The Wrong Space Cruise

You unstick your face from the bar, again.  The loud pong of a plastic cup hitting the floor and the unmistakable feeling of warm beer trickling down your back combine and you realize the guy next to you had been using your unconscious head as a coaster.  There are worse things; he could have been using your face to remove the smell of cheese that wafted continuously from under his arms.  You decide it’s best to be a coaster; you weren’t using your head at that moment anyway.

It is now your fourth night trapped on the Space Bowling Vessel aptly named ‘Turkey.’  Your cash is gone, presumably, you hope, to buy beer for you.  You also hope it comes back soon, you need a drink in the way that skinny bowler over there in lane three needs his arm brace.  The arm brace keeps him hitting strikes and the beer keeps you from hitting him, or anything else in Bowling Alley 22.

The man with the cheesy armpits finally decides to take a swing at you for spilling his beer and he’s using what looks like your pair of blue bowling shoes.  You slide barefoot to the floor behind your stool and watch the shoes smash into cheesy’s own bulbous nose.

‘One altercation a night or I’ll have to get drunk again,’ you think.

You turn away from the bar and head for the lanes.  Colored fluorescent bulbs spell out something you can’t see through four days of smoke, though because the lighting is bad all over the ship, the only letters lit up and visible through the fog of stale tobacco products are the words ‘shut up.’  Nobody seems to be listening to what strikes your hangover as a good idea.

In lane one you can see twenty or so of those trendy retro-is-in teenagers wearing Abercrombie and Fitch, a style that went out a millennia ago.  You can hear them moaning about their parents and their hair, two things that also went out a millennia ago when parents were deemed obsolete and humans were grown to the age of 18 in test tubes, taught how to eat, bowl, and whine, then released into the wilds of space.

Lane two is occupied by three balding men nearing the age where most humans in outer space are flushed out of airlocks for the insurance money.  They are complaining loudly about ‘kids these days’ as they granny roll their bowling balls into the gutters.  You think about the juicy insurance policies these poor fifty somethings have on them and make a mental note to track them down if you ever get off this ship.

Lane three is nothing but strikes from the guy you’ve decided to call Arm brace wimpy pants.  You snicker internally at your own archaic joke and move on to the next lane of misfits.

The next two lanes are engaged in what you think is a very heated debate when you consider the body count.  Lane four is lined by what appear to be big mechanical claws and lane five is occupied by green and yellow stuffed animals.  The animals, you can see, are of the race of creatures that just gained their independence from the race of claws in the lane beside them.  You vaguely hear something shouted about oppression and being trapped in a glass box only to be sold to the kid who put the most quarters in, but you soon tire of the battle that’s been going on for the last two days and keep moving.

‘Oh no, not again,’ you think as you see the scoreboards flicker up the face of a woman shaving her head.  Suddenly a song by some pop star starts screaming ‘oops I did it again’ in your ears from every direction.  You look up at the rental counter and you can see the pimply sixteen year old shoe renter playing with the knobs for the music and smiling in a way that would cook the oil out of greasy pizza, cheese fries, and nachos.

You turn away, reminding yourself that you’ve already had your one fight for the evening and decide that some Neo Genesi Pacman is in order.  You lumber towards the game, making sure to avoid cheesy as he writhes on the floor like a flipped turtle.  The unmistakable sound of an illegally born child tripping on a half inflated red bumper reaches your ears and it reminds you why the species was finally denied the privilege to procreate.

The only things not annoying you on your trip to Neo Genesi Pacman are the hundreds of racks of neon pink, green, orange, black and burgundy bowling bowls.  You kick one of the black balls hard with your unshod toe and feel a sense of completeness sweep over you as the pain shoots up your leg and into your throat.  The scream of pain you release is both an annoyance to you and the other patrons.  It also looks like it killed one of the fifty year old men who had decided to play pool on the badly scratched pool table.  If nothing else, the insurance payout will pay for your next vacation.  But you’re thinking a ping pong tournament ship may be less annoying.