Something In the Water

by Ron Smith

Actors live crazy enough lives as it is.  Anything else you throw at them just tricks it out as another degree of surreal.  You never know when or where your next job will be, and when it comes it bears little relation to your last ones.

I’d auditioned for a string of film and TV roles in the summer, was pinned to a few that fell through, and then booked three roles in October.  Parts don’t come that easily—a lot of study and work goes into auditions--so it’s a reaffirmation this is what you were meant to do.  It’s gratifying--you’re glad to be working--but suddenly you’re flooded with overlapping calls from three productions, three costumers wanting sizes, three people badgering you to get Covid-tested when that was going on.  Not to mention daily script changes from  three productions, shooting schedule changes, paperwork to do before shooting.  The day you actually appear on a set is liberation after all of this frenetic preparation.

My wife and I moved into an 1800’s house thirty miles north of Atlanta years ago when our boys were young, and for some reason never left it.  There were plenty of reasons to leave, like squirrels scratching in the walls and attic when you’re sleeping, but as many reasons to stay, and the drafty old place grew on us.  It’s comfortable, the air is clean, pastures surround us, our few neighbors aren’t up against us, and the spirits are friendly.  We have a well in a pump house, and in the summer, when it’s sweltering hot, the ice-cold water is as sweet as a mountain spring.

Unless some wayward varmint burrows into the well and dies, which happened four or five times, you know the water’s fouled when you step into the shower and it hits you in the face.  You hold your nose, and the next day open the well and try to fish out the rat, squirrel, or mole, pour a cup of bleach in it to kill the bacteria.  You buy gallons of water to drink and cook with in the meantime, waiting weeks for it to clear again.

While talking to movie people every day, setting up appointments to get fitted, studying revised shooting scripts, I’m working on getting rid of whatever has suddenly made our water a living nightmare. 

In the pump house I pull off the heavy concrete lid that’s supposed to keep it sealed.  It weighs eighty pounds, and I slide it to the side, and with varying homemade devices fish down into the dark fifty feet to the water surface, trying to snag the rotting critter out.  It’s worked before.  Using a bright light, I see something floating, but it’s hard to tell.  I’ve tied a grill top to heavy line on my fishing reel, triangular lines at the bottom to keep it level, and keep lowering it and jiggling it around in the water, raising it, and finally feel weight on it, slowly lifting it up, and get almost to the top when whatever it is slips off and plummets back into the well with a sickening splash.  Into the water we need to drink.  I’d had it, goddammit, that was it.  And it wasn’t easy to catch hold of.  I labor on it for hours, sweating, my back aching from leaning over the edge, and only give up when I snag the grill top somewhere down there, snap the heavy fishing line, and my contraption is gone.

Now I’m really pissed, frustrated, and know damn well I’ve got to get whatever dead thing in there, out, regardless, or it’ll be months before our water is safe to drink.  Every time we take a shower, it’s worse.  There’s no alternative to getting our water back, and although my wife’s not blaming me for anything, I know how sick this water makes her, and she’s counting on me to fix it.  This is something I do myself, so I’m not going to hire someone else to do it.  I pour a cup of bleach in the well and replace the concrete cap.  Hopefully the dead animal will wash out and the bleach will make the smell more bearable in the next few days when I’ll take another crack at it.  Rain would flush it out faster, but it hasn’t rained in weeks—uncanny when you need a good rain it’s the driest October on record.

At the store I load up 15 gallons of spring, distilled, purified, whatever is the cheapest  drinking water.  I lug it out of the trunk and line up bottles in the kitchen, a job in itself.

In the next few days we get the strong bleach smell in the water, but behind it you can tell something’s dead in it.  It’s the weirdest, most sickening amalgamation of bleach and decay, like some strange, foul, bleach soup.  It’s not right, you know it’s not no matter how bleachy it tries to be.  It’s like this dead animal is trying to feed itself to you, while you keep trying to convince yourself you’re smelling mostly bleach.  You’re not.

