Foreclosure of a Dream

This really shouldn’t feel like an eviction, but for some reason it does.

Last Monday I spent from dawn ’til dusk clearing out the last items remaining of our old home: the arcade. For those of you who haven’t seen it before, in better days it looked like this:

The “arcade” is really a shed that was already on the property when we purchased it. The actual number of machines inside fluctuated over time, but for most of 2011 it was home to 25 machines. I had another 3 in the garage that never made it out to the arcade — which, in retrospect, was for the best.

Back when we bought the house in 2002, the shed was literally just a shed. The walls and floor were wooden and unpainted, and the building itself was full of scrap lumber and sawdust. It was Susan who had the vision of what the building could be. She’s the one who (with the help of family and friends) painted the walls, put down the black and white carpet squares, and turned the shed into an arcade. Back then I only owned a handful of games — two, I think, along with a dartboard, a slot machine, a bumper pool table that converted into a poker table, and an air hockey table. Eventually the air hockey table, dartboard and bumper pool table were removed to make space for more games. There was a cool bar in there too that I got rid of. Eventually everything that wasn’t a game came out. I was operating under the “more is better” mantra, one I now regret.

For years I struggled with arranging my games in the room, but the problem was I simply had too many games for the space — a problem that some of you might say you wish you had, but trust me, you wouldn’t.

Although I’ve been buying arcade cabinets off and on since 1994, owning the building definitely enabled this hobby. Owning the building allowed me to own the machines — which means, sadly, that the loss of the building had led to the loss of the machines.

With help from Mom and Dad and a couple of friends, one by one the machines came out of the arcade Monday. I had already relocated six machines last week (three from the arcade and the three from the garage), leaving 18 machines for to move. The room was roughly divided into smaller (lighter) games on one side with larger (heaver) ones on the other. My plan was to move as many as I could starting with the lighter ones, saving the bulkier ones for when reinforcements arrived later in the evening.

While pulling games out I made a heartbreaking discovery — the building was not as waterproof as I had once thought. Rain had leaked in through the roof and ruined at least three of my games. Most arcade cabinets are cut from particle board, wood notorious for absorbing water and bloating into a mushy mess. Some of the wood literally crumbled like wet sand in my hands as I tried moving it. In a cosmic sense I suppose that my decision as to what to do with some of them that much simpler.

This is what the end of a dream looks like.

After taking a load of stuff back to the new house, I got 30 minutes of rest before it was time to head back and do it all over again. In the evening my friends Tim and Jeff came to help. The additional muscle was greatly appreciated, as by this time in the day my muscles were starting to quiver like spaghetti noodles. Unlike the games I had moved in the morning, most of the ones left were large, over-sized cabinets with big, heavy monitors. The lighter ones are for the most part a one man affair, but some of the heavier ones too all three of us to finagle through the door way, down the two concrete steps, across the yard, down the sidewalk, up the ramp and on to the trailer.

Seven or eight of the machines are in my garage. The rest are in storage. I’ll be selling what I can and literally dumping the rest. Games that I spent years tracking down and playing, I may be smashing into pieces and placing into trash dumpsters.

This is what the end of a dream feels like.