For Radio New Jerusalem

October 25, 2019

Chapter 1: Little Man

Back in the fall of 1966 my hometown of Alma, Michigan was a prosperous and happy place.  In the midst of this prosperity, and with lots of both blue and white-collar workers flush with disposable income, bowling had become the participation sport of choice. And, in the early 1960’s, two new bowling establishments had gone up to cater to this demand.

One was the 300 Bowl, a 24 lane Brunswick establishment, which was located on the northwest corner of Alger Road and M-46.  Across the intersection was the other: Gratiot Lanes, a 12 lane AMF equipped facility, which was located on the southeast corner in back of the Big Boy.

In the fall of ’66, I started 7^th grade, which in Alma back then meant it was my first year going to school “downtown.”  Downtown meant one block north of Superior Street, the “main drag” as we used to called it, where there was one city block that contained both Alma High School and Stilwell Junior High.

Besides being younger than the other kids, I was also small for my age and had a babyface.  You could’ve dropped me back into Mr. Brock’s fifth grade class at Hillcrest Elementary, and if you didn’t know me, there was no way you’d pick me out as the seventh grader in the crowd.

Starting junior high meant that kids from the sixth-grade classes of the six neighborhood elementary schools were now merged into one seventh grade class.  In Home Room, one of the few boys in the class I knew was a kid named Tom Hall, who had gone to Pine Avenue School.

I knew Tom because Tom’s dad, Don Hall, ran the 300 Bowl.  My dad, Irv Ropp, was a serious bowler.  He had sponsored a team through his own business, Ropp’s Super Service Garage, and when he disbanded the team, he was invited to bowl with Alma Concrete Products, the best at 300 Bowl or anywhere else in central Michigan.  He took his league bowling seriously, so during the time that roughly coincided with the school year that was also bowling season, our family activity was to go bowling at the 300 Bowl every Sunday afternoon so he could work on his game.  Tom was usually around running errands for his dad and practicing his bowling.  He was pretty good, too. 

As school began, I quickly became friends with Tom Hall, and since the common experience we shared was bowling, we talked a lot about that.  Tom told me his dad was forming a Saturday morning youth bowling league, and that I should get together with four friends and start a team.  I really liked the idea, but none of my friends were bowlers, at least not yet.

When I told Tom that I didn’t know any other kids that bowled, he suggested that I join his team.  They still had one opening and they’d hoped to fill it with someone with more experience than I had, but the first Saturday was coming up that weekend, and his dad had told him to ask around at school, and so he asked me.

“You’ll have to bowl your best because our team is pretty good,” he told me, “But from what I’ve seen of your bowling, I don’t think you’re all that bad.”

My mom didn’t like the idea of me joining a youth bowling league that included seventh through twelfth graders.  She was always afraid I was going to get hurt when I was around kids who were bigger than me, which was all the time.  My starting school downtown was more traumatic for her than for me, and I know this because she told me so all the time.  She was right.  The fact that I got bullied a lot didn’t help.  I didn’t like it, but I dealt with it.  Somehow every time I got roughed up, it was more like she was the victim.  I saw no reason at all why I shouldn’t bowl with the big kids, and I was excited about the chance to do so.  My dad was excited too and thought it would be a good experience.  Mom finally gave in with the condition we’d both be in trouble if this didn’t work out and something happened to me.

Saturday morning was warm and sunny.  True to form, when Irv dropped me off in our green and white, two-toned ’63 Buick LeSabre, I was five minutes late for registration but still really excited.  This lasted until I got in the door and walked up to where Tom’s team was busy filling out the league registration cards.  As my eyes adjusted to the darker confines of the bowling alley, I quickly counted five bowlers already present.  Tom saw me, and with a startled look, quickly walked over to where I was standing.

“Come on,” he said, “You’ve got to talk to my dad!”

He led me to a door that opened to the front counter on the left and to a small, private office on the right, beyond which were the shoe racks and a maintenance shop.

Don Hall was at the front counter, and when he finished, he came back to the office where Tom and I were standing and sat down at the desk.

“I’ve got some bad news for you, son.” He began. “We had a mix up concerning the last spot on Tom’s team, and when he asked you, I’d already promised it to another boy.”

Don looked at me rather apprehensively as if, given my youthful appearance, I might burst into tears.  He was visibly relieved when I simply and calmly asked, “Does this mean I can’t bowl?”

“Well, no, it doesn’t mean that at all.  Of course, you’re going to bowl,” he said.  “I’ve got a couple of options for you.  You could be an alternate, which means you’d fill in for bowlers that don’t show up.  The other option I have is a spot on another team that needs a bowler, providing it’s alright with them and with you.”

“I really wanted to bowl on a team,” I answered.

With that remark just nicely out of my mouth, Don said, “Ok, then, let’s go!”

He was out the door, and Tom and I were running to keep up.  The league sign-up activities were going on at lanes one through twelve, and we headed down to fifteen and sixteen, where a group of four, sad looking high school girls from the next-door neighbor city of St. Louis were sitting. 

Now, if you didn’t grow up in Alma, then maybe you’re wondering how I knew they were St. Louis girls.  Central Michigan must be like Asia, I guess.  It’s like Japanese and Chinese people look alike to us, but they know on sight who is who and can tell the difference.  I knew they were St. Louis girls because they looked like St. Louis girls.  And even as a fledgling seventh grader, I knew the various reputations that central Michigan local high school girls had with the Alma boys.  These were, of course, broad and largely inaccurate stereotypes, but they were widely believed, at least to a point.  Breckenridge girls were pretty, good natured, horny farm girls.  Ithaca girls were stuck in the 1950’s and would put out but would expect you to meet mom and dad first.  Alma girls were stuck-up bitches who prostituted themselves to Alma College guys.  And St. Louis girls?  St. Louis girls were just plain flat out sluts. 

This is the kind of orientation information upper classmen in the eighth and ninth grades provided as a free public service to the new seventh graders in my day.

Indeed, the four girls were St. Louis girls.  The leader was a girl named Jennifer, who was pretty enough but wore too much make-up.  She had deep blue eyes and used a matching blue eyeshadow that made her look like a younger and less bloated version of Liz Taylor as Cleopatra.  The bowling team was originally her idea, and it had been sold to the other girls as a good way to meet and hang out with boys.  This was based upon the original plan, which was that the girls would bowl at Gratiot Lanes, which was where the St. Louis boys’ youth league bowled.

Gratiot Lanes was operated by a fellow named Kenny Luneak, who had started a youth league for high school boys the season before.  Including girls hadn’t even occurred to him then, because the greater revolution that was going on in society that had girls doing things they hadn’t traditionally done before, like bowling, was just now reaching the Alma/St. Louis area in the form of a high school girls’ bowling team from St. Louis.

They called themselves the “Gutter Girls,” and this was long before this was popular as a name for girls’ and women’s bowling teams.  I don’t know, maybe they were the first.  It was unusual at that time for girls, even St. Louis girls, to denigrate themselves in this way, even if it was a clever name for a bowling team. 

Kenny Luneak’s take on the girls was that meeting, hanging out and making out with the boys was exactly what their motivation was, and he saw this as an unwelcome distraction to the task at hand, which was serious competitive bowling for sports minded boys.  That was his vision, the girls didn’t fit it, so he suggested they go see Don Hall at the 300 Bowl, which they did.

When it came to youth bowling, Don knew he was playing catch up and realized that it if he accommodated the girls it might eventually lead to a girls’ league, which would put him one up on Kenny, who didn’t see the potential.  And if the girls lured in more boys’ teams, especially the teams of older Alma boys still bowling at Gratiot Lanes, so much the better.  The Gutter Girls were welcome at the 300 Bowl.

The rub for the girls was that one of their teammates had bolted from the team at the last minute.  She was only bowling because it meant she could hang out with her boyfriend at Gratiot Lanes, and when the venue shifted to the 300 Bowl, she decided to just to hang out with her boyfriend without the bowling.  She was a no show that Saturday morning, and when a call to Gratiot Lanes found her present over there, her name became, “That Damned Sherry.”

The bottom line was that the Gutter Girls needed a bowler, I needed a team, and Don Hall was challenged with the task of making this unlikely union work out somehow because he had bigger dogs in the fight than the five of us.

He certainly wasn’t going to send me home disappointed, considering my dad was one of the best bowlers in town, a customer who spent money generously on bowling and food for the whole family when not much else was going on, and who was a valuable and respected member of the team that put the 300 Bowl’s name in the Alma Record every week without paying for it.

As for the girls, in them he saw potential.  He realized there was a growing push for women to participate in league bowling, and if Kenny wanted to stay in the stone age and treat competitive bowling exclusively as a “boys only” activity for Fred and Barney, then he’d be all too happy to host a ladies’ league at the 300 Bowl for Wilma and Betty.  He figured that the girls would have mothers who would appreciate his accommodation of their pioneering effort to compete in bowling, while sharing the girl’s resentment that Kenny Luneak wouldn’t do so.

The girls were seated on the bright Brunswick orange fiberglass spectator seats, which were attached to chrome tubes and ran in two rows above and behind the area where the score keeper’s console was.  Don marched me down in front of them, stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders as if I was a favorite nephew, and announced the good news to the team:

“Girls, I have a bowler for you!” He said cheerily.

Before he could even begin to pitch me to the girls, one of them, a petite but solidly built dishwater blonde named Barb, who would have been pretty if it wasn’t for a nose that was too big for her face, stood up and let Don have it:

“Are you shitting me?  I get payed to baby-sit, pal!  I don’t know what you’re trying to pull by pushing this little twerp off on us, but this is bullshit, buster!”

Don Hall and I stood there stunned for a moment, along with Tom, who was watching the show from the carpeted area up above.  Don’s jaw tightened and he cleared his throat as the girls nodded to each other in agreement that having me join their team was bullshit.  Taking a deep breath, and maintaining his composure, he laid it out for them:

“Let me sum this up for you girls.  There are four of you, and you need five to bowl in this league.  This young man is in need of a team to bowl on, and you’re it.  He’s going to bowl whether you do or not, and if there is another outburst, and if I hear anymore foul language like I just heard, you’re not going to be welcome here and none of this is going to matter.  This boy is a close friend of my son, and I know his family and they are fine people. I promise you that if he bowls on your team, he will be an asset to you and will cause you no problems.  If you can come up with a fifth girl by next Saturday, you can add her to the team, and I’ll find him something else.  If you want to bowl today, and still have a team next week, then he bowls with you, at least for now.”

That did sum it up for them, and turning to me, and speaking for all to hear, he said, “I’m sorry.  I wish I had a better opportunity for you than this, but this is all I have.  If this doesn’t work out, you let me know and I’ll see that you bowl with somebody else.”

The girls decided they’d have to make the best of it, and I followed Tom back up to the front counter to get my shoes.  Safely behind the counter, he said with a smirk, “Well, I guess this makes you the newest Gutter Girl!”  Don was standing behind him and tried to laugh so I didn’t see it, but I did.  I didn’t see the humor in this.

That first Saturday was tense and cold.  The first time I was due up to bowl Jennifer, who as team captain was keeping score, looked at me and said in a baby-talk voice, “Come on, now, it’s time for Mommy’s little man to go bowling!”  The girls all laughed, the boys on the other team found it hysterical, and soon everybody was calling me “Little Man,” and I didn’t like it.

But it’s not like it was all lollipops and roses for the girls, either.  The team of pubescent boys we were bowling, the “Lucky Strikes,” soon demonstrated that they were equal opportunity jerks by referring to the Gutter Girls as “Slutter Girls,” and were soon coming up with other clever team names like “Pin Whores,” and “Bowling Bitches.”  They liked this about as much as I liked “Little Man.”  Maybe less.

