Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

“ THIS ONE FELLOWwas waiting for his coffee and started telling me about an old typewriter he had thrown out. He wished he still had it. He was going to ask his girlfriend to marry him. If he did so in a typed letter, it and the moment would last forever. What could I do but roll in a new sheet and let him dictate? I was his Steno-of-Love. We did six different drafts.” What did he say to pop the question? I asked. “None of your business.” Did the girlfriend say yes? “I have no idea. He read over the letter a dozen times to make sure the words fit the occasion. Then he left with it and a vanilla-shot cappuccino and has not been seen since.”

HER PORTABLE TYPEWRITERallows Esperanza to take her keyboard services anywhere, but Java-Va-Voom is her faux Plaza Centrale. “This place puts up with me and gets my mind churning. I like having people around,” she said. “And, some of them have come to need me.” Oh, more than you may know, Evangelista Esperanza!

Because videos go around the world in nanoseconds, little pigs are celebrated for saving little lambs from drowning. No, wait. That video was an Internet hoax. What Steve Wong did was real, it happened, in front of witnesses, even, so he went viral.

We went bowling one night, you see, and Steve truly was the alley-ooper who threw or rolled—who bowled —an impossible number of strikes, so he deserves the reverence of all who bowl for fun and profit. Still, if you had not been there to eyeball Steve’s run, you might think Anna, MDash, and I had faked it all.

Steve’s accomplishments were not falsified, nor were they a fluke. He’d been the captain of the Freshman Bowling Team at St. Anthony Country Day High School, winning trophies at Young Bowler Tournaments at the Surfside Lanes. He even had a perfect game—twelve consecutive strikes for a score of 300—when he was only thirteen years old. His name was in the paper and he was given a lot of free swag from the Surfside.

When MDash hit the Year-One anniversary of his becoming a U.S. citizen, we celebrated by taking him bowling. We convinced him that it was a great American Tradition, that immigrants from Vietnam, Chile, et al. went bowling after a year of citizenship and that he should, too. He bought it. Steve Wong brought his professional-quality glove for his rolling hand as well as his custom-made bowling shoes! We wore crummy rentals with mismatched laces that were kept in dank cubbies behind the front desk while he wore one-of-a-kind yellow and brown bowling slippers, STEVE and WONG written across the toes, with three X s on each heel—XXX—representing the final frame of that perfect game of years before. The shoes came in a matching bag in the same hideous two-tone brown-yellow. We kept rubbing them, hoping to summon a genie as if they were magic lamps. When our beers arrived, I hollered, “My wish came true!”

MDash had never bowled in his native sub-Saharan village, so we got him his own lane and had the staff pull up the kiddie rails, the things that help little kids keep their balls out of the gutter. With his ball ricocheting from bumper to bumper, he always hit some pins for a high score of 58. My top game was 138—respectable as hell, what with all the Rolling Rocks I’d chugged. Anna, bless her, focused so much on her mechanics that she beat my high by six pins—a 144. Flushed with the thrill of victory over me, she was giddy, wrapping up MDash in her taut-as-coiled-rope arms and calling him “our American friend.”

But the surprise of the night was Steve Wong and his alley prowess. His three games—236, 243, and a final high of 269—made moot our competitive loop. He was so good we grew fatigued marveling at the splits he turned into spares. At one point he rolled eleven straight strikes over two games. I threatened to steal that glove of his and burn it.

“Next time I’ll bring my own ball,” he told us. “I couldn’t find it.”

“But you keep those ugly shoes where you can grab them in a jiffy?”

We bowled again the next week, the four of us. Steve found his ball with my help. I picked him up from his too-big house in Oxnard and went through the garage and three closets. His bowling ball bag—that lovely yellow and brown leather—was behind an old, beat-up plaid typewriter case on the highest shelf in what had been his sister’s closet, next to a box that held about a hundred old Barbie dolls with vacant smiles and impossibly trim waists. The ball was also that odd color combination, like a sphere of fake puke from a novelty store. The Chinese character for lightning was stamped within the trinity of finger holes. When we got to the Ventura Bowling Complex, he put the ball in a machine that turned out to be a bowling ball polisher. And he fitted Anna with her own glove, one with a lot of wrist support.

MDash was still on the bumpered lane beside our alley—his four games topped out with a high of 87. My first game was a 126, then I stopped caring because, well, we had bowled the week before and to my sensibility four games of bowling in one year is a fine total. Anna? Possessed! Again! She changed balls three times in the first game before going back to the rack for her original choice. With that special glove of hers, her concentration on her stride and on her release point, and constantly drying her palm with the little fan above the ball return, the woman flirted with 200 all night, finally topping out at 201. She was in such a good mood she took swigs from my beer.

And Steve Wong? With those three fingers of his slotted into the precision-fitted holes in that shiny orb, he put on a show of shows. His years of experience appeared in the grace of his footwork, the arc of his swing, the release of his ball hand sweeping upward to the projected computer scoreboard. He had the balance of a dancer, his cantilevered foot splayed behind his left shoe, his right toe tapping the hardwood in a triple-X kiss of brown and yellow. He never bowled less that 270 that night, finishing with a score of…300.

That’s right. The computer flashed PERFECT GAME PERFECT GAME PERFECT GAME as the manager rang an old ship’s bell behind his desk. Other patrons—who take bowling seriously—came around and shook Steve’s hand and slapped his back and paid for every Rolling Rock I ordered, proving that yes indeed, his were magic shoes.

We played again a couple of days later—at MDash’s demand. He’d been dreaming about the game. “Sleeping, I can see the black ball, curving to the 1 pin, to knock down all of them, but they don’t smash like I want. I want to smash them all down!” Breaking 100 was now a Vision Quest for him. On what would be only his third trip to the lanes, he eschewed the kiddie bumpers and promptly rolled five gutter balls in a row.

“Welcome to the varsity squad,” I told him before missing the 9 and 10 pins by a foot. Score me an open-frame 8. Anna picked up a spare by nicking the 7 pin so was already beating me. Last up, Steve Wong rolled a strike.

A flash flood begins with a drop of rain on stone. A forest fire tells with just a whiff of distant smoke. A perfect game of bowling is a possibility only when an X is recorded in the little box in the corner of frame number 1, the first of twelve in a row. Steve Wong racked up nine straight strikes, so in the tenth and final frame of our first game that night—MDash posted a 33, and I had a 118, Anna a 147—a gang had gathered around our lane, about thirty people (by frame 6 the other games had quit to watch what might be Steve Wong’s second perfect game in a row—an oddity and marvel as rare as twin rainbows).