If only real life were like Hallmark movies. I’d be the hero who exposed the evil landlord and brought the corrupt public servants to justice. I would get the key to the city, and Mom and Dad would find Jesus. Then their mental illnesses would vanish into White Republican remission. Cue the inspirational music, roll the credits, and the part of Bill Dunlap was played by Johnny Depp in his Mad Hatter costume.
However, real life is nothing like Hallmark movies. And I never received anything that even resembled justice or fairness. But I did learn some important lessons. The first and most important is that poor people’s lives mean nothing. I kept that building from exploding, and I didn’t get as much as a thank you. Looking at the building thirty years later, I doubt if the lead paint had been abated. I did get the landlord a good one, and he was fined and forced to make repairs. But it didn’t seem to inconvenience him in the least. He was even elected mayor for a term or two. This taught me to distrust local as well as national politics. Because the rot begins at the bottom and creeps its way up.
The funniest thing about it is I couldn’t have won as much as I had if I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even know that the state AG had an office investigating housing and safety laws violations. I contacted them while in a blind panic with my crazy-ass parents making things as hard as possible. The absolute hell of it was the AG housing investigation department doesn’t exist anymore. It vanished around the time Diane Witman was governor of New Jersey.
My legal protection ended when the landlord got busted. It was such a slam/dunk case I didn’t even need to testify in court. But that meant I was alone. Yes, I had my Larry Marra training, but I didn’t have the experience to really put it to practical use. Needless to say, there are many things I would have done differently. I should never have let down my guard. But the head of Section 8 called me, apologized, and called the lead exposure a tragedy.
That was pure bullshit because just about every apartment on Section 8’s lists had lead paint. And some of them actually had higher lead levels than the death trap. We had many possibilities, but none of them passed the lead tests. We also scoured the classified ads and came up with a couple of possibilities that did pass the lead test.
As ridiculous as it may sound, we were still scheduled for landlord/tenant court. We could still end up with an eviction on our record, and then Section 8 would have no choice but to drop us. The hell of it was, this wasn’t the first time we faced eviction from this landlord. We didn’t clear out the old apartment fast enough to suit him. So he decided to go in and throw out all the stuff we hadn’t had time to move yet. I called the cops on the sunuvabitch and reported it as a robbery. According to the New Jersey tenant handbook, that was my right. He had to give us the legally mandated two more days to move our stuff or face theft charges. Mr. Landlord was not happy.
Of course, the petty fascist wouldn’t take that lying down. So he filed an eviction order for non-payment of rent. Then he went on a two-week vacation and was somewhat dismayed we hadn’t panicked and ran away while he was gone. We paid our rent by postal money orders back then, and it took a week to get evidence that he filed the eviction after he cashed our money order. And keep in mind that this little fuck-weasel became mayor.
Needless to say, we didn’t trust our ex-landlord, and we were terrified. Being poor people, Warren County Legal Aid was our only recourse. We came to them six years before. Their only lawyer had first taken the job, and our landlord at the time was an outlaw biker. Our lawyer ate him alive. We went to him during the bullshit rent eviction, and I wasn’t happy with his representation. He made us bring in the rent we didn’t owe even though we brought proof we didn’t owe it, and we were stuck with court fees. So we weren’t so trusting when we came to him for the third time. In short, he should have been disbarred from the legal advice he gave us. He told us not to bother even showing up.
The lesson there was never to trust any official office, be it government, NGO, or non-profit. We would have been screwed if we weren’t educated. My partner grew up in a real estate company and had her license at 18. We both knew this was bullshit advice, and we decided to represent ourselves instead.
I didn’t feel up to the task. In fact, I was totally daunted and tried to find legal representation the same way I found the building investigator. I got out the blue pages and started calling. Alas, lightning didn’t strike twice. But I did get some wisdom from a friendly paralegal with a strong Latino accent. In words of one sentence, he patiently explained that I was totally fucked. There were absolutely no laws that protected anybody from economic discrimination. What few laws there were had no mechanisms for enforcing them. In short, as long as it couldn’t be proven to be racially or religiously motivated, there was nothing anybody could do about it.
