The parable of the bowling machine

My friend Larry is getting on in age. I notice it most when he smiles. His thick, round glasses magnify the wrinkles around his eyes, a pattern of lines so familiar I’d recognize them in a dry riverbed. In his prime he was a semi-professional bowler—he laughs when he says it because he mostly did charity events. But his team paid him a modest stipend for travel, which is more than most people get.

I couldn’t play at his level, but he didn’t mind. I’d show up to the lanes on Saturday morning and he’d be there, warming up, throwing a few practice balls, brushing his slide shoe. We’d play a couple games (he’d double my score more often than not) and then chat about technique over brunch. He didn’t just improve my game, he taught me life lessons: sometimes intentionally, by giving advice, and other times accidentally, by sharing a story he hadn’t yet seen the deeper meaning in.

Larry was a good bowler. The best I’ve ever met. Not famous enough to get sponsorships, though, which is why it struck me as odd when he showed up late one morning, lugging a contraption he said he got for free from a bowling startup in San Francisco.

It was a polygonal mesh the size of a prize pig at the fair, paneled over with a gleaming, angular symmetry that reminded me of Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons—a fitting comparison, it turned out, for a machine labeled Starcruiser: The Imagination Machine. And it was heavy. He grunted and strained as he pulled it through the lobby, raising every eyebrow in the room.

The owner of the alley was there that day. She frowned but didn’t say anything. Larry was her best customer; he probably kept the whole place in business. If he wanted to pull a weird machine around sometimes, so be it.

Larry was eager to show me how it worked. You’d roll it up to the lane, load a bowling ball into a hatch at the top, and press a button. The machine would heat up until the metal glowed and the air shimmered around it. Then the ball would fly out the front like a bat out of hell, skidding down the lane at speeds no bowler could hope to match. Sometimes it went straight down the middle, but more often it spun into the gutter, screeching and rattling all the way to the pit. That didn’t matter, explained Larry. You could always load it back up and try again until you got a strike. And this was just the prototype; the next Starcruiser would be able to throw a strike every time. At least, that’s what the Starcruiser website said.

I was intrigued. What could the machine teach me? Maybe, by studying its throws, I could learn to improve my form? But after watching him use it for a while, and even pressing the button a few times myself, I just felt lost. You couldn’t see what was happening inside the machine. You couldn’t predict where the ball was going to go. I finally broke down and told Larry I didn’t see the point.

He just laughed. “Give it a few months,” he said.

In the meantime, he wanted to practice with it, so we played a game, him with his machine and me the old-fashioned way. It was only the second time I ever beat him. The first time, years past, he had just gone through a divorce. I’d always felt bad about not letting him win.

This time felt worse.

“You’re getting pretty good,” he said. He was talking to me, I think, but he was looking at the Starcruiser.

When I came back the next week, Larry had brought the machine again. The week after that, too. And the next. Game after game, month after month, it was me and my arm against Larry and his Starcruiser. I suppose all the important parts of the ritual remained: we chatted, he helped me improve my game, we swapped stories about our kids and our dogs and made each other laugh. But I couldn’t help thinking something had been stolen from us. The machine was always there, big and looming and blazing hot, and I felt like it was listening to us.

Soon it wasn’t just Larry. Half the bowlers at the alley had a Starcruiser. They’d all gotten theirs for free, they said. They offered to get me one too. You might as well, they said, since they’re just giving them away.

I declined.

The next version of the Starcruiser was bigger and heavier, but it still mostly threw gutterballs. Larry said it was much better. You could load in four balls at a time, and it would spit them out one after another, rapid-fire, and the computer at the alley still counted it as a single frame.

That couldn’t possibly be tournament legal, I said.

Actually, it was. Starcruiser had made massive donations to the USBC and PBA. Now Starcruiser machines weren’t just allowed at sanctioned games, they were practically mandatory. A lot of bowling leagues wouldn’t let you play if you didn’t have one.

