The Gutter
A bowler’s quest through New York's underworld to master the art of the curve
MAY 16, 2026—I wrote the intro to this short story in January, 2025, but I like it and it’s oddly topical. I’m still in physical therapy, still unable to run as I once did, but I’m beginning to bike like a madman again. If you’re reading this hot off the press, I’m likely cannonballing over the George Washington Bridge and up the Palisades on my first big ride of the year.
JANUARY, 2025—I’m approaching physical therapy with renewed vigor in recent weeks. After months of languishing, I feel a sudden urgency to get back into top form. I’m not talking about running—that is still many weeks away. I’m not talking about biking either—getting back on the bike was surprisingly easy. Easier than walking to the subway and descending/ascending multiple flights of stairs. Easier than hearing the train arrive as you start down the stairs and watching it go as you reach the bottom and seeing the next one won’t come for another twenty minutes.
I need to get back into top form because I’m bowling again. I’ve been on a bowling team at The Gutter for nearly ten years now and it has become a pillar of my life (Robert Putnam was right). It was the social fix I needed when I was new to New York and I’ve met good people and made close friends through it. I had to sit out last season on account of my first knee surgery (meniscus repair / bone graft). I had my second surgery (ACL repair) in early December but I was walking around just fine after two weeks and felt confident enough to bowl in the winter league that started in January.
Getting into bowling shape may sound laughable. It is not an especially athletic sport, but it does require working legs and right now I look like the Tin Man learning to bowl when they used to call me ‘Silky.’ I won’t be so flat-footed once my left knee is able to support my weight. For the time being, I’ll keep waddling up the lane and chucking the ball with a prayer.
Bowling is muscle memory at this point, but I’m unable to slip back into my usual wind up. Returning to the fundamentals and recalling my Dad’s famous advice to “shake the hand” has helped. Just last week I managed to roll a 166. Regardless of my performance, it’s been great to get back to my regularly scheduled programming of evening bike rides and Monday night league at The Gutter. Apropos of that:
Here’s a story I wrote about bowling, my underworld quest to master the art of the curve, and how New York City lost its soul to developers.
The Gutter
Our motto was Nothing Matters and we were comfortable losing. We tanked every season, usually finishing last or second-to-last. But then, in our tenth season, we started winning. No one knew why, but we could all feel something was afoot.
Our bowling team consisted of an adjunct communist, an elite raver who ran on ketamine, and a cowboy we all bummed cigarettes from. Every Monday, we congregated at The Gutter, a punk bar in the yuppiest part of Brooklyn, to roll with a league of degenerates, half of whom wished to extend the weekend, while the other half sought redemption.
Some teams were organized around industry. We started out as a media team and gradually morphed into a design team. We were friendly with a team of DJs, one of whom parked a bus on an empty lot and made it into a famous open-air club. The all-girl team stood out in a league that heavily skewed toward boys and beer bellies. So did the competitive old heads who found each other in a softball league and was the only team to actually practice on the weekends. And then there was the team with mob ties who dressed well, wore pinky rings, and always arrived together in two black SUVs.
Everyone in the league had their own windup. The ponytailed communist, who shared my love for Italian literature and film, settled into his sightlines like a sumo wrestler—wide stance, bent knees—while the raver stomped like a penned-up bull, ready to run wild in the streets of Brooklyn and gore every landlord in sight. The cowboy squinted down the lane and threw a mean reverse curve that landed like a shotgun to the chest.
I privately theorized we were on a winning streak because we had finally surrendered to the team motto: Nothing Matters. And why not surrender? The economy was in freefall. The country was run by plutocrats and our so-called progressive city voted an ex-cop into the Mayor’s office just two summers after enraged citizens threw molotov cocktails at police cars. Later, the Mayor would become the subject of a federal investigation for accepting Turkey dollars and other perks in exchange for what exactly I’m not sure. Didn’t matter in the end because the DOJ ordered the case to be dropped. There was no mystery about what was exchanged here.