I go to work on the first of my three acting roles, playing a constable in a made for TV murder mystery in south Atlanta.  We’re working late in the front yard of an upscale house, and in the back of my mind I keep thinking about our bad water.  I get home at three in the morning and want nothing more than to take a nice, hot shower, but I could swear the water smell is worse.  I do this thing where I close my nostrils and pretend this putrid stuff isn’t there, and have a gallon of fresh water to rinse with when I’m done.  But after I dry off I can smell the foul stuff on my skin.  I try to cover it with Shower to Shower, but it’s still there.  It’s like some plaguing potion that won’t leave you alone.

I’ve played pickup basketball at a local gym for exercise and endorphins.  Nothing relieves stress for me more.  I’m about to head there next day, deciding first to pour another cup of bleach in the well to speed up the clearing process.  I get dressed, take a cup of bleach to the pump house, drag the heavy concrete lid back, pour it in, carefully slide the lid back so that it fits tightly and doesn’t leave a crack or opening.  I keep feeling around the edges, trying to center it, to get the lid to fit down on the rim, can’t get it on right, slide my right hand under the edge, tugging the thing over, it drops suddenly on my right  middle finger, smashing it just as I jerk it out, yelling and cursing.  My flattened finger’s bleeding and at first I’m sure it’s broken.  I’m about to play basketball and my right middle finger, pretty damned important to dribble and shoot with, is dripping blood all over the place. 

Nobody plays bleeding on a basketball court, it just not done.  And now the stress I was hoping to work off at the gym is jacked up to the ceiling.                                                                                                             

My wife and I work on a bandage with tape and gauze after the bleeding slows, but it’s leaking through.  I can live with pain; it’s bleeding that will keep me from having a few hours of stress-relieving exercise.

At the gym I play down the bandage and injury, which everybody wants to know about, and hide blood soaking through it with more tape, until I’ve got a bulbous wad of tape wrapped around my hand, and am licking the blood off so no one sees it.  Not only that, I’m playing stupidly because I have to baby it, trying not to hit it hard, and it’s a joke.  I might as well not be there instead of embarrassing myself with this half-ass performance.  Every time you catch a pass or rebound, dribble, you’re banging your fingers, you can’t get around it.  When blood starts to show up on the ball, it’s all over.

And in the back of my mind is our rancid water at home, which is why I was messing with that damn concrete lid in the first place, which led to this bleeding finger, and is making me the lamest player on the court.  I know I have to attack the well again, regardless of my smashed finger, though it’s the last thing I want to do.  I was hoping the bleach would erase the smell, but it’s not happening. 

My wife and I start joking, only to keep our sanity, about taking “rat showers.”  A “rat bath” is out of the question, marinating in that oily rat water; but a “rat shower” isn’t much better.  Rather than getting cleaner, more bleach friendly, it gets so awful we can’t do it any more—take showers, that is--and start heating up pots of bottled water on the stove to wash with, standing in the  bathtub, not turning on the water at all.  As sketchy as it sounds, it’s a heavenly reprieve from “rat showers.”  A full mud bath would be better than the current “rat shower.”  You start to wonder what you were thinking when you took them at all.  What was the point?  To trade your sweat for the delights of rancid rat on your skin? 

As I’m trying to figure out the next device I’ll use to fish the dead animal out--sieves, colanders, buckets, fishing lures--my oldest son tells me he’s got the solution, which, thank God, he does.  A few days later he shows up with a bright cylinder light on a long cord to drop into the well, to see what’s exactly there.  With it a five-gallon bucket attached to two long nylon ropes, one to the top handle, one to the side of the bucket to tip it and scoop up what is floating down there.  With the light we’re able to see a few floating animals, and one by one fish them out.  Two white, obscenely hairless, rotting squirrels, smelling exactly like the water we’ve been bathing in.  We’ve found rats before, but squirrels, though cute, are basically tree rats.  When we get them both out and some debris, we see the clear bottom of the well, and the beginning of sanity.  Hallelujah.

Now, he says, we pour a gallon, not a cup, of bleach in the well, and run the water in the house every hour for a period of time, to clear the pipes, purge the water heater, disinfect the whole system.  Which is what we do, still drinking bottled water, not taking showers yet, as the bleach is too strong.  Now the bleach takes over and the decomposing smell mercifully begins to dissipate. 

