by Adam Ruben
Maybe pinball is here to stay. Maybe it’s too integrated into our society to ever leave for good—certainly not a necessity for life but a nice thing to have. Like a smile.
“Were pinball not to survive, the world would continue,” admits Stern at the end of Special When Lit. “But a little bit of the fabric of life would be gone.”
Before that can happen, it’s time for one more pinball event before this book is due to the publisher, one more attempt to see if I have any shot at seriously competing, one more time Marina will watch the kids as I gallivant off to an arcade: PAPA19.
11
PAPA19: Judgment Day
* * *
THE VOLUNTEER AT PAPA19 looks like she’s in high school, and I think I’m scaring her. I’m trying hard not to inflict too much of my righteous, pinball-fueled indignation on her, but I think she can tell I’m close to losing my mind.
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” she tells me meekly. “I talked to the woman at the desk, and there’s nothing we can do.”
I’m not the sort of person with immediate access to rage, but at this point in the evening, my last shot at qualifying for the finals is about to disappear, and for no good reason. I’m about to unleash a tirade of dissatisfaction, but this volunteer, who has spent hours diligently tapping players’ information into her handheld tablet, just like I did for a couple hours at PAPA18, looks so scared. She’s precringing. She looks like she’s seen more than one older male pinball player fly off the handle after a mistyped score and is bracing for an explosion.
“But . . .” I say. And beyond that, I have nothing.
Let’s go back to the previous morning. I haven’t yet arrived at PAPA. I’m zooming across the Pennsylvania Turnpike in my Corolla, the Saturn having ended its fourteen-year run with a puff of smoke, a semimelted engine, and potentially a new life in the capable hands of National Public Radio’s vehicle donation program.
This will be my final visit to PAPA, if Marina has any say in the matter, which she typically does. This is the last PAPA before my book is due, which makes it the last PAPA I’ll have a reason, beyond enjoyment, to attend.
Once more over the Appalachians. Once more through the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel, and once more opening wide the double doors to Carnegie’s glorious annual arcade.
The longest lines this time are for Stern’s newest offering, Ghostbusters (2016), possibly timed to coincide with the release of the new film, even though the game art is based on the original. It’s a deliberately retro callback that earns fairly universal praise; the 2016 Ghostbusters movie would not have been nearly as successful a subject, as it has no Egon, no Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and there is no Dana.1
I’ve convinced my college roommate, Lee, to fly up from Atlanta and attend PAPA with me. Lee’s wife, a pediatrician, is doing something very important with vaccines in Sierra Leone for a month, leaving him in search of time-intensive diversions.
Before boarding his flight, Lee texts me a photo of eighty dollars in quarters stacked on the airport floor, meticulously picked out from plastic bags of change he’s been accumulating for a decade. “Game on,” he texts. I reply that PAPA only takes tokens.
At PAPA, as Lee brings an outsider’s perspective to the inherent weirdness of a massive pinball tournament and the wacky folks who play there, I realize somewhat sadly that I’ve become inured to the eccentricity. The physical quirks I identified during PAPA17 and 18—golf gloves, fanny packs, abundant male ponytails, sweatshorts, cameras strapped to belts—now seem unremarkable. I see a man in suspenders and an Egyptian pharaoh hat, another in a Star Trek uniform, and still another with a raccoon tail dangling from his rear belt loop. I watch a woman dancing, literally dancing, for ten minutes straight while waiting in line to play, and I have to actively remind myself that this is unusual.2
During lunch, for example, at the next table, two women drink coffee concentrate (not coffee but coffee concentrate), eat matzo (it’s not Passover), and—oh God, are they downing mouthfuls of bagged sauerkraut?
“Such an interesting slice of humanity,” remarks Lee. Careful, I want to warn the pinball players, as Venkman did in the second Ghostbusters film. You’re scaring the straights.
Lee is a perfect example of someone who could be nudged into the world of pinball. He’s played a bit, but no more than your average boardwalk-goer. He’s currently uninterested in competing, even in D Division, but he’s having fun on the practice games, with me as the tour guide supplying an annoying overabundance of information about each machine.
