How I Spent Juneteenth in Trump’s America

There was another plumbing apocalypse in my apartment. Wednesday night, after I’d gone to bed, I started hearing loud gurgling noises out of both of my toilets. Getting up, I saw occasional bubbles surfacing in one of the bowls, but it didn’t seem like a very serious problem. The following morning, not only were both toilets backed up, but a splatter of black goop had spewed up into my bathtub from the drain. I reported it to the management and went to work. When I got home, a harried plumber was at work on what turned out to be a hard-to-get blockage under my building. In the meantime, a large quantity of standing black water had collected in my shower and both toilets were caked with thick sludge from the depths. The plumber gave up for the time being and said he’d come back the following day. I decided to get a motel room for the night so I would at least have access to a working toilet without having to drive to a gas station every hour to take a piss.

Dotted along one of the main business thoroughfares of my town are several shabby motels I always assumed were used for prostitution or other nefarious goings-on. I never had any cause to patronize any of these places – until now. Stopping at an accommodation a few miles from my apartment – a spot that was probably a quaint and perfectly decent motor lodge for nice White people passing through town half a century ago – I was disgusted but of course not surprised to find that it was run by a dead-eyed, very dark-skinned Subcontinental who manned the front desk from behind a glass ghetto protection barrier with deceased insects stuck to it. Dispensing with niceties or even a greeting, he unceremoniously quoted a price and put out his gross brown hand to receive my credit card through the little slot. I never felt more American.

Way worse than I was expecting, even for an Indian-run dump, the dim room had a faint odor of marijuana and was lit only by a bare bulb on the ceiling. The air conditioning didn’t work and there wasn’t even a wastebasket. The curtain in the window was ripped and masking tape covered a gash in the wall above the bed. A rag was stuffed into a hole in another wall. The pillowcases and sheets were dirty, with a crumb from some previous guest’s snack still in the bed. I checked the mattress for bugs but found only a dead ant. The mirror in the bathroom, missing large chunks, was cracked and looked like a psycho had been whacking it with a pipe. The bathroom window had been broken at some point and childishly repaired with a combination of wood, tape, and a towel nailed over the gap. Astonishingly, the TV remote control worked, but every channel was slop and there was nothing I wanted to watch. Most importantly for me, the toilet was operational, even if it did emit a high-pitched whine for several minutes after every flush.

Put off by the pillowcases, I spent an uncomfortable and mostly sleepless night resting my head on the leather satchel I’d brought with my laptop in it. In the middle of the night a bickering couple staying in the room next to mine made an awful racket. “Open the door, Michelle!” Arguing over what I assumed was drugs, the man accused his girlfriend of hiding “two of ‘em” – doses of whatever they were using, presumably – and declared that he was “comin’ in to get ‘em!” The last I remember hearing, however, was his baby-like, defeated wailing. Eventually, the two of them disappeared into the night. There wasn’t even a curtain on the small shower stall, so when I washed up in the morning water got all over the bathroom floor. Figuring I was owed something for the awfulness of my experience, I grabbed two of the packaged micro-soaps to take home – not much of a score, admittedly.

In the parking lot – and what would Juneteenth be without a taste of authentic African-Americana? – a Black woman of the gorilla-in-a-blonde-wig type shouted at me to call her a taxi. “I don’t work here,” I explained, to which she exasperatedly responded, “You got a phone!” She yelled for her coal-dusky man to come over, berating him for his slowness, and he moseyed over, drinking a beer, sizing me up in an unfriendly way. Being a too-nice guy and capable of a degree of patience for subnormal types, I was actually going to call a cab for the pair until the man abruptly decided to call me “White Boy” and “one them Howdy Doodys”. “I’ll see you later,” I said, putting my phone away and getting into my car, prompting the man to warn me, “You ain’t gone see her never.” The plumbing, a two-day job, was fixed not long after I got home, and I spent the afternoon of Juneteenth 2026 scrubbing the remaining muck out of my two bathrooms. It’s tempting to look for a metaphor in the USS Gerald Ford style clogged commodes, black water, slime, sludge, and hassle of last week’s holiday, but my shower and toilets, unlike Donald Trump’s America, are white, presentable, and fully functional again.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.