centaur
Pinball Wizard
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2023
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- 60
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- 24
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- Favorite Pinball Machine
- Centaur
Written in 1975, published in the short story collection Giving Good Weight in 1979 which you can access here or here.
[1] Lukas ultimately decided to be less congenial, and changed the title to Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (Viking Press, 1976)
[2] And they did so until 1976, when pinball at last became legal.
Edits: formatting, typed out footnotes
THE PINBALL PHILOSOPHY
New York City, March 1975
J. ANTHONY LUKAS is a world-class pinball player who, between tilts, does some free-lance writing. In our city, he is No. ½. That is to say, he is one of two players who share pinball preeminence—two players whose special skills within the sport are so multiple and varied that they defy comparative analysis. The other star is Tom Buckley, of the Times. Pinball people tend to gravitate toward Lukas or Buckley. Lukas is a Lukasite. He respects Buckley, but he sees himself as the whole figure, the number “1.” His machine is a Bally. Public pinball has been illegal in New York for many decades, but private ownership is permitted, and Lukas plays, for the most part, at home.
Lukas lives in an old mansion, a city landmark, on West Seventy-sixth Street. The machine is in his living room, under a high, elegant ceiling, near an archway to rooms beyond. Bally is the Rolls-Royce of pinball, he explains as he snaps a ball into action. It rockets into the ellipse at the top of the playfield. It ricochets four times before beginning its descent. Lukas likes a four-bounce hold in the ellipse—to set things up for a long ball. There is something faintly, and perhaps consciously, nefarious about Lukas, who is an aristocratic, oliveskinned, Andalusian sort of man, with deep eyes in dark wells. As the butts of his hands pound the corners of his machine, one can imagine him cheating at polo. “It’s a wrist game,” he says, tremoring the Bally, helping the steel ball to bounce six times off the top thumper-bumper and, each time, go back up a slot to the ellipse—an awesome economy of fresh beginnings. “Strong wrists are really all you want to use. The term for what I am doing is ‘reinforcing.’” His voice, rich and dense, pours out like cigarette smoke filtered through a New England prep school. “There are certain basics to remember,” he says. “Above all, don’t flail with the flipper. You carry the ball in the direction you want it to go. You can almost cradle the ball on the flipper. And always hit the slingshot hard. That’s the slingshot there—where the rubber is stretched between bumpers. Reinforce it hard. And never—never—drift toward the free-ball gate.” Lukas reinforces the machine just as the ball hits the slingshot. The rebound comes off with blurring speed, striking bumpers, causing gongs to ring and lights to flash. Under his hands, the chrome on the frame has long since worn away.
Lukas points out that one of the beauties of his Bally is that it is asymmetrical. Early pinball machines had symmetrical playfields—symmetrical thumper-bumpers—but in time they became free-form, such as this one, with its field laid out not just for structure but also for surprise. Lukas works in this room—stacks of manuscript on shelves and tables. He has been working for many months on a book that will weigh five pounds. It will be called Nightmare: The Dark Side of the Nixon Years—a congenially chosen title, implying that there was a bright side.[1] The pinball machine is Lukas’s collaborator. “When a paragraph just won’t go,” he says, “and I begin to say to myself, ‘I can’t make this work,’ I get up and play the machine. I score in a high range. Then I go back to the typewriter a new man. I have beat the machine. Therefore I can beat the paragraph.” He once won a Pulitzer Prize.
The steel ball rolls into the “death channel”—Lukas’s term for a long alley down the left side—and drops out of sight off the low end of the playfield, finished.
“I have thought of analogies between Watergate and pinball. Everything is connected. Bumpers. Rebounds. You light lights and score. Chuck Colson is involved in almost every aspect of the Watergate story: the dirty tricks, the coverup, the laundered money—all connected. How hard you hit off the thumper-bumper depends on how hard you hit off the slingshot depends on how well you work the corners. In a sense, pinball is a reflection of the complexity of the subject I am writing about. Bear in mind, I take this with considerable tongue-in-cheek.”
