Bill and Hillary, Donald Trump, The Tech Bubble, Homelessness, and why we may never have nice things again.
Author: Bill Dunlap
64 year old retired salesperson Turned author. I'm a lifelong third party voter, and I don't want to hear about how the Democrats are going to improve my sex-life or how the Republicans will clean up my acne. I also lost all my patience for all religions including Neopagans. I will be happy to discuss my views but will not have them attacked for any reason. And since we have a secret vote in this country, you can bloody well guess who I voted for. My pronouns are he/him, but my wife came out as non-binary a year or so back and prefers they/them. Therefore it should be no surprise if I ban homophobes. It's one of my favorite activities.
You are welcome to join me on Facebook, where I will be updating information about this blog as well as my upcoming novel "Yule Be Sorry."
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I'm also on Twitter but don't know what the hell to do with it.
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Please keep in mind that I identify as poor. My blog will be stories about poor people. (Including my family and me) It is not an invitation to push your politics or religion.
In 1982, Slick Willie Clinton won the Arkansas Governor’s race as a “New Democrat.” He was as devoted a convert to Voodoo Economics as George H.W. Bush and just as hard right conservative. Clinton’s second tenure as Arkansas Governor was as full of trickle-down economics, austerity, and social program-cutting as any Republican administration. Yet, in the 1992 presidential elections, Slick Willie presented himself to a broader public as the second coming of Edmund Muskie. And a demented hobgoblin by the name of Rush Limbaugh started accusing him of being a communist.
That made about as much sense as calling Juan Peron a humanitarian or Frederick Douglas a White Supremacist. It was absurd. Yet, the more Clinton gave the Republicans everything they wanted, the harder Limbaugh accused him of being a bleeding-heart liberal. And rather than being ignored as the crank he was, it caught on. To this day, there are Democrats who insist that Bill Clinton was impeached over a blow-job when he was actually impeached and disbarred for life because he lied about it to a grand jury. That was Limbaugh’s purpose; to create such a smoke screen that both the Democrats and Republicans could ignore the facts and do whatever they wanted.
One of the most significant questions of the 1990s was how that fat, cigar-chewing bastard became so influential. Well, he was obviously born into it. The Limbaughs were part of the Missouri oligarchy. Both sides of his family were heavily involved in the John Birch Society. He had the family connections to have made it big in politics. Still, he wanted to be a radio broadcaster instead.
Initially, he crashed and burned. America has had shock jocks and abrasive personalities going back to the days of Will Rogers. But Limbaugh was so unhinged that he kept getting fired over his statements. He used the alias “Bachelor Ken” for some reason. I think it was so his on-air life didn’t interfere with his day job. He never kept a radio job for more than a year. Sometimes, he didn’t even survive for a month. Those were the days of the Fairness Doctrine, when broadcasting stations were required to air opposing views and were held accountable for misstating facts. Everybody from the Black Panthers to the DNC lined up to publicly refute Limbaugh’s bullshit with facts. He even initiated a few lawsuits, which is why “Bachelor Ken” always got canned.
Nepotism saved his butt. His family ensured he had a steady sales job for the Kansas City Royals. Otherwise, he would have had to find an honest job on his own, and finding a high-paying job with his credentials and work history was impossible even in those days. Eventually, he took a full-time position in the Royals’ marketing department. Due to his family’s political prominence, Rush quickly rose to the position of director of marketing. One might even quip that he was “rushed.” But the Limbaughs were a one-percent family, and they took care of their own.
Suddenly, the broadcaster who couldn’t hold a job was a VP and marketing director of a national sports team. He was playing golf and making deals with the people who fired him in the past. Rush, the stand-up guy, didn’t hold any grudges. He even started selling them universal life insurance policies for the old A.E. Williams company. He was introduced to some Washington insiders as a financial advisor. And he slowly wormed his way into the higher echelons of the RNC. His corporate lifestyle provided him plenty of leisure time, and he was already helping shape public policy. So when the fairness doctrine was eliminated, and radio stations didn’t have to worry about giving equal time to other views, Rush turned his talents to Talk Radio.
For those who don’t remember, Talk Radio was the social media of the late 20th Century. It was bad enough when it was just Howard Stern and the Whack Pack. But things started to go way south after the fairness doctrine ended. The insanity got worse and worse since the broadcasters could say anything with little or no consequences. Ed McLaughlin, CEO of ABC Radio, desperately sought somebody to knock Howard Stern from his throne as King of the Airwaves. History may never know if McLaughlin pitched a new radio show to his golf buddy Limbaugh or if Limbaugh went to McLaughlin. But Limbaugh returned to radio, and America may never recover from it.
Only this time, Rush sloughed off his “Bachelor Ken” persona like a viper sheds his skin, and it became the Rush Limbaugh Show. And the host was the real Rush Limbaugh. He spouted the same racist John Bircher shit he grew up with and believed with the fervency of a Jehovah’s Witness knocking on your door. That very sincerity was the cornerstone of his success. My neighbors in Blair House were ready for Rush. They were angrier than hell at Clinton and the Democrats, and Rush was calling Slick Willy a socialist. My neighbors didn’t have the education to know what a socialist was, except it was something terrible. And, of course, since Rush could be racist on the radio, they stopped believing that racism was wrong. And it was impossible to correct them. I count Rush Limbaugh and his shitty example to be the biggest step backward in social progress since the McCarthy Hearings.
I found it extremely easy to ignore Rush Limbaugh. I think it was because I went to public school in Florida. My Saint Augustine High School gym coach was just as bad as Limbaugh. I learned to tune racists out to preserve my sanity. For the life of me, I can’t remember hearing Limbaugh’s radio show at all. He came into my life as slowly as a cancer diagnosis. He was quoted everywhere; even if you didn’t listen to his show, you knew what he was. There wasn’t a comedian out there who wasn’t ready to make fun of him. But even ridicule is good publicity. His word and reputation kept growing. He became part of the environment. Rush Limbaugh was here to stay.
My luck ran out after my mother started watching his syndicated television show. It was on the air for about two or three years and was produced by Roger Ailes of FOX News fame. I distinctly remember sitting through three episodes but couldn’t hear anything Rush said. My mother would march up and down the room, yelling back at the hobgoblin on the TV screen. She would even throw small objects at the television screen. It was very entertaining, as you can imagine.
Then Mom left the room for a few minutes, and I was left alone to experience directly the southern fried hell, which was Rush Limbaugh. He was just like my old gym coach in Saint Augustine High School, only he had a salesman’s command of language. Limbaugh was being racist and ablest towards Rodney King and his disabilities. And he did it so wittily with puns and clever similes. I found myself trembling in outrage. When my mother returned, we were both yelling at the screen. Then I’d walk Mom outside so she could catch the hospital bus to dialysis and start fights with the elderly Dittoeheads.
That was another part of Rush’s appeal; he brought the bratty thirteen-year-old out in everybody. Rules of civility didn’t exist around him. He was a compassion-free zone where people could publicly release their bile without guilt or inhibition. It was an easy step from cursing out Rush on the TV screen to cursing out his fans in public. It started with lunatics like my mother fighting over whatever the idiocy the bloated cancer cell said that day. It slowly spread to the rest of the country. When I moved to California in 1996, Rush Limbaugh dominated political discourse.
Who was there to stop him? There was no more fairness doctrine. No requirements to air opposing views. And around 1996, courts ruled that news was entertainment. All journalistic standards had been stripped from the airwaves. And in the rare cases when somebody sued for defamation, Rush’s backers and allies had better lawyers. And nobody in broadcasting wanted to stop him.
It came down to Rush being good for business. As long as he was in the studio, neither Democrats nor Republicans ever had to worry about facts. The media became the battle of the strawmen. How many people fell off the unemployment rolls without finding employment didn’t matter. Bill Clinton was a liberal socialist because Rush Limbaugh said so. Nor did it matter how many taxes Clinton eliminated; Clinton was a socialist because Limbaugh said so. Rush Limbaugh defined the discussion. He had an incredible stage presence that kept every eye on him. And his drunken uncle politics struck a nerve in everybody. The nation was split between pro-Rush and Anti-Rush. And politics revolved around whatever he said.
The worst thing Rush and his media enablers did was normalize racism on the left. Never mind the right-wing, “minorities-are-subhuman” Ku-Klux-Klan-type racism. That’s going to be with us as long as we tolerate our regressive public school system. I’m talking about the “minorities-are-going-to-be oppressed-until-we-force-them-into-middle-class-white-culture racism.” It’s easy to forget that you’re infantilizing dark-skinned people when you can hide behind the outrageous statements coming out of the idiot factions of the Republican party. But Black People don’t need White liberals telling them what to do. Their time would be better served fixing the education system and health care systems they keep screwing up.
Black people in inner cities create their own systems. Public schools no longer teach critical thinking, so it’s taught in private homework clubs or church-sponsored after-school programs. The kids in these private, neighborhood-run programs get better educations than White kids in the suburbs. So, if you think kids in inner-city schools are badly educated, you’re sadly mistaken as well as racist. Limbaugh occasionally made valid criticisms of America’s failed education system and social programs, but they got lost in all his racist idiocy. And because Limbaugh made the criticism, the anti-Rush faction felt free to ignore the obvious fact that their education and social programs were badly failing.
Today, we’re still divided into the pro-Rush and Anti-Rush factions. Both sides are convinced that their politics is the only correct politics. Each faction is madly bent on destroying the other, to the point where they can’t focus on anything else. Any and all other views, suggestions, or wants are ignored because the only thing that matters is destroying the other side. Limbaugh was such a toxic bully that he made bullying acceptable in American society.
It’s only getting worse. Rush has long since taken over Hell’s Marketing Department, but the country is still how he left it; two cult-like political factions that can’t play well with others. And both the neoconservative and neoliberal news sources stole his act. Every talking head, from Tucker Carlson to Jon Stewart, uses Rush Limbaugh’s formula. Adopt a rigid political position that tolerates no criticism. Make cheap jokes at the expense of the other faction and mock all the critics, especially critics who avoid both factions. It’s easy, low-investment entertainment. And it keeps the money rolling in. That’s the only reason they do it; it brings in the money. It doesn’t matter that many Black families tune out the networks because they don’t want their kids learning to be bullies from the media. It’s profitable.
Thank god we only get one Antichrist per generation, and ours was Rush Limbaugh. Donald Trump is only a cheap black market knock-off of Rush. He may have stolen Limbaugh’s act, but he isn’t the unifying presence of the real Limbaugh. Limbaugh was a real mover-shaker and behind-the-scenes troublemaker. He could hold the Republican Party together because he was one of them. By 2008, he was the RNC’s spokesperson and de facto party head. Without him, the Republicans are falling into the same factionalism Rush started. And the Republicans are now being savaged by the cretins Limbaugh enabled during his rise to power. Ain’t karma a bitch?
Since it’s an election year, I think it’s appropriate to look back at Bill Clinton, his totally dysfunctional wife, the 1990s version of Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren (who most definitely passed for Cherokee during the Clinton years.), and let us not forget America’s favorite Howler Monkey, Segregation Joe Biden, who was Clinton’s drug czar, and Reagan’s boy in the Democratic Party before that. And as we go through memory lane, ask yourself why these incredible buffoons are still inflicting themselves on us? When are we going to have enough?
Any attempt to describe the disaster that was Bill Clinton would look like “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Since this is an autobiography, I can only report how it affected me personally. That limits it to a volume the size of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” Nobody could slog through that much muck. I’m keeping it down to the highlights. From NAFTA to Lewinsky, the hits just kept on coming! So, if I miss one of your favorite Clinton memories, drop me a line or mention it in the comments. I’ll be sure to add it to future revisions or even do a blog post if there’s enough material.
Bill Clinton taught me a fundamental lesson. Never trust a Democrat. And that was after Nixon taught me to never trust a Republican. I was a member of the Green Party back then because I was unsatisfied with both corporate parties and totally disenchanted with the DSA. But this was the early days of the Greens when they added their support to the Democrats. And I voted Democrat out of solidarity with the Greens. In reality, the Democrats were just the neo-liberal faction of the Reagan camp. And nobody was more of a neo-liberal than William Jefferson Clinton.
Back in the 1990s, there was some sort of liberal glamour surrounding the Democrats. They certainly didn’t earn it. Under Reagan, the Democrats purged themselves of all their liberals. Reagan had made being centrist cool again, and Clinton had the support of a party that believed in Trickle Down Economics as fervently as their Republican neighbors. They resented social programs as badly as the Republicans. In fact, the only thing that separated the Republicans from the Democrats was their irrational hatred of each other, which has grown to insane levels today.
Clinton promised not to sign NAFTA. He signed NAFTA. And today, we have young men hanging out on street corners because all the manufacturing has been sent overseas. He ran on the promise of universal health. What a joke! He sent Hillary on a “fact-finding” junket to Paris. Then said, “Sorry, universal health isn’t happening.” Then, he commenced handing Medicaid over to the HMOs, making Medicaid more expensive to the taxpayer and providing fewer services for the patients.
Clinton waged a very deceptive campaign. And I wasn’t the only one who got caught up in it. I was living in Hillbilly Heaven during the 1992 election. Many of my neighbors were disabled on welfare or disabled and working a minimum wage job without medical benefits. If Clinton had followed through on his healthcare promise, my neighbors would have rallied against the Twenty-Second Amendment, so Clinton could have had a fifth term. And I would have been one of them. Instead, we now have an entire class of people more suspicious of the Democrats than they are of the Republicans. We can thank Bill Clinton for that.
We voted for Clinton because Reaganomics was killing us. Then, Bill Fucking Clinton gave us more Reaganomics. Homelessness peaked during the Clinton Administration. And it wasn’t just Clinton. Democratic Mayor Jerry Brown eliminated Oakland, CA. Rent control and a day never went by when I wasn’t watching another eviction. But they were just Black people, so the white racist media didn’t care. And neither did the Democrats. The fear of homelessness is what I remember most clearly about the Clinton administration. Every day was terror.
Please note that anybody who dares to claim there was a treasury surplus when Clinton left office will be publicly shamed and subjected to a stern accounting lecture. That so-called surplus was in inflated internet stocks. It was entirely paper profits with nothing to back them. And they lost all value when the stock market crashed. There was never an actual treasury surplus. It was all deceptive accounting. I think Trump learned how to overvalue things from Clinton.
What amazes me more than anything else is the Democrats think poor people are so stupid we’d forget all about this. People died due to the Welfare reform. Folks aren’t going to forget that. I cannot believe the narcissism of a political party that thinks poor people would vote for them because we’d be afraid of the Republicans. And I can’t believe the ego of those who are shocked when we’re not. We have already lived through the Democrats lying and promising us they would change. All it takes is an evening with the Congressional Record to see both parties vote as a block. But unfortunately, neither the left nor the right will put in the effort.
They say hindsight is 20/20. I keep reminding myself of that to keep from being furious at myself for voting for Clinton. But if I let myself be angry about Slick Willy, I should also be angrier at myself for falling for Jerry Brown’s campaign in 1976, or for that matter, voting for Carter. It was Carter, not Reagan, who first started slashing welfare and education budgets. He laid off the entire federal Department of Vocational Rehabilitation in 1978. He was also the one who flooded social services with Southern Baptists and other Born Again Christians, so they were comfortably in place when Ronald Reagan took over.
Reagan begat Bush the Elder, and Bush the Elder begat Slick Willie. And it was all the same steady process of dismantling the New Deal and restoring militarization to 1950 levels. Democrats and Republicans are working on a con that’s still in process today. They do a Punch and Judy show for the cameras, and then they work for Wall Street when they think we’re not looking. It shouldn’t have surprised anybody when Clinton shredded the social safety net. Both parties had been working towards it since Carter. But as I said before, hindsight is 20/20. And quite often, hope blinds us worse than heroin.
Beyond Welfare Reform and the NAFTA betrayal, the one thing Clinton can never be forgiven for is helping to inflict Donald Trump on an unsuspecting world.
That loud, glitzy failure made himself a national figure by exploiting his friendship with the President of the United States. In return, Trump shared his real estate contacts with the Clintons. And the Clintons loved themselves some real estate. Remember Whitewater?
I suspect Trump got away with so much for so long due to his financial support of Senator Hillary Clinton. And New York was selected as her district because that was where Trump was headquartered. I don’t believe Trump and Hillary Clinton were serious when they dissed each other during the 2016 campaign. They were just mugging for the crowd.
See what I mean about Clinton? He’s just as big a crook as his buddy Trump. I’ve written thirteen hundred words so far and haven’t scratched the surface. From Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky, barely a month went by without some sort of outrage. Clinton and the Democrats trashed our refugee programs, eliminated most of the legal ways to enter the United States, and generally, out did Reagan in destroying the economy.
