Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Strike

Everyone should have a childhood friend who is at least foot taller, and preferably of a different skin color.

I did — my best buddy, Alvin, ultimately grew to 6' 6", exactly a foot taller than me, and was (and is) as brown as I am white. We were the interracial Mutt and Jeff.

When I was a teenager I had hair down the middle of my back. When Alvin an I would hitchhike together, we'd wait a long, long time for someone to give us a ride: 90+% of the population was guaranteed to dislike one of us on sight.

Alvin's whole family, in fact, was the Land of the Giants: his brother was well over 6 feet as well, his mother was around 5' 10", and his father, who'd once played in the Canadian Football League (he was a lineman) was one of the largest human beings I ever saw. To this day, he's the only person I ever saw pick up a sofa by himself and carry it up a flight of stairs.

I remember one time Alvin, Alvin's brother,  his father and I went bowling. His father, whose name was Marvin, had never been bowling before, for some reason, and when we arrived at the bowling alley the three of us began giving Marvin a stream of unsolicited advice. As he picked up a 16 pound ball — the heaviest in the place — our advice became critical. "No, Dad, stand this way." "No, put these fingers in the holes." "Don't start from there, start from here."

Alvin's father got madder and madder. Finally, he yelled give me the damn ball and get out of the way, took one step and launched the ball down the alley. It bounced once and slammed into the pins, shattering two of them.

Needless to say, it was a strike.

He picked up another ball. This one bounced twice on the way to the pins, which exploded when the ball hit them. Another strike.

His third ball broke another pin on the way to strike three.

At that point the manager approached and nervously asked us if we could either stop shattering pins or perhaps do our bowling elsewhere (or not at all). Marvin was convinced he'd made his point, and none of us were going to argue with him.

Needless to say, we all decided he'd won.

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