Bowling Diarrhea

“I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.” – Jim Morrison 

North Tonawanda is a charming timewarp wasteland. An ornate den in the polluted and odorous soils of the Rust Belt, home to creatures only found in 21st-century post-industrial terrain. Mutants likely conceived during a classic rock top-100 countdown in the back of a 1985 Chevrolet Astrovan. 

The men look like brutal biker gang members and the women look like pixies who spend their money on crystals and incense. Handsome in a menacing way, like leopards and venomous snakes. Oddly symmetrical faces, neck tattoos, and piercing eyes. Underemployed and listless citizens, driving around in a hand-me-down 1985 Chevrolet Astrovan. 

They produce children that look like kids who, at some point in my youth, pushed me off a swing or punched me in the stomach.  Half-bastard playground maniacs who smoked cigarettes before they were nine. The kind of kids that would hold a popsicle with one hand and flip you the bird with the other, even raise it a bit higher for your mother to see. 

Currently, my daughter and I are surrounded by these mutants at the Rainbow Rink Skating and Entertainment Center: a psychedelic cave on Oliver Street that smells like a bowling alley with a grease fire. We’re attending a birthday party, but it’s more like a rave. Everyone is high on Fun Dip and gnawing on light-up LED pacifiers. The soundtrack is a cacophony of Top 40 hits, screams, and thuds from sudden impacts. 

The rink is like a high-stakes game of human bumpercars. Everyone is a projectile or a helpless target, usually both at once. A bright starburst of light from the disco ball spins the room, as its white flecks crawl over every surface. Everyone scrambles, clutching at furniture, the room now askew like a sinking cruise ship. I see a man dangling from a chair before I can help him, a 200-pound child in sweatpants destroys him with an abrupt collision. I don’t feel sorry for them. They haven’t got the flow. I’m weightless now, in my brown greasy rentals, skating so smooth and so free. 

The disco ball is my star and I orbit around it, using my newfound powers. This place has uncovered something inside me, an ancient truth I can’t describe. Like an old mirror covered in dust: one wipe reveals its shiny surface. I sparkle in heavenly armor, call me Jupiter, the Sky Father. King of the gods and thunder. 

The slick wooden floor is the wheel of time, my daughter and her friends scuttle within it, like fish in the eddies of a stream. With acute wizardry, I scry this cauldron of souls. Peering into my past and my daughter’s possible future. She’s just learning how to skate, but I have to let her fall. I have to let her get hurt. How many more trips around this star will I have with her? Before my body is reduced to ash or lowered into the soil. The speed of my years is increasing and I’m watching my elders vanish in the fog. 

I think of the mutants. Their ancestors were better off. They built this town, (a critical stop on the Erie Canal) and nicknamed it, Lumber City. The name is evident in the rink’s floor, its wooden boards are arranged in a beautiful radial burst. Craftsmanship now forgotten. In a few years, it will be the subject of a show on the History Channel called, Ancient Aliens. The viewers will be too dumb to realize that humans once knew how to build a roller skating rink, and they’ll be too proud to admit that the human race is getting dumber each day. One day, they will look up from their phones and find that Earth is now spinning out of control, covered in famine and smoldering forests. 

My daughter needs to be strong for that. The coming doom. The New Dark Age, a place her ancestors built. Where black smoke blots out the sun and its shadows shrivel the crops. When her countrymen’s rancid mouths lash with tongues full of superstitions, made to summon the demon prince, Apollyon The Destroyer. 

The Earth, now a blistering ulcer he lacerates and drains into the abyss.