Crazy Flipper Fingers

My friend's birthday party was held at Lucky Ju Ju Pinball in Alameda. I went with a bit of trepidation - I had never shown much skill at the game of pinball (there are not many feats of hand-eye coordination in my scrapbook). I spent my youth wishing in vain for the abilities to show up after hours of concentrated practice. I remember that when I was eight or nine I believed that pinball was a game for burgeoning juvenile delinquents. You found machines in bowling alleys and stuck in the corners of laundromats. The idea of putting quarters into a machine was connected with two things: getting a candy bar and slot machines. Getting a Snickers bar was pretty much a sure thing - whereas getting three cherries in a row was definitely a chancy thing and therefore gambling. Pinball was definitely associated with the latter.
By the time I turned thirteen, I was stretching my boundaries a little bit. I could blame rock and roll, or hormones, but it was most likely a combination of the two - and these two items fell together in Ken Russell's film version of "Tommy." I had heard bits and pieces of the Who's opera, but never as a whole. The overture was used as intro music for the local station's late movie. I went to see the story of that deaf, dumb and blind kid at the theater across from the university campus. They were the first to install way too many speakers to give patrons that "concert (loud" experience. I was swept away by the music and images (it helped that it was loud and Ann Margret wrestled her pillow in a writhing mass of chocolate and baked beans). Then there was the pinball.
"Tommy" taught me that pinball was a means of salvation - a response to repression and a path to God. Elton John was the Pinball Wizard - how could this not be so? When the movie was over, we walked out to the lobby where there was a lone machine standing behind the ticket office. The machine was Fireball. It had tricks and features in its design that I had never imagined - most prominently a spinning disc in the center of the deck to twist the ball into directions that could never be fully controlled or anticipated. The flippers could slide together if you hit a certain bumper, and another would release any trapped extra balls (Wotan and Odin). I watched my older brother play first and was amazed at the sound and excitement generated by one silver ball. Then it was my turn. I pulled the plunger and let the ball go. I watched as it bounced, ricocheted, rang buzzers and bells and then slid abruptly right between the flippers: drain. My brother admonished me never to put both flippers up at the same time.
Thus began my futile search for the perfect technique. I tried to work my magic on the machines the way I saw other kids do - I was too shy to use a lot of "English" (hips and thigh). I stood in front of a new wave of machines that came just before the video game explosion came and all those pinball machines moved out to make room for Asteroids and Space Invaders. I felt a quiet bit of satisfaction as the video games took over - my frequent low scores would become a memory as the pinball machine became a relic again. The sad irony was that I was not that good at Space Invaders either.
Last weekend while I was listening to the jukebox play Canned Heat and Led Zepplin, I had a breakthrough. I played enough games on one machine that I finally started to anticipate some of its action. I won a high score on a match, then on a high score. I looked across the way at the others - staring intently at the glass in front of them - smiling. I pushed the start button and worked on my bonus.