Broken for You (28 page)

Cars speed past, sometimes using this section of Greenwood Avenue as an alternate route when the major north-south routes of Highway 99 and Interstate 5 are congested.

There are no sidewalks in this part of Seattle. Tourists do not flock to it. It is does not serve as the backdrop for family photographs. It is not called a "neighborhood" because it seems to lack identity. On the other hand, maybe it doesn't want an identity. Maybe it's incognito. Maybe it's in disguise.

In this unnamed northern part of the city—near the complicated confluence of Greenwood Avenue, 100th Northeast, and Holman Road, south of Broadview and east of Crown Hill; not that hard
to find,
but a little hard
to see,
unless you happen to be looking for it—is a bowling alley. Its sign is easy to miss, crowded as it is by other signage that has grown up around it since 1962: Mailboxes, Etc.; The Dollar Store; Jiffy Lube; Texas-Style Barbeque; Windemere Real Estate. But here it is: one of the last independently owned bowling alleys in Seattle, the Aloha Lanes.

Soon after he arrived in Seattle, M. J. Striker began searching for work that would draw on his extensive experience and afford him a living wage. He also required a form of employment that would allow him to stay true to his twenty-seven-year quest, his peculiar form of self-punishment, and his marital vows. It didn't matter that those vows had been uttered in a secular setting; in his loyalist heart, M. J. Striker was as married as if the Pope himself had tied the knot. In short, he looked for work at a bowling alley.

A place in North Seattle had an opening, and M.J. scheduled an interview with the general manager, a man named Rudy Hahn. He boarded a bus at the downtown Y. It was a long ride that took him through a lot of landscape and ended up on a street that had seen better days. He was mightily glad when he finally got where he was going.

From the outside, the Aloha Lanes looked like every bowling alley that had been built in the early 1960s and then outlived its popularity: big and unsightly, in a state of scruffy disrepair. Its windows were streaky; its paint job was old. The only external greenery was a palm tree that had been pruned so aggressively over the years that it was little more than a hairy stump. M.J. viewed places like the Aloha as Ozymandian ruins of the day, built by people who'd believed that America's favorite participation sport (and the way of life that went with it) would rule forever.

M.J. went in. From the sound of things, only a couple of lanes were in use.

There was a large circular stone bench in the lobby. It surrounded a concrete fountain which M.J. assumed was supposed to look like an exotic island, complete with lava flows, dusty plastic palm trees, and fake orchids. The fountain was neither full of water nor functioning. Its basin floor was inlaid with turquoise tiles—chipped, cracked, groutless—and littered with cigarette butts. Children probably used to make wishes here. Couples probably used to sit on the bench and neck. A fetid smell— part mildew, part stale cigarette smoke—emanated from pink and maroon, palm-frond-patterned carpet that had surely been laid in the 1970s. Tiki statues lined the facade of the front desk. They must have once resembled jolly Polynesian sprites; now they looked more like a small army of pissed-off dwarves who'd been pressed into riot-control duty. This was not James Michener's Hawaii. M.J. felt right at home. A kid with pimply skin and a mouthful of hamburger slouched behind the desk.

"I'm here to see Mr. Hahn," M.J. said. The kid turned his glassy eyes in M.J.'s general direction—he was obviously stoned—and pushed a fistful of French fries into his mouth. His fingers had the same pallid,limp greasiness as the fries, and for a moment it looked to M.J. as though the kid was about to devour his own hand. Oddly enough, M.J. envied him; the kid—in spite of his apparent hygenic and intellectual shortcomings—was, after all, a kid.

"Rudy Hahn," M.J. repeated, slowly. "I'm here for an appointment at ten o'clock."

The kid squinted obliquely at a place above M.J.'s head, as if he were receiving instructions from an invisible celestial source.

There was a burst of laughter from a group of elderly women. The kid blinked and tried to focus his eyes on M.J.'s top coat button. He muttered incomprehensibly and sank behind the desk. M.J. awaited further nonverbal communication. He watched the old ladies.