Trust was a lake drying up—we were all parched and bodies were beginning to surface. So I wasn’t surprised in the least when I overheard someone between games say we stood to be the first generation worse off than our parents.
With no future, it only made sense to take shelter in The Gutter, a run-down relic of an older, cuttier New York. For this reason, The Gutter was special. It was also the kind of special that earns a “now, now” pat on the head, or the way a bleacher parent describes someone else’s kid when they’re not around.
What I mean to say is The Gutter didn’t always work right. The cobbled lanes were full of dings and nicks and they were seldom oiled. Lane five had a slight lip that behaved like a guard rail and lane six was famous for splits and a helpful lip on the left side that sometimes acted like the hand of God. Everyone knew lane seven was cursed and that lane 8 had the best seats. Lanes one through four were reserved for pedestrians who often had no etiquette, which was another reason lane five sucked.
Instead of overhead TVs playing cartoons whenever you rolled a strike, there was a bank of monitors boosted from IBM in the early 90s. They served a singular purpose, which was to confound the user. They kept score, too, but not always honestly. You had to cross your strikes and check your spares.
The pinsetters were a constant headache. Sometimes the pin cycle would gum up and jam, or freshly laid pins teetered over. Other times the lane gobbled up all the balls and held them, like a dozen grapes in a stretched mouth, before spitting them back: phoom, phoom, phoom.
When the lanes gave us trouble, we notified a stone-faced attendant who disappeared around back without a word. The lane went dark as he tinkered around. What lay under the hood of The Gutter was unknown, but sometimes we saw his converse-clad feet suspended mid-air as he jiggered the pinsetter into alignment or shepherded a ball run astray. Then the lights would return and the balls whistled back and the wheel of life kept turning.
[pin setter photo]
Most people at The Gutter were friendly, but the attendant guy unsettled me. His pierced face and ice blue eyes were always half-hidden by a black hoodie, even in the summertime, and he seemed to dye his hair a new color every week—platinum blonde, slime green, hibiscus pink. But it was the silence that really got me. He rarely spoke a word and every week refused to hand over bowling shoes until I told him I was in the league, even though there was no way he didn’t recognize me after ten seasons.
Whatever. We were winning and I wouldn’t let anyone dampen my mood. Emboldened by our nihilism, we climbed through the standings, tallying win after win, until we clinched our first-ever playoff spot.
When you’re up, everything changes. You become clammy and self-serious. You watch bowling clips on YouTube before bed and dream about throwing the perfect curve. You even start thinking about getting your own ball.
I asked the league commissioner, a long-haired greasy fellow rumored to work for NASA, where he bought his ball and he told me about this guy in Queens named Dino. I penciled myself in for the next available appointment, which happened to be a week shy of the playoffs.
Dino’s shop was housed in a bowling alley right near the bridge to Rikers Island. He personally greeted me on arrival, extending a portly hand for a shake. His grip was strong and it felt like he was testing me the way men used to do. He was compact in stature with curly hair knit close to his head, mostly intact but somewhat receding leaving him with a distinguished widow’s peak. His shoes—handmade, leather, Italian—clapped against the wood floor as I followed him into his back office.
“So, what are we working with?” said Dino.
“I need a 13, and I want it to look like this,” I said and pulled up a screenshot of the first-ever photographed black hole—a hazy, angry-looking red ring against the blackest black. It could’ve been a doomed aura reading from Canal Street or the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings. It was menacing and supernatural, a destroyer of galaxies. It would make for a season-winning ball.
Dino couldn’t care less. “That’ll cost you extra.” He pulled a tape measure from his desk drawer and took my measurements—finger girth, hand spread—and then led me to lane eight in the corner.