With another ball, he ignites an aurora on the scoreboard. During the ball’s complex, prolonged descent, he continues to set forth the pinball philosophy. “More seriously, the game does give you a sense of controlling things in a way that in life you can’t do. And there is risk in it, too. The ball flies into the ellipse, into the playfield—full of opportunities. But there’s always the death channel—the run-out slot. There are rewards, prizes, coming off the thumper-bumper. The ball crazily bounces from danger to opportunity and back to danger. You need reassurance in life that in taking risks you will triumph, and pinball gives you that reaffirmation. Life is a risky game, but you can beat it.”
Unfortunately, Lukas has a sick flipper. At the low end of the playfield, two flippers guard the run-out slot, but one waggles like a broken wing, pathetic, unable to function, to fling the ball uphill for renewed rewards. The ball, instead, slides by the crippled flipper and drops from view.
Lukas opens the machine. He lifts the entire playfield, which is hinged at the back, and props it up on a steel arm, like the lid of a grand piano. Revealed below is a neat, arresting world that includes spring-loaded hole kickers, contact switches, target switches, slingshot assemblies, the score-motor unit, the electric anti-cheat, three thumper-bumper relays, the top rebound relay, the key-gate assembly (“the key gate will keep you out of the death channel”), the free-ball-gate assembly, and—not least—the one-and-a-quarter-amp slo-blo. To one side, something that resembles a plumb bob hangs suspended within a metal ring. If the bob moves too far out of plumb, it touches the ring. Tilt. The game is dead.
Lukas is not an electrician. All he can do is massage the flipper’s switch assembly, which does not respond—not even with a shock. He has about had it with this machine. One cannot collaborate with a sick flipper. The queasy truth comes over him: no pinball, no paragraphs. So he hurries downstairs and into a taxi, telling the driver to go to Tenth Avenue in the low Forties—a pocket of the city known as Coin Row.
EN ROUTE, Lukas reflects on his long history in the game—New York, Cambridge, Paris—and his relationships with specific machines (“they’re like wives”). When he was the Times’ man in the Congo, in the early sixties, the post was considered a position of hardship, so he was periodically sent to Paris for rest and rehabilitation, which he got playing pinball in a Left Bank brasserie. He had perfected his style as an undergraduate at Harvard, sharing a machine at the Crimson with David Halberstam (“Halberstam is aggressive at everything he does, and he was very good”). Lukas’s father was a Manhattan attorney. Lukas’s mother died when he was eight. He grew up, for the most part, in a New England community—Putney, Vermont—where he went to pre-prep and prep school. Putney was “straitlaced,” “very high-minded,” “a life away from the maelstrom”—potters’ wheels, no pinball. Lukas craved “liberation,” and developed a yearning for what he imagined as low life, and so did his schoolmate Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Together, one weekend, they dipped as low as they knew how. They went to New York. And they went to two movies! They went to shooting galleries! They went to a flea circus! They played every coin-operated machine they could find—and they stayed up until after dawn! All this was pretty low, but not low enough, for that was the spring of 1951, and still beyond reach—out there past the fingertips of Tantalus—was pinball, the ban on which had been emphatically reinforced a few years earlier by Fiorello II. LaGuardia, who saw pinball as a gambling device corruptive of the city’s youth. To Lukas, pinball symbolized all the time-wasting and ne’er-do-welling that puritan Putney did not. In result, he mastered the game. He says, “It puts me in touch with a world in which I never lived. I am attracted to pinball for its seediness, its slightly disreputable reputation.”
On Coin Row, Lukas knows just where he is going, and without a sidewise glance passes storefronts bearing names like The World of Pinball Amusement (“SALES—REPAIR”) and Manhattan Coin Machine (“PARTS—SUPPLIES”). He heads directly for the Mike Munves Corporation, 577 Tenth Avenue, the New York pinball exchange, oldest house (1912) on the row. Inside is Ralph Hotkins, in double-breasted blazer—broker in pinball machines. The place is more warehouse than store, and around Hotkins, and upstairs above him, are rank upon rank of Gottliebs, Williamses, Ballys, Playmatics—every name in the game, including forty-year-old antique completely mechanical machines, ten balls for a nickel, the type that Mayor LaGuardia himself destroyed with an axe. Hotkins—a prosperous man, touched with humor, not hurting for girth—got his start in cigarette machines in the thirties, moved up to jukeboxes, and then, in 1945, while LaGuardia was still mayor, to game machines. He had two daughters, and he brought them up on pinball. They were in the shop almost every afternoon after school, and all day Saturday. One daughter now has a Ph.D. in English literature and the other a Ph.D. in political science. So much for the Little Flower. In this era of open massage and off-track betting, Hotkins has expected the ban to lift, but the courts, strangely, continue to uphold it.[2] Meanwhile, his customers —most of whom are technically “private”—include Wall Street brokerage houses where investors shoot free pinball under the ticker, Seventh Avenue dress houses that wish to keep their buyers amused, the Circus Circus peepshow emporium on West Forty-second Street, many salesrooms, many showrooms, and J. Anthony Lukas.
