ogre, with absolutely nothing figured out. She was certainly not a Disney Princess, if anything, she was Maleficent with a heart of gold; She was Fiona if Fiona was born in the middle of a Limp Bizkit mosh pit from Woodstock 99. I had very little going for me, and I made mistakes daily, but I had a group of people, a bowling alley of misfits, that respected me enough to sacrifice one of their reserved lanes for the night.

I would be remiss if I didn’t hearken this story back to my previous article, “The Soul in the Box”. What made this story possible is me wanting to know the people in that bowling alley, every one of them, even if it was just a little bit of each person, even if you don’t agree with them at the onset of meeting them, even if you hate something about them first before you find something you love. You are the counter operator of your own life. There are tons of people in your bowling alley, and they don't all get along – but they all know YOU.

The thing THEY have in common is knowing YOU. If you care enough to dip your hand into that box and figure out something about everyones’ soul – the world really opens up for you when you take that approach, and sometimes, when the world opens up, you find something.

In This

Special Case

The World

Opened Up

And

I

Found

The

Rest

Of

My

Life

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