Before he settled for a stable career, my father dared to think of himself as an entrepreneur who needed only to find the right opportunity to make his fortune. The midway games where one of his ventures. He'd bought them second hand from some man he'd met at the racetrack where he went periodically to bet the small amount of money left over at the end of the week. He was always one good horse away from making it big. The midway games were not anything my brothers and I played at the video arcade in the mall, where we spent long Saturdays playing Pac-Man and Asteroids. The midway games weren't anywhere near video-based, and mechanical in the simplest of ways. Painted plywood ponies that raced up a track through pneumatic tubes. Heavy metal racecars that drove around a cutout track by paddles vibrating on a tin plate. Zoo animals exploring a Styrofoam savannah with the turn of a knob. They were relics of county fairs and carnivals that swept through small towns in the late summer and gave rural kids a chance to set aside their farm chores and play, or so I believed in my suburban imagination.
I suppose my father had an idea of himself that none of us saw: an honest huckster trailblazing across the country, setting up his midway games in harvested cornfields and charming the locals. (I never thought of my father as a charmer. I doubt the rest of my siblings thought of him as such either). Perhaps he imagined subsisting on as little as possible while he collected his fortune in quarters, sending money back home for safe keeping, reassuring my mother that he was on the verge of making it big.
Another time he had the idea of owning a Dairy Queen franchise. "Make a million just selling ice cream," he'd say. “What could be sweeter?”
We were a family that got by on chipped beef and cream-of-mushroom casseroles and powdered milk. On Sundays in the summer, though, my dad would load us into the family station wagon for Dilly Bars at the Dairy Queen. We devoured them as if they were the rarest treats on earth, while he laid out plans for his ice-cream empire.
And, again, he tried to convince my mother that they should invest in a pyramid scheme that an acquaintance convinced him was a no-brainer. But my mother wasn’t a fool, and she knew the moment the man walked into her living room with dirt under his nails that he was no good.