I am happy to announce that I have a job. It will last only until after the Independence Day holiday, but may come with a valid reference for future employment.

I have been hired to tutor a college student who is taking a condensed course differential equations. His mother intends for him to become an engineer, in her words, “of any sort". While I have found him to be a generally bright and insightful young man, when it comes to mathematics, he is, frankly, thick as pig shit. We spent the entire first day of my employment reviewing basic calculus; I spent the entire second day re-teaching him the basics of multivariable calculus; and the third covering more advanced techniques before finally touching upon differential equations. This was despite his mother, backed up by a well worn collection of textbooks, utter insistence that he had, “a very good understanding of calculus”. If his retention over the past few days is anything to go by, then I do believe he may just barely pass his course, especially as I have been given the assurance of his mother that these abbreviated summer courses are “always" graded on a heavy curve. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he wants to pass and I know he doesn’t want to be an engineer.

The best part is that I am being compensated in something other than experience and a good recommendation: for the extent of my tutoring period I have been given the cheapest hotel room in the area (I’ve honestly checked, out of pure curiosity) and two free meals per day at any of his mother’s many restaurant franchises throughout the area.

Getting to the hotel was a bit of a task. I first had to walk several blocks from the library where I had agreed to conduct the lessons to the nearest stop of The L. I then took that train to the Loop, transferred to the Blue Line, and rode to its penultimate stop. There I waited, and waited, and continued to wait for a further 38 minutes for an uncomfortably cold bus and its surly driver. (I have come to suspect that this obscure route is a sort of punishment for CTA drivers.) After 63 stops, my fingers, somehow both numb and in pain, were just able to signal for a stop. Then, after walking for about half a mile, I had finally reached the hotel. In either direction, my commute now takes between 2 and 3 hours with the lower end being favored.

Given my experience with cheap hotels, even I was surprised by this place. There was an ambulance outside with someone being treated with an oxygen cylinder. Upon entering, I was greeted by the sweet scent of acetone. I normally don’t find acetone that obnoxious but this gave me a headache after just a few minutes of exposure; the desk clerk, I would later find out, was being tended to in the ambulance outside for difficulty breathing. Someone must have used or spilled a large amount of the chemical just prior to my arrival.

My first room had the overwhelmingly strong smell of an ammonia like chemical—I would say cat urine, but in a place like this, we all know it wasn’t cat urine. My second room had a similar but less strong smell; it also featured a variety of used needles tucked into places where used needles wouldn’t typically be found. The hotel manager made me show him my second room before granting me a third.

The third room featured a great number and variety of insects. Instead of being given a fourth room, I was told to drop my stuff at the front desk and return in several hours whereupon I would find my room ready, having undergone fumigation.

A few hours later, I returned to find littered with scores, if not hundreds, of tiny corpses. It still smelled slightly of the fumigation chemical. There was a gap between the door and the floor of about one and a half inches in height. The arms of the “husband chair" / cuckold’s throne were covered in cigarette burns. The shower did not drain properly so that after 10 minutes, I found myself standing in calf-deep water. Still, the bed was comfortable, the air conditioner worked beautifully, and I had a recently unknown degree of privacy when I placed the spare pillows and my bag against the door. I figured that this room, as it now was, was probably the best I could hope to get. I fell asleep before the sun had set.

I woke up to a headache and a rash on those parts of my body which had been directly exposed to the bed’s sheets. I laundered them myself before hanging the “do not disturb” sign and leaving to tutor. I spent much of the day itching and rest of it drowsy due to a high dose of certain, popular, over-the-counter antihistamine. Due to the side effects of the drug: no matter how many times I did urinate, I still felt as though I had to; my eyes were painfully dry; and I found even ordinary lighting to be painfully bright.

Back at the hotel, I found that my do-not-disturb sign had been ignored. I thought about spending the night fully clothed but the bed had merely been made with the linens left unchanged, as too were the bin liners and towels. I went to bed.

I recalled a time early in my former career, when I had just been granted a license to practice independently: I had been invited to the home of one my professors, an elderly Finnish man who had fled due to his political leanings. Elderly is a bit of an understatement—dirt was a relatively new invention when he was born.

The visit, like all visits to his house, involved coffee and a trip to his sauna—tropical climate be damned. In the sauna, he handed me my coffee, sat his down, and climbed in—all of this done naked as the day he was born. As he climbed in, I saw a tiny bit of liquid shit, more than a drop but less than a stream, fall from him into and slightly around his coffee.

Before I said anything (NB: not before I could have said anything, merely before I had said anything), he had drunk his entire cup of coffee in a single gulp. I found this surprising as coffee, at least at the time, was a rationed product and I thought he would have liked to savor it a bit more. Instead of saying anything, I sat there like Bartleby, preferring not to act: I am unsure of whether I was uncaring, unwilling, or incapable of acting.

I do know that I was thinking about the implications of any decision. If I had said something, then his leaky anus would have been forever in the background of our relationship; saying nothing, I allowed my friend to eat shit. There is the possibility that he could have rejected my warning and drank the cup anyway. What if he drank the cup but discovered the splatter sometime later? I am uncertain as to how it compares to being lustful and stealing pears, but I’ve always felt guilty about it. I believe the hotel room may be cosmic punishment for my inaction.

In the mornings there are a few new insects that show up to feast upon the bodies of their fallen comrades. When I return by the evenings, they too have died.

In compensation for the state of the hotel, of which I seem to be one of but a few guests despite there being three floors of at least fifty rooms each, I have endeavored to have the most expensive meals imaginable while keeping within the scope of our agreement. For my first spite meal, I had a noodle dish with such a variety of add-ons that it had become almost entirely inedible, but nonetheless very expensive. Soon, I realized that it would be more effective to order “family style" menu items—these are single menu items meant to feed several people. The most expensive of these family-style items has been just about three-figures before tax and tip. I am not the first to have been compensated in such as at least one shift-leader referred to my order as the “tutor special".