I will never forget you, Al, behind the counter, with the too-tight blue polo all three buttons open, collar popped before it was even a thing, and the way the hair curled out of the open neck from your chest, so wild that my sisters developed a special hand motion, like a charade, just to indicate it—an open-palmed toodaloo wave at the hollow of their throat, the fingers playing the parts of little hairs gasping for breath. I will never forget the mornings that I spent there on the pinball machines that you had brought in and cycled out each month: Pin-Bot, The Addams Family, Playboy, Indiana Jones, Terminator 2, Twilight Zone, High Speed, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Whirlwind, Haunted House. I know now that they were some of the best, but all I knew then is that there was nothing quite like pinball.
The thing about those machines is that they were physical objects that contained physical objects that all moved and rubbed and stuck and broke like anything else and any of us, and yet I was distracted enough by the fact that there was a game going on in there, under the glass, to be both enthralled with and ignorant of it at the same time. No matter how hard I'd hit the flipper button, the button did the same thing, snapped that flipper up at exactly the speed dictated by its mechanism. And yet I couldn't help but feel like I was tapped into the damned thing somehow, like slamming the button's gonna make that ball careen up a ramp this much harder, get this many more points, feel this much more satisfying. Knowing it's just a game doesn't make it hurt any less when I see the ball screaming straight down the middle and know that no amount of nudging is gonna save me now, it's just a game, tell that to the 13-year-old who sunk fifty cents for three balls into one of the new tables and just wants to see how it plays.
My dad used to tell me stories about how when he was growing up, pinball went three games for a quarter, and the boys, there were four of them, they didn't have a lot of money so they'd do it flipper-flipper, one of them on the left flipper and one of them on the right, so they could both play for the same coin, only made sense. I don't remember the first machine I ever played on, but I know I was too short to see up into it, and I had to stand on a chair, and of course I couldn't reach both buttons, so I flipper-flippered it with my father. My parents eventually split up, and it wasn't but a year or two after my dad remarried that my new step-brother and I joined the bowling league in town to get out of the house on the weekends, do something together. I'd wait till our three games were over before I hit the pinball tables. I was still a kid but I wasn't a kid anymore, and eventually I taught myself to stop pushing both flippers at the same time, and I started learning how to cradle it, and then I started aiming for shots, and it was like anything that I felt myself getting control over at that time in my life. And then it became something.
There was something that appealed to me about pinball from the very beginning, which is that for all the planning you do, for all the calculated risks and planned shots you take, sometimes the damn thing comes screaming back down at you and you have no choice but to just hit it and let it happen. It flies up into the mix and it knocks around for a while, and there is an instant there as it's banging off your flipper that anything can happen. It could bounce off the jets for ever and ever trapped in there and jack your bonus multiplier way up, or it could loop around a ramp or drop into a scoop target I didn't even notice was active. And then sometimes the most magic thing of all would happen when I least expected it—multiball! Just keep hitting them, line up each one as it falls but keep your eye on the other ones out there, doing their thing by themselves. Each new little problem would roll down at me and I couldn't solve them all but some of them I could send right back up, what a thrill to keep it all bouncing around.
Of course there's an inevitable part to every game of pinball that has ever been played in the entire world, on every table, by the best and the worst players from the past to the present, as sure as death, and that's that it's going to end. I always secretly loved that part about pinball, just like the best video games—it's you against the machine, and you are absolutely not going to win, ever. But as you play, the more you do, the further you get, you almost believe for a second that you might beat it, until you remember of course that you can't, there is no beating it, only beating a score, beating yourself, doing better than you have ever done. There were games I'd drain two balls and give up, then play for twenty minutes on my desperation final ball and feel like the king. And there were games that I felt like I'd keep on playing for hours and hours, and before I knew it I'd drop two straight down the gutter, bounce one off the bumpers full-speed into an outlane, wouldn't even get to touch 'em. Tough break, kiddo.
Sometimes I'd catch that smell at one of those amusement park arcades, they'd have a couple tables in there I hadn't ever seen before. And every table was different, even if it was the same one. Maybe on one of the older ones the left flipper's a little weaker than the right, you can see the color's different and they obviously didn't have a good flipper to swap out when the old one broke so they just plugged this one in, patching up what was missing with whatever was available. I hated those but I loved them at the same time, they were imperfect, they were products of their environments.
A lot of time has passed since I've been able to just stumble on a pinball machine. The service guy doesn't bring them to that bowling alley anymore I'd bet, if it's even still open, I haven't been back in fifteen years. Actually I feel kind of lucky now that we have video games that pretend to be pinball machines, stuff like Pinball Arcade which has these actual real pinballs that I remember all built up to play on the TV. It's kind of an interesting thought, that these machines that so many memories are tied to for so many people, are, like so many other things that we don't often stop to think about, fragile, physical, impermanent objects. There will come a time when you can't just play a pinball game. If that time isn't already now! Just like there will come a time when there are no CRT television sets left, or when analog radio broadcasts are switched off for good, or anything else. Nintendo games, computer programs, all that stuff is basically safe, they're data, they run on chips. Pinball tables are less a thing and more a collection of things. Bits of plastic, miles of wire and lights, metal rails and balls and springs and contraptions all slung together and arranged and stuck in a box. Who keeps them running? Who will replace them when they're all gone?
It seems strange to me sometimes that the memories of a metal ball slamming off some hunks of plastic and wood could make me feel a certain way. But I also think the way our memories work is inherently irrational. We can insert memories we never had and believe they're true. I remember standing on a chair for flipper-flipper with my dad, but did I really? Was it maybe just in front of a video game? I'm pretty sure I played Whirlwind a lot, but was it Whirlwind? Was it maybe White Water?
One thing I am sure was for real was just like that nutmeg or the fresh towels, that particular smell of the griddle they'd use to cook the burgers, the deep fryer for those breaded mushrooms. The damp air full of old cigarette smoke from the other side of the bar, where the adults would throw darts while the kids did their bowling and pinball. I will smell it long after there are any pinball tables to play flipper-flipper on with my theoretical son, I will remember it in subway restaurants where two old men sit across from each other, both playing slot machines on their smartphones.
Photo credit: Goodnight, Raleigh!