On top of that, we were beaten badly, and nobody was in a good mood when this was over.  As we changed shoes and got ready to leave, I asked the girls if I’d see them next week.  Barb said, “Don’t count on it, squirt.”

It was a long, miserable morning for everyone, and when my dad picked me up shortly after noon, I climbed into the LeSabre without saying a word, and slouched down onto the vinyl seat-cover so hard it squeaked.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. 

When I told him the “Gutter Girl” story, he laughed harder than the Halls had.  Everybody thought my bowling for the Gutter Girls was funny except the Gutter Girls, myself included.

“But they hate me!” I protested.

“No, they don’t hate you!”  They don’t even know you!  It’s a big adjustment for everybody,” Irv insisted.

“Well, I’m not adjusting, I quit!” I announced.

In this emotional state, I had forgotten that “quit” was never really an option the old man considered, and as extreme as this situation was, he found no reason to make an exception.

“What I would do if I was you…” (which was usually what I ended up doing), “…is go back next Saturday and treat your teammates like ladies.  You do that long enough and they’ll respond by treating you like a gentleman.”  He made it sound so simple.

I was quiet the rest of the way home, and I was convinced I really would quit until I talked to Tom at school on Monday.  It seems that Don Hall had observed enough of what had gone on the past Saturday to come more around to Kenny Luneak’s point of view that the girls were more trouble than they were worth.  He’d decided that if they couldn’t find another girl bowler, then maybe the best thing to do would be to just end the experiment and move on before things got worse.

“My dad said to tell you that if that if you don’t want to be a Gutter Girl, you don’t have to,” Tom told me.  “You can be an alternate and he’ll get you on another team as soon as he can.”

While my limited time as a Gutter Girl hadn’t been much fun, I didn’t want to be the reason they got kicked out of the league either.  I told Tom that if they showed up with another girl bowler on Saturday then I’d become an alternate, and if not, I’d soldier on as a Gutter Girl.

“Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug.

When Saturday came, I thought for sure the girls would have somebody else, and I’d be looking for work with another team.  I was surprised when I walked in the south door and caught site of just the four girls walking in the east door. I walked up behind them at the table that had the chart containing the league standings, the schedule for that day, and the acetate score sheets that were projected up on the large, white wall above the lane apron.  None of the girls said anything to me except Jennifer, who simply said with an air of resignation and a sigh, “Come on, Little Man, it looks like you’re with us.”

Chapter 2: That Jerry Kid

The team we bowled that day called themselves the “Pin Richards” but they weren’t as bad as the Lucky Strikes had been.  It was Tom’s team, the “Striking Gentlemen,” that provided the drama that second week, and it was actually just one kid on the team that was the problem.  It was That Jerry Kid – the one who had taken my place on the team roster.

Tom told me That Jerry Kid was from Ithaca and had been kicked out of Town and Country Lanes for fighting.  His dad had pleaded with Don Hall to find a place for him in our league, and Don put him on the roster because Tom had forgotten to write my name on it.

That Jerry Kid’s dad claimed that his son was an excellent and very talented bowler, might even turn pro someday, and he didn’t want to see his budding bowling career interrupted by this “misunderstanding” with Town and Country Lanes.  Don bit on all of this, and thought if That Jerry Kid was as good as all that, it might propel the Striking Gentlemen, already the best team in the league, to become sort of a junior version of the dominant Alma Concrete team my dad bowled on.  He could envision the headline: “300 Bowl Youth League Team Wins State Championship.”  More advertising that money can’t buy and, better yet, doesn’t have to.

While advertised for students in grades seven through twelve, few high school students wanted to get up on a Saturday morning and go bowling, and the few Alma boys who did were already bowling in the Gratiot Lanes high school league.  This made the 300 Bowl Saturday morning youth league pretty much seventh through ninth grade boys, with maybe a few sophomores.  By the next year, as the demand for youth bowling increased, Don would be able to split the league into two; a junior league for seventh through ninth grades, and a senior league for tenth through twelfth.  The lasting legacy of the Gutter Girls would be a Sunday afternoon girls’ league.

What the girls had to endure to secure this legacy (with yours truly along for the ride), was to absorb the abuse and idiocy of adolescent Alma boys who really believed the crap that St. Louis girls were all sluts.  They treated the Gutter Girls like, well, gutter girls, and showed them no respect whatsoever.  From the girls’ perspective, this experience was like bowling in a cage full of screeching, sex obsessed monkeys.  I had yet to be blessed with the gift of testosterone overload that defines one’s entry into young manhood, and this example of what male adolescence was like made me vow to distance myself from it as much as possible both then and in the future.  No wonder the girls hated me.

This proved to me that my dad was right, and I determined that being a gentleman would be the most effective course to pursue.  I referred to the girls collectively as “ladies,” and treated each of them individually, and the team as a whole, with the utmost respect.

Besides Jennifer and Barb, who were both seniors, the team consisted of Julie, who was a junior, Kay, who was a sophomore, and me, a seventh-grade boy.  Jennifer and Barb were best friends, and Julie and Kay friends from school.

Jennifer was quiet and mature.  Her hair was jet black, which was probably courtesy of Miss Clairol, and she had a slight overbite.  It wasn’t like buck teeth, and it didn’t detract from her looks like overdoing the make-up did.  I still thought she was pretty and, in fact, to my young mind, she looked like a younger version of the picture of Gene Tierney that came in the wallet I’d gotten for Christmas.  I figured that if Gene Tierney lived in St. Louis and worked as a waitress at the Colony House Restaurant, and as a barmaid at the Friendly Tavern like Jennifer’s mom did, then Jennifer might be her daughter.  And Gene would probably tell her to back off on the eye shadow and mascara.

Barb, as was already evident, was both caustic and fearless, with a tendency to put her mouth in gear before her brain was fully engaged.  She was a farm girl from north of St. Louis and told me that she tossed bales of hay bigger than I was, and that’s what I’d get if I didn’t behave myself.  Since I did behave myself, we got along fine.  When you got to know her, she was smart and funny, and the fact that she took no crap from anyone often came in handy.

The other girls were Julie and Kay. 

Julie was a strawberry blond who was freckled, cute and really built, and I imagined that if Ann-Margaret had a little sister, she might be Julie.  She didn’t talk much but was bouncy, happy and likeable. 

Kay was the younger sister of That Damned Sherry and was blonde with a very pretty round face, lovely blue eyes, and a body that was just finishing the final stages of shifting its ample cargo into all the right places.  She was shy and quiet, kept to herself, and was obsessed with folding Juicy Fruit Gum wrappers into a brightly colored yellow and red chain.  Part of being a Gutter Girl was chewing lots of Juicy Fruit so Kay could have the wrappers.

Jennifer and Barb both smoked Newports.  Julie didn’t smoke technically but would bum Newports and smoke with the other girls when they went out to have a cigarette by Jennifer’s boyfriend’s car, which was a red,1965 Mustang 2+2 that he let her drive.  Kay didn’t smoke at all and hated it and would stand by the other three and cough and wave the smoke out of the air.  Perhaps the most distinctive thing I remember about the girls was their collective odor.  It was a combination of shampoo, cheap perfume, Juicy Fruit and menthol cigarettes, and I thought it was exotic – almost intoxicating.

This second Saturday began essentially where the first had left off.  While the Pin Richards weren’t as nasty as the Lucky Strikes had been, we were simply going through the motions of being a bowling team, and it was clear we weren’t very good.  Jennifer was the only real bowler among the girls, and was just a little better than I was, which was about average or a little below.  Barb had  bowled before but never regularly, and while her natural athleticism would eventually allow here to be pretty good, she was starting out hardly any better than Julie and Kay, who were novices and not quite at the level of rolling the ball down the alley with both hands, but weren’t that far from it, either.

For the first few frames of game one, we were all quiet and took our turns, while the Pin Richards quickly moved out to a comfortable lead and were animated in the fun they were having at our expense.

We were bowling at the end of the league activities on lanes eleven and twelve.  Down at the far end, the Striking Gentlemen were on one and two.  Kay was up in the spectator seats working on her Juicy Fruit chain, and when she got up to bowl in maybe the fourth or fifth frame, That Jerry Kid, who had sneaked down to our end of things, grabbed it and ran back to where his team was, waving it over his head, laughing manically and yelling “Look what I got!  Look what I got!”

Kay was thunderstruck and, after throwing a namesake gutter ball on her second roll of the frame, went back to her seat and sat down.  She looked down and straight ahead, hoping we wouldn’t see her tears, but I did, and it pissed me off.  I didn’t say anything but sat for a couple of minutes watching That Jerry Kid, who was down at number two in the upper spectator seats.  He was examining the Juicy Fruit chain like a curious chimp, and when it was his turn to get up and bowl, I watched him throw it under the seats for safe keeping.

As he walked up to bowl, I left my seat and sprinted down to lane two.  As That Jerry Kid threw his first ball, I laid on my stomach, reached down behind the spectator seats, felt around until I was able to grab the Juicy Fruit chain, then jumped up and ran back towards where we were bowling.

I looked over my shoulder to see That Jerry Kid, still standing on the lane apron, turn towards me and yell across the building loud enough to be heard above the bowling noise, “Hey, fucker!  I’ll kill you, you little asshole!”

Somehow, Don Hall had stood at the counter and had missed this little drama playing out.  This got his attention and he looked up to see what was going on.  He gave Tom a dirty look, and Tom began telling That Jerry Kid to shut up and sit down, which, under protest, he did.

I handed the Juicy Fruit chain to Kay and said nonchalantly, “Here’s your chain.  I got it back for you.”

She looked at the brightly colored paper chain that I had restored to her hands as if it was a baby I’d rescued from wolves, then looked up at me through her tears and with amazement said, “Oh, thank you!  That was so brave of you!”  She then smiled and it was like the sun had just come out from behind a cloud.

The other girls had gathered around Kay as this was going on and, now relieved, echoed her sentiments.  “That was really cool, squirt!” said Barb.  Julie nodded and added, “Uh-huh!” and Jennifer said, “Wow! You really are a ‘little man!’”

And, just like that, I became a teammate; a Gutter Girl.  I didn’t mind being called “Little Man” after that.  In fact, I was proud of it.  I sort of liked it.

Just as the Pin Richards were protesting to us to get back to bowling, I felt a slap to the back of my head and heard, “Hey, you little queer!”  It was That Jerry Kid.

I didn’t look at him and just said, “I don’t want any trouble with you.”

He replied, “You already got trouble, asshole!”

I turned around in time to see Don Hall walk up and say to That Jerry Kid, “You need to get back to your team. Now.”  He then turned to the Pin Richards and us Gutter Girls and said, “You all need to get back to your bowling.”  And so, we did.

We didn’t bowl any better, but the tension between the girls and I was gone.  I relaxed, they relaxed, and we were just kids bowling together.

As for That Jerry Kid, the girls were concerned that he really might beat me up, but by the time I was in seventh grade, I’d had a lot of experience dealing with bullies, and I knew the ones that talked the loudest hit the least.  The ones that hit first were what you had to watch out for; That Jerry Kid was strictly an amateur.  I was sure from the beginning that I had him pegged right as a loudmouth coward, and I did.  Besides, any real trouble with me and I knew Don would boot him out the door and back to Ithaca, and I’d be happy to take a few punches to make that happen.

