Well, wouldn’t you know it, just as things look worst, Providence plants a short—statatatah! the lights go out leaving a diminishing red glow on the shaven cheeks and chins of the two operators cringing before the girls’ destroying kooch-dance, the solenoid jitters to silence, the chrome ball, released, rolls traumatized back to the comfort of its friends.

“They’re all like this?”

“Oh, was I took,” groans Alfonso Tracy.

“It comes and goes,” consoles Bland, and here we get a reprise of Gerhardt von Göll’s “Bright Days for the Black Market,” with allowances made for time, place and color:

There’ll al-ways—be another dollar,

Any way it hap-pens!

If they catch ya nap-pin’,

Wake up-with, the dew on the grass

‘n’ you can hand ’em their ass—

You can make another dollar,

Third eye up on that py-ra-mid,

Oh give a listen kid,

It’s just winkin’ at you, singin’, “Piss on through!”

There’s a will, there’s a way,

Doesn’t happen, ev’ry day,

But if ya got-the-brains, those mid-night-trains

’ll never whistle your dreams away, hey—

Just flip another dollar,

Heads or tails it’ll be all right,

You can lose the fight, but

That ever-lovin’ War goes on and on, ya know,

Just follow that dollar and vo-dee, o-do-do!

All the baggy-pants outfielders, doughboys in khaki, cancan girls now sedate, bathing beauties even more so, cowboys and cigar-store Indians, google-eyed Negroes, apple-cart urchins, lounge lizards and movie queens, cardsharps, clowns, crosseyed lamppost drunks, flying aces, motorboat captains, white hunters on safari and Negroid apes, fat men, chefs in chefs’ hats, Jewish usurers, XXX jug-clutching hillbillies, comic-book cats dogs and mice, prizefighters and mountaineers, radio stars, midgets, ten-in-one freaks, railroad hobos, marathon dancers, swing bands, high-society partygoers, racehorses and jockeys, taxidancers, Indianapolis drivers, sailors ashore and wahines in hula skirts, sinewed Olympic runners, tycoons holding big round bags with dollar signs, all join in on a second grand chorus of the song, all the boards of the pinball machines flashing on and off, primary colors with a touch of acid to them, flippers flipping, bells ringing, nickels pouring out of the coinboxes of the more enthusiastic, each sound and move exactly in its place in the complex ensemble.

Outside the temple, the organization reps from Chicago lurk, play morra, drink Canadian blends out of silver hip-flasks, oil and clean .38s and generally carry on in their loathsome ethnic way, Popish inscrutability in every sharp crease and shadowy jowl. No way to tell if someplace in the wood file cabinets exists a set of real blueprints telling exactly how all these pinball machines were rewired—a randomness deliberately simulated—or if it has happened at real random, preserving at least our faith in Malfunction as still something beyond Their grasp… a faith that each machine, individually, has simply, in innocence, gone on the blink, after the thousands of roadhouse nights, end-of-the-world Wyoming thunderstorms that come straight down on your hatless head, truckstop amphetamines, tobacco smoke clawing at insides of eyelids, homicidal grabs after some way out of the year’s never-slackening shit… have players forever strangers brought about, separately, alone, each of these bum machines? believe it: they’ve sweated, kicked, cried, smashed, lost their balance forever—a single Mobility you never heard, a unity unaware of itself, a silence the encyclopedia histories have blandly filled up with agencies, initials, spokesmen and deficits enough to keep us from finding them again… but for the moment, through the elaborate theatrical foofooraw of Mob ’n’ Masons, it has concentrated here, in the back of the Mouthorgan temple, an elegant chaos to bend the ingenuity of Bland’s bought expert, Silver-Streaking Bert Fibel.