Self-Made Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

later.
    â€œYeah,” I croaked, trying to keep my voice down and my demeanor unshaken.
    â€œGreat,” he said, grabbing me by the arm. “C’mon and get yourself some shoes and a ball.”
    â€œOkay,” I said, following his lead.
    There was no getting out of it now.
    He walked me over to the front desk and left me there with the attendant, who was helping another bowler. As I stood waiting, I was able for the first time to focus on something beyond myself and my fear of immediate detection. I looked at the rows of cubbyholes behind the desk, all with those familiar red, blue and white paneled shoes stuffed in them in pairs. Seeing them comforted me a little. They reminded me of the good times I’d always had bowling with friends as a kid, and I felt a little surge of carelessness at the prospect of making a fool out of myself. So what if I couldn’t bowl? This was an experiment about people, not sport, and nobody had yet pointed and laughed. Maybe I could do this after all.
    I got my shoes, took them over to a row of orange plastic bucket chairs and sat down to change. This gave me a few more minutes to take in the scene, a few more minutes to breathe and watch people’s eyes to see if they followed me, or if they passed over me and moved on.
    A quick scan satisfied me that nobody seemed suspicious.
    So far so good.
    I’d chosen well in choosing a bowling alley. It was just like every other bowling alley I’d ever seen; it felt familiar. The decor was lovingly down at heel and generic to the last detail, like something out of a mail-order kit, complete with the cheap plywood paneling and the painted slogans on the walls that said: B OWLING IS F AMILY F UN . There were the usual shabby cartoons of multicolored balls and pins flying through the air, and the posted scores of top bowlers. The lanes, too, were just as I remembered them, long and glistening with that mechanized maw scraping at the end.
    And then, of course, there were the smells; cigarette smoke, varnish, machine oil, leaky toilets, old candy wrappers and accumulated public muck all commingling to produce that signature bowling alley scent that envelops you the moment you enter and clings to you long after.
    As far as I could see, only one thing had really changed in the last fifteen years. Scoring wasn’t done by hand anymore. Instead, everything was computerized. You just entered the names and averages of each player on the console at your table, and the computer did the rest, registering scores, calculating totals and flashing them on monitors above each lane.
    As I scoped the room, I noticed the team captains all busily attending to their monitors. Meanwhile their teammates were strapping on wrist braces and dusting their palms with rosin, or taking advantage of a few last minutes of pregame practice.
    I could see then that this was going to be laughable. They were all throwing curve balls that they’d been perfecting for twenty years. I couldn’t even remember how to hold a bowling ball, much less wing it with any precision. And that was the least of my worries. I was in drag in a well-lighted place, surrounded by some sixty-odd guys who would have made me very nervous under normal circumstances.
    I was dressed as down and dirty as Ned got in a plaid shirt, jeans and a baseball cap pulled low over the most proletarian glasses I could find. But despite my best efforts, I was still far too scrubbed and tweedy amid these genuine articles to pass for one of them. Even at my burliest, next to them I felt like a petunia strapped to a Popsicle stick.
    I was surrounded by men who had cement dust in their hair and sawdust under their fingernails. They had nicotine-sallowed faces that looked like ritual masks, and their hands were as tough and scarred as falcon gloves. These were men who, as one of them told me later, had been shoveling shit their whole lives.
    Looking at them I thought: it’s at times like