Physically, That Jerry Kid was about Tom’s size.  Tom was a “husky” boy as we used to say then, but he dressed really well and never looked sloppy.  That Jerry Kid was a little fatter than Tom, looked sloppy and had his hair in bangs that were too long and hung in his face half the time.  Any serious physical exertion made him red faced and out of breath.  He’d have to catch me to beat me up, and that wasn’t going to happen.

That Jerry Kid was one of those kids who took up bowling as a sport because he wasn’t going to play football or basketball, and, even so, he wasn’t as good as his dad had made him out be.  He wasn’t any better than Tom, and he wasn’t as good as one of the older boys on The Striking Gentlemen, a tenth grader named Jim McCarthy.  Jim always wore freshly ironed, newer jeans and expensive flannel shirts that made him look like a picture from the “Big Mac” section of the Penney’s catalog. 

The schtick of the Striking Gentlemen was that they dressed impeccably, and as a slob, That Jerry Kid stuck out almost as much as I did on the Gutter Girls.  Even though he was second or third bowler on the team, he insisted on bowling in the number five “anchor” spot, where a team’s best bowler was traditionally placed.  And he got away with this, and all his weird behavior, by whining and carrying on until it was just easier to give him his way.  He was that kind of bully.

We didn’t improve much as a bowling team right away, but we did become friends.  The girls adopted me as sort of a pet or mascot, and from my perspective, they seemed to be beautiful and exotic women of the world.  Or at least the world of St. Louis.  My response to my nickname of “Little Man” was to nickname the girls.  I was Irv Ropp’s son after all, and while that may not have meant anything to the girls, it meant I had grown up in the shadow of the master of nicknames – my old man.

In honor of her role as team captain, I called Jennifer, “Mon Capitaine.”  While the other girls were girls, I thought of Jennifer as more of a woman.  She was in a committed relationship with her boyfriend, who had graduated the year before and was working at Michigan Chemical.  His dad had gotten him into the chemical plant right after he graduated, and co-signed the loan for the Mustang, which was not just a red 2+2, but a red 2+2 fastback with rear window louvres and deluxe black vinyl interior.  It was powered by a 289 Hi-Po, and the power went to the Trak-Lok LSD rear end through a Toploader four-speed transmission with a Muncie shift kit (My dad owned ran a garage, remember?)

Jennifer wore her boyfriend’s St. Louis High School class ring on her left hand, and had it wrapped with different colors of yarn to make it fit her smaller finger.  Besides the make-up, she always wore the same tacky, fuzzy, shapeless, rainbow striped acrylic sweater to bowling.  It sort of matched the yarn on the ring, and the overall effect was almost clownish.  She once showed me a picture of herself and her boyfriend from prom night the year before.  She was dressed in a black, off the shoulder gown, with tastefully applied make-up and her hair done.  She was a knockout, and I realized that she dressed down like this for bowling to minimize the attention of the Howler Monkeys we bowled with.

Barb was just who she appeared to be and right out in the open about it in no uncertain terms.  I suppose that’s why she and Jennifer complimented each other so much as friends.  My name for her was “Babs,” which she hated, which is why I called her that.  I liked to call her “Babsy,” which she really hated, and which would always “get her going” on me.  If she got a strike or spare and I said, “Way to go, Babsy!” She’d turn on me, punch me in the chest with her finger and say, “Listen, you little shit, ‘Babs’ is bad enough, but ‘Babsy’ is over the line!” We had this kind of exchange a lot.

The only time I was really over the line with her was when I made some smart remark and she said, “Maybe I ought to slap you around a little to teach you a lesson.” And I said, “Maybe you ought to slap me around a little because I’d like it.”  She went from loud to quiet and serious, got right in my face and said to me, “That’s pretty fresh talk, coming from you, junior.”  That shut me up, and that was what she wanted.

The only girl who let me get away with anything was Julie.  Julie was a flirt, and I learned what that meant from her.  She always dressed in a tight pullover, knit shirt and tight jeans, and packed both impressively.  The nickname I came up with for her, which actually invented itself, was “Jewels.”

Since I was the only one on the team besides Jennifer who knew how or cared to keep score, that became my job when Jennifer bowled, and she would often put me in the captain’s chair for a long enough time so she and Babs could run out to the Mustang for a quick smoke.

I always figured this made me team cheerleader, and so when I was doing this early on and Julie got a strike, I blurted out, “Atta girl, Jewels!”  Once out of my mouth, I hoped she’d heard this as “Jules” like it was a play on her name, but I soon realized that girls have an uncanny knack for always knowing what’s really on your mind, especially when it’s stuff like this.  She turned to face me and didn’t have to flaunt the Jewels – they flaunted themselves.  She then scrunched her face up and stuck her tongue out at me as if to say, “Here they are, and you can’t have them.”

I suppose Jewels wished there were real boys to flirt with like this, but if she had done that face scrunch, tongue out thing to some of the other boys, they would have hung around her like a pack of dogs at the backdoor of a butcher shop.  I had the advantage of being harmless going for me, and I’m sure she must have known that this thrilled me to no end.  I figured that Jewels only flirted with nice boys, and I was honored that included me, even if I was a twerp.  I knew enough to never push it beyond this level.  We understood each other.

The nickname I had for Kay came indirectly from Jennifer.  Kay was more interested in the Juicy Fruit chain than in bowling, and her lack of attention irritated Jennifer to no end.  When it was her turn to bowl, Jennifer would call out, “Kay! Kay! Come on, you’re up!”  It was a natural for me to just act as if this was really her name, so I called her Kay-Kay.

In my behavior towards Kay-Kay, I was never anything other than the perfect little gentleman she expected me to be.  It was important to her.  I was her hero, her little knight in shining armor, and champion of the Order of the Holy Juicy Fruit Chain.  She trusted me and told me everything that was on her mind, which was plenty.

She was sad and apprehensive about the future.  She had been a fat girl up until about a year prior, when puberty began redistributing the baby fat into all the right places.  Now the same boys that made fun of her when she was fat, hit on her because she was cute, and it confused her and made her wonder, “How do you know if anyone is sincere about anything.”  She had become the kind of girl who was asked to be a cheerleader, not the kind who had to try out.  It frightened her.

She really wanted to just retreat into childhood and be secure in that because it was what she knew, and what she was comfortable with, and it didn’t hurt.  Growing up hurt.  She had learned how to make a gum wrapper chain when she was in Brownies and did this endlessly as she contemplated all this angst.  My goal was to somehow live up to her image of me and really be the person she thought I was.  I guess it still is.

The other girls didn’t really understand much of this and thought she was immature and childish.  Maybe she was, but I was going through some of the same stuff and could identify.  The difference between us was that I couldn’t wait to grow up and she didn’t want to, and it was like our different perspectives kind of balanced each other out.  To her, I was still the kid she’d left behind and the boy she wanted the older ones to be like.  She was the girl I wanted to like me like she did then but when I was her age.  She made my heart ache, and it was a feeling I’d never had before – good and bad at the same time.  For this moment in time, I was the kid who guarded the Juicy Fruit chain when she went up to bowl.  It was a big responsibility and I took it seriously.

So, we Gutter Girls settled into a comfort zone with each other, and I quickly got to the point where I looked forward to Saturday morning, even if we did get beat up at bowling every week.

As expected, I didn’t get beat up by That Jerry Kid, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t make my life miserable in other ways.  He became my own personal nemesis, and by extension, this included my teammates, who he treated with the same kind of contempt and disdain.  We were very much all in it together.

From the Juicy Fruit chain incident forward, I had become the special target of all the abuse that he could dish out, and if there was any benefit in this it was that some of the other boys that originally behaved like this backed off and stopped it when they saw how extreme That Jerry Kid was with it.  It got old after the first couple of weeks to everyone but him, and it was as if everyone came to the same unspoken realization that there was something seriously wrong with him.

That Jerry Kid would watch and wait until Don Hall was away from the front counter, then run down to wherever we were bowling and let me have it.

This abuse usually ran along these lines:

“Awww, look, it’s the little queer gutter baby with his little mommies, the Gutter Whores.  I bet they like to dress him up in girl clothes and push him around in a baby carriage.  I bet they’d like to chop his little wienie off and make a real girl of him.  You’d like that, wouldn’t you, asshole?”

As if doing this in a whiny, sarcastic baby-talk voice somehow wasn’t infantile enough, he would illustrate his point by wiggling his fat butt and sticking his tongue out, and not at all in a cute way like when Jewels did it.  At this point, he’d run back to where his team was bowling and wait for his next opportunity.

One of the most miserable Saturdays was the first time we bowled the Striking Gentlemen, as we had That Jerry Kid in our faces up close and personal.  Even his teammates tried to get him to shut up, but by now everyone knew that you didn’t try to speak directly to him concerning any of the crap he said, because that just made him worse: made him do it all the more.  Even Babs couldn’t get him to shut up, and she must have killed half a pack of Newports that morning, stepping out for a few puffs at a time.  When he got a strike, which unfortunately for us that day was pretty often, he would point a finger at each of us with his left hand, and then give us the finger with his right, while doing a little shuffle dance.  We lost all four points, which was the three games we bowled and total pins, but I don’t think the rest of The Striking Gentlemen had much more fun than we did.

I know Tom didn’t.  Before he even had his bowling shoes changed, he was in the office talking animatedly to his dad.  Don Hall responded by pulling That Jerry Kid into the office and telling him to straighten up or the next time he said or did anything to anybody, he’d call his dad and have him come and get him, and his team would forfeit the rest of the season.

He tried protesting that all he was doing was defending himself against the abuse heaped upon him by those mean girls and that little jerk kid, and when Don didn’t buy it, That Jerry Kid broke down in tears and between his nearly hysterical sobs promised Don it wouldn’t happen again.  Don ended up trying to sooth him into regaining his composure before his dad picked him up in such a state, and now even he was aware of how That Jerry Kid operated and how effective he could be at it.

Regardless, That Jerry Kid did at least get a little more subdued at this point, at least enough to stay under Don Hall’s radar.  When he could, he’d get in my ear and say something under his breath like, “I’m going to kill you, fucker!  I’m going to get you when you least expect it, and I’m going to really fuck you up, you little asshole.”

One time when he was doing this, I made the mistake of saying, “Hey, Jerry?” and when he said, “What, dipshit?” I gave him the finger where he could see it and no one else could, and he proceeded to belt me across the back of the head so hard that it knocked me to the floor.  Babs looked up at that moment, took a step towards him, pointed to where his team was and said “Git!”  He ran off like a scolded dog, and I recovered quickly.  I didn’t let on to the girls that he was stronger than I gave him credit for, or that this really hurt, or that it kind of scared me.

Chapter 3: That Damned Sherry

So, the weeks went by and we did manage to have some fun despite That Jerry Kid and despite being the worst team in the league.  We were deeply entrenched in last place without much hope for anything better, when something happened no one saw coming. 

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, the St. Louis High School Phys. Ed. classes conducted a unit on bowling.  It originated with a promotional package Kenny Luneak got from the marketing folks at AMF, suggesting the benefits to America’s youth (not to mention the bottom line) of promoting bowling in the schools.  It included posters and a 16-millimeter instructional movie, Bowling: The Great American Pastime.  Kenny offered free bowling time at Gratiot Lanes as part of the package, and the progressive St. Louis Schoolboard jumped on the idea.  It would be the next year before the more conservative Alma board would approve a similar Brunswick program at the 300 Bowl.

When their teacher found out that the girls were bowling in the youth league at 300 Bowl, she singled them out as an example to the other girls and applauded their pioneering spirit.  Jewels, Kay-Kay and maybe even especially Babs had to this point thought of bowling as something they did as a favor to Jennifer rather than as an activity in and of itself.  We were terrible, and the fact that we were seen as merely a distraction, a joke and a doormat good for four points almost every week, meant the girls had taken to heart the name “Gutter Girls” and had no higher expectations.  This talk of them as “pioneers” shamed them as it should have.

