POV: The alley smells like piss and some kind of sticky, artificial hard candy perfume. It leads to the back of a defunct ballroom - just a garbage lot now. You find the thing in a pile of crumpled Holiday Inn flyers and spent shell casings: a palm-sized game console, battered and blinking. You give it a look. It only plays pinball. Some of the functions are already busted, the ball keeps glitching out, going faster and faster. The who;e thing looks like it's about to snap any second now. The sky’s an over-saturated blue, beating down on you like a bad hangover. You squint and slump onto the steps, letting yourself get slowly pulled into this leftover pleasure device / bliss machine. But where did the pleasure go? The pinball spins out another wild turn, drills its way back into your sweating, calloused palm - disappearing sweetly into your palm lines like that Cuban bullet back in 1982. You want to hold onto so many things. But right now, it’s you who’s trapped in the grip.