The next day I have to drive to a motel down by the airport, fifty miles away, as early the day after I’m shooting the second film I’d booked, playing a U.S. Marshall.  I like sleeping in my own bed, but when I’ve got a 6 A.M. call, I book a cheap room near base camp so I don’t have to get up at 4 A.M. and grind like a maniac through traffic in the dark to work.  I’ve been doing this a while, and it makes the job far less stressful.  I’ve had good luck with cheap rooms, sixty dollars on Priceline, which is all I want to pay if I have to leave my wife and comfortable bed for the night.  It’s kind of like a protest against paying for one at all, to book a bare bones place just to sleep. 

I find a room online supposed to be a Howard Johnsons, that looks like one of these spare places, and drive down late the next afternoon to check in, relax and get ready to work in the morning.  From pictures, it’s practically luxurious.  My routine is to take a hot bath, study the script and run lines, take melatonin to knock out and get to sleep.  My wife will be busy with accounting work and running  water through the pipes in the house to get rid of the rat water.

The cheap room I’ve bought is ten minutes from the set.  When I pull up to the place, it looks like a Howard Johnsons.  It says Howard Johnsons, and I’m sure at one time it was.  But Howard Johnsons would’ve never allowed this place to exist.  I’ve entered a twilight zone.  This flophouse is in one of the worst parts of the city, on the forgotten edge of civilization, and looks like a war zone.  I remember then hearing that Howard Johnsons wasn’t in business anymore.

The stripped-down lobby is empty and looks like it’s been ransacked.  I call out and no one answers.  Signs everywhere say things are not in order.  Restroom out of service.  No Wifi.  No refunds.  Holes in the walls where things have been torn and ripped out.  After a while a lackadaisical Middle Eastern man saunters in with a bag of McDonalds.  “Could I get extra coffee for my room?” I ask, and he grins, mockingly, and says, “There’s no coffee,” as a frowning, disgusted- looking black woman comes in and says, “Our tv don’t work, we can’t watch tv in our room,” and the clerk says, “Talk to owner in the morning,” and she says, “Talk to….What?  I want my goddamn tv so my kids can watch it…”  I can’t control that, the man says, rooms are cheap but no guarantees, and hands me two key cards and mumbles instructions on how to use them, in a certain order, to open my room door.

When one depressing thing is stacked on top of another, there’s an accumulation of  despair that builds around you, like layers of demoralizing lacquer, so you wonder what the hell’s happening to you and why.  The water sickness was bad enough; while it’s still going on, I’ve left home to come to this godforsaken place where I have to spend the next twelve hours and try to sleep to work the next day.  I’m kicking myself.  I’d had good luck with cheap rooms, but this isn’t going to be one of them.  I’ll never get my money back.  For thirty or forty more dollars I could’ve booked a half decent room that was not in a slum ghetto, but I was so damn frugal and clever I outsmarted myself. 

As I look for my room, planes land overhead, shaking everything, and angry people glare down from balconies.  Ten beat up old cars sit in the littered lot, along with an ambulance with flat tires and shattered windows.  What the hell’s that thing doing here?  At the back of the complex are room doors that look like they’ve been machine gunned, sprayed with hundreds of bullet holes.  It looks like a movie set for a mob picture, or a real-life gang shootout last week. There’ve been gun fights here, no doubt about it, God knows what else.

I realize I’m in a dangerous place, but I’m still talking myself into believing it won’t be that bad.  I’m hard headed that way.  I refuse to leave and get screwed out of the money I’ve already wasted on this place.  As I’m messing with the two key cards at the door, a guy with dreadlocks trots down the steps and says, “Yeah, those things are tricky, got to jiggle it a little to get inside.”  Nice, I think.  Maybe he’ll be the one kicking my door in later.

Inside, the locks look like they’ve been drilled or pried off and reattached a few times.  Planes are landing directly over the motel, a thousand feet over it, one every minute or so, rattling windows.  The television is on when I open the door, the first good thing that’s happened to me that day—my tv works.  As the man said, there’s no coffee, no microwave.  There’s one ragged towel and a gritty washcloth. 