I could go on for another hundred thousand words and still have more to say. So, we have to take this one slow. One bite at a time. And if you follow me long enough, you’ll understand just why poor people vote for Trump. The Democrats released the Kraken on us with Clinton. After that, we laugh at the Democrats threatening us with Trump.
Me in my kitchen at Blair House. The Deer-in-the-headlight expression is from my brother sneaking up on me with a camera.
What can be said about Blair House that hasn’t been told about any other slum? Except it was prettier. Blair House was a four-building garden apartment built sometime in the early 1950s. It sat on the top of a hill and was surrounded by trees. One summer, we were inundated by Scarlet Tanagers. These birds tended to avoid inhabited places, but the olive-green females were bopping around, too. There were also deer, rabbits, and our share of mice and rats. The place was falling apart. The decorative pillars had rotted inside, becoming homes for wasps and those damned yellow jackets. Blair House was lousy with yellow jackets. Our air conditioner had been a condo for yellow jackets since before we moved in. I don’t remember ever using it. One day a neighbor took a swig of soda and swallowed a yellow jacket. The surgeons had to open him up to get it out. I don’t think he was the same since. Inside wasn’t much better. The water pressure was so low we had to flush the toilet by pouring a bucket of water into the bowl. The bathroom had a nasty mold problem. I tried scrubbing the walls with chlorine, but it didn’t do any good. We had to live with it for over a year before the drywall got replaced. Our last Thanksgiving there was ruined because the oven broke while I was cooking a goose. Blair House was privately owned by a rather nice but dotty fellow with a colostomy bag. He inherited the complex from his parents and turned it into section 8 housing for maximum financial security with minimum management and maintenance effort. But at least he sprang for an exterminator to rid us of wasps and yellow jackets when they grew too thick. And when I showed him the mold, he did fix the bathroom. But two years into our tenancy, it was sold to a bank, and yuppie vermin took over the ownership. Our four years in Blair House were divided into two parts, before and after Bill Clinton. Poppa-Doc Bush was still president during part one. I moved in late September or early October of 1991. By my next birthday in November, the American voters chose Slick Willy Clinton to continue Reagan’s trickle-down policies. It was still your father’s poverty when I got there. Rents were increasing, but welfare, food stamps, AFDC, and Section 8 were still fully funded. I could afford out-of-pocket medical care if I really needed it. Or I could get treated in an emergency room for free. I have a friend who keeps saying she never voted for Clinton because she knew he wasn’t a liberal. Maybe I could say the same thing if I lived somebody else’s life. If you’ve read “Countdown to Blair House,” you’d know I was up to my ass in alligators. Without evidence, I hoped Slick Willy would try to keep his promises and improve things. I even phone banked for him in the evenings. Did I ever get that wrong! In my defense, I wasn’t the only person desperate enough to fall for Clinton’s shit. All my neighbors at Blair House believed it. Most of all, they loved the idea of universal health. There was the dizzying prospect of upward mobility without worrying about medical care. If people didn’t have to limit their incomes to stay on Medicaid, there wouldn’t be anything keeping them from looking for better jobs. Better jobs meant getting off Section 8 housing. It meant no more food stamps. Best of all, it meant no more social workers intruding into our lives. Clinton’s campaign and election brought optimism to poor people, and that optimism embraced everybody at Blair House. Even the residents at the developmentally disabled group home were happy because everybody around them was happy. A few, like The Biker, didn’t care one way or another, but he was genuinely pleased to see the rest of us excited. Blair House was a never-ending kaleidoscope of drama. Such as the newlywed couple who lived behind us. The husband was a farmhand, and the wife was a waitress. (Yes, there were still farmhands in Warren County back then.) His father had been a live-in farm laborer for over thirty years. The son took over the job and moved to Blair House. But the parents couldn’t adjust to life in Boca Raton and tried to move back to their old house, which had been turned into a grain shed. So they moved in with their son and daughter-in-law without notice. And They brought their Australian shepherd with them. Nobody had any trouble with the dog except Manager. You see, the poor pooch was trained to herd sheep. And there weren’t any sheep in Blair House. So what’s an industrious canine to do but improvise? Since there were no sheep around, he decided to herd toddlers instead. I was alone in the living when our oldest came running in, yelling, “Dad, Dad, a dog’s holding my brother hostage!” Believe it or not, that was not the weirdest thing that ever came out of the kid’s mouth. I followed him into the courtyard, and five toddlers, two or three cats, and the odd squirrel were standing in a knot under a big tree. And the dog circled them and stopped any of the cats from darting off. And if a child tried to leave, the dog would take the kid by the pant leg and gently pull him back. That was one of the funniest things I ever saw, and I wish I had taken a picture. The dog trotted up to me, tail wagging high and proud, just bursting to be praised for doing such a craftsman-like job. And I was all, “who’s the good boy?” That mutt was the best thing that happened since the invention of the babysitter. A watchful four-footed nanny was the answer to a parent’s prayer. He was gentle, diligent, and loyal. His daddy, the retired farmhand, said god help the person who tried to hurt any of the kids or cats. And that was something I wanted to hear. We were getting reports of a suspicious van at the elementary school. That dog was worth his weight in diamonds! Of course, Manager had to ruin it. I swear, if Jesus was bringing us all into heaven, she would find a way to ruin the moment. Manager came out having a tantrum over the “horrible” animal. Then she looked at me. My arms were crossed, and I tapped my foot. “There was no harm done,” I said quietly. So far, my partner and I were the only people who stood up to her, and she was getting scared of us. She stopped dead in mid-tirade while I stared her down. Most of my neighbors had been cowed by years of pandering to social workers. They deferred to Manager because they assumed she had the power she claimed to have. But the winds were changing. I had been living in Blair House for nearly two years, and there wasn’t a damn thing Manager could do about it. People were learning she was not all-powerful. A couple of other parents even came outside to support the dog and weren’t backing down! Mothers were asking Manager not to be such an (in so many words.) bitch. It was turning into a rebellion Manager couldn’t win. If she succeeded in making the old guy get rid of the dog, people would hate her more than ever, which could lead to a revolution. If she tried and failed, the revolution would happen immediately. People would start treating her like my partner, and I treated her. So Manager retreated while threatening reprisals if her son was ever tormented by the dog again. She pulled the kid away, who was crying for more doggy time. Did I mention how much I hated that woman? I knew that Manager wouldn’t let the matter drop. She was a sneak, and you always had to watch out for the knife to the back. I expected her to call animal control behind our backs. So I worked to head that off. I helped the old guy get his dog vaccinated and licensed. That earned me brownie points with his son and daughter-in-law. They spent most of their free time looking for a new place to live. I would have hated to see the old couple separated from their dog. They had a tough enough time adjusting to retirement. There was a herd of about a dozen sheep nearby, so I spoke to the owners, and as luck would have it, the owners needed a well-trained dog. So I got them together with the dog’s owner, and the pup’s life became a Loony-Toons script. Each morning he would leave the house and cut through the woods to herd sheep. After a hard day of bossing sheep, he would come home to dinner and tummy rubs from his humans. The old folks got to keep their doggy, and Manager was foiled again. It got to the point where my neighbors were coming to me with their Manager problems. Too much energy was wasted on dealing with Manager’s antics. My partner made a hobby of foiling her. This would result in screaming matches where Manager would yell threats, and my partner would laugh in her face. I always used a more indirect method of foiling her, but if it did lead to an argument, I never raised my voice. I would smile and say, “go ahead; I have a lawyer on standby.” That was purely a bluff on my part, but it always sent her packing. Not long after our second New Year at Blair House, we hit a deer. Our car was totaled. I was a prisoner at Blair House for nine entire months. That meant I had nine months of constant Manager drama. Not having transportation, I was limited to odd jobs and getting to them by bicycle. And there is nothing I loved more after a day of Alzheimer’s respite work or mowing lawns than to come home to more Manager drama. Not that Manager was always a bad thing to have around. We got behind on the rent during those nine months, and we were sick with worry. One night, the anxiety was so bad that I couldn’t sleep. I was waiting for the eviction notice and didn’t have a game plan. It was early morning, a time when nobody expected to see me. I was at my bedroom window and overheard a conversation between Manager and The Biker. It went down something like this. “The Landlord lost the building for taxes, and it’s being auctioned,” Manager said to The Biker. “That sucks,” The Biker replied. “What happens to us?” “We’ve got leases, so they can’t evict us right away,” Manager replied. “But I destroyed the ledgers, so they won’t know how much rent we’ve been taking.” At that point, I had to tiptoe away so they wouldn’t hear me laughing. No wonder the original landlord lost the building with friends like that. But I slept easier that night knowing that Manager’s greed worked in my favor. We stopped worrying about our portion of the rent until I got working again. We were also a lot more civil to Manager. Which was a mistake. Chris and Debbie had become the biggest Blair House soap opera. I talked about them in The Night Carlos Died. We never saw them sober anymore. Chris had lost his maintenance position, and his free rent went with it. He moved into Debbie’s apartment, and they spent their days drinking themselves stupid. In their defense, their housemate had just been shot by the cops. But that was no excuse to pick a fight with The Biker. Those two were the meanest drunks I had ever met. They took to downing a quart of cheap vodka between them and getting into screaming matches. Chris would come downstairs to stay away from Debbie. Usually, he’d wait until Debbie had passed out and go back upstairs, where he’d join her in the Land of Nod. But this time, The Biker came out to ask him to please keep it down. It was a reasonable request, and The Biker was careful to mind his manners. He did nothing to deserve Chris turning around and giving him the same verbal abuse he had just given his girlfriend. Chris was such an asshole when drunk that he inspired me to quit what little drinking I did do. And I wouldn’t have blamed The Biker for tossing him across the lawn again. Instead, The Biker destroyed all the outlaw stereotypes by calling the cops. Chris stayed where he was and kept screaming at The Biker’s door. I had come out to see what all the noise was about and stayed to watch things unfold. I was thrilled to see Officer Clark (not his real name) arrive to de-escalate the problem. I wasn’t as friendly with Clark as I was with a few other officers, but I respected the hell out of him. Officer Clark was the hardest-working cop in Belvidere. He was hell on speeders, hunters, and deer spotters. Not only did he bust them, but he also reported arrests to professional groups like the medical licensing board or the Bar Association. You would be amazed how many doctors and lawyers went to Belvidere to get cross-eyed drunk and shoot at anything that moved. And Clark also confiscated tons of Saturday Night Specials and other illegal handguns from deer spotters. Clark was focused on keeping people safe and did an outstanding job. So this was the officer dispatched to get Chris back under control. Clark had an edge to him that made even drunks cautious, and he was usually able to get Chris under control. But not this time. Clark got out of his vehicle and confronted Chris, and Chris kept getting more out of control, yelling and screaming in Clark’s face. Finally, Clark put a warning hand on Chris’s shoulder, and Chris tore the glasses off Clark’s face and threw them against the wall. I could hear the lenses crack. Clark had his back to me, but I could see Chris, and he wore the same expression my stepson had while testing the limits. Belvidere, NJ, did not deserve its police force. I was positive that Clark was going to lose his shit. I felt sick from anticipating the violence. Instead, Clark took Chris down with a non-violent Aikido move. Chris was face down on the ground but not hurt. Clark should have taken Chris in, and that was that. As bad luck would have it, Debbie had woken up and followed Chris outside so they could continue their screaming session on the front lawn. Instead, she saw Officer Clark handcuffing Chris’s hands behind his back. She forgot she was mad at Chris and focused all her drunken rage on Clark. Debbie ran up behind Clark and kicked him in the ass. Hard! I could hear Clark cry out! He stumbled forward, pulling Chris’s arms in directions they weren’t supposed to go. Chris screamed in agony, and Debbie tried to kick Clark a second time. Only he dodged, and she fell on her ass. At that point, I laughed so hard that I didn’t see the second patrol car arrive. My partner and our kids came out in time to see two more officers arrive to help Clark. Chris had his face in the grass, his arms cuffed behind him. Debbie was on her back, windmilling her limbs so Clark couldn’t get the cuffs on her. The other two cops had to hold her down while Clark cuffed her. “Don’t get involved,” my partner advised. “Like I’m going to walk into that debacle?” I responded. “I’m just going to help Clark find his glasses.” The kids watched Chris and Debbie get dragged into separate police cars. A third patrol car arrived to drive Clark back to the station. He couldn’t drive without his glasses. I found them for him, but there wasn’t any good news. One arm had been bent in half, and a lens had crazed. “I’m sorry, Clark,” I said. “I paid 200 dollars for shatterproof lenses,” he mourned. “I’d be looking to get my money back,” I replied lightly, trying to improve his mood. Officer Clark had a very difficult day. His glasses got broken, there was a nasty streak on his temple, and a drunk kicked him in the ass. I should not have tried to wise-ass a laugh out of him… “Chris is paying for my new pair,” Clark replied, giving me the stink-eye. “I think that’s fair,” I said. “And I’m going to talk to Chris about this. He usually listens to me, and….” “Chris and Debbie are going to jail,” Officer Clark interrupted with such finality that I stopped trying. And truth be told, I didn’t blame him. Those two had been out of control since Carlos was shot. And all Clark wanted to do was calm the situation. It was entirely Chris and Debbie’s fault they ended up doing 60 days in Warren County Prison. And it did them some good to be in jail. They were going to kill themselves if they didn’t dry out. Officer Clark could have had Chris and Debbie put away for a few years. But he didn’t see the point. He dropped the assault on a police officer charge on a plea deal. They spent two months in jail with two years probation and addiction counseling. And those two months were the most surreal I can remember because Manager decided we were friends. I still shudder when I look back at this and blame myself for being civil to her. I should have known it was a bad idea. It started during deer season when drunks with guns descended on Belvidere like an invading army. Chris and Debbie had just started their sentences. It was a warm September day, and I was reading on the front stoop, where I was least likely to be hit by a stray bullet. Manager came running past me and yelled, “come on, get up!” Please don’t ask me why I got up and followed her. I must have been curious as to what flew up her ass. And I was also very bored. I followed her behind the dumpster, and she stopped in a clearing and started looking around. “What are we looking for?” I asked her, not seeing anything. “There were hunters here, and it’s illegal for them to be this close to the building,” she replied. That gave me a split moment of brain freeze. Then the words “What. THE. FUCK!!!” echoed through my mind, and I started looking around more carefully. I may not be Daniel Boone, but my father taught me a few things about tracking. And there was a long trail of broken saplings and weeds heading towards the road. The hunters must have already been on their way to a deer processor. I wanted to grab her by the neck, shake her, and scream, “are you trying to get us killed?” But I refrained. Mostly because I felt like an idiot for following her. And having been raised by dangerous lunatics, I had learned to be moderate in my responses. “What were you going to do if there were hunters here?” I asked her patiently. A blank look crossed her face. She had to think hard about that one. Then she said, “go back to the house and call the police.” “Why didn’t you just call the police?” I asked. “They told me not to call them unless I saw the hunters,” she said. “I heard the gunshot, so I ran out to look.” What could I do except go home? Then I had to face my partner’s reaction. “Why the hell did you follow her? Are you nuts? You could have been shot!” How does one answer those questions, except with the truth? “I was wondering what she was panicking over, and how long did it take you to figure out I’m nuts?” “Don’t let Manager mess with you like this,” they told me. “I don’t understand why she’s even talking to me,” I replied. This was before Manager played stupid games with the social workers. I was still trying to keep it civil and professional whenever possible. “Chris is in jail, and she’s looking for somebody to boss around,” my partner explained. I saw the light. I often noticed how Manager bullied Chris as if they were still in a relationship. She would have told Chris to follow her as she called out to me. And for the same stupid shit. “And I’m walking into it,” I said. “Don’t do her any more favors,” my partner suggested. “Do I look stupid?” I asked them. “Do I have to answer that?” my partner replied. Of course, my partner was right. The next day she asked me to haul some trash out, just like she would with Chris. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “But you know I have a bad back and knees. I’d hurt myself.” She soon learned to ask The Biker to do the odd jobs, which was actually the right guy to go to. The Biker had taken over as maintenance man, and he got the free rent. So why go to me? I think it’s because I’m flypaper for freaks. For the next few weeks, Manager kept coming to me to discuss all her evil thoughts and illegal plans. As if I were her partner in crime. I never invited it. I didn’t want it. And I felt no remorse about going to my neighbors and telling them about the underhanded trick Manager was about to pull on them. Another thing Manager kept doing was asking me about Chris and Debbie’s apartment. Debbie had two elderly and obese cats, and my partner and I were caring for them. We checked on the kitties two or three times a day, and I managed to make friends with one of them. His brother was so timid he hid in a closet, and I had to look inside to ensure he was still breathing. Manager kept asking me what condition the apartment was in. And it was very well maintained. The only sign of alcoholism was the open quart of vodka on the kitchen counter. I was tempted to pour it down the sink and eliminate the bottle. But I knew I would hate it if anybody did that to me. So I contented myself with not capping the bottle and letting the contents evaporate. The questions escalated. Manager started to ask about the furniture. What furniture did they have in the living room? Of course, I only gave the vaguest of answers. We sealed Debbie’s door with scotch tape, and the seal hadn’t been broken. She could have used her pass key to get in. In fact, I was amazed she hadn’t already. One day, the tape had been pulled from the door frame. I wasn’t surprised. The day before, she tried to thrust a Polaroid camera into my hands and demanded I take pictures. I explained that it was illegal and refused. Manager couldn’t contain herself any further and had to look. She used her passkey and broke the seal. As soon as my partner saw the break-in, they reported it to Warren County Legal Aid, who acted as Chris and Debbie’s attorneys. The next day, I returned from riding my bike in the Poconos, and Manager finally came to the point. Chris had an antique china cabinet that belonged to his mother. Manager wanted it. She figured that as the ex-wife, she was entitled to it, and it didn’t matter that Chris’s mother passed after the divorce. She tried to bully my partner into opening the door, so The Biker could carry it out for her. But you don’t even think about bullying my partner, and The Biker would have no part in it. I have no idea why she wouldn’t use her passkey. I guess she wanted to blame my partner if the police got involved. Undaunted, Manager came to me and told me she was planning to illegally evict Chris and Debbie for being in arrears. She hired a couple of guys to go in and bring all of Chris and Debbie’s stuff put on the curb and the china cabinet in her apartment. She told me I could take the cats in if I wanted to. Otherwise, she was going to have them put down. That woman was so evil even Cruella Deville wouldn’t associate with her. Chris and Debbie had already been in the process of being legally evicted. But Blair House was in legal limbo. There needed to be an owner or agent authorized to sign the papers and take legal possession of the apartment. Chris and Debbie could only be removed from their apartment once Blair House was sold. And that took months. Once again, only the gods of madness know why Manager came to me. Maybe she thought I would be scared into letting her into Chris and Debbie’s apartment. I didn’t like Warren County Legal Aid in the least, and I had damn good reason not to trust them. But they were the only game in town and a five-minute walk from my front door. I explained the situation to the secretary and was pleasantly surprised when they made themselves useful. The next day, Manager got a court order hand delivered by Officer Clark. There would be no illegal eviction. Chris and Debbie’s property stayed right where it was. When Debbie got out of jail, her cats were waiting for her. By then, the timidest cat would let me pet him a little. Chris came home to his beloved mother’s china cabinet. And Manager never said a civil word to me again. Soon the building was auctioned to a bank, and it was outright war between us. Maybe a week after Chris was released, he came to the house and dropped his car’s registration on the table. “It’s your problem now,” he said. Thanks to my partner’s wonderful mother, we could pay all the fees to get back on the road. I was working again. But Clinton’s welfare reform was going into effect, and life was never the same again.
