For Future Reference: Notes on the 7-10 Split

1

Get a job at the local bowling alley when your mom starts drinking again. Take whatever position they are willing to give you. You will be fifteen years old with no experience, three-fifths of a mustache, and the charisma of a dried pickle, so your only offer’ll be to man concessions for what you will later find out is far less than minimum wage. Luckily, the terms of your employment will matter zilch to you; important as the money will eventually become, you are really here only to avoid meeting the seemingly endless string of new lovers in your mother’s life. Somehow they will all seem to be the exact same man: around 6’1″, white, tan, bulky upper body buttressed by toothpick legs, with a translucent habit of barking laughter at jokes you haven’t finished telling yet. With unusual frequency their names will be three letters long. They will be Rays, Joes, Tads. They will all tend bar and wear silver chains that hang down into the Vs of their V necks. Introductions will be conducted with your mother speaking in the third person. “This is your mom’s New Friend Tad,” your mom will say, capitalizing new and friend with her eyebrows.

Unfortunately, any Tad who sticks around longer than three weeks will at some point express interest in becoming your New Friend too. Not in a skeevy way. They’ll just keep asking you hollow questions while you play Call of Duty on your days off. However, in a way that is hard to pin down exactly, these innocuous interviews actually will end up making you feel as though you are being hit on.

Pick up as many shifts at the alley as your new boss will allow.

2

Your new boss will be named Rory. At the time of your hiring, he will have been the owner and GM of Crankers Bowling Center for just over twenty-seven years. He is an obese, balding man with the sad jowls of a bulldog, and often smells of pine. Your first instinct will be to fear speaking in front of him. He will seem both to notice and to be perfectly okay with this.

Rory will also be in charge of your job training. It will be completed in under seven minutes. This includes the long, slow walk from Rory’s office inside the Pro Shop (over by Lane 24) to Concessions, which stares out over the beer-postered, neon-bedecked horizon of Lanes 1–8. Learn how to lock and unlock the steel cashbox behind the counter and how to attach and detach said cashbox to and from the rusty chain that Rory has, bizarrely, run through the cracked tile floor and rigged up to the foundation for “added security measures.” Observe the Crock-Pot in the back of the kitchen, where the hot dogs sleep, and the oldest convection oven you have ever seen, inside which sits a cake pan filled with the two dozen burger patties Rory grills each morning. Together, press the button that brings the nacho cheese to a boil. Then Rory will sigh, in anticipation of beginning the trek back to his office, and cease communicating with you verbally for about a month.

Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, come in after school, around three, and stay till close, around nine. The employee you will relieve on these weekdays is a pregnant woman named either Trudy or Gerty, who dresses like time stopped in 1979. Every day after you take her place behind the greasy counter, she and her massive shirt collar will amble on down to Lane 1 to enjoy the single free game of bowling employees at Crankers earn per shift, courtesy of the generous Rory. Unused games do not roll over.

Watch the way Trudy/Gerty throws her balls, and be impressed. Later, you will learn that she is what’s called a Power Stroker, but for now, just think she bowls like someone you might accidentally see on ESPN3 while channel-surfing. She’s got this huge backswing that takes the ball higher even than the top of her head and this way of flicking her fingers at the last second before letting go that makes the ball curve across the lane like something in orbit. Take note of and relish the tiny thrill that rushes through you each time she makes a strike. Soon you will live for that sound: the controlled chaos of a perfect ten-pin explosion.

Start closing down the concession stand thirty minutes early every shift so you can take advantage of your own free game. It will be shocking how long it takes Rory to notice that you are doing this. On your first go, grab a fourteen-pound ball and nearly break your wrist trying to spin it down the lane. Watch the ball fly directly into the gutter. Feel exhilarated by the dull throb in your forearm.

Go find a nine-pound ball.

Try again.

3

On Wednesdays, lie to your dad about what time school gets out so you don’t have to stand alone in the corner of the asphalt pickup area in front of all the other kids. Don’t take the bus either. Your dad’s new apartment will be in the overcrowded low-income part of Rockledge, and on that bus you will likely end up three to a seat, squished against a window that won’t open in the suffocating heat, the other kids shouting and wrestling and flirting all around you. Instead, hide in the library and analyze YouTube videos of Pete Weber, Walter Ray Williams Jr., and Mark Roth at the PBA championships. Once the librarian figures out that you’re just trying to watch old bowling matches while you wait for the school to clear out, she will feel bad for you and show you how to get around the computer’s firewall.