That’s the ugly truth that the movies try to conceal. Economic discrimination is ingrained in American law and society. There are no standards for justice except money. Conservatives who experience it firsthand get the idiotic idea that African Americans get preferential treatment. Liberals want to pretend that economic discrimination is limited to Blacks and minorities. But the reality is that economic oppression doesn’t discriminate. Once you no longer have the money for legal representation, a white man is as screwed as a black man. But the white man is much more likely to survive the screwing.
It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if we lost our Section 8. Between my partner’s benefits and my job, we could have afforded 1992 rents. It would have been hard, but once we had our living arrangements settled, I could look for a job that didn’t have seasonal layoffs. At the same time, we didn’t want an eviction screwing up our lives either. And we could be evicted if we weren’t in court to defend ourselves. So I spent a few days in the library, putting my hard-earned Larry Marra education to work. I prepared a counterargument claiming a constructive eviction and requesting first and last month’s rent on a new place, the return of our damage deposit, moving expenses, and damages. In other words, I did all the work the asshole at legal aid didn’t.
I wasn’t all that certain about the damages. I wasn’t sure about anything. Between my father’s loud and constant pessimism and my mother’s delusions, my head was in a horrible place. My partner was severely depressed and didn’t feel ready for the trial. To be candid, I was terrified beyond anything I had felt before. It wasn’t the court case or the housing; it was my parents. Being back in that seething pressure cooker of insanity did terrible things to my self-confidence and sense of worth. I knew I would lose, but I intended to put up a fight.
You could have knocked me down with a feather when the landlord conceded. Today I would have expected it because the bastard didn’t have a case. I could tell he didn’t expect us to be there by the look on his face, and he must have just discovered we filed a rebuttal because he was reading it on the bench. So he weaseled out of it by dropping the case. And once he dropped the case, I didn’t have a chance to present my side of it. The judge banged his gavel, and that was it. We didn’t lose anything, we didn’t gain anything, and we would need to file our own case if we wanted any financial compensation. That was when I decided to try for pro bono representation and sue the living hell out of everybody.
Of course, it was a setup. As soon as our city councilman landlord dropped his case, the rest of the power structure stepped in to protect him. I found this out from an old friend from high school. He was one of the landlords whose apartments were too high in lead. He had the decency to let me know Section 8 was bad-mouthing me behind my back. He had called them for a reference, and the head of Section 8 said my partner was a perfect tenant, but I was big trouble. I confirmed it by having my father pose as a landlord and call Section 8. They called my partner a perfect tenant but said I was big trouble. No matter how you look at it, that was illegal, but there was absolutely nobody to report it to. I was helpless against it unless I could find a lawyer.
This is where things get complicated. We had been spending as much time as possible away from my parents. We tried to be ghosts, sneaking in at night, feeding the kids, and going to bed. We also got up early and tried to be gone before my parents got up. But then I decided to start seeing if I could find a lawyer. I stayed home with the yellow pages and started calling. Finally, I got hold of an office manager who started the conversation, “I already spoke to your mother.”
“Why were you talking to my mother?” I asked. My stomach felt like I had been pushed out of an airplane, and I was plummeting to my doom.
I found out my mother had also been lawyer shopping. She wanted to sue on her own behalf. They tried to explain she didn’t have the legal standing to sue. She would respond with, “I am the GRANDMOTHER,” and start getting verbally abusive and demanding to speak to the attorney.
I got the same story from numerous legal secretaries. Mom had been harassing law offices for weeks, and nobody was even willing to hear my case. Mom had totally poisoned the well. I was so furious that I sought out my partner and told them what had happened. They had a sickening idea. What if Mom was calling Section 8 behind our backs?
I had that falling out of an airplane feeling while I called Section 8 from a phone booth. That’s when I found out Mom had been calling and verbally abusing them. I apologized profusely. I would have gotten on my knees if I had been there. I explained that my mother was extremely mentally ill. (Only I said she was as mad as a March Hare) and that she never spoke on my behalf or even with my knowledge.
That was when I found out about the third betrayal. Two landlords had accepted our application. Section 8 had called to tell us, but my mother answered and took the messages, and never let us know.
What was my mother’s motivation? I assure you it wasn’t any real attachment to her grandson. Cats were her only emotional connection. Mom was after the AFDC, the food stamps, and anything else she could get her mitts on because she was entitled to it.
She would grab every penny of birthday or holiday money from when I was little. She made it clear that minors had no property rights, and even our favorite toys were hers. And when I had summer jobs, she couldn’t wait to forge my name and cash my paycheck.
