CHORUS: Now, in the Junk Arcade: our four fellow travellers have almost reached their next destination; the sprawling and cavernous Logic Gate, unofficial home for pinball and her addicts on the Drop. All that’s between this little slice of equal parts heaven and hell and our cast is a single locked door. A basic dramatic set-up, yes, but will our favorite fools take the bit on with gusto?  Will there be harsh words, subtle threats, tense negotiations, and just a tiny wee dollop of magical realism? Will they manage to make progress into the Logic Gate, at which point the narrator will no doubt wax on about both his love of pinball and his hatred of the men who control it?  We cannot say for sure, but it’d be weird to be talking about it if they didn’t!  Still, we can never rely on the Chicago Street crew to do the precisely expected…

PB: Did you hear that shit?

yf: lol yeah that’s wild, I didn’t know anyone else was in here.

PB: Who the hell was that?

yf: i think that was the chorus? Which is super strange because i thought we were the chorus, so now i’m left wondering who the fuck we’re even supposed to be lol

PB: How was that a chorus?  It was one voice. One genuinely fucked up voice that referred to itself in third person plural, but… still   just one.

yf: yeah, you don’t… really… get greek theater tradition, do you?

PB: This is total bullshit, and I’m gonna figure out what’s fucking what.

yf: ok, lol, you have fun doing that. Anyway, kids, back to the show! (oh shit are we just bumper announcers?)

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”

– Jacques Lacan

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.”

– Marcel Proust

“You keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.“

– David Lynch

Honour Boxes first began to see limited use in the 1740s, at the very nascense of the British Industrial Revolution. These small, squat, cubic devices would most readily be found sitting on a corner table in a gentleman’s club, or some other area from which the rabble and women were restricted. 

They included, upon their top, a coin slot – very nearly the coin slot, the first that fully crossed the threshold from gimmick into true function. Alas. Next to the slot there would be a hinged door that opened upwards, exposing the box’s contents from above. Inside, there would be snuff packets or cigarettes or some other drug-delivery product in vogue at the time. 

Honour boxes slowly spread from the south, sophisticating in basic design, if not actual function, as they made their meandering migration across the isles. They were a convenient novelty, and were certainly appreciated by those who patronized them. But they were never going to succeed as a bonafide method of commerce amongst the landed gentry. 

This was due to the Honour Box’s coin slot having no actual complex mechanics in its guts. It was a mere mouth and stomach, with no connection to any security device within its gullet, meaning that the aptly-named contraption literally relied upon the “honor” of the upper-class clientele to both pay in the first place, and then not empty the entire box of its product, which they could ultimately do whether they paid or not. 

We are all, in the end, one human band of crooks and thieves, but anyone with historical sense knows that our betters have always been both enthusiastic and exceptional at skullduggery in all its forms, especially petty theft. With no way to regulate the process of transaction, there was no way to deal with the host of upper class cads and rakes who would help themselves to the boxes’ contents at their leisure, and with nary a single pence dropped.

And so the men of the ruling class, doubtless feeling insulted by the very idea of having to pay for something to which they felt entitled, lived up to their reputation as true scoundrels, and demand for the device as a commercial concern dried up. The remaining stock certainly wasn’t going to be risked on the lower classes, who also wouldn’t bother to pretend the absurd device was anything other than a source for free goods. Soon enough the boxes vanished from the public world, having been stolen into the private collections of country estates, or simply tossed in the bin.

But although Honour Boxes and their precious slots died a physical death, they left behind the ghost of an idea that refused to vanish, now that it was so close to being put in an actual, functioning body. As the age of mass production loomed large, this millenia-old dream was now fundamentally unstoppable, with the only question being how the threshold would break, not when. The bloom was coming, and the race was on to find the first corner of the market who would ultimately benefit from the flowering.

And while the actual winner of this contest ended up being a device of rote functionality – not exactly an inspiring machine even if it made perfect sense for it to be the first across the line – it was another invention, or rather a key blending of inventions, created mere months after the first, that would truly capture the imagination of the public, and drag the coin slot and it’s enormous economic back-end across the globe.

