Observations at a Chuck E. Cheese
I ended up at a Chuck E. Cheese’s tonight.
I was with my aquaintance(sic) and got to observe the jolly good times. Come, join me. Sit down, let me tell you all about this place.
Luckily the cavern was right next door, so I got to leave through the turnstile, buy the Captain Morgan vials, and then sneak them back into the place hidden in my pockets, flashing my empty hands at the pubescent security girl at the gate–the one holding the condensed version of Hamlet–as if I was trying to move through a metal detector at the Beirut International Airport circa 1985.
As I walked back to my seat, I caught sight of my surroundings: kids throwing hands and feet akimbo; kids flailing about, sitting in flashing helicopters that move up and down; kids shoving tokens into metal machines that blink, beep, and then poop out little gray tickets. The kids love those tickets; they are like adults’ pay raises, adult trips to the mall, serving the purpose to satiate the desire to stick things into things and get stuff–lotsa stuff; they are Scooby Snacks. Hot damn, do humans love Scooby Snacks, or what? There’s no real difference between theirs and ours: ours have pictures of dead presidents: theirs have a picture of a mouse.
Nope, no difference at all. Fucking paper.
I poured my vial into my plastic container of Coke and then settled into a buzz; I related to the kids and eased back down in my seat; I got to talk to my aquaintance(sic) and relax. I handed my daughter coins when she came back; I took it all in.
We are waited on by kids; the kids make the pizza and then run it out to us; some of them are trying really hard, some of them get mad because they can’t find the right table. Why do they care so much? Just put the pizza down wherever. The adults are just kids; the adults are jacked up on smuggled rum or coke or rum and coke so who cares? Their kids are off getting their Scooby Snacks, over in flashing-ticket-land. They are away and so the adults are happy: kids are sometimes best away, since most adults just want to do their own thing, be it sticking things into things or, perhaps, reading. Some read from the Bible, getting their high envisioning ancient, Heston-like men in a Cecil B. DeMille set waving fake wooden rods at the sky; a large black father with gray suspenders reads Steven King; he mumbles the words as he reads them.
We drink our rum and read each other.
Time passes and the kids come back with tickets. They cash hundreds of them in for two pieces of plastic shit. My daughter gets a plastic spider and a fake foam gun. We shove more money into another machine and get them popsicles.
Good times; everyone’s happy. The car is full of sated humans as we round McWorld’s manicured turns perhaps a bit too fast. The wheels screech causing the brakes to squeal. Pizza sits in everyone’s stomachs. We drive the circuit and take in everyone’s cheesy holiday decorations. The kids believe: not us. They admire: We laugh. We are all the same, but the adults have the age advantage. Us adults have the wisdom to know what can’t be, what won’t be.
The night ends with a curtain falling over my daughter holding a found token. She looks up to me and smiles as I pull out a cap from an empty vial.