In the words of the late, great Alanis Morissette, "You live, you learn." In that spirit, I have tried to avoid visiting any establishment that is named after two dudes ever since a scarring experience at Ben & Jerry's when those bastards took me to a back room and tried to milk me. To be fair, it may have been my own fault for taking a tour of their production facility without parental supervision so shortly after Meet the Parents came out. On account of my resulting PTSD and sensitive nipples, I went over a decade without visiting Dave & Buster's. I tried to explain to them that it was one of those "it's not you, it's me" situations, but they took it really hard. Dave even tried to take his own life with a Whac-A-Mole mallet, but he pulled through. It's a good thing, too, because a business called "Buster's" just sounds like a trailer-trash Hooters that doesn't even hire the like kinda-hot trailer-trash girls.
Okay, that was the first paragraph. We're going into the second one now. This past weekend, I decided that it was time to face my fears. I was inspired by my wonderful, supportive friends who encouraged me to "Shut the hell up because we're going to Dave & Buster's and we don't believe that Ben and Jerry tried to milk you." Our original plan was to attend the Sabres game, but we realized Montreal was in town, which meant that there would be ten thousand Canadiens fans in our arena in striped red shirts shrieking "Go, Habs, Go," and singing that Spanish "Olé" song for no discernible reason while reeking of old French cheese and unfiltered cigarettes. As you could imagine, that didn't strike us as an ideal outing, but we also weren't just going to hang around to sit through Saturday Night Live, so it was decided that D&B's gave us the best chance of avoiding froggy canucks and uninspired, out of touch, condescending comedy bits.
My main takeaway from the rekindling of my relationship with Dave and Buster is how unbelievably sore it made me. You can put a gay joke here if you want, but that's a little low-brow for my taste. Seriously though, it was sobering that one evening at an all-ages arcade could so bluntly display how much my body has deteriorated since my prime, other than in the ass region, which remains as spectacular as ever due to regular cheek-lift procedures I mean a diligent squats regiment.
The primary culprit of my present pain is the Speed Pitch, a game that simply requires you throw three balls as hard as you can and the higher your velocity, the more points you are awarded. Dane took his turn first and threw how I'd imagine Ru Paul would throw so it was clear that I needed to redeem the legitimacy of our group in case of any judgemental onlookers. Come on, it is absolutely fair game to imagine how ridiculous Ru Paul must look while pitching because based on my inexistent knowledge and interest about that lifestyle, he is such a catcher.
SO ANYWAY, I took the mound with a purpose, didn't warm up at all, and hurled those balls like I was Randy Johnson aiming at a bird. My best pitch resulted in 1,200 points, which sounds like a lot, but I have not yet figured out how to convert that score into miles per hour so I'm holding off on sending my tape to scouts, plus, now that the entire right side of my body has lost function, I may have to go on long-term IR anyway.
The severity of the Speed Pitch injury didn't set in until the morning so we went on to play basketball, at which I made a fool of myself because my hoops game is comparable to that of the pre-transformation Monstars, and also threw footballs at targets, at which Danny made a fool of himself because his arm strength and level of brain damage is comparable to that of Tua Tagovailoa. Sorry, Tua - you seem like an okay dude, but you play for Miami so you're gonna get some concussion jokes. And sorry, Danny - you seem like an okay dude, but you have three cats so you're gonna get some Tua jokes. I don't know if Tua actually has cats, but it really seems like he would, you know? I think it's the haircut.
The most surprising athletic performance of the night was a truly surprising surprise that came from Homer Simpson, surprisingly. Homer was a grimy remnant of this arcade's '90s glory days and had been resigned to the role of goalie in a Nerf-y soccer game, but we quickly found that he had some life in him yet, unlike his show, lol. Also, when I say that he was "playing goalie," I mean that his two-foot-tall, battered, stationary figure was connected to a rotating disc in front of a little net. No matter how well we booted those balls, this motionless, yellow cartoon character managed to turn us into A Night at the Roxbury - we could not score. You guys still like movies from the '90s that were based on SNL skits from the '90s that I've never seen, right?
