“Go out and work as a bouncer in a sex club. Work as a warden in a lunatic asylum. Go out to a cattle ranch and learn how to milk a cow. Set pins in a Honolulu bowling alley. Earn your money that way, in real life.”
Herman Melville
“Let us cultivate our garden.”
Candide
“The story is ludicrous.”
Maude Lebowski
Before I escaped the island of cannibals, I had convinced myself I was happy. Although I—the wandering son of a Boston nightcop—had little in common with my man-eating neighbors, I was so eager to finally find my people, my community, my real and true home, that I had convinced myself—truly, convinced—that I would be happy to live the rest of my days on this sugar-sand isle of flesh-fiends. So strong was my hope that I would be able to overcome digestive difference and finally settle down somewhere that I could be at peace. So deeply had I taken to heart what a San Diego friar once told me: rootlessness is the root of all evil.
But when I saw “Ronald sandwiches, limited time only!” on the menu at the deli, I just couldn’t take it any more. Ronald had been my friend. We played Fijian checkers together on the beach, and I couldn’t abide murdering—or, for that matter, spit-roasting—him just because he was so tender. He was tender—tender to me, the newcomer to this strange isle, a castaway washed ashore from the USS Roscoe Conkling. Ronald welcomed me. He was the best friend I ever had.
But I guess I’d better tell you about all this from the beginning.
***
It was an eerily silent Pacific summer, the summer they hanged John Brown, and I didn’t know what I was doing aboard a Peruvian guano vessel, bound for Tonga. I had spent the last two years as a dockhand in Lima, loading and unloading crates of birdbunk for the middle-men overlords of Shipping and Distribution. But I had grown tired of this work and, having vowed, when I first set sail from Boston Harbor six years earlier, to never spend more than a half-presidency in one place, I resolved to get moving once again.
I remember the color of the sky, the salinity of the air, the odoriferousness of the birds, the day I told Rico I was leaving. Rico was my closest friend in Lima—the son of Pampan gauchos, he too had caught the “Go West” bug and worked alongside me on the wharf. Our muscles strained and loosened together for two years, picking up and putting down those shit-laden crates. After work, we would get pisco sours at Rapa Nui’s and dream about our next adventures—about finding a place that would finally scratch that itch. In other words, somewhere that wasn’t Lima, which was getting rather boring. In fact, that’s where we found ourselves after work the day I told Rico I was leaving.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“There was only one post aboard the Conkling,” I said. “I needed to take it—you know how hard it’s been—”
“And you know how hard it’s been for me. Why would you not wait for another ship, one where we could go together.” He was starting to tear up.
“Rico, I’m sorry.”
He sniveled.
“Rico, I’m sorry but I need to go somewhere new. I need to find myself, and you and I both know that’s not going to happen here. I can’t load crates for my whole life.”
The next day, Rico waved me off from the dock. I never saw him again, although a sailor came through here recently who told me he had just won six doubloons off a crying Argentine in a Lima pinochle den not three weeks prior. I still think about Rico a little sometimes.
Other times, I think about him a lot.
***
It’s not like I made a beeline for the cannibals once I left Peru. Heck, I don’t think I’ve ever made a beeline in my life. Even when I was a kid sent on a dime errand to the drugstore, Ralph and I would find a new path through the woods to get there (I’ll tell you more about Ralph later). I would turn over a few rocks on the way, name a few earthworms, and say hi to some squirrels.
It has been the same in my adult life. My movements have more accurately resembled those of a real bee—zigzagging, chaotic, almost drunk (as Dickinson once suggested). I’ve ambled from place to place, never staying long enough to set down roots that I can see grow. I’ve made friends, but I’ve always left before our friendships really went anywhere. The same goes for romance.
But maybe romance is a place. At least, I seem to think that sometimes. I’m waiting to get to that place that is so magical, so perfect, so exciting, that I know that my first day there is the beginning of the rest of my life. But I’ve never felt that way, and so every stay of mine has been doomed from the start. Day 1 in Honolulu felt the same. It felt like it would just be another failed sojourn.
