June 23, 2009--Magic Fingers

Back when motels were motels--a nondescript strip of rooms that looked more like an army barracks than a resort with a parking lot--one of the few pleasures available there when stopping for the night after a weary drive was that for a quarter, you could collapse on the saggy bed and turn on Magic Fingers.

For those too young to remember, Magic Fingers consisted of a mechanical vibrator that was attached to the bed’s metal springs that was activated by an electrical motor which was set in motion when you dropped a quarter into the meter and which then meted out 15 minutes of soothing pleasure. You lay there inert and for those glorious few moments let the vibrations run through and relax your body. If you had traveled far and wide and had another long day planned for tomorrow, another quarter bought you another 15 minutes of bliss.

As the label on the meter promised, “Magic Fingers quickly carries you into the land of tingling relaxation and ease.” How I looked forward to that simple pleasure, to being transported to that tingling destination.

Until last week it never occurred to me that Magic Fingers had an inventor. I thought it simply existed. Like the woods behind the motel or, in my on-the-road imaginings, the road itself. Always there, always alluring, always waiting.

But now I know that it was invented back in 1958 by Kansas-born John Houghtaling, former cookware salesman, former remote-controlled lawn mower salesman, and former hotel busboy. He also was a tinkerer and must have come up with his iconic creation by combining his experience growing up in Kansas with its endless dusty roads with selling those self-propelled lawn mowers with the insights he gathered from schlepping luggage for exhausted hotel guests. This not only made him a few bucks and offered millions of travelers something more than a night of snow-filled TV to watch, but it also justified an above-the-fold obituary in the New York Times when he died recently at the enviable age of 92. I hope he passed in his bed, with you-know-what turned on. (Full obit linked below.)

And, in the spirit of truth telling, Magic Fingers during the repressed era of the 1960s and 70s, when it was ubiquitous and before product liability lawyers made a living and put them out of business by suing motel owners and the Magic Fingers company on behalf of plaintiffs who they claimed were injured after being tossed out of bed by excessive vibrations, Magic Fingers also offered the possibility for more than just late night relaxation.

If you had the right kind of date who was known to be “loose,” and if you got “lucky” (both very rare circumstances) on a Saturday night you might make you way over to the hot-sheet where, behind its flickering neon sign, for less than ten dollars, with a pocket full of quarters, a room, a bed, Magic Fingers, and forbidden pleasures might await. “Might” being the operative concept.

I was thus lucky regretfully just one time. I will protect the relatively innocent (I am talking here about myself) by not getting into too many revealing details, but suffice it to say that “Brenda,” which is not even her real name, was well-known in the neighborhood as someone who, as it was put euphemistically at the time, “liked a good time.”

So I borrowed my father’s car, we went for a Shore Dinner and the movies in Sheepshead Bay, and after that headed toward, let’s call it, the Driftwood Inn.

Before plopping down my ten dollars in cash, avoiding eye contact with the bored motel clerk, as casually as I could, stretching and yawning to demonstrate how weary I was, I asked if the room that was available had Magic Fingers.

“They all do pal,” he grumbled, probably having been asked the same question by a generation of frustrated but hopeful Brooklyn boys, “Why else would anyone come to this dump?”

I did not have a ready answer for that, not one I was comfortable sharing, and with that assurance I slipped him the ten, he passed me the sticky key, and Brenda and I made our way to room number 11, the same number that I wore on my basketball jersey. I thought, How lucky can I get?

As if we were an old married couple stopping there for the night, after I spent a few clumsy minutes pretending to see if the TV was working (it pulled in only two channels) and making certain that there was soap in the bathroom (there was one paper-wrapped domino-sized cake) and hangers in the closet (I found half a dozen left over from someone’s dry cleaning)—I tried the bed, bouncing on it as if to see if was firm enough to assure a good night’s sleep before we hit the road again in the morning.

Much-more-experienced Brenda, either having been there before for the same purpose of having watched too many B movies, with a sly smile said, “Maybe I should slip into something more comfortable,” and from her large pocketbook she extracted something that looked red and silky. With my heart pounding in anticipation, I rummaged in my pocket looking for my quarters.

While I fumbled with the Magic Fingers meter, finally managing to stuff a quarter into it, Brenda emerged from the bathroom, alluringly backlit, in her crimson peignoir. She swayed over to join me on the bed, curling up against me, while I lay there rigid while either I or the bed itself began to tremble.

Quickly, those wonderful fingers began to work their magic and before very long, with Brenda slowly unbuttoning my shirt, I began to relax. Even in my inexperience it seemed to me that we were making wonderful progress. Some of this attributable to Magic Fingers.

But alas, this was to be short lived.

The motor attached to the bed frame began to make a high-pitched whine and in the next moment all sound and all motion ceased, that caused by the device as well as that which was until then generated by my attempts at erotic foreplay. As we lay there, now in silence, the smell of burnt electrical insulation began to fill the room. Magic Fingers was on fire!

You can easily guess the rest. One hint--my ten dollars was not refunded.