Little Casino

The light of bowling alleys

HE HAD BEEN VAGUELY AWARE, FOR SOME time, that odd and unexpected things often happened in odd and unexpected places, but he had no sense that such things could happen to him. Perry or Sam, let’s say Perry, had picked him up about seven o’clock, after supper, in his old dusty black Plymouth coupe, and they’d gone up the hill to the Blue Front for a Coke, then down to Chez Freddy, if witnesses can be believed, but nobody seemed to be around. Well, it was a May weekend, well before the season. They wound up in, of all places, the bowling alley. He didn’t know how to bowl and Perry wasn’t much good, but they rented their shoes and made fools of themselves: expected behavior for bowling alleys. A few people were there, and a couple of girls, the bowling-alley light, harsh and shadow-less, setting them in clattering and crashing space precisely. The light of bowling alleys can be proven romantic, though the steps of the proof and its final flourish may be too simple to be given credence.

He had no idea where her Evander Childs High School was, nor her Boston Post Road, nor her Mosholu Parkway, Van Cortlandt Park, Gun Hill Road, but these were mysterious places to which she belonged, and were strangely inextricable, too, in his wayward mind, from the crisp white uniforms worn by nurses, from the perfume-edged odor of sweat, or so he was compelled to believe, even from the smell of ice-cold furs and the oil-slicked glassy waters of the Narrows. He knew that something was happening, despite the banality of everything, perhaps because of the banality of everything, the musty smell of the garage, just opened after the winter, the dirty screens leaning against the sides of the house, awaiting springtime cleaning, the blowing phlox bordering the hedge. There she stood. He looked around for Perry, Perry Plymouth, where was he? and he was talking to the other girl, small and dark, with startlingly white, even teeth and a short haircut that held her face in an ebony frame. Later, that summer, his friend, Teddy, would fall in love with this dark girl, making his Italian family as unhappy as her Jewish family. “Such goeth the breaks, brother mine,” Teddy’s older brother, Joe, would say, but sadly. In any event, what was happening to him, now, could well be considered instrumental in understanding the romantic nature of bowling-alley light. Which, by curious but logical divagation, which there is no time to explain, led him to wonder, that summer, about the whereabouts of Perry.

Helen, her older sister, picked him up at the DeCamp bus stop in Caldwell that fall, in their father’s car, a powder-blue Buick. What in God’s name was he doing at the Caldwell bus stop? In the fall? Helen was engaged to a second-year medical student, Sam, whom she’d met at Jones Beach. Of him and her younger sister, Sam had said, that past August, “You sly dog.” Which reminds me that Marvin, her cousin, had said, “If she weren’t my cousin, oh yeah, oh Jesus.”

The subject of the foregoing is not at all clear, as will be obvious to the attentive reader. The subject, for all I know, may not even be in evidence.

Werner Heisenberg was not convinced by this proof, and thought it, as a matter of fact, “frivolous.” But then Heisenberg had no idea of what a bowling alley is, or, in this case, was. He is on record as saying, in reply to a question concerning bowling alleys, posed him by Lotte Knapke, “Of that which I cannot talk about, I have to keep my mouth quiet.” He of course meant “silent.”

It’s perfectly OK for New Yorkers to make fun of New Jersey and/or its residents, but it is not OK for others to do so. And I mean New Yorkers, not transplanted rubes like, say, E.B. White.

“What about a transplanted rube like Virgil Thomson?”

Fuck him, too, with his wand and his peanut-butter pie!

“I’m not quite …?”

Wand, wand, wand, for Christ sake! You never heard of a wand, and pie?

“You mean maybe a cane?”