The Lanes That Never Sleep : Open Around the Clock, Earthy Canoga Park Bowl Attracts a Sometimes Bizarre Array of Alley Cats and Denizens of the Night

Eleven fifty-nine and counting.

Fifty-eight . . . 57 . . . 56 . . .

Two blissful young companions slump over a counter at Canoga Park Bowl, simultaneously watching the clock and each other.

Less than a minute until hourly rates drop, from $14 to $9 per lane.

Thirty-four . . . 33 . . . 32 . . . What compels the drowsy Wisa Gavinlertvatana to travel from Inglewood to the West Valley’s only 24-hour bowling alley?

Her companion turns away, grinning sheepishly.

Four . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1.

He raises his hand.

12:03 A.M.

A cocktail waitress from the Royal Room, the alley’s in-house drinking spot and bastion of good cheer, lifts her head from a book.

“I hate it here,” she says.

12:15

Hush. The sermon has begun.

“It’s a mental game,” Jose Santiago says of his 2 1/2-year hobby. “You have to get the form down first. But it’s frustrating many nights.”

For Santiago, after toiling to boost his average from 160 to 225, frustration is a 200 score. For others, frustration is what attracts them to Canoga when area bars close and a realization strikes: The alley is the only place to go.

Santiago is here to bowl, not loiter. He takes the game seriously--in fact, borderline religiously, which has a precedent. In the 14th Century, bowling was a German religious ceremony. Parishioners hurled an object at pins symbolizing evil. Those who missed did penance.

Concentration is key. So is the proper equipment. Santiago owns four balls, each suited to varying lane conditions.

“Balls aren’t picked for show,” he says. “They have a purpose.”

Amen.

12:17

His hair as slick as the oily lanes, Cool Guy might be a club-scene Romeo--if he were old enough to drink. He scours the shelves until he finds a ball with finger holes that fit.

Cool Guy is the alias for Richard Gutierrez of Northridge. Many bowlers use pseudonyms for the video scoring screen to avoid association with embarrassing efforts. Or with bowling at all.

The closet bowler phenomenon is nothing new. Henry VIII reportedly ridiculed the game while keeping his own private lane.

Tonight, Cool Guy faces Humidor, a.k.a. John McCaw, a psychology student at Seaside Community College who has named himself after a cigar accessory.

Cool Guy, looking suave, sends four in a row into the gutter. Humidor fares better, perhaps thanks to post-rolling gyrations.

By the seventh frame, Cool Guy discovers a string dangling from his $2 rental shoes, which he promptly cuts off.

A-ha! “It’s the shoes.”

Another gutter ball.

12:40

Thanksgiving in July on lane 17.

Three strikes in a row equal a “turkey,” and all Santiago is missing is the stuffing. He converts for a spare in the second frame, then feasts on 10 consecutive strikes, including three in the final frame.

His high was 279. Now it’s 280.

12:45

The Royal Room. Usually, the dimly-lit pub serves entertainment--though hardly fit for kings. On Karaoke nights would-be minstrels croon horribly out of tune. But this is Wednesday morning, 75 minutes before the sale of alcohol becomes illegal, and the bar is closed.

12:47

Sean Tabibian, a Glendale law student nicknamed Metroman, has devised a test akin to one in the film “Diner”--in which a character’s fiancee had to pass a Baltimore Colts’ football quiz. To join his company, Tabibian says his chums must ace a bowling test.

He is kidding, of course. Always kidding:

“Went to Pierce College. Majored in registration.”

“These shoes are great. Great way to catch a fungus.”

A ball is stuck in the gutter. Metroman tries rolling another ball into the gutter.

Now there are two balls trapped.

“The lane’s defective,” Metroman pleads. No laughter from the desk manager.

1:25

Ed Gardner couldn’t sleep. The 26-year-old West Hills resident needed to bowl, as he has for 16 years, lucky socks or no. And no girlfriend or wife was around to tell him no.

“I’m a single guy,” Gardner says. “I have no worries.”

So he threw on a Dick Tracy shirt and joined the unofficial men’s club at Canoga: the later the hour, the men say, the less the chance of a female appearing.

He also brought the Purple Beast, his reactive resin ball.

“I was competing in tournaments, but with the new equipment I saw where the sport was going and wanted out,” says Gardner, who has a 200 average. “But I love it. If the game’s changed, I’ve got to learn the new game.”

And sometimes, wear different socks.

He giggles: “My lucky socks are black, blue, green and beige.”

And dirty. Even bachelors have standards.

1:36

Night owls, according to Gardner, are “pretty easy-going guys.”

Gardner, meet Gusher.

Bulging eyes. Rapid tongue. The singer-songwriter for the four-piece hard-core band (“Don’t call it punk, man.”) Gusher, Michael Gusher, is a walking, talking, bowling 78-r.p.m. record.

Currently, however, he is immersed in reflection, as his friends bowl on without him.

“Bowling is the ode to the blue-collar worker,” he says.

