It is generally bad practice to take sitcom theme songs at their word. But ever since Cheers debuted, our culture has normalised the idea that sometimes we want to go where everybody knows our name. As a lifelong extrovert in his 50s, I must be clear: Your general outlook about wanting to go where everybody knows your name will change once they know your name at Walgreens. My pharmacist and I have known each other by name for some time, but now whenever I approach the counter, she just says, “The usual?” (Statins, for the record. Neat.)
Sometimes you want to go where there is zero chance anyone will even ask your name, and if there is Skee-Ball at this place, all the better. This is why in the year 2024, I have adopted my dumbest habit yet, and I am a grown man with a favourite scratch-off ticket. I now go—no more than once a week but also no less than once a week—to Dave & Buster’s for a weekday lunch. By myself. And I love it.
To paraphrase Ray Parker Jr: Dave & Bustin’ makes me feel good. The whole thing began with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a 12-week “spiritual path to higher creativity” I’ve been doing with a Zoom accountability group. One weekly assignment is to take yourself on an “artist date,” to find an activity nourishing to the artist within. I was having trouble coming up with ideas, and after I took my inner artist to see Saltburn, our relationship was strained. I closed my eyes, and my soul spoke in images: That familiar blue-and-orange logo came into focus. Oh, so you are an idiot, I whispered to my inner artist. Thank God.
I’d always imagined Dave & Buster’s as Chuck E Cheese for grown-ups, and my assessment wasn’t far off: It’s Pac-Man and Super Shot and shoot-’em-ups where you take out zombies with full-size rifles tied to the console. There is no animatronic band of anthropomorphic vermin, but there is plenty of the indistinct pop music one typically hears only inside an Uber, so it evens out. It’s a carnival midway that never moves to the next town, and it has a bar in it. There’s a lot to love is what I’m saying.
The unfortunate fact about grown-ups is that some of them will choose to have children, and those children will need a place to celebrate birthdays. So after school and on weekends, Dave & Buster’s becomes Chuck E Cheese. These times are to be avoided. Let them have the run of the place on a Saturday afternoon.
Your time to Dave & Bust is at 1am on a Tuesday. You’ll be one of no more than eight people—always male, always unaccompanied. As you roam, you will struggle to avoid eye contact with these men, and they with you. You will be united by a common shame and a common quest for digital points to be accrued on your Power Card. The floor of Dave & Buster’s feels like the cruising area of a public park but without the faintest possibility of sex. It is a blinking-light district. You will have found your people, and you will know they are your people because they don’t want to talk to you either.
I was immediately drawn to Super Shot, which I now consider the only acceptable way to play basketball. To shoot hoops in a gym is to risk being asked to join a pickup game, and I must ball in a space where there is no chance of accidental team sports. If I’m going to do badly—and I am—I need it to be in a place too full of distractions for anyone to notice. (There’s also a hybrid of Super Shot and Connect Four, so I can ponder my lack of athletic ability and strategic thinking together, in noisy peace.)
My Dave & Buster’s—in the already tragic heart of already tragic Hollywood—is capable of legitimate visual poetry. By the front door, there’s a DoorDash rack. So this means either there are people in LA who actually crave the Dave & Buster’s 14oz rib eye outside the arcade, or there’s a Dave & Buster’s chef in LA who maintains hope that such a person exists. I don’t know which makes my heart ache more. Though it’s a trick question, because neither makes my heart hurt more than the double-pepperoni flatbread on the Shareables menu.
I’ve struck up exactly one conversation at Dave & Buster’s, and it was a short one, because we didn’t speak the same language. “I visit from Stuttgart,” said the stranger next to me cheerfully as he housed his all-American cheeseburger. “Ok!” I replied. We nodded at each other for a while, and that was pretty much that. I came away happy for him. He’d shown himself the real America. An enclosed space, dense with bright things for us to stick our money into. All of us using our talents to get more and more of a currency that is worth less and less. All of us too distracted by the shiny logos to pay attention to any one thing for too long. At least here the guns don’t have bullets in them.
After a few weeks, I earned enough points on my Power Card to buy a travel tumbler with the D&B’s logo and the words “DING DING DING.” Even when inanimate, Dave & Buster’s is deafening.
We’re living in a time of maximum stupidity, and sometimes the answer is to surrender to it. Feed your inner artist warm pretzel sticks with your choice of dipping sauces. Then come back to your regular (and maybe equally noisy and stupid) life refreshed. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your shame. That’s Dave & Buster’s by yourself at lunchtime on a weekday. Hey, it’s no dumber than being a Disney adult.
