“The people I meet always go their separate ways.
Sometimes you tell the day by the bottle that you drink
I’ve been everywhere, still I’m standing tall
I’ve seen a million faces and I’ve rocked them all…
Cause I’m a cowboy
I got the night on my side.”
—Jon Bon Jovi was a popular musical choice on Tuesday night’s mixed league bowling
Poised and balanced and graceful beyond all expectation, one in ten bowlers moves like a dancer.
The pose. The stare-down. A short burst of concentration then the three or four quick steps as the arm swings back to full amplitude before the swing forward launches the bowling ball onto the lane. The ball spins in place as it drifts between two gutters to the end of a path 60 feet long where the reflections of ten white bowling pins float on the surface of the lane like trees over a lake.
The scattering maple pins echo through the bowling alley. Multiply the sound by the twenty lanes in the Saugerties Bowling Club and you have the incessant crashing of the bowling surf.
“We came here in ‘68,” says Rob Houtman, the bowling alley’s owner. “We had another bowling alley in the village, right where the Boys and Girls Club is. That used to be our bowling alley and then they knocked it down. Built a big, beautiful Boys and Girls club there.”
The color scheme painted on the walls – red and cream colored like the interior of a 1950’s coupe – matches the chairs. Painted in giant black letters six feet tall, the words: Millwood Lanes.
“Millwood Lanes is from a movie shoot they did,” says Houtman, “for a couple episodes of Pretty Little Liars, but it looked so cool I left it up.”
The days of waxing and oiling lanes are over for Houtman, who has long been in the business. He now uses overlays.
“They’re not waxed. There’s a coating on it. Like Formica.,” he says. “In the old days they used shellac or lacquer. Then we went to urethane and then to solids. We used to recoat it every year but this is about 10 years old. Less maintenance. You know the bar in Mirabella’s? Same thing. I gave them extra sheets to build that bar.”
Asked to choose between two films out of the bowling canon, between Kingpin and the Big Lebowski, Houtman doesn’t hesitate.
“Obviously you’re not a golfer, are you?” he asks.
The racing track version of bocce, the aristocrat’s cornhole, modern bowling as differentiated from the sport of ancient Egyptians is now a sport emblematic of the industrial revolution. Underneath the noise of the crashing pins and guttered bowling balls, the mechanical susurration of belted wheel pulleys driving conveyor belts concealed in the back out of view area of the bowling alley is constant. This is where the pin-setting machines toil. When a signal is received from an infrared sensor placed on the lane, the process begins. After a pause the machine descends and gets a hold of any bowling pins left standing. A great metal gate swings down and sweeps away the fallen pins into some dark alley where the conveyor belt runs. Then the pinsetter disappears back up above the lane, inert, like Scylla, waiting to come out and snatch bowling pins all over again.
If one were to get in back of the pin setter, or get a hand caught in a pulley and conveyor belt apparatus, real mechanically-inflicted damage could be done. The Kansas City Star relates that as recently as 2018, the owner of a bowling alley in Florence, Colorado, was crushed to death under a pin-setting machine. A freak accident.
Somewhere spiritually in between an off-the-strip keno parlor and a last-century airport lounge, loitering around in a bowling alley can become disorienting. There are molded fiberglass chairs to sit on and display monitors are hanging above the lanes to keep score. Similar to a skating rink, there are no windows in a bowling alley and the artificial light lulls one into a sense of timelessness. It could be 3am, it could be noon. Even the decade comes into question as the music pumped out over the loudspeakers, like the sport itself, has resisted the innovations of the new century. Only the haze of cigarette smoke is gone forever, replaced by an air heavy with the smells of the deep fryer – buffalo wings and french fries, po boys and burgers.
Tonight is mixed-league bowling. Team names are displayed on the monitors. Gutter Punks. We’ve Been Framed. Crazy Balls.
Craig Monteith, a tall and calm-spoken art handler with his hair tied back, is rolling for team Despair.
“I grew up with candlepin bowling,” says Monteith. “Smaller balls, thinner pins, three rolls instead of two. A very confusing scoring system which I still don’t understand. It’s a New England thing.”
He introduces John Gougoutris, a burly 25-year-old wearing a beanie and a goatee beard. As the night goes on the other players in the alley will speak of his bowling abilities with quiet respect. He has bowled a 300 in the past, the perfect score. That’s twelve strikes in a row, every time the first time.
“How many bowling balls you got, John?” Monteith prods.
“Too many,” answers Gougoutris. “Like 35. They’re all 16-pounders I don’t throw anymore.”
Sixteen pounds is the outside weight for a bowling ball. As Gougoutris has honed his game, he’s shed a pound, and the old balls have piled up at home. He says that one pound makes a major difference for arm fatigue, for the wrist, for the shoulder, he doesn’t get tired anymore but worries he’s losing some of the ball’s drive in the tradeoff. Curiously, with his collection of what are essentially cannonballs, John has never thought of owning a cannon. After mulling the idea over he allows, “Great home defense right there.”
Says Monteith: “You are the cannon.”
The Saugerties Bowlers Club. Patel’s Kingston Lanes. Spins Bowl in Poughkeepsie. Cortlandt Lanes further south. Arkbowl and BBQ just across the county line in Arkville. It’s cheaper than skiing and the likelihood of popping a knee out of the socket is much reduced.