Around three thirty go stand outside. After your mother’s affair and the trial separation, your dad will only grow more and more unreliable, so you’ll need to be ready for him anytime between three thirty and six. If you wore those terrible skintight jeans to try to blend in with the kids who skateboard, change into the gym shorts you keep in the back of your locker before you go stand under the tyrannical Florida sun for who knows how long. If the pickup area is empty, take the bocce ball out of your backpack and practice your backswing, your wrist positioning, and your four-step delivery. If there are still a few stragglers waiting for their parents, stand silently and go over the pin-arrangement nicknames in your head. These are important. They will make you sound like you belong in this strange and surreptitious world of bowling. Plus, you will have recently heard Rory say, “Never utter the word split in the middle of a game,” and this wisdom will stick to you like a traumatic memory. A Lily looks like a squat triangle and results when you leave the middle pin and the two back corners (the 5, 7, and 10) standing. You get a Dinner Bucket when you leave the 2, 4, 5, and 8 pins in the shape of a diamond. Leaving the 4, 6, 7, 9, and 10 gives you a Greek Church.

That one looks like a . . .

Greek Church?

Most people call the 7-10 split either Goal Posts or Bedposts, although some old-timers call it Mule Ears—which will be your personal favorite. “Only one way to handle that fucker,” Rory likes to say whenever he walks past someone stuck with the 7-10. This won’t make any sense to you for a while, because there are actually two ways to try and pick up a set of Mule Ears. But Rory never explains himself, so don’t worry about it too much.

When your dad finally arrives, climb into his newly leased, freshly waxed Chevy Tahoe and do not think about his apartment’s leaky ceiling, or how the power’s been shut off at your mom’s house twice in the last four months, or the way he said, over and over again, that they could never afford to send you to Florida Air Academy to begin studying aviation instead of to Rockledge High, where just last week you studied the way one student won a fight against another student by wielding a metal lock from one of the lockers. Do not ask your dad what took him so long. He won’t have a good answer and you’ll both end up feeling like shit. Turn the AC on full blast and thank science for small miracles. Eventually he will turn it off, look down into his lap (while driving), and ask, “How’s your mother?” Say: “Fine.” Or “Okay, I guess.” Or “Can you please, please, please stop fucking asking me that?” Do not say: “Good.” Or “I don’t know.” These answers will send him, respectively, into either a spiral of despair or a frenzy of rage.

When you get home, open the windows and empty the ashtrays while your dad pours charcoal into the illegal grill on his back porch. Then watch Pete Weber interviews on his iPad until dinner. Occasionally when you mess around on your dad’s tablet, you will see that he has forgotten to close the Find My iPhone app, and on-screen will be a map of Brevard County with a little green circle around the location of your mother’s phone. It will usually be settled at a nail salon or a bar or the restaurant where she works or what you can only assume is a Tad’s house. Every time this happens you will wonder how any man could stay so curious about a woman who betrayed him to such an extent. You will feel simultaneously both pity and revulsion for your father. In your mind, he will become some amalgamation of a sobbing toddler lost in a grocery store and something gone rancid in the sink. But which of the two is more apt to raise you? A hopeless child or nothing at all, nothing but an inanimate piece of garbage.

Don’t mention his cyberstalking. To anyone.

Close the app for your poor pathetic father.

4

Buy a choice pair of bowling shoes from Rory in the Pro Shop; that way, when you come in on the weekends, you’ll only have to pay the price per game. He won’t give you a discount on the shoes, but he will make sure you get the best quality for a novice—Dexter Jacks—and he’ll sit there with you for forty-five minutes, tying and untying the laces, comparing the regular size 9s with the wide-width 8.5s until he’s positive that the shoes fit perfectly.

When you’re at your mom’s, hide the shoes in her garage, under all your old model airplane kits. After your power gets shut off for the second time she’ll start stealing from your concession-stand money. She probably wouldn’t pawn your shoes, but there’s no way to be sure.

On Sundays wake up early. Eat a Pop-Tart. Finish all your homework. Then debate whether or not you have enough time to bake and eat some Bagel Bites before your mom wakes up around two. If you fell asleep before she got home last night, you should be in the clear as long as you’re gone by one thirty. If you heard her bring a Tad home early, and if you made the mistake of pretending you were asleep, then you will, regrettably, know exactly when she made it to her bedroom and should be able to do the math accordingly.

When you guess wrong, she will come out of her room, alone, in her turquoise down robe, climb onto a barstool, lay her arms out flat on the chipped laminate countertop, and rest a cheek against one of her biceps. She will watch you take the Bagel Bites out of the oven and burn the shit out of the top of your mouth as you eat them as fast as you can. “Do you know how much I love you?” she will ask without lifting her head. She is pensive and full of sweet shame when she is hungover. This will not seem like a small blessing at the time, but eventually you will come to find out that it is. She will be a thirty-five-year-old who looks like a forty-five-year-old, but when she says things like this, she will sound as young as a senior at your high school. You will look into her gray eyes and love her back in spite of yourself.