When Kenny Luneak spoke to Bab’s class as they prepared to bowl at Gratiot Lanes the first day, he encouraged them to consider bowling as not just a great recreational opportunity to pursue with their friends, or as the perfect date night activity, but also told them that league bowling for girls was the up and coming thing, and that if there was enough interest, he hoped to start a girls’ league the next fall.  He hoped that this class and the bowling experience at Gratiot Lanes would inspire the girls to acquire the serious, competitive spirit necessary to participate in, and enjoy, bowling as the great team sport that it was.  At this, Babs let him have it until her teacher spoke up and said, “Barbara!  That’s enough!  Go out to the bus!”

The upshot of the bowling unit in school was that it gave the three girls the perspective that Jennifer had tried in vain to instill in them: that it was a sport.  I played baseball, and, well, I was a boy.  I knew this going in, and it was why I wanted to do league bowling to begin with.

To be sure, I enjoyed the fringe benefits of hanging out with cute high school girls who liked me and thought I was cool, even if they thought of me more as a mascot than a teammate.  I wouldn’t have joined any other team by this time if you’d payed me to.  In fact, I would have paid to be a Gutter Girl.  There were guys who had taunted and tormented me about being stuck on a girls’ team at the beginning who realized by now that they’d give anything to be me.  It was sweet.  But, on the other hand, if we actually tried to bowl to win, it would be even more fun for everybody – especially the girls.

It was what Babs heard in Kenny Luneak’s words to her gym class that turned things around for us Gutter Girls.  When she had gone with Jennifer to talk to him, and he had run them off and over to the 300 Bowl, he had flat out told them that they weren’t serious about bowling, and that he didn’t want them there being a distraction to the boys, who were serious bowlers.  That was Kenny.  He always said what he thought just like Babs.

It was clear that what he had heard about the girls’ experience so far at the 300 Bowl had given him no reason to believe that he hadn’t been exactly right in his assessment of them back then.  Maybe they weren’t the same kind of distraction he envisioned, but they were a distraction nonetheless, and, as for being serious bowlers, well, they had the record that proved he was right about that.  In short, Babs wasn’t so much pissed off at Kenny Luneak because he had been wrong about the Gutter Girls, she was pissed at herself and the other girls for making him right.  They were not serious bowlers.

At this point, it was Christmas vacation and school and bowling both stopped for two weeks.  The girls were off in their world, and I was in mine for this time, so I would only find out afterwards, when the second half of the season commenced in January, what had transpired in the lives of my teammates.

First of all, Barb and Jennifer had a major reconciliation.

Frankly, I never realized there was any problems between them, because the girls kept their private lives private, and there was a level at which I didn’t interact with them. 

For example, I didn’t go to the bathroom with them and thought it weird they went together.  I couldn’t imagine saying to Tom Hall, “Common Tom, let’s go take a leak then hang out in the men’s room for a while.”  That was weird.  And they didn’t talk to me about their periods, boys they liked, or their relationships with each other.  I was ok with that.

I found it the strangest thing of all when I discovered that girls have these silent disagreements that go on and on while on the surface everything appears ok.  Finally, this breaks down into apologies and crying and hugging and it gets really emotional, and then, at long last, everything is okay again.

Boys were different.

Gary Lytle was my friend and a kid that grew up down the street from me.  In an argument about something in a neighborhood baseball game, I once picked up his bat and broke it in half by swinging it into a tree.  It was an old bat, and I didn’t think it would break that easy.  I thought he might beat the crap out of me, but he just picked up my new baseball, took it home, cut it nearly in half with a hatchet and threw it back in my yard.  When I saw my wounded baseball, I figured we were even.  Next day, we played ball like nothing had happened.  He used my bat, and we pooled our pop bottle money to buy a new ball.  No apologies.  We didn’t even talk about it.  I don’t remember that we ever even mentioned it to each other.  That was how boys settled their differences.

Girls were different.

So I guess this great breakthrough happened when Babs and Jennifer exchanged Christmas gifts, and Jennifer started crying when one of the gifts she got from Babs was a fancy bowling towel that had “Gutter Girls” emblazoned on it in glitter, and her name embroidered on the bottom.  At Jennifer’s tears, Babs broke down into, “Oh Jen, I’m so sorry!”  and they hugged and cried and cried and hugged and everything was okay.

The other girls got bowling towels too.  I didn’t and when bowling resumed and I saw the towels, I was looking around terrified that there might be one for me.  The novelty of me being on the girls’ team had worn off with everyone but That Jerry Kid, and I didn’t need anything getting all of that started again.  Babs took this to mean that I was hurt that I wasn’t included, and I insisted bravely, “No, not at all!  All I wanted for Christmas was a hug.”  The girls gave a collective “Awwww…” and I got a big hug from each one, and that beat hell out of a stupid towel.  I’d learned how to milk this situation pretty good by this time.

Jennifer’s mom got her a new bowling ball, bag and shoes for Christmas.  The towel from Babs color coordinated with the ball, bag and shoes, and there was another round of hugs and crying.  Inside the bowling bag was a gift certificate to take all the girls bowling at Town and Country, where Jennifer’s mom bowled in the area’s only women’s league.  

She and Babs had worked on all of this together, and part of the deal was that a couple of the gals from Jennifer’s mom’s Friendly Tavern team were coming along, and the girls were going to get some one-on-one coaching and instruction.  Ball selection, grip, approach, release, game strategy, attitude, the whole nine yards.  It had taken Babs, Jewels and Kay-Kay half the season to figure out that they wanted to compete as a bowling team, and that to do so they had to learn to bowl.

The reason for this delay in coming to terms with what it meant to be on a bowling team was That Damned Sherry. 

Now, I’d never seen That Damned Sherry until I got curious what she looked like and Jewels showed me a picture of her in her cheerleader outfit.  Captain of the squad.  Looked like Lana Turner’s younger self in a St. Louis sweater.  Looked like Kay-Kay in a couple of years.  No wonder she was afraid of growing up.  Jewels had functioned as her gal Friday, as well as her best friend, until the big rift about the bowling team, which was right when school started.

At that time, That Damned Sherry was suddenly, madly and forever in love with some St. Louis football player that she couldn’t live without because she looked sooo good on his arm.  The fact that this young man bowled in the high school league over at Gratiot Lanes clicked with what she had heard Jennifer saying about starting a girls’ team to do league bowling like the boys. 

That Damned Sherry envisioned of a band of flamboyant and cutesy girls in edgy and sexy outfits just bowling, flirting with the boys and having fun.  When she saw an ad for the youth league at Gratiot Lanes and noted that it didn’t specifically forbid girls, she interpreted that to mean that the “Gutter Girls” would be welcomed. Afterall, who wouldn’t just love it?

Jennifer didn’t like That Damned Sherry and the feeling was mutual.  She and Babs hated each other.  That’s another weird thing girls do that boys don’t: they’re friends with girls they don’t like.  Babs had started out doing the Gutter Girls thing only because Jennifer wanted her to and thought it was a stupid idea.  Jewels and Kay-Kay were along at the will of That Damned Sherry, who had never shared her vision of Gutter Girls with the other girls because she was afraid Jennifer and Babs would back out, which they would have.  Her idea was to spring the outfits and the concept on the girls as a surprise once they had a team established, and she was somehow sure at that point they’d just love it.  

When Kenny Luneak ran the girls off, That Damned Sherry quit on the bowling idea but didn’t tell anyone else. Figuring that they were all agreed that the priority was having a bowling team somewhere, Babs and Jennifer, who were assigned the task of signing them up at Gratiot Lanes, instead got this accomplished at the 300 Bowl.  That Damned Sherry didn’t show up the next day, and that’s where I came in.

This resulted in a big fight between the girls after that first Saturday, and the fight ended when Babs, to no one’s surprise, told off That Damned Sherry and convinced the other girls they had an obligation to each other to stick out the bowling until they could figure out what else to do, and this was mostly so That Damned Sherry wouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing they’d quit. 

All agreed.

But that wasn’t the big blow up.  That happened at Christmas time.

When Babs cried on Jennifer’s shoulder over all of this, it was because she finally realized she was taking her anger at That Damned Sherry out on Jennifer because she was the one that had originally come up with the stupid bowling idea.  The other girls just showed up every week and tried not to take sides.  Since I was blissfully unaware of all of this and reacted to each girl by trying to be to each one what she most wanted me to be, they essentially liked me more than they did each other most of the time.  I became like the dog that held the family together.

When Jennifer’s mom had taken the girls bowling at Town and Country, the big surprise of the night had been in the person of That Damned Sherry.  Jennifer’s mom meant well.  She thought the girls shouldn’t be alienated from each other like this, so she set this up as a chance for everybody to hug and cry and say they were sorry like Jennifer and Babs had, and initially, this is how it went.  She rented the game room at Town and Country, bought a cake, and threw the girls a little reunion Christmas party, leaving them alone to kiss and make up.

That Damned Sherry’s vision of a bowling team had been as a prop to her Homecoming Queen ambitions.  The girls on her court were to be her “classy friends,” but to show the world what a great, fun and sexy gal she was, she’d also go slumming with her “counter-court,” her Gutter Girls – the bad girls from the other side of the tracks that she bowled with.  She thought this avant-garde, and artistic.  She envisioned skits at school pep rallies based on this concept.  She imagined it as something like a bowling alley scene that might have been cut from Bye Bye Birdie.  She was sure this would result in a great upsurge in her popularity. 

When Kenny Luneak said, “No way!” and ran Jennifer and Babs out of Gratiot Lanes, this all blew up in her face.  And, as if even God was in on it, That Damned Sherry’s reign as Homecoming Queen featured a drubbing of St. Louis by Ithaca in the mud on a rainy October Friday night, as her makeup ran, and her $50 hairdo fell under the weight of the tiara when it was placed on her head.

As costuming for her Gutter Girls, That Damned Sherry had bought each of the girls a red nylon jacket, gingham blouse and black jeans outfit, and since the bowling team idea blew up before she had the chance to give them their costumes, she presented these items as her Christmas gifts to the team. 

Football season was over, she was going through a very painful breakup, and she needed some time to rest and recuperate and just hang out with the girls.  Bowling sounded like fun after all, and she then announced the good news that she had magnanimously decided to let bygones be bygones.  All was forgiven and she was rejoining the team!

Rather than be overjoyed as That Damned Sherry expected, the girls were quiet.  When Jennifer tried to explain about me being on the team, That Damned Sherry said, “I heard you had some little boy bowling in my place.  Just tell him to go bowl someplace else.”

That was the point at which Babs cut loose on her, informing her that they’d all rather bowl with me on the team than her.  She finished up by saying, “He may be a kid, but he isn’t a senseless and insensitive bitch like you are.  And he’s a good person, which you’re not.  Even if he wasn’t, I’d rather bowl with the worst jerk Alma boy there is than with you.  Maybe we should just step outside and settle this once and for all.  I’ve been looking forward to kicking your ass for a long time.”

With that said, That Damned Sherry burst into tears and began to wale and cry, demanding sympathy from Jewels who just shrugged.  She demanded familial loyalty from Kay-Kay, who bawled her eyes out, but stayed united with the other girls.

As Jennifer went to work trying to talk Babs down so she didn’t mop the Town and Country parking lot with her, That Damned Sherry stormed out of the game room and into the bowling alley proper, yelling, “Take the team outfits I bought you and shove them up your ingrate asses!”

