It’s summer. I’m 10 years old, and I hop out of my mom’s new 2012 Honda Odyssey and onto the sweltering asphalt of the Chuck. E Cheese parking lot. In my sweaty palm, I clutch a coupon for 10 free tokens and my mom’s $4.99 all-you-can-eat salad bar coupon.
As we approach the building, she swings the front door open. I am hit with a wave of cold air-conditioned air and the aroma of cheese pizza. My ears are awakened with children screaming like they’re in the pits of hell, but they’re not in hell. They’re in Chuck E. Cheese.
As I approach the pit of body odor and buzzing arcade games, children dart about like sharks in the ocean. My heart beats out of my chest, my feet planted on the black, confetti patterned carpet littered with pizza crumbs and childhood trauma.
I hear yelling from above my head. As I look up, I see a giant, plastic, tube structure. The colorful tubes worm their way across the ceiling like an anaconda constricting my breathing. I realize I am holding my breath.
A segment of the tube rattles in anger. I see a small, dark silhouette crawling inside through the plastic walls. The silhouette drop kicks another silhouette and the predator scurries away. Did I just witness manslaughter?
The structure was so large and mazelike that it was physical evidence proving the backrooms theory, an urban legend describing an endless maze of rooms that victims get lost in for eternity.
I find a small stage and a dusty, purple curtain. Six-foot animatronics robotically creak and squeak as they string their fingers across fake guitar strings, grip wooden drum sticks and click pretend ivories of a keyboard.
One animatronic opens and closes its jaw, singing into a microphone, except its jaw is broken. Its mouth just gapes open into the microphone as if it were sucking the souls of surrounding adolescents.
A kid standing next to me told me the Chuck E. animatronic ate his little brother. My mom finds me and hands me a small plastic cup of tokens to feed the arcade games. I am no longer at the bottom of the food chain. I have power.
I pass the skee-ball game as children climb up onto the lane, simply placing their plastic balls into the highest-winning spot while the employees aren’t looking. Then I pass the sketchbook booth, but all I see is a child sitting there picking his nose. I accidentally make eye contact. My pace quickens.
My favorite game is the jump rope game, where one jumps along to a fake jump rope on top of a weight-detecting platform. I place my token cup behind me, and my focus deafens my surroundings.
As I’m jumping, I hear yelling directly behind me. I swivel my head. My older brother is yelling at a child with a sinister grin. The child is wearing a flaming monster-truck muscle shirt and camouflaged cargo shorts.
His sticky fingers are holding a handful of tokens from my token cup. He bends back down, placing my tokens back in the cup as my brother fusses at him. He was caught token-handed. His face of defeat fueled my ego. I was now alpha of this pizza jungle.
Despite the trauma, I now realize the wisdom and knowledge I had been bestowed. Chuck E. Cheese enhanced my childhood cognitive development and sharpened my awareness.
Not only that, I was taught finance through token and ticket currencies: one hundred tickets bought you a dejected slinky. Three hundred tickets bought you bacteria-infested cotton candy. Six hundred tickets bought you a line of cocaine and a lifelong gambling addiction.
Chuck E. himself blessed me with womanhood when I got my first period in the Chuck E. Cheese bathroom. Or the pizza just caused internal bleeding. They gave me a free pizza as a congratulation.
I hopped back into my mom’s 2012 Honda Odyssey. No longer did I hold crumpled-up coupons. I yielded a small bag of made-in-China treasures, sweat on my brow and leftover rat pizza from the place where a kid can be a kid.
Maddie Scott is a 19-year-old journalism and history sophomore from Covington.