Go bowl until you break through your callus and your thumb starts to bleed.

5

It’ll take a couple of months, but eventually Rory, the cheap bastard, won’t be able to help himself, and he’ll start giving you free tips. Turns out he’s been watching you. “Look,” he’ll say. “I know you want to be a Power Stroker, but you’re bowling like a Cranker who has no idea what he’s doing, and you’re really not built to be anything but a Stroker, especially if you ever plan on moving up from that nine-pound Nerf ball you use.” None of this will make much sense to you right now, but when he says it to your face, it’ll crush you. “And for the love of God, will you stop trying to hook these shitty house balls? Jesus. I’ll bring in a weighted ball for you on Monday.”

You’ll feel better after that.

Rory will tell you to go home and watch YouTube videos of late-career Norm Duke. “He’s a little pip-squeak, like you,” Rory will say. “And he doesn’t try to be fancy. At least in tournaments. He just hits the pocket.” That’s the sweet spot in the pin pyramid—directly between the top pin and the next pin on either side.

Stop trying to be fancy.

Just hit the pocket.

As your bowling improves, you will slowly begin to feel like you are a part of something. The regulars will start to speak their secret language to you. The younger kids will watch the way you rip the ball down the lane. And at the very same time, when you toss a perfect ball, when you watch and hear a perfect strike, when those pins crash and collapse on themselves like a dying star, that magnificent bang will allow you one quarter second of escape from this world.

6

Bury yourself in the sport. Ignore every other aspect of your life. Obsession is the key to greatness in anything, and fortunately you will become nothing if not obsessed.

Start skipping seventh period once or twice a week to bowl for an hour before your shift. This will be your math credit second semester, but you are the smartest kid in your trigonometry class and never cause problems, so at first, your teacher will not do anything aside from marking you absent. It will not be long until your grades begin to plummet, however, even in the classes you do attend regularly. After about a month, your trig teacher will hold you after class one day and ask, “What’s going on?”

Say: “Work. Sorry. I just have to work.”

She will respond, “That’s not what I mean.”

Say: “I know.” Or “Then why did you ask?”

Or don’t say anything. Just walk out the door.

Next, try leaving school after lunch. You won’t get away with this for long—the fat resource officer will soon catch you biking away from campus and chase you down on his golf cart—but you’ll bowl a 229 the second time you escape, so you will feel that, overall, it was worth it.

On the day you get caught, the tubby asshole will haul you into the vice principal’s office, and she, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, will call your mom to come pick you up. Obviously, she will not answer, so Mrs. K will leave a message and then be at a loss for where to call next. Ask to borrow the telephone. Call the La Quinta and ask for your father. Tell him the truth—that you can’t get ahold of your mom, and you’re in the process of getting suspended—or else he will claim that he can’t possibly leave the assistant manager in charge for the rest of the day and hang up on you.

Push the phone back across the desk too aggressively and then sit quietly stewing for half an hour. Read the cheap motivational posters that surround you. Excellence: It is a commitment. It is an unrelenting pursuit of your goals. Decide that by this metric, you are excellent. Tenacity: It is continuing to move forward on your path when there is nothing in sight. Wonder if this definition still applies when there is plenty in sight. Ask this poster how one is to be tenacious when your mother’s pink nail polish can be found on the rim of the toilet seat every morning, evidence of where she clutched and scraped at the bowl. Or how about when a shirtless stranger scrambles the last of your eggs, hickeys on both sides of his neck, then asks why you aren’t at school. Imagine what it must be like to be one of these tenacious kids, who, somehow, finds the strength and the willpower to travel these empty and free and wide, wide open paths.

When Mrs. K sees you shaking and asks if you are all right, tell her yes. Watch her glance at the clock and chew on the cuticle of her left ring finger.

Your dad will arrive wearing a new pair of sunglasses. Mrs. K will go over in detail how many classes you’ve missed over the last two months. Stare out the window and think of more pin-arrangement nicknames: The Christmas Tree. The Mother-in-Law. The Sour Apple. The Washout.

Suddenly your mom will burst into the office, wearing sweatpants and what is clearly a man’s large blue button-down.

“Well, would you look at that,” your dad will say. “Shouldn’t you still be asleep? It’s only one o’clock.”

“Fuck off, Mike,” your mom will reply, and Mrs. K will understand everything immediately and never look at you sternly in the hallways again.

