Leisureplex: A melted Viennetta, a handful of dust

Performed at De School on January 7th 2024. The theme was Conclusions: After the sun has set.

A bowling alley of my youth

As we are sharing memories of De School, with personal reflections, the melancholic and euphoric, the ridiculous and the sublime, I thought I would take us all away to another place from my past. A place that is no longer there. And in revisiting my own memories, I hope it will soothe the loss of De School and the feeling when a building is lost to the passage of time. The building I will be speaking about was in a suburb of Dublin, Stillorgan, Leisureplex the bowling alley of my youth.  

Leisureplex Stillorgan was razed to the ground in 2021. The rumours of its demise had made it to me in the Netherlands. Formerly, Stillorgan Bowl, it opened its glistening doors in 1963, it was Ireland’s first bowling alley and hosted the Bowling World Cup in 1989. Then, it was the centre of the ten-pin universe. With this recent destruction, it seems to me, nothing is sacred; All that is solid melts into air. The wrecking ball had replaced the bowling ball. Now, the building is confined to the dust heap. But the memories sustain me, take me back, take me way way back to Leisureplex 1999, at the turn of the last millennium:

The well-waxed lanes where bowlers wore the battered and tattered shoes fit for a clown at the local circus; the gleaming heavy balls appearing like magic from the throat of a churning machine, the ten pins illuminated in the distance. It always smelt like ketchup and shared footwear. The rattle, the scuttle, the clunk of the gutter. Crude murals on the wall were beautiful to us as children, like the frescos of old masters. Televisions, that fizzed with static, displayed the scores and when a player got a strike, a spare, or nothing at all, the television showed grainy and absurd animations of bowling paraphernalia, scenes of inanimate things coming to life. I remember seeing:

·       A bowling ball cracking like an egg, a runny yolk pouring down the drain

·       A golden ball metamorphizing into a plump turkey, squawking and flapping in celebration.

·       Elusive pins bending and mutating to avoid the incoming force of the rolling ball.

·       Three pins knocked down, growing wings and ascending into pin heaven.

But now the screens are black and the footage is lost. The ten pin angels have floated towards the clouds. And it makes me think of all those bowling balls, which themselves are feats of genius invention and alchemy, where did they end up?

Leisureplex was a popular destination for birthday parties. It was never just bowling, there was so much more. The Zoo was a kids soft play area, a maze of slides and tunnels. It was primal, it was a world of endless entertainment: The high freefall, the ball pit, tubes into tubes, pipes into pipes, tangled, twisted, the nets, the rope bridge. The zookeepers were away, and it was feeding time. Baboons throwing muck. Hippos in the depths. Parrots in the canopy. Snakes in the reeds. This was everything, a labyrinthine jungle, where energy was exhausted and imagination soared.

After the madness of the Zoo, food would be served for we were hungry after play. Cocktail sausages, chips, chicken nuggets, goujons, washed down with the fizziest of sugary drinks. And for dessert, a Viennetta ice cream cake was wheeled out like a prized fatted calf. The birthday candles blazing. We would stuff our jowls until our brains froze over. And to us children, the future lay before us like the dusted chocolate ripples on this continental cake. A man in a massive dinosaur costume would deliver the Viennetta. He went by the name of Plexi. I now wonder, who was that sweating man in that suit, what joy he brought to us, but what perpetual itching hell he must have existed in.

Right beside the Zoo, there was Pompeii Paints, a place for less animalistic mayhem, a place for young artists to paint and sculpt in clay. You could make crockery, bring home a mug, a plate, a tile or a vase for your mother. Now looking back, now with all we know about Leisureplex and its destruction, the name of this clay making area takes on a whole new meaning. I think of the fate of Pompeii under Mount Vesuvius where in 79 AD hot ash rained down on the city in the bay of Naples and lava flowed over Herculaneum burying it for centuries, preserving it for archaeologists of the future to find. In the case of Leisureplex, the bubbling magma came in the form of suburban redesign and town planning. Less extreme of course, but as T. S. Eliot writes, how do world’s end? Not with a bang, with a whimper.

