of all different varieties (Sonia’s birdcage is my favorite), rockabilly hair and retro boots, punk rockers with eighty-five piercings, stoners in flannel shirts, leather jackets, mohawks, and goth rockers in all the eyeliner, being eyed by drunk guys in bona fide bowling shirts and families out for wholesome fun who look at us like we’re some kind of angry drug-addled, moralless mob of fuckers. We love that.
We all storm the counter and line up the assorted combat boots and Converse high-tops and exchange them for clown shoes and then follow Billy like a long row of baby ducks to six lanes we command at the front of the bowling alley, near the entrance. I don’t know what the staff were thinking putting us here, must not be worried about first impressions I guess.
The beat brothers and Jeff, Sonia, and I are a team against Vagaboss and Hanna Octane. Hanna is a single-woman folk-punk act, just her and her pink Mexican Stratocaster and seventeen different effects pedals which she’s willing to run straight to the fucking board! (Don’t mind me, I’m a gear snob and a guitar without an amp is like a mouth without a tongue to me.) Her guitar tone makes me want to drown myself in a bathtub, but she’s got an amazing voice, and even if every song she writes is about being dumped, she’s otherwise a very sweet person. She’s a bleached-white-blonde Courtney Love clone in terms of her style, though less fucked up than that and much nicer. But she is a little weird. When she talks, she uses this sort of haughty, affected, superior tone of voice, but she’ll be talking about things like her favorite color marshmallow peeps. I don’t know how old she is. Sometimes, I know it’s mean, but we all try to guess. She could literally be anywhere from fifteen to thirty-five years old for all we know in terms of how she looks. But she doesn’t go to school, she has no job. Nobody seems to have any idea what she does for money. There’s no way she makes a living on music, she doesn’t play enough and she doesn’t even have a single out. She lives over in Somerset with some people nobody seems to know. But like a lot of us strays, she’s part of this scene because when Billy calls, she shows up. To be in this club, the bar is really pretty low. You don’t have to be a musician. All you have to do is show up, wherever we all are, whether it’s Carolier or the Melody or the Dead End. Just show up and don’t be a dick. But you can even be a dick as long as you have an excuse.
Tonight, our motley crew is also joined by Scoob, the doorman at the Court Tavern. Scoob and Billy are a team with Matt and Julia from Circle Time in the lane next to us. They’re playing against Fester, who is joined by Molly, and I’m fairly sure now that Molly and George are banging, and if they’re not, they will be soon. There’s something in the way George’s mohawk perks up when Molly enters the room. When they see me, they give me a knowing smile and I give them wide, worried eyes. I worry all night George is going to say something about Travis to take the piss out of me. George embodies all that is terrible and wonderful about older brothers, so I have a reason to be worried here.
The great thing about Rock and Roll Bowling is that we’re all here doing something most of us really suck at, instead of in the clubs doing what most of us are pretty good at. It’s like this level-playing-field jackassery. Once you add a few pitchers of beer and the concerned parents rushing their innocent children past us before our rowdy, heathen presence can make too indelible an impression, you have entertainment for all, especially when George leads the entire group in an a cappella rendition of “The Soul Slayer” by Slow Life, which is really the rally cry of the New Brunswick music scene. We all join in and sing it like it’s our anthem, like we’re the dwarves singing in Bilbo’s hobbit hole right before we go off after the dragon, and endure the angry stares of nearby bowlers who just have no idea what they’re in for tonight.
For the entire first hour we’re here throwing gutter balls and