Tower Motel Excerpt 10 december 2019

Well, the poor old Tower only had a little sign, and if it looked like a slow night, which most of them were, the Wolfes didn’t even turn it on. Bill told me once it cost more to light the sign for a night than they made off one room. All they had space to claim on their sign were “phones in rooms,” which might have been a large selling point in another century, and “free tv” on the second line, although they just had an antenna and got only four channels, one of them PBS, which never had anything good on it.

Another thing about the sign was that, like most everything else at the Tower, it didn’t work just right. Sometimes several of the letters didn’t light up, so you could see a bunch of nonsense up there. “Looks like Chink talk,” my dad would say. At other times it would turn out to be accidentally funny, and Bill and Evelyn’s sign was famous even before I worked there. Of course, this was not the kind of fame anybody would want. It was like being famous because your nose is two feet long. People in town would drive by just to see what their sign said that night and maybe get a laugh. How do you know when your town is boring? When some of the excitement is to watch a sign make mistakes. Brother.