After that, at the Galaxy Lanes, we were the Wycheskis. My father might have only been pro for one day back in 1963, and he might have choked on national television in front of millions of people, but he was still a pro. No one else there except Leo Florida could say that.
We were the Wycheskis, and we had a plan. By the time I’d rolled my first 200 game, I’d known what to do, because my father had explained it. Get going with Youth American Bowling Association, learn the competition through that and scratch matches. Start after school at the Galaxy when I got old enough, working the counter and scoring matches. Letter in high school, keep up with league play and tourneys until I was ready for the PBA qualifiers. It was a path. It had been my father’s path, in fact, and while it hadn’t gone exactly right for him, he was prepared to show me the way. He would teach me how to be weightless on the glide forward; he would teach me the timing of the release. The game was, after all, about position and timing, and he would help me absorb this truth into my very cells.
My father warned me that some people wouldn’t understand this level of focus—he didn’t name Chelsea and her set specifically, but I got his point. Bowling wasn’t exactly glamorous—not anymore at least, though the framed black-and-white photos on Leo’s Hall of Fame wall made me wish that men still wore suits and women tight-waisted, full-skirted dresses, sitting in neat rows to watch the hometown matches. My father said it didn’t matter that those days were gone; it didn’t matter that the Galaxy wasn’t a showplace anymore, or that the unions were on their backs in our town and across the Midwest while the good jobs blew away, or that thousands of men, some of them scarcely a decade older than me, had streamed from the jungles of Vietnam to the Veterans Home on Columbus Avenue, many of them missing this or that part, some of them still seeming to be on the lookout for them. What mattered was that perfection could still be had in the form of a ball curving with just the right spin toward its target. Correct action could prevail. “Don’t let Leo make you think the how doesn’t matter,” my father said to me over and over again. Maybe he worried from the beginning that Leo would ruin me like he’d nearly ruined him. Anyway, I didn’t care—I believed my father when he said the past didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was my coach, and we were the perfect combination: natural-born talent and experience. All we needed was each other—we knew this the way we knew the order of pinfall in a perfect strike, left-handed or right-handed, or the number of boards a ball had to hook across to make that strike.
What we didn’t know was the number of years and months and days we had left together, which were seven, five, and two, respectively. That math, simple and final as it turned out to be, was beyond us.
THE FACT THAT Leo Florida left my seventeen-year-old father in Las Vegas the night he froze at the foul line at the Showboat was reported in Bowling News, Ohio Bowler, and the Sandusky Register. Only one article, the one slightly sympathetic to Leo with a nod to his high scores—“semi-pro material”—mentioned that Leo had at least been kind enough to leave “the young Joseph Wycheski” his car, in which they’d driven out there together. The question was where Leo went and why. My father had always believed that Leo had taken off, and stayed away for years, because he was so embarrassed by my father’s failure. And this was the reason my father had sworn off bowling. He never said this to me, but I knew, and knew just as well not to ask him about it.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t rolled well. He didn’t roll at all. There is probably still footage coiled up in a can somewhere, and you could play it over and over again: my father standing at the top of the lane at the Showboat, four-and-a-half steps back, ball cradled like an egg, perfect form. He advanced to the line, shuffling forward. And stopped. Shook his head. Went back to his point of origin. Advanced and stopped again. Did this a couple more times. Sat down at the line and bowed his head, clutching his ball between his knees until Leo came onto the floor and led him away.
My father, an only child born late to his parents, hardly left their house that spring after he returned from Vegas until his father, a nonbowling quarry worker—thirty-five years in the pits off Milan Road—demanded he get a job. So at the beginning of that summer after his famous failure, my father was onboard as a deckhand on the Neuman ferry line, which runs back and forth to Kelleys Island, and that was how he met my mother, who was on vacation with her family. He found her on the upper deck, face turned to the sun. She was small and beautiful, her brown hair tinged with blond. He was sun-sick at the time, his skin burned and peeling, but he knocked off the patches of dead skin the best he could and introduced himself to my mother, asked her to meet him that night. Just like that. Whenever my father told that story, I couldn’t imagine any boy my age having that much courage. But then, my father had gone from rolling lines on national television to tossing rope coils, so maybe he thought he had nothing to lose.
After the last ferry run of the day back to Marblehead, he took his father’s bass boat and made the four-mile return trip to Kelleys Island. My mother was waiting for him outside the Hoezvelt cottages. They took two of the bikes her family had rented for the week and rode by moonlight to the glacial grooves, which looked like frozen water, petrified crests and troughs of waves. They sat on a beach nearby, and he went swimming out to a buoy and back in the black water to impress her. When he sat dripping beside her and tried to kiss her, she’d slapped him on the ear. I know, because she told me later, that the reason she’d slapped him was because it was the first time she’d thought she might be in love and she was scared.
As for my father—maybe he’d used up his fear for a while. He told her he wanted to drive down to Centerville and take her out on a date that Saturday night, and she said her father was a preacher. He said in that case he’d come on Sunday, when her father was at work. And this made her laugh. My mother had grown up in a family of devout, nonconversational Methodists, and she wasn’t used to humor. She, too, had been born late to her parents, though she had two siblings, a twin brother and sister, twenty years older than she, who lived together all of their lives and never married, a family detail she chose to say very little about. She and my father agreed that if they ever became parents (on this first date, I imagine they were speaking about their own distinct futures, not yet seeing them as intertwined—or maybe this moment was their earliest inkling) they wouldn’t wait so long to have kids; they didn’t want to look like grandparents at their children’s high school graduations, as her own father had, who was seventy-two when she’d gotten her diploma the previous spring.
Whenever my mother told stories about her childhood, which wasn’t often, I imagined it in black and white, like the first part of The Wizard of Oz. Mostly she talked about being bored, about wanting to run away, about moneymaking schemes to fund a bus or train ticket to New York, Chicago, or at least Columbus. She had considered careers in dance, acting, and fashion design—and maybe when she and my father met, those dreams were still clinging to her, a gauzy hope that lit her cheeks and eyes and made him fall in love with her.
After that first date, my mother didn’t get caught sneaking back in her cottage, and my father sped across the glass-gray dawn water in his father’s bass boat and made it to work on time. They got married that Christmas in 1963, and I was born the following November.
My father never said he was unhappy with my mother. Once he said to me he wished she’d slapped him harder, brought him to his senses. But that was after she started working at the Emmanuel, a store-front church that had moved in after Zleigman’s Shoes closed, and she started bringing home slippery little pamphlets with pictures of a blue-eyed Jesus looking sadly down from the mount, or from a cross, with what I later recognized as just a hint of sex in his eyes—something I knew better than to mention. Another time, when my father replaced the roof of our house himself, he told me to keep in mind that the root of “mortgage” was old French for dead. Many, many times he told me that, when it came to marriage, I should wait. The reasons, whatever the specifics, always had to do with keeping the Wycheski Plan on track.