“I made it super clear that I don’t have a key for any other door than my store’s,” Etch sighs, jerking a thumb toward Picky. “This one said she’d take care of it.”  Picky, for her part, turns her head toward the Kid as a wicked smile creeps across her face.

“Are you kidding me?” the Kid whines, with an exasperated splaying of his arms and fingers.  “Did you bring me along just to try to get me to break open this door for you?”

“I didn’t bring you along, you volunteered to come along, because you’re greedy and you were bored. And now that we all happen to be here, yeah, I could use your help with this, since you’re the one of us who can do it.”

“Do you notice that black dome above the door?” the Kid says. I look up and am surprised that I hadn’t even parsed the camera, given its looming presence – its lidless, unpupiled eye. “The people on the other side of that camera are people who know who I am. These people have money, these people are very legitious. These are the types of people who call the cops, and who cops and judges listen to.”

“It’s a door,” Picky says.

“Right, then let’s just go to another door. It’s not like there’s no other way out of here.”

“It’s a twenty minute walk back, to then walk another 40 minutes around the actual complex,” Etch says.

“We don’t have time to go back, anyway,” Picky says. “We don’t have time to hunt around for some other egress. We need to go through this door, pretty much now, for my very clever, very precise plan to work.”

“Yeah every individual detail of this plan you’ve been enacting has just fucking oozed with precision…” the Kid shoots back

“You can hear sad men playing their desperate games through the wall!” Picky asserts, with exaggerated frustration. “We’re literally picking a meaningless lock in order to get through a door into a public space! We aren’t breaking and entering to steal something, or to gain access to some place we’re not supposed to be, so I can’t imagine it’s something anyone’s really gonna give a shit about.”

 “Right, so we’re breaking and entering into a place…” the Kid says, his voice starting to quiver with legit anger. “…just for the pure entertainment value of doing crime.”

“No, this is about expediency, which is a concept I know you understand,” Picky insists, refusing to back off despite his earnest physical response. She’s right about the other side of the door, at the very least; the low but distinct sound of a pinball-laden arcade radiates through the plywood – that rising saturation of electronic noise and humanity, a soundscape less busy than the obnoxious buzz of a casino, and also less anxious… a warm sense of familiarity starts to seep and pool into the rugged channels of my being.

“I’ll catch cases for a lot of dumb reasons, but just straight-up breaking and entering on film, no thanks. You all can eat-” The Kid stops here, just fully stops, dead-ass frozen, and he’s got a sublime kind of gaping look on his face, a purity of blankness that still subtly betrays the potent mixture of disbelief and fury raging just below his higher consciousness. I glance back at Picky, who’s casually holding a small object. 

I want to call it the small object, because that’s the phrase that immediately comes to mind, but just after that thought comes what appears to be a sequential notion, although I’ve no idea from where, that it is so VERY MUCH the small object that it is entirely appropriate to consider it a small object as reference to its singular externality and I literally do not know what the hell i’m trying to say or where any of it is coming from, but I definitely cannot take my eyes off of a small object Picky is holding in her hand.

There is a pregnant silence. I look back at the Kid, and when I see his face, I snap a pic of it, because it is now literally anime levels of stupefied, and it will likely make for prime meme material later, around the house.

My mind quickly returns to what appears to be a small object sitting in Picky’s hand. The phrase that now pops into my mind is “abstract familiarity” which has that annoying and uncomfortable academic queasiness about it that suggests the description of what the phrase means is going to be very much longer than the phrase itself.  But no, I’m just… just filling my head with useless silly thoughts about a small object Picky is holding in her hand.

Calling it “nondescript” would be a little cloying, but it has a somewhat toyish look to it, definitely the whiff of someone’s personal 3D printer.  It is vaguely egg-shaped, featuring a light blue lacquer color and a finicky geometric overdesign on the majority of its surface. Although it isn’t a cube, it reminds me of nothing so much as a cross between Mulholland Drive’s blue box and the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser.  That specificity feels agitating, as if something that important shouldn’t feel so on the nose… but on the nose about what?

