Illustration by Matt Mahurin

It is generally bad practice to take sitcom theme songs at their word, but since Cheers debuted in 1982, our culture has normalized the idea that sometimes we want to go where everybody knows our name. I am a lifelong extrovert, but as a man in his fifties, let me be clear: your general outlook about wanting to go where everybody knows your name will change once they know your name at the Walgreens. My pharmacist and I have known one another by name for some time now, which has never gotten less alarming, but now when 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 favorite 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.

Let me explain.

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 of the weekly assignments is to take yourself on an "Artist’s Date,” to go somewhere you haven’t been or do something you stopped doing, all with the purpose of nourishing the artist within. I was having trouble coming up with things this inner artist might enjoy, and after I had taken him to Saltburn the week before, our relationship was tense and strained. I closed my eyes and searched my soul, which spoke in images: that familiar blue and orange logo came into focus. The D, and then the B. Oh, so you are an idiot, I whispered back to my inner artist. Thank God.

Never having been to one, I had always imagined a Dave & Buster’s as a Chuck E. Cheese for grownups. My assessment isn’t completely off the mark: it’s Pac-Man and Super Shot and the thing where the shelf sweeps the coins off and any number of games where you shoot at zombies with full-size rifles that are tied to the console. There is no animatronic band of anthropomorphic vermin, but there is a lot of the indistinct pop music one generally only hears inside an Uber, so it evens out. It’s a carnival midway that never moves to the next town, and there’s a bar in it. There is 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 just regular Chuck E. Cheese. These times are to be avoided. Children are loud and pushy and almost never have any good book recommendations. Let the children have the run of the place on a Saturday afternoon.

Mark Davis//Getty Images

Inside the Hollywood Dave & Buster’s in 2014, shortly after it opened.

Your time to Dave & Bust is at 1:00 P.M. on a Tuesday. You will be one of no more than eight people—always male, always unaccompanied. As you roam the floor, 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 public park or gym is to risk being asked to join a pick-up game. This will not do. I need to conduct my balling in a space where there is no chance of accidental team sports. If I’m going to do badly–and I am going to do badly–I need it to be in a place too full of distractions for anyone to notice. (There is also a hybrid of Super Shot and Connect Four, so I can ponder my lack of athletic ability and basic strategic thinking together, in noisy peace.)

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.

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. I know this because I have checked: you cannot get an Air Hockey table delivered from a Dave & Buster’s. So this means either there are people in L. A. who actually crave the Dave & Buster’s 14 oz rib eye or Voodoo Pasta but don’t want to go to the trouble of enjoying themselves to get it, or there’s a Dave & Buster’s chef in L. A. who maintains hope that such a person exists. I don’t know which makes my heart ache more, and it’s a trick question anyway, 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 on a weekday afternoon, 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. “Okay!” I replied. We nodded at each other for a while, and that was pretty much that. But 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 of this, I have earned enough points on my Power Card to buy an insulated travel tumbler with the D&B’s logo and, in a spiral around the perimeter, 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 inner artist's 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.

Illustration by Matt Mahurin

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