“I’m trying to combo it from the left ramp to the right ramp or right loop,” I tell him while slapping the buttons of Johnny Mnemonic, “and that lights throwing spikes, which will start super spinner; then if I can get quick multiball, I’ll just pound the spinner.”
Lee steps up to the machine. He points at the gap between the flippers. He says, “I’m trying to get it to not go there.”
I have the same goal on my first entry in C Division—trying to get the ball not to go there—but you’d never know it. I launch my first ball on Mousin’ Around!, a 1989 machine whose theme is aggression toward mice. It’s a ball I’ve played over and over again in my head since PAPA18, because this is it, this is my chance to qualify for the finals, and it’s this or nothing, and it all starts now.
Ball one on game one of entry one is the definition of touch-and-drain: launch, roll over one switch, then gone, for a score of 10,010. It leads to a shitty finish, then an even worse showing on World Cup Soccer.
Entry one reminds me what a long, expensive slog this whole process will be. Despite a fearless game on No Fear (1995), my five games in entry one place me twenty-first overall, which would be sufficient on Saturday night—it’s the top twenty-four who qualify for the finals—but this early, my position will surely plummet as more people play.
Dinner takes place once more at the ersatz calypso restaurant Bahama Breeze, where the FSPA group clinks glasses of rum and wishes each other luck, then enjoys a spirited kvetch session about scorekeeping volunteers who stand too close to players’ elbows.
Back by the tropically decorated bathrooms, I call Marina to wish the kids a good night.
“Say ‘Good night, Daddy!’” Marina instructs Benjamin, now almost two years old.
“Good night, guy.”
“Did he say ‘Da-y,’ like ‘Daddy’?” I ask.
“No, he said ‘Good night, guy.’”
I know Benjamin didn’t intend this, but it feels like a demotion.
Entries two and three mirror the theme of entry one. I now have the second-highest scores on each of three machines—one on each entry. This accomplishes little. Sweaty and vexed by the ignominy of helplessly flapping at a tiny ball, I know I’m doing this wrong.
As evening turns to night, Lee says he wants to go back to the hotel. I want to stay until they kick us out at midnight, but I’m Lee’s ride.
“It’s been a long day,” he cajoles. “You started driving early.” It’s certainly true; my day began what feels like a lifetime ago, over two hundred miles away, waking up early to shower before the kids got up, pulling laundry out of the dryer, then trying (unsuccessfully) to convince Maya that she didn’t need to wear a Belle costume to breakfast.
But there’s something about Lee’s tactic that gives me pause. He’s not saying we should go to the hotel because he’s tired; he’s saying we should go because I’m tired. All my life, people have been trying to convince me that I’m tired. I’m not tired! I want to play pinball.
Telling someone he’s tired is like telling someone . . . I don’t know, that pinball is silly. That it’s not worthwhile to invest your time and energy in a game you know is ultimately inconsequential but that, nevertheless, has a special pull for you. It’s a way of mainstreaming the obsessives, of convincing us what is and isn’t rational to desire. But you know what? We obsessives are just fine, thanks.
Instead of getting into my car, I challenge Lee to a game b
ased on cars, Corvette, and when he scores seventy million, I score over seven hundred million.
“Now who’s tired?” I ask with a huge grin.
“Me,” says Lee.
Fair enough. At this point, my best entry has drifted down to thirty-second place, but tomorrow is a new day. And a crucial one. This book is due in two months—on, how neat, the 40th anniversary of the relegalization of pinball in New York City, not to mention the 145th anniversary (plus one day) of the issuing of Montague Redgrave’s patent for “Improvements in Bagatelles.” Marina is unlikely to support another visit to PAPA until the kids are legal adults. If I want to qualify for the finals, tomorrow is the only day.
“Hi,” I grumble to the hotel desk clerk. At this point, Lee and I are both beyond exhausted. “Reservation for Ruben.”
“All we have left is a smoking room,” he says.