They all looked nice, the way old ladies do when they go bowling. They were wearing slacks, dangly earrings, lipstick, and sweatshirts decorated with shiny doodads or pictures of things like orca whales, sea lions, and turtles; it was, after all, Seattle. They'd all had their hair done. Furthermore, they all looked young; even old ladies look young from behind when they're bowling. M.J. knew that if he got close, the ladies would smell of fabric softener, dry talcum, floral perfume. None of them would smell like turpentine, sweet onions, oregano, and sweat. None of them would be Gina.

He looked toward the video arcade. A couple of truant teenagers with pierced body parts and sunken edgy eyes were shooting at something. Girls or boys? Who could tell.

The kid resurfaced with some papers. He slid them across the desk to M.J. and then shuffled over to the diner. M.J. pulled a pen out of a cracked ceramic bowl sitting next to the cash register—it was made to look like a halved coconut—and began filling in the blanks, for the thousandth time recounting his recent employment history, his expectations, his qualifications, and printing "N/A" in response to questions related to emergency contacts and next of kin.

When he was done, he walked over to the diner counter, where the kid was hunched over a plate of nachos. M.J. held out his paperwork. The kid couldn't be bothered—he was enraptured by a glob of Velveeta— but to M.J.'s complete surprise, he blurted a surly multisyllabic utterance ("Dohntgivituhmee. Hahnzinthere. Gowahnin. Fuckinay.") and gave M.J. a disgusted sideways glance.

It took M.J. a moment to decipher this message, fraught as it was with complexity and nuance. Finally, though, he smiled broadly, and in his best parody of the Lucky Charms leprechaun said, "Tanksulaht, eejuht!"

The kid jerked his head up to squint at M.J., momentarily lucid, completely dumbfounded. M.J. grinned and headed for the office.

Rudy was sitting behind his desk, listening to somebody on the phone. When he saw M.J., he smiled and gestured for him to come in. He wrapped a hand around the mouthpiece and whispered, "I'll be done in a minute."

Rudy had on a short-sleeved bowling jersey which was unbuttoned to mid-chest—a function not of fashion nor of vanity, M.J. realized, but of necessity: Rudy Hahn was built like a brick shithouse. It was hard to imagine a collar anywhere in America that could comfortably accommodate Rudy Hahn's neck. He wore a white undershirt and a large silver crucifix. He had thick black hair that, from what M.J. could tell, was abundant everywhere but on his head.

"Yeah, I know," Rudy said, nodding patiently. "Listen, I've gotta go. I've got a prospective employee here. . . . Okay. Bye."

Rudy hung up, sighed, and stood. He reached across the desk to give M.J. a handshake. "Sorry about that. One of my gloom-and-doom colleagues complaining about the sorry state of the PBA." "That's okay."

"Glad you could come in, Mr. Striker. Have a seat." "Thanks." M.J. handed over his employment application and resume. Rudy studied M.J.'s credentials. "Perfect name for a bowler, by the way." He looked up and squinted through his thick black eyelashes. "I see here that you've traveled around a lot." "I like seeing the country."

Rudy clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. "I ask because, to be honest with you, it's getting hard to hold decent people in these front desk jobs. I started working here when I was seventeen—can you believe that?—and I took it serious. Still do. I've got people who've been bowling here for three generations. They're as good as family to me." Rudy ran his fingers over the top of his head—a gestural remnant, M.J. guessed, from the days when Rudy had something up there to run his fingers through. "But I get a lot of flakes now. You know what I mean. Kids who think they can get paid by the hour to eat burgers and play video games." Rudy glanced out at the vacant front desk and grimaced. "They're not here for long. I get a lot of turnover."

"Sure."

Rudy looked down at M.J.'s paperwork. "You've got age, experience. I'm sure you're more than qualified to do the job. My question is—and I hope you'll be honest with me here, no hard feelings either way—will you be able to stay?"

M.J. shifted in his chair. "What kind of commitment are you looking for?"

"At this point—" Rudy winced and rubbed his stomach. "Damn. My doc tells me I'm working on an ulcer . . . Hell, I'd settle for six months."

M.J. looked down at his shoes. He liked the look and feel of this place, and Rudy seemed like a straight-up sort of fella.

"Okay, yeah. I can do that."

"Can you start tomorrow morning? Not that I'm eager or anything."

"Sure."