Picky moves her thumb over top of it and gently presses the top, causing a small object to shudder and swell, as if threatening to do something more interesting than its size and affect suggests. What follows is a moment that feels impossibly long, and my mind begins to remember things it forgot, or thought it forgot… look, it’s all very confusing, it feels like some sort of broadcast signal intrusion in my brain, something that wasn’t supposed to be there now is, and by virtue of being there, it now belongs there just the same as any other fragment of impression.

By some combination of force mixed with desire, my mind is carried back to that ridiculous moment in time. The past washes over me like an old friend: the berzerk shade of madness that seemed to inflict Chicago Street that weekend,  the legend of the ridiculous path that a small object took to enter the Kid’s possession, the dubious but glorious hustle Picky ran to scheme it off of him, and then the ostentatious way it was apparently destroyed when the Kid wouldn’t stop bitching about it… these events were beginning to pass out of recent memory and into minor legend, but obviously, Picky still has moves to play, and knowing her, she clearly has her eye on expanding this tale’s legacy.

“Hey, Picky,” I say, my voice audibly trembling in a way I neither expected nor appreciate.  “What the hell is that, and why do I recognize it without remembering it?”

“Recognition is remembrance,” Picky says, through her wide, slightly crooked grin.  “And don’t make me have to drop a madeleine cakes reference right now, because that gag is played.

“Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that shit before,” Etch says. Even they have a look of slight confusion, which may as well be wild surprise given their dedication to their composure. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s nothin’ important, just a thing between me and the Kid,” Picky says, placing the object between her index finger and thumb and eyeballing it like some sort of precious jewel.  “It’s honestly the only thing in the world I trust the Kid to hold onto more than anyone else… well, like, most of the time…”

“I should snatch that out of your hand, and get the fuck out of your life right fucking now,” the Kid says, as he manages to somewhat regain his composure.

“Do it, if you’re committed to that course of action,” Picky says, her rictus grin widening. She’s a few inches shorter than the Kid, but at the moment she seems about a foot taller. “I might let you take what’s mine, for that bargain. But you would finally be capitulating to the fact that it is mine.”

“According to your self-serving admirality-court fringe-flag bullshit, maybe, but…”

“Dude, you’re going to go to war with settled law right now,” Picky says, her smile fading into that annoyed insistence we all know and dislike. “For once, just appreciate the fucking grift.” He doesn’t respond, but I can see intense amounts of wheels within wheels grinding just behind his eyes.

“You burned it in the oubliette after the sequence,” he says, after a moment. I recognize most of those words on their own.

“Close-up magic is pretty fucking easy when you’re literally surrounded by misdirection,” Picky replies.  

“You swore it wasn’t a proxy you destroyed.”

“Very solemnly swore, in fact, I believe on the life of Mo. She thought that was pretty funny…clearly I lied to shut you up about ever getting it back. It was mine at that point, and it was mine to burn, and it was mine to lie about. Degenerate gamblers who rage against bad beats don’t deserve to call themselves degenerates, and they certainly don’t get to choose the terms of their wagers after the fact.”

“…so you kept it.”

“Yep.”

“You kept it for this moment.”

“I knew a moment like this would come moseyin’ along.”

“You kept it in order to force me into opening this door?”

“I thought it’d be good to keep you from using it for a while,” Picky replies. “No one’s forcing anyone to do anything they don’t want to do.”

“Why the fuck would you give it back, after you did all of that fucking social engineering on order to take it from me?” the Kid says, sliding neatly from anger to bargaining. 

“We actually are on a pretty tight schedule, dude,” she says. “If my multiple unread messages from LC are what they think they are, then Mo’s already starting to lose her shit. But more importantly, I need to come into this place a little more low key than blowing through the front door.”

“You think doing a B&E while obviously being recorded is the subtle choice here?” the Kid says.

“It’s not the “subtle choice,” it’s the right choice and…” here she switches to a voice that I think is supposed to sound like Hans Gruber. “As it happens, it’s also the necessary choice.” 

The Kid fumes silently for a few more moments, and then slowly exhales, flutters his eyes, and reverts to his usual apathetic expression.

“How about you don’t do me any goddamn favors and you don’t treat me like a mouse in a goddamn skinner box,” the Kid says, slowly and deliberately reaching out his hand and snatching a small object from her. “You can shove your intermittent rewards up your ass.”  