Major Hoop’s House. One of the oldest houses in New Jersey.
My partner and I had a minor disagreement over how I should title this post. They wanted me to call it “Hillbilly Hell.” And they sure had a point! It was hell for us! In 1992, Belvidere, NJ, was one of the most isolated places in northwestern New Jersey. It was a rural backwater surrounded by cornfields. There was a little strip mall with a supermarket, a Chinese restaurant, and small retail shops. And, of course, there was a laundromat. It was close enough to walk to, which was a mercy. Otherwise, you were stuck with the shops in town.
There was a tiny grocery store in the town center, a pet shop, an excellent deli, a little bookshop, and two libraries. Belvidere was the country seat, so we got the county and town library. At least I always had reading material. The grocery store had a very nice meat counter, but it was a little on the expensive side. Sounds absolutely idyllic, doesn’t it? We hated every second we had to live there. We were utterly isolated. We only got to see or catch up with our old friends on the Third Sunday in May Picnic in Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. We never missed a picnic. It was the only time we felt any connection with our old lives.
Belvidere was one of the oldest bergs in New Jersey. Maybe one of the first cities in that part of the state. It was founded by Major Hoops and once home to Robert “Bob” Miller, who was famous for embezzling the Continental Congress into insolvency. There were a few revolutionary war-era buildings in the area. My mother-in-law nearly burned one of them down. She had her oil pan replaced, and the mechanics didn’t put a new cap on it. So oil splashed on the engine as she drove, and black smoke rose from under the hood.
Of course, MIL called the garage and asked about it. But the mechanic assured her that oil had spilled on the engine during the replacement. She shouldn’t worry about it, and it would burn away on its own. MIL took him at his word and decided to drive the 70 miles to our house. She figured the oil would burn off by the time she got to us. Things went fine on the highway, where there weren’t many twists, turns, and bumps. But once she turned onto Alternate 22, the oil splashed out of her engine in buckets. Her whole car was surrounded by black smoke, but the mechanic had assured her that it was supposed to do that, so she kept driving.
So there she was, driving down Mauch Chunk Road with a solid thunderhead of black smoke pouring out from under her hood. MIL was a mile from our place and decided to pull into a diner to use the bathroom. The restaurant was a log cabin built a little after the constitution was ratified and a county landmark. MIL parked up against the 200-year-old wooden building and ran into the bathroom.
She was no sooner in the restroom when the car burst into flames. Fire shot out from under the hood and kissed the cabin’s well-seasoned logs. A pair of Belvidere cops and a few volunteer firefighters were having lunch. They jumped into action. One of the cops burned both his palms pushing the car away from the diner. While a firefighter grabbed an extinguisher. The second firefighter called for a truck while the second cop banged on the lady’s room door and shouted, “Hey, Lady, your car’s on fire.”
MIL yells back, “don’t worry, it’s supposed to do that!”
MIL came back outside, and her car had been pushed to the middle of the lot while firefighters doused it with a high-pressure hose. The entire front end was blackened and cracked, and the tires exploded. To this day, my partner and I crack up if one of us says, “it’s supposed to do that.”
I went into town the following Monday and saw one of the town cops in civvies, whose hands were bandaged. “Hi, Bob; what happened to your hands?” I asked
“You’re not going to believe this, Bill, but this ditzy redhead was driving with black smoke pouring out of the hood. Kent and I were having lunch at the Log Cabin, and we were putting our food down to get in the car to stop her. But she drove into the lot and parked right next to us. Then her car caught fire!”
“I heard it was supposed to do that,” I said, my face flushed. “That was my mother-in-law.”
“You poor son of a bitch,” Bob said sympathetically.
I can’t blame my mother-in-law, really. Not only is she one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met, but she is also the least mechanically inclined. Besides, she was heading for Blair House. I’m convinced we lived on top of a cursed burial ground, like in that movie. I never saw any paranormal events, like floating toys or dead preachers. Still, the place seemed to attract misery and bad luck. And who needed dead preachers when we had the apartment manager? That woman was misery on two legs.
I was outside late one evening, and I saw Manager lumbering around in her bedclothes. She looked like a bear in a pink nightgown. I still shudder at the memory. When I first moved in, a volleyball net was set up, and we’d go outside on the weekends and play. Manager decided that she wanted to manage a Blair House softball team. Nobody was interested. Half the players were Sikhs who didn’t know baseball from Jujitsu. And we weren’t playing by any rules. We were drinking beer and hitting the ball back and forth.
Two days later, we got a letter written on Blair House Stationary forbidding the playing of volleyball. Manager took our refusal personally. The nut thought she was Nurse Ratchet and the rest of us were her inmates. Then she wondered why we all gave her the fish eye when she tried to sign us up for her softball team. Only Chris, her ex-husband, joined. But poor Chris couldn’t get himself to stand up to her.
My poor partner had moved in several months before I did. And Manager tried to dictate my partner’s life. They put up with it because they hoped management would let me move in. Then we found out that Manager had been lying, and did the gloves come off! I didn’t announce I was moving in. I just showed up with all my stuff. A few days later, Manager was at the door, threatening to have my family evicted if I didn’t leave immediately. Then my partner showed her all the papers, all legal and proper, and told her to take a long walk off a short pier. That woman spent the next three and a half years trying to me kicked out.
As luck would have it, Manager had a kid the same age as our youngest boy. Our apartments adjoined, and the kids became fast friends. We let our guard down enough to let our toddler into Manager’s apartment to play. We figured it would be alright if her ex-husband, the maintenance man, was around. But one day, Chris wasn’t there, and Manager burst into the bathroom while our son was peeing. Our youngest is autistic, and that moron traumatized him so severely that he still can’t go to the toilet unless the door is locked.
Manager found what she was looking for, though. There was a ring of contact dermatitis on both legs. I also get the same type of rash from many artificial fibers. His mom and I had already spotted it and treated it. But Manager reported it to DYFS.
Now the Division of Youth and Family Services gets crank calls twice an hour. And god knows my parents had phoned in their own share. But when Manager called in her crank report, they had crank reports from two unrelated cranks and had to send an investigator.
The local DYFS office had its share of problems. They were notorious for having snatched a kid from a loving home because the kid had the same name as an abused child. And instead of admitting to the problem, they doubled down and insisted they were right. And the poor abused child was left in hell. DYFS sent us an investigator who must have been a significant problem. She violated our 5th, 6th, and 14th amendment rights by staring through our window without announcing herself. This caused further trauma to my youngest, a teen, before we could open the shades.
Madam Stormtrooper then pounded on the door like a cop. Mom was in the bathroom, so my ten-year-old answered the door and physically blocked her from storming inside. Our four-year-old was in the middle of a full-scale meltdown over the nasty person who stared through our windows. My partner heard our oldest yelling that a business card wasn’t legal identification. The woman tried to force her way in without legal identification, and our oldest kid kept blocking her.
Stymied by a ten-year-old. My partner went to the phone and started calling the cops while the idiot yelled she was from DYFS, waving her card over her head. I don’t think that ever happened to her before.
My partner put down the phone to demand her business, and do you know what the first question was out of that idiot social worker’s mouth? She pointed to my youngest and asked, “Is his father Black?”
My partner slammed the door in that racist bitch’s face and told her to come back with the cops. Then they called the local NAACP chapter to ask for advice for reporting racism from a state social worker. Then they called DYFS and made a phone complaint. Later, I found the direct number of the president of the NAACP and gave him a call. I can’t remember his name, but he was a Baptist preacher and very supportive. He called DYFS on our behalf. We got a very conciliatory call from DYFS while I was at work, and they scheduled a legal interview.
“I want to see a copy of the complaint and a legal warrant before she steps foot in here,” My partner demanded. “I also want to know why she thought it was appropriate or legal to ask if my husband is Black.”
My partner got a stammering apology and promised everything would be legal and proper. The same social worker returned the next day before I went to work; she was all smiles and reconciliation. We didn’t get a copy of the complaint. But we did get a letter of apology for the “misunderstanding” on county stationery, and she presented a county photo ID. I also showed the woman my contact dermatitis and how it was treated.
Then I told her exactly who had been making the reports and why. She hemmed and hawed and told me she couldn’t say who it was. I replied, “that’s okay; I know who has been making those reports and why.”
“I guess we can put this down to welfare wars,” she said with a smile.
“By the way,” I added as she headed out the door. “We Dunlaps are from Scotland.” I can never resist a final dig. Out of my many bad qualities, that one is the worst. But I will never regret that one last needle.
That Social Worker’s casual racism saved us from any more visits from social services. Like all the other Warren County Social Services, DYFS was racist and afraid of being called out. Which was a relief because siccing the authorities on neighbors was a popular pastime at Blair House. That was what the social worker meant by “Welfare Wars.”
We were frequently harassed by false police reports. The residents literally didn’t have anything better to do than call the cops on each other. My partner and I always responded to this by not responding. The cops would come, we spoke to the cops, the cops left, and we went on with our lives. We never called the cops on anybody unless it was something serious like child abuse and domestic violence. We never responded to harassment with more harassment. People stopped messing with us after a few months. It was no fun when we didn’t play too.
There was one guy nobody dared to call the cops on. He was a full brother in the Pagans MC. He lived in the corner apartment. We along great. I ran with YIP in my younger days and learned the care and feeding of bikers. I knew how not to offend, which was more than some other people I could mention, like Chris.
As I mentioned in The Night Carlos Died, Chris was a raging alcoholic. And when he drank, he became the biggest asshole on the planet. He and Debbie lived above the biker, and sparks frequently flew. Chris was in a lawn chair on the shared porch one day. He was so drunk he mouthed off at the biker, who picked him up, lawn chair and all, and tossed him about ten feet. Chris landed on the pavement, and I was the one who went to the hospital with him.
I managed to broker peace and convinced Chris to keep his mouth shut when the biker was around. But of course, it didn’t last more than a week. The Biker started accusing Chris and Debby of making a thumping sound all night. They denied doing it, and the thumping didn’t stop. It looked like The Biker would take his lost sleep out on them with a tire iron.
The problem was the baby upstairs. He was banging his head on his crib from the moment his mom left to work until she got home. The poor thing’s father was a piece of work. We used to hear the child crying, and the father would respond by screaming at him. Then we listened to the baby being spanked and the child crying in pain and panic. That was when we called the police.
The cops played it cool and said it was an anonymous welfare check. The next day the father tried to blast the television to keep people from hearing him screaming, which annoyed The Biker. I have no idea how that creep kept his baby from crying, but it resulted in head-banging that kept The Biker up all night. It got to the point where The Biker called the cops and invited them into his apartment to hear the banging. Then the cops went upstairs to investigate.
Once in Chris and Debbie’s apartment, the cops could hear the banging coming from the apartment next to Chris and Debbie. That poor baby was hitting his head with considerable force. The police contacted the mom, who came home, found out what was happening, and sparks flew. She moved out the next day. I still remember her exit. She was dressed for work, and her hair coiled in a perfect French braid. She carried a suitcase in one hand and had the baby on their hip. My partner even helped her get the baby in the car seat. That was the last I saw of them. I hope they had a happily ever after.
Relations were strained between the father and me, by the way. Lucky for me, the full wrath of The Biker was now focused on him. The father left a few days later, and The Biker seemed to have a sense of accomplishment about it. He was so glad to get things resolved that he made peace with Chris and Debbie.
Of course, it was too much to ask that Blair House become peaceful. Perish the thought! The drama with Chris and Debbie was over, and the baby was in a safer place, but The Biker still had his girlfriend. Much of The Biker’s problems with Chris and Debbie stemmed from living with his girlfriend. She was a one-woman riot. She was the craziest, meanest, and nastiest drunk I had ever met. Like many alcoholics, she was pleasant when she was sober, but she wasn’t pleasant very often. And, of course, she was totally unpleasant to her boyfriend.
The biker was a very even-tempered person, not at all the stereotype. I haven’t met any outlaw bikers who I consider crazy or nuts. And they’re rarely violent without a sound financial reason. My main rule for dealing with bikers is to never do business with them and always buy a round. If The Biker was any stereotype, he would have been violent to his girlfriend. But he refrained from defending himself when she punched, kicked, and bit him.
I remember them returning from a bar at about two in the morning. They were both drunk, but The Biker was steadier than his chick. She was yelling and screaming at his back. But he just ignored her and headed for the door. Biker Chick was way too drunk to watch where she was going, and she hit her head on a tree branch and landed on her ass. Anybody else would have been concussed, but Biker Chick jumped to her feet and screamed, “hit me again, motherfucker,” and started to punch out the tree. She hit that tree until her knuckles were bloody. Biker lifted her under his arm and carried her inside. Her limbs thrashed, and she screamed like a cat in heat.
Of course, it was hell for the Biker Chick’s daughter. The poor kid acted out her mother’s violence. She was the same age as my stepson, who tried to play nicely with her. But it always devolved into violence. I always put it down to the girl having to grow up seeing her mother’s drunken rages. Watching her mother’s rages was traumatic, and I was in my 30s. God knows how bad it must have been for a kid.
My stepson was raised to never raise his hand to a female. He ended up taking a couple of bad beatings from the kid, and I would have to intervene. To give Biker Chick credit, she tried to be an involved parent when she wasn’t shit-faced. She laid down the law and forbade her daughter from playing with my stepson. None of us were happy about it, but we agreed it was the only way to prevent violence.
The Biker finally kicked his girlfriend out of the apartment, and Blair House became quieter without them screaming at each other. The Biker had a boy my stepson’s age. He came over a lot more since Biker Chick and her daughter moved out. Some afternoons Biker and I would sit on the porch, drink beer and listen to The Grateful Dead and Neil Young. The Biker also had a son with his ex-wife, who lived near the river. He and my stepson got along well enough. It’s a shame that years later, he and his father got busted for distributing meth and are both serving life sentences.
