Addam's Family Pinball Machine

The Addams Family Pinball Machine and an Arcade on Alpine Road

I used to love playing The Addams Family pinball machine.

The mamushka. Hey! Hey!

When I was taking classes at Rockford College, I had a little circuit I would sometimes make afterward. I’d stop at Dollar Video, then head over to a small arcade on Alpine Road and play The Addams Family. I don’t remember what the arcade was called anymore. Maybe somebody else in Rockford does. What I remember is the machine.

It was perfect.

The Addams Family was already exactly the sort of thing I liked: macabre without being particularly threatening, funny without being cheerful, populated entirely by people who seemed to regard normal human behavior as some inexplicable eccentricity. Then somebody turned all of that into a pinball machine.

The machine talked to you. Gomez shouted. Thing appeared. The mansion was full of little mechanisms and surprises. Lights flashed everywhere. The whole table seemed slightly deranged, as if instead of designing a game somebody had somehow trapped the Addams house underneath a sheet of glass.

And, of course:

The Mamushka! Hey! Hey!

Pinball machines were wonderfully physical objects. You didn't merely operate one. You developed a relationship with it. You learned how hard you could hit the flippers, where the ball tended to go, which shots you could make reliably and which ones you were going to attempt anyway. You could even shove the entire machine around a little, provided you understood exactly how much misbehavior it would tolerate before declaring TILT and taking everything away from you.

There was something satisfying about that arrangement.

The machine had rules, but it also allowed negotiation.

I don't remember what classes I was taking on the particular afternoons I went there. I don't remember what videos I rented at Dollar Video. I don't remember what I paid to play or exactly how long I stayed. Thirty-some years later, most of the practical information has disappeared.

But I remember standing in front of that machine on Alpine Road.

That's the strange hierarchy memory eventually imposes on a life. The things that seemed important at the time gradually dissolve, while some completely ordinary afternoon survives intact because there was a particular sound, a particular light, a particular object waiting for you at the end of it.

Someday I think I'm going to buy one of these machines.

Not a reproduction. Not a digital simulation with a hundred pinball tables loaded into it. I want the enormous, ridiculous physical object. I want it in the basement taking up space and requiring maintenance. I want the silver ball and the mechanical noises and Gomez shouting from somewhere inside the cabinet.

Mostly, though, I suppose I'd be buying that little arcade on Alpine Road.

I'd be buying an afternoon after classes at Rockford College.

I'd be buying Dollar Video.

I'd be buying back a few minutes with the person who stood in front of that machine all those years ago, put another quarter in, and still had absolutely no idea where the ball was going next.

The Mamushka!

Hey! Hey!

The mamushka. Hey! Hey!