The awful time I helped someone

This is a story of me trying to help people and getting absolutely destroyed for it.

On 2/4/2023, Kristen was having a girls’ night with her best friend, so I went to get them a box of pinot. In the liquor store parking lot, I notice a car with its hood up. It’s really cold in the northeast, wind chill around -7, and they’re old people.

I ask if they need help. I’m not handy with cars but he is and thinks he knows what needs to be done, so I offer for her to sit in my car with the seat warmers in the meantime, and he can come in and warm up when he needs to. They happily accept. He’s over 70, she’s around 60. She comes over very slowly- she’s got COPD or whatever it is- and sits in my car. There is a smell of pee. That’s fine, they’re older and I’m not kicking them out into the cold for a pee smell.

The battery needs a new connector for the terminal, so I offer to drive them to get it. Oh, I’m so nice, they say, thank you so much. My pleasure, I say, feeling good about myself. The lady opens a bottle of peppermint schnapps that was just bought from the liquor store. She takes a swig. “Want some?” I say no thank you. She keeps hitting it and I realize she’s beginning to slur and be really, really funny. While the guy’s in the autozone getting stuff, she says things like “You know what? I have a 197 IQ, and no one cares” and “he’s got thirty years on me. I’m 59 and he’s 70.” It’s fun for a while, but she keeps hitting the bottle and it’s becoming clear that this lady is a full-on problem.

At this point I’m telling myself I’m helping the man more, because he seems very sweet. We get the parts back to their car, and I have to jump it. The car is running! Okay, phew, it’s been about an hour and a half of this at this point. I say I’ll wait for them to pull out so I can make sure they’re okay, and then their car dies again and won’t start back up. Alright, back into my car she comes. She’s drunk and cranky. About a half hour more passes. The old lady sings this in the car, several times (to the tune of Old MacDonald): “Chinese people never swear, asshooole, asshoooole”

I suggest they call a tow truck. He says it’d be better if we could go and charge their battery at the autozone, so okay, I’ll take you, hop in. At the autozone, it’s going to take an hour for the battery to charge, so the plan is to take them to get some food- he’s complained a few times about not eating yet today.

The lady says she needs to pee and there’s a chinese restaurant right there, perfect. I pull the car up to the curb for her and she now says she no longer has to go. “It went away.” I look down and yeah, it went away, she has peed herself in my passenger seat. It has been about twenty seconds between talking about needing to pee to it happening.

Okay, he says, howsabout Burger King for some food. I drive over there miserably, thinking about my peed seat. He gets some food and they eat it, and I sit in my car smelling a lovely mix of pee and fast food. I am miserable and keep reminding myself they’re older and not doing well, so I’m still helping.

I say hey, we’ve got an hour for the battery to charge, why don’t I drive (the lady) back to the motel you’re staying at and I’ll take (the man) back to finish the job. “Okay,” he says, “that sounds good. Can I go to Stop & Shop to grab some stuff first?” How am I going to say no to anything at this point, so we pull in and he goes in to get some groceries.

We’re sitting out in the car and dark is falling. She’s as miserable as I am, and she starts talking about the man. Evidently he hits her. I put that together with her two broken front teeth and the thought I was clinging to of helping this sweet old man puffs into dust. He’s taking a long time in the store. “He probably got pinched,” she slurs. “He’s always stealing.” I ask if she can call him and she says “he doesn’t let me have a phone because when he’s behaving badly, he’s worried I’ll call the cops.” She’s the one with the money, she gets what I’m guessing is disability. He takes it from her and makes all the decisions. I’m aghast. She hasn't eaten in three days, and those onion rings are the first thing she's had in that time. He keeps her drunk.

It’s now been fifty minutes since he went in, his battery is charged and there’s no point in the plan as it had been at this point. She’s getting really upset at him, and is still pretty drunk, so she says let’s just leave him. I’m so disgusted with him that I agree and we drive away.

I’m driving her back to the motel, telling her she should leave him and thinking about how I’m almost free. If you see how much more text there is to read, you can guess how free I almost was.

She picks up the bottle off my car floor and it is almost empty. There is maybe an inch and a half of peppermint schnapps left in that thing that was new three or four hours ago. She starts polishing it off and getting wasted again.

We get to the motel. The guy has the key so I say she’ll have to go into the office and talk to someone about being let in. “You do it,” she says. Uhhh, yeah, okay. I go in and talk to the office guy. He says you don’t need a key, the door to room 3 just opens. I drive her to room 3 and yeah, room 3 doesn’t even have a knob. You just push it open.

She’s about to go in and I’m about to be free when the office guy comes over and mentions that they checked out this morning. She said she thought they had ten days. Nope, they checked out. She holds up a card. “Do you take debit cards?” No, they don’t.

Okay, so we’re back on the road, looking for a place that will take a debit card. We find two. One is full, the other has converted to a homeless shelter. Please take a moment and try to sympathize with my mental state. Kristen’s asking if I’m okay, do I need her to come get me, etc. The lady slurs “maybe I’ll die. That’d be a blessing. I don’t even want to be buried. Just chuck me in the ocean. Maybe a shark will eat me. I like getting eaten when I’m alive, and I like getting eaten when I’m dead.”

We go to an ATM so she can just take out cash for the room. She has lost the debit card she has just been holding, and we lose maybe twenty minutes with her slowly searching her stuff, including several pockets I watched her search already as I’m holding my flashlight up for her to see. Eventually she finds it.

She makes me navigate the ATM menu. She says take out $200. Insufficient funds. I start whimpering. $100? Insufficient funds. I check her balance. She has sixty-one cents.

We park to figure this out. “Call them,” she says, holding up the card. She’s instructing me to call her benefits people and argue about why she hasn’t been paid. I’m mindless with despair, here. Understand that I can’t just kick this lady out and say not my problem anymore, she’s stumbling drunk, she’s got COPD, she’s got wet pants and the wind chill is in the negatives. She will die. Do I take her to a homeless shelter? Do I take her home to my place? Do I pay for her room myself?

As I think that last thought, peace washes over me as I see a way out. Yes, I’m going to do that. I drive back to the ATM and take out cash. I say I’ll cover it and she’s got nothing to say to that except that it sure would be nice to have another bottle with her. I ignore that, get her the room and she finally walks her pee-pants out of my car, seeming… upset? Hurt? …that her time in my car is ending and I’m getting out of here.

She mentions again that she hasn’t eaten in three days and I announce that I’ll order a pizza and have it sent to her room. She doesn’t say thank you. I ask what kind of pizza she wants and she says “Avocado. And (british pronunciation) tomato.” I leave and the room’s light is off before I’m in my car. She’s not going to be conscious to receive this pizza, I think.

As a VERY low-level petty revenge, I don’t get her an avocado (british pronunciation) tomato pizza. I get her a margherita pizza, the worst pizza there is, and take what snide satisfaction I can in this. I drive home in my peed car. Free at last after five or six hours of this.

I was right, she didn’t answer the door for the pizza guy. He left it outside the office and the manager said in the morning there was no pizza there. I hope someone or some raccoons enjoyed it.