Pinball, 1973 (10 page)

The Rat looked blankly at the six empty bottles of beer lined up in front of him. Between the bottles he had a good view of J’s back.

Maybe the tide’s going out, thought the Rat. I was eighteen the first time I had a beer here. How many thousands of bottles of beer ago had it been? How many thousands of potatoes worth of fries, how many thousands of jukebox selections? All of it, everything that had swept like waves up to this little barge, was withdrawing. Haven’t I already drunk enough beers in my time? Of course, by the time people get to be thirty or forty they’ve had their share of beers. Even so, he thought, there’s something about the beer here. And twenty-five, that’s not such a bad age to retire. People with any sense have gotten out of college and are working as loan clerks at the bank by this age.

The Rat added another empty bottle to the lineup, and drank down half his brimming glass in one gulp. Out of sheer reflex, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then wiped his damp hand on the seat of his cotton pants.

Let’s think this one through, he told himself.

Don’t run away, think. You’re twenty-five years old, a good age to be thinking a bit. You’re two twelve-year old-boys old, kid, how do you measure up? Not even one boy’s worth. Maybe not even worth as much as an ant farm in a pickle jar. Oh, lay off; enough with these stupid metaphors. They don’t do any good. Think, where did you go wrong? C’mon, remember. Like I even know where to start looking.

The Rat gave up and guzzled down the rest of his beer. Then he raised his hand and ordered another bottle.

“You’re drinking too much today,” J said. No matter, the eighth bottle took its place on the counter.

His head ached a bit. His body bobbed up and down on unseen waves. He felt sluggish behind the eyes. Vomit, said a voice at the back of his head.

Go ahead and spit it up. Then you can have yourself a good long think. So stand up, get yourself to the john. No good. Can’t make it to first base.

Yet somehow the Rat managed to throw out his chest, stride to the restroom, open the door, chase out a young woman who was touching up her mascara, and bend over the toilet.

How many years has it been since I got myself vomiting sick? Forgotten how to vomit. You undo your trousers, was it? Cut the dumb jokes. Just shut up and vomit. Vomit till nothing comes but gastric juice.

Once the Rat had vomited up all the liquid in his stomach, he sat down on the toilet and smoked a cigarette. Then he washed his face and hands with soap, and smoothed down his hair at the mirror with wet hands. A bit on the gloomy side perhaps, but his nose and cheeks weren’t so bad-looking.

The kind of face a junior high school teacher could love, maybe.

After leaving the restroom, he went over to the woman whom he’d interrupted at her make-up, and apologized. He returned to the counter, drank half a glass of beer, chased it with a single gulp of icewater from J. He shook his head two or three times, and by the time he’d lit up a cigarette, his head was resuming its normal functions.

Well, ready then, the Rat muttered. There’s a long night ahead, let’s get down to thinking.

It was the winter of 1970 when I slipped into the enchanted kingdom of pinball. I might as well have been living in a dark hole, those six months. A hole dug to my size right in the middle of an open meadow, where I just covered myself, putting a lid on all sound. Not a thing engaged me. When evening rolled around I’d wake up, bundle up in my coat, and have myself a time off in a corner of the game center.

I’d finally found myself a three-flipper “Spaceship” exactly like the one at J’s Bar. When I put in a coin and pressed the play button, the machine would raise its targets to such a succession of noises it’d almost start shaking. Then the bonus light would go out, the six digits of the scoreboard would return to zero, and the first ball would spring into the lane. An endless stream of coins fed into the machine, until one month later, a chill and rainy evening in early winter, my score soared to six figures like a hot-air balloon after the last sandbag is tossed overboard.

I wrestled my trembling fingers away from the flipper buttons, leaned back against the wall, drank my ice-cold can of beer, and stared for the longest time at those six digits registered on the scoreboard–105,220.

That was the beginning of my brief honeymoon with the pinball machine. I hardly showed up at the university, and poured half the earnings from my part-time job into pinball. I became practiced in most techniques – hugging, passing, trapping, the stop shot – and soon enough it seemed someone would always be watching in the background when I played. A high school girl with bright red lipstick even came up and brushed her breast against my arm.