He carefully holds a small object in his right hand while he rifles through his bag, pulling out a drill. “I don’t know how to “pick locks,” by the way.  I know how to most effectively break them.”  He lines the drill up with his off-hand, while continuing to examine a small object, with a bewitched look on his face.

“You’re on camera, remember,” Picky grins.

“Who gives a shit? These guys are fucking assholes, anyway.” The drill’s whine echoes harshly through the hall as he shoves it into the lock, causing an even more unpleasant grinding wail. Then the Kid yanks the whole lock mechanism out with a violent flourish, and boots the doors open.

  They swing back to reveal another long room, but unlike the previous bland passages, we’re greeted by a pure and good and magical vista. The hallway ahead is dim and narrow, and on each side is a neat row of classic pinball machines – legendary titles like Midway Plaisance, Blood Gulch, Hey Batter!, and Magic Lantern… somehow I always forget the beauty of this kind of tableau until I am inculcated within its sacred embrace.   

The pinball machines that fill this hallway are known as electromagnetics, or EMs, for those hip to the lingo. These games are all well over half a century old; pre-digital, with clattering analogue reels that both keep the score and provide a constant thrumming cadence. And all of these pins are in pristine condition, with well-lit backglasses that radiate a glowing warmth and colorful charm. 

The sounds these pins produce are primitive in the best way: punctuating pop-bumpers oscillating between high and low pitched bells, their haunted ringing long lingering over the soundscape; the solid, machine-rattling thwack of the side bumpers and the clanking and whirring of drop targets as they clatter up and down; the flippers – snapping and crackling with intention; and the rumbling purr of of the ball as it rolls, slides, and glides around the playfield.  

As we begin to traverse this sensual paradise, I note the rabble of fellows inhabiting this room – older and rumpled, bespeckled with hats pulled down close over bald heads. It’s as close to that anonymous expression of masculine late middle age as you could find – and don’t very much wonder if I’m seeing ghosts of my future self. They haven’t looked up at us after our barging in, but instead are, to a man, deeply focused on the playfields in front of them, their eyes fully glassed as if lost in feed.

In a real sense, they are, right now, prisoners in their own strange addictions. peculiar to the Drop. It’s the same need all of us share, the kind of uncanny pull toward some amusement or other that might bring someone, sometimes unconsciously, to a place such as this; a place where they can, for just un suçon, feel truly lost and detached; a quick hit of succor, away from the cloying needs of the strangling world.

The classics section makes up seven or eight different hallways that dead-end in the back of the Logic Gate. This locational obscurity, along with the primitive nature of these machines, means that this area has a limited, old-timer appeal. That makes it one of the Gate’s quieter and more meditative corners. 

(Also, a lot of the cruising that goes on in the Gate ends up consumating in some dim nook or cranny of this area, which frustrates the owners of this place to no end (the no fags policy isn’t official as of this writing, so it’s still tentatively illegal to kick out the queers, but the spirit of the Logic Gate’s “sovereign law” still embraces that antique view with some gusto.))

(Or so I’ve heard.)

The Logic Gate isn’t far from the actual perimeter of the Carnival, being situated at the threshold of its so-called “Low Orbit”: an area of about five kilometers sprawling out around the front gates, where the never-ending river of the general public enters into a wide delta that amasses itself directly outside of the Carnival’s unceasing maw. 

The Low Orbit is another strata to this fascinating economic onion that blooms in the fluctuating wake of the Carnival’s massive gravity. It’s heavily controlled by carny interests or by the Rookery itself; if you’re an outsider who wants to set up shop beyond this point, both the cost of rent and the need for Carnival favor exponentially increases the closer you get to the gate. Thus the area is mainly controlled by massive corporate entities, weirdo trillionaires, or carefully-maintained carny conspiracies. 

Here at this asshole end of the Low Orbit, however, there exists another liminal middleground of the Junk Arcade, where pure economics takes a back seat to the soft power of populist patriarchal sway. Here, the rent is much less brutal than it would be a couple hundred feet closer to the Big Show; it’s the kind of sum a group of middle-aged, middle-class white dudes might be able to pool, given their above-average access to resources in a system already weighted toward their success (provided they pay back that system-granted success by strictly maintaining structures of patriarchal control.)

