The humidity is reminiscent of a sweaty gym sock when I enter Clancy’s Irish Parrot Bar to challenge Ian Jacoby, Chippewa Valley native and publisher of the new pinball magazine “Nudge,” to an ad hoc best-of-seven pinball playoff. The barroom is midweek quiet, just a few patrons watching baseball on two TVs bookending the bar. We order drinks and reconnoiter near the “Stranger Things” pinball game. Jacoby is an expert trash-talker, but we get right down to business.

“I think pinball is, more than any video game, a social experience,” Jacoby explains. “People aren’t going to own multiple seven- to ten-thousand-dollar machines. So, you’re going to go out and play. I’d go out to random bars and bowling alleys and meet weird people.”

Tonight, I’m the “weird people.”

“Got any tips for a new pinball player?” I ask, though I consider myself to be somewhat seasoned. I grew up playing pinball at Wagner’s 66 & ½ Lanes during birthday parties and while my parents bowled. I know my way around a pinball machine, I think.

“Practice,” he replies, like I’ve asked him literally the most stupid question in the history of stupid questions.

“Yep,” he says, sipping his Diet Coke. “Definitely practice. Don’t worry. Play. Just play. Keep the ball alive. Keep it flowing. The way I got into pinball wasn’t about getting a high score. It’s about hitting a ramp. And then hitting that ramp again, and again.”

“You mentioned this particular game was hard,” I say, “why?”

“It’s real hard,” Jacoby answers. “It plays fast. There’s a mechanism called an opto, and for a long time the opto was very unreliable in this game. But I heard they fixed it.”

We agree on a practice game. Jacoby rattles off information about the pinball machine with the same passion someone might display for a beloved and invaluable automobile. Between pinball insights he also relays facts from a John McEnroe biography he’d read years ago, and casually compliments me on a few decent shots I make. Jacoby is an unlikely savant. At six-foot, four-inches tall, he’s a mountain of a man that is just as comfortable talking pro basketball as he is literature or experimental music.

“It’s a cool game. It’s made by the best pinball designer of all time, Brian Eddy, at least according to us, according to ‘Nudge’. You see how I’m killing this thing right now? I hope you write that down. Another jackpot, another jackpot. Like, for the reader: Ian Jacoby is killing it. Hitting multiball shot after multiball shot ... It’s all about bonuses in this game.”

Jacoby wins the first match by a score of 166,611,790 to my paltry 22,694,930. He prevails in the second match by a score of 110,826,470 to my 31,283,670.

“Let’s go,” Jacoby says, clearly in his glory.

After the third game, a pathetic drubbing in which I post a scant 6,724,850 points to Jacoby’s 117,702,200, he offers to let the last of his five balls simply drain down to the bottom of the machine. He’s offering me the “mercy rule,” but I’m too proud to accept.

“You didn’t move the needle very much,” Jacoby jeers.

At times, the machine is lit up like an elaborate multi-colored circuit about to explode. Lights are flashing and strobing with enough intensity to give an epileptic a seizure. I never really find “the zone” that professional athletes or pinballers like Jacoby talk about. At times, I can see Jacoby is there, in the zone, slowing the game down, managing, cupping, the ball just so with deft flippers, aiming for bonuses, targets, bumpers, guiding arrows. But I’m always losing and frustrated, always reacting, slamming the ball up the middle of the game’s board and leaving myself difficult follow-up shots. The closest sports metaphor I can reach for is billiards. It feels like rather than finessing easy shots, I’m cracking the cue ball so hard I have no idea what will happen next. I’m chaos to Jacoby’s control.

Jacoby isn’t afraid to nudge the machine either. A nudge is what it sounds like, a gentle hip-check, but not so much as to cause the game to go “tilt,” or essentially shut down. Jacoby is repeatedly giving the machine the business. When the silver ball veers in a direction he doesn’t approve of, or settles in some backwater of the game’s mechanics, he bucks his hip into the machine like he was shedding a defender in a pickup basketball game.

Our final match is closer, 68,795,480 to 12,177,810. But Jacoby seems bored. We lean against the back wall of the bar and leaf through his nascent magazine. It’s a bold publication, espousing three rules: 1.) Pinball is for everyone, 2.) Everything is already kinda (redacted), so let’s have fun, 3.) Be funny. But the magazine is more than fun. It’s beautifully designed, jauntily written, and the photography and writing are true to a passionate, scruffy, outsider subculture. It ain’t “Magnolia Journal.” “The aesthetic for me,” Jacoby explains, “is like ‘Thrasher’ magazine. Gritty and dirty. It’s like skateboarding. People thought skateboarding was a joke until it wasn’t.” Jacoby explains that part of the impetus for the magazine was his frustration with the gatekeeping of the high-brow literary world. After suffering rejection after rejection, he decided to buck the system and do his own thing, start his own magazine, writing much of the content himself and tapping friends to create additional content. “I’d hold the writing in this magazine up against anything,” he says, citing a specific article written by a local friend of his.

There’s a lesson in Jacoby’s passion for pinball. If the world withholds what you want, give it a nudge or two.

Butler is the internationally best-selling and prize-winning author of "Godspeed," “Shotgun Lovesongs,” “Beneath the Bonfire,” “The Hearts of Men” and “Little Faith." His books have been translated in more than nine languages and optioned by Hollywood for film and TV. He lives with his family south of Eau Claire on 16 acres of beautiful land. Follow him on Instagram at @wiscobutler or on Facebook or Goodreads.

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