The Priory Lit. Mag

David Calbert
This is Damien. Damien hates his job. He works as a motel six desk clerk from six in the morning until three in the morning four days a week and for a few hours on Saturday. He hates his job because he has never had a good day at his job in his life. Just yesterday a man walked into the lobby wearing a tuxedo and pulling a woman in a dress behind him. When he got to the counter Damien saw the bloodshot eyes and could smell alcohol rising from the man’s mouth. The man asked, “Can I get a room?” and off course Damien had to because that was his job, to give out rooms, but the only one available was the one right next to the Lobby, right behind hind the wall of his desk in fact, and Damien had a hunch of what was about to take place and he didn’t want to have it happen right behind him for God knows how long. But he had to give the room to the man with the Tux. Why? Because it’s his job. So for the next three hours he had to listen to the cheap motel six bed springs squeak, and the headboard thumping against the wall like some sort of horny metronome, punctuated by the muffled grunts and shouts of the couple. When the couple came to check out the man’s shirt was un-tucked and hanging over his crotch like a tired flag. Damien checked him out bitterly saying, “Careful walking out to the car, you wouldn’t want to pull anything.”

But that was not Damien’s worst day by far, not in the least. There was another day when around noon a whole family walked in, tourists, wearing Hawaiian shirts, socks with sandals, large hats, and cameras swinging around their necks like a cow lazily flicking its tail. But this was not an average tourist family, oh no, they were much worse. The first thought that Damien had when the vacationing crew entered his place of business, after the preliminary thought of ‘why would any one want to visit this shit hole, the grassy knoll where they shot JFK is not that exciting’ was ‘Oh my god their as fat as sea lions’. This was not an exaggeration, this family had enough fat on their bodies to feed a medium sized village in Iceland and keep them warm through the winter for at least a year. When they walked, the loose flesh on their legs shook like Jell-O, and the rolls on their necks rose up and down when they asked for two rooms. The man, sporting a greasy, prickling beard over the fat of his face took the keys, and his wife, whose breasts hung well below her navel, grabbed the hands of both their children and lead them out. Even the kids were bloated like puffer fish. The flesh of their upper arms rolling down over their elbows and onto their lower arms, like a sock being turned inside out. They left Damien alone for hours to contemplate the terrifying question of how this couple had copulated not once, but twice in order to produce children.

It was summer and by late afternoon the heat was rising in waves from the pavement. Damien looked out of the lobby windows as he played solitaire at his desk, and saw the family of manatee’s drive out in their heavily burdened Volkswagen, scraping its bottom on the pavement when it turned right onto the road. Damien looked at his own car, parked in one of two employees only parking spaces, an ancient Oldsmobile that still had a fair amount of mileage on it. The other employee space was empty. It was Saturday and Damien was working alone.

The family returned not to long after they left and pulled into a space in front of their room. As Damien was about to observe, the rotund family had never experienced a Midwestern summer, nor a summer of any great heat for that matter. Damien watched as first the father, then mother and children, stepped out of the car each holding their own grease stained bag of Taco bell, and clutching in their blubbery hands large soda cups. The man locked his car, then paused. He put his enormous drink on the roof of his car and wiped a hand across his forehead, coming away with huge droplets of sweat. He grabbed his drink and took a huge gulp as his wife fussed over his the kids, a girl and a boy, where were fighting over some toy. Damien saw with genuine shock that the husband had already formed huge, saucepan wide sweat marks under his arms, darkening his Hawaiian shirt. The huge man dropped his food and begun to sway, not five feet from his room. He scratched his beard once then fell backwards slowly, like a massive tree being chopped down. Damien hated to admit it but he actually said timber in his mind as the whale of a man fell unconscious to his back. The wife and children immediately looked over and yelled in horror at their downed husband. The wife jiggled over, dropping her meal and bent over her husband frantically. She began to yank and pull on the man’s huge arm, trying to get him to his feet but without success. The heat from the sun beat down like a suffocating blanket and the woman began to sweat profusely, and actually attained sweat spots that exceeded her husbands in size. Her nicely permed hair flopped and her makeup began to run down her sizeable cheeks in runny paths of black and grey. Suddenly the woman stopped tugging at her husband and stood up, swaying the way a hot air balloon might if it were caught in an updraft. When she passed out, she actually fell across her husband. By this point Damien had already called the paramedics, but couldn’t bring himself to actually go outside and help. He was mesmerized, it was like watching some sort of sadistic act at the circus involving elephants, and he couldn’t look away. The kids were now frantically tugging at their parents, tears running down their puffed out cheeks, mixing with the sweat in between their neck rolls. They didn’t last very long, and when the ambulance finally arrived, they found the obese family literally heaped into an unconscious pile on the pavement. They had to call in two more units just to have enough men to lift the each family member onto stretchers. The children could be lifted by two men, but the adults took at least five each, and by the time the crew had them loaded into the back of the ambulances, they were just as sweaty as the family was. No one was in a good mood after that, so when the head ambulance guy asked Damien what had happened, it was more like an interrogation. The guy asked, “And they just fell over, no seizure, nothing?”

“No, they all just fell down after they got out of the car. Kinda like a tree being cut down in the forest. You know, like Paul Bunyan style? Timber!”

“Have you ever seen a tree getting cut down in a forest?”

“No.” Damien replied honestly.

“Then you have no idea what the hell you talking about.” The ambulance driver said and left in a huff.

But that was not the worst day of Damien’s job, not by far. The worst day of Damien’s job was a bright morning in fall, just as the wind was starting to cool down and the sun was beginning to fill the horizon of farmland and cornfields. The leaves were starting to change colors as well, only adding more purples and oranges to the sunrise. Damien had just timed in when a young man walked in, carrying only a backpack. Damien had watched him get out of a truck outside of the motel and wave to the driver as he drove on, and walked up to the lobby. He had a thick beard and long hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing a black jacket and worn jeans. Damien noticed that the young man was wearing hiking boots, and couldn’t stop his eyes from falling back to them the whole time the man was in the room.

The man walked up and asked, “Do you have a road map?”

Damien pulled a Illinois State roadmap out from under the counter and handed it to him. Damien asked, “Can I uh… Get you a room or something?”

The bearded man smiled and shook his head, saying, “No, I have a schedule to keep man, but thanks though. I just needed the road map.”

Damien raised his eyebrows and the man said, “I’m trying to make to the border by night fall.”

“And you’re walking?”

The man nodded, lifted his right foot, and shook it to point out the hiking boots. He said, ‘I’m from New York and I’m making my way to the California coast. I woke up one day and I realized that I didn’t want to die with out seeing the country.”

The man left Damien alone in the lobby, wondering how he would make it through the rest of the day.

That man came in yesterday. If you were to walk onto the Motel Six’s property in a small Illinois town, and walk up to the lobby, you would pass an Oldsmobile with the back seat stuffed with suitcases and boxes. And if you were you walk into the lobby and asked the desk clerk for a room, he would gladly give you one, wearing every shirt that he owned and clutching his car keys, waiting for the sun to go down.