Growing up, I lived atop a large mountain of cheap stuffed toys. And not the good, expensive, well made stuffed bears you can get for Valentine's day. No. Those got the good place on the bed and did not belong in the great pile. The Pile was mostly the kind of cheap, vaguely mammalian monstrosities you find either on the back wall of a small town carnival's dart-throw, or in a claw machine.
This was partially my fault. But only partially.
When I was about three years old, I remember making frequent drives between McAllen, TX, and Houston, which was where my grandmother lived. A certain recent show about a certain famous tejano singer got something very wrong: There are no mountains in Matamoros, or McAllen. Or Brownsville. There is a lot of green, a lot of palm trees and a lot of flat. Mesquite brush sometimes attempts to become a tree, but this usually ends in failure and a split trunk (this happened to one of our cars, once. There was also a beetle infestation, so it could have been the beetles). This expanse of unyielding green is sometimes broken by small towns and truck-stops, until you hit King Ranch. It's about an hour of driving where there is nothing but privately owned and untamed mesquite brush, belonging to a very much working ranch. There are no turn offs. I think there is one rest stop. The only real break in the monotony is the Sarita or Falfurrias immigration checkpoints, which don't really help keep a rambunctious three year old under control.
So we would always stop at one of the truckstops immediately before the Endless Expanse, and mom or dad would attempt to find something that would keep me entertained long enough for them to reach the next truck stop. Given that this was the late 80s and the concept of a television in a car was quite a long way away (modern smart phones were Star Trek material) this was a lot harder than it sounded.
In the midst of this desperation, I realized that claw machines existed. In that there was this box, fronted with glass, full of soft, colorful fluffy things that I needed. I had never seen these toys before. I would forget about them as soon as we left. But for the five minutes I beheld the glorious alter of fluffy goodness, I was hooked: I needed that (insert stuffed toy here).
My mom knew that these were rigged games that produced only empty pockets and sadness, so she avoided them religiously. This meant our religions were now in conflict, as I was worshiping the fluff through the barrier of glass. I needed her to get me a stuffy. Any stuffy. And I unleashed every tool in my three-year-old toolbox, which mostly comprised screaming, tantrums and crying.
Finally, Mom decided to show me an objective fact: You cannot get a toy out of a claw machine. She put one quarter in. Maneuvered the silver claw slowly through the sacred space of fluffiness. (I am watching this like the little aliens in Toy Story, mouth agape that the altar is actually doing something) All the while telling me "You'll see. This is a waste of quarters."
The claw stops.
"It's gonna go down now and nothing is going to come up."
She hits the button. The claw descends, the holy finger of a choosing god that will give me something fluffy to hold. Mom watches it with the sane adult skepticism of a life of disappointment. She knows she is crushing my dreams, but she also knows this has to happen, or else--
The claw has risen.
It holds a cow.
She stares, disbelieving, as the claw cranks its way over to the near left corner and deposits the cow into the hole. She has to physically restrain me from climbing into the machine to retrieve my cow before she fishes the thing out herself. She looks at it. It is, indeed, a cheaply made stuffed cow. But it is also very much real. She got the cow out of the claw machine. Her base thesis is disproven.
Every addict can recount that first real hit of their drug-of-choice. For Mom, that moment was the hit of dopamine that came with this accomplishment. She got the cow. She got the cow. She not only accomplished the challenge of keeping me quiet and happy for an hour in a car seat, but she defeated the rigged complexities of the claw machine.
And she can do it again.
And she did.
She began to develop strategies. You never go for what you want, just what you think you can get. Never go for anything on the sides, they've been stuffed down in there. Don't ever hit the machine after the guy has just filled it up, because they pack the toys in there on purpose. She'd limit herself to a couple dollars worth of quarters and then that was it. Every machine she saw got examined for a potential conquest. And the cheap pastel stuffed animals kept piling up.
Sadly, all things must end. In our case, addiction was not conquered. The machine manufacturers simply replaced the well-constructed, durable claws with loosely connected ones that couldn't hold a feather if you superglued it to the struts. Toys that in yesteryear would have been an easy addition to the hoard slipped from Mom's grasp to lie mockingly atop a pile of holiday themed stuffed animals. And as the new model of claw became more profitable, all the old, fun machines were replaced. I've attempted to replicate the claw machine wonder for my own daughter, to no avail.
To this day my mother still sometimes holds her coin purse and looks at the stuffed animals within the glass box. She knows she can't get anything out of it.
But maybe she could.
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