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FOR GENERAL DISTRIBUTION

 

08.03.00

ITHACA NY USA.

 

A PINBALLER LOOKS AT 30

David Yantorno’s autobiography of his tumultuous 20’s as a ZenWOWist

 

WON’T HAGGLE?

THE DAVE YANTORNO STORY IN 3 PARTS: PART 1: THE EARLY YEARS

By: David Yantorno

420 pp. New York

Doubleday. $27.50

 

                  By Andre Alexis

 

Enthusiasts of professional pinball will learn more about some of their favorite players in David Yantorno’s exhausting play-by-play of nearly a decade of memories. The book charts the ZenWOWist movement from its inception up to the recent Memorial Masters Tournament held annually in Ithaca NY, the birthplace of the notorious ‘religion’. This candid picture of an often news worthy group shows that their overtly rude-boy public image actually is the way they lead their private lives. Yantorno immerges as the best narrator for FIPA’s most embattled franchise since he seems to be the only player with a short or long-term memory with any resemblance to linear history. The ZenWOWists, with more lawyers on their payroll than players, march defiantly down a path of Hunter S. Thompson like debauchery while dominating their international competition at the only sport that will tolerate them. Yantorno puts the reader in the midst of the most intimate moments in Won’t Haggle? which shows the mature muse in one of the media’s rudest-boys.

 

Yantorno, aka Vide, aka Dave Y, aka Tingboy, aka Slowspank, compiles the early years with a gloss seven chapter history from 1990 to 1996, as he takes a stab at informing the reader as to what professional pinball is truly like. Here Yantorno shines as an author, giving accounts of tournament shenanigans from well-documented sources, laying groundwork for the current image of the ZenWOWist cult. The author admittedly fades into his lowest rankings ever as he “baby-sits the bleedin’ self-destructive bastards” whom he both admires and scorns. Both the Father of Modern Pinball, Jay Damberg, and the Scourge of Modern ZenWOWism, Matty Herman, were nursed back to health repeatedly at the hands of the author, he asserts, saving their careers. In a bold example of the depraved post match lifestyle ZenWOWists purport to lead, Yantorno retells the story of the 1993 Dollywood Daze in Tennessee. “Every player in every match played Bally’s 1979 Dolly Parton. So by day 2 of the weeklong tournament some of us got the idea that even more drugs than normal would be necessary to overcome the backglass imagery and the monotonous play. Tuesday morning Herm and TT had opened up heavyweightZed’s Mitsubishi brand X stash and taken it all, that’s a month supply for Zed! Herm was treating a carpet sample like a thousand-dollar hooker while TT had procured a bathtub full of bluecheese. I physically had to place their hands on the machine and point their heads down and Herms still hitting a flask of Markers. Later, when they had both passed out, which was Friday night, I had to put saline I.V.s in their arms. In three days they had eaten nothing and drank only booze” On another occasion Yantorno recalls Las Vegas 1995 when heavyweightZed, after a night of drunken gambling was arrest by an undercover officer. When appearing in court the following morning a visibly staggering hZ, after choosing to defend himself, told the court “to set the record straight, I thought the cop was a prostitute”. After time serverd and his bail paid, reports Yantorno, hZ immediately advanced upon the arresting undercover officer and proceed to hit on her. “By the time I got over to him he was already using his line about ‘coke off her breasts’ but in his weakened state a one armed head lock lead him away.”

 

The autobiography continues with a chapter entitled ‘What’s Honk Got to do with It’, a compelling look at a WOWist side project gone horribly awry. Yantorno details the power struggle within the band Goose, popular in the early 90’s just before the release of their second album No Time Like the Pleasant, with a stark unraveling of the overbearing, abusive and drunken personality of producer/bassist Cos. The project had a humble beginning, but soon expenses and egos were through the roof, while cases of unsold albums remained in the basement. Cos, explains Yantorno, hated the success of others especially him. “He became enraged and violent towards me after so many years of struggling side by side.” Yantorno observes, “although truly I was receiving more than my fair share of the girls attention.” Yantorno then vividly recalls his near extinction as a WOWist, his near, as he puts it, “permanent subordination to that damn woman.” Yantorno here becomes his most human, and his most sincere as he tells of his climb back to the top of professional pinball. The author describes this entire tension filled year of refocusing on the WOW within and the WOW without.

 

In the later half of the book, especially chapter 9 and 10, but arguably 9 through epilogue, Yantorno seems to be emphatically defending himself. While the first eight chapters delight readers with inside glimpses at the mysterious figures we read about and watch, the last four come across as a speech by Yantorno for Yantorno. Chapter 9, entitled “I am NOT a Bleedin’ Poof!” swims in ambiguity and apparent anger. While Chapter 10, “Everything I Said in Chapter 9 was True!” contains another diatribe along with 44 pages of identical text of the chapter to which it refers. Yantorno begins the next chapter boasting of his rise to renewed pinball glory in the media capital of the world, New York City. Here the book looses it precarious grasp on reality as Tingboy, as the author now only refers to himself, rises to a level of pinball greatness that no statistic can support. If that were not enough, Tingboy extols the virtues of his recent solo albums as well as his long list of products that bear his name or endorsement. On track 6 of his most recent album, the author admits, his very own lyrics include “Wasting away again in Grand Championville, searching for my lost extra-ball.” In turn after controversial turn Yantorno insists that heavyweightZed brand whiskey was his idea and that he played “absolutely no role in the zenWOWist monkey wrenching of the Illinois Williams P2K plant”. This spirited defense of himself after a grand jury found him guilty on both counts even after appeal. All in all the book trails off in a most crude way leaving the reader wanting more of the first seven chapters.

 

When asked for comment upon hearing of the book release, heavyweightZed had this to say. “From what I read, Vide’s trying to play himself off as the rudest of the rude, and that’s bollocks. At the Memorial Masters Touney post match party at eklein’s I-town compound, I noticed that Dave wasn’t around after awhile. I poked my head in a few rooms and found Herm, taking speed with vodka, chillus in the VIP suite with a Cornell sorority, the Flaming Scottsman dinkin’ me own whiskey and singing himself, Llyod, and four sheep to sleep from on top of Mata Hari. But no Dave, so I keep poking around. Finally I find him in eklein’s den. He looks at me like I startled him and tells me to close the door. When I see what he’s about, it ain’t coke booze or whores, he was readin’ them old Russian Pinball Technique books! Mumblin’ to imself about the need for restraint and improvement. Ach that ain’t even your grandmothers rude.”

 

All in all Won’t Haggle? leaves the reader asking, what the? However the first of a trilogy does raise one good point. The high priests and practitioners of ZenWOWism may, and indeed do live alternative self-destructive backward lifestyles that most consider to be an abuse of their power, that bafflingly red-eyed slurred and inebriated context notwithstanding they do bring pinball to the masses. And oddly it is this message which underscores Tingboy’s inability to live up to his own hype.

 

 

-wownet digital news

 

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