The Motel Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

down this deserted road towards town. I was walking you to school. We were eating donuts and I was drinking coffee. You were drinking hot chocolate,’ cause you don’t like coffee. Even soaked in sugar and milk you don’t. So we walk towards downtown to where you could catch the bus, but all of a sudden a car pulls up. A big blackCadillac with tinted windows, and these two big guys come out, and they’re really strong and they grab us. One guy gets you, one guy gets me, and they put us in the car. Luckily we still had our donuts and our drinks because they drove us all the way to San Francisco without stopping. We asked them what was going on, but they wouldn’t speak to us. We were both really scared. But it was warm in the car and we just sat there waiting.
    ‘Well, they took us into a warehouse on some pier. Then they separated you and me. We were yelling for each other. “Annie,” I yelled. “Annie, I’ll find you,” I said. “Wait for me, Frank,” you said. “Don’t give up hope!” Then they took me to this room and made me change clothes. They gave me an orange jumpsuit and I put it on. They put a chain around my neck that had a small tag with the number fifteen on it. The chain I couldn’t get off, it was that tight, they had permanently locked it on. Then this guy came, like a doctor, and he said, “Fifteen, roll up your sleeves.” And so I did. He took a blood sample, then he took my temperature, checked my heart, all that sorta thing, and then they led me onto this yacht, and that’s when I saw you again. You were dressed in the same orange jumpsuit and your number was sixteen. The boat was huge, but it wasn’t like a ship, like a naval boat or anything, and it wasn’t as big as a cruise ship, it was just a big yacht. A boat for rich people. Well, this other guy, who was Number Four, told us to follow him. So we did, we didn’t know what else to do. We went below deck and then you could hear the ship moving and we left San Francisco. They stuck me in the kitchen. As a cook’s assistant. The fat-ass cook, he was Number Seven. You were stuck in house cleaning, with a lady, an old mean bag, Number Ten. No one said anything. I asked and asked Number Seven about you,and each time I did the chain around my neck would shock me, and let me tell you it hurt like hell. So we’d cook, bake, fry, cut and chop. That’s all I did. For eight hours, maybe twelve hours, that first day. We made some great stuff, though. Soups and casseroles, Chinese food, Mexican, even pies. I made Number Seven make a few peach pies ’cause I know it’s your favorite. We even had a prime rib cooking, and it was twice as good as at the Fitz. That night, after shift, they took me to a room and threw me in. It was dark inside and when I found a light, I turned it on, and there you were laying on the bed. It was a nice bed too. A queen size with good sheets and a warm blanket. There was a big window and if you looked out you could see the moon and the stars and the rolling sea. We lay in bed together, and you said, “I hate cleaning, but everything is clean already so we quit early. Number Ten, at first she was a mean old bag, but then we started playing cribbage, and then we ate this great prime rib dinner. They even had peach pie.”
    ‘So the next day came and the next day went, and it was like that for a long time, for weeks, for months. Then one evening there was a terrible storm out, and Number Seven was worried as hell and told me that we were gonna just make sandwiches, that he was too scared to cook. So I chopped up carrot and celery sticks while he made them. “We’re so damn close to our destination we can’t sink, can we?” he would say as sweat poured down his face. I didn’t know what to think, so I went into the fridge and took out the last peach pie and I set it on a tray, and then I made a thermos of coffee, got a few Cokes, and a couple cold turkey sandwiches and I told him I was gonna head back to the