Pin Ball At the Nursery - 1977

how Sharon Mitchell and I became friends pinball at the Nursery 1977.

Pinball CBGBs 1978

Throughout the late 1970s I stood at the front of CBGBs for the Contortions, Damned, and the Voidoids. Afterwards I drank beer and play pinball at the back of the club. I was never friends with the big names. The bartenders were my friends, the doorman with the yellow construction helmet let me in for free, college co-eds thought I looked like David Johansson from the New York Dolls and by the time they discovered I was simply a poet, it was too late to try for someone else. I was lucky and CBGBs became my home away from home.

Foto by Bob Gruen

GASLIGHT PINBALL by Peter Nolan Smith

Pinball was banned as a game of chance in New York City throughout most of the 20th Century.

In 1976 a pinball wizard proved the contrary to a courtroom by calling out his shots to the amazed judges.

The ace later acknowledged that his called shot was pure luck, however pinball machines once more populated amusement arcades and bars. Coming from Boston I had spent hundreds of dollars in the amusement arcades along Washington Street, honing my skills on the slanted playing field.

In 1976 I quit my job as a substitute teacher in Boston and moved to New York in a stolen car. I lived in Park Slope and ran the lunch at a gay restaurant near the UN. For being the waiter, cook, busboy, barman, and cashier from 10am-3:30pm, I earned about $50 a day.

After work I wandered over New York's premier entertainment area. Times Square was packed with porno store, go-go bars, massage parlors, XXX movie houses, bars, and amusement centers, which were filled with good players. The best was a Frenchman. We competed head to head once a week. Michel had soft hands. His flipper work was extraordinary. He won most of the time, but not always.

Michel worked as a bartender in Park Slope. The Gaslight Pub on 7th Avenue had cheap drinks, a good jukebox, a few beautiful girls from the neighborhood, and a great pinball machine. It was also two blocks from the apartment that I shared with a gay jazz impresario.

The straight crowd at the bar didn't like queers. James didn't care whether they liked him or not. He was a drinker and bought drinks for the old regulars, who never questioned his largess, especially since I was friends with Davie Corr, an insane bank robber, who once robbed three banks in Flatbush back to back to back.

Whenever a stranger challenged me to a pinball game, Davie backed my play. A dollar for 1000 points. I sometimes won by 100,000. A c-note was a good money for a game of skill.

Michel and I battled regularly on SLASH. I maintained an advantage since he couldn't leave the bar long enough to get into his rhythm.

One night I entered the Gaslight and ordered a Jack and coke. The men at the bar kept turning their head to the corner, where a dark-haired skinny girl with big breasts was bumping the pinball machine with her pelvis like she was on a burlesque stage. The brunette was wearing a band-aid of a mini-skirt and a skimpier tube-top showing skin was as white as a zombie. Stiletto heels made her my height.

Michel lifted his eyebrow and leaned over the bar.

"She had been playing like that for an hour."

"Non-stop?"

"Non-stop." He motioned with his head to go play with her. She wasn't his type. He liked black girls.

"Anyone play with her?"

"No one here good enough to beat her."

"Thanks for that vote of confidence."

At that time I had a theory that the way someone danced was the way they made love. Extending this hypothesis to pinball was a leap of faith and I asked the pinball player, if I could play a game.

"Pinball?" Her voice was pure Flatbush. She was a hometown girl.

"It's the only game in here." I slotted a dollar's worth of quarters into SLASH. We played for a half-hour. I beat her by only thousands, since I was mesmerized by how savagely her hips thumped the machine. After the tenth tilt I risked a slap in the face and asked, "Do you make love the same way you play?"

"Only one way to find out."

She drained her drink and took my hand. I waved goodnight to Michel. James was walking down the block with two tough boys. He was into rough trade. Seeing me with Fran he smirked at the both of us without saying a word. He knew better than to cockblock a friend.

Fran lived a few blocks away from the bar. She taught kindergarten. I told her about teaching in South Boston during the busing riots. Her school was in Bed-Stuy. Her pupils were good kids. None of them ever saw her this way.

"Enough talk about school." She pulled me inside her ground-floor apartment and secured a series of locks. The windows were covered by heavy curtains. She didn't bother to switch on the lights.

"I have a crazy ex-boyfriend. He won't leave me alone." Fran stripped off my clothes, then kneeled on the floor and shucked off my jeans. "You don't mind if we do it on the floor. I like it that way."

"Not at all."

It took Fran three seconds to naked. She left on the high heels. They scraped over the wooden floor like spurs on a horse's back. Her white skin was covered with baby powder and she left a trail across the room. Her pelvis was breaking my bones, but she wouldn't let me go, not even when someone knocked on the door.

