Volume 3, Issue 85: Blue Eyed Soul

"Can you keep it simple? Can you let the snare crack?"

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Twenty years ago, my mother, with both children finally moved out, decided she wanted a new house. She didn’t want to leave our neighborhood in rural Mattoon, Illinois, but she had tired of our old house, the one my father had built when I was four years old and she was pregnant with my sister. She wanted something more modern, with more space, and more designed for a couple in their 50s than one with two children bouncing all over the place. But she didn’t want to move, exactly. So dad bought the empty lot right next door and built her another house. I had just moved to New York City when he started building it, all caught up in my own ambitions and dramas, and I didn’t spend a night in it until Election Night 2000, when I fell asleep on the couch believing Al Gore would be our next President and waking up to something different entirely.

The key part of the new house for Dad, the part he insisted on including if he was going to build the place, was the basement. He’d give Mom whatever she wanted upstairs, but downstairs, downstairs was his. Downstairs had the big-screen TV, the comfortable coach, the easy chair with the kickstand to put up your feet, the surround sound. Downstairs had the bar, with beer fridges and old Cardinals paraphernalia, along with various cheesy tavern tchotchkes like a framed photo of “The Sopranos” cast and a neon Busch beer sign. There was a pool table, and a jukebox (which we still have, one that’s frozen in time in 2002, when we initially stocked it; there’s actually still a Vines CD in there), and years later there would be an air hockey table, bought for Christmas by a son who was perhaps a little too eager to please. I was so happy for him. He had his man cave. He had his place to unwind at the end of a long day. He had earned it. Shit: He had built it.

But Dad was most proud of his pinball machine. He’d been doing some electrical work for some guy in Tolono and spotted it in the corner, gathering dust, with a broken screen and mostly malfunctioning lights—it needed a ton of work. Dad said he’d do the electrical work for free if the guy gave him the pinball machine; he’d spent enough time in pool halls and saloon to have always wanted one himself, and with a little cleanup work, this would fit perfect in his basement. He worked on it for months, and when he had it ready to go, he called me in New York.

“Hey, I want you to hear something, it’s from my pinball machine, I got it working.” He then put the phone up to some sort of speaker. I couldn’t make out what it was playing at first. “Do you know who that band is?” he asked. “I thought you might have heard of them.”

I still couldn’t figure it out, until the song came upon the undeniable riff, the one I’d first heard when I was 11 years old and sounded like a portal straight to hell.

“Wait … Dad, do you have a Guns N’ Roses pinball machine?”

“Oh, you know that band?” he said. “I didn’t know any of the songs, I figured you might.”

My father hadn’t just restored a pinball machine. He had restored the famous, even somewhat infamous, 1994 Guns N’ Roses Data East machine. This is the version that Gilby Clarke sued over, because he had been kicked out of the band by the time it came out. This is the version that, if you reach a certain level in the game, begins playing the GN’R song “Ain’t Goin’ Down,” an “Appetite” B-side which, until they finally put it on Spotify in 2018, was available exclusively on this game. They only made 3,000 of these back in 1994, and one of them, a damaged, non-functional one, was sold at auction last year for $12,000. It is one of the most famous pinball machines of all time: It is a pinball machine that has its own Wikipedia page.

It is, frankly, incredible. My dad didn’t know, or care, about any of that, though. He just loved that he had his own pinball machine, in his own basement, in his own house.

My parents lived in that house for 18 more years. During that time, they saw both their children get married, they became grandparents, they buried their mothers, one of whom passed away just upstairs a few hours after having a beer and watching the Cardinals downstairs with my dad, and then eventually moved to Georgia. My uncle Terry and his wife Eva now live in that house. The old house next door, the one I grew up in, the woman who bought it died right before the pandemic, and now it sits abandoned and in disrepair. When I was in Illinois in August I stopped by to see it. It looks like it is about to sink into a swamp. It broke my heart to look at it.

The pool table is still in my uncle’s basement. The air hockey table, we ended up giving that to my friend Scott; his boys, teenagers now, play rigorous, fierce matches against each other. The big screen TV has long been thrown away, as has the DVD collection that my parents diligently collected, with all the time they had to watch movies now, with the kids all gone. The jukebox and a lot of the old neon signs are now in my dad’s garage, the one he built (and fell off of, and then finished building), along with his workbenches, a golf cart he restored, a little book shrine and the most beautiful car you’ve ever seen in your life.