A Logic Gate, near as I understand it (don’t write in,) is the basic binary circuit that allows for the creation of more complicated circuits and basically makes electronics, as a whole, possible. So the name would be a super fun pun if the tribe of men (and they are all men) who oversee this place, economically and socially, didn’t actually consider themselves to be paragons of logic, and thus, ultimate arbiters of universal truth.  

Cats like this are my philosophical mortal enemies; dudes who cling to the duality of “right” and “wrong”, and who coincidentally always find themselves on the side of the former. Nevermind that every one of these motherfuckers has their own specific definition of what “logic” is, most of them boiling down their supposedly bespoke philosophies into roughly the same structures; structures that are built with deference to tradition, paternalism, and dedication to empire.

As a result, these dudes all build roughly the same constructs in their minds, despite starting out at supposedly idiosyncratic places. They’re living proof that reactionaryism is a self-organizing gravity well, and that fascism is syncretic; in a sense, all of their roads do lead to Rome. They hold on to this idea of being a Good Citizen of Empire, and treat that framework as the most solid structure that could exist – therefore any attempt at self-examination is dangerously deconstructive. 

In essence, their philosophy treats reflection as a fundamental sin.

To put it more bluntly, the Logic Gate is administered and frequented by the sort of middle-class-born white-dude douchebag who thinks way too highly of their opinions and their hobbies. They don’t qualify traditionally as incels, as lots of these cats have decent-paying jobs and partners and reputations, such as they are. Their misogyny and racism isn’t as open as the more reactionary lot they openly cater to (boys will be boys, and their money is always green.)  But they are the “traditional” buffer that fails to challenge, and thus props up, the reactionary core of woman-loathing sociopaths that they’re more than happy to have patronize their business.

Ultimately, these guys are collectors; that is, accumulators and hoarders, men not satisfied or indeed even acquainted with the concept of a “fair share.” And on the Drop, when you have a large-enough collection of something, you essentially have a built-in business – which very literally explains every car “museum” in existence. 

And those who collect items related to the amusement industry are therefore doubly blessed, as these are the frivolous machines we’re all more or less addicted to, and compelled to seek out, on the Drop.

That makes the guys who run this place both literal and metaphorical gatekeepers to one of my favorite things in all of existence – my one true love, my only drug (well…): pinball. By controlling this space, and reinforcing the idea that this is the Drop’s spiritual pinball home through ritualistic self-mytholization and proximity to the Carnival, these dickheads maintain and control, as much as they are able to, the narrative of what pinball “can” and “should” be. This metaphysically recursive ego trip blows back into the material world, being massively projected by the Logic Gate’s prime location. 

In terms of material product, The Carnival gets first choice of all the prime amusement devices, large and small. Its vast resources – token, ticket, and prodbox – give it near-exclusive access to much of the newer, more sought-after amusement products that the Maker spits out. The Rookery really only truly competes with the behemoth known as Ethereal in this regard. And the Logic Gate, merely by its proximity to the Carnival, and connections inside, gets to pick over whatever’s left of the choicest cuts of continually cycled-out product, right after the carny houses take their own cut.

And the junta of seven or eight men who form the financial backbone of the Logic Gate have the financial means to snatch up both the best of the leftover new stuff, and the best of the old stuff, assuring themselves possession of both the most popular new games and the best-conditioned rares and classics to horde for themselves, and to occasionally sell to wealthy collectors from the clusters far above us, for inflated ticket-rolls way above the paygrade of regular jerks like me.

  So yes, middle-age white men love pinball, and the pinball industry loves them back, by catering almost exclusively to them, both in general content and access to distribution.

I wish I could resent them to the point of avoiding places like this, but… they have so, so much good stuff… the pure-grade pins that flow into the Logic Gate constantly, making it hard to not visit by the sheer gravity of its bounty. If you love pins, you’re probably going to find yourself here sometimes, even though a bunch of shitty right-wing cishet chuds run the place, and spend copious amounts of time here, generally policing their surroundings as much as focusing on their games. Look, there’s truly no ethical consumption on the Drop…

…Look, we all contain multitudes.