Burning Down the Mouse

I’d been awake in Hanoi for over 72 hours. This would be my 5th underground Black Crested Gibbon fight of the night. The locals started training Gibbons to fight during the Vietnam War to keep wayward GI’s away from the women and children. “Gibb Gabs”, as they’re known to locals, are responsible for what a recent Vietnamese study claimed was around $80 million in illicit gambling revenue. But I wasn’t here for the Gibb Gab. I was here for the entertainment. More specifically, I was here for the one they call “Rattitude”. Or as I and millions of other children of a certain age know him – Charles Entertainment Cheese.

Chuck E. Cheese was born, Carlotto Augustino Formaggiano. He was the eldest son of Italian-Rat Immigrants, Giuseppe Francesco Formaggiano and Benedetta Giuliana Francotti. He grew up in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, and had loved singing from an early age. When he was old enough to count, he started cleaning musical instruments to make enough in bus fare to travel down to Coney Island on the weekends. There, he’d perform for house bands at arcades before forming his own group at 15 called, “The Plague Bois”. 

The group achieved some modest success and was well-known on the college circuit before the band’s drummer, Matthew Acquabenne died in a freak banana-boat accident. Carlotto, as he was still known, disappeared for 4 years only to return having legally changed his name to “Charles E. Cheese”. Shortly after his reappearance, Charles opened up a local pizza joint in Bed Stuy called “Chuck’s Cheese”. Every night, from 11 pm to midnight, Charles and his band, “Chuck and the Make Believes”, would play original songs to an ever-increasing fanbase.

For many, a bustling pizza business and local celebrity status might be enough to fill their cup. Not for Charles. Where some saw pizza with a soundtrack, Charles saw dollar signs. Within 5 years, Charles had opened over 22 “Chuck E. Cheese’s” family entertainment restaurants in the tri-state area. The premise was simple: a place where a kid can be a kid. With many of the very games Chuck grew up with at Coney Island, good pizza, and live musical performances, Chuck E. Cheese’s became THE place to be seen for the grade-school glitterati. 

As Chuck steadily grew his business, a chance encounter with Sigeru Miyamoto (designer of the Donkey Kong franchise) convinced Chuck that video games would be the future of his restaurants. If Chuck had been flying around town in his own helicopter before, he was about to blast into the stratosphere in a pizza-shaped rocketship. 

Chuck E. Cheese’s recorded 15 consecutive years of double-digit growth from 1981 to 1995. After going public in 1989, Charles Entertainment Cheese became the world’s richest rat business-owner. Of course, with great success and riches comes great temptation and for Chuck, women and drugs were his vices.

“Well, I just remember we were at Chuck’s house in the Hamptons and he was dating Kim Bassinger at the time,” explained a lifelong friend of Chuck’s who wished to remain anonymous. “Michael Keaton had shown up and was about 2 grams into a chooch-fueled bender and asked Chuck if he wanted any and uh, well yeah, I guess that’s kinda where it started”. “It” was a $10,000 a day cocaine and rare-cheese habit that dominated Chuck’s life for the next decade. 

In between speed-boat runs from Miami to Medellin, base jumping off Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, and buying not one but two professional badminton teams, Charles managed to get married and divorced an astonishing 12 times. It was after his final marriage (to a craps dealer from the Sands in Vegas he’d met a mere three hours prior) that the board of Chuck E. Cheese Inc. voted to have Charles removed for “dereliction of duty”. 

A legal soap opera ensued with accusations of fraudulent accounting, insider trading, and even cannibalism emerging in public depositions. In the end, Chuck was forced to sell the majority of his shares in Chuck E. Cheese Inc. and sentenced to pay a fine of $107 million to the SEC – a record judgment at the time. Chuck spent the better part of 2 years trying to appeal the decision but the entire endeavor devolved into a comic of errors with Chuck even representing himself at one point.

In an attempt at regaining some of the magic he’d found with his restaurants, Chuck opened up “Chucky’s Place” – a bar and nightclub for kids serving non-alcoholic cocktails and featuring DJ sets by cartoon characters. The club managed to stay open for 6 months before the Feds raided the premises under suspicion of illegal pet-rat trafficking. Chuck was due to appear before a federal judge on rat-kateering charges before he disappeared into the thin air. 

Some said he fled to the jungles of Argentina while others claim he turned up dead in a Senagalese prison. While others may have forgotten about Chuck, something about his story always stuck with me. I became hell-bent on finding out where he’d gone and if he was still alive. 

Which is what brought me to a Gibb Gab at 3 in the morning in a sweaty Vietnamese basement beneath a Bahn Mi shack. I’d been told that between Gibb Gab matches, the one they call “Rattitude” performs a 2 song set. As the carcass of an unfortunate Gibbon was swept aside, I saw him. There was no doubt that this was Chuck E. Cheese. He’s heavier now, face puffy from what is probably too many nights alone with a bottle, yet he still commands a presence. Gone is his supporting band and dazzling light show replaced instead by an old folding chair and a worn-out guitar. 

Even though the songs were sung entirely in Vietnamese, the raw emotion didn’t need translation. The pain and scars of a rat who had the world in his paws penetrate his vocals while his lone guitar provides a sparse yet melodic backdrop to the sorrow. For two songs, the crowd sat completely captivated, not daring to disturb the sonic exchange occurring between performer and audience.  

As the last note faded, nobody clapped or hooted or hollered – they just bowed as Chuck ambled off, guitar and chair in hand. As the room slowly reverted back to its more pugilistic tendencies, I pushed my way through the sweat and tobacco smoke to try and speak with the rat himself. He sat quietly in a dimly lit backroom nursing a beer and scrolling through his phone. 

He didn’t seem surprised to see me and beckoned me to come in with a flick of his whisker. We sat and talked for the better part of an hour. He politely answered most of my questions and deftly danced around others he wasn’t comfortable addressing. He’d come to Vietnam to escape the insanity and try to find some type of inner peace. He spoke at length about the power of the jungle to break down the vestiges of a lurid past. He waxed poetic about the generosity of the locals and a bustling ex-pat community. But most of all, he entertained me. The true pros can never completely turn “it” off and Chuck still has “it”.

We shared a beer together before Chuck said he needed to get back to his family – he’s been married for 5 years to a local Vietnamese woman and has 2 children named Napoli and Margherita. We exchanged pleasantries and I thanked him for taking the time to make a former kid feel like a kid again. As he made his way out the door he paused before turning back to me and pulling out a necklace with a pendant danging from it.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, referring to what I recognized as a golden Chuck E. Cheese game ticket. “It’s something I keep with me so that I never forget.” As he turned the shining pendant over in his paws tears began to well in his gigantic rat eyes, “It’s to remind me that if you’re willing to play the game, you just might win.”

And with that, Charles Entertainment Cheese walked out of the room and back to his life. While the money and the glitz and the glamour may be gone, Chuck seems to now have something he never knew he needed – contentment.