Maybe I should call this post “Hillbilly Hell.” I don’t think anybody was happy there. Not me, not Chris or Debbie, and The Manager was the most miserable of all. The Managers’ kids had it worse. She had two. One my toddler’s age and a girl a few years older. That woman had Munchhausen’s by Proxy. She was constantly diagnosing her children with the most amazingly mysterious ailments. Worse, She found a doctor feelgood in Philadelphia willing to give the kids heavy drugs for any disorder Manager-mama could think up.
I remember talking to Chris and begging him to do something. Manager had those kids on Ritalin for imaginary ADHD. I had watched them nodding out like dockside junkies. I begged Chris to intervene, but, of course, he wouldn’t do anything. He didn’t have the backbone. I understand the kids grew up alright, but all those pharmaceuticals couldn’t have been good for them.
Soon after the baby incident, a young couple with several terrariums of snakes moved in right next to us. I’m phobic of snakes. I’m also phobic of loud, aggressive assholes who abuse their girlfriends. And this guy was the abusive bastard from hell. On the first night there, he beat his girlfriend so severely that I was the one who called the cops.
I never call the police if I can help it. Not even a mellow bunch of cops like the BPD, but there was no way I could ignore that. I could hear him striking her. And her screams were terrifying. The cops came, but the girl was too scared to press charges. The next day, the boyfriend took the girl’s battery out of her car to ensure she didn’t leave him. That was alright, we had an automobile, and the battery was charged and ready. My partner helped the girl pack her things and return home to her parents.
Things were tense for a while. The boyfriend kept threatening to kill us, only to have The Biker pick him up by the collar and told to behave. Two days later, the boyfriend was arrested for stealing a car battery and beating his girlfriend black and blue. She got braver once she was no longer in physical danger, and I understand the creep went to jail. But that left an apartment full of snakes in the apartment.
Clearing out that apartment was not Chris’s finest moment. He managed to break a terrarium holding a seven-foot python. Chris freaked and ran from the snake who disappeared. Nobody wanted a seven-foot python wandering around Blair House. Chris and The Biker dropped their animosity and searched that apartment from stem to stern. They even chain-sawed the sofa in case the snake was hiding there. But there was no sign of the snake.
Eventually, fall moved aside for winter, and the temperatures fell under twenty degrees. We figured that Mr. Snake had frozen to death, and we stopped worrying about him. Then after winter turned to spring, Mr. Snake decided to venture out of the basement for some evening air. Unknown to anybody, the snake found its way into the Blair House Basement, which was nice, toasty warm, and filled with yummy rats. And it was such a perfect environment that the snake grew another two feet.
Of course, that was the evening my youngest was running barefoot through the grass. My son met Mr. Snake near a hole in the foundation. The snake poked his head out, and my kid froze in terror. The head moved, and my kid kicked at it reflexively. Then the snake bit him on the foot, and my kid finally screamed.
“That can’t be a snakebite,” My partner said, looking at the puncture marks on his foot.
“I looks like a snakebite,” I replied.
“When was the last time you saw a snakebite?” my partner demanded. Today we could have called up a picture on the internet. Back in 1995, we had to find help. Several Sikhs were living in one of the upstairs apartments. I found myself asking one of them for help, and being some of the nicest people on Earth, my neighbor came to see my son’s foot.
The poor kid became nonverbal during stress and couldn’t tell us what had happened. Our Sikh neighbor came and looked at the foot, and he turned ashen gray and told us to take him to the emergency room immediately.
Who knew that boa constrictors left a similar bite mark pattern as some venomous snakes in Punjab? Not us and not our neighbor. We got the kid in the car and high-tailed it for Warren Hospital. The fact that we had a possible venomous snakebite won us an immediate room and a doctor. The doctor looked at the bite and said there weren’t any venomous snakes that big in the Northeast, and if he had to guess, our kid had been bit by a pet boa constrictor.
That was when we remembered the lost snake. It was still alive. “No, it can’t be,” was Chris’s reaction when we woke him up to tell him the fucking boa was still alive.
“My dad found one in a cellar once,” Debbie said. Debbie’s late father had been a professional exterminator specializing in larger pests like raccoons and snakes.
Chris didn’t want to hear that. I felt terrible for telling him, but he was the maintenance man. The next day, he and The Biker were in the basement with flashlights, looking for the snake. As Debbie observed, this was a job for a professional exterminator. Still, the owner wasn’t going to spring for a professional, not when Chris got free rent. Needless to say, the snake was never found. For all I know, it’s still in the bowels of Blair House, growing fat on river rats and growing until it’s big enough to crush and eat residents. And if anybody is still living in those apartments, I hope they sleep well tonight.
I don’t think anybody could have found that snake because the evil forces of Blair House protected it with dark and ancient magic born of opiates and madness. Maybe my partner is right. Perhaps I should call this Hillbilly Hell. But there were so many good times as well. My partner and I joined Chris with our instruments on a summer evening. There was hitting the volleyball over the next with one hand while drinking Budweiser with the other. And I got to grill every nice evening. I learned to grill corn on the cob at Blair House.
It wasn’t all that bad during the first two years. And much of what we were going through was more due to work than when we lived. It wasn’t until the last two years that it became Hillbilly Hell.
I’ll start by saying I’m not a big supporter of American law enforcement. But I witnessed a police shooting that was a clear case of the police protecting civilians and themselves. Carlos had lost his ever-loving mind and stabbed his housemates with a bayonet. Then he charged the cops yelling, “Kill me, or I’ll kill you.” The police had no choice but to shoot. Carlos committed suicide by cop. And the people who were actually responsible for the tragedy never suffered any repercussions.
Let me tell you about the Belvidere, NJ, Police force. There wasn’t a killer in the lot of them. They were the mellowest group of law enforcement officers I had ever met. BPD was respectful to everybody, including the poor residents. I didn’t know every officer personally, but those I spoke to had transferred from urban police forces in tough places like Trenton and Newark. They came to Belvidere to write traffic tickets and rescue kittens from trees. Not one of them deserved to be Carlos’s exit strategy. In fact, Belvidere didn’t deserve the professional police department they were lucky enough to have. And Belvidere is literally the only police force I would say that about.
It all began in the early winter of 1993 after Debbie finished her two-year prison sentence. Carlos was her boyfriend, and they were both junkies who spent half their time shooting up in New York City and the other half sponging off Debbie’s mother. Carlos attacked the old lady when she refused to give them drug money. He ended up with a four-year sentence, and Debbie did two with some time for good behavior.
Debbie reached her low. She turned her life around. She was on a methadone program, and her HIV was under control. She had reconciled with her mother just before the old lady died, and her mother left enough money for Debbie to move into Blair House. It was a crying shame Debbie was still a raging alcoholic, but addiction stories don’t end like they do on the Hallmark channel.
Chris, Our maintenance man, was also a raging alcoholic. And Debbie discovered that she loved getting drunk with Chris as much as she liked shooting up with Carlos. So Debbie decided to leave her junkie ex-boyfriend behind, and Chris and Debbie became our closest couple-friends. That should give you a clue of how screwed up our Hillbilly Heaven was. Those two were constantly getting into trouble, and my partner and I kept pulling them out. And it wasn’t one-sided. One day, Chris came into the house, tossed his car registration on the table, and said, “it’s your problem now.” Yes, Chris and Debbie were alcoholics, but that doesn’t mean they were bad people.
Carlos was another story. Debbie was a Warren County girl who went to New York and fell for a “bad boy.” Carlos was the bad boy. I can’t say if he led her into heroin addiction, but he was there to make things worse. And it was a real codependent relationship. He was abusive, and she couldn’t pry herself away from him. Even after she hooked up with Chris, she couldn’t let go. Carlos was also a paranoid schizophrenic. He was obeying the voices when he attacked Debbie’s mother. He also suffered from AIDS Dementia. He spent four years in the prison hospital because he was too dangerous for the general population.
For some damned reason, they released the poor bastard when his sentence was up. No support. No help. No rehab. They just kicked him out the front gate. So there Carlos was, a ticking time bomb with no place to go and nothing to get there with. What else could the poor putz do but walk the half mile from Warren County Correctional Center to Chris and Debbie’s front door? And there he stayed until he snapped out and tried to murder the people who cared for him.
Debbie felt guilty for breaking up with Carlos while he was still in prison and breaking their suicide pact. They were supposed to kill themselves when their AIDS got too debilitating. Debbie actually felt guilty for choosing to survive. She asked Chris if Popi could stay with them for a while. Chris had the backbone of a banana slug and agreed to it. Carlos squatted in their apartment for months. He didn’t contribute a dime, either. Carlos wouldn’t even let Chris help him get his SSI reinstated. He had become too paranoid.
I didn’t know about Carlos’ HIV or his Schizophrenia until after the dust settled and I heard it from the police. He seemed to be the mildest of people. Carlos rarely spoke but smiled a lot. And he seemed harmless. The poor bastard was so short and skinny that a moderate wind could have blown him away. His big black mustache should have looked ridiculous on other skinny men, but it worked on him.
Too quiet is always a red flag. Every insane murderer you hear about on the news is always quiet. They always smile. And always seemed friendly. Until they’re not. It was that silence that made me uneasy around Carlos. In the six months he had been around, I can’t remember exchanging more than a few words with him. He just sat there and smiled. I suspect he no longer had anything in common with the real world and lived in a monstrous fantasy world. I’m still freaking out that such a dangerous person was so close to my kids.
Every once and a while, I would get little hints from Chris that things weren’t as harmonious as they appeared. He was annoyed that Carlos wasn’t contributing any money. And he was a little bit jealous of the attention Debbie gave him. I asked Chris why he put up with the freeloader. And, as usual, he backed down and said the poor guy didn’t have anyplace else to live. It wasn’t my business, so I didn’t press. I don’t know if it would do any good if I did. Both Chris and Debbie were stubbornly self-destructive.
Of course, Chris’s ex-wife, the manager, was the catalyst. She was one of those people who fucks things up on people for fun. One day, it occurred to her that Carlos was living off the lease. And she couldn’t have the rules bent like that. Chris and Debbie tried to put Carlos on the lease, and Chris’ ex-wife claimed the landlord refused permission.
I didn’t believe it for a second. The manager was a toxic narcissist who would lie to keep in practice. I also think the racist bitch didn’t want a Puerto Rican living on the property. I tried to help Carlos because I hated the manager’s guts more than I was afraid of him. But Chris and Debbie were okay with Carlos leaving. They wouldn’t admit it, but they were tired of having Carlos around.
Strangely enough, Carlos took the news very cheerfully. That should have warned us. Suicidal people always cheer up when they come to the final decision. His mood seemed damned strange, considering he was being kicked out on the street.
Despite the alcoholism, Chris and Debbie were better human beings than those who ran the prison. They tried to help Carlos. They made appointments with social security, doctors, and housing agencies. Anything to help him get stable. Chris was even willing to drive him to New York if that was what it took to help him get housing. But Carlos refused it all. He wouldn’t go to any appointments, and there was no way to force him. He claimed his plan was to walk to NYC. Of course, he had something totally different in mind.
The last time I saw Carlos alive was Sunday, June 5, 1994, the day before he was supposed to leave. I passed him while coming home from the butcher shop. I told him I would be sorry to see him go, which was a little white lie. He responded with his usual big charming grin, which creeped me out. Later, we went to the mall with my mother-in-law, and I forgot all about Carlos and his big friendly grin. I looked back at all the red flags he was waving and wondered how I could be so blasé as to put them out of my mind. I had grown used to having him around. It never occurred to me that he was about to snap. Even though it was apparent after it happened.
Blair House sat in the middle of a pleasant wooden lot. After my mother-in-law went home, we had our coffee outside. We came home with new lawn furniture. Mom and I sipped our coffee in the warm evening while the kids chased fireflies.
Meanwhile, Carlos was inside doing psycho-killer shit. He took the sharpest blade in the kitchen, an old bayonet Chris used to chop vegetables. Lucky for Chris and Debbie, bayonets didn’t have a proper grip. Otherwise, they would both have died that night.
Carlos came up behind Chris and plunged the bayonet into his kidney. The blade missed the sweet spot thanks to AIDS-weakened muscles and a poor grip. Chris pushed Carlos away and ran out of the apartment. Poor Chris was too terrified to make a sound. He managed to stagger down the stairs without falling.
Chris lurched through the door and weaved towards one of our nice new chairs. At first, I thought he was drunk. I was at the wrong angle to see the blood leaking from the wound and expected to help him upstairs again. My partner did see the blood dripping down our chair. They looked up at me and cried, “call an ambulance.”
“Get the kids inside,” Chris said, his voice sounding like it was coming from the grave.
“Hurry!” my partner said firmly.
While this was going on, Carlos entered the bedroom where Debbie had passed out drunk. She was lying on her back, and he stabbed her right in the chest. The blade hit a rib and bounced out of Carlos’s hand. Debbie gave out a blood-curdling scream that made me grab our youngest. I grabbed our oldest by the arm and tried to pull him inside, but he refused to move.
“Poppi stabbed me!” “He stabbed me!” Debbie screamed from the stairwell. She ran out of their apartment, her shirt dripping with blood. I thought she would die for sure.
“Get the kids inside!” Chris repeated. There was more urgency in his voice the second time. For once, my stepson didn’t give me any trouble. He ran ahead and opened the door while I carried the three-year-old. My partner stayed behind to help. I don’t think it even occurred to them that a crazy killer was about to burst through the door. But there wasn’t anything more they could do. Debbie warned them she had HIV and not to touch her bloody wound without hospital gloves.
To this day, I don’t know who called the cops. My stepson decided to go out for his mom, and I had to block the door to keep the kid inside. So I definitely didn’t call the cops. I heard the sirens seconds after I got the kids inside. The police lights flashed through the window and against the wall, which made the oldest more determined to go out. He stood with his back to the window, and I had all my attention on the kids. I was trying to soothe the three-year-old while the ten-year-old yelled at me.
I wasn’t watching the cops leave their cars and reach for their weapons. And my stepson was yelling too loudly for me to hear Carlos scream, “kill me, or I’ll kill you!” He waved the bloody bayonet and charged the three officers protecting the civilians. I did hear the gunshots. Altogether, the three officers fired off eight rounds and a warning shot. But I heard it as five. Some of the bullets were fired simultaneously. Five rounds hit Carlos, killing him instantly. Two shots were never accounted for. The eighth went through the downstairs apartment, frightening a poor Labrador Retriever who cried for her daddy for the rest of the night.
I froze from fear and confusion. My stepson went silent. I knew those sounds were gunshots, but I didn’t want to admit it. I desperately tried to convince myself they were something else. Fireworks, an ambulance backfiring, anything but gunshots. Within seconds, my partner ran inside, yelling, “get on the floor!” I found myself on top of my three-year-old without thinking. And my stepson tried to get outside again, and his mom had to wrestle with him. But it was over. No more gunshots. Carlos was killed right in front of my partner’s eyes. To this day, they still get PTSD flashbacks from the night Carlos died.
I never warmed up to Carlos, but I had difficulty believing he was dead. I had seen him that afternoon, and he was smiling. The memory of that happy smile still haunts me. My partner told me the cops killed him, but my brain wouldn’t accept the information. I kept going into denial and asking people if he would be alright. The police set up their temporary headquarters in the manager’s kitchen. God, that woman was in her glory! She was making coffee and sandwiches and kissing the police chief’s ass.
“Is Carlos going to be alright?” I asked the police chief when I came in to give a statement.
“Carlos is never going to be alright again,” the chief snapped. I think the chief was taking the whole thing worse than I was. He was a big guy with the stereotypical cop body. Like the rest of the force, he was there to be Andy Taylor, the town’s best friend. Shit like this wasn’t supposed to happen in Belvidere, NJ. But we both had to come to terms with it. I left and went to Chris and Debbie’s stoop. Carlos was still there, behind yellow tape. There were investigators around him, reporters arrived, and news photographers took pictures. Carlos was the biggest story in that berg since the Revolutionary War. I looked at Carlos and cried.
Debbie was incredibly lucky. She got out of it with only a few stitches. Poor Chris had a long recovery and used a colostomy bag for a few months. They both mended, but the drinking got worse than ever. Not that I could blame them. Carlos wasn’t the only bad thing that happened to them that night. Debbie got outed as HIV+ over the police radio. The dispatcher also revealed that the suspect had Schizophrenia and AIDS psychosis.
The press went nuts! That was just the sort of lurid story that sold newspapers back in the 1990s. They played the AIDS angle for all it was worth. My partner was in hysterics, the kids were having tantrums, and the goddamned reporters kept ringing the doorbell. And when I answered the door, the first thing that came out of their idiotic mouths was, “did you know they had AIDS?” I finally had to ask the cops to keep them away.
The country hazmat truck arrived, and they tossed our new lawn furniture into the dumpster. 28 years later, and I’m still pissed off over that. We had those chairs for less than three hours! And neither the cops nor the Board of Health knew that HIV couldn’t live outside the body. We could have washed those chairs off with bleach. Besides, it was Chris, not Debbie, who bled all over the chairs.