***
Honolulu—that was my first stop after the cannibals. Once they ate Ronald— shoved him into a taro hoagie and washed him down with gum-numbing kava—I just couldn’t live with myself if I stayed there. I had given the cannibals a shot and they had disappointed me—they were not it. I got on a ship once again, fleeing the cannibals’ blowdarts with some off-duty Coast Guard to Honolulu. The job market was terrible in Honolulu that year, and I spent my first week searching for Irish-friendly wanted ads, squatting in beachfront lean-tos, and bumming cigarettes off of local saxophonists. No one would give me the time of day. Good God, it was hard to even find work cleaning up leis after a luau. I was feeling awfully lonely, awfully dejected—maybe worse than ever—when a ship in a bottle washed up by my beachside banana leaf hut. I popped it open with my trusty flip-flop corkscrew and unfurled the parchment.
Swing by Johnny Pineapple’s Bowling Alley on Tiki Tickler Avenue! Strike a pose, you turkey!
And in the fine print at the bottom:
Now hiring new pinsetters.
***
For the first few weeks I set pins at Johnny’s, I didn’t hang out much with my colleagues. They say bowlers bowl alone—well, pinsetters set pins in painful solitude. All of us seemed to be running from something, and we didn’t want to share with anyone else what that something was. But you could make guesses—and after an entire young adulthood spent in the Pacific, trying and failing (except for Ronald and Rico) to break through with just these types, I had gotten pretty good at sussing out what another doughboy was doing out here. My manager, Roebuck, for one, bore all the signs of a recovering kava head (sunken, Benjamin Button features, thousand-yard stare). He had probably numbed himself dry with the Fijian blue elixir, and Hawaii was a sort of rehab stint for him—a tropical halfway house. Laremy, a pin-setter who got here a few weeks before me, had a fiery flamingo tattoo that indicated he had gone deep on assignment for Uncle Sam in Tonga. Edgar was flat-out obsessed with didgeridoo fusion music, having joined a “band” somewhere in the Outback after getting kicked off a fishing vessel for his nightly flute freestyle sessions.
There were usually just three or four of us—pinsetters, that is—on shift during the day, and only eight lanes (a pinsetter can generally reset three lanes consistently at one time, as most people in the biz agree), so sometimes Roebuck had me on shoe duty. What’s your size, here you go, try this, hmm maybe this one, things like that. One day about three weeks in, I found myself polishing a size eleven shoe alongside a workmate, Rocky. I had pegged Rocky as the try-everything wanderer: the kind of guy who scaled the Andes in the morning and went shipwreck-diving in some Caribbean trench in the afternoon. We had been scrubbing away for about thirty minutes, vigorously applying the dishcloths to the now-shimmering red shoe, when Rocky asked me where I was from.
Two weeks after that, Rocky and I had become tight. I had gained, for the third time in my life, a real pal.
***
Except it was actually the fourth time. I told you earlier that I’d start at the beginning and I lied. But I’ll get there eventually. Back to Rocky.
***
During our lunch breaks, Rocky and I ate stewed yams together. On the weekends, we went to hula shows and sat in the back, marveling at how everyone in Hawaii always smiled. We fiddled with the nickelodeons down at the Waikiki boardwalk, checking out the new pictures of the mythical Great Whale that had been in the papers for the last two years. These were the best few weeks of my life, to be honest. You see, with Rico we were always on such a tight work schedule, and with Ronald, he was always being peer-pressured by his other friend group to play elbow-ball (don’t ask). But Honolulu, with Rocky—this was the first time I truly realized I needed to stop running away from things.
After all, I reminded myself, what would my life have looked like if I had stayed in dreary, mill-dotted New England? Well, it would probably have looked like my father’s life and my father’s friends’ lives: from my twenties to my sixties, I would either mix concrete or work as an orderly at the sanitarium or maybe, just maybe, become a police officer. And I would meet some Emily Dickinson type who was depressed out of her mind but couldn’t even communicate her ennui through a puppet show, let alone a poem.
