Earl’s Roadside Motel

A short story by Adam ScheinbergWritten over a period from Fall 1993 to Spring 1998Revised May, 2003

If I could be any being, living deceased, or fictional, for a day, I would undoubtedly beMickey Mouse. There is no one who doesn’t like Mickey Mouse. Mickey must hug more peoplethan anyone else. Each day, thousands of young kids make their sojourn to Florida or California(or the more recent Eurodisney in France) to bestow a hug upon this rodent they’ve never metbefore. Disney seems to attract more visitors than does Mecca. To have the worldunconditionally love you is my technical definition of paradise. Only Mickey Mouse commandsthis seemingly unattainable respect. I mean, think about it. You know anyone who, for somereason, doesn’t like Mickey Mouse? In addition, being Mickey Mouse for a day would give me theopportunity to see Disney World in detail. My last visit was abruptly ended by a rather untimelythundershower. The vacation was salvaged, if one uses that word lightly, by Earl’s RoadsideMotel. They had a few video games. Frogger is actually a pretty cool game. It’s like, you crossthe road, but wait!, there’s still a river to get across! Earl wouldn’t buy Frogger. Actually, I can’tsay that, I never met Earl. I don’t even know if Earl exists. That would be cool if he did,though, because then I could call and request Frogger. Earl did have Donkey Kong. To mydismay, the power was lost when I completed the fifteenth level. Not to worry, after all, DonkeyKong only has three levels that just keep repeating. It’s not like I didn’t know what was comingup or anything. I could have told you, “Hey, after this, it’s going to go back to the first level.” Imean, they could have put in a little more effort than that. I did notice, however, before thepower went out that Mario is the main guy in Donkey Kong. I hadn’t realized that he was thestar of anything before Super Mario Brothers. That’s another great game. Earl neglected topurchase this classic as well. In fact, Earl had, rather unwisely, in my opinion, invested in Pong,a first generation video game technological effort. Pong would only swallow two of my quartersbefore the cease of my stay, and those two only because of curiosity. I pumped most of mymoney into Dig-Dug. Dig-Dug is a stupid game where you, a farmer, has to kill gophers. I don’teven like Dig-Dug. But it is pretty cool to kill the gophers. I wonder if real farmers have gopherproblems as serious as the farmer’s in Dig-Dug. I hear they released a Dig-Dug 2. I don’t reallycare. Not like I wanna get it or anything, but it would be cool to own it. It’s actually cool to ownsomething even if you don’t want it. Did you ever notice that? I have a few CD’s I really bought just to own. For instance, AC/DC’s

Back in Black

. It’s got You Shook me All Night Long, and it’sgot Hell’s Bells, and Back in Black. It’s a decent CD. I couldn’t get rid of it. But I never reallyuse it. In fact, if someone removed it from my CD rack, I probably wouldn’t even notice for afew weeks. Or maybe months. It’s hard to tell with stuff like that. Estimation was never astrong point of mine. Not to put it down or anything. It’s certainly handy under the properconditions, however, I refrain from usage of estimation whenever possible. I once estimatedhow many jellybeans were in a large jar. I was way off. The winner got the jar. I would’ve