Escaping the Rapids of the Chunky Brown River

    I stood there, heart racing, clutching a psychotic cat attacking me as I held her, my girlfriend Jennifer shouting to me from across the rapidly broadening brown river, “hurry up! Jump!” I ran and leapt across and just made it far enough to avoid my feet becoming saturated in that water. Were I not obese, this might not have been such a harrowing maneuver, but as it was I nearly didn’t make it across, and almost ended up ankle deep in that shit and piss filled torrent. Though my feet were spared, it is entirely possible that I had already drank and showered in that same sewage filled water hours before without knowing it.
    It all started a couple days before. We were homeless at the time, in the summer of 2004, bouncing around between filthy dive motels on the Berlin Turnpike in central Connecticut with two cats and 41 hamsters in tow, and all our belongings stuffed into my ‘98 Taurus. There were countless motels on that stretch of road, all dilapidated remnants of a bygone era when that was the main thoroughfare into and out of the capital city. None had been maintained or improved since the post World War II economic boom when there was a lot of traffic and a lot of weary travelers passing through. Some looked like they had not been cleaned since then either. Yet oddly enough, none of them allowed pets because they were worried about the messes or damage that a cat might do to a place with 50+ years of stains, dirt and damage. Their “guests” were actually tenants because most of them lived there permanently and were capable of doing far more damage than any animal could ever do even after a bowlful of laxatives. What is even stranger is that the only motels we did find that accepted pets, for the most part, were new and rather nice and actually might have had reason to worry about new stains.
    Why we were stuck with the two cats and the army of rodents is another story entirely but to make it short, the cats had been in my family for 15 years and we were not about to put them up for adoption when at the time we believed our homelessness to be temporary. The hamsters were Jennifer’s and I really do not understand what the deal was with that.
    After much searching we found a place on the southern end of the strip called The Parkway Motel or The Parkway Motor Inn, I don’t remember exactly so I will henceforth refer to it as The Parkway. It was a dive like all the rest but comparably better than many of them and even had a convenience store in front of it, also called The Parkway Something, and that certainly made things easier for motel dwellers like us. A nice young girl working in the office who was, of course, Indian or Pakistani, told us they would take pets and the weekly rate was reasonable so we took it and were quite pleased since we thought the money we had would not be enough. 
    As a side note, it is not a stereotype that motel owners are all Indians or Pakistanis. It is an absolutely indisputable fact as scientifically provable as saying that the sun is hot. We either stayed in or shopped dozens of motels up and down that strip, plus a few on the shoreline of Connecticut and even some in Ohio, and all but two of them were owned and staffed by Indians or Pakistanis. All the ones I talked to were Indians. Even the other two may have been owned by Indians, as I found out one that was staffed by Americans actually was also Indian owned.
    Our room at The Parkway was pretty big, with a view of the most awful, horror movie reminiscent trailer park I have ever seen. There was a mirror all down one of the walls for a reason I cannot imagine. If it were on the ceiling it might have made sense. We had told the office we had one cat so we smuggled in the other cat and all six cages of hamsters and a few boxes of our stuff so we would have a back seat in the car again. We were sharing the room with another couple because we did not have enough money to pay for the room ourselves. The girl was pretty nice, and normal, the guy was another story in himself. His name was Paulie, and his sister was my ex girlfriend. He was a user, a backstabber, and just all sorts of bad and irresponsible. We had no choice but to tolerate him. It was that or sleep in the car.
    We were in this room for two days, maybe three. The first night, I said something that made Jennifer burst out laughing while she was eating Taco Hell, and she choked and puked all over the floor. That was certainly not the first stain on that carpet but a major catastrophe later on would make it a moot point. We had a good night though, it was our first night alone together. Paulie and his girlfriend stayed elsewhere that night.
    The next day, we were eating supper in the room again and drank some of the tap water. We both agreed it tasted funny and we ended up buying something to drink at The Parkway store. A couple hours after that, I took a shower and the drain backed up. The water that backed up was clear but there were floaties in it that looked something like undigested spinach. Why I was not alarmed by that I don’t remember. But I got out of the shower in a hurry nonetheless. I took a dump, no plumbing problems there. But then later I went in there and if I remember right, there was no water in the toilet. I flushed it to refill it but the toilet clogged. So I called the office to ask for a plunger.
    The family who owned the motel, I should mention, lived in a house connected to the office. It had a great big window with no curtains so you could see the well furnished and decorated dining room and as you walked into your filthy shithole of a room, you could see how well they were living on your money. The whole family worked the office at different times and at this time, it was the teenage son.
    So I go to the office and the kid gives me a plunger, which does no good. So I call back and tell them the toilet is broken and we need it fixed. Now an older guy, maybe in his 30’s or 40’s comes in, skinny and third worldly looking. He tries to fix the toilet to no avail and blames the problem on us. He calls in the mother, who is the queen bitch of the whole brood and this is when the proverbial shit hits the fan, not the shit coming up out of the shower drain.
    The bitch comes down and right away starts yelling at us. She claims that they don’t take pets and had no idea we were there with two cats. They never did notice the stack of hamster cages hidden under the blanket. She claims the cats were swimming in the toilet and their hair clogged it. Yes I’m serious, that’s actually what she said.
    The arguing got worse and worse. Voices were raising louder and louder on both sides. The bitch claimed that the girl we described who had rented us the room and told us pets were allowed did not exist. The girl had not written pets on the receipt, if she even gave us one, I don’t remember. Queen Bitch called Jennifer a liar and called her some name, I don’t remember what it was. Jennifer clenched her fist, ready to deck her, and I yelled something along the lines of, ‘don’t fuckin call her a...’ whatever the insult was. So the Indian bitch, whose English was as bad as her personality shouted back, “you call me fuck! We done!” To that, we started laughing and to this day, we still occasionally quote that classic line. But after that, Fuck, as I shall now call her, stormed off back to the office and told us we had to get out and we would only get part of our money back.