She will explain to your parents what happened today and ask if either of them can take you home. Notice that when she speaks of your upcoming suspension, it has subtly morphed from a three-day suspension into a one-day suspension in the blink of an eye.

“I guess that means me,” your mom will say, like an unwilling martyr. Like a custodian responding to a page to clean up a slew of vomit. “I suppose that means I’ll have to take off work tomorrow too.”

“No, no, no,” your father will say. “You’ve done enough. Did you hear anything the woman said? He’s been skipping out on class for weeks now. The boy’s coming with me.”

This will come as a surprise. Feel momentarily grateful. Cared for. At first you will not have the presence of mind to recognize these words for what they truly are: nothing but an attempt to rub your mother’s face in it.

Give it a few more seconds.

“Oh, now you want to step up?” your mom will say. “Well, that’s fine by me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” your dad will ask.

“Fine fine fine fine fine,” she will respond.

“No. What? Don’t do that.”

Mrs. K will seem to sense what’s coming next before anyone else. Watch her long earrings sway like wind chimes in a storm as she scoots forward to interrupt.

“I mean, I’m sitting there begging you to take him three days a week,” your mom will say. “But nope. And now here you are finger-wagging at me.”

“That’s not true at all,” your father will say.

Look at him not looking at you. Understand that it is very true. Think of your father’s iPad and how aware he is of your mother’s hobbies and extracurricular activities.

“I’m happy to take him,” he will say. “Bring him over! Anytime.”

Like you are a small bookshelf. Or a lamp.

Mrs. K will suggest you return to class while they hammer out the details.

On your way out of the front office, look out the window and locate the resource officer out by the bus loop. Think about cutting across the common to the opposite side of the school and sneaking out through the back door of the auditorium. Then consider everything that just transpired between your parents, what that says about who they are and who you are likely to become.

Wonder if maybe it wouldn’t hurt to catch up on your trigonometry.

Then sprint for the auditorium anyway. Bask in the feeling you get when you plow through the back doors; try to mash that feeling up and squeeze it, roll it up and bottle it. Off to the alley you’ll go.

7

Duct-tape the latch bolt down on the fire door that leads to the alleyway behind Crankers. Buy a trowel from Ace Hardware and hide it in a bush. Rory disconnected the fire alarm years ago in order to create a shortcut to the dumpsters, so for a while you’ll be able to pry the door open after-hours any time you please.

It will be peaceful in the alley at night. There will be no strange men or disappointed teachers. No other children staring through you. No anthills of ash or floor-strewn buckets half-filled with brown rainwater.

No moans at all—be they pleasurable or miserable—echoing their way across a too-small apartment.

Nothing but a deep, comforting darkness interrupted only by a few hundred glow-in-the-dark sticky-stars and the smells of freshly oiled lanes and a carpet that hasn’t been cleaned in two decades.

You won’t be able to sleep on the lane couches at Crankers every night—you have to be home enough to be seen on those rare occasions when your mom checks your bedroom on a drunken whim or when your dad peeks in on you after one of his midnight shower cries—but you’ll work out a good system eventually.

Tell your dad you’ve started working six nights a week to start saving for college. He won’t check the alley’s hours.

Tell your mom your dad said to tell her that he’s ready to step up and take you three nights a week. She won’t call to verify.

Mix and match stories when you need to. But don’t try too hard; serious effort will not be necessary. These half-baked lies will sustain your secret sleeping arrangement for so long, in fact, when you look back on these months, after you graduate college, you won’t even be able to muster anger at your parents: with proper perspective, their unbelievable negligence will become transparent, and you will look through it like the lens of a kaleidoscope and see only the many shapes and colors of their despair.

8

It’ll be Rory who catches you.

You’ll stay up too late one night studying your favorite lane’s oil patterns with the flashlight on your phone and forget to set your five a.m. alarm before falling asleep. He’ll grab you by the back of your T-shirt like it’s the scruff of a kitten’s neck, your right cheek peeling off the leather of the couch like a sticker, and yank you in the direction of his office.

“Why are you sleeping here?” he will ask after he’s shoved you onto the footstool that functions as his office’s guest chair. Watch him flip through an actual Rolodex, looking for your mom’s cell-phone number. Laugh—in a pitiful attempt to hide your fear. This will be so ineffective, reality will finally begin to set in. Get your very first inkling that you can only go so far when attempting to run from one aspect of your life by hiding within another.

Unfortunately, you will not accept the truth of this fact for a long, long time.

Say: “She’s not going to answer.”

“Oh, she’ll answer,” Rory will reply, hitting redial on his landline. “It would be one thing if you were bowling. That I could understand. But you don’t even know how to turn the damn machines on.”