In a mid-piece conclusion regarding the kids sports games things we played, we were all made to look like fools in one event or another. I couldn't help but think that Bruce Springsteen was onto something with "Glory Days," except for the part about his buddy throwing a great "speedball" because speedballs aren't a thing in baseball, though they are a thing that killed both John Belushi and Chris Farley.
For a moment, join me in another world. A better world. A world in which you were somehow unaware that fried food exists and that Dave & Buster's serves said food on the premises. Even in that world, it would become apparent that mozzarella sticks were nearby as soon as you played your first round of Ms. Pac-Man, you Ru Paul ladyboy, because every surface in that joint is sticky or greasy or both. To be fair, D&B's standard procedure of separating the food area from the game area is far superior to that of Chuck E. Cheese, where I recall them stacking bare pizzas on the air hockey tables, though I may be misremembering, as I haven't been there in over a decade because I try to avoid visiting any establishment that is named after a rodent due to a scarring experience at Bushy Beaver's Gentlemen's Club.
Just like at the Beaver, a real weird vibe descends upon D&B's when the sun goes down. By the time we left at 10, the scene resembled some sinister combination of a walking dead nightclub and a dystopian electric playground for their feral spawn. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think "Bring Your Child to the Bar Day" is going to catch on anytime soon. I'm honestly surprised that this place is permitted to operate in this fashion by the same government that won't let me wear my invisible pants in public.
Let's talk economics for a second because after all, I have an MBA that I don't use because I spend my time being underemployed and writing these stupid posts that you don't read: if you think inflation has been bad at the grocery store where you buy your Hostess products, you should see what is going on in D&B's prize room. We put $30 on our Power Card™ at the start of the evening and performed rather decently at all of the games that didn't feature Homer Simpson, so I figured that we earned at least enough tickets for one of those sticky-hand things that our parents hated because they'd get stuck to the ceiling and then your dad would hit you, which would make your mom mad and they'd fight about it and eventually get divorced and then after some time had passed, your mom would bring a new guy around who is super religious and named Gary and has glasses and you'd finally be pressured into calling him "dad" even though you know he's not really your dad because your real dad is living in a rundown apartment in a bad part of town and gaining weight and drinking and balding and wondering where it all went wrong and realizing that he actually misses your sticky-hand-from-the-arcade antics and then after maybe a year or so, you find him in a garage with a bottle and the car running, or maybe like a Slinky or something.
We wound up with roughly 450 tickets and could only afford a shot glass that was inappropriately displayed alongside an array of plastic Chinese doodads for kids. There was an XBox available for 300,000 tickets, so I did a quick calculation with my engineering degree that I don't use and based on the ratio of tickets to dollars for the shot glass, that console would cost $20,000 of real currency. I haven't purchased any systems recently, but unless that XBox can produce a more convincing COVID vaccine card than my printer, I don't think it's worth that price. Danika selected and went home happy with a foam stress ball in the shape of a bag of movie popcorn for 200 tickets and I still don't know how to process that. Maybe it highlights the fact that it's the little things in life that we should cherish and be grateful for. Or it means that she had a Planet of the Apes-style lobotomy. That movie came out in 1968.
Perhaps the most disappointing event of the evening was my Skee-Ball performance. In total, there were six of us in a row, just like we were in line for a WNBA game, so my ineptitude was obvious, just like WNBA players. I didn't even medal. I could stand up here at this invisible podium in my invisible pants and give you excuses, but I am better than that. I'm no Patrick Mahomes or his criminal brother or his insufferable wife or his whiney teammates or his one whiney teammate's very famous stupid girlfriend who won't leave us the hell alone with her bullshit music - I have class. It's technically a lower class, from what I've seen in census data, but it is class nonetheless. I refuse to take the low road and point out that Dane was blatantly encroaching into my lane with his 5'-6" frame and 5'-6" ass and throwing me off of my axis. Do not bait me because I will not say that.
If you're curious, it turned out that the Sabres lost and SNL very nearly endorsed antisemitic Islamic terrorism again and continued their nearly impossible streak of unfunny episodes in a row so our intuition was on point. Again, Lorne, I am available. Have you heard that I have unused degrees in both business and engineering and have experience in being milked? My email is gohabsgo716@gmail.com.