By the time I broke 150,000, winter had really set in. There I’d be, alone in the freezing, deserted game center, bundled up in my duffel coat, muffler wrapped around my neck up to my ears, grappling with the machine. The face I’d encounter from time to time in the restroom mirror looked lean and haggard. My skin was flaky. The last sip of each beer began to taste like lead. Cigarette butts scattered everywhere around my feet, I’d munch on a hot dog or something I’d keep thrust in my pocket.

She was great, though. That three-flipper “Spaceship” – only I understood her, and only she understood me. Whenever I pressed her replay button, she’d perk up with a little hum, click the six digits on the board to zero, then smile at me. I’d pull her plunger into position – not a fraction of an inch off – and let that gleaming silver ball fly up the lane onto the field. And while the ball was racing about, it was as if I were smoking potent hashish; my mind was set free.

All sorts of disconnected ideas floated into my head, then disappeared. All sorts of people drifted into view across the glass top over the field, then faded away. Like a two-way mirror to my dreams, the glass top reflected my own mind as it flickered in unison with the bumper and bonus lights.

It’s not your fault, she said. To which I only kept shaking my head. You’re not to blame, you gave it your all, didn’t you?

No way, said I. Left flipper, top transfer, ninth target. Not even close. I didn’t get a single thing right. I hardly moved a finger. But I could have, if I’d been on the ball.

There’s only so much a person can do, she said.

Maybe so, said I, but that doesn’t change a thing.

It’ll always be that way. Return lane, trap, kick out, out hole, rebound, hugging, sixth

target bonus light, 121,150. It’s over, she said, it’s all over.

* * *

In February of the new year, she vanished. The game center was stripped clean, and the following month it had become an all-night doughnut shop.

The kind of place where girls in curtain-material uniforms brought you tasteless doughnuts on tasteless plates. There were high school students who parked their bikes out front and nighthawk cabbies, bar hostesses, and diehard hippies, all drinking coffee with the exact same bottomed-out expression. I ordered a cup of their awful coffee and a cinnamon doughnut, and asked the waitress if she knew anything about the game center.

She gave me a dirty look, the way she might have looked at a doughnut that had fallen on the floor.

“Game center?”

“The joint that was here up to just a little while ago.”

“Haven’t the foggiest,” she said, shaking her head wearily. Nobody remembers a thing from the month before, that’s the kind of town it was.

I roamed the streets in a blue funk. My three-flipper Spaceship was gone, and nobody knew where.

That’s when I gave up pinball. When the time comes, everybody gives up pinball. Nothing more to it.

Rain had been falling for days, then suddenly let up on Friday evening. From the penthouse window, the town made a depressing sight, soaked to the gills and swollen with rainwater. The setting sun breaking through the clouds turned them a mysterious color, and the afterglow painted the room in the same hue.

The Rat slipped a windbreaker over his T-shirt and headed into town. The asphalt streets of the shopping arcade were dotted here and there with still puddles that stretched out dark and wet as far as the eye could see. The whole town had that evening-after-the-rain smell about it. Pines along the river stood drenched top to bottom, fine droplets at the drooping tips of their green needles. Runoff coursed thick and brown into the river, then slid down the channeled concrete river bottom out to sea.

Evening was over almost as soon as it began, and darkness fell damp over everything. Then in an instant, the dampness turned to fog.

The Rat rested his elbow on the car window and made a slow tour of the town. Banks of white fog slanted westward up the drive into the hills. In the end, he took the riverside road down to the coast.

He stopped the car by the seawall, let back his reclining seat, and smoked a cigarette. The sand on the beach, the concrete blocks along the shoreline, the trees of the windbreak, everything was wetted down and dark. Yet a warm yellow light poured through the blinds of the woman’s apartment. He glanced at his wristwatch. Seven fifteen.

A time for people to be finishing dinner, all warm and snug in their apartments.

The Rat put both hands behind his head, shut his eyes, and tried to picture her apartment. He wasn’t really sure because he’d only gone in twice.

