The ball shoots past a coffin and two Elviras with low-cut dresses and come-hither stares. The machine mimics a bubbling caldron: pop-pop-pop-pop. The ball wriggles through a ramp, skirts flippers designed to resemble bones, and disappears.
Scheffki, a plumber weaned on pinball as a kid in Chicago, fishes into his camouflage shorts for quarters. He racks up 3,042,230 points. The machine jams.
Elvira: "You just don't listen, do you?"
Arnold, 52, hears this from across the room, "like how mothers can sense when their kids are in trouble."
He hustles over, unlocks the machine and plucks out a stray part. Scheffki asks Arnold about the Bali-Hi machine, and Arnold says it could fetch up to $1,000 online.
"Lucky it's not an eight-track tape player," Arnold says wryly. "Then it would have no value."
Fans are whirring overhead. A machine somewhere is humming the theme to "The Lone Ranger." In the row behind Scheffki, Quintana gives up on Spider-Man. He heads to a machine immortalizing the band Kiss.
"I'm the biggest freaking Kiss fan," Quintana says in a near-whisper. He strokes the glass. A notecard says this was the 11,381st of 17,000 Kiss machines made -- "a true classic." Gene Simmons' tongue unfurls in one corner; Ace Frehley glares from the other. Kiss babes preen in black bodices. Snakes spit fire. Quintana's game is over in less time than a song. "There's nothing worse than putting three balls right down the middle," he says.
Quintana, 30, who has a short ponytail and a soul patch, got hooked on pinball a year ago when a friend stumbled onto the Hall of Fame. Quintana steps outside to smoke. His phone rings. It's his wife.
"I'm playing pinball," he says.
She understands, and tells him to call her later.
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ashley.powers@latimes.com
