Joey remembers falling asleep to the sounds of league bowling when she was a little kid in Eastern Michigan. “Both my parents bowled, and my older brother was supposed to keep an eye on me, but he would tell friends to meet him there to play pinball,” she recalls. That left her free to nest in a pile of family coats under a row of seats. There was something calming and oceanic about the rhythm of rolls and cracks around her, blending with the ambient murmur of banter and gossip into white noise. In middle school, she joined a youth league and spent her Saturdays at the same lanes. “I learned to flirt there, I learned to smoke there, I learned to trash-talk there,” she says. “It’s where I grew up.”
Returning to her hometown alley last year with her own daughter and grandson, she says, was the opposite of nostalgic. “Everything was loud and flashing and neon. Overstimulating. Expensive.” The floor was so grubby that the thought of sitting anywhere on it was nauseating, and the lanes were dark, lit primarily by bright neon stripes and squiggles. “They turned it into a funhouse,” she remembers saying.