“Let’s see how you throw,” he huffed, reaching for a handsome cane, which he used to rise from his swivel chair. I followed him to an empty lane in the far corner and picked up a thirteen-pounder. I slid my right foot into position, toes pointing north by northwest, and moved my left foot alongside it. My right heel lifted, then left, then right, like a puma zeroed in on its prey and ready to pounce. I took a deep breath and let it fly. I was always making small adjustments to my throw here and there. Lately I was bringing the ball back higher to gain more momentum before my release. Gravity gave me an extra boost without sacrificing accuracy, but I was still bowling more spares than strikes and had a frustrating affinity for splits, which is what I rolled in front of Dino.
He clapped his cane against the lacquered wood and barked, “Again.” I picked up one pin in the second frame. “You’ve got a decent arm,” he said. “Have you ever tried curving it?”
I had, many times. I knew how to do it, but I had no control. Sometimes the ball didn’t even make it halfway down the lane before guttering. When I did manage to bend the ball back, it didn’t have enough speed to carry it into the head pin and ended up on the other side of the gutter. The curve was risky for these reasons, but it was dynamite when it landed. It was precisely this kind of pin action that my game was missing.
I relayed all this to Dino who listened patiently. He pointed his cane at a ball rack and said, “Try a twelve, and throw it harder.” I picked up the twelve. Lined my feet up on the other side of the lane, the far left side. I did not wiggle my tushy like usual. I just took a deep breath, stepped forward and released. The ball made a wide arc, kissing the right lip of the lane before arcing back and colliding with the head pin. Strike.
I smiled. “Again,” said Dino, expressionless.
Another strike.
“Again.”
Gutter right.
“Again.”
Gutter left.
“It needs work, but I think you’re ready.”
I shrugged it off as beginner’s luck. “I mean it,” he pressed on. “But you have to decide now. A ball made for curving has two holes, not three, and can be weighted differently.” I barely knew the man, but I trusted his instinct. I wanted to believe him and, at a deeper level, believe in myself. The playoffs were only a couple weeks away and I knew it was reckless to change up my throw so late in the season. But I also knew the curve would take my game to the next level and, maybe, just maybe, get us over the hump.
He drilled two holes.
My new ball was the black pearl of The Gutter, where it earned plenty of oohs and ahhs on its debut.
My performance, less so.
Before I adopted the curve, the ball usually bent to my will. What I lacked in power, I made up for in accuracy. I didn’t roll a lot of strikes, but I almost always picked up the spare earning me the title Spare King. The curve, however, loosened the ball out of my control. Now it bucked and swerved, as if possessed by a mind of its own. I watched the red ring turn and turn, and whatever sense I had was lost to this turning gyre and its strange gravity.
There was another problem too. The lanes kept swallowing my ball. Every other roll, my ball simply wouldn’t return, throwing off any flow I might have achieved.
Worse still, it was testing the patience of the pale attendant I’d come to think of as a living gargoyle. When the ball-swallowing continued the following week, he was fed up. He tapped a cigarette loose and threw a set of keys on the counter. “Your ball, your problem,” was all he said before stepping out for a smoke. His orange hair had blonde tips and looked like a flaming halo.
I grabbed the keys and slipped behind the counter when no one was looking and slowly made my way down a dark hall with an unusual number of twists and turns.
I unlocked a door where the sounds of the alley were amplified: balls carving down resin lanes, pins exploding like fireworks. I found the light switch and a lonely bulb illuminated a beautiful mechanical ballet. The pinsetters worked in perfect concert, opening their jaws to lift the leftover pins and then restore them into tidy pyramids.
And then I noticed a tiny man bustling from lane to lane, chasing each incoming ball and pushing them on to the correct return track. I had never seen him working at The Gutter before. Maybe he lived back here, like an old movie projectionist, invisibly pulling pleasure levers to anesthetize the public.
But this job appeared nonstop. It was hard to stop staring at the tectonic muscles shifting under his oiled skin. The sound of his leather sandals scraping against the floor was barely audible over the cacophony of balls and pins colliding. I kept quiet as I watched him, unwilling to interrupt his laborious flow. I thought he would never rest, but eventually he paused to wipe his sweaty brow and only then did he notice me. He cocked his head, seeming just as confused as I was.