What was utterly unforgivable was the Board of Health wouldn’t let the dog’s owner into his apartment. The dog was crying harder because she knew daddy was back. The poor guy had to sit outside and listen to his baby cry while the forensic guys removed Carlos’s body and the hazardous waste guys steam-cleaned the porch. And that took about four hours. I feel as badly for that pup as I do for Chris and Debbie.
After tossing our lawn furniture and letting the dog suffer, you should have seen the mess they left. There were discarded vinyl gloves and used bandages all over the ground. I made myself responsible for cleaning it up and carefully used shovels and tree branches. There were still reporters around, and I got my picture taken disposing of a used rubber glove on the end of a stick.
Of course, the newspapers played the AIDS angle for all it was worth. Poor Debbie’s privacy was violated as her medical condition was on the local newspaper’s front page. Chris and Debbie became local pariahs and were shunned by the whole town. I caught a grade schooler spitting at them. And when I confronted him, he said, “they have AIDS, and that makes them bad people.” What can you do with that sort of mentality? And it was horrible to see it coming out of a child.
There was an investigation of the shooting. We were interviewed by a detective from the prosecutor’s office, who also happened to be my second cousin. My partner and I gave our statements, and we told the truth. The officers stepped in front of the civilians. They gave verbal warnings and a warning shot, but Carlos was determined to stab them. The cops got off, and I have no problem with that whatsoever.
What irks me more than anything else is nobody investigated why a paranoid schizophrenic with AIDS Psychosis and a history of violence was released into the community. He was not mentally competent to be released unsupervised. The prison administrators could have gone to court and had Carlos declared incompetent. He could have been placed under a conservator and hospitalized. It would have been the best thing for the community and the best thing for Carlos. But I think the whole thing boiled down to nobody caring about poor people.
Having Carlos committed was work. It would have taken the prosecutor’s office and the public defender working with the courts to have him taken care of. Putting Carlos in the hospital would have been a dent in somebody’s budget. Then there was the myth of impoverished people being a personal burden on the taxpayer.
Maybe things might have been a little different had Carlos been white. It’s barely possible that the powers-that-be might have put a little effort into helping a white prisoner. But Warren County hated poor white people almost as much as they hated minorities. Had things been different and Carlos attacked a pair of middle-class strangers. The prison authorities would have been investigated. It would probably be very superficial, but at least somebody would have looked. But Carlos attacked a pair of poor people doing their best to be decent human beings. And who the hell cares about poor people?
So, instead of improving the prison system, the authorities fell back on AIDS hysteria. Warren County was still in full AIDS Panic mode. The citizens of Belvidere had their middle-class NIMBYreflex stimulated, and Blair House had to go. Even though we were the victims more than they were. My partner even testified to a grand jury in the cops’ defense. Talk about gratitude! Blair House was sold to a bank before the summer was out, and the illegal harassment began a few months after the closing. And once again, my family would be in another fight for our lives.
If I had the money, I’d buy that grand old bastard a grander monument.
Work began at nine sharp. Larry wanted me there at seven; hell, he never wanted me to leave. I also wanted to go home at six. And Larry had to concede because I was all he had; god help me! If he had his way, I’d sleep at my desk, eat microwaved weight watcher meals and piss in bottles.
For those who haven’t read my first post, this was during the late summer of 1990. I worked for Pennsylvania Real Estate Magnate Larry Marra Sr. Once, he was the biggest real estate guy in the state. You went into his office, and you’d be greeted by a giant map of Pennsylvania, captioned, “Welcome to L. Marra Country!” I think everybody hated that poster. I remember Dave Boyer, the columnist from the Easton Express, writing about how that poster offended him.
This was late in the summer of 1990, and Larry was living the last two years of his life. And the amazing thing is he lasted that long. I described him as “The Picture of Dorian Grey that stepped out of the frame and went into real estate.” And I can’t think of a better description. He was an evil-looking character who had once been tall but shrunk in on himself. I assumed he was in his 80s and learned he was only entering his late 60s. Looking into his blue eyes was like staring into an abyss of rage and madness. Larry survived two or three heart attacks and lived thanks to a double pacemaker.
I already recounted the business reversals and personal betrayals that drove Larry into that house on Wolf St. in Easton, PA. His son stole oil properties and pocketed the profits. Larry’s girlfriend dumped him for domestic abuse, left a few of her deeds behind, and picked up a few of his on the way out. Plus, she took the entire maintenance crew with her. Larry couldn’t afford to hire new staff. Every property he had left was mortgaged to the max. A reasonable man would have known he was in a no-win situation. But Larry didn’t believe in unwinnable situations. He was the James Tiberius Kirk of Real Estate. He had gone to the mattresses in the Wolf St. House and fought a war he couldn’t win.
Larry was literally besieged by people trying to serve him legal papers. He hid in his house, never answering the door, and only aired it out on Sundays when it was against state law to serve court documents. Before starting work, I had to do a security sweep of the entire block. It was the one thing on my to-do list that never changed. I never caught anybody hiding in the bushes and figured Larry was getting paranoid. Until one day, a process server jumped out of the bushes two blocks away and tossed a subpoena through the broken van window. “You’ve been served, Larry, have a nice day!” he laughed as he did a victory jog away from the van. Larry was livid, and I started my security sweeps when I crossed into Easton.
From the outside, Larry’s house looked abandoned. The shrubbery grew to block the front door, and I had to take a side path to get in by the back door. From the inside, the house looked haunted. Larry kept his food on the half-finished back porch. He had a microwave, and it scared the hell out of me every time he used it. He’d set it and run into the kitchen, which looked like it belonged in a Rob Zombie movie. This is why Larry kept his food on the porch. The “Welcome to M. Marra Country” poster hung on the basement door next to the rusting hulk of a refrigerator. I have no memory of ever being in that basement or seeing any unimaginable horrors lurking down there. The one I worked for was bad enough.
Larry resisted any of my efforts to clean the place. Which should have been my first clue that his brain was shutting down. His personal office was filthy with papers, and files were tossed all over the floor. The entire house hadn’t been dusted or vacuumed in years. The hallway near my copying machine had the drywall torn off a wall. The big office in the front room looked like somebody had died in it. But it contained the best legal library in Northhampton County. My workplace was the file room where thousands of deeds were kept in cardboard boxes on rough 2X4 shelves. There was no ventilation in that room. I passed out from lack of oxygen a couple of times.
If I was lucky, he wouldn’t be home when I arrived. That happened a few times a week. Sometimes he would be gone for the entire day, which was idyllic. I’d go through the mail and write “return to sender” on legal-looking envelopes and toss them in the mailbox. Then I’d come back with a cup of coffee and go through my most important duty, checking the newspapers for any articles that mentioned his name. I had to cut them all out and make multiple copies.
Every article was uncomplimentary. Larry was the most hated man in four or five counties. All his properties were crumbling blights, and he didn’t have the staff to maintain them. His every waking hour was dedicated to his legal cases, and he couldn’t afford to pay his lawyers. Newspapers in Northhampton, Lehigh, Carbon, and Bucks counties all had it out for him. A more reasonable person would be a little more conciliatory. But not Larry. He was determined to sue every reporter and newspaper who criticized him.
I wasted a tremendous amount of time making endless copies of articles that said the same thing, “Mow Your Damn Lawns, Larry.” It got tedious after a few weeks. But now and then, some articles weren’t so dull. I came across an editorial that got a bit personal and mentioned that Larry’s ex-wife was also his stepmother. I didn’t copy that one because I was trying to be couth. I reckoned that Larry would want that brushed under the carpet and forgotten.
Did I ever regret that decision! He found out and chewed me out for ten minutes without breathing. I tried to ask him if he had read it. But it didn’t matter. The article was about him. He had tears in his eyes, “it was about me!” he cried, and I felt like shit. Larry loved the attention to the point where even negative attention made him happy. It made him feel as if he were still an important figure in the world. At that point, I realized I was copying just for his ego. And if that doesn’t remind you of our 45th president, reread it.
When left alone, I had tons more copying to do. Going through an entire toner cartridge in a day wasn’t unusual. On top of the morning vanity copying, I also got to xerox tons of records. They were to be used as evidence in the many varied lawsuits that made up Larry’s life. I got to handle the most intimate pieces of Marra history. I found his divorce papers. The ones where he divorced for incest. I also found a few interesting tidbits about his ex-girlfriend. She was a pretty slick operator in Eastern Pennsylvania real estate. I think she did better once she was on her own.
Larry wasn’t making wise decisions. Digging through his records made me wonder why he didn’t deep-six most of it. They didn’t exactly make him look like a saint. I found a couple of handwritten letters between Larry and an oil executive. According to the letters, the executive agreed not to tell Larry Jr. about some oil deals. This is why I decided Larry had been the main crook in that situation. And I believed that for over thirty years until the courts proved otherwise.
Another duty was answering the telephone. That was easy enough when Larry wasn’t around. More times than not, it was an attorney from a county board of health or zoning board demanding that Larry make a repair on his properties. He could have sent me to do some of the work, but I was too busy clipping newspaper articles about him not making those repairs. It was a kind of vicious circle.
A lot of people called looking for someplace to rent or buy. In those cases, I took down addresses and mailed them the lists. I must have mailed out five to twenty lists a day. But to my knowledge, nobody ever called us back on them. Except for one, and that was a dilly.
This crazy truck driver from Pittsburgh saw a house while driving down the interstate and found Larry’s telephone number on the door. And if he were to be believed, Jesus told him that it would be the perfect home to get his family away from the crime and sin of Pittsburgh. As far as I was concerned, Jesus must have hated the guy’s guts to tell him to rent from Larry. But I humored him along. I got his name and address and mailed him the lists. I told him to find the address and call me back.
I forgot all about him for a while and went about my business. But he called me back a week later and told me he couldn’t find the address on the list. So I dragged out my copy and tried to help him find it. And all the time I looked, he was droning on about Jesus having sent him to that house. It was perfect for his family. I checked the list twice and couldn’t find it.
This was not my lucky day. Larry came home from court, and the judge must have chewed him a new one. He looked like he wanted to explode, and I gave him an excuse. I told him there was a potential tenant on the phone, but I couldn’t find the property on the list. Larry berated me for my incompetence and denied that the property wasn’t on the list. He called me “stupid” a couple of times, but on that occasion, he refrained from accusing me of homosexuality. That was another clue I was dealing with a person with dementia. I presented him with a problem that didn’t have a routine answer, and he vented his spleen rather than admitting he didn’t know.
I returned to the phone with tremendous sympathy for Larry’s ex-girlfriend. I never blamed her for dumping him. And with a temper like Larry’s, she showed rare good sense in waiting for him to be in the hospital before she rabbited. At that moment, I was ready to follow in her footsteps. Only the threat of not getting paid kept me from doing it. I returned to the phone to see what I could do with the truck driver. It was my sense of professionalism. I could never leave a customer hanging. If Larry wasn’t going to help me, I was determined to wing it. I hoped the tenant had hung up, but no such luck.
“I’m sorry to keep you on hold,” I said.
“That’s okay because I have a question,” he responded, and my stomach sunk. If I didn’t have an answer, I wouldn’t ask Larry. “Do they turn the oil well off at night?” he inquired.
“The what?” I asked, wondering how that day was going to get worse.
“There’s a big oil well about three feet away from the front porch,” said the Pittsburgh truck driver, who wasn’t the brightest disciple in the congregation. “That thing makes a big racket, and I’m worried it might keep the kids awake at night.”
It speaks very well of my professionalism that I didn’t break down and scream, “we can’t rent you a house with an oil well in the front yard, you motherfucking idiot!” I swallowed air and counted to ten. “Well, that explains why it isn’t on the list,” I said, pretending not to have lost my composure. I sounded calm while silently acting out my frustration by gesturing and making faces at the phone. “We can’t rent you a house with an oil well on it. You should have told me about the oil well.”
“Well, I figured you’d know about the oil well,” he answered. I think that guy must have found Jesus during an acid trip.
“Larry Marra owns thousands of properties,” I replied. “I can’t be aware of everything going on with all of them.”
“But Jesus sent me to that house,” he argued.
“Maybe Jesus didn’t want you to have the house. He just wanted you to call L. Marra Real Estate. Do you still have the lists? Check out the homes we’re actively renting, and we also do rents to own. Find something you like and call us back.”
“Jesus didn’t let me down,” he said. “Thanks, Bill.”
The trucker actually called back a few times, but nobody was around to answer. And I made sure to erase his messages so the boss wouldn’t call him back. If there is a Jesus, he either sent that poor son of a bitch to Larry as a sick joke or knew I wouldn’t let Larry take advantage of him. Whatever that poor guy’s problems, renting from Larry was a sure way to make them worse.
The resident loon came into my workspace as soon as I hung up the phone. “How did it go with that tenant?” he asked.
“There was an oil well three feet away from the front porch,” I told him.
“Well, that’s why it’s not on the list,” he replied, forgetting the verbal abuse he just gave me. He was always in a better mood after venting his spleen. “It must be one of the properties my son stole.” He stopped suddenly and lit into a smile. “But if I rent him the house, that will help establish my claim through the courts,” he said, planning to himself. Then he turned back to me, “can you call him back?”
Larry demonstrated a lack of ethics that can’t be explained away by dementia. He was always that crooked. His mental decline only worsened an already black reputation. That’s why I was shocked to learn his son actually did steal those properties. Everything he did screamed crook.
The next thing I knew, he dumped a massive file on my desk. He told me to write a legal brief and not leave until it was done. He needed it by the following day. I stayed there for an extra two hours, which made Larry happy. He never liked me leaving at six; making me work late was a victory.
Sometimes I would come to work, and Larry would be at a Burger King across the river. He could relax because Pennsylvania process servers couldn’t follow him out of state. Larry spent hours there working on his many legal cases. He constantly refilled his decaf in a soda cup and never paid. I’m surprised the managers never kicked him out of there. Maybe they just felt sorry for the poor old bastard.
It wasn’t unusual for him to call me sometime after three and order me to meet him at a courthouse. Usually, it was in Easton, where he had bench warrants against him. By four thirty, I had to be standing in plain sight outside the courthouse parking lot. Larry would drive by and toss me an envelope without stopping. I took the papers to the clerk’s office while he took off like a bat out of hell.
I usually made it to the court clerk’s office fifteen minutes before closing. I think the clerks felt a little sorry for me. They were always very friendly despite me bringing them more to do at the last minute. “I’m here to file this for ‘Last Minute Larry,” I’d say, and the clerks would crack up. Soon, all the clerks called him “Last Minute Larry,” and it spread to other courthouses. Larry found out about it but never traced it back to me.
There was some method to his last-minute madness. He was overwhelmed by court cases and needed more time to do everything. And he was doing everything with only me for help, and I was learning as I went. So he delayed as much as possible. Filing appeals and other papers at the very last minute gave him days more to prepare.
Then there were the days when he was home. Sometimes I got to actually learn stuff like how to write a legal brief. Larry could be a patient teacher, and I picked things up quickly. There were even times when we would work harmoniously together, filing deeds, checking through files for evidence, or any number of things that needed to be done. But Larry was always as touchy as a hat full of fulminate of mercury. He was so mercurial that I called him “Electric Larry,” after a silly character in an 80s movie. One wrong word, and he would go totally nuts, and I’d be left at the edge of tears. And when I came home, my partner would ask, “how are things in Electric Larry Land?”
Amazingly enough, he occasionally showed a human side. He would break into tears when talking about his ex. He never understood why his ex left him. And I mentioned in an earlier post that he showed apparent remorse over the deputy he accidentally ran over and killed. Then there was the time my mother suffered a major heart attack. He was amazingly supportive and helped my father and me find a hospital to properly treat her condition. I came dangerously close to thinking of him as a friend, so he always shocked me with his frightening flairs of temper and vile language. He was Electric Larry, and nothing would change that.
He’d take me on road trips several times a week. And he was generally good company. “Just think,” he used to joke. “Someday, you can say you knew Larry Marra when he was only a struggling millionaire.” We usually ate at a fast food joint when he made that joke. But to give him credit, he always paid for my meals. But he was in no physical shape for the long distances we had to drive. He’d be Electric Larry again when we returned, cursing and swearing and not letting me go home to my dinner.
He sent me on some insane errands during these trips. He couldn’t attend many of his trials without risking arrest. So he’d wait in a parking lot a few blocks from the courthouse, and I would have to sit for the verdict and report back to him. Once I gave him some bad news, and his heart stopped. His usually green complexion turned paper-white, and he lurched forward. It was a good thing his lawyer came with me. He was the one who caught Larry on the way down. A second later, the old maniac was laughing about his second pacemaker kicking in. He was living entirely due to technology. From that day on, I came to work prepared to find him dead somewhere and carefully checked the house when he wasn’t home.
