go.Jimmy.go

Long before Katy Perry sang about dancing on tabletops and having a Friday night she couldn’t quite remember, I had already mastered the art of Friday night.

Or at least the early-1980s teenage version of it.

And there’s one particular Friday night I still remember.

It’s sometime in the early 1980s, and my friend Mike and I are climbing into the back seat of his mom’s old blue station wagon for a ride to the Palmer Park Mall.

For a teenager back then, being dropped off at the mall on a Friday night after a long day at school was like being dropped off at a Hollywood movie premiere in front of the paparazzi. It ranked right up there with the Dip-and-Dances at Palmer Pool during the summer or piling into Penn Pizza with a bunch of classmates after a school event.

You didn’t need tickets, and there was no invitation. Nobody even had to organize anything. You just showed up, solo or with your friends.

Even if you weren’t one of the popular kids at school, somehow being at the mall on Friday night made you part of the crowd.

There was something liberating about being dropped off by your parents in front of those glass doors and watching their car disappear into the parking lot. For the next few hours, you were on your own. That alone moved you up at least three notches on the teenage coolness meter.

Personally, it also gave me the perfect opportunity to showcase my chiseled teenage abs, Sylvester Stallone good looks, red Members Only jacket and Jordache jeans.

Okay, I made up most of that – although I did have the Members Only jacket.

A typical Friday night at the mall was exciting because you got to see everyone from school outside their natural habitat. No teachers. No pencils. No homework assignments.

Even more importantly, it was also an opportunity to see the prettiest girls from school.

During the week, I might catch glimpses of them roaming the hallways between classes. But at the mall they seemed to travel in packs, gathering together like some mysterious teenage sorority.

Of course, my shyness pretty much guaranteed that I wouldn’t actually talk to any of them. But that didn’t stop me from mentally rehearsing my best “Hey, how’s it going?” as we pulled into the parking lot.

Not that romance remained on my mind for very long. Because once the smell of pizza hit me—and an Orange Julius was inevitably dripping down my hand—there were more important matters to attend to. Mike’s mom had already given us a time and rendezvous point for the ride home. Time was of the essence.

Bad then there was no Spotify. No streaming. No YouTube. You couldn’t just pull a phone out of your pocket and instantly listening to practically every song ever recorded. If I wanted to discover new music, you went to the record store.

For me, that meant the Listening Booth.

I’d wander through the racks of albums, studying the covers and deciding which record was worthy of whatever money I’d managed to save. On this particular Friday, I had enough cash to buy an album.

There was something special about walking out of a record store with new music tucked under your arm. Of course, you couldn’t immediately hear it. You had to do the no prehistoric ritual of waiting until you got home, pulling the record from its sleeve, putting it on the turntable and lowering the needle.

Waiting was part of the experience.

With new album safely in hand, Mike and I headed toward the far corner of the mall, past stores like The Gap, Rainbow Store, Pearle Vision and Waldenbooks.

Our destination was darker.

Louder.

And considerably more dangerous to the quarters in my pocket.

The Fun Attic.

All week I’d been accumulating quarters, and now it was time to spend them.

Walking into that arcade was like stepping into another world. The place was dark except for the glow of dozens of screens. Machines beeped, buzzed and flashed in every direction. Kids crowded around cabinets battling for high scores on Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Pole Position and whatever happened to be the latest obsession.

It was teenage nirvana.

There was also an unwritten code. If somebody was playing the machine you wanted, you didn’t need to say anything. You simply placed your quarter on the console.

That quarter meant only one thing:

I’m next.

Everyone understood it. Heck, even the toughest kid in the arcade respected the quarter.

I was something of a traditionalist when it came to video games. While everyone else moved on to newer machines, I remained loyal to Space Invaders. I was perfectly content blasting rows of pixelated aliens for as long as my quarters lasted.

So imagine my horror when I discovered that my beloved Space Invaders machine was gone.

Someone at Fun Attic had committed the unthinkable.

They’d replaced it.

And then I saw what had taken its place.

Dragon’s Lair.

There it stood, almost by itself, looking unlike any arcade game I’d ever seen.

The graphics weren’t blocks and dots anymore. This thing looked like a cartoon.

An actual cartoon.

Dirk the Daring raced through a castle filled with traps, monsters and certain death, all in an attempt to rescue the beautiful Princess Daphne from an evil dragon.

There was just one problem.

50 cents a play.

Fifty cents!

That was double what most arcade games cost.

For a teenager operating on a limited weekly quarter budget, this required serious financial consideration.

I considered it for approximately three seconds. Then I put in fifty cents.

I was hooked.

Every time Dirk died—and believe me, Dirk died a lot—I reached into my pocket for another two quarters.

And another two.

And another two.

Then something unexpected happened.

Girls started watching.

A few members of what I’d come to think of as the Palmer Mall Sorority gathered around the machine as I played.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just some shy kid from school.

I was Dirk the Daring; navigating collapsing platforms, swinging swords and avoiding certain death while girls actually watched and cheered me on. This had never happened while I played Space Invaders.

Clearly, Dragon’s Lair wasn’t merely a video game. It was a chick magnet.

For a few glorious minutes, I felt like a rock star.

Even Mike—my loyal compadre who normally would have wandered off to play pinball by now—stayed beside me.

My wingman.

Eventually, reality arrived in the form of an empty pocket.

I had spent every quarter I owned. Princess Daphne remained imprisoned, and the dragon remained undefeated. And the girls wandered off to wherever it was teenage girls went when they weren’t watching socially awkward boys dumping their life savings into an arcade cabinet.

Mike and I eventually met his mom at the designated rendezvous point and climbed back into the old blue station wagon for the ride home.

I had my new album with me, and originally I’d planned to spend the weekend listening to it.

But now I had another mission.

I needed more quarters.

A lot more quarters.

Because next Friday night, Mike and I would be back.

And I’d get another shot at that dragon.

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More than forty years later, what strikes me isn’t really the video game, the record store or even the girls gathered around the machine.

It’s how much anticipation there was in something so simple. Back then, Friday night meant something.

There were no group texts deciding where everyone should meet. No social media showing us what everybody else was doing. No phones keeping us connected every second of the day.

There were three really important lessons I learned during the 1980’s:

First: If you wanted to see your friends, you went where your friends were. Second: If you wanted new music, you went looking for it.

And third: If you wanted to rescue a princess from a dragon, you’d better have a pocket full of quarters.

Maybe that’s why I remember nights like that so clearly.

We didn’t know how good we had it.

We were just waiting for Friday.

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