“Seriously? But I have a reservation for a nonsmoking room,” I tell him. “I made the reservation three months ago. Here, I can show it to you on my phone. And I called tonight to say I’d be arriving late.”
“Don’t know what to say,” shrugs the clerk, more interested in his own smartphone than anything I could show him on mine. “We gave away the room. We had a lot of people come in—there’s some kind of Ping-Pong convention.”
I feel more prepared the next morning for entry four. While Lee showers, I watch Bowen Kerins’s tutorial videos, marveling at the man’s ability to assess the value and the potential danger of every shot. His brain is a databank of rules, which he can combine and evaluate in a fraction of a second.
At PAPA, lights flash, solenoids fire, and sounds overlap: the usual. This morning I’m trying to achieve a Zen-like state, even though I don’t really know what one is or whether it would help me. Calm down. You know how to do this. You’re well rested. One bad ball is just one bad ball. One bad game is just one bad game.
And, as I learn from entry four, five bad games are five bad games. I keep hearing a new idiom from frustrated players: “shit the bed,” as in, “I really shit the bed on Iron Man.” I don’t know whether the phrase implies soiling one’s sheets or physically defecating an entire bed—a significantly worse outcome, medically speaking—but either way, entry four shits the bed.
As I start my fifth entry, the lines for each machine have grown longer, and I have a pounding headache. I think it’s from focusing fully on a game, getting the blood flowing, then standing behind two or three people to wait for the next game. Go go go focus focus now stop and wait, and wait, and here we go this is it go go focus focus. My hands shake from repeated adrenaline withdrawal.
Entry five shits the bed.
Then I notice someone familiar. He’s tall and comfortable, with short dark gray hair and stubble, all made practically unnoticeable by his sky-blue eyes and giant smile. He’s wearing an untucked button-down denim shirt, playing Stingray (1977), and laughing with some friends.
Oh my God. It’s Ed Robertson.
The lead singer of Barenaked Ladies is playing pinball at PAPA.
I’m not a celeb stalker. I don’t read Us Weekly, and I don’t watch TMZ. But to me, there’s always been something so, I don’t know, separate about those in the limelight. Something palpable. Something that makes me nervous. Which is all to say that when I’m in the vicinity of someone well known, I enter Famous Person Mode. It is not a pretty sight.
In 1997, for about fifteen seconds, I met then president Bill Clinton. He asked me two questions while shaking my hand. The first was my name, which I told him correctly. The second was where I would start college in the fall. I told him—and this is verbatim—“Uh . . . I forgot.”
Lee agrees to help me pinball-stalk Ed Robertson, which means we just “happen” to pick a game to play near where Robertson is playing while I try to build up the nerve to talk to him. I’ve actually been e-mailing Robertson’s agency for months, trying to see if I could interview him for this book, so I feel like I have an in, but . . . gah. I don’t know.
My half-minute conversation with Robertson is a blur. I tell him about this book, he writes his e-mail address in my little notebook, and for some reason, I mention that I enjoyed his New Year’s Eve concert in 1998 at the Spectrum outside Philadelphia.
“That part was lame,” Lee says when I gleefully recall my thirty seconds with Robertson and show off his e-mail address. “But other than that, good job!”
I relate the good news to Marina on the phone, much to Maya’s delight—apparently the phone was on speaker, and I have now caused Maya to run around the house, laughing and yelling, “Daddy met a bare naked lady!”3
Having dispensed with the lameness and made the evening a little more difficult for Marina, it’s time for entry six. It doesn’t shit the bed, but it doesn’t do whatever the opposite of shitting the bed is, either. It’s not enough.
Lee, at this point, says he’s “getting a little pinballed out” and goes to the café area to sit and read. The clock ticks closer to midnight, when qualifying ends. My arm hurts. Don’t care. I’m thirsty. Don’t care. There are hundreds of pinball machines between me and the water fountain, so I’ll never make it there without stopping to play anyway.
Entry seven includes a score of 150 million on The Twilight Zone. Ordinarily that’s a decent score, but with player after player putting up scores on these machines, the bar continues to rise, and a score of 150 million is now worth essentially zero. By the time entry seven finishes, I’m still in forty-third place, and there’s only time for one more entry before midnight.