Ignore him. Really take in his office for the first time. Notice the boxy desktop computer from the early ’90s. The plastic cases behind his head filled with bowling trophies and photos of a skinny Rory with his teammates, also from the early ’90s. His daughter’s school pictures in a lineup on the far wall, only K–7, her hair getting thinner and thinner and thinner until she is bald in the final photo, marked 1993.

“Tell me what’s going on, kid,” Rory will say, the phone still cradled atop his massive shoulder, his ringless ring finger still jabbing redial. And maybe because he is the first person to ask more than once, you will consider telling him some version of the truth, some explanation he couldn’t possibly understand. Something like: “I have to get away from those noises.” Or “I’m a person when I’m here.” Or “When I’m staring at all those sticky-stars, I forget to ask myself what I did to deserve this.”

But in the end you will not be ready to admit any of these things. Not yet.

Your mom will answer on the twenty-third try. Rory will rat you out, and after a short conversation it will become clear to all involved parties how often you’ve been spending your nights here. Then Rory will drive you home, ignoring you while he appears to consider the situation. To your amazement, your dad will already be in the driveway with your mom, in his La Quinta uniform, looking not angry but ashamed. But what will really floor you is this: as they hang their heads and speak only to each other’s shadows, your parents will share a single cigarette—though still being careful not to touch.

Before you get out, Rory will reach across your lap and roll down the passenger-side window by hand.

“The kid’s fired,” he will shout at your parents. “For breaking and entering.”

Take this news on the chin.

Then wait.

“But he’s got practice from three to five. Weekdays only.”

Your parents will look at each other like a pair of sad dogs, then look at you, then nod.

“That’s three to five p.m.,” Rory will add.

9

Find a balance.

Do everything except sleep and shower at the alley, but spend just as much time doing your schoolwork at the rickety plastic tables as bowling.

As promised, Rory will officially begin coaching you every week. At first he will charge you $10 an hour. After spending more time with your father, he will take only $6 out of pity. Later, your mother will come to your first youth-league match, drink three pitchers, and shout so loudly at mediocre shots that the other fifteen parents will treat her like a leper. The following week Rory will settle at $2 an hour.

By the time school lets out for the summer, you will have become the anchor on your five-man bowling team. Discover that bowling is one of the most high-pressure sports there is. At the higher levels of competition, a single open frame—a frame in which you do not record either a strike or a spare—can leave you hopelessly behind in a match. Learn to revel in the tenth frame. Appreciate knowing exactly what you need to do to win. There is no confusion. There are no incomprehensible mysteries. It is nothing like loving your family at all.

It will happen in the quarterfinals of the youth state championship. You’ll need a spare and eight pins in the tenth for your team to advance. You almost never get nervous, but for the first time in your bowling career both of your parents will be at the match, and although they will stand as far apart from each other as possible in the large crowd, they will both act like normal adults, cheering at the correct times and embarrassing you the correct amount.

You’ll get the jitters. You won’t choke exactly, but the result will be just as bad as if you did. During your delivery, you will feel a slight hesitation, a fraction of a fraction of a second, at the bottom of your release. This will decrease your ball speed, and thus your shot will hook too much and miss the pocket. You’ll hit the 1 pin dead center, and when the missiles settle, you’ll be staring at a set of Mule Ears. The crowd will moan and groan like the match is already over, because, for all intents and purposes, it is. Walk back to the ball return with a lump—heavy as a bowling ball—in the pit of your stomach. Like so many moments in life, this is a situation in which you can really only laugh or cry. Avoid looking at your deflated teammates. Instead, shake your head at the crowd and smirk. This passes for high comedy in your sport. They will give you a round of applause and begin packing up to go home.

After you grab your ball and settle into your setup on the boards, go over the two ways to pick up a 7-10 split: (1) Hit one of the pins at as close to a 180-degree angle as possible, not toward the other pin but in the opposite direction. Using this strategy, you are actually hoping to bounce the pin off the sidewall and back across the lane, where it might hit the other pin. (2) Hit one of the pins as hard as you possibly can diagonally into the back corner of the pit. If you try this method, you want that baby to ricochet like crazy, fly back out of the pit, and then tumble into the far pin. Either way, the idea here is to think more about what surrounds the two pins than the two pins themselves. Not that this theory helps a whole lot in the long run. But it’s a useful way to think about the problem.

Reconsider Rory’s stupid comment about Mule Ears. Finally get it. Realize there really is only one way to handle this fucker: any way you can.

Remember to keep your wrist straight during your release.

Let that sucker fly.

Read more from Issue 18.1.