I imagine it was kind of the same for Rocky. He was the son of loggers from the foggy, futureless Oregon Territory. He had also heard the calling of Califia, the whisper of the southern stars, beckoning us to follow ceaseless horizons. Go south, young man. I had to think there was something special about this place, about Johnny Pineapple’s, that would make it the ultimate, last, and final stop on my journey.
***
I wanted it to be clear to you, dear reader, that I truly, deeply felt and believed all that I just said to be true, so that you perhaps don’t judge me so harshly when I tell the following story.
The day after a fun night on the town with Rocky—coconut ice cream, circus shooting games, a thoughtful slice-of-life play at ShaggyDog Theaterworks—I was called into Johnny Pineapple’s office for a “performance review.” Or at least that’s how Roebuck described it to me—he said it was a routine thing, a kind of rite of passage for new pinsetters. Johnny liked getting to know his boys and I had barely met him so far—just seen him flip-flop around the bowling alley, hand-shaking and back-patting all the regular customers, and signing paperwork that Roebuck handed him. As Roebuck led me to Johnny’s office, the other pinsetters looked at me with cheeky nods and say-no-more winks, so I didn’t exactly know what I was getting in for when I stepped into Mr. Pineapple’s garish yellow office.
As soon as I walked in, I knew. I knew that Johnny knew I was planning to skip town—something I wasn’t even sure I fully realized myself until that moment. I don’t know how I knew. I don’t know how he knew. But the moment I walked in, I felt all woozy and grabbed my head. He rushed over to me, and pushed a chair out to break my fall.
“Oh you poor soul, my poor, poor little Bromeliad. Sit down, sit down. Let me get you a glass of pineapple juice.”
He handed me a tall glass of the coolest, sweetest, freshest juice I had ever tasted, and it started to soothe me. My breathing calmed down and I listened to Johnny.
“Sometimes the pinsetters have this reaction. You poor sweet things. I’m just trying to help you see-”
“I…”
“Johnny Pineapple’s is a final stop. You’ve been fleeing from the human bond your whole life, and now you must stop and you must stay.”
***
Okay, now let me interrupt Johnny Pineapple for a second and tell you about the first friend I ever left. I told you I would earlier and now I’m making good on that promise.
When my life was still landbound in the Commonwealth, Ralph—the milkman’s boy down the street—and I were best friends. We played stoopball, nerded out over the latest Irving stories, and imagined an entire fantasy world of goblins, ghouls, and adventure in the copse (what a delightful word!) behind the post office.
I would sometimes tell Ralph about my dream to sail the Seven Seas, to duel with pirates, see the Holy Land, and discover some sort of hitherto unknown subspecies of zebrafish. In short, to live a life of adventure. But Ralph had no interest in ever leaving town; his adventures started and ended in the copse behind the post office. Ralph wanted to go to school in town, grow up to be the milkman like his father, root for the Boston Braves, and marry his second cousin. He was, I decided, tragically, a square.
I just couldn’t understand it.
The narrow view.
The ambitionlessness.
It made me angry. It made me forget how much fun we had together.
So one day Ralph and I were playing stoopball and I cracked a surefire double down Gutterbird Alley. Ralph ran after it, giggling, “I’m gonna throw your ghost runner out at third!”
But as I was rounding first (the manhole cover on Wallis Rd), I looked back at Ralph goofy-cackling as he ran to the ball, and a sudden spasm zapped the innermost knot of my being. I threw up all over the road. And instead of sliding into second, I ran off the basepath, through our magical woods, and back home.
The next day I hitch-hiked on a passing buggy to Boston, hoofed it around the docks for a few hours, and convinced the second mate of the Ticonderoga to bring me aboard on the way to Rio.
I never saw Ralph again, but one time in Lima I met a sailor from the town over who told me Ralph has been the milkman ever since his father passed last winter.