“Yes, Mr. Lukas. What can we do for you?”
Lukas greets Hotkins and then runs balls through a few selected machines. Lukas attempts to deal with Hotkins, but Hotkins wants Lukas’s machine and a hundred and fifty dollars. Lukas would rather fix his flipper. He asks for George Cedeño, master technician, who makes house calls and often travels as far as Massachusetts to fix a pinball machine. Cedeño—blue work smock, white shoes, burgundy trousers, silver hair—makes a date with Lukas.
LUKAS STARTS FOR HOME but, crossing Forty-second Street, decides on pure whim to have a look at Circus Circus, where he has never been. Circus Circus is, after all, just four blocks away. The stroll is pleasant in the afternoon sunlight, to and through Times Square, under the marquees of pornographic movies—Valley of the Nymphs, The Danish Sandwich, The Organ Trail. Circus Circus (“GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! LIVE EXOTIC MODELS”) is close to Sixth Avenue and consists, principally, of a front room and a back room. Prices are a quarter a peep in the back room and a quarter to play (two games) in the front. The game room is dim, and Lukas, entering, sees little at first but the flashing scoreboards of five machines. Four of them—a Bally, a Williams, two Gottliebs—flash slowly, reporting inexperienced play, but the fifth, the one in the middle, is exploding with light and sound. The player causing all this is hunched over, concentrating—in his arms and his hands a choreography of talent. Lukas’s eyes adjust to the light. Then he reaches for his holster. The man on the hot machine, busy keeping statistics of his practice, is Tom Buckley.
“Tom.”
“Tone.”
“How is the machine?”
“Better than yours, Tone. You don’t realize what a lemon you have.”
“I love my Bally.”
“The Bally is the Corvair of pinball machines. I don’t even care for the art on the back-glass. Williams and Gottlieb are the best. Bally is nowhere.”
Buckley, slightly older than Lukas, has a spectacled and professorial look. He wears a double-breasted blazer, a buff turtleneck. He lives on York Avenue now. He came out of Beechhurst, Queens, and learned his pinball in the Army—in Wrightstown, New Jersey; in Kansas City. He was stationed in an office building in Kansas City, and he moved up through the pinball ranks from beginner to virtuoso on a machine in a Katz drugstore.
Lukas and Buckley begin to play. Best of five games. Five balls a game. Alternate shots. The machine is a Williams Fun-Fest, and Buckley points out that it is “classic,” because it is symmetrical. Each kick-out well and thumper-bumper is a mirror of another. The slingshots are dual. On this machine, a level of forty thousand points is where the sun sets and the stars come out. Buckley, describing his own style as “guts pinball,” has a first-game score of forty-four thousand three hundred and ten. While Lukas plays his fifth ball, Buckley becomes avuncular. “Careful, Tony. You might think you’re in an up-post position, but if you let it slide a little you’re in a down-post position and you’re finished.” Buckley’s advice is generous indeed. Lukas—forty-eight thousand eight hundred and seventy—wins the first game.
It is Buckley’s manner to lean into the machine from three feet out. His whole body, steeply inclined, tics as he reinforces. In the second game, he scores fifty thousand one hundred and sixty. Lukas’s address is like a fencer’s en garde. He stands close to the machine, with one foot projecting under it. His chin is high. Buckley tells him, “You’re playing nice, average pinball, Tony.” And Lukas’s response is fifty-seven thousand nine hundred and fifty points. He leads Buckley, two games to none.
“I’m ashamed,” Buckley confesses. And as he leans—palms pounding—into the third game, he reminds himself, “Concentration, Tom. Concentration is everything.”
