Bowling Queens

No, it’s not a take-off on that ABBA song we all know and love: I’ve joined a gay bowling league. I’m actually rather surprised myself. For a long time, I have been thinking that I need to get out and do stuff. Stuff that would allow me to meet other homos. So that I might not be alone. Forever. It was really kind of a lark (inasmuch as something, anything, to stave off incipient depression and crushing loneliness can be called a lark. Maybe a darker bird would be more apropos?) Anyway, I am part of a team.

Picture three older men, men who could comfortably (in terms of age) be my biological father. Now, imagine that they were reared at Swishy Pete’s Camp for Feminine Boys. Oh, and give them all moustaches. Then add another guy who can actually bowl okay, but who is still just outside my age range and (let’s be brutally honest) not really my type at all. And there’s me of course, who has not bowled in at least three years. Yes. I know you can see it now.

Add to this the fact that this is a REAL bowling league. I suppose I must have been channeling Jack, when he joined the gay soccer team. I thought it would be more fun, more casual, bowl a couple of games, hang out, etc. I thought there would be drag queens. No.

Instead, you must bowl three games. You cannot play two games, you can’t “skip” anyone, you have to play by the league rules. Since we have five players, and we can only play other teams with five players, and two of the fucking queens on my team have to sneak off for a goddamn smoke break every six seconds, that means that the whole bowling experience takes about three hours. When you consider the fact that we don’t get started bowling until about 8:30 p.m., that it takes me a half an hour to get home, that the old queens named our team “CIA”, which stands for “Cock Inspectors of America”, that I cannot bowl worth a shit (I didn’t even break a hundred in the three games I bowled; for those of you who have not experienced the zeitgeist that is bowling, that is REALLY bad), and that I didn’t even see very many guys who I thought were cute or even kind of cute, I think you can understand why I am going to quit.