And the Band didn’t begin to play anything. Actually it was 51 years ago today, which adds an extra, unwanted beat to an overworked couplet …
The Composer (me), The Poet, The Joker, and The Fencer were café-hopping on a beautiful autumn evening. The place was Paris, and there were great cafés on each corner of the intersection of the Boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail.
It might have been Le Rond Point, and the pinball machine (le flipper) might have been The Dipsy Doodle or Aces and Kings — one of those Williams, Gottlieb, or Bally machines that were ubiquitous in every café in Paris.
The thing is, I spent way too much time trying to master that particular machine — learning how to punch it on either side without tilting; persuading that little round silver ball to slither down the right tunnel (ding ding ding), or happily bounce off the bumpers until they all lit up and the dings sounded like the mighty bells of Notre Dame … but most importantly, to avoid the catastrophic DRAIN, ending the play.
**
The four of us were taking turns, playing like maniacs in order to avoid having to slip another one-franc piece into the money-hungry coin slot. And we were doing well, watching the scoreboard flipping numerals like the hundredth-second place on a stopwatch.
Suddenly, the four of us became aware that we were being observed. Four Corsican toughs were speaking heavily-accented French, which we responded to with our medium-level fluency. We were being challenged!
**
A twenty-franc bill was slapped on the glass top and the details of the bet were agreed upon and we pooled together are resources and matched their wager. Forty francs! That was a lot of money for us scrappy students.
We would play two rounds of four turns — each of the eight players getting two turns. The Corsicans went first. They were drunk as hell, but managed to rack up a big score. It was our turn. My friends decided to put me in the clean-up spot, so I waited — sipping red wine while they each took their turn — ooh, The Joker tilted — bad news!
I’m up.
I pull back the lever and shoot the silver ball up into the top region. It slides through a high-value slot and moves downward, hitting the bumpers, triggering special targets, and then, after just 15 seconds of play … I shudder in horror as the ball slips into the DRAIN lane. Turn over, very few points scored.
The forty francs — two bills with portraits of old kings etched in the center — were staring at me in shame. Crap, we’re gonna lose this bet.
Round Two. The alcohol-drenched Corsicans are focused like Napoleon taking on a distant hill … one guy drains, the other three rack up a ton of points.
Our turn. The Poet maneuvers the orb beautifully, using the flippers to hit the high-value targets, moving the ball back to the top — scoring well. The Joker and The Fencer have decent turns, but when I step up to the machine for the final turn, the scoreboard shows that we’re behind by ten thousand points.
I feel nauseous.
But as I pulled the lever, I felt that the geometric gods were guiding my flippers. A little tap on the left, avoiding a tilt. Hitting targets. Racking up points. Ding ding ding. My compatriots were yelling and screaming. The Super Bowl of Pinball.
When the ball finally drained, the scoreboard was in our favor. The Corsicans grumbled. We grabbed our forty francs and skipped down the Montparnasse sidewalks, singing a filthy Frank Zappa tune, and the town was ours!
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Author: Lewis Saul
