THE MADRID FILES
î1999 HeavyweightZed
Times were tough in the days before the WOW. I was a young pinballer then, just learning the harsh ropes of addiction in the dark bars and crowded arcades of central Madrid. The city itself was horribly polluted in every corner. The cars and factories had laid waste to all colors but for grey, black, and bitter yellow. Nothing was green. Everything had a layer of dark soot on it. And the pinball wasnÕt any brighter. Back then, you know, a game cost 500 pesetas. That's nearly a dollar for three balls and some surly Spanish guy telling you things about the game in a language that you only half understand. You've gotta get good quick, or else you might as well spend all that cash on lottery tickets or PCP.
I had gone to Madrid, in theory, on a student exchange program. But between the alcohol and the pinball, I ran out of money early on. I saw it coming, but I didn't give a damn. I sold my clothes and luggage for extra cash and never once went to my host family's house. I didn't know who they were or where they lived, and I didn't care. It was all Addam's Family, Judge Dredd and T2 back then. A replay in a bar wasn't too hard to come by, but getting on the board in the arcades was tough. The competition had a narroweyed and slowburning fierceness to it that was not easy for me to surpass in the early days of my association with 'Rudeboy Pinball.' I filled the local machines with those thick gold 500 peseta coins until I bottomed out.
Has the dawning sun ever woken you up from sleeping in an arcade doorway? Have you ever hugged yourself for warmth while trying to explain to a foreign policeman that you don't care about vagrancy? That he can go and fuck himself if he won't give you the equivalent of fifty cents? Have you ever begged quarters for a single game while your stomach is grumbling at you like an Earthshaker machine?
Those were dangerous times for me. The winter was coming to Madrid and the grimy streets were getting cold at nite. I had run out of money for hotel rooms. I was becoming thin and sallow; my clothes were dirty and smelled of billiards chalk and vinyl floor tiles. I began to live in fear of something happening to my hands: that they would get caught in a door or stepped on when I slept on the streets at nite. My precious hands... they began to smell like the metal of coins, and large calluses developed on the tips of my middle fingers. If they got hurt, I wouldn't be able to compete; I wouldn't be able to replay, and that was an injury I literally could not afford.
I stole a jacket out of a bar at the opposite end of the city one nite. I ran like a rabbit in a bad dream until I felt safe. I arrived back at my part of town, Tribunal, several hours later, with the sleeves ripped off and wrapped around my hands. The jacket I could wear as a vest, but it was the protection for my hands that mattered to me most.
One time --it was late in the evening-- I was standing in front of the Last Action Hero. I had the money, the credits were in the machine, but I wasn't playing yet. I'd gotten to simply holding onto the metal for a few moments before launching a ball. You know, to savor the moment, to really get into the sensation. Like eating my food slow, it allowed me to get the most pleasure out of the minimal amount of pinball on which I was surviving. (No matter how much I played, though, it was never enough. On a good day of panhandling, I could play for several hours. My wrists would be swollen and my vision blurry, but it was never enough.)
Sometimes, if the arcade workers kicked me out because I didn't have any money to play, I would comfort myself by standing and holding onto anything that was metal and waist-high, anything that would stop the twitching for awhile: a newspaper vending machine, the trunk of a car, the sides of a mailbox. Once, towards the end, I had to hug-tight a metal signpost when the world suddenly became disorienting and came crashing in on me. The sharp edges pressed snug against the inside creases of my knuckles...
The depravity of my condition, was equal to the strength with which I had adopted the Rudeboy Style, El Estilo de los Insolentes. Despite the blackouts and the hunger, the letters ZED began to appear on more and more boards, and I slowly became acknowledged as one of Madrid's toughest. I played for money and could win, sometimes doing well enough that I wouldn't have to beg that day. When I first arrived, that extra cash might well have gone towards a place to stay for the nite, but by now any leftover winnings went straight to the amphetamines... or painkillers, or whiskey...
This one time with Last Action Hero, though.... Bad Religion screamed from the arcade's beat-up stereo speakers. The fluorescent lights flickered in patterns that were dangerous and unsettling. My hands rotated the flipper buttons in their sockets. My legs were weak, so I thought about tightening the bolts in their sockets. My head was bowed, and I was staring down at the glass. Most of my face was obscured by unruly dreads falling from my head, but what I could see from the fluorescent reflection was ghostly and hollow. I hadn't shaved in months. One of my eyes was bruised the color of the gunk that collects in the feet of the machines, and the other had sunk into my face like withered fruit on the vine. I had been in a few fights. Simply attacked at other times. A few of my teeth were loose. They would fall out soon if I didn't start eating more.
