Watch a top twirl across a tabletop, and in sets reality, mimicking the cosmic spin of the moon around Earth, Earth around the sun, our solar system on the edge of our galaxy that spins around the supermassive blackhole at the center of the Milky Way and perhaps the galaxy around something bigger we cannot yet know. The twirl is simple. The twirl is mesmerizing. The twirl is pleasurable to observe and maddening to ponder.
After nearly 29 years as a top enthusiast, I still weep every time I watch one dance.
July of 2010, the members of Tops Off To Tops: Top Tops Club waited outside Richmond Cinema 16 for a midnight showing of Inception. Brenda Aberdeen made shirts for everyone watching based off a promotional image of Leonard DiCaprio’s character “Cobb” spinning a top. Aberdeen squatted in her pop-up stool with a cigarette burning to her shaking fingertips. She was nervous. We all were. A friend of club treasurer Melvin Buckley got his hands on a pre-screening bootleg of the film, and he claimed this was the movie that would finally bring tops into popular culture. We allowed ourselves to get our hopes up. A lot was at stake.
Most of the younger members of the club got into tops when we watched the 1994 film It Runs in the Family where Kieran Culkin plays a kid named “Ralphie” who battles his bully in the tops game of “Kill”. Although this movie was a sequel to A Christmas Story, it had none of the first movie’s lame-ass bullshit.
This movie made tops look fucking cool, and to be honest, any variety of tops battle is cool. Watch a top sumo wrestle another top out of the kill ring, and you never want to dabble in cock fighting ever again. It’s not like fighting cocks are easy to keep. Chickens are assholes – especially ones you’ve raised and trained to murder other chickens. Tops aren’t assholes. Tops just spin.
And while that movie created a whole generation of cult tops enthusiasts, somehow tops never broke into mainstream popularity. The older members of the group gained their affinity towards tops upon reading Franz Kafka’s short story The Top, which is obviously a brutally fascinating story, but Kafka isn’t exactly the kind of author pulling in a whole bunch of new tops fans.
Outside of fiction, dreidels are maybe the most widespread use of tops, but their religious ties have always made them a bit a novelty to Jews and non-Jews alike. Nevermind that a game of dreidel can be as intense as any back alley craps game.
In a world as rigid and, honestly, anti-Semitic as this one, this was another case of tops failing to break into mainstream popularity.
So we sweated our asses off outside a movie theater in mid-July. Albert McKinney drew a chalk circle along the sidewalk, the familiar white dust blurring the crisp line that started in one spot and ended in the same spot. Five hours until midnight, but we wouldn’t be bored. We held off playing our quarterly Kill tournament until this night. Our hope was the normies going to see Inception would witness how cool tops were and catch the fever. But either way, this night was to be a celebration of tops.
I didn’t win that night, and I don’t mean that I didn’t win the entire tournament. I didn’t win a single game. Stacey Anderson demolished my top in the first round. She had imported a fighting top from a designer in Morocco that had a low center of gravity I was not expecting. I picked the wrong damn top, and I paid the price for it, watching my own top skid away and nearly fall into the parking lot where cars sauntered by where we gathered – most likely to witness our spectacle.
Anderson made it another two rounds until Charlie Charleston opened his polished cedar top box and carefully chose a speed top that would knock Anderson’s into oblivion.
That’s the thing about tops. A lot of novices think weight is the only factor that goes into Kill tops, but they would be wrong. The name of the game is pushing the enemy top off kilter, disturbing its spin. A pro doesn’t win a game of Kill by simply picking the heaviest top that will spin. A pro wins by picking the top that will match up the best.
This is exactly what Charleston did.
While not unbeatable, the man had perhaps the most diverse tops collection out of all of us, and his knowledge of tops physics and matchups made him the most consistent winner at our club. Whenever Nationals came around, he would usually be the member to represent us. Any of us could beat him on a given day, but if we played a hundred tournaments, he would probably win more than the rest of us combined.
He was lucky he didn’t have to face Anderson in the first round. That’s always the best way to beat a tops genius like Charleston. Surprise him with a top he doesn’t expect. If you pick a very good but one-trick top like Anderson had, he’ll make you pay. He observed her, so she paid.
The rest of the tournament was child’s play for the old man, with him only dropping one game in the best of five Finals. None of us had any counter-picks to keep him guessing, so none of us won. That man was a legend.
We rounded out our wait by playing dreidel and inviting the normies to join in.
They didn’t, so we made our bets alone, money shifting among the members of Tops Off To Tops: Top Tops Club as it always had. The club was its own closed economy where the same crumbled bills changed hands but never changed.
Inception itself was like a top. The movie displayed its protagonist, a top, not at all at first and then in short spins and finally for that long, resting moment when the movie ends fixed on a spinning top before cutting to black.
We cheered. While the movie could have had many more tops and a lot less dream juice or whatever the fuck, ending the movie on a top that potentially spun for eternity was genius. Just imagine that: a top that never stops spinning. Nothing in the world could be more beautiful.
The concept of reality tied to tops was also wonderful, and the crux of the movie that tops are both mysterious and insanity-inducing was something we at the club had been saying for years. This wasn’t the perfect tops movie, but it made tops seem rad and it was popular and the ending was perfect.
Or so we thought.
What I didn’t anticipate was that most people would fixate on tops but in the wrong way.
Excitedly, I chatted with some fellow movie-goers in the lobby about the final scene.
“And the way the camera stayed on that top,” I said. “Brilliant!”
“Yeah,” some asshole said. “So he’s still stuck in the dream, right?”
“I don’t think so,” some fuckhead said. “Did you see the top wobble at the end?”
“I think the top goes on forever,” I said.
“Right,” the asshole said. “So it’s the dream. This guy agrees.”
“No way,” fuckhead said. “It wobbled!”
They argued back and forth about whether or not the top meant Cobbs was dreaming or not but they never stopped to appreciate the mere spinning or not spinning of the top itself. They only cared about what it represented in terms of the plot.
We gained a few more members during the height of Inception. Some fell in love with tops completely and are still with us. Others left the club because, like the average movie-goer, their interest in tops was fleeting.
We’ve watched great tops stories. We’ve watched popular top stories. We’re still waiting on the story that will finally push tops from niche hobby to popular sport.
Watch a top twirl across a tabletop, and in sets reality. Twirl. Twirl. Cut to black.