Bowling Diarrhea

Keglers at Transit Lanes may be some of the best food you will ever eat at a bowling alley, for good reason too. The staff knows that serving lousy finger foods may provoke horrific physical attacks from the human-sasquatch hybrids that eat here. Kegler’s grill keeps their clientele happy. At Keglers, culinary art is simply a matter of workplace safety.

As I enjoy a cup of coffee and a chicken finger, I inadvertently glance at the birthday party in the neighboring lane.The homogeneous nature of the family gives me unease. There are about 20 of them. Each looks similar to a cave troll from Lord of the Rings: large, bald, potbellied, and hungry. Each speaking with a combined vocabulary of about 27 words.

I am next to a large gathering of this rare creature only found in upstate New York. Fully aware of the danger I am in, my body responds with an acute flashback. I’m reliving an afternoon in 2014 when a coworker told me that he wanted to strangle me to death.

Stewart is about 6’13” and each of his hands are the size of a toaster oven. He has shaped them into a horseshoe behind my neck. Stewart is as wide was he is tall and he is running hot, insulated by a black Under Armour zip-up he wears to work everyday. After the verbal threat, I look behind me, only to catch a glimpse of his featureless black slip-on ‘dress shoes’. The kind that only line cooks and obese 12 year olds wear to church.

If Stewart decided to go for my throat, I would have no chance at survival. With some luck, I could pull him down as I spasm, smashing the desktop computer we are both staring at, destroying the AutoCAD drawing we had been collaborating on. A meticulously rendered remediation plan for the famously polluted Love Canal. Needless to say, our work environment was toxic.

I can’t fault Stewart. This is the farthest he has ever been from home. Like any other mythic beast, he was dangerously far from the magical land that suspends and animates his physical form at optimal levels.

My peripheral vision picks up a long glimmering streak of catchup on my son’s coat sleeve. I’m back in 2023. He had used about 16 napkins during my lapse. I search Google for a map of New York State’s bedrock geology. Pastel blobs and blue rivers show me that I have walked us directly into a trap. Transit Lanes is dangerously close to a paranormal superhighway.

Creatures like Stewart can only move along a very specific east-west latitude. It has to do with the Bertic Limestone formation that runs along the Onondaga escarpment. The Onondaga escarpment runs parallel to Sheridan drive. Transit Lanes is located just north of this escarpment, where exposed Akron Dolostone juts out over Transit Road near the Olive Garden. This steep change in elevation exposes both dolostone and shale which these yeti-mutants use to transport themselves between mostly caucasian gathering places.

My map shows that these troll tunnels are less than 1,000 feet from Transit Lanes. These hairless giants are beside me and they are taking inventory of appetizers. A quick estimation reveals that they have about a $2,000 boneless wing budget.

Not to worry, they currently have a dozen pitchers of soft drinks. They can’t walk far away from soda without losing some of their strength. A woman, (who could be Stewart’s grandmother) is commiserating with the other elder-trolls of the party. I can see disappointment on her face.

“will this be enough food?” She asks.

The other elder-trolls look at the spread: dozens of different kinds of fried brown objects in large bowls on a spotless black table cloth.

I avert my gaze to another lane, in fear eye contact will get my face torn off and my detached limbs used as weapons in a chaotic bloody melee against the wait staff. I don’t work here, but my physical similarities to the employees may confuse them during their bloodlust frenzy.

By some invisible command, the cave trolls go quiet. Heads reared back like a pack of a dogs who just stopped barking. There is about to be an explosion of sound and movement. The cave trolls are looking sideways at each other. chins up. Silent deliberation. Something or someone is about to be maimed.

Will it be me? Will I be spending my last moments deliriously trying to stick a dollar bill in the jukebox with my entrails spilled out over the carpet? Should I jam my son into the ball return in order to hide him from the Blitzkrieg that is about to happen?

We’re fucked.

A waitress walks into the party area, holding an empty tray in her armpit like a discus. Some kind of interspecies communication takes place. A young troll-woman from the party picks up a paper plate and begins to serve herself. Crisis averted. No choking, bludgeoning, or disembowelments today. The cave trolls are satisfied with the spread. Did an extra order of jalapeño poppers just save countless lives?

I ask you, dear reader, could the food at Transit Lanes be so damn good if it wasn’t for high stakes moments like these?