WE JUST threw our oldest boy a birthday party at the local bowling-pizza-video-drome. He and his twenty-three friends are six, and perhaps you heard the sounds of the balls as they were flung up (surprisingly high and far, I thought) and came down on the polished wood floors. I don’t know who makes these alleys, but I’m pretty sure we should get them working on cockpit doors.
Now, the subject of kids’ parties has been a staple American cliche since the end of World War II, and, indeed, might have been one of the causes of it. (“Excuse me, but I paid for cocktail franks, and they weren’t put out, and the balloons are flabby? Okay, that’s it, we’re annexing the Sudetenland.”) Even a run-of-the-mill bowling party, which is what I thought we were throwing, is the sign of an affluent culture, and I don’t think that’s bad. I’m not worried about raising spoiled kids, because the part of parenting that counts is imparting work ethic and values, not whether they have two baseball bats instead of one. Okay, five bats. Twelve. Whatever. The point is, if parents can afford to throw a little wing-ding for their heirs presumptive, it’s churlish not to.
To begin with, we had the party on Super Bowl Sunday. This may sound like a bad choice until you consider that all these kids have parties, and trying to hold out for an open date is as fruitless as waiting for Pat Buchanan to say, “Gee, I’ve got to support the Israelis on this one.” For reasons surrounding the mysteries of copulation, the birthdates of children have cluster periods, and a graph of these in my area would look something like a pin-map of sorties in Afghanistan last autumn. The turn of January into February is one of these clusters, which makes me wonder how many Southern California couples were drinking heavily in May of 1995.
Anyway, my wife was sick on Super Bowl Sunday with a pretty bad cold or flu or whatever that thing is that we can’t seem to cure even though we landed on the moon. So it fell to me, alone, to (a) corral the kids, (b) pick up the cake, (c) get to the party, (d) set up the party, (e) you get the picture. I pasted on my best next-four-hours smile, the kind that never reaches the eyes (you know, like any French president) and plunged in.
When we got to the bowling alley, the place was just opening and everything was still quiet. I took the kids up to the counter, put down the cake, and started handing out twenties to anyone I saw. I’m a big tipper anyway. My dad used to say only gangsters overtip, so I guess now I have something in common with the Sopranos. (They have no moral grounding whatsoever, but presumably my knowledge of Thackeray is greater, so it evens out.) My thinking was, these kids are trying to make a few bucks, and if I grease them a little maybe they’ll help me. I was wrong, but at the moment of The Greasing they were all very pleased. Still, they assured me that everything was already in motion, five lanes had been set aside, the food folks were ready, and, bottom line, this was not their first time at the dance. They took the cake to refrigerate it and told me to go play a little pinball with the boys and not worry about a thing. I smiled in return, or whatever it was my lower face was doing at that point.
This was 9:54 A.M. The party was set for 10:30. God’s in His Heaven, and all’s right with the world.
At 10:23, after trying to show our little one how to use the flippers and losing to him anyway, one of the employees to whom I had slipped a double sawbuck strolled over and said he was leaving, and that the others weren’t actually in charge of parties and maybe I ought to speak to the folks in the restaurant. I beg your pardon? But he was gone. I stood there looking stupid for a few seconds (a number I believe we American fathers retired decades ago), checked the boys and dashed to the front as quickly as a man can in Topsiders and Dockers.
The alley was filling and alive with bowlers, if you call that living. But our five lanes were still dark, even dusty. Only tumbleweeds could have made them seem more deserted. I took a moment to look stupid again and then shot up to the counter, where another of my twenty-dollar wonders was chatting on the phone. Please, please, please, one of us begged, probably me. When she looked over I clasped my hands and lowered my head so humbly it would have made Gunga Din look like George Sanders. She followed me back to the pinball area and actually seemed to be listening as I told her my plan. I would run off to the restaurant area and stagger around in panic until I met someone who could start the party, if she would keep an eye on the children. She assured me they would be fine, right after I peeled her another Jackson. I squinted at her face to see if she was exhibiting the warning signs of Ecstasy, and then a great epiphany flooded over me: I don’t know the warning signs of Ecstasy. I chose to cover it all with another stupid look (the pause that refreshes) and Grande Jete-d away. It was 10:26. The dance of the dullards had begun.
