Phys. Ed. was such a traumatic and humiliating experience for me in junior high and high school that there was no way I was going to take any similar courses in college. For me, perhaps the most significant aspect of my high school graduation was fact that it signaled the last time I would be forced to change clothes in a locker room and wear gym shorts.
So I was genuinely distressed when I started attending the University of Utah and realized that there was a P.E. requirement.
My distress was shortlived, however, because it soon became apparent that I still wouldn't have to put on gym shorts if I didn't want to. I could take courses like golf, archery, rock-climbing, or ballroom dancing without ever going near a communal shower.
But it was—what else?—bowling that turned out to be the ticket. You could repeat the class for credit—I ended up taking it during three different quarters in all. But it was the first time I did that I'll never forget.
It was then that I bowled my all-time high game of 201—a line that included a run of five consecutive strikes—but that's not what stands out the most for me. What I remember best is my partner in the class tournament.
You see, in Bowling 101, the first six weeks of class are spent mastering the basic concepts and techniques of bowling, and the last four are spent in a double-elimination partners tournament. That's right—partners.
I was one of the kids who always got picked last when it came time to choose up sides for sports, and I didn't make friends in many of my classes, so I never imagined that someone was going to pick me for his tournament partner. Her tournament partner, really. Because when the time came for the class to divide up into two-person teams, I was approached by a very lovely young blonde woman. Stellar, right?
Well, sure, up to a point. She also happened to be married and pregnant.
Very pregnant, in fact—about eight and a half months' worth. I asked her what in the world she was doing in a bowling class in her condition. "I've been pregnant long enough, and I'm sick of it," she said. "I'm trying to induce labor."
As it happened, we became pretty good friends over the next month, as we bowled our way together into a middle-of-the-pack finish in the tournament. I became quite taken with her, thus lengthening my string of "friend" relationships with attractive women who are involved with other men (a recurring motif in my life story, and one you can be sure we'll revisit it in weeks to come) and inducing in myself adolescent fantasies being there to deliver her baby when her water broke on the boards.
In point of fact, the only thing I ever did that might have affected her pregnancy at all was accidentally letting the bowling ball slip from my sweaty grasp on the backswing of my approach. The ball landed right next to her with a crash, startling her stiff, but if it had gone a foot the other way . . . I don't even want to think about what the result could have been.
But in the end her grand scheme failed. The exertion of bowling didn't do one whit to bring her gravidity to its natural conclusion. The only day of class she missed that quarter, in fact, was the last, but we had been knocked out of the tournament a week before and hadn't bowled since then. So much for the bowling-alley method.
My friend Lynne once attended an Oingo Boingo concert with me when she was eight months pregnant. She says that's why her son Christopher likes rock music so much now. I never saw my bowling partner again after that quarter, but maybe her little boy—because that's how the ultrasound called it—will grow up with an unusual fondness for the sounds and rhythms of bowling alleys.
And if he does, I wonder if he'll ever figure out why.