Don’t think my family was camping in her living room out of the goodness of Mom’s heart. We were paying her sixty dollars a week for the privilege of being abused. On top of that, my father refused to do his yearly tax work. He kicked back depending on the First National Bank of Bill to make up the slack.
So it made sense that my mother wouldn’t pass on our messages. If we left, the sixty dollars a week would go with us. Her mind was also deteriorating. She was over 20 years older than Dad. Her kidneys were shutting down from two decades of eating a pure protein diet and the nicotine-related double bypass and aneurysm surgery took its toll. She was falling into her final depressive cycle, and it was ghastly beyond any she had before. In four years, she would die like a mad animal.
Of course, she denied not giving us our messages. She got so indignant that I knew damn well she was lying through her teeth. But the rationale over calling the lawyers was beyond insane. She claimed that she was legally entitled to financial compensation for her suffering as the Grandmother. And the hell of it was, she sincerely believed it.
At that point, we needed to get away. I was calling friends in NYC to see if we could find a place to crash for a while. My partner went to see if she could transfer her benefits out of state and met her new caseworker.
I grew up on welfare since I was 14 years old in St. John’s County, Florida. Some of the most vicious and petty people I ever met were social workers. I don’t trust them as a matter of course. And I hate being on public assistance to the point where I was reluctant to file for unemployment. But this new caseworker was different. She was a hanger-on from the 60s and early 70s when idealistic college grads willingly went into social work to make a difference. Jimmy Carter purged most of them when he cut the social services budget in the 70s. Then they were replaced by born-again Christians who used their clout to impose their religion on their clients.
The new caseworker pointed out that we were now homeless. Back then, crashing on your barking mad parents’ floor wasn’t considered being housed. My partner and the kids were entitled to emergency housing. And if I gave up my unemployment, I could join my family in emergency housing. We would be away from the crazy people and apartment hunt in peace. As I said before, I hate being on any public assistance. But there was no way I would pass up a deal like that.
Emergency housing meant the County would put us up in a hotel room, and we had a choice of two. The first was the Hotel Lafayette across the Delaware River in Easton, PA. The building was over a century old, and you could bet your life it was chock full of lead paint. Besides, it was the hangout of pimps, prostitutes, junkies, and pushers.
Option Two was the Broadway Motel, way out in the boonies. Broadway, NJ, was the home of over a thousand livestock and maybe two hundred people at the most. The Motel was surrounded by cornfields. There was a bar and a pizzeria across the street. We lived on pizza, calzones, and non-perishables we got with our food stamps for the next month. We kept milk in a cooler outside the front door.
We moved in during the last few days of January, and things weren’t all that grim at first. My mother-in-law took a vacation week and stayed with us, helping us get to housing appointments and grocery shopping. My partner’s ex-husband had grown up in Broadway, and we were on good terms with their ex-in-laws. So we weren’t entirely isolated.
Our caseworker showed up on the first with our checks, food stamps, and housing lists from both Phillipsburg and the County. And that was the last we ever saw of her. She disappeared without a word. We reached her boss when we tried to call her, and he told us he was our caseworker. From that moment on, we didn’t get a lick of support from welfare. I think that was also part of the plan.
There were four of us in that tiny cramped hotel room, and it didn’t look as if we were getting out of there any time soon. We had already burned through the Pee-burg landlord lists. So I called them again just to be on the safe side. The county lists were at least three years out of date, but I called them anyway. I got the papers every day and called everything. We had a few nibbles, but the houses were contaminated with lead paint. And my reputation as a trouble-maker didn’t make things any easier. And the more frustrating things got, the worse I got. I was on an anger treadmill, and I didn’t know how to get off.
It got to the point where I couldn’t stop calling landlords past eight PM, and I wanted to start again at 7:30 AM. I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there next to my partner, staring at the ceiling, worrying about what would happen next. One night I heard a scrabbling in the cardboard box we used for a larder. I thought one of the hotel cats had gotten in, so I got up to see what she was up to. It was a mouse trying to gnaw its way into a can of deviled ham.
We stopped and stared at each other. I could see its beady little eyes glittering in the flashing neon lights. Then, rather than running, as I expected, it went on the attack. I was a hundred times bigger than the little bastard, but he launched himself at me anyway. I jumped back, but it hit me in the belly button, dropped down a few inches, and bit into my underpants, hanging off my crotch by its sharp little teeth.
