Family
The Pinball Wizard
Skill at pinball may not indicate a dissipated youth, after all.
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These devices really worry only gross beginners and inebriates. A more advanced player knows that both the ball and the playing surface are very slick. A slight nudge with your right hand, well within the latitude allowed by the tilt devices, has the effect of sliding the ball to the right by moving the surface underneath it to the left. A nudge with your left hand shifts the ball to the left. A push forward with either or both hands curves the ball.
Another trick is to nudge the machine towards a ball approaching a bumper, thus increasing the impact. All this is in the interests of action, and in the interests of show. Even though he's only nudging the machine, Roger's whole body contorts to the accompaniment of small guttural noises from his throat. Is that it then? Is Roger the pinball wizard an exhibitionist? He just smiles and imitates, "Keep your eye on the bouncing ball, little boy, keep your eye on the bouncing ball. Some people swear there's little Albanian gremlins that around under the board with magnets strapped to their helmets, but don't you believe it, just don't you believe it."
On his next shot Roger points out the calibrations along the plunger. Many machines are planned so that the ball has the chance of racking up a good initial score right after it enters the top of the playing field. Using the calibrations controls and takes advantage of the force of the ball.
"That's right on the edge of what I personally consider cheating, by the way. I know guys, real purists, who won't even nudge the machine, but I'm not proud. To me cheating is taking advantage of a machine's weaknesses."
For example? We adjourned to 'Klondike.' Up at the top the ball can go down one of two slots. Both slots have a rollover.
"If you pull back the plunger just a tad, just enough to get the ball on the board, it will drift to the edge of that slot on the right. It's a narrow slot and the rollover offers resistance. If you nudge the machine forward just as the ball gets to the rollover it will score your points and the ball will back off it. Then as it comes forward again you nudge the machine again and pretty soon you have this nice little rhythm going back and forth a hundred points a click.
"I got 150,000 on one ball doing that once but then I got tired so I let it drop on through. Made me feel bad, though. That's what I call cheating."
Why, because it's too easy?
"No, because it made me feel bad. Discovering that trick was fun, but hell, it's not the machine's fault if somebody back at Santa's workshop didn't catch that. I felt like I was having a sword fight with a tree or something. It's hard to lose that way."
I'm not so proud. After half an hour of trying I started to get the hang of that little rocking motion. As I played out the balls, our friend pointed out something else.
"You don't know the board. Half these guys coming in here trying to impress their dates would do much better if they scouted the board in advance."
I thought that perhaps such thoroughness would take some of the mystery and glamour out of the game.
"Hell, no," Roger laughed. "Remember once upon a time when you didn't know anything about sex except that you wanted to find out about it? Well, when you found out, did that take the mystery and glamour out of it?"
Perhaps not, but it had made sex a lot more complicated.
Such thoughts about my loss of innocence led me to reflect that instead of knowing a machine like the back of his hand, perhaps for Roger it was more a case of knowing the game like a junkie knows his veins and the contours of his first rush. I have this suspicion, perhaps a lingering prejudice from the fustian days of pinball machines in arcades with fat greasy proprietors, that the game is like a narcotic. Something associated with evil weeds and tobacco. Roger laughed and waved his hand. "Look at this place."
He's right. We were in a sedate, expensively furnished club, with red pile carpets, panelling on the walls, and a beer garden with folk singers out back.
The image is changing. Much to the profit of the manufacturers, pinball is undergoing a renaissance, especially in the new cities and big college towns of the Middle West and South. "It's not an addiction. It's just a closed little world of its own, with its own laws and rules, with orgasmic patterns and people playing games. That's an old, old pastime, really."
We wandered back to "Spanish Eyes" as Roger explained another, to me dubious, tactic. "Talk to that little round mother. Keep your eyes on it, make friends. Order it, cajole, plead." In this age of science we know of course that the ball can't actually hear us, but it is true that our minds control our bodies. They can, and will, respond better at a mechanical skill if we take our minds off the process. In the words of our guide, "Ignore your hands. Do a mind thing with the ball and your hands will take care of themselves."
In my eagerness to understand the pinball mystique, I jumped on this remark. "Ah, ha! It's a way to lose yourself, forget your worries, get lost in—" "—a false and artificial world, right?" Roger interrupted me, cocking his head and looking at me from under his eyebrows. This guy is sensitive, I realized. It just doesn't do to intellectualize on a pinball freak.
"Spanish Eyes" has a hoop affair right in the center of the board. As I watched Roger, I learned that he ran that hoop whenever he chose to.
Compared to the way I often frantically flail at the buttons, his control of the flippers astounded me. Like in baseball, timing is everything.
The flippers are controlled by solenoids. Their introduction to the machines in 1947 was the last major change in the game, though some fanatics would make a case for the dervish disc in "Fireball." The solenoid keeps the flipper extended as long as the button is depressed. On many machines you can thus stop the ball, cradling it at the pivot end of the flipper.
Hold it there and look around. Any "specials" lit? Bonus lights? Big scores? Suddenly release the button. The flipper will fall back and the ball will start to gently roll down it. Learn the proper moment, zap the button, and send that ball where you want it to go.
That's what Roger was doing and it went around that hoop whenever he wanted it to.
Then Roger did something I'd never seen before. He actually passed the ball from flipper to flipper.
Pretty impressive. "Artsy-craftsy," he said. Roger had one final tip. Often that sinking feeling comes when the ball is racing directly for that hateful space right between the flippers, that trough of despair where no flipper alive can touch it. Before you shoot a ball sometime, though, push and hold both buttons. That trough is not as big as it looks when the flippers are at rest. A seemingly dead ball can be at least slightly deflected by one of the flippers if it is off center slightly. When this happens, if you've panicked and slammed both buttons at once, the deflected ball will still be dead-and pointlessly so. Instead, hit the buttons in succession, first the one controlling the flipper closest to the ball, then the other. A deflected ball can often be saved by the slightly delayed second flipper and you're back in business.
What about the name "pinball"? The ball part is easy. The 'pin' in the word comes from an early version of the machine, without flippers or electricity, similar to the games some of us played as children where a marble was shot onto a plastic playing board and fell into a slot. In the early Thirties this was a popular gambling game of chance.
We've come a long way since then. The progeny of that nail have been bent and twisted into what we all know and love as rollovers, kickbacks, and thumper-bumpers.
A nail, or pin, obstructed the slots. Thus the name "pin-and-ball."
"Pin-and-ball," a game of chance that struck fear into the hearts of thousands of Baptist mothers and wives throughout the South, is now a consummate game of skill and determination that entertains and tortures tens of thousands of sons and daughters everywhere. Many, of course, after a hard night at the machines, can be heard muttering and grumbling phrases but today's addicts or freaks or whatever will soon be back, clutching another bag of hopefully hot quarters, fire in their eyes.
If you're among them or would care to join, Roger wishes you good luck.
As for the man himself, he's not obviously a saint, but it is certain that someone is on his side. So, if you hap- pen to run into him under the sign of the Transcendental Eyeball at that Final Pinball Machine in the sky, be prepared to wait in line. He'll be there a long time.
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