I call my wife and tell her where I am, and she’s worried sick, and we both start praying.  This isn’t the place Priceline described, I tell her.  This place is like some third world country; or worse, a guerilla camp in a third world country.  It looks and feels so rundown and destitute and sad, I’m depressed people live here, much less that I’m here myself.  Maybe that’s why I’m here, I think, to see how a struggling segment of the world lives.  I’m thinking about the people in Ukraine, what they’re dealing with right now.  But somehow that isn’t cheering me up.  Don’t ever do this again, she says.  Spend at least a hundred dollars and get a decent room where I don’t have to worry about you getting mugged.  Don’t worry, I say, as another plane roars over the building, I’ll never scrimp on a room again.  This is just stupid.  Just stay in your room, she says.  There’s a Waffle House next door, I tell her, I’m going over there to eat, coming back, and hunkering down for the night.

I’m not sure the Waffle House is open, but I see someone moving around inside.  I go in and order a breakfast dinner from a friendly young black cook who serves it.  Outside I see one ragged man limping down the street.  This place is desolation.  A dressed up black woman in a white Cadillac with a front plate that says “Boss” orders food to go and waits in her car, smiling at her phone.  The waiter-cook takes it out to her.  I ask for a large black coffee to go, to wake up in the morning, and give him a good tip.  When I leave he’s sitting out on the curb smoking a cigarette.  Where the hell is everybody?  I think I’ve found the place no one wants to be.

I go back to my room, not parking in front of it so as not to give away my location, and try to be sure I’ve got the locks right.  Walking in I feel eyes on me and see the woman with the broken television glaring at me outside her room.  I call my wife again, we pray some more, and she says she’s running the water like crazy at home and it’s smelling better.  That’s good news, as long as I make it through the night and get home again.  I want to believe I’m overreacting, that no one’s going to bother me here, but there’s another voice telling me my door could be slammed open in the middle of the night, at any moment.  That could be a regular thing here.  Later, my brother tells me in places like this they’ll knock on your door and ask if you want crack or a girl.  I don’t want to know how he knows that.  I hear banging around and noise outside, and start to worry about my car.  Maybe I’ll be safe here, but in the morning find my car trashed, tires flattened or missing, windows cracked.  A late model Volvo might really piss off the inhabitants of this place.

One thing I was looking forward to doing after weeks of rat water was taking a decent shower, which I do.  In the morning I have cold coffee to look forward to, which I hate, but it’s better than no coffee.  I take a melatonin, turn white noise on my phone, and try to slide into a coma with the hypnotic sounds of planes rolling in, reminding me of that great last scene in the movie Heat, with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. 

I can see and feel the scene like I’m there, the rising and receding waves of planes landing, runway lights flashing, their faces in shadows suddenly lit up as a plane roars overhead, going dark again, until Pacino gets the drop on De Niro, sees his shadow behind one of the light blocks, and takes him down.  Wed to his work, he holds De Niro’s hand as he dies, detective and criminal married in their miserable, violent lives.  It’s beautiful.  I love movies, and that’s why I’m doing this, sitting in this godawful piece of shit rundown joint to work on another film tomorrow.  Glamorous, I whisper, with a chuckle.  Isn’t it goddamn glamorous, this acting life?  If people only knew what actors go through, I think, though I chose it, and it chose me, so I’m not looking for sympathy.  The highs are just as high as the lows are lows.  And like the man said: “The mind is a place unto itself, it can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.”  But there’s also such thing as a physical hell.  As long as we get our damn water back, and I don’t get stabbed or shot tonight, everything’s gravy.

I wake in the middle of the night to pee, and there are bugs everywhere.  On the side table, lamps, sink, tub, walls, you name it.  It’s like they’re having a party in the dark, and you flick on the light and they scatter, like, what are you doing here?  Who are you, this is our domain.  I’ve never seen bugs like this, and my worst nightmare is one crawling across my face while I’m sleeping, which will be the final breaking point for me, but for some reason it doesn’t happen.  But every time I turn on the light, they’re everywhere, and again, I’m distraught for people having to live like this, not one night, but their entire sad, grim, downtrodden lives.  I’ve got a lot to be thankful for.  I feel like Scrooge being visited by the ghost of gratitude.  First you live with rat-poisoned water, now you see what life could be like if you actually lived here and were someone else.  Having clean water will be a revelation.  Getting out of here will be a new life for me.

