Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Do NOT Try This At Home

So this one Friday night, when I was a wee lad just barely able to reach the pedals and pass a driver’s license exam, my friends and I went bowling. I know, sounds like a totally boring evening in rural Mississippi, but you don’t know my friends.

The county where I grew up in Mississippi was a dry county, like many of the counties in the South. But each municipality or city could decide for itself whether to sell beer or not. And it wasn’t illegal to transport beer and whatnot across county and city lines so the whole “dry county” thing was pretty ridiculous, but that’s the Deep South for you. Crazy puritanical on the one hand and insane drunkenness on the other.

For this evening, as on all evenings, I was the designated driver, which meant that we would all hang out at the Fire Tower and my friends would get stupid drunk and start peeing out my windows as we drove home down Hwy 49 at 2 AM. Or puking up Greek food in my back seat, that was also another possibility. I haven’t been able to eat a gyro since that day, as you can probably imagine.

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell.

No, this one night, we went bowling early in the evening. Then the plan was that we’d scoot over to Brandon (a “wet” city), hang out in front of a gas station until some college student or anyone would buy Bartles and James and Budwieser for us. (Though, again, I’d like to point out for the record that I remained stone cold sober for all of this.) The hanging out in front of the gas station was the tricky part, because if you were too eager looking, the station attendant would get wise and you’d never get anything. But I digress.

So while we were bowling, we decided to steal a bowling ball. I’m not going to go into exactly how four rowdy teenage boys managed to sneak a bowling ball out the door of the bowling alley, but we did. OK, fine, it was hidden in my friend Todd’s backpack. Not a big deal at all. Except to say that Todd was pretty slick walking out the door. He turned in his rented shoes with this huge bulge in his backpack and somehow the guy at the desk failed to notice the droop in the pack.

So we have a 16 pound bowling ball. And beer. And pubescent male testosterone. Just two of those things is enough to start some first rate trouble, but all three in the back of my car was enough to cause a major international incident.

First thing that happened was we try to break it open by dropping it in the street. No luck. So we dropped it off a roof and only managed to crack Brian’s driveway. Please take a moment and imagine how that went over the next morning with Brian’s Dad.

By this time we are duly impressed with the construction of the bowling ball. It can NOT be killed. But now it must die. We are a gaggle of teenage boys on a mission to break the ball at least in half by the end of the evening or until we are arrested, whichever comes first. What we really want are shards of bowling ball and a cloud of bowling ball dust, but we will settle for just being about to see what’s in the middle.

What we figured we needed was velocity. We couldn’t get higher than a roof to drop the thing, so… what to do? WHAT to do?

“I know! Let’s throw it out the window of Deal’s car while we drive down the road!” Or something drunken and slurred to that effect.

I knew this was a bad idea, of course, but my drunken amigos were quite persuasive, “Come on! It’ll be totally rad, man!” A cogent and concise argument if I’ve ever heard one.

So they pile into the back of my Dodge 600 ES (the “ES” stood for “European Styling,” I never could figure out what was so European about the PoS, but again, I digress). We tried a couple low speed runs with the ball and man, let me tell you, bowling balls are made of tough stuff. And, it takes a LONG time for a bowling ball going 55 MPH to slow to a complete stop. And they BOUNCE. Not terribly high, but a LOT higher than you would expect. But they don’t break, even at that speed.

And, when you let one fly and you are going downhill, it’s entirely possible that the bowling ball will actually gain speed and catch up to your car. It may even graze the side of your Dodge 600 ES with a sickening “thunk” before it careens off like a 16 pound pinball and smash into a mailbox, utterly destroying the mailbox with a noise that sounds like sheet metal being crunched in one of those car crushing pressing machines at the junkyard. Maybe that could happen. It’s entirely possible, you know.

Then it’s conceivable that the all the lights could come on in the house with the now demolished mailbox, while your drunken friends are wading in the ditch to find the muddy, but sadly still intact bowling ball, except for a gouge where it hit the US Postal Service approved mail container. You, in your state of sobriety might whisper/scream to your drunken homies, “COME ON! A LIGHT JUST CAME ON! SOMEONE IS COMING!” but they would whisper/scream back to you, “We have to get it, it has our fingerprints all over it!” never mind that the muddy ditch water would have obliterated all traces of identifying marks. But you don’t think of at until later. Instead, you get out of the car to help look for the stupid 16 pound jet black albatross from hell that has now ruined your life. No one is exactly sure where the thing bobbled off to after killing the mailbox, but always before it landed in a ditch so according to drunken logic, it MUST be in the ditch. You remind your friends that this is The South, and everyone is armed for bear and the owner MUST have heard the death knell of his mailbox and is now loading his 12 gauge so he can hunt down and kill what he probably thinks are foreign communist invaders, what with Red Dawn still in theaters.

Wolverines!

It is taking them FAR too long to find the ball. Panic is setting in and your stomach has tied itself into a sheep shank knot. You can feel the man with the 12 gauge coming down his winding, tree lined lane any second. You try and listen over your stupid buddies’ frantic searching and slashing and sloshing for The Shotgun Man’s footsteps.

You leave your foolish compadres to wallow in the slimy ditch and, praise all that is holy in the Universe, let us all give thanks to Zoraster, thank you baby jebus, you find the bowling ball across the road, down about a football field from the scene of destruction, just sitting there in a mud puddle in the gravel on the road’s shoulder. You scream/whisper again, “I FOUND IT! LET’S GO!” and everyone clambers back into the car, though someone tried to call “shotgun!” and claim the front seat, but this just reminds everyone that a real shotgun might be coming down the mailbox owner’s driveway, so the claim of shotgun is rendered null and void.

Then, after you figure out that we have made a clean getaway and examine the bowling ball in scrupulous detail under the harsh glare of the 600 ES dome light, your friend Todd will inevitably blurt out, “Hey, the thing isn’t even cracked, we have to go faster next time!”

You don’t even think twice about dropping off Todd at his house almost immediately.

1. That was an awesome movie.

   Though I don’t remember there being a Partisan Bowling Alley…

   Posted by Radioactive Jam  on  07/12/07  at  08:22 AM

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