It was her ex-boyfriend.

"Fran, I know you're in there." He called out her name and pounded on the door.

"Don't stop. He'll go away." She humped upward with the same power as when she had been playing pinball. I was her SLASH and there was only one way for her to tilt me.

The ex-boyfriend left the front door only to bang on the window. The good kindergarten teacher whispered dirty talk in my ear and whimpered out a moan of release.

"That was good."

"For me too." It was more wicked and I had no intention of leaving her apartment, until I was certain that her ex-boyfriend was gone. We did it again.

Back at the Gaslight Pub Michel set me up with a beer. I was exhausted from the first, second, and third times. James was in the back with his boys. He pretended not to see me. The rest of the bar was drunk. I had been gone two hours.

"So how was it?"

Normally I never discussed the secrets of the bedroom with another man, however Fran and I hadn't used her bedroom and Michel was a fellow pinball player.

"She did it just like she played pinball."

"I thought so." Michel winked at me.

Fran was back at the machine.

I went over to the pinball machine. My pelvis was bruised and my hands were weak. I tilted SLASH on the first go and that lack of skill had nothing to do with luck. Fran won with ease.

She was good at pinball, but better at another game and that was winning.

After all pinball was good a game of chance."

May 15, 1978 - CBGBS - JOURNAL

I spoke to Alice before she took off from Charleston. I offered to meet her at LaGuardia. Arrival time was late at night. She said she was just going to her apartment. Only seven more days or so to her college performance at The Ensemble Studio Theater. THE GENTLEMEN FROM VERONA. Shakespeare. I have only seen a hippie troupe performing MIDSUMMER NIGHT DREAM in the Boston Common and AS YOU LIKE IT after the blackout a year ago. The city had been so quiet.

I said I would see you tomorrow I went to cbgb's. Strangely playing pinball my shoelaces broke a strange omen.

Alice has become so distant. She loves in the theater. I have a life in the theater too. But only as a spectator. On the outside looking in.

Excessive man from CBGBs. I don't know for what. Maybe cuz he's only 15. He's been banned before. his father came down and told Hilly not to let him in. This won't last same as the others. X is a die-hard punk.

I will miss him, since the 15 year old guitarist is the only other player in CBGBs.

Pinball is my relief from frustration in anger. When I play I think it's nothing more escaping the gravity of the death hole touching the flippers to prevent the ball disappearing.

I rarely tilt.

Mayor LaGuardia in the thirties send the police to smash all the pinball machines. He explained this action, by saying " pinball machines steal money."

He was right, but not for people like me who basically play for free games.

I started playing at the amusement centers of Washington Street up from the Combat Zone, then the Phoenix bar on Commonwealth Avenue, the Bright Spot in Allston, 15 Lansdowne, days of Buchanan's underneath the Lenox Hotel, blue Ranch by the Greyhound bus stop, The Gaslight Pub in Park Slope, The Ocean Club on Chambers Street, and now cbgb's.

I played all over America and only found several players of my caliber; Xcessive, Micel the French bartender from The Gaslight Pub, and Fran Malin, not that she was as good as me, but she humped the pinball machine savagely he's thrust pushing the ball back into space. I asked if she f*** the same way.

She said yes.

It was the truth.

CBGBs Pinball 1978 VDO

Throughout the late 1970s I stood at the front of CBGBs for the Contortions, Damned, and the Voidoids. Afterwards I drank beer and play pinball at the back of the club. I was never friends with the big names. The bartenders were my friends, the doorman with the yellow construction helmet let me in for me, college co-eds thought I looked like David Johansson from the New York Dolls and by the time they discovered I was simply a poet, it was too late to try for someone else. I was lucky and CBGBs became my home away from home.

Pinball The Gaslight Inn Park Slope 1977

At 3 O'Clock
I thought about going to Rockaways
The day slipped away
Seconds ticked into Minutes
I catch the B54 bus
It's 4:16

I calculated the time.
Four hours
Back and forth
To and from Rockaway

At North Portland
I get off
Across the avenue
Fort Greene Park

A green lawn shaded by trees
My feet carried me
To a Japanese Pagoda Tree
My hand swept away the twigs
And stones
I lay down an orange towel.

This is not virgin ground
Millions of feet have trampled this spot
There are no footprints.
Someone
A long time ago
Carved 'FRAN' into the thin bark.
The name shows its age
I knew a Fran
From Park Slope
1976.

Long black hair
Jewish
She played pinball
At the Gaslight Inn
On 7th Avenue
Her hips humped the machine
Without a tilt
I didn't know her name.