At two in the morning I start hearing, behind landing planes and my phone’s white noise, the distinct sound of power tools grinding and drilling on the floor above me.  Why in God’s name would anyone be doing this in the middle of the night?  But yes, that’s what it is.  It goes on for an hour or so.  I get up again, flick on the lights, and bugs fly everywhere, and I’m laughing.  I'm so sick of this.  I’m broken and depressed.  I’ll never do anything like this again, I swear to the Ghost Of You’re A Cheap Dumbass.  I can feel my wife lying awake worrying about me, and I pray for both of us.  I hear people coming and going, a woman screaming occasionally, kids running around at three in the morning, arguing, car horns, people yelling and slamming doors, and pray them away from my door. 

When my alarm goes off, I’m up, splash my face, and sit in bed watching CNN, downing cold Waffle House coffee, which I can’t stand, but it works.  It’s 6:30 in the morning, and for no reason I can imagine, the smoke/CO 2 detector in the room goes off with that ear-piercing, deafening squeal.  I jump up and yank the battery out of it.  Another perplexing thing, but I’m used to that now.  I take a quick shower, noticing no bugs--they’ve withdrawn and disappeared until the witching hour.  I pack my things, grab my laptop I couldn’t use, open the door, and fly to my car, which I’m ecstatic is unharmed.  The tires are okay, no broken glass.  I throw my stuff in, start up, and haul ass out of there without warming it up, and text my wife I’m on the way to the set, I’d made it through the night. 

We’re celebrating.  It is something when this is what you're celebrating in life, not getting mugged or killed in your motel room.

I get to base camp, into my trailer, the AD brings hot coffee and a breakfast burrito, and I’m in a different world.  It’s like you’ve woken from a nightmare and everything’s good.  I play a Federal Marshall in a scene where a female prisoner just had a baby, and I storm into the room demanding she be shackled to the bed and not allowed visitors.  I channel Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive.  We shoot it over and over, at different angles and closeups, and I’m barking at some wonderful black actors playing her poor, broken-hearted parents, an emotional scene.       

When I get exactly what the young, sharp, black female director wants for the scene, she hugs me and thanks me.  It is every actor’s wish, when their job is done, to get the grateful approval of the director.  I’m feeling gratified and over some self-esteem hump finally, driving home, telling my wife it went well.  She tells me she took a shower this morning, and it wasn’t bad at all.  It felt almost normal.  Another revelation.  Things are looking up.

The next week I’m getting fitted for the third job I've booked, playing a racist judge in an episodic series about Martin Luther King and Malcom X.  I run to the lab to get Covid tested, then to production to try on wardrobe, and a judge’s robe.  We’re shooting in Covington, seventy miles from my house, so I book a better room this time, a few miles from basecamp, in advance.  I know it will be an early call.  It almost always is.  I’m way ahead of them, I think.          

The day before the shoot I drive to Covington and check in.  The woman at the desk is holding a screaming baby.  I go to my room and there are no pillows on the bed, no remote for the television, no coffee machine.  I’d paid a hundred dollars for this dump, and there are no damn pillows on the bed.  You’ve got to be kidding.  What is it?  Why is it so hard for things to just work as they should?  I ask for another room and they give me a handicapped one, which is fine, with a chair in the shower. 

I text the AD and ask what my call time will be tomorrow.  3 PM, she says.  3 PM?  Seriously?  So I didn’t need this room at all.  There you go, you’re way ahead of them.  You’re a professional.  It’s perfect, that’s what it is.  I could’ve left my house at midday tomorrow and taken my time driving here instead of wasting a hundred dollars, leaving my wife again overnight.  I have a fat magnum of Pinot Noir, and drink most of it, chuckling to myself, watching a documentary of Muhammad Ali.