Lukas notes aloud that Buckley is “full of empty rhetoric.” But Lukas, in Game 3, fires one ball straight into the death channel and can deliver only thirty-five thousand points. Buckley wins with forty. Perhaps Lukas feels rushed. He prefers to play a more deliberate, cogitative game. At home, between shots, in the middle of a game, he will go to the kitchen for a beer and return to study the situation. Buckley, for his part, seems anxious, and with good reason: one mistake now and it’s all over. In the fourth game, Lukas lights up forty-three thousand and fifty points; but Buckley’s fifth ball, just before it dies, hits forty-four thousand two hundred and sixty. Games are two all, with one to go. Buckley takes a deep breath, and says, “You’re a competitor, Tony. Your flipper action is bad, but you’re a real competitor.”
Game 5 under way. They are pummelling the machine. They are heavy on the corners but light on the flippers, and the scoreboard is reacting like a storm at sea. With three balls down, both are in the thirty-thousand range. Buckley, going unorthodox, plays his fourth ball with one foot off the floor, and raises his score to forty-five thousand points—more than he scored in winning the two previous games. He smiles. He is on his way in, flaring, with still another ball to play. Now Lukas snaps his fourth ball into the ellipse. It moves down and around the board, hitting slingshots and flippers and rising again and again to high ground to begin additional scoring runs. It hits sunburst caps and hole kickers, swinging targets and bonus gates. Minute upon minute, it stays in play. It will not die.
When the ball finally slips between flippers and off the playfield, Lukas has registered eighty-three thousand two hundred points. And he still has one ball to go.
Buckley turns into a Lukasite. As Lukas plays his fifth ball, Buckley cheers. “Atta way! Atta way, babes!” He goes on cheering until Lukas peaks out at ninety-four thousand one hundred and seventy.
“That was superb. And there’s no luck in it,” Buckley says. “It’s as good a score as I’ve seen.”
Lukas takes a cool final look around Circus Circus. “Buckley has a way of tracking down the secret joys of the city,” he says, and then he is gone.
Still shaking his head in wonder, Buckley starts a last, solo game. His arms move mechanically, groovedly, reinforcing. His flipper timing is offhandedly flawless. He scores a hundred thousand two hundred points. But Lukas is out of sight.
(The End)
Footnotes:J. ANTHONY LUKAS is a world-class pinball player who, between tilts, does some free-lance writing. In our city, he is No. ½. That is to say, he is one of two players who share pinball preeminence—two players whose special skills within the sport are so multiple and varied that they defy comparative analysis. The other star is Tom Buckley, of the Times. Pinball people tend to gravitate toward Lukas or Buckley. Lukas is a Lukasite. He respects Buckley, but he sees himself as the whole figure, the number “1.” His machine is a Bally. Public pinball has been illegal in New York for many decades, but private ownership is permitted, and Lukas plays, for the most part, at home.
Lukas lives in an old mansion, a city landmark, on West Seventy-sixth Street. The machine is in his living room, under a high, elegant ceiling, near an archway to rooms beyond. Bally is the Rolls-Royce of pinball, he explains as he snaps a ball into action. It rockets into the ellipse at the top of the playfield. It ricochets four times before beginning its descent. Lukas likes a four-bounce hold in the ellipse—to set things up for a long ball. There is something faintly, and perhaps consciously, nefarious about Lukas, who is an aristocratic, oliveskinned, Andalusian sort of man, with deep eyes in dark wells. As the butts of his hands pound the corners of his machine, one can imagine him cheating at polo. “It’s a wrist game,” he says, tremoring the Bally, helping the steel ball to bounce six times off the top thumper-bumper and, each time, go back up a slot to the ellipse—an awesome economy of fresh beginnings. “Strong wrists are really all you want to use. The term for what I am doing is ‘reinforcing.’” His voice, rich and dense, pours out like cigarette smoke filtered through a New England prep school. “There are certain basics to remember,” he says. “Above all, don’t flail with the flipper. You carry the ball in the direction you want it to go. You can almost cradle the ball on the flipper. And always hit the slingshot hard. That’s the slingshot there—where the rubber is stretched between bumpers. Reinforce it hard. And never—never—drift toward the free-ball gate.” Lukas reinforces the machine just as the ball hits the slingshot. The rebound comes off with blurring speed, striking bumpers, causing gongs to ring and lights to flash. Under his hands, the chrome on the frame has long since worn away.
