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The Pinball Philosophy (1975)
Written in 1975, published in the short story collection Giving Good Weight in 1979 which you can access here or here. THE PINBALL PHILOSOPHY New York City, March 1975 J. ANTHONY LUKAS is a world-class pinball player who, between tilts, does some free-lance writing. In our city, he is...
The steel ball rolls into the “death channel”—Lukas’s term for a long alley down the left side—and drops out of sight off the low end of the playfield, finished. At the low end of the playfield, two flippers guard the run-out slot, but one waggles like a broken wing, pathetic, unable to function, to fling the ball uphill for renewed rewards. When he was the Times ’ man in the Congo, in the early sixties, the post was considered a position of hardship, so he was periodically sent to Paris for rest and rehabilitation, which he got playing pinball in a Left Bank brasserie.
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