I knew I would scare everybody if I screamed, so I clamped my jaw and held my breath as I did a Tom Cruise trying to shake that critter off my junk. I jumped up and down and gyrated my hips like David Lee Roth. Finally, the little bastard flew, taking a patch of my shorts in its little mouth. It thumped against the far wall. I grabbed a can of peaches and bounded after it, but the wee bastard vanished into the wainscoting.
The damned thing must have been a shrew. I doubt mice have that sort of chutzpah. Besides, the motel management had so many cats and dogs even Jerry Mouse couldn’t have gotten into one of those rooms.
My partner and I were constantly arguing over nothing. We were losing hope of ever getting an apartment, and our new case worker was calling and pressuring us every day. We were both depressed, and our oldest was acting out in school and at home. Or what passed for a home.
I think I would have acted better if I knew I had ADHD. My poor brain was in overload. I was suffering from sensory overload, and I was totally fixated on going back to work. I grew up on welfare and still confused employment with freedom. Because even wage slavery was better than a life controlled by social workers. I was terrified of not going back to my lousy job. I was deaf to any alternatives that didn’t include me being able to commute to Allentown when my job reopened.
Even if I didn’t have ADHD, I have no doubt that what happened next was planned from the moment we moved into the Motel. On March 1st, we received reduced food stamps, no welfare check, had our Medicaid revoked, and were given 24 hours to leave the Motel. We were now helpless with minimum support. We were utterly dependent on the County for everything.
“But that’s illegal,” yells the middle-class reader. “They have to give you notice before they cut your benefits.” And yes, it was as illegal as all hell. But there we were, stuck in the middle of corn fields and horse farms with no welfare. We could have appealed, but what the hell were we supposed to survive until the appeal? Mark out 20 acres and demand a mule? Besides, they didn’t even give us the appeal form. Remember, we were dealing with local government. Laws were for the little people. True, we could have moved back in with my parents, but that was out of the question.
I hadn’t the first clue how, but I wanted to fight it. I was ready to die fighting to get to a job selling circus tickets over the phone. But there wasn’t anything to fight with. I was fresh out of ammo, and the County of Warren had a howitzer aimed at me. Our new caseworker offered to drive my partner to the welfare office to renegotiate. I wasn’t invited. I stayed in the hotel room with the boys and went through the blue pages for the 5,000th time since this absurdity began. But there wasn’t anybody left to call.
My partner came back in tears. Welfare had everything ready for her. They reinstated her welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid for her and for our oldest. All she had to do was sign a child support order against me that was retroactive to January 1st.
Remember the end of 1984, when Winston Smith had the cage full of rats strapped to his face, and he had to say “Do it to Julia” to save himself? That’s precisely what the low-life motherfuckers in Warren County Welfare did to my partner. They presented as female back then, and they were always quiet and shy. The petty fascists figured that they would just get rid of me, and it would all go away. After a few months in stir, they would assign me a minimum wage job and garnish my wages. And by then, they figured my partner would move on because social workers have that sort of low opinion of their clients. Since I was literally indigent, I was in for a lengthy jail sentence.
I can hear the neoliberal Democratic chorus singing, “but you have to support your child.” And I respond with, “I hate you all.” Child support laws are just like antiabortion laws. They exist to punish people for being poor. My partner and son didn’t see as much as a red cent from the child support arrears I was told I owed. From there on, they only received fifty dollars a month which was a fraction of what I paid. So don’t give me any shit about supporting my son. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) a day in his life when I wasn’t there for him.
Middle-class men can simply hire a lawyer and totally fuck over their wives and kids. The laws are deliberately written for them to do this. But poor people are low-hanging fruit.
My partner is no idiot; they knew what welfare was doing. I knew it too, but I was angry at them anyway. I had been mad for so long and at so many people that I didn’t know how not to be angry. We had a nasty fight, and I forced them to kick me out. It wasn’t just the right thing for them; it was the only possible thing to do. So I left, and I only had one place left to go. That’s right, Mom and Dad, just the people who take a terrible situation and worsen it.
For those who might be interested, my partner and I will be celebrating our 40th year together in June of 2023. So I raise my middle finger to Warren County Welfare.
The Traumatic 90s 