Lukas points out that one of the beauties of his Bally is that it is asymmetrical. Early pinball machines had symmetrical playfields—symmetrical thumper-bumpers—but in time they became free-form, such as this one, with its field laid out not just for structure but also for surprise. Lukas works in this room—stacks of manuscript on shelves and tables. He has been working for many months on a book that will weigh five pounds. It will be called Nightmare: The Dark Side of the Nixon Years—a congenially chosen title, implying that there was a bright side.[1] The pinball machine is Lukas’s collaborator. “When a paragraph just won’t go,” he says, “and I begin to say to myself, ‘I can’t make this work,’ I get up and play the machine. I score in a high range. Then I go back to the typewriter a new man. I have beat the machine. Therefore I can beat the paragraph.” He once won a Pulitzer Prize.
The steel ball rolls into the “death channel”—Lukas’s term for a long alley down the left side—and drops out of sight off the low end of the playfield, finished.
“I have thought of analogies between Watergate and pinball. Everything is connected. Bumpers. Rebounds. You light lights and score. Chuck Colson is involved in almost every aspect of the Watergate story: the dirty tricks, the coverup, the laundered money—all connected. How hard you hit off the thumper-bumper depends on how hard you hit off the slingshot depends on how well you work the corners. In a sense, pinball is a reflection of the complexity of the subject I am writing about. Bear in mind, I take this with considerable tongue-in-cheek.”
With another ball, he ignites an aurora on the scoreboard. During the ball’s complex, prolonged descent, he continues to set forth the pinball philosophy. “More seriously, the game does give you a sense of controlling things in a way that in life you can’t do. And there is risk in it, too. The ball flies into the ellipse, into the playfield—full of opportunities. But there’s always the death channel—the run-out slot. There are rewards, prizes, coming off the thumper-bumper. The ball crazily bounces from danger to opportunity and back to danger. You need reassurance in life that in taking risks you will triumph, and pinball gives you that reaffirmation. Life is a risky game, but you can beat it.”
Unfortunately, Lukas has a sick flipper. At the low end of the playfield, two flippers guard the run-out slot, but one waggles like a broken wing, pathetic, unable to function, to fling the ball uphill for renewed rewards. The ball, instead, slides by the crippled flipper and drops from view.
Lukas opens the machine. He lifts the entire playfield, which is hinged at the back, and props it up on a steel arm, like the lid of a grand piano. Revealed below is a neat, arresting world that includes spring-loaded hole kickers, contact switches, target switches, slingshot assemblies, the score-motor unit, the electric anti-cheat, three thumper-bumper relays, the top rebound relay, the key-gate assembly (“the key gate will keep you out of the death channel”), the free-ball-gate assembly, and—not least—the one-and-a-quarter-amp slo-blo. To one side, something that resembles a plumb bob hangs suspended within a metal ring. If the bob moves too far out of plumb, it touches the ring. Tilt. The game is dead.
Lukas is not an electrician. All he can do is massage the flipper’s switch assembly, which does not respond—not even with a shock. He has about had it with this machine. One cannot collaborate with a sick flipper. The queasy truth comes over him: no pinball, no paragraphs. So he hurries downstairs and into a taxi, telling the driver to go to Tenth Avenue in the low Forties—a pocket of the city known as Coin Row.
