Lonely in the Automat
I’ve always thought of automats as lonely, melancholy places. I entered my first automat when I was 14 and visited the first of many, many navy bases.
Naval bases in those days were almost defined by their automats and automats were the only place to be for a certain kind of junior sailor. There were the living quarters, the dining hall, the bar if you were old enough and the automat if you were not. I was not.
There were two occasions to visit the automat and it presented a different aspect on each occasion.
Killing time after lunch, waiting for class to begin, you encountered the brash, flashing automat. At lunchtime, the automat was a buzzing hive of sailors drinking crap coffee from the crap coffee machine, playing video games and sitting around crap little tables munching crap snacks from the crap little dispenser things tempting you with their little A-H and 1-9 buttons that made their inner robot spring to life and threaten to dispense the pack of tutti-fruities to keep you awake through the afternoon’s boredom but, ultimately, disappointing you with physics-defying feats of cruelty, snatching your tutti-fruities back into its greedy maw or dangling the little snack mere inches above the dispenser tray with all the other unreachable tokens of misfortune.
It was in such an automat that I first completed Dragon’s Lair to great applause and where I first found all the Easter eggs in Track ‘n’ Field. It was where Alf Menzies and I made it to the end of Super Mario Bros (though we never did defeat the final Bowser or, as we called him, the big green thing) and where we emptied the trivia machine, Blockbusters, of all its pound coins every day. But that was the happy automat.
“Dragon’s Lair. The fantasy adventure where you become a valiant knight on your quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an eeeevil dragon…. Lead on adventurer! Your quest awaits!”
The other automat is the one that looms in my memory.
Melancholy automat was a dark, empty hall of flickering lights; the only place open at 2:30 AM when the bus back to base after a weekend in civvy street dispensed its tired young human cargo.
I remember several variations of that sad journey back from the exciting world of stolen kisses, far-away family and fading friends still plodding their way through school while I served Queen and country. Portsmouth to Helensburgh was the longest. Bexleyheath to Fareham guaranteed a hundred fellow travellers. But hardest of all was the journey from Sidcup to Torpoint, back to HMS Fisgard in Cornwall.
It started on Platform 2 at Sidcup Station (where the Rolling Stones began) and the 12¾ miles to Charing Cross. Then came the long, rumbling Circle Line reaching Paddington just in time for the 4-hour train ride down to Plymouth. At Plymouth Station, it was a short cab ride to Devonport and, most romantic in my misty memories, the long chug-a-lug of the Torpoint Ferry dragging itself along its heavy chains across the dark, forbidding Hamoaze.
By the time you got to the Cornwall side of the river, you were well into the wee hours of the morning and, if you were lucky, you could share a cab ride to the base. That was the moment when it hit you that you were in the Navy for real and for the foreseeable future. Then a short walk up the hill and a flash of the ID card to the bloke unlucky enough to be on gate duty — those were my rituals — until, finally, the automat.
The automat was the only place to get food in the middle of the night and it was a place entirely transformed from the bustling, mechanical bazaar of the daytime. At night, there was just you and the whir of the carousel dispensing your stale Cornish Pasty — desperately needed sustenance after so many hours of travel.
The main lights were always off and you were doomed to peer at your pasty in the ancient microwave oven—the same oven used by Admiral Nelson himself— lit intermittently by the brazen flashing of the video games. Those sounds are still fresh and familiar—from the ding-a-ling-a-ling! of the slot machine to the Beep-beep-BEEEEEEP! of Pole Position—until, eventually, the bright Ding! of the microwave announcing that it was time to wolf down my oggie before the sun came up and summoned me to my classes just a few, short hours after the dawn.
I didn’t think I’d ever finish this drawing. I thought my muse was gone. It happened before. I have a half-finished charcoal drawing of my wife that I started in 2001. I don’t know how many times I’ve picked up that drawing and stared at it, wondering how I would ever draw anything ever again.
I chose Hopper’s Automat precisely because it looked easy. I expected I’d be able to lose myself in the memories of automats past as my finger rubbed the image of Hopper’s lonely flapper girl onto the screen of my iPad but just the act of opening Art Studio was a challenge. The splash screen to me was Oglaf’s Muse or, more likely, her successor. Under her withering gaze, all confidence faded.
My previous painting had become a slog. My earliest finger-paintings took a mere hour or two each but copying the old masters was hard work and a drain on my enthusiasm. Hopper was easier but each time I fired up Art Studio the memory of The Virgin bade me close it down just as quickly. But my drawing is done now and the long, forgotten memories of automats past can go back to the dark place where they so lately rested.
I wonder what stories that lonely flapper girl in Hopper’s Automat had to tell.
A tiny request. It’s so very hard to get noticed when you start out as a writer on Substack. Please consider sharing this essay so that others will see it. Maybe even add a little note of your own.
I used to work in the funfair at Chessington Zoo and your “Beep-beep-BEEEEEEP!” just took me straight back to the arcade. Thank you.