But inside, in the room where we watched our beloved Cardinals fall just short to the Dodgers on Wednesday, the pinball machine remains. It was carted all the way out from Mattoon, in the back of my mom’s Rav4, through Kentucky and Tennessee and downtown Atlanta. It still works perfectly, almost 30 years old now. My two sons constantly try to outscore each other on it, even though it’s a little inappropriate, even though if you reach a certain point level an electronic woman shows up on the video screen and flashes you to tell you your score. It makes the kids giggle, though we tell them, yes, that’s inappropriate. I bet they start getting weird about that electronic woman sooner than we are ready for them to.

When William and I were in Cleveland a few weeks ago, we visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Guns N’ Roses are members of the Hall, and we stopped by their exhibit. And William absolutely could not believe what he saw there. Neither could I.

“It’s Baba’s machine!” William said. “This means Baba is famous!” I really do think William has looked at his grandfather a little different since he saw that display.

The world churns on and on. Children become adults become parents become grandparents become old men and women. Houses are built, lived in, abandoned, razed. Your childhood home, once so eternal, falls apart; your new home becomes just as eternal to your children. These physical things, they are only what we put in them. Without my father’s pride and care, and my mother driving the darned thing halfway across the country, the GN’R pinball machine is at best a museum piece, at worst just an old hunk of junk metal in the back of a broken-down bar. Instead, it’s special, and functional, a source of joy today more than it ever was before. Someday it, and the car, and the houses, they’ll fall apart, because stuff like that can never last, not even your childhood home. But then there will be other things to pour our hearts into. Nothing lasts forever. But what we hold onto makes a difference. What we care to preserve is what we can carry on. It doesn’t matter what it is. It only matters that it is something. Ain’t Goin’ Down. Sing it, Axl.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. We’ll Never Hate Anyone Like Brady or Belichick Again, New York. I sort of feel like large sections of my entire sportswriting career has been following these two, and this, I hope, is my capper on all that.

2. Reasons to Root for Every Playoff Team, MLB.com. Cheering for happy things to happen is good for the soul.

3. An Ode to the Great Dog Daisy, Country Living. I wrote a piece for Country Living magazine this month about the greatest dog that has ever lived. Pick it up!

   

4. Four Notable Humans of the Week, Medium. A new feature I’m working on. I don’t know if it works or not. But it did feature all sorts of Bad Art Friend hot takes

5. The Top 50 Players in the Playoffs, MLB.com. It is very enjoyable to sometimes write things that make so many people so angry! For no reason!.

6. “Official” MLB Playoff Predictions, MLB.com. So much wrong here, already!

7. What Pop Culture Tells You About Turning 45, Medium. This is a riff off last week’s newsletter, I hope you will forgive me.

8. “One Chip Challenge” Movies, Medium. Freakout movies, all in a row.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, discussing “The Many Saints of Newark,” “Titane” and “Venom: Let There Be Carnage.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I previewed the Wild Card, and then … well, you know what happened then.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the Arkansas win and previewed Auburn.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“I Was a Part of Something Unusually Evil,” Olivia Nuzzi, New York. We all knew these mea culpa, “please forgive me” articles and books were coming. But there’s no better writer the capture both the pathos and the bullshit of that than Nuzzi. I wish I could write things like this.

BOOK I’VE READ THAT YOU SHOULD READ

“Boom Town,” Sam Anderson. There isn’t a writer I drop everything I’m doing to read immediately when he has a new piece more than Anderson. This book is about Oklahoma City, but it’s really about everything.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

Getting back caught up on these! Just a few more to go!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Cold Little Heart,” Michael Kiwanuka. Sometimes songs hit you right in the gullet. There’s a shorter, radio-friendly version, but this is the right one.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

In honor of the 30th anniversary of Nevermind, which happened last week, here is the insanity of a Chris O’Donnell romantic comedy with opening credits scored to “Love Buzz.”

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will