She did this to humiliate the other girls in front of Jennifer’s mom and her teammates, who were there waiting for the reconciliation between the girls to finish so they could help them with their bowling.  With that, she was out the front door, in her car and laying rubber out of the parking lot.

That was the big blow up.

Chapter 4: Showdown

Our Gutter Girls Christmas miracle would be that the bowling light was now illuminated in all of the girls and, like the star of Bethlehem, it would change everything.  Any boy who asked a Gutter Girl out to a movie would be told, “Let’s go bowling instead!”  The girls were suddenly into bowling like the jumping, cheering, striking girls on the AMF poster in their locker room at school.

The second half of the season began with the Gutter Girls splitting two points apiece with the Al E. Cats, the team just above us in the standings.  Jennifer and I both thought we should have done better than this.  It was the best we’d ever bowled as a team, everybody cheered for everybody else, and we were like a real team.  Yet we split with the team in next to last place.  It was disheartening.

Afterwards, Jennifer and I were going over the scoresheet, “There’s something we’re not seeing,” she said.

“You know, my dad bowls on the best team in town,” I offered, “Why don’t I talk to him?”

“Yeah, ok,” Jenifer said, “I’ll ask my mom. We’ll compare notes.”

We agreed to arrive a half hour before bowling the next week.

When I asked my dad if I to could talk to him, he got nervous like I was going to ask him about the “birds and bees” or something.  I was now 13, and bowling on a team with four girls aged 15 to 18.  I guess it was a legitimate concern.  Anyway, he was visibly relieved when all I wanted to talk about was bowling, and the conversation we had was a revelation.

“Bowling rewards two things: excellence and improvement,” he began.  “If you have bowlers on your team who make a drastic improvement in a short period of time, with a handicap based on what they did at the beginning of the season, then your team is poised to have some fun in the second half.”

“How does the handicap work?” I asked.

“Handicap is the equalizer among bowlers.  If you add your handicap to your average and the other guy adds his handicap to his average, they will equal each other.  You start out even.  Your score is your actual pin count plus your handicap.  If the difference between your opponent’s handicap and yours is 20 pins, then he has to beat you by 21 pins to win.  Don’t think of bowling as one team against another.  It’s five individual bowling matches organized into a competition.  Bowl head to head, not team to team.  Best total score of the five bowlers wins the game, but it’s five individual matches that determine the score.  Pay attention to those matches.”

The old man was on a roll now:

“The equalizer among teams is total pins.  Totals pins aren’t handicapped.  If the other team is made up of better bowlers, then they’re going to win total pins because their actual score is going to beat yours.  However, it is possible to win the match by winning all three of the handicapped games.  You can win three games and still lose total pins.  The idea is that on any given day, it’s not necessarily the best team that wins, but the team that bowls the best.”

“Okay,” I said, “I follow all of that so far.  Where does strategy come in?”

“In the way you choose the match ups.  Most teams use a set lineup.  That works most of the time.  Our team’s system is to use the statistics.  Our captain takes the league stat book and compares our bowlers to theirs and picks the best match ups.  He says it’s like hunting with a rifle instead of a shotgun.  You have to be more accurate, but once you are the advantage is yours.”

“How do you know which match ups are best?”

“You look at your bowlers over the last four or six weeks or so and compare their trends up and down to the bowlers on the other team.  You adjust the averages to reflect the current situation, and you come up with a projected handicapped score for each bowler in each game.  You pit your strengths against their weaknesses by selecting each individual bowler on your team that matches up the best against each bowler on their team.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Just one more thing,” Irv answered. “The intangibles.  The things that don’t show in the statistics.  Personality, for example and…”  He paused looking for the right word.

“What else?” I finally asked.

“Are any of the girls on your team good looking?”

“They all are,” I said.

“And the other teams are younger male jack asses?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Then let’s call it, ‘the feminine mystique.’”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You’ve bowled with these girls since September and you don’t know?”

Jennifer and I arrived for bowling early the next Saturday, just as we’d planned.  She was already there when I arrived.  Babs rode with her as usual and was bowling a practice game.  This became pretty much a regular weekly thing once she realized that Don Hall wasn’t going to charge her extra to bowl before league started.  Don’s stock had risen with her since the dust up with Kenny Luneak in gym class; when it finally dawned on her who had let them bowl and who hadn’t.  She apologized for her opening day remarks, and he responded to her desire to become a better bowler with the offer of a free practice line of bowling before league started.

While Babs worked on her game, Jennifer and I worked on the team.  Her mom’s information pretty much paralleled what my dad had said about handicaps, total pins and the idea that it was the team that bowled the best that won, not the best team.  What my dad had said about picking matchups by analyzing the team statistics was new to her, and as I did my best to explain it, a light went on and she quickly grabbed a piece of loose-leaf from the blue, canvas covered school notebook she’d brought with her.

She quickly drew two “L’s”, one on the top half of the page and one on the bottom.  She wrote the names of each of our bowlers to the left of the upright bar, put the dates on the top and scores in 10 pin increments along the bottom of the “L.”  She had me read the total series for each of our bowlers, to which she quickly added the current handicap, divided by three, and plotted it on the graph.  She, in turn, did this for each of the “Turkey Trots,” the team we were bowling that morning.

“Good at math?” I asked rhetorically.

“Uh-huh,” she said without looking up.

In a couple of minutes, she had projected scores for each bowler for both teams.  We looked at the numbers in silence for a minute.

“I think we should adjust the girls’ scores to reflect just last week.  The scores prior were so terrible, we’ll understate our potential if we use them,” I said, “Our scores, yours and mine, should be done like you figured the other teams’.”

“Okay.  That makes sense,” she said, and went to work making the corrections.

I looked down at the adjusted numbers and said, “If we bowl according to your projection, and they do too, we should take two.”

“You think only two?” she said with a hint of disappointment.

“Well, look at it this way,” I began, “We took two last week against the last place team.  We bowl the same, we’ll do the same today against the next team up in the standings.  We have the benefit of our inflated handicap, but their handicap is also really high, and they have two bowlers who are also showing significant improvement.  On paper anyway, we’re as good as the two teams above us.  A month ago, we weren’t even close.”

“Gotta walk before we can run, I guess,” said Jennifer.

I nodded.  In the first half of the season, we had only split two points each on two occasions, and that was against teams that had bad days.  Other than that, we had only won a few games here and there.  We had never won three games, which meant we had never beaten another team.

It didn’t happen against The Turkey Trots.  We bowled a little better, but they bowled above and beyond what we predicted, and we still managed to split the four points.  We’d never won two points two weeks in a row before, and when I tried to sell Babs and Jewels and Kay-Kay on the idea that this was a significant feat, they treated me like a wide-eyed child grasping at straws.  I resented it.  Jennifer knew the difference, but it was going to take a big win to convince the other three of the greater truth that appeared on paper but had yet to manifest itself in reality.  We really were better.  We could compete, we just hadn’t had the right opportunity to do so yet.  The next week would be our big test.  We bowled the Striking Gentlemen.

That Jerry Kid had become much less conspicuous over maybe the last month of the first half.  That had continued in these first two weeks of the second half.  He hadn’t had any great change of heart towards me, and he still managed to find at least a couple of opportunities each Saturday morning to harass, threaten and try to intimidate me.  He was as big a jerk as ever.

The difference was that Don Hall had convinced Jim McCarthy to take him under his wing and do the “big brother” routine with him in hopes that this would straighten him out.  Or at least keep him quiet enough so Don didn’t have to deal with him.  Jim McCarthy was a bigger, older kid who was always nice to me, so I always thought a lot of him.  He exuded “cool,” I thought; a very desirable commodity.

What this meant for Jim was several times over a Saturday morning taking That Jerry Kid aside and putting out, or at least trying to control, the emotional fires that flared in him.  I’d seen several occasions when Jim McCarthy had That Jerry Kid in a quiet spot away from the bowling alleys, hands on his shoulders, saying, “Hey common now, Jerry.  It’s ok, buddy, take a deep breath…” that sort of thing.  Once That Jerry Kid caught sight of me while this was going on and said, “What are you looking at, asshole?” 

My two pet names remained, “asshole” and “fucker.”

Jennifer and Babs got to the 300 Bowl 45 minutes ahead of bowling the next Saturday.  I walked in right behind them.  Babs bowled and we pulled stats.  With some trepidation mixed in, we couldn’t wait to see how we lined up against The Striking Gentlemen.  We pulled six weeks of stats on their bowlers, and what it revealed was very interesting.  Jennifer went back and pulled the same stats for our team and made the calculations.  We looked at each other in disbelief.  She rechecked her numbers.  They were correct.

Jim McCarthy serving as baby sitter to That Jerry Kid had taken its toll on himself and the other gentlemen.  The averages of the four bowlers on the team not named Jerry had declined steadily over this time, and That Jerry Kid’s rose, but only marginally.  They were slumping, but still winning, and it hadn’t affected their averages enough to significantly bring up their lowest-in-the-league handicap.  Our averages, of course, began to rise only after the Christmas break, making our handicap artificially high.  The result was an ascending line on Jennifer’s graph that met their descending line and intersected it on this Saturday.

Jennifer stated the obvious: “If we bowl like we have been and they do too, we should take three points today.  And the one thing that’s the most likely to screw us up…”

“…is That Jerry Kid.”

We said it at the same time, like we’d rehearsed it.

Jennifer went to work on plotting our bowlers against theirs.  She looked at how we stacked up by the numbers and said, “If I do this the way the numbers say, then Barb ends up bowling against That Jerry Kid…”

“…and as much as she hates him, she might just kill him and then we’d forfeit,” I said, finishing her sentence for her.

“That’s what I’m thinking.”  She was silent for a few moments.

“You know what else I’m thinking?  If you bowled against That Jerry Kid, it might disrupt his game enough to give us a bigger advantage.  What do you think, Little Man?  Are you up for it?”

“Oui, Mon Capitaine! That’s what I was thinking, too.”

Babs walked up then, mopping her brow with her Gutter Girls glitter towel.  Her job on the team now was working on improving her game and keeping Jewels and Kay-Kay motivated to do the same.  Jennifer ran the team, and I was Igor to her Dr. Frankenstein.

We filled Babs in and asked her what she thought.

“Sounds like a good plan to me,” she said.  “You’re probably right.  If That Jerry Kid pissed me off enough, I just might kill the son of a bitch.  I’d rather watch the squirt’s back so if I do kill him, it’s more likely to be justifiable homicide.  I’m sick of him and his shit.”

She paused as she looked around to see if anyone might be listening.  Then leaning in to both of us she said, “You know what else I’m sick of?  All this bullshit about us not being a distraction to the boys.  Why the hell not?  How come nobody complains about them being distracted?  What are they?  Helpless and stupid?”

“You know you’re right, Barb!”  Jennifer exclaimed.  “Besides, who’s a bigger distraction than That Jerry Kid?  We’re all expected to put up with him because why?  He can’t help being a jerk or something?  And we’re supposed to be good little girls – and boys –so we don’t, what, distract him?”

Babs tapped her finger menacingly on the list of enemy bowlers on Jennifer’s worksheet and said, “If you really want to beat these horny toads, that’s how you do it – you distract ‘em!”

“The feminine mystique!” I interjected.

“Jesus, Jen!” Babs exclaimed, “What have you been teaching him?”

When Jewels and Kay-Kay arrived, we grabbed our coats before they had theirs off, and Jennifer called an impromptu team meeting out at the Mustang. While Jennifer, Babs and Jewels smoked Newports, Kay-Kay and I looked on and shivered.