I dropped in to watch a tournament one evening. Sure enough, everyone had their Starcruisers lined up, so close they were practically touching. The whole alley was like a sauna; it must have been a hundred degrees at the back. I could only imagine how hot it was near the machines.

After every shot, whether it hit any pins or not, the bowlers would wipe their brows and remark at how impressive the machine was, how futuristic it looked. “I’ll never bowl without the machine again,” they would say.

An hour in, one of the bowlers passed out on the floor. The paramedics arrived and carried him away, saying it was heat exhaustion. Another bowler made a snide remark about learning to use the machine correctly. Everyone laughed.

I couldn’t keep watching after that.

The next time I played with Larry, he went to the counter and asked them to raise the bumpers on his lane. “They keep the ball out of the gutter,” he explained, as though he’d discovered a well-kept secret. “They make the Starcruiser more effective.”

I was smart enough not to ask if that was tournament legal.

The bumpers helped, of course. Me as much as him. I won, which was becoming a common occurrence.

I asked if he had any tips for me. He didn’t.

The last time I saw Larry at the bowling alley, he greeted me at the door and led me to the lane with eyes full of excitement. He’d just bought the latest Starcruiser, he said. It was expensive, but he had plenty of equity in his home, and it was worth it.

It was so big I wasn’t sure how he’d gotten it inside. Instead of a hatch at the top, it had a pipe that slotted into the ball return so it could reload itself. “I’ve been learning to use it better,” he said. “I’ve been watching videos.”

Then I saw the lane. Bricks were piled up knee-high along both sides, stacked loose and uneven, with only a hand’s span of floor visible down the center. I asked him if it was under repair.

“No,” he said. “These are the new bumpers. They stop the ball from drifting sideways. Almost every shot is a strike now.”

His new Starcruiser didn’t have any buttons. When the game started, an LED on its side turned green, a deep rumble shook the floor, and ten bowling balls shot from the front in a near-continuous stream. A wall of scorching heat passed over me and disappeared, like the blast from opening an oven. Two pins remained standing: a split. I turned to see Larry’s reaction, but he wasn’t watching. He was reading a pamphlet.

I waved a hand to get his attention. He glanced up and chuckled. “I don’t watch the game anymore,” he said. “The machine is faster on its own.” Then he held up the pamphlet: Starcruiser User’s Guide.

“You go ahead and play, though,” he said. “You go ahead and play.”

I stared, but he didn’t look back. He scratched his scalp with a wrinkled finger, then turned the page.

In that moment I hated the machine more than I thought I could hate anything. I wished for it to disappear. I wished for it to explode, even if it might take us with it. I fought to keep myself from kicking it, screaming at it, taking a bowling ball to beat upon its surface.

As though it could hear my thoughts, the Starcruiser clicked once and went deadly silent.

Larry startled, half rising from his seat, the pamphlet falling from his fingers.

The machine broke its silence, then, making a wailing, grinding noise, the sound of wood in a blender, the sound of two table saws meeting, and a mass of glowing blue sludge lurched from its emitter and lay steaming on the waxed floor of the lane.

Everything went quiet again.

“It’s okay,” Larry whispered, maybe to himself. “It’s under warranty.”

A hush hung over the alley. The other bowlers stared at Larry’s Starcruiser, some of them nervously glancing back at their own as though the malfunction might be contagious.

I picked up a ball, slowly, and offered it to him. Maybe he’d remember. Maybe we could have one more game, just him and me.

He took it, held it in both hands like a melon, turned it around to stare into the triad of holes. “I don’t remember which fingers to use,” he said.

When I came back the next Saturday, Larry wasn’t there. He’d never missed a week before, not in 20 years.

The owner waved me over when she saw me. “He couldn’t make it today,” she said. “But he sent his Starcruiser so you can still play. He says he’ll try to make it next time. No guarantees.”

I thanked her and said I couldn’t stay either. I don’t remember what excuse I made.

I haven’t been back.

The parking lot at the bowling alley is empty these days. They say no one visits anymore; they just send their machines.