High-res version

it was the summer after i turned 16.  i had just finished my junior year of high school.  i had my driver’s license.  i was, in that precise moment, invincible.  not coincidentally, this was also the moment when i got my first “real” job.

the job was at the brand new chuck e. cheese’s pizza time theatre, erected that spring in a strip mall in a suburb neighboring the one where my family lived.  now, keep in mind, this was the early ’80s, so this was back when chuck e. cheese first rolled into being.  chuck e. was not just a cheese but the cheese in that era.  this experiential restaurant was the biggest thing to hit the teenage arcade experience since, well, ever.  AND they served pizza!  so getting this job made me, like, the prom queen of the teenage job market.  but the only reason i got the job was because my mom knew some people and pulled some strings.  otherwise, i’d have been working a paper route and maybe doing the summer camp counselor thing or, worse yet, babysitting.  no, this was the manna job.  it was like employment gold.

i remember my first day of training as if it were yesterday.  in addition to the handful of real (i.e., grown-up) employees, there were about thirty of us, all between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, receiving our policies and procedures manuals and our standard-issue, brown polyester shirts and red plastic bowler hats.  we were all new employees because the store was new, but i was the only person from my high school who worked there.  all the others were from the neighboring suburb’s high school.  this meant i was completely unknown, without historical context.  i could be anyone i wanted to be.  it was an exciting time to be invincible.

a strong student with excellent math skills, i was early slated to work the cash register.  but i was also a whopping 4’11” tall, which meant that i was still within the qualifying dimensions for “character shifts.”  honestly, i haven’t been to a chuck e. cheese’s in decades (for which i thank my maker), but in the early days of chuck e. cheese’s pizza time theatre (let’s call it “CECPTT” from here on in, shall we?), the place was all about the theatrics.  it wasn’t just the then-novel-now-creepy, bionic-animal-powered musical vignettes covering catchy CECPTT ditties at precise intervals throughout the day.  there were also the live characters who would circulate the restaurant floor on weekend days, greeting kids and creating photo ops so parents could fill the family albums, all of which having long since been laid to rest in dusty basements, beside the board games and nancy drew/hardy boys mystery series collections.

the live characters were none other than puny little high schoolers like me (okay, some were actually as tall as 6’3″) whose forewarning of their assignments was evinced by yellow highlighter code on the posted weekly schedule.  the yellow highlighter meant we were to report to those shifts in shorts and t-shirts and prepare to sweat our tuchuses off for the duration.  to give you a behind-the-scenes glance, there were always two costumes for each character so that, at shift change, you didn’t have to climb into a manifestly wet and smelly costume that a co-worker had just doffed (a pyrrhic victory in that someone was certain to don that costume during the following shift, and this was back when lysol was the only antibacterial game in town).  needless to say, once you peeled yourself out of the costume at the end of a workday, you definitely didn’t want to make other plans before scrubbing down and recalibrating olfactory senses.

notwithstanding the obvious downsides, a key bonus of the character shift was that you got to take a fifteen-minute break every hour and an extra-long break for lunch.  you also got to drink as much free soda as you wanted, although water was highly recommended (in light of the propensity for sweat-induced dehydration that usually ensued during the shift).

the ultimate highlight of the character shift, however, came in the form of free game tokens.  and when i say “free game tokens,” i mean as many tokens as you wanted, to play as many games as you wanted, as long as you played them with the customers.  of course, you didn’t have any pockets when you were in character, so you kinda had to hold a bunch of them in your oversized, smelly costume hand and then keep going back to the break room to get more, but essentially you could play games for nearly the entirety of each forty-five minute stretch you were out on the floor.  i spent hours upon hours honing my skills on tron, centipede, donkey kong, and frogger, and this free-game-token feature also made me the most awesome galaga player known to the summer of 1982.  i accepted even the most challenging “challenging stages” with great gusto and the kind of confidence witnessed only in the likes of the last five minutes of each six million dollar man episode when steve austin would finally collar his criminal nemesis.

i will also admit to an arcade guilty pleasure, which pleasure has arguably taught me more about life in general than any other guilty or non-guilty pleasure i’ve experienced in life thus far:  the whac-a-mole™ game.  if you’ve ever played whac-a mole™, you know exactly what i’m referring to.  if you haven’t, allow me to illuminate.

the object of the game was actually quite disturbing.  the player, holding a large, black mallet, stood in front of a box with five empty holes cut into the top surface.  when the game began, mole heads pop up randomly from the holes, and the player scored points for whac(k)ing the moles with the mallet on top of their heads before they dropped back down into their holes.

beyond the obviously boorish and generally anti-vermin connotations of the game, however, the subtlety in its zen-like mastery was not lost on me.  in order to succeed at whac-a-mole™, one first had to receive the random onslaught of mole-head-popping activity with an attitude of abounding calm and a gaze as supple and receptive as water.  but then, more importantly, one was required to gauge and expend only the exact measure of energy required to knock the moles on the head and then retract immediately in coolheaded anticipation of the next mole outburst.  anything more than the minimal amount would waste precious time and would hamstring the player when the next head appeared while the overcommitted mallet was still stuck on the whac(k) too severely dealt.

in other words, whac-a-mole™ demanded ninja-like reactions and an acceptance of randomness and unpredictability that is simply not experienced in our culture except, perhaps, by elite military attachés and those waiting in line at the DMV.  it mandated a solid grounding and steadiness in oneself above all, in face of whatever external assaults or internal distractions would conspire to cause moments of great stress.

in retrospect, no other experience from my youth would inform my greatest life challenges as tellingly and accurately as this arcade game.  how ironic, then, that it was during a high school summer dressed in a giant, smelly mouse costume when i would learn the secrets of life’s flow:  center your being, relax your gaze, use only the effort required for the task at hand, and carry a large, black mallet, just in case.