Part Two of the Drive - A Tale of One (Very Awful) City

Let's pick up right where we left off.  Tuesday morning, we woke up in Knoxville, drove for an eternity, and ended up in a place I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy:

Marathon is not an inaccurate way to describe Tuesday’s drive from Knoxville to Tulsa.  By the end, we were exhausted, dehydrated, starving, sore, and at risk for having a heart attack.  If my bowels had released at some point during the drive, it would not have been surprising.  Marathon.

The drive was just too long.  Too many hours of monotonous countryside.  Too many unexpected tolls on Oklahoma roads.  (Why would I want to pay to drive here?  You should compensate me for pain and suffering for setting foot in this wasteland!)  Too many thunderheads that I was convinced were going to turn into giant whirling funnel clouds that would head straight for my tiny little car.

We left Knoxville at 7 in the morning.  We gained an hour as we entered Central time.  Even so, it was around 8 PM when we finally checked into the motel where I thought my life was going to end.   After stopping at three other hotels where we could not stay, we finally came upon a Budget Inn that was both affordable and hospitable to Ajax.  (Sorry, no pets.  Sorry, too expensive.  Sorry, no vacancies. – Wait, what, a hotel in Tulsa is full?  Who the hell else came here voluntarily?)  We hastily paid for our room and immediately suffered buyer’s remorse as our sense of desperation for shelter waned enough for us to take in our surroundings.

Signs adorned the lobby cautioning, “No Refunds,” and “We are not responsible for anything stolen from your room or vehicle.”  I suppose those aren’t unreasonable policies, but you could tell this was just the kind of place where people might really really want and deserve a refund, and where you would probably be one of the lucky ones if you left with all the same belongings you had upon arrival.  We emerged from the lobby to a simmering asphalt wasteland.  The strip of dirty, low buildings and scabby parking lots stretched on for miles in either direction. 

Where.  The hell.  Were we?

Exhaustion and hunger were overriding any questions I had about the safety of my person or possessions, so we proceeded to our room.  The door swung open to reveal a hell-hole.  My first thought was to check the vents to make sure there wasn’t a briefcase full of money and a transponder hidden anywhere because this was clearly the kind of place where Anton Chigurh would blast open your door with a cattle stunner and kill the shit out of you because you took his drug money.

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men

I don’t even remember if we checked for bed bugs.  By some miracle, the place must not have been infested, but bedbugs would have just been icing on this cake full of razor blades and horrors.  Andy sat down on the bed and a beetle immediately crawled up his pant leg.  I tried to wash my hands and found that only scalding hot water was available from the sink.  I peeked in the cabinet under the sink and found a half-eaten pudding cup (in addition to a dark hole that led to some abyss of plumbing and probably child-raping clowns).  If you're wondering, the pudding was chocolate.  No, I do not recall if it was Jello or Snack Pack, but in retrospect it could have just as easily been Swiss Miss or Kozy Shack.  So many questions left unanswered.

But I digress.  After 14 hours on the road, I was ready to just lay face down on what I’m sure was an unspeakably filthy comforter atop the bed and cry until I passed out.  But I had come to Tulsa for a very specific and important reason!  Tulsa was not on the way to Utah, nor was it on my list of places I ever wanted to visit, save for the fact that Danielle was forced to call it home for three years.  So I tried to rally and make arrangements to meet up with Danielle.  But then the problem resurfaced -  Where.  The hell.  Were we?  

My camera didn't have a 'hellscape' setting, so this photo doesn't accurately capture the desolation.

 In my short-sightedness, I had failed to make sure I knew where Danielle lived in relation to the city proper (if you can even call it that).  As we approached Tulsa from the south, I realized this omission and called her to find out.  South.  She lived south of the city, the very place I was driving at that moment.  As fate would have it (fate, you bitch) Andy, driving ahead of me, hit a dead zone and had awful cell reception as I tried to inform him that we needed to get off the highway and find a hotel NOW.  He thought I was telling him NORTH, keep going.  Ugh.  So we ended up somewhere north of Tulsa as we began our hotel search.  I have no idea how we ended up where we did, on the west side, in a bleak, sprawling ghetto. 

Danielle wasn’t familiar with our blighted wasteland location, so she tried to look up directions.  As fate would have it again (that trollop), computer troubles prevented Danielle from swiftly obtaining directions.  Andy and I were too tired and disgusted to venture very far from the hotel.  It was almost 8:30 by this point, and we hadn’t eaten since lunch.  On the verge of crying, screaming, slipping into a coma, or all three, I regretfully told Danielle that hanging out just wasn’t in the cards. 

Andy and I set out to find the closest possible source of food.  We found a Mexican restaurant in the half-vacant strip mall next to our motel.  They had cheap and fast margaritas that provided the only bright spot in what was one of the worst days of travel I have ever experienced.

The watered-down margaritas did little to dull the pain of returning to our room.  On the short walk back, we noted that the freegan (or more likely homeless person) digging in the dumpster behind our motel, stuffing treasures into his backpack, had moved on.  With defeat in our hearts and Mexican food-babies in our bellies, we trudged up the stairs to our room and shut the door that had no chain or deadbolt.  We brushed our teeth in the bathtub, because it had cold water.  We looked around…for the…cat?

In the next installment, we'll learn where Ajax the Intrepid ventured, and how we pulled him back from the edge of the abyss.