In the morning I sleep late, have brunch at the Waffle House, and take my time getting to basecamp.  I fill out paperwork in my trailer because I have all the time in the world, and pile into the van with the other actors and crew and head to set. 

The town of Covington is taken over by production.  It’s a beautiful, warm fall day.  We have trouble getting to the courthouse, roads blocked off everywhere, movie cars from the 40’s and 50’s lining the streets.  We rehearse, break for a meal, and start shooting at 8 PM.  The old courtroom is filled with black people mostly, and my character, a white judge in the Jim Crow fifties, is depriving young Malcom’s mother of a home she owns with some white privilege law.  When she begs for mercy, he threatens to take her children away too.  It’s brutally sad.  We shoot for hours, the sadistic scene played out before a cast of black actors and extras.  I’m good at these roles, primarily because I grew up watching black people abused and treated like dogs by white people, and I like to show how repugnant and unjust it was, mean spirited and senselessly hateful.  For hours I embody that spirit and feel the misery of a race as I strike down this woman’s hopes and dreams. 

We wrap at 1 AM, and I splash my face and head home.  There’s little traffic on the road, and I listen to national sports talk from New York with a sports guy that sounds exactly like Christopher Walken, music to my ears.  I feel good about these three roles I’ve done.  I’ve knocked them out, and our water is, at the moment, restored. 

A few nights later my wife and I are woken by what sounds like nuts rolled across the ceiling in the attic.  We live in a grove of walnut trees, a squirrel’s paradise, and in cooler weather they carry nuts into the ceiling and walls.  We hear them scratching, sometimes it sounds like they’re playing marbles up there.  I’m sure they are part of the same family that ended up in our well, and we lay in the dark thinking about what we’ll do to them if they don’t leave us the hell alone.

“Our ever-present animal, scratching in the wall,” my wife says.

“Not too slender, he’s not too tall.”

“I’m looking for squirrel recipes.”

Water is life, we know.  Our family is the water triplicity.  Two Scorpios, a Cancer, and a Pisces--three water signs—intuition and emotion.  Since we moved into this old house, which is less than a mile from the largest lake in Georgia, everything has, ironically, been about water.  There were broken pipes in the winter when temperatures dropped to zero, water heater problems, the well pump switch would stick or burn out, and the septic tank fills up at least once a year and has to be pumped out, because the clueless character who built the drain field didn’t know what he was doing. 

And then every now and then another animal would slip into our well and we’d go through this lovely adventure.  It’s uncanny how much all of this would happen, always about water, this clear, magical stuff we’re made of, flowing through us like life itself.  When you don’t have water, clean, usable water,  you feel like your actual existence is threatened, because it is.

That December the worst artic blast in years blows through while we’re visiting our son in Asheville for Christmas.  We know it’s coming, and before we leave we do everything in our power to keep the pipes safe--lights under the house, plastic on walls, heaters on inside, insulation on pipes, water dripping from faucets.  But the temperatures plummet below zero for three nights, and when we return our pipes are broken everywhere, water spewing in the crawl space under these old floors.  Our repair guy, Hosea, works with a helper, taking four days to repair them all.  Again, we’re heating up water on the stove,

standing in the tub with a washcloth.  Again, I’m buying dozens of gallons of water to drink and bathe with. 

It’s remarkable how many things can go wrong.  They keep piling up, and you keep fighting to restore sanity, to set things straight, to clean up the messes.  There’s no such thing as purity, there’s always something dogging you with manic imperfections, random fiascos, but you keep praying things won’t go too wrong for too long. 

As long as you have water you have a chance.  It’s worth more than its weight in gold.  You’re thankful when things simply go right, and you turn on your old best friend, the faucet, and out flows that sweet, mysterious stuff that is the milk of life. 

BIO: In 2012 I published the thriller novel, “Creature Storms.” I published “A Pilgrimage To Dennis Hopper” in The River Teeth Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and was listed as one of the most notable essays in Best American Essays, 2015. I’ve published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in a dozen literary journals. My second novel, The Sentry, was published on Kindle in June, 2025. I am also a film actor, appearing in We Are Marshall, The Mist, True Detective, Hidden Figures, Boy Erased, and Just Mercy.