The Rock-afire Implosion
INTERRUPTIONS
are for soap operas.
MARCH 19TH 2.5 BUCKS 1.5 BUCKS
MARCH MADNESS CHEESEBURGER & FRIES
DURING ALL GAMES
COORS LIGHT PINTS
DURING ALL GAMES
MyEaglesNest.NET
ALL SPECIALS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE
Helm/Animal House Dart Tourney March 22 Sign up at 12:30 play all day!! April 12 May 10
Never Miss A Game!
110 N. 3rd Street Downtown La Crosse
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Check out the newly improved Walk In Get a Ticket for a 2for1 Drink lounge up the Drawing at 12:30 To Choose Who Spins 1 Lucky Winner Every Thursday! back steps; Prizes Include Beer/Liquor/ and Bar Tabs Up to $1000 For complete with Saturday - Sunday Stop In s il D a N t A Monday - Wednesday De adult arcade! (Mon - Wed Take Your Shot at the Wheel)
For All Ages Over 21!
By Brett Emerson
brett.emerson@secondsupper.com
Due to an error in communication, I once believed ShowBiz Pizza was located on Mars. This was before I realized that all the Martians live in California. It was in that ephemeral state where I last tread among the ball-pit halls of a Chuck E. Cheese, conqueror of the ShowBiz Empire. We castaways celebrated the Snake’s 19th birthday with skee-ball and without children in tow, which made us feel creepy in the way that all adults are now conditioned to feel creepy around strange children. We played our games, collected and spent our worthless tickets, and left quietly, as though we had committed some transgression against childhood. “Aren’t you a little old to be trick-ortreating?” the neighborhood asked me last Halloween, as I sauntered through town as a '70s game show host. Frustrated with the prejudice of age-appropriate behavior but growing bored with explaining myself, I started to lie to the candy distributors. A sick daughter was invented, too bedridden from the fluctuating temperatures to go outside. As any good imaginary father would, I took my imaginary daughter’s place as the trick-or-treater and fleeced the town of its candy, as shameless, guiltless, and ageless as any Match Game panelist can be. She’d have been proud of me, if she existed. On the first of March this year, I returned to my childhood Mars. This time, the guest of honor was CJ Slugger’s kid, freshly one year old. At least we had a kid this time. But Chuck E. Cheese wasn’t the gloriously dank Martian colony of my childhood. It probably hadn’t been for years; the last time I had come to Valley Square with cheap games in mind, my friends and I had been turned away for not being legal adults. And the entryway was the same, with the same Polo Army Private playing doorman to the kindergarten Studio 54. I expected some hassle, a proof of spawning or a screening on some sex offender database, and it’s possible that this could have gone down, were it not for CJ Slugger and the Leprechaun materializing behind me and ushering me into the ruins of red earth. The bleach wasn’t a tangible thing. It carried no smell. Nonetheless, a flood of bleach doused my memories and waged chemical warfare. Despite its '80s cred, hearing Tears for
Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” felt so out of place as I shuffled through the corridor between entrance and dining room and noted that this Chuck E. Cheese looked exactly the same as the one in California — bright and sterile. The dining room had been flattened and brightened as well, leaving the room dimensionless, just another part of the building. Past the extended banquet tables twitched a piss poor shadow of Showbiz Pizza’s animatronic band, the Rock-afire Explosion. The Tears for Fears music, as it turned out, was part of the karaoke soundtrack by which this band sold its barely credible pantomime. Without so much as a pulled curtain, the soundtrack repeated every 15 minutes, playing Tears for Fears again and again. Annoying. The old ShowBiz dining room was a structure of majesty, a darkened bier hall with a raised balcony separating it from the rest of the floor and curtains on the stage. Its band was fantastic, full of apes, dogs, and a mouse cheerleader with, as I discovered one night on a robot upskirting, wires for genitalia. ShowBiz probably messed up my conception of women a bit, but at least there was a real performance, dammit! At least Chuck E. Cheese knows where its bread is buttered, as far as games go. Pillaging CJ’s Cup-o-Tokens, the three of us rushed over to that ziggurat of our youth, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. Awesome. But the buttons would freeze and Donatello’s coin slot was jammed with tokens, so kicking ass didn’t go as planned. I ended up wedged between two kids as they fought Krang the evil brain, trying to dig tokens out of the Donatello slot with a knife — which, when I think about it, is pretty appropriate. CJ and his family left, Lep and I wasted the rest of the tokens on ticket amusements, and we cashed in our booty at the automated ticket machine. After a day’s work, paid for by cupfuls of tokens, we ended up with… 180 tickets. And since we tried to cash in a ripped ticket, the machine docked us one. We couldn’t get anything good; I had to pay an extra three bucks to score a wobbly spike ball which broke sometime later at CJ’s mom’s place, where his nieces tied Lep up, beat him, and sprayed him with perfume. I taught the youngest one to say “It puts the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again!” It was the most adorable thing I’ve seen lately. My childhood memories live on. As usual, they have found a home on YouTube, albeit with the prerequisite veneer of irony which separates disaffected grownups from their genuine child avatars. One rogue engineer choreographs Billy Bob, Fatz the Gorilla, Rolfe deWolfe, and the rest of the Rock-afire Explosion to play and sing to aural gems from the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Lil’ Wayne. A much lower quality video questionably syncs up the robots to 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny.” If it was any other song, the video would be crap, but as it stands, the thing is genius. There are more authentic documentaries to be found, as well as like-minded folks who prefer talking redneck bears to talking Burger King Kids’ Club reject rodents. But these glories of twenty years ago have been absorbed into one more corporate machine which creates memories that are as unique as Mormon housing. This isn’t rose-colored past loving. In this case, the present really does suck.
Second Supper vol. 9, issue 155