Everything I Know About Life I Learned From Pinball
Now and again successful people are asked what exactly it was in their youth that shaped them in such a distinctive way.
Sports is a popular answer, others will point to the encouragement of kindly little old ladies just up the street who gave them a cold glass of lemonade after finishing the grass and slipped them an extra quarter for doing such a good job on the hedges.
A favorite book might be cited, or the friendly policemen walking the beat, or the librarian who cut the youth some slack in the matter of late fees.
Seldom in the exchanges do you hear what you’d like to hear, which is something along the lines of, “I suppose I just decided to embrace larceny at an early age and never looked back, expanding my technique over the years into white collar crime,” or even, “my old man had a lot of money and that about sealed the deal.”
Answers such as these reflect far more honesty than these questions usually elicit or in fact than people want to hear.
The reader is actually on the lookout for some attitude that he can take up and apply personally, or some practical advice that over time will result in monetary rewards, the admiration of society, and an all around successful life. With an emphasis on successful.
Therefore these interviews by nature circle in on the conventionally successful, those holding generally positive and law-abiding views.
Neither you nor I have ever seen an exchange where the reporter asks a fellow being indicted for tax evasion because they can’t get him on the bootlegging charges, “what is your advice to young people, Big Sammy? What were your greatest influences?”
You will wait many a day before the writer asks the fellow on the other side of the table in the interrogation room, “what first got you interested in safecracking, Jimmy? What do you recommend for today’s heistmaster just starting out?”
I hate to keep coming back to the point but I say again that these questions are almost always put to the famous and the successful among us, which means that it is a question that most of us will never be asked.
I don’t know that this has to stop us. Let us then pretend that it has been asked of us.
I would say, sitting back in my chair and making a big show of long consideration, that the thing I learned the most and the best life lessons from in youth was pinball.
It is like life itself in that the main object of play, that shooter-marble sized steel ball, is set upon by forces that it doesn’t in the least understand, nor has any chance of understanding.
Rolling along, literally, with a bit of a wind at its back, this metal ball descends from the top of the field of play with the expectation that it will more or less travel along in a peaceful, almost serene manner, from top to bottom, and then do it again.
What’s not to like? There is much colorful scenery on the way, you seem to have a cheering section 100% behind you, and gravity does most of the work for you. All in all, nice work if you can get it.
It presents itself to the mind of the youthful steel ball as an entirely pleasant way to pass the evening, at the end of which he can settle into close slumber with the five or six other steel balls he considers his brothers.
This sense of easy confidence and openness to new experience is soon shattered.
A mere glancing touch along one of these interesting colored bumpers in the upper left field of play, or a collision with an unassuming length of elastic that turns out to be stretched tight as a drum, results in a mad ricocheting motion up, across, and around the table, complete with sounding sirens, ringing bells, random hoots, train whistles, factory whistles, and riverboat whistles, snatches of musical phrases played by marching bands most of whose players appear upon first hearing to be drunk, and then, just when the breath is about to be caught, this mad system enters into the last lap of play with a burst of feverish energy, further flinging the now-dizzy ball against the mechanisms on the other side of the board, or perhaps above where you just were, which in turn send you and your ball zinging every which way as before, except in a new way.
This is repeated oh, fourteen dozen times per play.
It is a random, noisy, disorienting, destructive experience.
In short, it is very like life.
The young man who has seen his steel ball batted back and forth maniacally between two clanging bounce-inducing mechanisms with a constancy that lets him leave the table entirely and go to the bar to get another sarsaparilla, and chat with a couple of people on the way back about the season’s prospects for the local basketball team, and stick his head outside to see if the rain has let up, and upon returning to his pinball machine finds this crazy bangitty-bang-bang thing still going on unabated, is well-prepared for common situations in life that might await him, say, being in the middle of two colleagues at work holding differing political opinions who are sharing them openly.
The lad who watches steel ball after steel ball make a lazy arc at the top of the field of play as it exits from its launching mechanism and then drop straight down the length of the middle section of the playing surface, no matter how madly he flips the flippers, which in fact seem to be doing nothing so much as waving goodbye to the ball as it drops to its clattering doom, will find this good preparation for performance reviews at work, the magazine editor’s response to the first tender shoots of poetry that the young man has sent for publication, or indeed, for hard-practiced and entirely ineffective lines of dialogue sprung upon unsuspecting strangers in the course of business, social, or educational pursuits.
The bar, unaccountably, quiets at this moment, ‘hushed’ is not too strong a word to describe it, which is a strange thing because it is a noisy bar, seemingly just so everyone in the place — perhaps in the universe — can savor that distinctive hollow rolling wooden sound, the sound of a complete lack of success.
At such moments the youth and the man that comes after feels very much like that steel ball on its straight shoot to oblivion, and the sound, again I return to it, of the hollow roll along the wooden playing surface will retrieve itself from the past and ring in his ears, reminding him that he has been here before.
But at least he has had some early exposure to the feeling and has benefited from a kind of inoculation if you will. That hollow roll accompanies more human ventures than not, and it is good to have more than a nodding acquaintance with it.
And it goes the other way too.
It is often the case in pinball that you are awarded a free ball for doing something that you have no recollection of doing, some happenstance execution of a complex series of actions in exactly the right order, that lights the machine up and communicates the message that it is a pleasure for it to have played against a demi-god of the pinball arts such as yourself.
In fact, you don’t know now, to this day, how you got that free ball.
But you did, and that too is like life, and the unearned luck that will sometimes come your way, sometimes in heaping piles of treasures that you, of all people, know that you have not earned. Take that good luck while you can.
Pinball, again like life, is a game of uncertain outcome and truly ambiguous scoring.
The player may stand there dripping with sweat for an hour at a time working the machine for all he is worth, and when he looks up he sees that he has gained a grand total of 22 points.
There are other times when he has turned his attention away from the game to gander at the football game on TV, make little circle patterns on the shelf just to his left with the bottom of his bottle of sarsaparilla, discuss with a stranger why exactly it is that when you slip on ice or snow while walking at no more than a reasonable clip you can seemingly elevate upwards and travel horizontally for some length until you land flat on your back on the hard pavement, reset your watch, wind your watch, take off your glasses and look through them from the other side to see if that makes you see better, see how long you can hold your breath, and try to balance a pool cue on your nose, and only then to remember that you ball was in play on the pinball machine, and come to find that you have racked up a billion and a half points and are in fact now eligible to simply take the whole row of machines home with you.
As in life, you learn in pinball that risk pays off, until it doesn’t.
You learn that trying to force life your way can result in a ‘tilt,’ but that the light touch, so light in fact that you don’t actually touch the machine but stand there twisting your upper body in the direction you wish the steel ball to go, can sometimes nudge life into the direction that you prefer, can sometimes introduce a trend in events that at some point in the future, never guaranteed, can result in good news for you.
This is not bad for a machine that makes so much noise and eats your quarters at the rate of several hundred every hour and deserves to be part of every young person’s education curriculum.
