Gutter Mouth

Saturday night, after our teams both lost, we went bowling. (I was in a Cal T-shirt; the blue-eyed boy was in the letterman jacket his father had earned for hockey when he had gone to Ohio State decades before his son, and which is emblazoned with his old nickname "Dutch," which has no significant explanation that I can discern).

When we go to the bowling alley in Mar Vista, it always feels like observing a social experiment, only we're participating alongside the subjects as we study. I always wonder who all these people are, because I will swear I don't see them every day around Los Angeles, and I'm not talking about one speicific sort of person either. It's all sorts of people, who mainly have in common that they seem to keep their kids up too late and curse around them.

Shortly before we'd showed up for bowling, I'd called the alley and they'd said it would be about a 45-minute wait for a lane. (That surprises me every time, that bowling lanes are so coveted in our there's-everything-to-do-here town of Los Angeles. What are all these folks' stories?) When we got there, a very robust woman said it would be two hours—it was so busy, couldn't we see that?—and that she didn't care what they told me on the phone, and that furthermore there was no list to which we could add our names, but that we could sit at one of those tables and wait to be called. She reminded me of a woman to whom MM and I used to refer—only among ourselves, of course, and with some fear and reverence—as the Javits Coffee Lady; one time, years ago in New York, we were at a convention at the Javits Center and we'd gone to get coffee in the cafe there, and the woman working the counter had made some very heavy-handed remarks about having to work at Javits and not taking any smack from nobody mmmmhmmmm.

Told about the two-hour wait time, I got a little bit indignant, and then stopped myself from broadcasting that scorn on my face because I thought this woman might be the type to shank me from her post behind the counter and not think twice. The blue-eyed boy and I got a drink in the bowling alley's bar (where an older lady was performing a shockingly effusive version of "Proud Mary" in an apparent karaoke contest), and then went to play a round of Lord of the Rings pinball. From where we were loitering in front of the pinball machine, the big lady could see us, and hollered at the blue-eyed boy, "Hey, red jacket," and gestured for him to come over, and told him a lane was available (all while I was not looking). Five minutes had elapsed since she'd told us two hours.

I waited until we were putting on our bowling shoes out of ear shot, and then I told the blue-eyed boy that I knew she'd had it out for me from the moment we'd walked in, but then had apparently decided not to punish him just because she didn't like me. He does have a gentle face, and looks (and is) wholly nonconfrontational, and I do have a tendency to do the neck roll and suck my tongue in the face of irritating customer-service people and drivers who cut me off. "What's the expression?" asked the blue-eyed boy, innocently, so as not to rile me. "You can catch more flies with..." I told him it was vinegar; and he's right.

I'd really wanted to break 100, but I bowled a 98 on account of a distracted gutter ball in the last frame. Next time.