    The problem with the money was the difference between a weekly and a daily rate. If you pay for a week at once, you pay less than you would if you paid by the day and stayed there all week. I don’t remember the amounts at The Parkway at that time but I think it was around $45 a day. So if you paid the daily rate, you would pay around $300 for the week. But if you paid the weekly rate up front, it was about $250. We only had $125 so we split the bill with the other couple and I think I borrowed some money from somewhere for food and gas for the week. So when Fuck kicked us out, that meant we had only stayed there two days and she would charge us the daily rate. This meant she would keep $90 and give us back $160, which of course we had to split with the other couple. This meant we would not have enough to pay for another motel for the week and would be stuck sleeping in the car with two cats and 41 hamsters for at least a couple days and they would all have to sit out there in the car while I was at work. I’m not sure where Paulie and his girlfriend would have gone. I may not be remembering the days correctly either, we may even have been there three days, which means we would have gotten back even less money.
    Right before this happened, Paulie rolled up with a bag of beer right about the end of the argument. He didn’t contribute to our argument but brought the beer into our room. Paulie was under 21 and so was Jennifer, but I was 26. This meant when the cops showed up, I would be responsible for having underage people in a room with alcohol. They were both 20 so at least they weren’t minors but it still would have meant trouble for me.
    After Fuck stormed back to the office, Paulie in all his misguided and powerfully stupid wisdom, decided to go to the office and try to make things right. I didn’t know he was going to do this. All I knew was about five minutes later he ran back into the room and said he had threatened to kill all them “Indian fuckers” and so Fuck had called the police. He said he had a warrant out for a failure to appear or some such misdemeanor so he was out of there. He left the bag of beer in the room. So now I had the police on the way, a bag of booze in the room with a girl not old enough to drink, all thanks to Paulie, and I had to figure out where we were going to sleep.
    I ran out and brought the beer to the car and went to the office. The teenage kid told me that they had called the police and cancelled the help call because Paulie left. I told him that we would not have enough money for another room for the week and that we did not clog the toilet. He kept saying there would be a lot of damage (though neither of us yet knew how much there would end up being) and somebody had to pay for it, which of course I reiterated that it had nothing to do with us. I implored him to work with us and I have to say, he seemed to believe me and genuinely sympathize with our situation. He said Fuck gets mad a lot but that they are good people and he would talk to her for us. She had said we could stay the night and had given us a different room, a far more dilapidated room. So we had until morning to figure out what to do and in the meantime, when she cooled off, he would talk to her.
    After my talk with the nice young man, we were sitting in the room despondent and in somewhat of a state of shock at how quickly our lives had been turned upside down, at least for the next few days. Then we heard a bubbling sound that rose in pitch. It was the same sort of sound you would hear when filling up a bottle and it makes that bubbling sound as it gets to the mouth of the bottle. I went and looked in the bathroom and the toilet had instantly filled with water and was now pouring over the sides in a waterfall. I don’t mean just water spilling over the sides, I mean a rapidly gushing waterfall, a little Niagra Falls of chunky brown water. The bathroom floor flooded even as I stood there watching it.
    We were now racing to get all our stuff packed up as fast as possible. We were rushing like the place was on fire. We had to move boxes of stuff, pack up our suitcases, haul out six cages of hamsters and round up two skittish cats. By the time we finally got everything packed, the shit flow was now a river flowing across the floor. We had to jump over it every time we had to run something out of the room, up the stairs and down the corridor to the new room, and that was many, many trips.
    When we finally had everything hauled up to the new room, the river was now a foot to two feet wide and was flowing as fast as you might see water running down the road in a rain storm. There were chunks of brown floating down like little whitewater rafting expeditions. We now had to get the two cats out of there, who were spooked and had crawled under the bed. I tried and tried to coax them out but when they refused, I got aggravated and started yelling at them so now they climbed up inside the box spring. I had to move the side table out of way, then lift up the king size mattress and lean it against the wall, then lift the box spring off the frame. I then had to reach up inside to grab each cat and drag it out of there. Even though I had grown up with these cats, they had loved me and cuddled with me since I was a kid, they now acted like they were terrified of me and attacked. Each one went berserk in my arms, scratching and clawing and trying to escape. I had to take them one at a time, gripping them by the neck and holding them away from my body while they tried to kill me. By now, the brown river was so wide I could barely jump across it and it was deep enough to soak my foot if I landed in it. I barely did make it across with each one. My shoes were wet and brown but thankfully, my feet stayed dry.
    Later that night, we walked by the room and saw a puddle outside the door where it had seeped out underneath. The next day, there was a whole team of Indians in there cleaning, including the mysterious pet allowing girl that Fuck claimed did not exist.
    When I talked to Fuck in the office, she said we could stay the rest of the week in the new, more dilapidated room. She said they didn’t usually rent that room out because it was so unpleasant and were planning on fixing it up anyway, so we could stay there with our animals but had to leave the next week. She admitted that the plumber told her the reason the toilet backed up was because they hadn’t had the septic tank pumped in so many years that it simply overflowed back up the pipes and we happened to be unlucky enough to be directly above it. Other rooms had complained of clogged toilets too but none had exploded into the room the way ours did. She would not apologize but she was polite and we avoided the office for the rest of the week.
    I still don’t know why the water tasted funny but I didn’t get E. Coli or the Hershey squirts so I like to assume that the funny taste was from bad city water, not the ass juice of countless transients.

--