The door opened on a six-mat dining-kitchen; orange tablecloth, potted ornamentals, four chairs, orange juice and newspaper on the table, a stainless steel teapot, all neatly arranged, not a smudge or stain anywhere, and the two small rooms beyond with the partition removed to make one room. A long, narrow glass-topped desk, and on it three ceramic beer mugs crammed full of all sorts of pencils and rulers and drafting pens. And a tray laden with erasers, ink-eradicator, old receipts, drafting tape, clips of assorted colors and yes, a pencil sharpener. Stamps.

Alongside the desk was a well-used drafting table with a long crane-necked lamp. The color of the shade, green. And over against the back wall, a bed. A small Scandinavian-style plain wooden bed.

It could hold two people, but the thing would creak like a rowboat at the park.

The fog grew thicker as the night wore on. Its milk-white obscurity hugged the coast, moving slowly. Every once in a while a pair of yellow fog lamps would approach head on, then pass by the Rat at a reduced speed. A fine mist crept in through the window, and dampened every last thing in the car. The seats, the windshield, his windbreaker, the cigarettes in his pocket, everything. The freighters offshore began to sound their foghorns like the plaintive lowing of stranded calves. Each foghorn droned at its own pitch, high or low, piercing the gloom and drifting up toward the hills.

And on the righthand wall? the Rat continued, trying to recall her rooms. A bookcase and a tiny stereo, and records. And a wardrobe. Two Ben Shahn reproductions. Nothing special on the shelves. Mostly architectural trade books. Some travel books, too, guidebooks, travelogues, maps, a number of best sellers, something on Mozart, sheet music, several dictionaries, some kind of dedication penned inside the cover of a French dictionary. The records were mostly Bach or Haydn or Mozart. Those and a few keepsake records from her younger days: Pat Boone, Bobby Darren, The Platters.

Beyond that, the Rat was stumped. Something was missing. Something important. Something that robbed the whole apartment of its reality, left it floating in space. But what?

Okay, hold on; got to remember. The lights in the apartment and the carpet. What kind of lights? And what color carpet? He just couldn’t remember.

On impulse the Rat opened the door and was about to dash through the trees of the windbreak, to go knock on her door so he could check out the lights and carpeting. Of all the idiotic notions. The Rat leaned back in his seat, this time to look out to sea. Other than the white fog over the dark water, there was nothing to see. Except off and on, out there, the orange beacon light blinked, steady as a heartbeat.

For a while, her apartment simply floated in the obscurity with neither ceilings or walls. Then little by little, the image grew weaker in its details, until it had completely vanished.

The Rat turned his head toward the ceiling, and slowly closed his eyes. Then at the flick of an imaginary switch, he turned off all the lights in his head, and darkness came over him again.

The three-flipper “Spaceship,” somewhere she kept calling me. For days and days, she called.

With devastating speed, I finished the mountain of work that had piled up. No more lunch breaks for me, no more playing with the Abyssinians. I spoke to no one. The office girl would come in to check on me from time to time, only to walk out again shaking her head in exasperation. I’d finish a day’s work by two in the afternoon, throw the manuscripts on the girl’s desk, and fly out of the office. Then I’d go around to game centers throughout Tokyo, just looking for my three-flipper “Spaceship.” But it was no use. Not a soul had seen or heard of it.

“A four-flipper ‘Underground Explorers’ won’t do? Brand-new machine, just in,” one game center owner said.

“Afraid not, sorry.”

He seemed a little disappointed.

“How about a three-flipper ‘Southpaw,’ then? Gives you the bonus light on cycle hits.”

“I’m really very sorry, but I’m only interested in the ‘Spaceship’.”

So he did what he could. He gave me the name and phone number of a pinball fanatic

acquaintance of his.

“This guy might know something about the machine you’re looking for. He’s a regular encyclopedia, probably the most up on any machine in the catalogue. Kinda strange character,

though.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Nah, don’t mention it. Hope you find it.”

I went into a quiet little coffee shop, dialed the number. Five rings and a man answered the phone.

In the background I could hear the NHK seven o’clock news and a baby crying. “I’d like to ask you about a special pinball machine, if I may,” I declared after giving my