Sometimes I had to get information from the tax assessor’s office, or I would have to file eviction papers. (Not that I can remember any that had been successfully served. Not by me, at least.) But Strangest of all were the trips we took to tax auctions. You would think twenty-something million dollars worth of property would be enough for anybody. But not Larry. Every scrap of topsoil he owned was mortgaged, second mortgaged, or otherwise in hock. Larry had to pay taxes, fees, insurance, and mortgages on all of it. The proceeds would go to the bank if he sold any property. The only thing he could do was buy more properties and mortgage them.
He usually went to the tax auctions in Carbon and Bucks counties because he didn’t have outstanding warrants. But tax foreclosures weren’t as common in those affluent areas. Besides, Larry preferred the special auctions where they discounted properties nobody wanted for the entire tax bill. One day Larry gave me two thousand dollars cash and the lot number of a property he wanted me to bid on. I had been to enough auctions to know what I was doing. So I went out and did it.
Larry might have been the best general since Sun Sui. Dementia may have clouded his ability to see the big picture, but his attention to detail was exceptional. The tax auction began at one in the afternoon, but he told me to get there between two and two thirty. I don’t know how he did it, but I got there around two ten, and they were nearly ready to auction off the one I was supposed to buy.
They were in the process of auctioning a large house with a detached cottage. From the description, the place was falling apart. A big biker offered the full-back taxes in the first bid. He got it, of course. Then the tax clerk asked for his name and address, and the biker gave the property he had just won as his address.
“Excuse me, but you live on the property?” the clerk asked.
“I live in the cottage,” he replied as he took out a biker wallet and pulled out an unholy wad of cash. “Buying it was easier than moving all my stuff.”
That got a big laugh out of everybody, and a few attendees applauded. I was too nervous to laugh. This was the very first time I had ever bid in an auction. I was so excited; I was on the verge of peeing myself. I trembled like a chihuahua at a cat show and desperately wanted it to start and be over simultaneously.
“Next on the block is property AI33333 (or whatever number it was. You expect me to remember it after 32 years?). The bidding begins at two hundred dollars.” The auctioneer called out.
My heart pounded so loudly I could hear it, and I trembled like a racehorse. I had been living for that moment for the last five minutes, but it felt like hours. My legs jumped without me wanting to. I was out of my seat and yelled, “Two hundred dollars,” at the top of my lungs. The entire room burst into laughter, and I wanted the earth to open and swallow me. The biker gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder on his way out. I guess this wasn’t unusual for somebody’s first tax auction, but that didn’t make things any less humiliating. I sat down and tried to act with a little bit of dignity.
“Two fifty,” the auctioneer said with a big chuckle in my direction.
I waited for the next bid, secure in my two grand budget, but nobody topped my bid. I started getting excited again but managed to keep it under control. Somebody was bound to counterbid. That’s how they did it in the movies.
“Two twenty-five,” the auctioneer said, and my legs wanted to jump again. I had to stop myself from topping my own bid.
“Two hundred one,” the auctioneer called, and there were crickets. “The bid stands at two hundred. Do I hear two hundred one?” he continued, and I braced myself for a second bid that never came. “We have two hundred dollars for this property.” That was my bid. I couldn’t get myself to believe it was so easy. “Two hundred going once.” I was sure somebody was going to top my bid. “Two hundred going twice.” Nobody was bidding against me, and my heart was breaking. Where was the drama I always saw on television? It wasn’t fair!
“AI33333 goes to the young man with the beard and ponytail,” the auctioneer finished, and I was devastated! Not only had I made an ass of myself in public, but I made an ass of myself for a property nobody else even wanted! I could have burst into tears.
“Your name and address, young man?” the tax clerk asked.
“I’m purchasing this for Lawrence Marra Sr,” I replied, and everybody stared at me. And I think their pity was worse than their laughter. I slunk down to the podium wishing the whole thing was over.
“You work for Larry?” asked the auctioneer.
“Times are tough all over,” I replied, trying not to sound bitter.
“You know, they’re hiring over at the Burger King in South Bethlehem,” the tax clerk said as he filled out the paperwork. I had to sigh after I gave him the cash.
“I tried there two days ago,” I replied. “The position is filled. But let me know if you hear about a bomb factory looking for a dud tester.”
That got a friendly laugh. “Don’t worry; something safer will come up,” the clerk said kindly.
“And everybody gets excited at their first auction,” the auctioneer assured me. “You did great for a first-timer.”
“At least you didn’t top your own bid,” the clerk laughed. How did he know I was on the verge of doing just that? “Give our love to Larry,”
Naturally, Electric Larry had to ruin any trace of a victory by being amazed I came back with his 1800 bucks and the deed. He counted the money and checked the receipt three times. That was the moment I stopped even wanting to like him. He could even manage to demean somebody for their integrity. And instead of thanking me for being such a loyal employee, he told me to file it. Then he found another reason to release his venom at me. That was the part when I emotionally ended my employment with him. Two weeks later, my partner discovered I was eligible for unemployment. The next payday, he came close to physically attacking me, but I was quitting that day anyhow.
Larry was living in a state of ever-increasing debt and buying junk properties to take out more loans and bury himself in more debt. Bankruptcy was as inevitable as the massive stroke that felled him at the Easton Courthouse in the early spring of 1992. At the time, I was convinced he was trying to manipulate the courts to steal property from his son. Today I know he was the injured party. I also learned the signs of dementia.
I can’t blame myself for not getting him help because no help was forthcoming. I tried to get intervention, but I simply didn’t have the legal standing to do so. The cops wouldn’t even help me when I reported Larry for urinating in public. I tried calling Larry Jr. to volunteer to testify against his father in a competency hearing, but Junior hung up on me. I must have scared the living crap out of him because if Larry Sr. went into court-appointed conservancy, Larry Jr’s ass would have been grass.
I got my State of California Real Estate License in 2006, and I passed the exam because of all Larry taught me in 1990. Due to what Larry had taught me, I represented myself in court numerous times. I would have been homeless back in 1995 if Larry hadn’t taught me every dirty landlord trick ever written. Larry Marra Sr. was the most influential person in my life, bar none. And the irony of it; I hated his guts. Time, education, and life experience tempered my hatred into a deep pity. As well as intense gratitude for all he taught me. Over time, his memory became a blessing.
Those were the Days, My Friend, I thought they’d never end; we’d dial and dial forever and a day.
I will never apologize for being a telemarketer. We live in a capitalist society, and the telephone was the cutting edge in reaching new customers. People who didn’t have the time and patience to talk to me hung up. No hard feelings on my part. Most people were too busy to talk to me. And that was awesome! It meant I didn’t waste their time with my presentation, and they didn’t waste my time. I usually had a quota of 150 dials an hour. I didn’t have the time to waste. Hang up on me, and I went on to the next call.
The no-call list came out in the early 90s, the most tremendous boon to telemarketers since Alex Bell. Telemarketing is a numbers game. Out of about 100 people, one might be a sale. And it wasn’t unusual to have a two sales per hour quota. The no-call list eliminated hundreds of wasted dials. Productivity jumped by about 25% when they came into use.
We used to call it “dialing for dollars .” Every day I’d sit down, light a cigarette, and the floor manager would call out, “nine O’clock, you bastards, It’s time to play dialing for dollars!” The cigarette burned out in the ashtray before I took a second puff. I’d pause dialing to light another and have one drag out of that. Most of my nicotine habit was satisfied by secondhand smoke from my fellow bastards’ cigarettes burning in the trays. By the end of a four-hour shift, our ashtrays would overflow, and we could sit back and finally enjoy a whole cigarette.
As a telemarketing manager, I hired single mothers on their way back to the workforce. I wrote college recommendations for my part-time high school employees. Then the many artists and writers passed through my telemarketing rooms. And a couple of them are names you might recognize. But they dialed for those dollars just like the rest of us on their way to the top. And I was able to help them all. Being a telemarketing manager gave me the power to do some good.
I started telemarketing in the late seventies, selling subscriptions to the Newark Star-Ledger. In those days, you were given a contract that listed all your responsibilities and laws you dared not break. One complaint to the right person could end your job. There were FCC regulations and FTC regulations, and we were monitored by state authorities. We also had a code of ethics. We were always polite to the nastiest prospect. That was the golden rule in telemarketing. Even before the no-call list, we never called a person who requested to be left alone. And we never gave out the numbers of the celebrities or politicians we spoke to. And I talked to many. I befriended Senator Arlan Specter after I called him on a wrong number.
So what happened? The celebration of greed which was the 1980s, grew into the lapsed ethics of the 1990s. By 1999, telemarketing had become so dirty that I couldn’t do it anymore. The worst was between 1998-2001 when I worked for Aames Home Loan. That job deserves a blog entry that will come in due time. But I watched my profession rot around me, and there was no reason for that to have happened. It was the greed and stupidity of management.
Nobody understood how I could be a telemarketer, not my partner, and not my brother. I think you’d have ADHD to understand the attraction. Telemarketing wasn’t managed like other jobs; the bosses left you alone. They were happy as long as you kept smiling, dialing, and selling. I hate being in a structured environment, and there is a minimum structure in a boiler room. I ignored the script. Once I had it memorized, I free-formed. I increased everybody’s production when they picked up some of my on-the-spot spiels. And no two conversations are ever the same. Not the good ones, not the bad ones, and the weird ones were priceless. It was the endless variety that kept me coming to work every day.
It was a brutal way to make a living. Not everybody can do it, and you must learn to use your anxieties and insecurities to fuel your work. The more scared you are, the faster you dial. The more sales you made. The more counters to the customer’s objections you made. People who couldn’t do the job stared at the phone in terror. Their fears and anxieties were too big to control. I remember one poor girl who tried so hard for half a shift before running away in hysterics. That was an extreme case. People generally sat down and tried for a week before quitting.
The pay structure was another attraction. No way in hell I could support my family on minimum wage. Conversations amused and delighted me, but the commissions and bonuses motivated me. And making more money in bonuses and commissions than you did in your base was addictive. Quitting cigarettes was easier than leaving telemarketing. I tried other ways to make a living. I owned a bookstore in Allentown. I did payroll for Bethlehem Steel, factory work, Alzheimer’s respite work, and retail, but I always came home to telemarketing.
I spent years calling for contractors because that was what I knew. At one time, I could rattle off the strengths and weaknesses of every brand of windows on the market. And as I spread my wings, I learned other aspects of home repair. I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, even though I shouldn’t be trusted with a hammer. I partnered with a salesman, and we traveled through three companies together. We must have been the most successful team in the entire Lehigh Valley. But we parted ways when I discovered he was a grand wizard of the local KKK.
I fell back to the bottom of the dog heap and sold newspaper subscriptions for an outfit in the Pocono mountains. That’s where I had my first brush with telephone dialing machines. Those machines were the first step in destroying telemarketing as a profession. It was impossible to stay focused on the job when a computer dialed the phone for you. Your head drifted off, and you were always surprised if somebody answered. Or you would confuse a real answer for an answering machine. And for me, dialing machines came out of the worst corner of hell. I have ADHD, and I have to stim to concentrate. Pushing buttons on the phone was a perfect way to stim. If I can’t stim, I smoke. And, of course, I was in my first non-smoking boiler room.
The machine was as stupid as a sack of hammers. It dialed one number after another without regard for wrong numbers, disconnected numbers, or fax machines. There’s an art to working a telephone list, and the goddamn soulless machines lacked the ability. Once I sat for half an hour while the goddamn soulless idiot machine dialed one disconnected number after another. I said fuck it, sneaked out for a cigarette, and returned to another 15 minutes of disconnected numbers interspersed with fax machines. And when I was finally talking to actual human beings, they were from Brooklyn and only read Hebrew language papers.
On my third night, I let the stupid machine dial while reading the help-wanted ads. I found one for Resorts USA in Bushkill, right outside of Stroudsburg. I had heard rumors about that place. Even part-time workers were said to earn over a thousand dollars a week. And that was a princely amount back in the 1990s. I typed up a resume as soon as I got home. The following day, I shaved off my mustache, brushed my hair into a neat ponytail, and applied for the position. I was hired during the interview and began work that coming Monday. This was my first corporate job with paid sick days and yearly vacation. It was a giddy step upwards from boiler rooms.
My job was to sit at a telephone that never stopped ringing. Remember those TV commercials that flashed a phone number and promised operators were standing by? I was one of those operators. I worked in a vast room with a few hundred telephones in it. Several departments shared that space. I ended up transferring to one of them, but that was the same thing I did just by answering the phone. The commercial would play, and the customers would call. The phones lit up from the front of the room to the back in a long wave. I answered the phone and talked the prospect into coming to an office for a timeshare presentation. In return, they were promised a transistor TV set, a cutting-edge novelty at the time, and a voucher for three days and two nights in Atlantic City.
I got a twenty-dollar bonus for everybody who came in. I’d have twenty people coming on a bad day. Since they happened twice a week, that was a minimum of 800 dollars a week. More often, it was closer to 1200. And that was just in bonuses. I also got a small piece of any sales which would raise my paycheck by another couple hundred dollars.
I thought I had found the job of my dreams. My partner and I were so excited we planned on buying some land in the mountains, stick on a trailer on it, and growing ginseng. But our dreams of ginseng farming died very quickly. Resorts USA’s managers were pushing the sales staff to oversell the timeshares to impress the bigwigs at the parent company, Rank International. It got so bad that there were two families per available timeshare, and they kept selling. This resulted in a few lawsuits, and Rank dropped Resorts USA like a bad habit.
Overnight, working at Resorts USA became more trouble than it was worth, and I volunteered for a layoff. Which was not a good thing. The Clinton economy had devastated the area. Bethlehem Steel was already half closed down, and other factories were high-tailing it to China. Professional salespeople were fighting over telemarketing jobs they’d have sneered at only a few years earlier. So following Horatio Alger’s advice, we went west to California, where the streets were paved with jobs.
Working in Pennsylvania didn’t prepare me for the reality of telemarketing in California. Pennsylvania had stronger consumer protection laws than California. And under Clinton, the FCC didn’t have the budget to oversee telemarketing rooms. And federal consumer protection laws were being slashed left and right. Businesses were allowed to rip people off in any way that amused them, and telemarketers became their weapons of choice.
We arrived in Oakland, CA, in August of 1996. And I was employed within 24 hours of our arrival. The egotistical little bastard that I was, I assumed it was from my superior telephone skills. They saw fresh meat with the hayseeds still in his hair and ate me alive. My first job was for a company I worked on and off for throughout the 80s.
However, that job was in Fremont while I lived in Oakland. I had no concept of the distances in California and assumed a commute to Fremont would be like a commute from Easton to Allentown. I don’t even think I picked up the phone for that place. I couldn’t get from my morning job in San Francisco in time for my evening job in Fremont. My morning job was fundraising, and that was the job I should have ghosted. Not knowing the game, I found myself trying to solicit funds for some charity or another and failed because I didn’t realize it was a scam. The whole thing was about finding somebody willing to give up 30 bucks in return for an income tax receipt. There were professional fundraisers who kept their own lists of such donors. I figured out that scam and stepped right into another one.
I found myself selling advertisements for the “Police Review.” This time I decided to research and found a copy of the “Police Review” in the public library. And my boss was gobsmacked that I found it.
Eventually, he let me in on the joke. There was no such publication as the “Police Review.” A few copies had been printed in case they were needed. Nobody knows how one of those copies ended up in the library. I suspect it was evil spirits. The true purpose of the Police Review was to shake down Hispanic and Asian immigrants. By donating to the Police Review, you got a sticker you could put in the window. In Asian and Latin American countries, shopkeepers would get stickers on their windows to show they had paid the police their protection money. So on one call, I did things exactly the way my boss told me to, and I hope I can be forgiven someday.
“Hello, Mr. Asian Victim, my name is Bill, and I’m calling on behalf of the Police Review. This is a very important publication that every law enforcement bureau receives every month. Your local police station gets it. The California Highway Patrol gets a copy. The DEA and FBI all get copies, and even immigration gets a copy.”
I heard voices in the background, and one of them yelled “Immigration,” and it sounded like he was running. I heard a door slam.
“We’re asking for your support by purchasing an advertisement in the Police Review. A full-page ad is 1,000 dollars, and we will, of course, give you a sticker you can put in your window to let everybody know you support the police.”
“But that’s too much money,” Mr. A. Victim said.
“I understand that,” I replied. “These are tough times, but remember, all law enforcement agents and police will see your ad. (Like hell!) Maybe a half page for $500?”
“I can give $100,” said Mr. Victim.
“How about a quarter-page ad for $250?” I asked. “Remember, the FBI and Immigration get this magazine.”
There was a muted conversation in a language I assume was Cantonese. Then Mr. Victim said, “Okay, $250, but we get a sticker.”