EN ROUTE, Lukas reflects on his long history in the game—New York, Cambridge, Paris—and his relationships with specific machines (“they’re like wives”). When he was the Times’ man in the Congo, in the early sixties, the post was considered a position of hardship, so he was periodically sent to Paris for rest and rehabilitation, which he got playing pinball in a Left Bank brasserie. He had perfected his style as an undergraduate at Harvard, sharing a machine at the Crimson with David Halberstam (“Halberstam is aggressive at everything he does, and he was very good”). Lukas’s father was a Manhattan attorney. Lukas’s mother died when he was eight. He grew up, for the most part, in a New England community—Putney, Vermont—where he went to pre-prep and prep school. Putney was “straitlaced,” “very high-minded,” “a life away from the maelstrom”—potters’ wheels, no pinball. Lukas craved “liberation,” and developed a yearning for what he imagined as low life, and so did his schoolmate Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Together, one weekend, they dipped as low as they knew how. They went to New York. And they went to two movies! They went to shooting galleries! They went to a flea circus! They played every coin-operated machine they could find—and they stayed up until after dawn! All this was pretty low, but not low enough, for that was the spring of 1951, and still beyond reach—out there past the fingertips of Tantalus—was pinball, the ban on which had been emphatically reinforced a few years earlier by Fiorello II. LaGuardia, who saw pinball as a gambling device corruptive of the city’s youth. To Lukas, pinball symbolized all the time-wasting and ne’er-do-welling that puritan Putney did not. In result, he mastered the game. He says, “It puts me in touch with a world in which I never lived. I am attracted to pinball for its seediness, its slightly disreputable reputation.”
On Coin Row, Lukas knows just where he is going, and without a sidewise glance passes storefronts bearing names like The World of Pinball Amusement (“SALES—REPAIR”) and Manhattan Coin Machine (“PARTS—SUPPLIES”). He heads directly for the Mike Munves Corporation, 577 Tenth Avenue, the New York pinball exchange, oldest house (1912) on the row. Inside is Ralph Hotkins, in double-breasted blazer—broker in pinball machines. The place is more warehouse than store, and around Hotkins, and upstairs above him, are rank upon rank of Gottliebs, Williamses, Ballys, Playmatics—every name in the game, including forty-year-old antique completely mechanical machines, ten balls for a nickel, the type that Mayor LaGuardia himself destroyed with an axe. Hotkins—a prosperous man, touched with humor, not hurting for girth—got his start in cigarette machines in the thirties, moved up to jukeboxes, and then, in 1945, while LaGuardia was still mayor, to game machines. He had two daughters, and he brought them up on pinball. They were in the shop almost every afternoon after school, and all day Saturday. One daughter now has a Ph.D. in English literature and the other a Ph.D. in political science. So much for the Little Flower. In this era of open massage and off-track betting, Hotkins has expected the ban to lift, but the courts, strangely, continue to uphold it.[2] Meanwhile, his customers —most of whom are technically “private”—include Wall Street brokerage houses where investors shoot free pinball under the ticker, Seventh Avenue dress houses that wish to keep their buyers amused, the Circus Circus peepshow emporium on West Forty-second Street, many salesrooms, many showrooms, and J. Anthony Lukas.
“Yes, Mr. Lukas. What can we do for you?”
Lukas greets Hotkins and then runs balls through a few selected machines. Lukas attempts to deal with Hotkins, but Hotkins wants Lukas’s machine and a hundred and fifty dollars. Lukas would rather fix his flipper. He asks for George Cedeño, master technician, who makes house calls and often travels as far as Massachusetts to fix a pinball machine. Cedeño—blue work smock, white shoes, burgundy trousers, silver hair—makes a date with Lukas.
LUKAS STARTS FOR HOME but, crossing Forty-second Street, decides on pure whim to have a look at Circus Circus, where he has never been. Circus Circus is, after all, just four blocks away. The stroll is pleasant in the afternoon sunlight, to and through Times Square, under the marquees of pornographic movies—Valley of the Nymphs, The Danish Sandwich, The Organ Trail. Circus Circus (“GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! LIVE EXOTIC MODELS”) is close to Sixth Avenue and consists, principally, of a front room and a back room. Prices are a quarter a peep in the back room and a quarter to play (two games) in the front. The game room is dim, and Lukas, entering, sees little at first but the flashing scoreboards of five machines. Four of them—a Bally, a Williams, two Gottliebs—flash slowly, reporting inexperienced play, but the fifth, the one in the middle, is exploding with light and sound. The player causing all this is hunched over, concentrating—in his arms and his hands a choreography of talent. Lukas’s eyes adjust to the light. Then he reaches for his holster. The man on the hot machine, busy keeping statistics of his practice, is Tom Buckley.
“Tom.”
“Tone.”
“How is the machine?”
“Better than yours, Tone. You don’t realize what a lemon you have.”
“I love my Bally.”
“The Bally is the Corvair of pinball machines. I don’t even care for the art on the back-glass. Williams and Gottlieb are the best. Bally is nowhere.”