Jennifer told them what the stats said about how our two teams lined up and then gave the team a short pep talk:

“We’ve waited a long time for this opportunity.  These guys have beaten us three times.  We’ve never even won a point against them.  And That Jerry Kid has been nothing but a pain in our butt.  We’re going to pull out all the stops today.  Every trick in the book is up for grabs.  If they think we’re a distraction just being here, then wait until they see us try!  Any questions?”

“What about That Jerry Kid,” Jewels asked.  “I don’t know as I want to distract him.  He gives me the creeps.”

“That Jerry Kid is mine,” said Babs, “I’ll take care of him.  Why don’t you work on the two goofy guys – one’s mine and one’s yours.”

“That should be easy enough,” said Jewels.  “And two for the price of one is always interesting.  Ok, I’ve got it.”

“What am I supposed to do?” asked Kay-Kay.  “I don’t know how to be a distraction like Julie does it.”

“No, you don’t!” said Jewels, “I agree completely!”

I then responded to Kay-Kay’s question this way: “You’re bowling against my friend, Tom.  Just be yourself and talk to him.  Talk to him like you do me.  He’s a really nice guy and I think you’ll like him.  You don’t have to tell him your ‘special secrets’ or anything like that.  Just be nice to him.  Tell him about yourself, about how hard growing up is, and about how all the changes going on with your body have your feelings all confused.  He’ll like that stuff.  He’ll like you.”

I was trying to imagine Tom keeping his mind on his game as Kay-Kay went on and on to him about her hopes and dreams and the angst of her burgeoning sexual development.  And she could move smoothly from one to the other while expertly weaving her Juicy Fruit chain and maintaining a complete air of wholesome innocence.  It wasn’t like the girl didn’t have her own charms and talents.

As Kay-Kay was nodding, Babs pointed the butt of her Newport at me like she was aiming a gun and said, “You know, runt, I don’t know as I’d ever let you near a daughter of mine.”

Since they did weird stuff like this all the time, I didn’t find it unusual that the girls decided to all run off to the bathroom together, so I went out, put on my shoes and waited for bowling to start in 15 minutes.

The girls arrived fashionably late at the starting time of 9 am, as I was preoccupied setting up the score sheet in Jennifer’s absence.  I was concerned and a little ticked off they weren’t there.  The Striking Gentlemen were in place, That Jerry Kid had manage to call me by his two favorite pet names a couple of times already, and I was anxious to get the party started.

While I didn’t appreciate the girls’ late entrance, I did like the matching red nylon jackets they were wearing, each with their name embroidered on the front.  I liked it when they turned around and the jackets had “Gutter Girls” printed in white letters on the back, superimposed over a background of exploding glitter covered bowling pins.  I was also as surprised as everyone else, and a little hurt I wasn’t in on any of this, so I went back to working on the scoresheet.

It wasn’t until I stood up and Jennifer sat down next to Jim McCarthy at the scorer’s console that I noticed that she’d changed her clothes.  In place of the fuzzy acrylic sweater, she was in a red and white gingham blouse tied at the mid-riff and worn to great effect.  It was complimented by tight, black jeans that were turned up to the knees.  Her hair was tied up both tastefully and playfully in a red bandana, and her make-up looked as if she wasn’t wearing any yet at the same time there was a blush to her cheek, a hint of color on her lips, a hint of perfume about her, and her over all look was bright and fresh and pretty.

I looked around at the other girls and they were all decked out the same way.  I would learn later that these were the outfits That Damned Sherry had told them to shove up their asses at Christmas.  Wearing them today was their way of shoving them up hers.

Babs looked amazing.  She had make-up applied that down played the size of her nose and highlighted her positive features.  Her hair was in a short perm that also helped this effect.  She may not have scored as high on the pretty scale as the other girls, but she certainly pulled off attractive, even cute in a sort of loud, country way.  She was wearing the same gingham blouse and black jeans outfit.  She looked as good in it as any of them, and her body was taut, strong and athletic. A real country girl.  She was clearly in excellent shape, regardless of the Newport’s.

Jewels looked like Jewels but more so in the gingham and black jeans.  She tied the blouse high and tight and wore the tight black jeans like a second skin.  There was a touch of color on her cheeks, a little lipstick, maybe a shade darker than her normal color.  Her hair was down around her shoulders as usual, and she looked like the cheerleader she was.

Kay-Kay was perhaps the most transformed Gutter Girl.  She usually wore a modest blouse and baggy jeans to down play her physical assets, but today it was the tight black jeans with gingham blouse tied at the midriff look.  She wore it well and with just enough self-consciousness and shyness to make me wonder if she wasn’t doing it on purpose.  The best touch was a decorative belt made out of Juicy Fruit chain.  She didn’t wear any make up because she didn’t need any.  That’s what I always liked about her looks the most.

Collectively, the girls looked more like a chorus line from the Grand Ole Opry than a bowling team, but there was no denying it: they looked good.

As for me, I was sporting my usual 10-year-old dork look, though by now I had matured to maybe the appearance of an 11 year-old.  I’d grow a foot during eighth grade and transform from a little dorky kid to a taller, skinnier dorky kid, but that was still to come.

The former Gutter Girls were usually reserved and almost defensive, but today they were as charming as their new outfits, and offered their hands to the Striking Gentlemen, who tried not to stand slack jawed as the girls wished them a pleasant, “Good morning!” then chatted aimlessly and light heartedly about how happy they were to be bowling them this morning.  That Jerry Kid sat off by himself sulking and ignoring all of this.

Just before we were to start, Kay-Kay called us back to the spectator seats and offered a freshly opened pack of Juicy Fruit.  “For luck!” she said, and we each pulled out a stick so that the wrapper stayed behind.  Soon the aroma of Juicy Fruit filled the air.  It had become our trademark.

When Jennifer sat down with Jim McCarthy she asked if she could ask him questions about scorekeeping because, “You’re so smart and all, and I get confused sometimes.  I’d appreciate it so much!”  She gave him a shy smile that would melt any guy’s heart, or ice for that matter.

I overheard this and thought to myself, “The dumb shy girl routine.  I should have seen that coming.”  She did long division in her head faster than the calculators we had back then.

Jewels was talking to her two Striking Gentlemen, flirting with both but with one just a little bit more than the other.  I thought maybe she’d work this angle until they wanted to kill each other.  She was an artist.  I didn’t know either of these guys, as they came from the nearby town of Shepherd.  They were both good bowlers, and I think one was in ninth grade and the other in tenth.  One was tall and one was short, and one was named Jeff, so I called the other one “Mutt.”  I think Mutt’s name was Roger.

Kay-Kay asked Tom to sit with her in the spectator seats, and was soon telling him all about how she didn’t want to grow up and wanted to stay a little girl, but her body was changing so fast that she just didn’t know how to deal with it: “I’ve had to change bra sizes twice already in the last month, and now this one is too tight!” she announced plaintively.  She then reached inside her blouse and tugged at her bra straps as she wiggled her shoulders and rolled her upper body all around.  “It’s so hard to get comfortable, I wish I could just take the darned thing off!”

I realized now that I’d only seen the sanitized version of this routine – the “Disney Princess” version.  Tom was getting the porn movie version, and I suddenly understood just why it was that Jewels resented Kay-Kay.  Kay-Kay wasn’t scared of growing up or of her sister, she was scared of herself.  She should have been, too.

“I better pay attention to what I’m doing,” I thought.  “That ‘poor little girl who’s busting out of her bra’ thing is devastating.”  Tom had kind of a glassy eyed look and I thought he must be pretty much done for the day already.

As Jewels proceeded to turn Mutt and Jeff into mush based on nothing more than the false impressions she was creating in their minds, Babs was watching my back.  Quite literally, too, I might add.  She was seated alone in the curved seats that went around the back of the scorer’s console and was watching me and That Jerry Kid.  With the gingham blouse and black jeans, she almost looked like she could be on a river bank with a line in the water and me as bait.

Jim McCarthy was so engrossed in showing the suddenly warm, approachable and vulnerable Jennifer the finer art of the scorekeeper’s trade that he wasn’t even aware of That Jerry Kid.  Babs was like a lioness waiting to strike the hyena that was threatening her cub, and as we began bowling, I was trying to think of a good way to move the process along.

That Jerry Kid and I were both bowling fifth, so I sat next to him as we awaited our turns and decided to take a page from the girls’ book and be friendly.

“You know, Jerry,” I began, “There’s no reason we should have any hard feelings between us.  Why don’t we just shake and be friends?”

“Fuck off, asshole!” he said emphatically, “I’m not your friend!”

We took our turns bowling, and That Jerry Kid got a seven and I got eight.  We both missed the spare and sat back down at the same time.

He was clearly irritated at himself, so I acted like I’d beaten him so badly that I’d offer him some friendly advice.

“You know, you might want to move over a half arrow on your approach.  Maybe try a four-step approach instead of three,” I suggested in the most mature voice I could muster.

“Shut the fuck up!  Don’t tell me how to bowl!  You say one more word to me and I’ll cut your nuts off!”  The red face and the shortness of breath were starting. I was getting to him.

I didn’t want to “get him going,” at least not yet, so I kept quiet for a few frames.  That Jerry Kid was the better bowler, and slowly pulled out to a lead.  I was a few pins ahead with the handicap difference, and when I got a thumbs up from Jennifer, I knew we were leading as a team at the midway point of the game.

That Jerry Kid rolled his first ball of the sixth frame for a strike as I still stood on the apron after mine.  This was the victory he had been waiting for, and with it, he held his right hand behind his head with only the middle finger extended, and started dancing around me in an Indian war dance, as he tapped his left hand against his mouth and made loud war whoop sounds.  Not only our two teams but the bowlers on either side of us stopped to watch what was supposed to be my deep humiliation as inflicted by That Jerry Kid.

With the attention thus focused on me, I spoke up loudly enough for all to hear, “Hey, Jerry, I know what your Indian name is!”

“Yeah? What, asshole?”

I couldn’t believe he bit.

“Chief Flaming Dickhead!” I announced.

Almost half the league was watching, and almost half the league was suddenly laughing at That Jerry Kid.  Even Jim McCarthy couldn’t help it.  All the girls, all his teammates, everybody but That Jerry Kid, me and Babs, who was watching silently a few feet away.

As expected, That Jerry Kid took off on me, “Shut up you little fucker!  Shut up!  SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Now he was screaming at everyone.  The laughing subsided as the real fear arose That Jerry Kid might just lose it.  That was always the fear, that something would push him over the edge.

That Jerry Kid was now right on top of me and I could feel his spit landing on me as he yelled.  Just when I thought he was going to let me have it, Babs was suddenly right there.  The lioness had pounced.

She took the nail of her right index finger, sharpened in anticipation of this very moment, dug it into the end of That Jerry Kid’s nose, and pushed him back away from me.

“OWWWW!” he howled, “That really hurts, you stupid bitch!”

Babs turned the nail and pushed harder.  She got right in his face, nose to nose and eye to eye, and talked in that low, “I mean business” voice that was both calm and terrifying.  Only That Jerry Kid, Babs and I could hear what she said.  Her eyes were wild and kind of crazy looking – like a spooked horse.  Only she was in total control.

“I know who you are, and I know what you do,” she told him.  “You sit down, and you shut up.  If I hear so much as a peep out of you, everyone in this building will know what I do about you, and you’ll wish they were just laughing at you, you little bastard!  Now sit!”

That Jerry Kid’s complexion turned from red to ashen and he sat down like Babs told him to.  There was a red mark on the end of his nose.

