The Lonely Hearts Club [On Hold]

Chapter Three: Yesterday

Nothing has gotten me in the Christmas spirit more than bowling, of all things.

   Sure, snow, cookies, hot chocolate, and Santa’s face pasted on every ad promoting sales in December got me pumped for the holidays, but not nearly as well as ten-pound balls and used shoes.

   It started one fateful day when I was eleven, feigning some kind of foreign disease to stay home and mindlessly flip through TV channels. I happened to stumble across the broadcasting of a bowling tournament, and that was when I decided I wanted to be a bowler—because, as my prepubescent self was convinced, bowling was cool. (When I was that age I was also certain baggy pants were “hip.” The 2000s were weird years I didn’t like to talk about.)

   I knew I wouldn’t do it professionally, of course, because I could barely get one strike per game when I first started out—even now, after all this time without playing I doubted my luck was any better—but that didn’t stop me from forming a league with a few reluctant friends. They warmed up to the idea after a while, though, and I could say with confidence that we weren’t actually that bad. I mean, we weren’t great either, but at least we didn’t have to use the kiddie lanes with the rails up to protect the gutters.

   The league consisted of five of us: me, Jesse, Courtney, Liam, and Jack. We called ourselves, and our team, the Lonely Hearts Club. I was the one that chose the name, after a bout of argument over it, since it was my idea to form a bowling league in the first place. The team was named after the Beatles song and album ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ because that was the record I received for Christmas that year. It turned out that the title was too long to fit on a shirt, though, so we shorted it to the Lonely Hearts Club. To save us all from the winding explanation whenever someone asked, we all just said it was because we’re single and there were usually no questions asked.

   Courtney, Liam, and Jack were all friends Jesse and I made in miscellaneous classes we took in college. Courtney was the best out of all of us, I had to admit, and Liam came in a close second. Jesse was the next runner-up, which left Jack and I as the underdogs. I didn’t mind. The team didn’t seem to either. But at least Jack was an amazing pool player, as he proved to us more than once before.

   Every year, a few weeks before Christmas, a bowling tournament is held by the owners of the alley we frequent. It isn’t a big deal to most people, there were no cameras or live national coverage of the event, but I still looked forward to it every holiday season. It was fun, we had a chance to win $500 to split between the five of us, and I received approximately one phone number after it was over for my efforts. I learned the hard way that not too many girls wanted bowlers in comparison to, say, football players—the difference in numbers was drastic, but I rarely landed anyone’s digits anyways so it wasn’t that much of a tragic loss.

   What was tragic, however, or at least unfortunate, was the fact that Jesse’s game was off today. I took a wild guess and figured it had something to do with the fact that he had to get used to hobbling with his new medical boot on (as opposed to having to juggle crutches and a bowling ball, which would inevitably end in disaster). He didn’t seem to mind, though, making a big joke of the whole thing, with the rest of us caught in between concern and amusement. We all began to lighten up—since Jesse never took anything seriously anyway—after he demanded that we all sign his boot like it was a cast and doodle on it so it didn’t look so bland. Liam sketched a lopsided bowling pin and then Jack reshaped it to make it look like a dick.

   Jesse seemed more delighted than I thought he would’ve been when Courtney finally asked what happened to him, and recounted the story as we took our turns rolling balls into pins, making our time in the desert sound a lot more exciting and enthralling than it actually was. He finished with a flourish, and when the others turned to me to ask if it really went down like that, I said with a shrug, “Probably, but I was, you know, unconscious for most of it,” and took a swig of my Pepsi.