Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Page A

mixing zone, for the league that bowled just ahead of us was the Gay Bowling League and the fellows would often come into the bar to do post-match assessments while we were limbering up. They were a good-natured crew and what I really liked about them is that all of them drank Budweiser, even though the bar did stock some unadvertised Heineken and Kirin way at the back of its cooler. As anybody who has bowled knows, it’s really bad form to drink anything but Bud or maybe Miller Lite at a bowling alley (or, okay, maybe if you live in Pennsylvania and bowl, you can drink the local favorites, Yuengling or Rolling Rock). But remember: this was San Francisco, where everything is precious or, if it’s not yet, soon will be. So I liked the fact that even the relentless pressure of San Francisco preciousness couldn’t bully gay bowlers into drinking imported beer.
    There was one sour note in our otherwise convivial relationship with our gay bowling brethren: names. As you know, we were quite proud of our choice of the Pinheads, so imagine our surprise when members of the Gay Bowling League started showing up in their bowling shirts with their team names embroidered on the backs and we realized that, slam-dunk, we had been badly outnamed! I’ll leave it to you to judge but it seems impossible to argue that Oh, Spare Me!, Bowling for Husbands, and, my favorite of all time, the Meet Balls were not all superior to the Pinheads.
    However, what really sealed the bar at Japan Town Bowl in my beer joint memory was the improbable night that we, the Pinheads, found ourselves in the league championship match against our archnemesis, a team with a name so boring that I have long forgotten it. Unforgettable, though, was their anchor bowler, a man who physically resembled Pavarotti but who bowled monstrously well; he bowled with grace and style and had an average around 200. He moved like a ballerina with a bowling ball in his hands.
    A bowling match is three games, with a fourth game awarded for the team that racks up the most total pins in the three games. We won the first two games, and went into the final game leading by about 80 pins—a comfortable margin, we figured. We could lose the game but still win the match and the championship so long as they didn’t beat us by more than 80 pins. Alas, in the final game, after two opening spares, Pavarotti got hot and started bowling strike after strike after strike. Around the seventh frame it was clear he was on fire and I recall one of my Wall Street Journal colleagues crying out: “Oh, no. He’s gonna bowl his weight!”
    Well, he didn’t quite make it. He only bowled a 279, but that was enough to erase our 80-pin advantage and crush us. We accepted the exquisitely faux-gilded, three-foot-high second-place trophy, being denied the even more exquisitely faux-gilded, six-foot-high first-place trophy.
    Though battered and demoralized, we retreated to the bar and were saved from what well might have been our fate—going home and getting a good night’s sleep. Instead, we sat at the bar, nursing Budweisers and our wounds and playing “Crazy” over and over again until, feeling better, we switched to “New York, New York” over and over again until people started screaming at us never to play either of those songs again. Sometime later, a man with a broom, the same man who had finally unplugged the jukebox, came and kicked us out, whereupon we discovered all mass transit had stopped running.
    Well after I left San Francisco, they tore down Japan Town Bowl and the bar with it and are planning, no doubt, to put up something precious in its place. But the bar lingers forever in my beer joint memory.
    It was a benchmark to keep in mind as I headed down the Mississippi.

    My idea to not overly plan my trip didn’t seem quite as clever when, sitting in my hotel in Minneapolis, I realized I would have to first head up the Mississippi River if I