No Time to Spare

For some families whose workdays are long and whose sleep time is fragmented, the night hours are a balm.

Reversing the usual pattern of waking and sleeping, they manage to steal time together while the world is dark. Some of them do so at Linbrook Bowling Center, the only bowling alley in Orange County where the doors never close.

“You’ve got to do what you can,” says Marco Marquez, 26, bowling at 2 a.m. on a recent Wednesday with wife Yvette and their three young daughters. “Sometimes you just want to be with your family, no matter what the time or cost.”

The Linbrook is a good place to do that. Named for Lincoln Avenue and Brookhurst Street, the Anaheim intersection where it is situated, it has been open continuously since 1958.

Marquez, a Buena Park security system installer, works 60 to 80 hours a week, leaving him precious little time with his wife and daughters, ages 3, 4 and 8.

“I work so much that I usually just feel like watching television and drinking a beer,” he says. This particular night, “everybody was very frustrated--we needed to get out.”

The trip started as a search for ice cream, then evolved into a scramble for dinner after 9 p.m. But all the restaurants were closed, so the family grabbed a fast-food chicken-nugget meal and took it to the bowling alley.

“You can’t do a lot of things at night,” Marquez explains. “You can’t go to the park because it’s too cold. You can’t go play pool because you can’t bring your family. This is the only thing we know of that you can do with your family this late at night.”

That wasn’t always the case. In fact, back in the ‘60s, there were 24-hour bowling alleys across Orange County, says Jeff Gillum, Linbrook’s general manager. But bowling declined in popularity during the early ‘70s.

“The only reason we survived,” Gillum says, “is because, as the others closed, when it got to be 2 or 3 in the morning and people wanted to bowl, they’d come to us.”

Today, the bowling alley, featuring 40 lanes available every day and night except for a few hours on Christmas, attracts 25 to 60 customers between 1 and 8 a.m. on a typical week night, says Tommy Bement, the night manager.

“When the moon is full, we get more traffic,” he says. And “if you’re going to see weirdos, you’re more likely to see them on my shift.”

But his patrons also include college students taking breaks from their studies, bowlers who don’t like to wait for lanes, graveyard-shift workers unwinding on the way home, plus those sharing family time.

Robert Landis, who works all night as a security guard, often awakens his 3-year-old son at 4:30 a.m. for father-son fun at the bowling alley. “It’s basically a hangout,” says Landis, 26, of La Mirada. “All our friends are here. And he likes to bowl,” he says, nodding toward his son.

Ironically, family harmony doesn’t always mean togetherness. Jim Hartley credits the Linbrook with saving his marriage--not by bringing him and his wife together but by keeping them apart. An entrepreneur and bounty hunter who generally works until the wee hours, Hartley, 35, was in the habit of rolling into his Pomona home just about the time that his wife was getting ready for work in the morning.

“She’d be getting up in a bad mood, and I’d be getting off in a bad mood,” he recalls, “so we didn’t get along. She needed her space. That’s why I started coming here on my way home.”

He says he bowls a couple of games to delay his arrival until after her departure, and the relationship prospers.

Michelle Morgan also uses the bowling alley as an escape, in her case after caring for her elderly grandmother all day.

“When she sleeps, I sneak away,” says Morgan, 27, of Anaheim. “I set my alarm for 2 a.m. to go out and bowl.”

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The very early-morning hours also draw another type of patron: the independent soul in search of solitude that can be elusive in daylight.

A bearded man with a long ponytail and tattoos of dancing women on his legs walks in. The man, wearing a T-shirt promoting the heavy-metal album “Cowboys From Hell,” says he’d just as soon not give his name.

“There are people I’d prefer not to know where I am,” he says, glancing over his shoulder as he talks.

He admits to being 30 years old, though, a carpenter by trade and a regular at the Linbrook after 2:30 a.m.

“I’m not a people person,” he says. “There are fewer people out at night and fewer idiots on the roads. And I’d rather throw a 14-pound ball at a bunch of wooden pins than go out and run somebody over with my car.”

Another late arrival--a man wearing ragged corduroys and a heavy coat--appears like a phantom at the door, where he stands wistfully. “I slept a whole lot yesterday,” he says, “so I could stay up tonight and come out to play.”

But he doesn’t go in. He was ejected recently, he says, for annoying other bowlers. “I’m no longer welcome,” he confides, shivering in the night air. “I’m on restriction.”

He is joined by a young man holding a cellular telephone. The newcomer has been bowling with college friends celebrating the end of finals, but now he wants to call his girlfriend in San Francisco. He presses the receiver to his ear and listens intently for a few seconds, then relaxes and lowers the phone.

“Nobody answered,” he says. “I guess there’s nobody home.”

He doesn’t seem surprised, though. It’s 3:45 a.m., after all--they’re probably out bowling.