Typical Day
On Sunday morning, at 9am, amusement arcade enthusiast and owner of his town's only operating arcade, Arcadia, for the past five years, Paco Manning is pulling on his trousers. Most companies take Saturday and Sunday off, but for Paco, the weekend means business.
And today, business comes in the form of an eight-turning-nine-year-old's birthday party. Paco worked for years teaching art at local middle and high schools. A true renaissance man, Paco used to carve cuckoo clocks, whittle a little, and restore old pinball machines in his spare time. When a local 7-11 shut down and the space opened up for dirt-cheap rent, Paco seized the chance to start an amusement arcade like the ones he remembered so fondly from his youth.
He ran the numbers. With his retirement pension, Paco could afford to sink a little bit of money into a project that he knew wasn't going to return his money. And so now, six years later, Paco has committed himself to a life of clipping coupons and socks from last decade in order to finance the arcade.
Paco shows up at Arcadia at 11am. He starts to dust off the countertops, and on a whim, rearranges a couple of the pinball machines. Right around 11:30am, Pinster Ballington, the squeaky-voiced, pimply kid that Paco pays minimum wage to help out on special occasions comes into the arcade with that trademark awkward bounce.
"Hiya, Paco!"
Paco stifles an eye roll. This kid is so overeager. Arcades are great, but this kid could use some real friends. Once Pinster told him he wants to be "just like Paco" when he gets older. Paco didn't have the heart to tell him there’s no future in arcades.
"Hey there, kid. Listen, we got a birthday party coming in 30."
"Okay, great! Yeah, let me go start some music for the background!"
While Pinster bounds across the length of the arcade, Paco flicks the lights on. The pinball machines light up, and make quiet chiming noises. The whole place seems to whir to life. Paco hears The Who's "Babo O'Riley" come on over the speakers. "Sheesh," he thinks, "This kid is majorly stuck in the '80s."
Finally, the minivan's worth of kids shows up at the arcade. "Thank god for birthday parties," Paco thinks, fully aware that no one else was going to show up at Arcadia that day.
The kids shriek with delight maybe, but probably more from fright. Since he opened Arcadia five years ago, Paco has learned that kids today are actually scared by any form of entertainment that's not a magically lit-up electronic screen. But hey, Paco's convinced the Arcadia keeps him hip. He probably wouldn't even know what an iPad was if these kids didn't wander through his arcade with their eyes glued to those silly screens.
Pinster's gathering the kids to go over some ground rules. No shouting, bathrooms are on the left, key for the bathrooms is behind the counter. Every game costs a dollar, except air hockey which is 50 cents per player and the gumball machines that are 25 cents.
"And remember," Pinster adds. "If your finger goes in your nose, your hand goes in the sink. All right, kiddos, have fun."
The kids cautiously approach the pinball machines, the way one approaches a dog with a reputation for biting. One by one, though, they feed the machines their coins and dollars.
For Paco, though, it wasn't about the money. Watching the kids' faces lighting up over the lit-up pinballs, Paco felt pretty good. And it helped that, at this stage in his life, he didn't need the money to pay the bills. He'd paid his dues. All he needed was a birthday party once in a while to offset the costs of the cheap rent, Pinster's cheap salary, and the electricity bill for a couple days a week.
The birthday party cleared out by 4pm, as the exhausted, happy kids were picked up by their parents. Pinster and Paco mopped the floors and cleaned up some of the gift-wrapping strewn over the floor. Then Paco headed to the old PC in the back office (formerly a closet) where he needed to send some emails.
If Arcadia is a side project for Paco, he has an even side-lier side project. Using his knowledge of servicing and repairing coin-operated machines, Paco restores old, broken-down pinballs bought off Craigslist. He then sells them back to collectors or licenses them to movie sets looking for an authentic touch.
Even though he occasionally makes some big bucks, the work is too unreliable for Paco to make good money off of it. He does these side projects because, well, no one else out there does. Without him, the classic pinball machines of his childhood would simply rot.
After fiddling for nearly an hour with a particularly stubborn pinball machine, Paco's eyes are starting to fail him and his blood sugar’s running low. He heads home for the day at 6pm—a relatively relaxing workday, though maybe not for a should-be retiree. At home, he makes a nice, warm meatball sub and watches The Price is Right until late in the night.
There aren't any birthdays scheduled for Monday, and he knows there won’t be anyone in the arcade until 3pm when Jack and Tyler (the arcade's only customers) are out of school anyway. No reason to wake up early. Eventually, he drifts off to sleep, dreaming about being bizarrely hunted by that mechanical claw all arcades have.