Buckley, slightly older than Lukas, has a spectacled and professorial look. He wears a double-breasted blazer, a buff turtleneck. He lives on York Avenue now. He came out of Beechhurst, Queens, and learned his pinball in the Army—in Wrightstown, New Jersey; in Kansas City. He was stationed in an office building in Kansas City, and he moved up through the pinball ranks from beginner to virtuoso on a machine in a Katz drugstore.
Lukas and Buckley begin to play. Best of five games. Five balls a game. Alternate shots. The machine is a Williams Fun-Fest, and Buckley points out that it is “classic,” because it is symmetrical. Each kick-out well and thumper-bumper is a mirror of another. The slingshots are dual. On this machine, a level of forty thousand points is where the sun sets and the stars come out. Buckley, describing his own style as “guts pinball,” has a first-game score of forty-four thousand three hundred and ten. While Lukas plays his fifth ball, Buckley becomes avuncular. “Careful, Tony. You might think you’re in an up-post position, but if you let it slide a little you’re in a down-post position and you’re finished.” Buckley’s advice is generous indeed. Lukas—forty-eight thousand eight hundred and seventy—wins the first game.
It is Buckley’s manner to lean into the machine from three feet out. His whole body, steeply inclined, tics as he reinforces. In the second game, he scores fifty thousand one hundred and sixty. Lukas’s address is like a fencer’s en garde. He stands close to the machine, with one foot projecting under it. His chin is high. Buckley tells him, “You’re playing nice, average pinball, Tony.” And Lukas’s response is fifty-seven thousand nine hundred and fifty points. He leads Buckley, two games to none.
“I’m ashamed,” Buckley confesses. And as he leans—palms pounding—into the third game, he reminds himself, “Concentration, Tom. Concentration is everything.”
Lukas notes aloud that Buckley is “full of empty rhetoric.” But Lukas, in Game 3, fires one ball straight into the death channel and can deliver only thirty-five thousand points. Buckley wins with forty. Perhaps Lukas feels rushed. He prefers to play a more deliberate, cogitative game. At home, between shots, in the middle of a game, he will go to the kitchen for a beer and return to study the situation. Buckley, for his part, seems anxious, and with good reason: one mistake now and it’s all over. In the fourth game, Lukas lights up forty-three thousand and fifty points; but Buckley’s fifth ball, just before it dies, hits forty-four thousand two hundred and sixty. Games are two all, with one to go. Buckley takes a deep breath, and says, “You’re a competitor, Tony. Your flipper action is bad, but you’re a real competitor.”
Game 5 under way. They are pummelling the machine. They are heavy on the corners but light on the flippers, and the scoreboard is reacting like a storm at sea. With three balls down, both are in the thirty-thousand range. Buckley, going unorthodox, plays his fourth ball with one foot off the floor, and raises his score to forty-five thousand points—more than he scored in winning the two previous games. He smiles. He is on his way in, flaring, with still another ball to play. Now Lukas snaps his fourth ball into the ellipse. It moves down and around the board, hitting slingshots and flippers and rising again and again to high ground to begin additional scoring runs. It hits sunburst caps and hole kickers, swinging targets and bonus gates. Minute upon minute, it stays in play. It will not die.
When the ball finally slips between flippers and off the playfield, Lukas has registered eighty-three thousand two hundred points. And he still has one ball to go.
Buckley turns into a Lukasite. As Lukas plays his fifth ball, Buckley cheers. “Atta way! Atta way, babes!” He goes on cheering until Lukas peaks out at ninety-four thousand one hundred and seventy.
“That was superb. And there’s no luck in it,” Buckley says. “It’s as good a score as I’ve seen.”
Lukas takes a cool final look around Circus Circus. “Buckley has a way of tracking down the secret joys of the city,” he says, and then he is gone.
Still shaking his head in wonder, Buckley starts a last, solo game. His arms move mechanically, groovedly, reinforcing. His flipper timing is offhandedly flawless. He scores a hundred thousand two hundred points. But Lukas is out of sight.
(The End)
[1] Lukas ultimately decided to be less congenial, and changed the title to Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (Viking Press, 1976)
[2] And they did so until 1976, when pinball at last became legal.
Edits: formatting, typed out footnotes
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