1976
Park Slope
Pinball
I ordered a Heineken.

The bartender wondered
If she made love the same.
After her last ball
Disappeared
I challenged her to a game.
Her Sephardic eyes
Locked on mine
Then gazed at my groin.

"Fran."

She had a Brooklyn accent
Very Brooklyn
She was a native
I came from New England.

Her first shot collected 33,000
Mine 55,000
Her hips ground into the machine
54,000
She was good
I was better.
87,000

"You're going to tilt the machine."

"I never tilt."

Her eyes fixed on the machine
FUTURE SPA
A good run
78000
My next shoot collect 25,000

I took it easy
My best score on the same machine
Times Square.
615,000
I wanted this game over
Fast.

She never caught me
I rewarded her loss
With a White Russian
She slid closer to me
Her skin was caked with baby powder.
I had to ask the bartender's question
About her humping the pinball machine.

"Come home with me and you'll find out "

The answer was yes.
And yes everytime.

Fran had a boyfriend. At her apartment When we were naked on her mattress the phone rang she never answered a little later a persistent knock On the door. It was him. Fran whispered "Don't say anthing And don't stop." I never did not once. I got up from the lawn in Fort Greene Park.
My fingertips touch the name
FRAN
On the Japanese Pagoda Tree
Someone had cut it into the trunk
It wasn't me.
Her name was only tattooed into my memories.

1976
Pinball
Fran.

El Phoenix Bar - Boston

My friend Jorge posted this photo and I thought 'pink elephant'.

Only one place had one and it was in Brighton, Mass.

In college I drank in a Commonwealth Avenue establishment with a mural of a naked woman riding a pink elephant over the bar. THe El Phoenix Room offered draft 'ganseets at 25 cents and drinks for $1. You could play three pinball games for a quart and got the same amount of songs from jukebox for two-bits. The regulars were Irish trolley drivers and the girls attended BU.

The Irish owners ran a Mexican restaurant up the short step of stairs. The cook was a one-armed woman from Monterrey. I tasted my first tacos and enchiladas there. Rosa served the spiciest food in Boston for years.

It closed years ago.

There is no trace of the El Phoenix Room online.

Ah, the memories.

The owners also had a bar underneath the Forest Hills train station.

Concannon and Sennetts'

Neither dive is there anymore.

Ah, the memories.

Pong

During the late 1960s and early 1970s I played pinball at the arcades on Boston's Washington Street. My skills flourished and I competed against older wizards on machines such as Centrigrade 37 and Strikes and Spares. We loved the lights and bells accompanying our struggle to prevent the steel ball from ever dropping into the death hole.

Pinball machines were also very popular in bars up and down Commonwealth Avenue and I was # 1 on Royal Flush at Concannon and Sennett's Bar. My good friend FM and I played doubles against BU co-eds for beers. They were good, but we were better, but at a quarter a pint we could afford to be losers to pretty sophomores from New York, although none of us were ready for the November 1972 appearance of PONG.

Few of us had ever seen a computer, even though I had been a math major in my first two years of university. FM and I tried our hand at PONG. One hand and good eyes controlled the paddle and the game sped up the longer you kept the ball in play.

The 2-D table tennis game cost a quarter.

FM and I were soon the best in Boston, but we tired of the game and returned to pinball, which was a much more physical exercise.

Neither of us foresaw the future demise of pinballs in bars, but electronic games were the wave of the future and exiled pinball machine to museums or basement rec rooms.

No one plays PONG anymore, especially not FM and I.

We like drinking beer instead.

And we did in the 1970s too.

And so did BU co-eds, because some things never change.

Concannon & Sennett's Bar - Boston

My friend Jorge posted this photo and I thought 'pink elephant'.

Only one place had one and it was in Brighton, Mass.

In college I drank in a Commonwealth Avenue establishment with a mural of a naked woman riding a pink elephant over the bar. THe El Phoenix Room offered draft 'ganseets at 25 cents and drinks for $1. You could play three pinball games for a quart and got the same amount of songs from jukebox for two-bits. The regulars were Irish trolley drivers and the girls attended BU.

The Irish owners ran a Mexican restaurant up the short step of stairs. The cook was a one-armed woman from Monterrey. I tasted my first tacos and enchiladas there. Rosa served the spiciest food in Boston for years.

It closed years ago.

There is no trace of the El Phoenix Room online.

Ah, the memories.

The owners also had a bar underneath the Forest Hills train station.

Concannon and Sennetts'

Neither dive is there anymore.

Ah, the memories.