Lee has gone back to the hotel. It all comes down to this. Over the course of the last three PAPAs, I’ve put in a total of twenty-three entries, and this one—entry eight tonight—will be my twenty-fourth and last. In my notebook, I write, “DO NOT BE BAD.”
My first of five games is Mousin’ Around! I don’t know why I keep choosing this machine—I’m not playing it well—but compared to some of the other games, I at least know the rules on Mousin’. This time I drain with a score of 2.6 million. Hmm. On this machine, that’s not bad.
Next is World Cup Soccer, which can be a fast, frustrating game. My strategy is always to advance toward multiball, which can be started by shooting the ball into a notoriously difficult-to-hit scoop, a metal strip that guides the ball into a hole. I try to light that scoop early via a series of other shots, making multiball available, then spend as much time as possible trying to bury the ball in the scoop. Sometimes it works right away. Often it doesn’t.
This time, it does. Oh, wow, it truly does. I have multiball. I’m scoring during multiball. I’m having not just a good game but an epic one, surely one of the top few games in this contest, a game that culminates in a score just over one billion. The volunteer shows me her tablet, and I confirm my score.
I can still blow this, but I’m two good games for two—on pace to qualify. However, while in line for the third game, No Fear, I check my entry-in-progress on my phone to see where that World Cup score ranks.
Uh . . . something’s wrong. My score is listed as 280 million, a zero on World Cup, not one billion. That’s not my score.
I flag down the high school volunteer I’m about to intimidate. She apologizes but explains that there’s a reason they ask us to confirm our scores on their little tablets before moving on to the next game. Now I see the reason: When something is incorrectly entered, it becomes the player’s fault, not the volunteer’s. When I confirmed my score, was I even looking at the tablet? I don’t remember.
This is not happening. No no no. This is my last entry of my last trip to PAPA, and everything is falling into place. I will not be thwarted by a clerical error. I scored over one billion on World Cup. I don’t want to be difficult. But I think I need to be difficult.
Losing my place in line for No Fear, I find a purple-haired woman at the main desk and explain my issue. I’m definitely not the only person who’s ever had this problem—it’s bound to happen when they’re trying to manage thousands of entries
in real time. But why me? Why now?
She can’t reassign my score, she says, because what’s to stop anyone from approaching the desk and claiming they had a billion points?
With a little research, I see the source of the error: my high score was most likely switched with the score of someone named Kody. He has my billion, and I have his 280 million. To fix my score, the purple-haired woman concedes, I’d need to find Kody, bring him to the desk, and have him agree to swap scores.
I don’t know who Kody is. I don’t want to yell, “Does anyone know Kody?” in the middle of the tournament, so I can only look at every player’s nametag and hope to encounter Kody. This is more difficult than it sounds, since Kody could be anywhere in the facility or maybe in the parking lot, or maybe he’s gone home—and if he’s playing a game at the moment, I can’t exactly lean over the playfield glass to scrutinize the tag hanging from his neck.
Kody. Kody, Kody, Kody. Where the hell are you?
Roger Sharpe partially credited serendipity for his magic plunge in 1976. Serendipity is a wonderful phenomenon in that it needs no cause, like divine intervention, nor a trend, like luck. It just needs the right thing to happen at the right time. And sometimes it does.
The first person whose nametag I look at, standing right there by the C Division games, is Kody. Bingo.
Even better, Kody himself just noticed his unexpected billion on World Cup, and, honest guy that he is, gladly approaches the information desk with me to fix the mix-up. Kody, wherever you are, thank you.4
After a decent showing on No Fear, my next game is Full Throttle, Heighway Pinball’s much-anticipated first game. The presence of a Full Throttle machine at PAPA means that Heighway has officially become the fourth manufacturer of pinball machines, joining Stern, Jersey Jack, and Spooky.5 Lines for Full Throttle are especially long, since the game is enough of a rarity that everyone wants to play it.