The restaurant that runs the alley is a deli and a big one, part of a chain, and here I want to take a moment from the story. For a long time I’ve felt it’s a shame that many cultural enclaves in America have melted into, well, The Melting Pot. I mean, if I go to a soul food place for chicken and waffles, I want to be surrounded by black owners and waiters and customers. If I go to a trading post on an Indian reservation to buy souvenirs (a trip I’ve never actually made, which is probably why they’ve turned to casinos), I want to see genuine Indians, or at least authentic ones. You get the point. Outside of New York City, I don’t think I’ve seen a Jewish counter-man at a deli for twenty years, and that saddens me, because the sometimes amiable, sometimes short-fused deli-man of yore was always a great part of the experience of ordering your food. It’s like the old Myron Cohen jokes. You order the brisket, and the heavily-accented waiter shakes his head and says, “You don’t vant de brisket. Take de boiled beef.” “But I don’t want the boiled beef.” “Yes, you do.” In California today, the employee who pulls the chain on the number-changer and yells, “Next!” is almost always going to be Mexican or Asian, which at least provides some comedy when ordering lox.
This time, however, in a new and dizzying ethnic jump in deli-men, the guy who called my number and stepped forward could have been cast in any role where the character description read, “A Hell’s Angel in his forties, immense, physically intimidating and fresh out of a long jail term. Very fresh. Like, that morning.”
There are some things in life you know at a glance without any prior experience. Fake breasts, for example. I’m pretty sure I had never seen prison tattoos before, but when this guy placed his pad and pen on the counter, I would’ve made a very large bet that that’s exactly what I was looking at, and not just because “Death” was misspelled. His hands were covered with badly injected ink, and several unpleasant slogans disappeared under his sleeves. And I would’ve made that same large bet that somewhere on the rest of his, uh, body, was at least one swastika. (This was a deli, remember?)
Neither of us said anything right off, in my case because I don’t think I could have. So I resorted to the only thing that seemed to have even limited success for me so far that day and gave him twenty dollars. He grabbed the bill so quickly I was pretty sure a tin-foiled packet of crystal meth would slide back across. When it didn’t, I broke the ice and mumbled something about a birthday party, and, believe me, I’m just glad it didn’t come out, “Say, we’re about the same age. Were you in my fraternity?” He walked out from behind the counter, headed right at me and, an instant before I fainted dead away, loped past me back towards the bowling alley. I limply followed, matted with terror-sweat, finally seeing the wisdom of adult diapers.
I’d like to report that the next few minutes saw a full turnaround and that the elements of the party quickly fell into place, but they didn’t. My new cellblock buddy turned the lanes on and then disappeared. I think he’s since crossed a state line and violated his parole. The cake had been misplaced. Where? They didn’t know. I buttonholed so many waiters about food that each of them re-ordered it, and we wound up with fourteen jumbo pizzas, twelve-and-three-quarters of them left over. Guess who paid. Pitchers of soft drinks and juices were set out handsomely but without cups. This time they knew where they were, but only the manager had the key, and he was nowhere to be found. Perhaps he had recently said something unkind to the ex-con and will be found a hundred years from now, walled-up like “The Cask of Amontillado.”
Et cetera. Of course, the kids had a great time, because that’s what kids do. They dropped balls and laughed and punched each other and bounced off the walls, and the little goody bags my wife had made days before gave them all the refined sugar they needed. The other parents understood completely, which is another way of saying they couldn’t have cared less and just wanted to go home and watch the Super Bowl, all of which I understood completely. And eventually I put my beloveds back in the car along with twenty-three useless presents and twelve-and-three-quarters boxes of cold, jumbo pizza. Oh, and two quarts of chicken soup for Mommy, complete with noodles, rice, chicken, carrots, and matzoh balls. The only reason I mention this is because before we left I spent five full minutes saying, “Just the broth, please. No, no, the broth. JUST THE BROTH,” to the take-out clerk, a very pleasant but uncomprehending Burmese. Ah, diversity.
Larry Miller is a contributing humorist to The Daily Standard and a writer, actor, and comedian living in Los Angeles.