"Great." Rudy stood up and shook M.J.'s hand. "On your way out, ask for Jean, our bookkeeper. She can get you set up with your paperwork."

"Thanks." M.J. started to leave.

"You bowl?"

"No. I just like to watch."

"That's too bad. I was hoping to lure you into a league." Rudy got up and walked M.J. to the office door. "Do you follow the pros? Do you have a favorite kind of bowler?"

M.J. paused. He looked at the old ladies—who weren't all that much older than he was, come to think of it. "My favorite bowler is the one who's shown up at three-thirty every Friday for twenty-seven years. Do you have anybody like that?"

"Oh, yeah." Rudy laughed. "We do. You'll meet 'em all."

Twenty-one

The Origins of the H
awaiian
Skirt Collect
ion

M J. had been working at the Aloha Lanes for a few weeks when Irma Kosminsky, one of the Aloha's regular patrons, came back from her annual vacation to Hawaii.

M.J. had seen her often enough. She was hard to miss, with her dyed orange hair and her floral print outfits. Mrs. Kosminsky bowled twice a week: on Tuesday morning with the ladies of the Hadassah League, and on Thursday afternoon in one of the senior leagues—The Hits and Missus—with a quiet, frail-looking gentleman that M.J. assumed was her husband. But he couldn't remember ever speaking with her; so he was surprised when, after distributing leis to practically everyone in the bowling alley, she marched over to him carrying a large straw tote bag, embroidered with bright yellow pineapples and bearing the words "Maui Is for Lovers."

"Here," Irma said, thrusting the straw bag at M.J.'s chest. She leaned close and squinted up at him. "You're a handsome man. I bet you're not even seventy yet."

"Excuse me?"

"Stop looking like such a cloud!"

"What is this?" M.J. asked, eyeballing a sheaf of tissue paper in the bottom of the bag.

"I've been watching you," Irma went on, standing on her tiptoes and lassoing a lei over M.J.'s head. "I'm not asking you should be happy or anything, God forbid, just that you should wear something with a little spirit, a little pizzazz, a little flash."

"What is this?" M.J. repeated. He reached into the tissue paper and extracted a neon-pink and lime-green rayon shirt. Someone with a grossly inaccurate understanding of mammalian anatomy had designed the fabric; its pattern featured grass-skirted, topless women with bowling-ball-shaped breasts and men with engorged biceps. The men were riding on the backs of creatures M.J. guessed were supposed to be dolphins—although they looked more like quadruple-amputee dachshund puppies.

"It's a shirt, for God's sake!" Irma bellowed. "A Hawaiian shirt!"

"I don't understand."

"Wake up, Junior. You work at the Aloha Lanes. The lounge serves cocktails in ceramic coconuts. Half the songs on the jukebox are Don Ho singing 'Blue Hawaii,' the other half are Don Ho singing 'Bali Ha'i.' YOU figure it out!"

M.J. accepted the shirt but didn't wear it.

A week went by. Irma started pestering him.

"What's wrong with you?" she said. "You don't appreciate my gifts?" M.J. was deeply unsettled by her use of the plural; he was afraid it foretold of future planned assaults on his wardrobe.

"It's a lovely shirt, Mrs. K. It's just not my style."

"Come for dinner tomorrow night."

"That's nice of you, Mrs. K., but—"

"I'll serve something black. Bean soup, licorice, coffee. It'll be very grim, I promise. We'll cover the mirrors. We'll listen to Piaf. We'll read passages from Dostoyevsky."

"Why are you doing this, Irma?"

"It's a mitzvah, doll. You should come by a quarter of six, and leave by seven-thirty. My sweet husband Sammy needs his beauty sleep." Irma helped herself to a front desk brochure about kids' birthday parties and scribbled her address on the back. "If you don't come, I'll never forgive you."

The Kosminskys lived about a mile and a half northeast of the bowling alley. M.J. expected a retirement community, or even a nursing home— there were plenty of them in the area—but the address Irma had written down led him to a regular apartment building called La Belle Mer (a confusing name, since from what M.J. could tell there was nothing whatsoever aquatic about the place). He climbed the stairs and found Apartment 204. Irma opened the door. She was wearing a voluminous, floor-length Hawaiian print muumuu and cradling an obese, black, three-legged cat.