Before leaving, we could squeeze a last bit of time out in the arcade, pool tables illuminated bright, horsey boys, zombies coming out of the screen, Rally-X, air hockey, motorbikes, and dunking in basketball hoops.

Leisureplex opened its sliding doors into a limitless, hyperactive party, and I always left, I was dragged from it, wanting more and more. It was a technicolour universe, and at the time, we deemed it the pinnacle of technological progress. Perhaps it’s a good thing I never returned to see the place falling into destitution. The lanes unwaxed and rough. The bowling balls losing their colour. The Zoo lifeless, not a chirp out of it. The dinosaur costume left out by the bins. The Viennetta slowly melting, turning into tepid mush, pouring down the sink, getting sucked down into the dark.

While back in Dublin in December, I went to Stillorgan one evening. All my fears were confirmed. The old site of Leisureplex Stillorgan was unrecognizable. The empty space was filled by a large residential complex, a monstrous structure. This was what replaced the great bowling alley of my youth. The lanes of my young life pulled apart, planks cracked into dust, pulped to nothingness, a fallen edifice of my disappearing youth, replaced by a set of towers of eight-storey apartment blocks with 232 luxury units for Dublin’s lucrative rental market. With the disappearance of Leisureplex, now I realize that on every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation.

Noordwijkerhout and ascending pins

In preparing my story for tonight, I did most of it on a short post-New Year holiday in Noordwijk aan zee. I was staying in a small cabin sheltered in the dunes. Battening down the hatches during a massive storm hitting from the North Sea. It was a time of reflection and recovery after the gluttony of the festive season.

There was some respite from the lashing rain and we got a taxi to Flamingo’s Party Center. This was Noordwijk’s answer to Leisureplex Stillorgan. My girlfriend and I bowled alongside young families screaming with glee. Again, the place smelt of ketchup and feet. But it was different, this time, an unnerving stink, what was going behind those all you can eat swing doors, I thought to myself. I dread to think. And sharing shoes with random members of the public, what on god’s good earth, who’s idea was that? As a fully adult man, I am putting my foot down. This has to stop.

But anyway, something felt off. The shoes didn’t quite fit me. I couldn’t find the right weight of bowling ball. The 14 seemed too light, the 16 much too heavy. The 15 was nowhere to be seen. Despite respectable scoring and an enjoyable bout of bowling, I was left with a heavy feeling in my gut, longing for Leisureplex, I was bowling against the current, rolling back ceaselessly into my past. After 60 minutes, we handed over the shoes, got our jackets and went out towards our hut.

Early the next morning, we went walking in the dunes of Noordwijk, the loose sand scuttled over the ground, there was sea froth jiggling, gulls went nowhere against the gust, the marram grass danced its pleasant dance, and far in the distance were figures, ghostly, disappearing and appearing in the salt sea spray.

Then, in a moment, the sun appeared, the bright orb, resembling miraculously a burning bowling ball, a vision above, a divine interruption. As I stared into the light I thought, almost blinded, what is the sun but a big bowling ball in the cosmos and this planet another, orbiting around the gutters, floating amongst the stars?

I found myself smiling a wide grin, praising Leisureplex, the memories, the bowling balls and the pins of my past. I realized then, it is not the building that makes it, it’s the memories that stay with us, they are sticky, so sticky, stuck to all our senses, and that’s where they will remain, the drenched soapy mop of time will not mop these memories away. The physical is ephemeral. The ethereal moments we shared are eternal.

I never got a chance to place my palm on the brick wall of Leisureplex and say a final goodbye. But tonight, we have that chance, poetry, stories, memories pouring from our hearts as we say our final goodbyes to De School.

These lost structures, one by one, becoming shades – Leisureplex, De School, what next? – they truly had it all. And we are much the better for their existence. And in all tomorrow’s parties, all down those waxy lanes, across dance floors elsewhere, sipping frothy coffee in cafés, in other places and new spaces, we will always take a brief moment and remember the days and nights we all shared in the buildings where we built the foundations of our lives.