Bowl-A-Drama

The trip didn't get off to a good start.

I was in the middle of directing my first feature film when my good friend, and former manager, came to the small town I was in to visit.


We met up at a diner on the towns main street. It wasn't the fun kind of diner, you know the '50s themed restaurant that can serve you a quality milkshake and food dripping with Americana (sometimes mistaken for grease). This was the other style of diner, the one frequented by men proudly donning John Deer hats who are served by bitter middle-aged women who cigarettes tucked behind the ear and who use the term 'hun' like a period.


The trip didn't get off to a good start as one of these bitter middle-aged servers dumped a pot of coffee all over Dan's lap.

Yet this isn't a story about that, this is a story about what happened afterwards.

We were looking for something to do that night, and a small town doesn't exactly overwhelm you with options when almost everything but the strip club closes at 8pm (6 on weekends!)


We could've stayed at my place and watched an old Paul Reiser stand-up comedy VHS tape I had discovered in town earlier that week, but with the crazy girl I was living with around it'd be hard to listen to Reiser's observations on finding a seat in a movie theater over top of said crazy girl trying to interpret her latest dream.


"Like okay, I get that me being naked at a marina means that maybe like I'll be caught off guard, or somethin', but like why would you and the unicorn die in that car bomb?"

So Dan and I settled on going out to the one place every small town has, or you know, other then a Wal-Mart... we decided to go bowling.

Bowling, I mean it doesn't get more simple then that. You go, rent out some communal shoes that seem to always be some strange mix of red and black with neon green laces, then throw a ball at some pins for forty five minutes. A simple plan. Well, any other night.

See not long before my sister Emily had gotten married and Dan had been there. During the course of the reception the photographer, Ben, an extremely nice man with a limited working knowledge of English had approached Dan and I and asked me if I would like a photo with 'your partner'.

What did he mean? Like a business partner? Did he use the word partner instead of friend? Or did he think we were dating? Like partner partner, like Ellen and Elton (not together, that'd be a little to hetro). And if this man, who barely knew us thought this, then what did everyone else think?

We were pretty good friends, we did a lot of things together, he was even here at my sisters wedding.

Normally we were both pretty secure in our sexuality, I mean hell I had had a guy send me a drink at a bar and I didn't even send it back, though this may have been less my security in my sexuality and more my Scottish penny pinching. But still, I didn't send it back.

But something about the way the photographer said it shook us. Maybe I was giving people the wrong impression, I did cry pretty hard when Tom Hanks' volleyball floated away and that Halloween costume my first year of college probably wasn't helping anything.

So there we were, two guys on a Saturday night going out to a bowling alley. Maybe we were continuing to send the wrong idea to people?

I tried calling up some girls to get them to join us.

No luck, none I knew in town were free.

So reluctantly before my roommate began remembering another detail of her dream (always involving death, sex, or nudity) Dan and I climbed into the back of a cab alone and headed towards the lanes.

“So,” Dan started talking overly loud, “Suzy said she’s meeting us there?”

“Yeah,” I replied, picking up on what he’s doing, “She picked up Julie and is meeting us at the alley.”


We began taking turns elaborating on our plans with 'the girls' creating a fictional back story normally reserved for the geeky kid at elementary school who comes back after summer with a story of the girl he totally kissed at camp.

Now there were three of us in the conversation, the cab driver jumping in. We talked about our girlfriends who were waiting for us at the bowling alley and then about his ex-wife. We bonded with that cabbie, and it was clear there'd be no mistaking us for a couple of guys out on the town looking for a gay old time.

The parking lot seemed oddly empty, but we just attributed that to the fact that well... this is bowling.

We were in for a surprise though as we walked through the door and found the empty, dark, bowling lanes staring back at us.

A scruffy looking man with a ponytail stood behind the shoe rental desk, polishing the counter.

“Are you closed?” I asked, hoping maybe they were just trying to conserve power.

“Yup,” he croaked.

I looked at my watch, 7:30.

“Oh, when do you guys close?”

“Whenever people stop showing up,” he replied.

“Well, we showed up?”

He looked at us, then back down at the counter.

“Sorry.” He continued scrubbing. I had mis-underestimated the nature of a small town again, the Cidiot in me assuming a place people go for entertainment would be open past dusk on a Saturday night.

Dan and I turned to leave but stopped dead in our tracks when we noticed the taxi was still sitting outside, the driver doing some paperwork.

Dan opened the door, ready to head for the cab when it hit me.

“Wait!” I shouted as though all life on this planet depended on him not going through that door.

“We told him we were meeting two girls here. We can’t just leave alone, we’ll look like idiots!”

Dan and I stood there, looking at the cab driver filling out his paperwork. He was just sitting there, happily writing stuff down, as though he was just screwing with us, waiting to call our bluff.

“What if we call the cab company and ask for the taxi a few blocks away? Chances are they’ll send him, right?” suggested Dan.

It was genius, we’d send the driver a few blocks away, call back and get another cab to pick us up before the other cabbie even realizes there was no one to pick up. It was perfect; we were home free… until the plan didn’t work.

“We could walk back to my place?” I suggested. A snowstorm kicked in as if on cue.

It was at that point that pony-tail decided to lock up for the night. Looking at one another, sighing, Dan and I sheepishly climbed into the cab.

“How was bowling?” asked the driver, smiling ear to ear. We had a quiet ride home, then settled in for Paul Resier and his crazy early 90s clothing.

Oh and I believe it was decided by 'crazy girl' around the middle of Resier's act that the unicorn in the dream being blown up symbolized the death of her innocence and me being blown up, well that was because I hadn't vacuumed like I said I would apparently.