“Of course, you get a sticker,” I assured him.
Since this con had nothing to do with any police force, he would get shaken down again and again. The sticker wasn’t going to save him. My boss slapped me on the shoulder and praised the sale. I didn’t even collect my commission. I left at the end of the day and never returned. But it was an important lesson in watching your ass.
This was an awful time for me. We were living on my brother’s kindness and cleaning jobs my partner found. I woke up with anxiety and went to bed in a blue terror. Finally, my prayers were answered just before Thanksgiving, and I found a real telemarketing job with a real contracting firm. This was my first time telemarketing for a company with its own construction crews. I was used to paper contractors.
Of course, this being California, there was a great big hairy fly in the ointment. The entire city of San Francisco was burned out. It was fried. The city had been called so many times that you wouldn’t find a customer to save your life. And the ones I did find were free estimate junkies, and the salespeople refused to go see them. Part of the company’s problem was we called out of the phone book. There were no fresh leads. There were no new homeowners or any factors that make up a successful telemarketing room. I was dialing last decade’s leads and getting last decade’s results. And sooner or later, they were going to start blaming me. Bosses too cheap to buy fresh leads always blame the telemarketers and wonder why they have such a high turnover.
Aside from that, there were more red flags on that job than a bad romance. Among their many other flaws, they were religious. I don’t know if the owner or the managers were religious. I knew the receptionist was a devout Buddhist. But the foreman was an Evangelical Christian preacher who spoke no English. On Sundays, I used to see him preaching in front of the 24th St BART station. He would be hollering into a loudspeaker while his hype-man translated it into English.
Somebody told me he had once been a top chef in El Salvador and cooked the best Thanksgiving dinner in the universe. I’m always down for a free meal, so I accepted the invitation. The dinner was everything promised and more. I can’t imagine how he got turkey white meat so moist. And the turkey gizzards stewed in champagne were to die for. I would ask for the same menu the night before my execution because dying would have been better than the next two hours.
After the dinner, the chef testified. I expected it and stuck around so as not to offend anybody. There was a chance I would work there again after New Year, so I didn’t want to offend anybody. Besides, I had a raffle ticket, and how long could it take? It was two hours of grueling boredom. Two hours of trying not to crawl out of my skin while the asshole droned on in Spanish. And the same hype-man as at the BART Station translated his riches to rags story. He was a famous chef in the old country with a TV show and a brandy habit. Then came the Sandinista, and god brought him to the US, where he found Jesus and humble employment in the construction trade.
That took an hour and fifteen minutes. The chef would say a few paragraphs, and the hype-man would translate and toss in a few “Hallelujahs a praise Jebus or two, and the story meandered on like a Marquis DeSade novel. So I figured the worst was over, and I could go screaming away from the holy water. But no. Then came the prayer. And were I the almighty, I’d have sent a bolt of lightning through his spleen just to shut him up! The prayer took another half hour, and then, there was a fucking alter call. I was ready to go home, bathe in brimstone, and dedicate my life to Satan.
Most of my coworkers didn’t seem impressed and were obviously there to humor the boss. Who took over and did the raffle, and I won a big frozen turkey. Which was a good thing because they closed their telemarketing room entirely. That was a very sound decision on their part. I was spinning my wheels, and they were wasting their money. At the same time, I needed a job. So I came home with a few extra bucks severance and the turkey. Both had to last until my next paycheck.
I went through a two-week job in the Financial District, selling these VIP cards for a hotel chain. My most vivid memory of this job was how intensely uptight the manager was. Later, I would see the manager sitting on the pavement in the Tenderloin, so it was pretty obvious why he had been so uptight.
Around the same time, I was fundraising for a legitimate ecologic nonprofit. But the problem with that job was everyone was so focused on Julia Butterfly and the protests going on with the headlands they didn’t want to talk about the American River.
Soon after Christmas, my luck improved, and I answered an ad from a contractor in San Mateo. That commute wasn’t as bad as Fremont, and the office wasn’t far from the BART station. And the owner was a nice enough sort. He hired me and even gave me a BART ticket home. Plus, he set me up with a carpool. I stayed with him for a year and a half, but I had to earn every single day of it.
The best thing about this job was the leads. They were fresh. And rather than being confined to the city of San Francisco, we called all the way down the Peninsula. This was a broad enough territory that we were guaranteed to make money unless we were foolish.
Of course, my coworkers were stupid, crooked, and caused more trouble than the job was worth. The boss had no people sense. I have no idea where he found his room manager. I recognized the guy as a male prostitute who tried to pick me up near my apartment. He even lived in my neighborhood, and he was the carpool.
The dummkopf had road rage, and it scared the living shit out of me. This guy would get insanely angry and try to run other cars off the freeway. Once he followed a woman to her house, got out of the car, and screamed obscenities at her. Another time he was cut off by a blond in a Camaro. Dummkopf tried to run her off the freeway, but he got cut off by a beat-up old pickup truck driven by a couple of guys who looked just like Cheech and Chong. They teamed up with the blond in the Camaro and boxed us behind an old man driving a big boat of a yellow Cadillac. The old guy looked terrified and refused to go faster than 45 in the middle lane. The pickup truck and the Camaro took turns pushing us behind the Caddy. Cheech and Chong were making smoking gestures at the blond, and the blond made kissy gestures back. Meanwhile, smoke was coming out of the dummkopf’s ears.
Next week, the boss moved the telephone room from his expensive office in San Mateo to a cockroach-infested hellhole in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. And I insisted on getting to work on BART. We were joined by a crazy woman from Arkansas, and I thought I would have to ghost. And believe it or not, she was a prostitute! I don’t want to consider how my Billy Graham-loving boss found those shitbirds. I’ve worked with junkies, Born Again Christians, Moonies, and outright thieves, but that was the first and only time I worked with prostitutes.
I kept the room going. I broke all my previous dialing records to keep the business going while the other two kept bugging me to join them in their schemes. This lasted for about two weeks before my boss left his checkbook in the office, and the prostitutes stole it. I told my boss about it, but he wouldn’t press charges. The female prostitute was arrested trying to cash one of his checks, but he wouldn’t cooperate with the cops.
The male prostitute played a long game. He managed to buy a brand new Lexus on credit, using the boss’s account number as his own. That man was a hardened criminal and an expert conman. A month went by, and the finance officer called me looking for the male prostitute. She sounded like she was 12 years old and was under the mistaken belief that the prostitute owned the company. It broke my heart to tell her she had been had.
I will have to assume that the 12-year-old loan officer pressed charges. Because the male prostitute came back to the office to kill me. He was stopped by building security. By sheer luck, my phone room was on the mezzanine of the Warfield Theater, and Marilyn Manson was performing that night. There was extra security, and one of the rent-a-cops noticed the gun in dummkopf’s waistband. Otherwise, I would have met a grisly end at the hands of a pissed-off whore.
The bright spot of the day was having to go home early because there was no way to telemarket while directly above Marilyn Manson. It simply cannot be done. We were standing directly over the stage, which was louder in the office than in the front row. The brighter spot was I became the telemarketing manager. A small raise, commissions, and overrides. And I got to pick my telemarketers. No more crazy prostitutes. But one day, working in The Warfield’s Mezzanine supplied enough crazy to fuel Congress for a month.
The great sage John Lennon once said that “life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” But in my case, life was happening too quickly to plan. I had only been in California for less than six months and burned through six jobs, plus two more that I can barely remember. Now instead of floundering from one debacle to the next, I had a safe place to get the lay of the land and make a plan. One of the great myths of the 1990s was all you needed was a plan, and stick with the plan, and you were guaranteed success. And like every other sucker in the US, I believed it. And Sunzi laughed at me from the grave.
I turned 40 while running that phone room. And 40 is the year people tend to confront themselves. And I faced a lot of aspects of myself and found them wanting. My experiments in management taught me that some of my deepest-held beliefs were utter bullshit. And I learned that my people sense wasn’t as sharp as I fooled myself into believing. But most of all, I realized that I was at a dead end, and I was the only guy who could get me out. Telemarketing wasn’t working for me anymore, and I needed to find a better way to make a living. Dialing for Dollars had lost its appeal. It was time to find some other way to make a living.
Warren County Courthouse. I spent entirely too much time in this Building.
Here’s the irony. I could have moved back in with my family anytime we wanted to. We were victims of a toxic narcissist on a power trip. That happens a lot when you’re poor. You constantly run into other poor people who get a little authority and decide they’re Franco. The apartment manager outright lied and told my partner that Welfare and Section 8 would not allow me to live with my family. And we were so beaten down we didn’t even fact-check.
At least I got to visit during the weekends. Naturally, the manager made vague threats every time she saw me. “I hope you’re not staying long,” she would say, or “Section 8 doesn’t want you here.” This had the opposite effect she intended. My partner looks timid, but they don’t tolerate bullying. Those exchanges usually ended with my partner giving the manager a piece of their mind and the manager retreating with a confused look on her piggy little face.
As unpleasant as the manager could be, returning to my parents was worse. When I returned from the first weekend, Bob and Virginia were in rare form. They were terrified I was getting back with my partner. Virginia jogged in circles waving her arms, and my father glowered at me. “What did you do all weekend?” were the first words out of Virginia’s mouth. I assured them I had only spent the weekend to make sure the kids were alright.
That didn’t sit well with Virginia. She had given up on gaining control of “THE BABY” and had taken to having jealous fits every time he was mentioned. She and Bob wanted me back as their caregiver. I was the custodial child during high school. I did everything for them, shopped, paid bills, and even hid money so Virginia wouldn’t spend it all on cigarettes. They hated dealing with reality and wanted me to do it for them.
Growing up, they kept me dependent on them by ensuring I was always broke. And this started all the way back in preschool. If I got five bucks for my birthday, Virginia spent it on herself or brought me to Sears and ensured I spent it. I was not allowed money under any circumstances. I had to give my paycheck to Virginia during my first job. Times were terrible then, and I was proud to do it. But Virginia decided that was the law of the universe. She had the gall to forge my name on my paychecks and cash them herself. And that continued until I made my first escape.
Virginia wanted those days back. One day, she had the iron gall to suggest that I turn my entire paycheck over to her and come to her for my daily needs. I think I answered that one with a dirty look and walked away. Another time I overheard her saying to Bob, “all those years he’s been working, and I barely saw a dime.”
Four years later, I was sitting in my brother’s kitchen in San Francisco, and the memory flashed back with surprising vividness. I asked my brother, “how could I have possibly forgotten that?”
My brother replied, “there wasn’t enough room in your brain for sanity and Virginia.”
That pretty well summed up the next three months. I lived with a pair of crazy people, and humoring them was my go-to survival mechanism. I just let go of everything I couldn’t change and let it roll off like water off a duck’s arse. I never let them know I was already back with my partner; I might not have survived the shit storm. I told them I was spending the following weekend in New York. I came back Sunday night, and they had a conniption fit over me, not giving them a phone number where I could be reached.
One of my partner’s new friends at Blair House came up with a brilliant solution. I created a new girlfriend named “April.” If my partner needed to call me at my parents’ place, her friend would call and introduce herself as “April.” Then she would hand the phone over to my partner. It was hilarious. Virginia died a little every time I said, “love you very much,” before hanging up. She tried asking subtle questions about our relationship, and I would lie outrageously. Like, “April” didn’t have a telephone because she was an emergency room nurse and didn’t want to be called into work on the weekends. And I hit Virginia right in her faux-bourgeoisie snobbery by telling her that April grew up on the junkyard her parents owned.
Bob and Virginia knew better than to ask to meet April. I learned the folly of involving them in my love life back in middle school. They hadn’t even met my partner until we lived together for half a year. In fact, I kept a considerable distance between them and my life since I was in my middle teens. They had come to accept this, which shows how dysfunctional they had been as parents.
Since I stubbornly refused to return to being their keeper, Virginia used her other tricks to get control of my paycheck. Her main tactic was to self-destruct and demand I rescue her. She would cash a check without the funds to cover it, and I had to give her the money to prevent it from bouncing. I always fell for that one in high school. Other tricks included not having food money or money for the electric bill. In the past, I coughed up the cash like I was her personal ATM. She didn’t know what to do when I stopped reacting.
Virginia would bounce a check, and I told her I didn’t have the money. I usually blamed child support. It took a big bite out of my salary every week, but not as big as I led her to believe. Then she’d throw one of her patented temper tantrums, which always used to cause me panic attacks. But I knew about the stash of cash she kept at the bottom of her closet. So I stood firm and refused to give in. The next day she’d wail about the bounce fee, but I shrugged and said I couldn’t help her.
It would have worked if she played at silly buggers with the power bill, but Bob took care of that personally. He knew better than to trust Virginia with it. But Bob did add his own unique touches to the madness. I suspect he was the mastermind behind the mail order bride catalog, which we’ll be coming to shortly.
As you can imagine, my child support payments became the latest obsession. So Virginia had taken to formulating Lucy Ricardo-like plots to get me out of paying child support. She responded by accusing me of refusing to accept reality and stormed off. But I kept reminding her that I was not abandoning my kids, including the stepson she hated so much.
Dealing with those two was exhausting, and I wasn’t always on my A game. For instance, I was sorting through a box of books and found a brochure for a festival in Ohio.
“You went to Ohio!” she gasped in horror. Virginia was morbidly agoraphobic, and any indication that I traveled induced a hissy-fit.
“Not that time,” I replied, not really paying attention. I was trying to prevent a travel tantrum, so I got blindsided.
“According to this, somebody was there last July 1989,” Virginia said accusingly. The storm was brewing.
“I didn’t go,” I replied, hoping to avoid the tantrum by telling the truth. “My partner went with a friend, and I stayed behind for work.”
There was one of her silences that instantly grabbed my attention. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth moved. “Your son was born in April of 1990,” Virginia said. I knew that tone of voice too well. She had a cunning plan, and that never ended well for me.
“What of it?” I asked; my stomach turned cold and dropped to my testicles.
“Do the math, you idiot!” she explained. “He’s not your son! He’s somebody else’s kid! She slept with somebody at that festival and got knocked up! You shouldn’t have to pay child support!”
After months of “THE BABY” this, and THE BABY that, hearing that Dickensian lunatic call him “somebody else’s kid” made me feel like the walls were falling down on me. There was a rushing noise in my ears, and I felt dizzy. Virginia’s obvious delight only made things worse. I couldn’t do anything but gape as she raced down the short hall yelling, “Robert, Robert, he’s a little bastard!”
A school of thought teaches us we choose our parents between lives. I always considered that to be total bullshit. I can’t imagine any karmic lessons learned from being raised by those basket cases. I watched them come out of my father’s room. Virginia was doing jazz hands while Bob fist pumped. And all I could do was wonder what horrible sin I may have committed in the last life to deserve them. They must have been a karmic punishment for robbing widows and foreclosing on orphanages in one of my past lives.
I was opened-mouthed and speechless as Virginia outlined her cunning plan to rat-fuck her grandson. She wanted me to go to Welfare with that brochure and claim I had been cuckolded. Then, she figured, I’d be released from child support, and I could sue the county for the past payments. Then both of them dumped on my partner for being a scarlet woman and me for being a sucker.
“You are both out of your minds,” I told them after my voice returned. I choked on the first few attempts. “How often have you mentioned how much my son looks like my brother at that age?”
“You don’t owe her anything!” my mother replied. She didn’t have a logical answer, so she went into a rant. “You never got legally married; she an outsider. You don’t owe a thing to her, her brat, or the kid.”
I got the legally mandated DNA test results out of my backpack and handed them to her. “Read it and weep,” I told her. It was getting entirely out of hand, and I decided to end it right then and there.
She looked at it from several angles and handed it to my father. “I heard blood tests aren’t that accurate,” Virginia said hopefully.
“This isn’t a blood test; it’s a genetic test,” I replied as my father handed the paper back and shrugged. “They’re 100% accurate.”
“But it says 95%,” my mother argued.
“Look, the appeal is at the beginning of September,” I sighed. “I’m reasonably certain that I’ll get out of the child support order then,”
“And what if you don’t,” Virginia asked.
“Then I’ll appeal to Federal Court,” I replied. I wanted that conversation to end. It made me nauseous, and I needed to get away from them.
“And are you going to get any of that money back?” she demanded/hoped. Translation, “do I have any hope of getting my hands on it?”
“I doubt it,” I replied. As much as I resented that child support order, I preferred the money went to the goniffs in Warren County over Virginia.
This is the crap I had to put up with every day except on weekends. Otherwise, life was good. I didn’t have any luck finding a new job, but I got a promotion at the one I had. The regional manager invited me to join his full-time crew. Which meant I would be traveling with the circus. And when the Allentown show was finished, I’d be on my way to Arizona.
