When I was 12, I rode the bus home from junior high to our house in rural Indiana. We called it a farm, but it was just a few acres of cows, a you-pick strawberries business and the remains of a chicken coop I burned down the previous summer because they’d stopped laying and, well, on a farm, that’s that. And I puttered around the house as many Gen-Xers did - making myself lunch and watching reruns and going all Tom Sawyer on the house.
Xers get this. We were feral kids. I saw a tornado lift our carport off the house that year, my parents nowhere to be found but our neighbor Mary Uhl on the corded party-line phone asking if my sister and I were OK. Sure, we said; why not? “Because a tornado just tore off your carport and threw it in the soybean field behind your farm.” And so we rushed to to back window to watch the little spinner turn the aluminum carport into spaghetti. After it swept back into the air, I made my sister a Steak-Um sandwich. That’s what it was like to be an Xer.
So I’d spend those hours before a proper grownup showed up prowling the house like a Raymond Chandler hardcase. And I found things no child should find, because Boomers left handguns and porn and powder cut with baby laxative in plain view. (The latter keeps you quite regular.) And I found a slot machine.
Which I took apart.
The slot machine belonged to my grandfather on my maternal side. An intimidatingly tall man with a raging temper who had been an educator, then a school principal, then - for an unexplained period before being a real estate agent - a bar owner. He was tyrannical.
The slot machine came from his bar in downtown Sellersburg, Indiana. This was a tiny burg then, and is little more than a commuter hospice for Louisville now. It was so small that when my grandmother on my paternal side needed work during one of International Harvester’s many strikes, receptionist at Hinton Insurance was the only gig in town. She got it, and that’s how dad met mom. Creeks rise and fall and flood.
The slot machine took nickels and paid tokens, which appeared in a glass window slot on the side, and its denomination portended how many free drinks you would get. Lotteries come and go.
So I took it apart. The porcelain case comes off easily, after you remove the knob with an Allen wrench. (It’s painted with fingernail polish, btw.) And the innards are pure mechanism. Pre-digital, pre-electronic, back when Wurlitzers ran on pistons and electricity didn’t want to be grounded. Just a machine of unthinking metal.
And - spoiler alert - once I had it down to metal pieces so small you could put them in your eye and still blink, I could not figure out how to put it back together.
And that’s when my father came home.
He saw the mess of metal on my cowboy blanket. Nuts, bolts, gears, cogs, who knows what that is, all spread across the bed. He had no real love for his father-in-law, and this was very much a mutual arrangement, but what is mutual is respect.
“Fix it,” he said.
I looked at the litter of dry metal - the whole mechanism was thirsty for oil - and the porcelain husk and cried because I was overmatched. Later in life, I’d be nominated for a Pulitzer for covering methamphetamine in the Central Valley of California, picking up the detail of how meth addicts will take apart carburetors and electronic equipment and then despair when presented with the rubble of their mania. I got that at 12.
“You get no allowance and you’re grounded until I can put a nickel in that and get a token.”
Granted, “grounded” at 12 in rural Indiana is a small threat. But I had designs on taking a girl named Kathy to a double feature. So I got to work. To fix it.
This became my job after school. Steak-Um for me and my sister, then the slot machine.
It was impossible. I’d put all the pieces in place, pull the handle, nothing. I’d tear it down again, put it back together, pull it and get a token - and then present it to my father for approval and it would chink up.
But after almost a full summer of tinkering, it threw a token. And then another. And that’s when the machine became mine.
It’s on my shelf today because I’ve needed it as a beacon throughout my career. Every industry is difficult, small and complex in absurd ways. Every industry goes through periods where they are taken apart, parted out for scraps, maybe abandoned on a cowboy blanket. But the pieces are there to be assembled. Stare at them. See how they come together.
And fix it.