stupor and blowing up abandoned cars on the back lot of a friendâs junkyard. You could tell that the news was devouring him, and the only way he could deal with it was to tear himself up and anything else inanimate that was handy.
âYou know, man,â he said to me, âshe puts up with a hell of a lot with me, and I canât say Iâve ever been unhappy with her. How many guys can say that? Iâve got a good woman. Sheâs never given me a minuteâs trouble.â
Bob agreed. âYeah, thatâs how I feel. I got nothinâ bad to say about my wife either. Nothinâ.â
It was an odd contradiction, but one that I came across fairly often among married men who talked to Ned about their sexuality. The way they told it, it sounded as if the male sex drive and marriage were incompatible. Something had to give, and usually what gave was honesty. These guys either lied to their wives about going to strip clubs, or at the very least they lied about the ubiquity of their sexual fantasies involving other women. On nights like these, among the boys, they could be honest, and there were no judgments.
The bowling part of the evening was clearly secondary to the beer and the downtime with the boys at the table, smoking and talking shit. They cared about their game and the teamâs standingâmore than they let onâbut as Jim jokingly put it to me as a way of making me feel better for being the worst bowler any of them had ever seen, the league was really just an excuse to get away from their wives for the evening. I learned later that this wasnât true. Actually, it was a money league, and every game we lost cost us twenty dollars. This made me all the more thankful and impressed that theyâd taken my poor showing with such good humor.
Still, they warmed to me more and more as my bowling improved, and I got the sense that it wasnât just about the money. It was as if there was an unspoken credo among them that there was just something you couldnât quite trust about a guy who couldnât bowl. I didnât drink or smoke either, and, though they never said so, I could tell they thought this was just downright unnatural, probably the sign of someone who had it too good in life for his own good. Beer and cigarettes were their medicine, their primrose path to an early grave, which was about the best, aside from sex and a few good times with the guys, that they could hope for in life. The idea of telling one of these guys that smoking or drinking to excess was bad for his health was too ridiculously middle class to entertain. It bespoke a supreme ignorance of what their lives were really likeâHobbesianânot to put too fine a point on it. Nasty, brutish and short. The idea that you would try to prolong your grueling, dead-end life, and do it by taking away the few pleasures you had along the way, was just insulting.
The whole business of bowling, when we got down to it, was, as you might expect, tied in to masculinity in all the predictable waysâhierarchy, strength, competitionâbut it was much more subtly processed and enacted than I had suspected it would be, and I wasnât outside this tug-of-war by any means. I had my own issues, old issues that were bound up with being a tomboy and competing in sports with boys my whole life.
When I appeared at the bowling alley on that first night, I was late. Practice time was just ending, so I didnât get a chance to throw before we started. These guys had been bowling all their lives. They threw with spin and they hit with precision. They must have known me for the putz I was the minute I heaved the ball with both hands. There were fifty or sixty guys in that room, almost everybody smoking, almost everybody drinking. They had names like Adolph and Mac, and to a dyke scared to death of being gay-bashed, they were just downright mean looking, all seated at their respective tables with nothing else to do
Carl Nixon
Brian Farrey
Stewart Foster
Kate Douglas
Betta Ferrendelli
John le Carré
Roxie Rivera
Aimée Carter
Melanie Nilles
Cathy Maxwell