Everyone that didn’t hear what Babs said marveled at how quickly she got That Jerry Kid under control.  I heard Jennifer say to Jim McCarthy, “She has a way with kids, doesn’t she?”

Game one continued without further incident, and when it was over, we had won by a comfortable margin.  High handicap against low handicap was a killer, and distracted bowlers and the scene with That Jerry Kid had taken its toll.  He beat me in actual score, but the difference in handicap made me the winner, which I pointed out to him.  He looked like he was about to tell me off when he caught Bab’s cold, steely eye and just sat down dejectedly.

Game two was more of the same, and featured Jewels at her distracting best.  With Babs now dedicated to neutralizing That Jerry Kid, she was working Mutt and Jeff as the planned two for one special.

At the beginning of game one, she’d asked the boys if they would watch her bowl and maybe offer some tips on improving her game.  Her bowling was already much improved, and her game needed no help whatsoever.

It was Jewels who had first made me take notice that there was something, oh, I don’t know, what’s the right word?  Special?  Yeah, “special” works.  There was just something special about the way a well-built girl’s rear end looked in a pair of tight jeans, especially as she takes a three-step approach and releases a bowling ball.

She soon had the boys so intent on watching this special something that they really didn’t pay much attention to their own bowling.  It became an interruption to their coaching of Jewels and her attention paid to them in the form of coy smiles and gushing thanks for their efforts on her behalf.  In fact, their coaching was so good, she ended up beating both of them.

This was the point at which Babs’ practicing was catching up to her game, and she beat her opponent, Mutt, in actual score without the handicap, while at the same time keeping That Jerry Kid in line with a dirty look or a quiet word in his ear now and then.  It was like she was on a mission from God on this particular Saturday morning.

As game two was about to begin, Jim McCarthy told Mutt and Jeff to pay more attention to their bowling.  He was speaking to the whole team, himself included.  Jennifer’s attention had him off of his game, and Tom was now guarding the Juicy Fruit Chain with his life while Kay-Kay chattered on to him about what a good looking guy he was and how when he grew into his baby fat like she had, he’d be the best looking and sexiest guy in Alma.  She punctuated her chatter by getting uncomfortable and adjusting her bra straps.  I don’t think he even knew what he bowled in game one and I don’t think he cared.

The Striking Gentlemen made a good attempt at serious bowling, but it only lasted until Jewels bowled in the third frame.  She rolled her first strike of the game and proceeded to throw her hands over her head, jump up as high as she could, and kick her heels up.  It was just like the AMF poster!  Jewels let out a cheerleader squeal, clapped her little hands together, and did a series of cheerleader bounces that seemed to defy gravity.

“Follow the bouncing jewels,” I thought, and boy, they sure did.  Follow them I mean.

When this little show was finished, Jewels gave her head a shake and her hair fell perfectly into place.  She held her hand up like a it was a gun, then pantomimed blowing the smoke off the barrel and into the boys’ faces.  She walked by Mutt and Jeff as if they weren’t there, and then, as an afterthought, reached back and patted Jeff on the cheek and chucked Mutt under the chin so his mouth would go shut.  She looked over at me and gave me a face scrunch.  I applauded and she curtsied.  It was vintage Jewels, and, as usual, I was a most appreciative audience.

With That Jerry Kid not threatening to kill me, or calling me a little queer, or fucker or asshole, I bowled pretty good.  With the handicap, I beat him again and this time by a few more pins than in game one.  I didn’t say anything, and he gave me no shit for once.  He was afraid of Babs, like anyone with any sense would be.  His red face had returned and belied his calm demeanor.  He looked like a pot with a tight lid getting ready to boil.

With the Gutter Girls up two games to none over The Striking Gentlemen, our match became like pro bowling on TV.  We’d started a few minutes late due to the girl’s entrance, and Babs confrontation with That Jerry Kid had added time to game one.  So had Jennifer’s conversation with Jim McCarthy, and Kay-Kay’s chatter at Tom, not to mention the bra adjustments. The first two teams to finish that Saturday did so as we were just starting game three and stayed to watch.  Two by two, as they finished their games, the other teams gathered around to watch this unexpected showdown between the worst team in the league and the best.

Jim McCarthy rallied his troops with a pep talk that amounted to the shared realization that this wasn’t the same team they’d beaten twice before.  They were already at the point of doing no better than a tie.  There was no saving the day, only saving face.  Tom told Kay-Kay she was the nicest girl he’d ever met, then handed the Juicy Fruit chain back to her and changed seats.  Mutt and Jeff promised greater attention to the task at hand, and That Jerry Kid said nothing, which was always a plus.

“Who are we?” Jim McCarthy asked, in an effort to rally his troops.

“Striking Gentlemen!” the rest of the team answered, as That Jerry Kid just sat there slouched down with his hands jammed into his pockets.

“What are we?”

“Striking Gentlemen!”

“Oh brother!” said Babs, “What striking bullshit!”

Jennifer called us up to the scorer’s console.  Her speech was much shorter.

“Kay-Kay!” she said, using my nickname for her, “Juicy Fruit!”

Kay-Kay produced another pack of gum.  We pulled sticks, again leaving the wrappers behind.

“Let’s do this!”  Jennifer said in a low but determined voice, as the aroma of Juicy Fruit again wafted through the air.

With an audience, game three became serious business.  It was like when Dick Weber bowled against Earl Anthony on the Pro Bowler’s Tour. No distractions, just bowling.

The Striking Gentlemen struck first and three of their first five bowlers got strikes in the first frame.  They were aware now that they had to cover the handicap and then some to beat us, and even with this start, it added up almost even after the first frame.  That Jerry Kid had to cover 20 pins to beat me, and when I got a strike in the first, he opened, and the pressure was on him.

They weren’t the first-place team for nothing.  The Striking Gentlemen bowled well and, other than That Jerry Kid, seemed to get their mojo back in this third game.  And the unsung hero for us was Babs, who continued to bowl her best and watched That Jerry Kid like a hawk sizing up her prey.  Whenever he looked up, he met her steely gaze looking back at him.  She didn’t say a word to him, and he didn’t utter any, like it was a negotiated truce between the two of them.  The longer this went on, the more intense it became, and by this third game, That Jerry Kid was clearly stressed.

Tom and Jim McCarthy both stepped up and were both having good games.  That was powerful because both were capable bowling over 200 and eating up the big handicap we had.  Jewels and Kay-Kay and Mutt and Jeff were bowling about average and pretty much just canceled each other out.  Babs was bowling above her average and Jennifer, consistent as always, was at hers.  This all shook down to mean that the game was going to be determined by how I did against That Jerry Kid.  Jennifer had called it right.  Without Kay-Kay in his ear and wiggling in the seat beside him, Tom was bowling one of his better games, and with that Jerry Kid neutralized by Babs, so was I.

The second half of the game went back and forth, with Jim McCarthy and Jennifer continuously updating the score and crosschecking each other.  That Jerry Kid and I were never more than a few pins apart.  He was bowling better but was still not himself.  I was bowling him even and remembered what my dad always told me about baseball.  When you’re playing above your ability, it’s like climbing a mountain.  Don’t look down, just keep climbing.

It came down to that Jerry Kid and me in the tenth frame.  Everything stopped as Jennifer and Jim McCarthy checked the figures on the score sheet, factored in the handicaps, and discovered that I needed to beat That Jerry Kid in actual pins by one for us to win the game and the match.  I was down by one pin going into the tenth.

That Jerry Kid bowled first, and after not saying a word to me for the entire game, he leaned over as he walked by me and said in a low voice, “This is where you get yours, asshole!”

He rolled off the pocket just enough with his first ball to get an eight count.  He picked up the spare.  He did the same thing on his bonus ball that he had on the first, and it was another eight count.  He kicked the ball return on his back to sit down and sulk.

I got a seven count on my first ball and then barely picked up the spare as one pin wobbled before it fell.  And now here I stood.  A strike would win it for us, and I’d beat That Jerry Kid by one pin in the actual score.

“Don’t look down,” I said out loud.  It was so quiet the others could hear me, and I’m sure wondered what I was talking about.  I took a deep breath, made a nice, smooth three step approach, laid the ball down perfectly, just like on the AMF poster, and watched as the pins exploded into a strike that looked like the picture on the back of the girls’ jackets.

Suddenly I was surrounded by hugging, jumping, squealing Gutter Girls.  What better way to celebrate this, the highlight of my bowling career.

After a few minutes the mayhem subsided.  The Striking Gentlemen shook their heads then shook our hands and offered their congratulations.  “Well done!” said Jim McCarthy.  “We’ll know what we’re up against next time.”

That Jerry Kid didn’t say anything, just hurriedly changed his shoes.  He was bright red and his eyes were bloodshot and he was clearly not hiding how upset he was.  No one said a word to him.  He looked at Babs like a wounded pup and she just looked back at him coldly and without changing her expression, as she just slowly and sadly shook her head at him.  She didn’t say, “You sorry sack of shit.”  She didn’t have to.

Jennifer and I were up in the top row of spectator seats changing our shoes.  The other girls were doing the same at the lower level, and The Striking Gentleman likewise on the next lane over.  I was sitting sideways with my foot up on the chair tying my shoe, and Jennifer was bent over tying hers on the floor.

We didn’t pay any attention as That Jerry Kid walked past us and stopped behind the railing that separated the carpeted area above from the bowling alleys below.  He just stood there looking at us until we finally noticed, and Jennifer and I looked up at him at the same time.

That set him off on me.

“I hate your guts, you little fucker!  You didn’t beat me.  That lying, fucking bitch of yours is out to get me!  She cheated!  Maybe I’ll kill her when I kill you!  Maybe I’ll kill the whole goddamn bunch of you, you whores!  Especially you, you little cocksucker!  I should have beat your ass when I had the chance.  This is all your fault!  You make me want to puke, you and your ugly whore bitch friends, but especially you, you little queer motherfucker!”

At this point, most of the bowlers in the league were still present and stood there watching dumbfounded, as did the balance of the Gutter Girls and Striking Gentlemen.  I looked past that Jerry Kid and saw Don Hall at the counter looking on at all of this.

Jennifer looked That Jerry Kid right in the eye, and with an anger I’d never heard in her voice before, she said, “I’ll tell you what!  He’s more of a man than you’ll ever be!”

With that, she cradled my face gently in her hands and proceeded to place a soft, wet, lingering kiss right on my lips.  It was warm and sweet.  It tasted like Juicy Fruit and menthol.

“For Christ’s sake, Jennifer!” Babs exclaimed.

I heard Tom Hall wistfully say, “I wish I was a Gutter Girl!”  The kid next to him said, “No shit!”

There were some whistles and cat calls, and I heard “Whoa!” and “Damn!” – stuff like that.

Jennifer’s lips parted from mine, and as she pulled away from me, she took the tip of her tongue and ran it along my upper lip from one corner of my mouth to the other.  It was electric.  Looking at me with her soft, deep blue eyes, she then gave me this coy, little girl smile and proceeded to shyly bite her lower lip.  Honest to God, the first thought that crossed my mind was, “No wonder she gets to drive the Mustang!”  Hell, I would have signed the title over to her and walked if it was my car.

I thought I was going to melt, and That Jerry Kid almost did.  He was standing there with his knees buckled together and one foot almost off the floor.  He was grinding his hands into his belly, and his face was even redder and was contorted into this weird, puckered look.  It seemed as if all of the anguish, confusion, conflict, anger, meanness, hatred and insanity in him were gathering into one place.  Without changing his weird posture, he looked around to see everyone looking back at him.  He slowly stood up straight, his face returned to a reddened but more normal look, and we all braced for what would come next.