***
So startling was my first exposure to Johnny’s mentalism that I almost got the sense that he even knew about Ralph. He might have, for all I know. I still don’t know what memories and thoughts he can access and which he can’t. But it didn’t scare me exactly, his powers. In fact, it left me with a weirdly warm and fuzzy feeling. I downed the rest of my pineapple juice and Johnny walked me out of his office. It had grown dark and the alley had closed in the time we had been having our “performance review.” But my fellow pinsetters had gathered outside the office to wait for us. Rocky was there and I gave him a fist bump.
“Aces,” Rocky said. “So now you’re a real part of the Johnny Pineapple team!”
I smiled, locked his palm in a Rosicrucian handshake, and we all hip-hip-hoorayed. For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow.
Which nobody can deny.
***
It was a little later that evening. We were enjoying a nice little initiation party for me, cups runnething over and overflowething with pineapple juice. I had officially joined the Society of Pinsetters by passing my “performance review” with flying colors. Apparently Johnny said I was the best, most hopeful soul he had ever seen. Even more than Roebuck.
The laminated lane was slippery. I had to wear special, grippy shoes to set the pins in the right place each time, and avoid falling on my Boston Bum. Blotto with spiky pineapple juice, we all decided to have a little bowling round-robin to cap the night off. Johnny Pineapple was dominating—he’s a real rolling wiz, I have to say. He truly could win tournaments, and not just in Hawaii. But he said no to a surefire champion career just because he loves running this place so much, loves being with his little Bromeliads, loves bringing us all together, cultivating his garden. And even though he was crushing us, we were all still having a great time three-finger rolling and debating whether Zevon & Zevon or Stuart Whitesand were the best bowling shoe designers west of the Mississippi.
We all laughed and slapped our knees when we thought about what a funny cockeyed caravan life is. How we had all ended up here, together. We wanderers, roughin’ it from Manila to Monterrey throughout our magnet-less twenties—mutinying, jumping ship, bootlegging rum, circumnavigating, and smooth-talking our away through the most ironically named of the oceans. How we found ourselves here, setting pins in a bowling alley just like Melville did, years before he wrote Moby-Dick. But we were doing better than ol’ Mel—after all, we weren’t alone. We didn’t have to pilot leagues more to find Brahman in the kelpy deeps. We did not have to cling to the floating coffin of Queequeg as our last grip on human contact amidst the splintered wreck of the Pequod. Call us not Ishmael, but the Tribes. And Johnny Pineapple was our Moses, parting the Red, Red Sea.
Johnny spoke the thoughts lodged in all our hearts.
“Gentlemen, my spiky, silly Bromeliads, I’ve brought all of you here for a purpose—each of you one by one has hopped into my pineapple tree to discover life beyond loneliness. We know the world out there isn’t what it used to be. Community is dying. Old folks born during the Valley Forge winter now spend their golden years three-finger-rolling alone. Kids invite fewer friends to their birthdays. And you American wanderers, refugees from lifeless Louisville and boring Bakersfield, took to the seas to find meaning, to find joy, to find friends. And all along, this is what you were looking for.”
We nodded along, every last one of us. I was briefly tempted into my erstwhile cynicism to lament my frittered-away youth in the South Seas, my halcyon days wasted alongside incorrigible maneaters and shell-company stooges at mediocre beachside smoothie bars, but for the first time ever I realized I didn’t regret a single day. Each adventure, each moment, each friendship had not been incomplete or imperfect like I once thought—mere stepping-stones until my real life could begin. No, that had been my life. They had all been my life. Rocky. Ronald. Rico. Ralph. All of them. Pineapples. Cannibals. Guano. Stoopball. All of it.
I didn’t need to be headed anywhere. I didn’t need to be the American Wanderer. Maybe I wouldn’t write Moby-Dick, but then again, maybe I’d write something better.
Johnny handed me a shimmering, shamrock-green bowling ball, and I rolled a beautiful, beautiful strike.
by Zachary Partnoy