Gusher strokes his long sideburns, puffs once, puffs twice, shadowed by a “No Smoking” sign. He appears to write the next verse to that ode in his head: “People think it’s pathetic, then you do well, and they’re impressed.”

He is a Generation X Renaissance Man, an Otis Parsons School of Design graduate with a degree in fine art photography who also skateboards professionally and philosophizes about the game he digs:

“Buying your own ball’s poser. Selling out to the establishment.”

Mosh to that.

1:44

A female--with chipped incisors, a thread-deficient blouse and wearing spandex so tight it could make her arteries curdle--approaches a visitor: “Two men go into the bathroom?”

2:08

When the rest of the West Valley shuts down, Canoga Bowl becomes a crossroads, a gateway to elsewhere.

Trevor Wheeler, 46, unmarried and between jobs, waits on a lady friend.

He chats leisurely about the company he owned, about avoiding alcohol for a decade. His beeper interrupts. “Gotta go,” he says.

2:36

This is a slow night for Brendan Crawford, the West Hills Patrol officer serving as alley security guard. But for the sporadic crashes of rampaging balls and the clickety-clack of pins being replaced, the alley is serene.

“It used to be busier,” Crawford says. “A lot of gangs used to show up when other alleys were closed because of the earthquake.”

Crawford stays until 3:30 a.m. during the week, until 7 a.m. on weekends. For 15 minutes he converses with a burly, tattoo-covered man wearing a bandanna, who shares one of the 46 Best Western hotel rooms next door.

“When his hours overlap with his roommate, he comes here to play video games,” Crawford says.

2:49

And then there was one.

It’s an overdue getaway night for a 23-year-old single parent with two kids, a full-time job and a propensity to answer personal queries with a noncommittal “eh.”

3:00

An L.A. Kings cap tugged over his eyes, his feet bouncing off the floor, the energetic, diminutive Danny Matuan looks the part of a Jawa in Star Wars .

“It runs pretty good, this house,” Matuan chirps, while Mario Fiumara removes oil from lanes with a Zamboni-like vacuum stripper. “We take good care of it.”

He leads a visitor to his hideaways: a dusty office and the cramped area behind the lanes (“the heart and soul of the alley”).

Master switches and contraptions resembling open washing machines spin, churn, and rattle. Each lane’s accouterments include an AccuScore box that controls the monitor, 21 pins, and the mechanisms to control them.

After a roll, the following occurs:

A deck drops down to detect a possible strike, then pick up and re-spot remaining pins after a rake has swept deadwood.

A steel and leather board called a pit cushion blocks the ball.

A pit conveyor moves pins and the ball to pin and ball elevators, respectively, at the rear of the pit. A cross conveyor carries pins from the pin elevator to the turret.

Then the turret delivers 10 pins to the gate, which drops them into place.

3:50

The lanes are virtually empty now, but the billiards room is bustling.

4:15

For 10 months, Fiumara, 40, has manned the graveyard shift four days a week.

“I don’t think you ever get used to the crowd you get in here,” he says, “but you deal with it.”

He will deal with it until nine in the morning.

“It’s mostly a derelict crowd in here between 3 and 5,” Fiumara says. “On this shift, you run a fine line with customers. You are supposed to avoid confrontations. You have to lighten up.”

Bags under his eyes, shaped like crescent moons, are as dark as the pre-dawn sky.

4:20

His bicycle leaning precariously against the ball rack, Tommy Morris shakes his head, walks steady and straight, his paisley pants flapping in the breeze caused by the air conditioner. He pauses, adjusts his black glove, swings his arm.

The ball rolls between pins. Field goal.

Try again?

“Out of work right now,” he says. “Got all the time in the world.”

4:39

Two women, “not the type to bring home to Mom,” Fiumara opines, saunter into the arcade where they can choose from a variety of pinball tables, some of which involve simulated battles.

Behind his desk and in front of a sign that reads “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” Fiumara engages in a fight of his own, with only surveillance cameras as allies. He exchanges barbs with a group of teen-agers his boss has banned from the alley for, among other infractions, finding and keeping a beeper.

Profanity and a show of machismo coarsen the confrontation. The teens offer to “take care” of Fiumara and then threaten to take things outside.

Ultimately, they leave.

Later, as 14 frugal pool sharks share two tables, Fiumara concedes: “These are the two hours I wish this place was closed.”

Canoga Bowl will earn less than $200 during the graveyard shift. Gene Giegoldt, who manages the alley, says that because of insurance concerns, it is cheaper not to close the place. “Maintenance work needs to be done anyway,” he adds.

5:49

All is quiet on the hardwood. Light licks through open doors, off portraits of bowlers past, down empty lanes.

Morris hobbles out of the pool room with his bike, as if planning to ride off into the sunrise. He heads back in.

As night ends, a poem comes to mind, one by Edward Taylor, dead for 266 years:

“Who spread its canopy? Or curtains spun? Who in this bowling alley bowled the sun?”

Could have been anyone.