What came next was something of a surprise.  He started to open his mouth to speak and his lower lip began to quiver.  He then suddenly burst into tears and ran screaming and crying towards the south end of the building.  He sat down in the lower spectator seats at lane one, put his face in his hands and wept, waling openly and loudly enough that we could hear it where we were, half a building length away.  No one went near him or said a word.  We finished changing, turned our bowling shoes in at the counter and left in silence.  The last thing I saw of That Jerry Kid, he was sitting slouched down at lane one sniveling.

Chapter 5: St. Louis Girls

The next week, I walked into the 300 Bowl 30 minutes early as usual.  Babs was at the counter, talking to Don Hall.  Jennifer was working on statistics and figuring out our line up for that morning’s match against the Lucky Strikes.

I walked up to the table where she was sitting, and before I could say “good morning” she said, “Come on, Little Man, we have to talk.  Let’s go out to the car.”

This was the first time I had ever been in the Mustang, and Jennifer let me sit behind the wheel.  I would have lost the red foam dice with black dots hanging from the mirror, but other than that, it was as cool as I expected.

“Are you okay, Little Man?” she asked like I was sick or something.

“Sure.” I said.

“Barb let me have it pretty good after what happened with That Jerry Kid last week.  You know.  She said it was one thing to mess with That Jerry Kid, who had it coming, but not if it meant messing with you to do it.”

“I don’t consider myself messed with,” I said. To the contrary, I considered myself richly blessed, but I didn’t say that.

“She – well, me too – we just wanted to make sure that you didn’t get any wrong ideas or anything.”

She was uncomfortable, and I was getting that way.  I mean, what?  Did she think I was expecting that we’d steal the Mustang and take off together?  That fantasy had actually occurred to me as I sat behind the wheel checking out the gauges, which included the dealer option tachometer.  But I knew it was just that: a fantasy.  Bowling with the Gutter Girls created a lot of fantasies in my mind and most were better left unexplored.  I knew the difference between fantasy and reality, and I was cool with what had happened.  I really was.  And I kind of resented Babs sticking her big nose into all of this and making such a big deal out of it.  I decided to change the subject.

“That Jerry Kid sure freaked out, didn’t he?  It must have made him really jealous to see me kissing you.”

Jennifer gave me a curious look like she was trying to determine if I was serious, then realized I was.  “You are such a child sometimes!” she said.  “That Jerry Kid wasn’t jealous of you for kissing me, he was jealous of me for kissing you!”

I sat for a moment processing this.  Then it dawned on me what she was trying to say.

“You mean…”

I looked at Jennifer and she was nodding.  This hit my gag reflex, but I vowed to myself I’d do anything not to barf in the Mustang.

“Do you know why That Jerry Kid got kicked out of Town and Country?” she asked.

“Tom told me it was for fighting,” I said.

“Well, that’s sort of true,” Jennifer said, “He got caught with his hand down the pants of an eight-year-old boy, and his older brother beat the crap out of him.  That was the fight.”

“Holy shit!”  I said, “He’d have to kill me before I’d let him do that to me!”

“That’s what Barb was afraid of.  My mom bowls in Ithaca, and we found out about this from her at Christmas time, and, well, you know Barb.  She decided then and there she was going to get him out of here before something bad happened.”

“So, what did she do?” I asked.

“She told Mr. Hall.  That’s why she apologized to him.  That’s why she comes in early on Saturday morning to bowl.  It’s so she can talk to him and tell him anything else she’s found out.”

“There’s more?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, there’s more.  Mr. Hall wanted to give That Jerry Kid every chance, but when he found out about the dirty stuff, he decided it was best for everybody, him included, to kick him out as soon as an opportunity presented itself.  Since you were his target, He asked Barb to keep an eye on That Jerry Kid when we bowled against his team, and then what he did last week cinched it.  He’s a really sick puppy.”

“That Jerry Kid is gone?” I asked.

“That’s what Barb was talking to Mr. Hall about.  Let’s go see.”

When we walked in, Babs saw us, and we walked over to where the other girls were.  The Lucky Strikes were picking out balls and getting shoes, so we had the area around the scorer’s console to ourselves for a minute.

“Well, I hope you wore a bra that fits you today,” we heard Jewels say to Kay-Kay as we walked up.  “That ‘Ooooh, look, my boobs are too big for my bra’ bit got old a long time ago.  Your tits haven’t grown any in a year.  You really need to come up with something new.”

“Oh yeah?” said Kay-Kay, “Well maybe if you wore yours a little tighter it wouldn’t look like you were juggling a couple of grapefruit under your shirt.  But then I guess you’d just have to drop your pants and do the ‘splits’ to get attention.”

One of the results of pulling out all the stops for the showdown with the Striking Gentlemen was that these two girls no longer made any pretense of decorum in front of me.  They talked the same to each other when I was there as when I wasn’t, and I always acted like I wasn’t paying attention to this kind of girl talk, while in reality I found it highly entertaining.

This served to reveal Kay-Kay in a new light I hadn’t seen before, and she dropped the little princess routine.  I decided that her journey through puberty must have been God’s retribution to That Damned Sherry.  It must have been like Lana Turner waking up one day to discover that her little sister had changed into Marilyn Monroe.

As the Lucky Strikes gathered, put their balls in the return rack and changed shoes, Babs and Jennifer conducted an impromptu team meeting.

“That Jerry Kid is gone,” Babs told us, “Don Hall talked to his dad when he came to get him last Saturday.  He confronted him about what he’d found out, told him about the big scene, and told him to get the kid outta here and get ’im some help.”

Jennifer piped in, “I talked to my mom, who talked to the gal on her bowling team that knows That Jerry Kid’s mom, and she said that there’s a really nice young priest at St. Paul’s in Ithaca that’s offered to provide some counseling for him.  Maybe he’ll be able to help him get straightened out.”

“That’s probably a better option than me killing him,” said Babs.

And that was it.  I didn’t hold any ill will against That Jerry Kid.  I never did.  Still don’t.  He was pathetic.  On the other hand, bowling became a lot more fun with him gone.  For everyone on our team, everyone in the league, for Don and Tom Hall, and especially for me.

The girls decided to keep wearing the gingham blouses and black jeans.  They wore the blouses tucked in and not tied at the mid-riff and added a black silk neckerchief that completed the look.

I was able to dress up the act a little myself.  I had grown an inch or so since school started and needed some new clothes.  My mom had a “Mrs. Robinson” thing for Ricky Nelson back then, and, while I found this a little disturbing, I hit upon the idea that I could exploit it by suggesting that I should dress like Rick did.  After all, who was cooler than Ricky Nelson in 1967?  Elvis?  Maybe.  The Beatles? I didn’t think so.

I went with the white shirt with broad vertical stripes look, and I got a pair of chinos and some white jeans.  I went from looking like the 10-year-old son of one of the Ventures to the 12-year-old brother of one of the Beach Boys.  Much cooler.

Besides the outfits, the only part of the original concept of That Damned Sherry that was retained was the idea that there should be an element of theater involved.  I worked it like the midget straight man who hangs out with the chorus girls in an old burlesque show.  The girls doted on me like I was the biggest stud Alma had ever produced, and held me up to the other guys as the example of manhood that they should attain to.  That put an end to calling me a ‘homo’ for bowling on a girls’ team, and we had a lot of fun.

And we bowled pretty well, too.  Well enough that we didn’t need too many distractions to be successful.  When we did, it wasn’t like Jewels and Kay-Kay couldn’t get it done.  Kay-Kay’s busting out of her bra act never got old and the boys fell for it every time.  Jewels came up with new routines that were always bouncy, effective and never failed.  I think Babs summed it up best when she said, “Why don’t you girls give it a rest?  Alma boys are just too easy.”

The girls just nodded, sighed and said, “Yeah.”

By springtime, we’d achieved our last goal, and that was climbing out of last place.  We moved ahead of the Al E. Cats in May and, on the last day of the season, we took four from the Pin Richards and tied the Turkey Trots for next to the bottom.  That may not sound like much but considering how deep the hole was we had to climb out of, it wasn’t bad at all.  We aimed to compete, and we did.

Don Hall threw the league a bowling banquet of burgers and fries on this warm, early June Saturday and handed out the league trophies.  The Striking Gentlemen had added Gary Lytle to their roster in place of That Jerry Kid, and he was good enough and sane enough that they won the championship easily.  We were proud of Jennifer and ourselves when she walked up to receive the team trophy for “Most Improved.”  We would have won the trophy for “Most Gained Respect” if they’d had one.  That’s how we saw “Most Improved.”  We may have been Gutter Girls, but we weren’t doormats.

Saying our good byes at the Mustang was harder than putting up with That Jerry Kid had been.  We lived in different worlds and traveled in different circles, so when I said good bye to the girls that day, I knew that’s what it meant.

Kay-Kay handed me a six-foot piece of Juicy Fruit chain.  She lapsed into the little girl act, looking up at me with her head down, as she batted her eyes, and said, “Don’t ever change.”

My heart ached and I wanted to laugh, and with an air of mock seriousness I managed to just say, “You either.”  Then we both laughed.  Like Babs used to say, “Never shit a shitter.”

Jewels gave me a hug, a peck on the cheek and a face scrunch.

“I’m sure going to miss that,” was all I could think of to say.  She looked down and nodded.

Babs looked at me for a second then grabbed me into a hug so tight I couldn’t breathe.  “You behave yourself, you little shit, or I’ll come hunt you down and kick your ass!”

“I’d like that!”  I said, and got away with it.

Jennifer and I just stood and looked at each other a second or two.  Then she gave me a big hug and said in my ear, “You’re the best little man a Gutter Girl could have.  Take care of yourself.”

I looked up and saw my dad turning into the parking lot in the LeSabre.  I started walking in that direction then turned and gave the girls a wave.  They waved back.

I never saw the Gutter Girls after that.  Well, that’s not quite true.

I saw Jewels one night at the Skytop Drive-In Theater.  I was standing in one concession line with my dad and she was across from us in the other with a boyfriend.  She was in a halter top and cut-offs.  We saw each other at about the same time, and I gave her a little wave.  She smiled, gave me a face scrunch and we both laughed. 

On the way back to the car my dad asked, “Who was that girl you were making faces with in there?”

“Oh, that’s just one of the girls I bowled with.”  I said innocently.

“One of the girls you bowled with!  Good God!  And you didn’t know what the feminine mystique was?”

“I figured it out,” I said.

And I saw Jennifer one evening when my family dined out at the Dandee Drive-In in St. Louis.  It was still old school and didn’t have speakers at the cars like the A&W in Alma did.  Jennifer must have gotten a summer job there as a carhop, and she didn’t look very happy about it.  I know she saw me in the backseat when my dad ordered.  It was awkward and we both acted like we didn’t see each other.

When my dad turned the car lights on to have her come get the tray, I leaned up and said in his ear, “That’s one of the girls from the bowling team.”

He responded by throwing a buck on the tray.  I then said, “She was captain,” and he threw a second dollar on top of the first.

Our order was maybe five bucks and a ten per cent tip was considered plenty in those days.  When Jennifer saw the extra money on the tray, she looked my dad in the eye and said a sincere, “Thank you.”  She looked at me and smiled and winked and I did the same.

As I grew up and I grew older, I never really cared that much for Alma girls, though some were my friends and they were all right.  And, yes, I thought Breckenridge girls were fresh and pretty, and Ithaca girls were cute enough I suppose.  But when all was said and done, I could really identify with the sentiments of the Beach Boys.  I just wished they all could be St. Louis girls.