And then a thundersome voice bellowed out, “Back to work or I’ll have your head!” The tiny man held my gaze for another second. By now there was a pileup of balls in lane six and he returned to his task.
I turned around and there was Hades himself, seated behind a large oak accounting desk. His eyes tunneled through me and my bones went cold. He licked a feathered quill with a black-stained tongue and dipped it in a pot of ink. “What is it?” he growled. “Can’t you see I’m busy?” Before him was a long ledger of names, presumably dead souls in need of processing.
“I’m… here for my ball,” I said like an idiot, anxiously glancing in the direction of the tiny man who was sweating furiously. “You haven’t seen my ball, have you?” I said to the tiny man, “It’s black with a red ring around it. Looks like a black hole.” But he just kept on trucking from lane to lane, ferrying each ball back to its rightful owner.
“You mean this ball?” Hades said, pulling open his desk drawer. And sure enough, there it was: my black pearl. The red ring pulsed in his palm and he tossed it to me underhand, as if it were as light as a baseball. I caught it with more chest than I intended and felt all air escape me.
“Thanks,” I wheezed, wondering how many of my ribs snapped. “This is it. I should probably get going.”
Hades laughed. “No one comes here just for a ball. Tell me, what it is you really want.”
I covered my mouth and coughed. My chest squeezed in pain and blood spotted my palm. Seeing the blood made me worry that toss might have punctured a lung. I slowly backpedaled. “I really should get going. I think I’m up.” But as I turned to leave, the ring around my ball flared bright red and scalded my hands. I dropped it and looked down at my raw hands which sizzled with fresh blisters.
“Don’t be a fool,” Hades hissed. “I know you came here to cut a deal.” he said leaning over his desk.
The blisters on my hand burst and blood dripped down my fingertips. “I just came for the ball. Really.”
Hades snapped his teeth. “By accepting the ball, you’ve already agreed to my terms.”
“So you get my soul in exchange for a ball? No, no thanks,” I sputtered.
“Your soul? Ha! I have a million souls just like yours. I have no need for another.” he shouted, hammering his fist over his desk as bright columns of fire spit up all around me. A pot of ink spilled from his desk onto the ground before me. I felt sweat swim to the surface of my forehead and back.
“What if,” Hades began more calmly, “I gave you complete mastery over the curve?”
My eyes widened, but I didn’t say anything and averted my gaze. I looked down into the black liquid pooling around my feet and hardly recognized myself.
Sensing an opening, he pressed further. “Rest assured your soul would be safe. What I want is the soul of the city.” He unfurled a scroll of paper, placed his palm over it, and the fine print of a contract bloomed into being. “All you need to do is sign here, here, and here,” he said, marking each spot with a red X, “to make it official.” His shit-eating grin bore pointed teeth.
The terms of the deal were shrewd: I was to collect the soul of New York City.
Thankfully, Hades had thought everything through and told me exactly what I needed to do. The soul was not locked away under Gracie’s manor or tucked inside Lady Liberty’s torch. It was not buried in Central Park or at the bottom of the Hudson. Reading through the contract, I learned the soul of the city was quietly converted into equity in the 1980s as part of the mayor’s revitalization effort. New zoning laws and state-sanctioned violence weren’t enough to eradicate crime from the streets of New York. They needed money too, and lots of it. The public coffers were nearly dry, so city planners turned to private developers. But convincing them to pony up millions of dollars for a mismanaged city overrun with crooks and artists was no small feat. That’s when the mayor offered the city’s soul as collateral.
In exchange for seed money, the soul of New York City was split evenly five ways and doled out to the biggest real estate developers in each borough. Their ranks included a number of private equity firms, most notably Blackstone. All of them were now minted billionaires. And it was now my job to recover these fragments and return them to Hades.
