Junior Reno

Grannabelle calls arcades Junior Renos. Little dens of sin that prepare you for the real thing, so that once you are old enough to sneak your way onto a casino floor--you are ready.

I do not like video games. Another one of the great deprivations (along with MTV) of my childhood was that we never...NEVER...had a video game system. Thus, I never enjoyed going to the video arcade. Neither did Tina. Or Greg.

But somewhere along the line, probably at a pizza parlor, Tina, Greg, and I discovered that Greg was awesome at winning stuffed animals in the claw machines. Those machines are impossible. No one ever plays them and no one ever wins. Except for Greg. The precision with which he could pick up and win ugly, often hard, stuffed animals was unusual. He constistently beat the odds. I didn't like the stuffed animals we won; I really thought they were kind of tacky. But I loved gambling and knowing that with Greg at the joystick we would do the unexpected.

Recently Sumner has been checking out the claw machines. At various the video arcades, pizza parlors, and airport bars we frequent, he begs us to try the claw. We tell him, as we put the quarters in the Skee Ball machine, that the claw machine is a trick. It is trying to take his money and no one ever wins. Mini golf is so much fun by itself, why do we need to also try the claw? If we do the claw that means one less try to shoot the quarter into a bowl to win a family ashtray? But he pushes on and marvels that the claw machine and the tacky toys that are stuck inside of it.

One day, I broke down and told him two things. First, I told him about Greg and how amazing it was, back in the day, to see his "talent" override the system again and again. Second, I told him that next time we saw one of those machines that I would "teach him a lesson" by showing him how hard it is to win with the claw. This just fueled the fire. Sumner talks about Greg, wonders what he is doing now and how we could recruit him to join us at Chuck E. Cheese next year for Sumner's birthday.

So, on Friday night, Sumner and Ramona and I found ourselves at Papa Gino's waiting for take out. There was a claw machine and Sumner and Ramona stationed themselves at it and gawked at the items inside. I offered to give it a try, finally. We immediately lost 4 quarters before we realized that the machine wasn't plugged in. So, we plugged it in and put another dollar in. For a dollar, you get three tries. Sumner wanted me to be at the joystick. Try one, we didn't even get a prong of the claw on a toy. Try two, the claw fingered an arm that was connected to a bear lodged between two other animals. Try three, bingo, we won a horrible little bird stuffed with something like akin to newspaper and pebbles. Sumner was estatic, "It's like we have Greg here. You are so good at this game. Mom, we won. We won!" This was not what I had hoped would happen

Now, Ramona wanted a try. So, I antied up. Three more tries, three failures. Ramona looked at me through those tiny glasses, dumbfounded and then started to whine. She looked at me at said, "I want to learn the lesson Sumner learned."

Now Grannabelle, what am I supposed to tell her?