I looked up from the reflection and inhaled the rank air. I exhaled. I watched my arm move towards the plunger in underwater-slowmo. I pulled the plunger back and began to play. While the ball fiddled with the pop bumpers, I thought about Jason Damberg, the Father of Modern Pinball. He'd been on TV last nite; I watched in a bar. While shoving the machine, I remembered how --as a child-- I had wanted to be Damberg when I grew up. I had wanted to be a professional pinballer. I had wanted...
The ball came down to my right flipper, and I cradled it reflexively. Around me were other pale and malnourished addicts. This was a tough arcade where the energy was always a low growl. The occasional well-off player from someplace like Bernabeu would occasionaly chance his skills here, at first thinking that he could play pinball and later being more worried about leaving with his life and not so much the improbable high score...
I gave the ball a smooth push to the left ramp and was anticipating the return to the left flipper when I heard a coin fall to the floor. The jingle had a heavy and somewhat dull ring to it and I knew right away it was a 500 piece, good for one more game. I spun away from the machine and dove towards the floor behind me where I'd heard the coin hit. As would be expected with such lean company, I wasn't the only one who had heard the coin's alluring song. The other addicts hit the ground, too, and the dirty coin rolled dangerously close to another man's weathered hand. I howled and grabbed the man's arm. Someone else pulled me by the hair and yelled at me in Spanish that I was a 'sister fucking American.' I brought the man's hand to my mouth and bit down, hard and on his middle finger. Blood spurted across my face. The man screamed and dropped the coin. I pulled it towards me and put the coin in my mouth, a ploy I'd learned early on so that my hands would not get hurt when the others tried to pry them open.
The first man had gone fetal and was nursing his ruptured flipper finger, but the other still wanted the precious coin. He wrestled me back to the floor, but I wouldn't punch him. I would never punch anybody and risk bruising my hands. He was stronger than me, and forced me onto my back. In a moment of desperation, I slammed my forehead in to the bridge of his nose, with the coin clamped tightly between my back teeth. His head whipped back, and he covered his face with his hands. I got out from under him and gave the fellow's face a bit of the elbow, and then, once he was hunched over, even a few turns of the boot to be sure that he would not get up again. But I never touched him with my hands. Never the hands.
When the violence was done, I stood up and looked immediately to the Last Action Hero. I still had two balls left. Thick strings of drool poured from my mouth as I put the coin in my pocket, and, trembling, stepped back up to the machine. Blood --maybe mine, maybe his-- dripped from my face to the glass. I looked at my hands: they did not seem bruised. My forearms had the usual healthy look and well-developed proportions that were so opposite from the rest of my shriveled body and mind. I wiggled my fingers a bit and went through a few drills while the older man with the bit finger groaned from the corner of the room. Everything seemed in order. I wrapped my hands around the corners of the machine and closed my eyes. While waiting for my breathing to slow down, the police --la policia-- burst into the arcade with riot gear.
It was my arrest and subsequent deportation that brought me back to The States.
My folks tried putting me in rehab for awhile, but it was apparent --back then-- that I was a bad seed: destined for dark and unlawful pinball until the day that my predictably miserable and drug-induced death would take me from this world.
As fortune would have it, however, I did not burn out quite so quickly. While still in the lock-up, I was paid a secretive visit by a man named Ron Denson. Father Denson was, of course, one of the earliest preachers of the WOW, but I did not know him then. Denson more or less snuck into my empty white room and sat down on the edge of the ungiving white bed. It had been nearly a week now since they let me sleep without the restraints on my arms and legs.
'So I hear you like the pinball pretty well,' he said. 'I heard you like to give the machine a bit of a spanking now and then.'
The middle finger on my right hand twitched some, and I nodded suspiciously with mute assent. I must have looked quite the miserable sod because the look in his calm brown eyes was magnanimous and of sincere pity.
'I know of a game,' he said quietly, 'a new way of pinball.'
He placed his hand on mine. 'Have you heard of a machine called Dimension?'
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