He handed me his quill, but I hesitated before signing. “What do you plan to do with the soul of New York?” I asked.
“A little late to be wondering that, isn’t it?” Hades chided. “I simply want to accelerate what is already happening. The American project has failed. It is time for new leadership and a great reset,” he said, lowering his voice to a purr as he ran his fingers over the oak desk. “Once I have the city’s soul, I will merge our worlds into one giant necropolis. I’ve hired a top firm, the very best in mergers and acquisitions, to manage the onboarding process.”
I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing, but I feared I may have unintentionally sacrificed the planet for the curve.
Hades was on fire now and kept blowing steam. “Everyone talks about the cloud and blockchain and micro chips as if technology will save you,” he railed. “But they forget this world is made of dirt and iron and that history is forged from fire and blood. They fancy themselves machines forgetting they are made of meat. They forget that I, Hades, lord of the underworld, have trillions of souls at my disposal.”
He paused to catch his breath. “I know what you’re thinking,”—honestly I was thinking about bowling a perfect game with that sweet, sweet curve—“but there’s no sense in trying to stop me. Between all your mass shootings and the forever wars obscured from view, your people have long flirted with necropolitics. I’m simply unafraid to openly embrace what everyone is quietly doing.”
At this I shrugged, picked up the pen and signed the document. Hades snapped his fingers and sparked a flame over his thumb. He lifted an emerald candle from his desk and held it above the fire. Wax dripped down over the folded contract. He pressed down on it with his ring, sealing it with the crest of a skull haloed in flame.
“There’s a shareholder meeting tomorrow afternoon at the Four Seasons. You’ll find who you need there.” he said with a wave of his hand. I wanted to ask more, but I could sense his growing impatience. There was, after all, an endless procession of souls to process, pins to set, balls to oil and circulate. “Well, what are you waiting for? Go forth! Make me a king and I will grant you the curve.”
I stole a last glance before leaving at the little man hustling. Like a true New Yorker, he worked long, unforgiving hours on contract without benefits or job security.
I retraced my steps and found my way back to the bar where I ordered a beer and shot. The bar had thinned out and I wandered over to the alley. It was my turn, but no one seemed impatient. I lined up my feet, breathed deep, released. The ball swung wide, rotating fast in the opposite direction, the red ring sang against the resin lane. Strike. It went like that all night. I couldn’t tell if it was me, or if Hades was giving me a taste of what lay ahead. Doubt was creeping into my mind.
I biked home, wondering what the hell I was going to do when I showed up at the Four Seasons. I failed to read all the terms and conditions and it just occurred to me that I had no idea what the penalty was if I failed to uphold my end of the deal. Surely there was one, and surely it was eternal.
I was too anxious to sleep. When the sun finally rose, it was a relief. I got up from bed and realized I had sweated through the sheets. I made coffee, tried to read, looked out the window. Everything seemed normal. Traffic bellowed below, as trucks delivered their goods and busses wheezed by pulling up to every other corner. Commuters scurried underground, some tired, some self-important. The oldheads played chess and the teens blasted reggaeton. I closed the curtains in distress. They had no idea. My coffee had gone cold but I decided to let it be and try to nap instead.
When I woke up, everything was dark. I checked the time: half past six. Fuck. I was massively late, but if I took a cab I could maybe catch them on their way out. I got dressed as fast as I could and ran out the door. A piece of paper was pinned to the door. I grabbed it and stuffed it in my pocket. I ordered a car as I waited for the elevator. Once inside the elevator, I unfolded the crumpled paper. It was an eviction notice, which made no sense because I never missed a payment. I was ready to dismiss it as a scam, but then I remembered the notice was pinned on the inside of the door, not the outside. I read it again more carefully. This time I read that I was being evicted not from my apartment, but from the world entirely. Signed, Hades. I had reached the first floor by then but the elevator didn’t stop. It didn’t stop at the basement either. It just kept going, plunging deeper and deeper and deeper.