pure idiot mystery

for sarah. some highlights:

“It’s like playing the one-eyed monster,” says Earl, a semi-retired mechanic who prefers to go by his first name. “You just put your money in, and it just takes it and stares back at you—challenging you.”

Earl isn’t an Erotic Photo Hunt completist, but he is a purist. He never plays “Hunks”: “I don’t care if he’s wearing short shorts—I don’t want to be touching his johnson, you know what I mean?” He also avoids Megatouch’s other variations on the classic version—“Chippendales Photo Hunt” and “Penthouse Photo Hunt,” which provide additional distractions for an extra quarter. “You can guess what those are like,” says Earl. “Swinging dicks? I’m not going down that avenue,” he says of the Chippendales version. The Penthouse game has similarly failed to entice him. “So you see the pubic hair. They’re not spread open or anything,” he says. “If I wanted to see a hairy crotch, I wouldn’t be paying for it.”

Earl doesn’t claim to favor any of the few dozen models offered up to him every evening. He has, however, begun to resent some of the women who appear in the more frustrating puzzles. “A couple of them on there, I would smack the shit out of them. I’m just tired of them,” says Earl. “This is a bitch I hate,” Earl says, indicating a busty woman posing suggestively on a director’s chair.