Sam Bittman, newest member of team Despair, explains the scene.
“A lot of people have been bowling here for a long time,” she says. “They’ll be here at least like three or four nights a week. It creates a sort of family environment.”
She doesn’t remember ever seeing disagreements between teams getting physical.
“No interpersonal arguments. I’ve never seen people get mad at each other,” Bittman says.
“I’ve seen more people get frustrated with themselves. It’s personal but we support each other. Oftentimes, our mood… if one of us is doing better, we’ll all do better. It’s uplifting”
Three games make one series. 10 frames make one game. Each game takes about 45 minutes to an hour. Multiple games over multiple nights represent hours of life accrued bowling on the lanes to the exclusion of much else. Instead of watching the Super Bowl, Monteith went bowling alone at Cortlandt Lanes.
“When I got there, there was one woman, a grandmother bowling all by herself,” he says. “And there was a woman at the register. And one guy sitting from the bar, who worked there, but the bar was closed.”
The art handler has been a little bit down recently about the art market. He theorizes that behind slowing sales, collectors have grown nervous about global military conflicts.
“John has a perfect game going right now,” Monteith gestures to Gougoutris standing out at the end of his lane. “He needs three more. Our teammate who’s not here, Steve, has gotten a 299 which is 11 out of 12 strikes in a row. With everybody watching him, going for his last strike he only got nine of the 10 pins. By one pin he missed the perfect game. He’s done that twice.”
There is an easy theatricality here available to anyone who bowls.
A little strutting bantam of a man releases his ball onto the lane, turns and swaggers back, holding his hand cupped to his ear to listen for the sound he’s sure is coming as the ball careens into the pins and scatters them. A perfect strike.
A bald man with no eyebrows, of indeterminate middle age, built like a fire plug, winces as his near strike leaves one pin standing after all.
A woman trudges out and drops her bowling ball almost straight down like a heavy stone onto the lane. The ball rolls listlessly forward with no spin. She doesn’t even look relieved. An enigmatic Sisyphus, she repeats the same pantomime, burden lessened without relief, over and over.
Another man releases his ball, halting his forward motion with a slide into a sort of relaxed Jesus Christ on a holiday cross wearing khakis pose, before his arms fall down behind. His bald spot is as shiny as his bowling ball.
The art handler explains that all present are members of the United States Bowling Congress. You register, you pay a fee, and you’re in.
“I think your first 300, you get a ring,” says Monteith. “Back in the day when there were less 300’s they used to make 299 rings.”
A pensioner named Jim Cranford shares a fantasy in the lull between games.
“I’ve always bowled, but anyway, I used to work in Manhattan, near Battery Park. I have this recurring fantasy of bowling outside the stock exchange. There’s a subway stop at the end of the block. I could see myself just coming up the stairs and throwing two or three bowling balls down the middle of Wall Street. And then watching the suited private security standing there, with the thick necks that smell like cologne and the earpieces, scatter shouting – It’s a bomb! It’s a bomb!”
The intensity of Jim’s high pitched laughter is unnerving, but he seems to mean well
At first eager to stay off the record, Charles Brooker, team member of Spare Me Your Excuses, reconsiders in order to identify the cultural divide hampering the sport.
“Between the bowling alleys for bowlers and the bowling alleys for birthday parties,” says Brooker, “it’s a pretty serious divide. There are people who will treat this like Skee-ball versus people who treat it like a noble sport.”
Now in his thirties, ten years a practitioner, Brooker says he’s been bowling seriously since 2019.
“It’s just a really delicate, beautiful game,” Brooker says soberly. “People think that it’s very linear and you know, just throw the ball straight at it. But it’s a very subtle sport. The lane is like an organic dynamic surface which is always changing based on how you react with it.”
It’s a wonder after rolling a perfect game that the immaculate bowler would not, after an honorable interval of carousing and revelry, return his or her bowling shoes and walk out the door never to return, secure in their accomplishment.
Obsessive-compulsive, tragic species that we are, endlessly reaching for perfection the bowler bowls again. Tonight, playing in the mixed leagues, fate and luck would meddle and contest with one another.
Gougoutris would not bowl his 300. Team Despair fell behind and lost the first game against Living on a Spare. “We’re winning scratch,” said Monteith, “but we’re losing by handicap.”
Between games, Monteith heads outside to smoke a cigarette and commiserate and talk jargon with another bowler.
“You noticed the lanes are different tonight?”
“I don’t know because I’ve been on crap lanes and I’m finally on a decent pair. I’ve been working with the inside line where I’ve been to the left like six boards.”
Team Despair would see a reversal of fortunes after this low point and pull out of their rut to win the next two games in the series. Monteith bowled a 257 in the last game.
According to local lore, the B-52’s used to romp here in Saugerties. They’d come in and party and hang out. But that was then. Now one Saturday a week, a honky tonk band calling themselves the Neon Moons shows up and plays in the dark painted bar off the main room. The draft beers start at $3 and the bartender Laurie Below, (pronounced bee low) says the whole place gets full up.
“They bring a good crowd, fun group of people,” says Below. “Some just sit at the bar and listen. Usually the whole place is full of people dancing. The next one is happening on March 23.”
The show is projected out to the lanes and the bowlers go on bowling.
Join the family! 