Spoiler, I never made it to Arizona. I would have missed my appeal hearing if I had left. This is just as well because I hate hot weather and Arizona. But suppose you had the choice between Arizona and living with Bob and Virginia. In that case, I bet you would pick Arizona too. My partner didn’t see it that way, and they were distraught that I planned to be an utterly absent dad. Which was just an important reason not to go.
Of course, I had to endure one of my mother’s “Bill is Traveling” tantrums, but my almost trip to Arizona positively affected my parents; it made them shut the hell up. I had gotten up and left before, and they realized how close they were pushing me. So they both avoided me for a few days.
I think they were catching wise about “April” and realizing that I was more likely to move back with my family than run away to join the circus. And once I was back with my family, there was no way I would go back to being their keeper. They were so desperate they put their heads together and came up with an idea that was so bizarre it still hurts my brain to remember it. They were going to buy me a wife from the Philippines.
Bob probably found an advertisement for Filipino Brides in Playboy. He was the first person I met who read Playboy for the articles. Then I got older and met other gay men. My father was so far in the closet he ordered take-out from Narnia. I think that’s why he married a woman 11 years older than he was. Virginia was his way of fooling himself that he was straight. He didn’t understand my attraction to my partner, who presented as female at the time. Bob assumed I was going back to my partner for the sex. So, he figured that if they could supply sex for me, I would stay with them and become the custodial son again.
He brought the advertisement to my mother’s attention. I think it took a little bit of argument for her to accept the idea. She had a creepy Jocasta Complex that gave me goose flesh. But I can’t see Virginia refusing the chance to get her very own slave. Besides, she would get to play sick games with my privacy.
I don’t understand why they thought I would go along with their madness. But Bob sent away for the mail order bride catalog, and they looked at it when I returned one Sunday night. They were at the table, not screaming at each other. That was unusual enough to get my attention. Virginia sat at the table, flipping through a magazine while Bob stared over her shoulder. And did I mention they were smiling at each other? So did the friendly greeting they gave me. That kicked my caution into the red zone.
“Hi,” I said and headed into the kitchen from the entrance they weren’t blocking.
“This is no good,” Virginia said in a heartbroken voice. “He’ll have to go to the Philippines to get married.”
“So he stays in the Philippines for a few days,” My father replied.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself. I figured a shit storm was brewing, and I wanted to get it over fast.
“But he’ll have to fly,” Virginia protested. She was morbidly phobic about flying, just as she was about anything else that involved leaving the house. But she got hold of herself and said, “I bet we can book him a round trip on a boat.”
“Why are you sending me to the Philippines?” I asked. Virginia was known to throw fits if I left the apartment for cigarettes. I couldn’t believe she wanted me to go all the way to the Philippines.
“We got this in the mail,” Bob said.
Virginia wore her death goddess grin as she handed it to me. Then they braced themselves like they were giving me something I wanted for my birthday. It was a mail-order bride catalog. It was just like the sorry websites that are sometimes advertised on Facebook. Only this was printed on cheap newspaper stock. And the ink was so cheap it was nearly running on the page.
I was numb while I looked at the details. To sum it up, for 5,000 US 1992 dollars, I could purchase any of the girls in the catalog. And there were about thirty pages of blurry photographs and little blurbs. They all announced they were good Christians who would be loyal until death does us part. Can you say human trafficking? I like the way you say that. And I wasn’t holding back laughter because I thought human trafficking is funny, but the idea that I’d go along with this was funnier than hell.
“I hate to rain on your parade, but I don’t have 5,000 dollars,” I said, tossing the catalog back on the table.
“Don’t worry about that; we’ll cover it for you; you can pay us back,” Virginia said quickly. I wondered how much money she had squirreled away in the bottom of her closet. My estimate rose to 5,000 dollars or more.
“Why do you think I’m going to the Philippines to get married?” I asked softly. The answer was obvious, they were both as crazy as emus on crank,
Virginia grinned and pointed to a picture in the catalog. “I think she’s very pretty,” she replied, avoiding the question.
I was forced to come to grips with how out-to-lunch those space cadets were. That was the moment I lost all hope for both of them. I still tried to include them in my family for the next three years, but I knew I was whistling past a graveyard. For all practical purposes, I was an orphan.
“Why don’t you take a look? Maybe you’ll see somebody you like,” my mother urged, handing back the catalog. Since I was curious, I took it to the sofa and thumbed through it while my parents stared at me like a pair of dogs expecting a treat.
I sipped my coffee and flipped through the catalog. It was deplorable! A couple of the women claimed university degrees. And they put themselves on the auction block. This was obviously white slavery, and it sickened me.
“You think I’m going to marry one of these women?” I asked them, and they responded with big smiles. “You really think I will willingly take a slow boat to Manila and come home married to one of these people?”
Their expressions of hopeful delight were more than I could handle. I burst out laughing. I think that must have been the best laugh I had since the gas leak. And the harder I laughed, the more the screwballs sunk into themselves. I laughed so hard I had to pee. When I returned, Bob and Virginia had retreated to their respective rooms. And they stopped bothering me. Virginia would occasionally ask about the catalog, but I always responded by laughing.
I took the catalog home to show my partner; they were appalled and didn’t see the humor. But as I said before, the catalog wasn’t funny, but Bob and Virginia were a hoot! The booklet eventually found its way to the office, where my coworkers were as amused and appalled as I was. In fact, my friend Jules was outraged and started to explain human trafficking. And I told him, “that’s why it’s so funny; my parents thought I was going to go for it.” The catalog stayed in the office until it disintegrated into forty pieces and got tossed out and forgotten.
The office closed by the second week in July; we had literally called everybody twice. Commissions had reached the bottom of the barrel, and I had no money saved for the layoff. The office wouldn’t reopen until October when we’d be selling tickets for the M. Charles Holiday Review. I had no unemployment, so I found a hidey-hole by telemarketing for the Olan Mills Studios. That was the lowest of the low, but it beat no income. I only worked there for a week before getting an old friend’s phone call.
I’ll call him Karl, even though that wasn’t even close to his real name. I met Karl while running my bookstore in Allentown, PA. He had just opened his own home improvement company and wanted me as his telemarketer. He hired me for his telemarketing room, and we hit it off and made a lot of money together. It took a little talking because I was still dreaming of Arizona, but I accepted and left Olan Mills that night.
The money was a lot better than M. Charles. My base salary was higher, and my commissions meatier. On top of that, it was so well located that I could get there by bus in the morning, and my partner could drive me back to Phillipsburg after work. They picked me up on Friday night and didn’t bring me back to Phillipsburg until Monday evening. So I had one less day with Bob and Virginia. That alone made the new job worth it. Of course, I had to let Virginia know I was making more money in my base, but I never mentioned the commissions. So my rent only went up to $80 a month.
Virginia never stopped trying to get money from me. A week before I left, I brought a paperback from the thrift shop next to the office. I came home and opened the book to read with my dinner. Virginia was in the kitchen getting her goodnight tea. I opened the book, and a hundred-dollar bill fluttered between the pages and landed on my lap. Virginia saw it. She moved towards me like it was pulling her on a string. I knew she would ruin the moment, so I consoled myself by folding it carefully and putting it in my wallet. Her eyes locked on my hand while I put my wallet back in my pocket.
“What are you going to do with it?” she asked.
“I don’t know; why?” I responded, picking up my mug and opening the book up again.
“Gerber’s selling special health insurance that only grandparents can open,” she said. “A hundred dollars will open the account, and from there on, it’s only ten dollars a month.”
The next day, I called Gerber Life in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I was told Gerber didn’t sell health insurance by both offices, and they said they had never heard of such a bizarre policy.
Virginia even had the nerve to ask if I thought about Gerber Health Insurance. “There is no such thing,” I told her. “I called both the New Jersey and Pennsylvania offices. They deny having such a policy. Do you have a brochure or something I could look at?”
“The offer must have expired!” she said quickly and ducked back into her room, slamming the door.
Here’s the funny part. A friend had a room he rented for fifty bucks a week with laundry and breakfasts included. I set it all up except paying the hundred dollars but moved back in with my family. The hundred dollars was spent on a day trip for the family. That hundred dollars could have been first and last week’s rent on a new place.
Around the same time, I discovered the child support order had been canceled at the end of June. My former regional manager mailed me two weeks of child support and a letter explaining that payroll was slow in withdrawing the lien. And just like that, I was free. No more child support. It was gone without saying goodbye.
I would have waved that check over my head and danced around the room in any other place. But the last thing I needed was for Virginia to learn I had money. So I sat down and put my head between my knees to keep from exploding with joy. Then it occurred to me that something bloody weird was going on.
I called Warren County Child Support as soon as I hit work the next day. The guy on the phone confirmed that they ended my support payments but didn’t have any more information. Then I asked about the order or regulation that kept me from living with my partner. He replied that since there was no support order, I was no longer bound by child support regulations. I thanked him profusely, hung up, and wondered what the blue living hell was going on.
My partner received a letter from Welfare that had been delayed because it was mailed to the hotel room. Our toddler had been taken off Medicaid and food stamps as of September 1st because I was supporting my son directly. This was certainly news to me.
We went to the county courthouse before work the following Monday. First, we went to Welfare, and her worker denied having banned me from living with my family. He said all we needed to do was tell him I was moving back in so he could readjust the benefits. Since they were already adjusted, there weren’t any problems. For all he cared, I could have moved in the next minute.
Next, we went to the court clerk’s office to inquire about my appeal. The court clerk told us my appeal had been canceled due to the rescinded support order. They had sent me a letter about it. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that Virginia swiped the letter. Stealing official mail was the petty mischief she pulled to keep in practice. I was so angry at Virginia that I forgot to request a copy of the letter. This was such a huge mistake; I’m surprised Larry Marra didn’t crawl out of the grave to bitch-slap me. And not getting that letter did come back to bite me in the ass, but that story will be told in its place.
It was good that we were in Belvidere, where all the government offices were a short walk from Blair House. Finally, we went across the street to the County Section 8 office. The county section 8 office was in a row of blue wooden storefronts across from the courthouse. The women running it were the usual pair of Warren County matrons. Of course, the office was full of religious posters.
We told them what was happening and that I wanted to rejoin my family. And damned if that didn’t press their preaching button! We got a lecture about how god wanted me to be there for my kids. We waited for the sermon to wind down because it’s easier to let them get it out of their system than argue. We gently corrected them and told them we thought County Section 8 was keeping me from living with my family.
“Who said that?” one Section 8 worker asked.
“The apartment manager,” my partner replied.
“Where do you live?” the other asked.
“Blair House,” my partner replied.
The women’s shoulders slumped, and they rolled their eyes.
“Our office’s mission is to keep families together,” The first explained. “We certainly didn’t issue such an order.”
“Have you cleared it with Welfare?” the other asked as if she would cry if we said no. Her face dimpled when we said the benefits had already been adjusted.
“We’re just going to need you to sign a few forms and readjust your rent for next month, and you can move in today.”
This was the first and only time having Born Again Christians working in a public office ever worked out for me. In under fifteen minutes, it was done. The papers were signed, the rent adjusted, and I was only going to be twenty minutes late for work. Life was good.
I moved in the next day. I returned to my parent’s apartment that night and told them I had found a room near work. Bob wished me well, happy to be returning to his usual isolation. Virginia asked that I continue to send her my rent. Which I did not.
So here’s the story of how I ended up in Hillbilly Heaven, and it was a real hootenanny from the beginning to the end. For us, it was a beginning. We were leaving Welfare and Section 8 and all that shit behind. Blair House was going to be our launching pad. This was the year 1992, and George H.W. Bush was still president. This would change in November when William Jefferson Clinton became president. Blair House ceased to be our launching pad and became where we would fight for survival.
Last blog post, as you may recall, we left our hero so beyond fucked he couldn’t even hitchhike back. His partner had been forced to sign a child support order against him. He had no money because he was tricked into giving up his unemployment benefits and was still waiting to be called back to work. Two months of unrelenting stress had triggered ADHD symptoms he didn’t know he had. He couldn’t relax or stop being angry for a moment. Remember, he had a jail sentence hanging over his head. And, worse of all, he had nowhere to go but his bat shit crazy parents.
Somebody with more sense than me would have dashed across the river into Pennsylvania. Or I could have hightailed it to Manhattan. That’s what my partner’s ex-husband did, and he paid all of $700 in child support in fifteen years because it was too much of a pain to collect from him. They picked on me because I was low-hanging fruit. Besides, my partner’s ex-husband never cost a Phillipsburg city council member half a million dollars in repairs and fines.
I stuck around because I would be damned if I was going to let those bastards in Section 8 and Welfare run me off. So I decided to go full Larry Marra on their asses. In retrospect, that was the decision that changed my life. Never again would I go into a situation where the state would have that kind of control over me.
I’m ashamed to admit it, but Welfare managed to get in my skull. I was furious at my partner for signing that child support order. I vented like crazy when I called my parents, and then I was leaving my partner forever.
My resolve shattered when I got back and saw the grin on my mother’s face. She reminded me of the Irish Goddess of Battle and Death. Maybe it was the green in her complexion. Still, I could easily picture her in the middle of a battlefield surrounded by crows feeding on corpses. Mom was sympathetic and assured me I could stay for free until my job started and pay the back rent in installments. And I wasn’t to worry about a thing; she would devise the perfect plan to get custody of my son.
Then my father mentioned the child support order and that I had ten days to pay $200 or end up in jail. You should have seen Mom’s grin vanish! She went from goddess triumphant to foiled madwoman in seconds. Her fists balled up, and she stamped in a fury. She resolved that we would have to gain control of the baby immediately.
“No,” I said. I was angry at my partner, but it was only on the surface. There was no way in hell I was going to demand custody. Not only would it have been devastatingly cruel to my partner, but there was no way in hell I would hand my son over to those lunatics.
Something inside me snapped, and I wasn’t willing to humor them anymore. There were 10,000 reasons why I wasn’t going to go for custody; I chose the one that best suited my purpose. “I don’t have a job, and I’m camping in your living room. There isn’t a judge in hell who would award me custody.”
Mom’s grin came back, “That’s easy to get around,” she said with a laugh. “Your father and I will sue for temporary custody until you get on your feet. So I’ll get the AFDC, and we can buy a house together.”
You see? A sane person would have seen my point and table the matter. But not Mom. She believed she was entitled to anything she wanted and expected the world to provide it to her. And god help the world, and anybody around her, when she didn’t get it. This was why I didn’t just come out and tell her I would not demand custody. She might have gotten violent and started throwing things.
I looked around the living room like I was about to give a presentation and stared at my father. “You know that the court will do a background check?” I asked with a bit of a chuckle.
Ten years ago, Dad had been the accountant for a meat packing plant that shipped cocaine with the sausages. He pleaded insanity and locked himself in a funny farm for a few months. He couldn’t have passed an SPCA background check. And they both knew it.
The real world was their kryptonite, and I dumped a pocketful of reality on their laps. Dad had the grace to look slightly embarrassed and shrugged at Mom. Mom looked at him like he was going to pay for it again. Then she slunk off to her room, muttering something about me enjoying prison life. And my stomach grew cold. From that moment on, I stopped thinking about them as “Mom and Dad” and started referring to them by their first names.
They did one good thing for me. I didn’t have enough room in my head to be angry at them; the City of Phillipsburg and Warren County, and my partner and I stopped being mad at them before I went to bed that night. There was an awkwardness between us due to the child support order. But we talked that out as well as other things. But we both had the willingness to work them out. But I never told my parents, and I didn’t even tell Bob and Virginia when I moved back in with my family.
Bob and Virginia gave me a lot of extra motivation to beat that child support charge. I didn’t want to ask them for help. Virginia had a few thousand dollars stashed in the purses piled on the bottom of her closet. But she wouldn’t lend me any unless I agreed to sue for custody. So I went to the library and studied. For the first time, I learned about my enemy instead of blindly reacting. Larry would have been proud of the way I methodically researched the problem.
One of the most important lessons I learned from Larry is that everything you need to know is in the public domain. All you have to do is ask for it. So I went to the friendly references librarian and asked her if the library had a copy of the County Welfare Social Worker’s handbook. And, of course, they had a copy because it is required by law.
It only took an hour before I caught Warren County Welfare on several, shall we say, irregularities. The biggest whopper was we were never offered an appeal. Had we made an immediate appeal, they would have had to reinstate us immediately. We were never provided the form. I was not receiving unemployment when I signed for county welfare. They had no legal reason to terminate us. The most damning of all is I was homeless. Back then, homelessness was a defense against child support. That changed under Clinton, but I’m getting ahead of the story.
At that point, I had grounds for all sorts of appeals, but not enough to keep myself out of jail. Even if I had the $95 to file my appeal, it would still not prevent the arrest order from being executed. The warrant was already ordered. I was essentially turning myself in for arrest.
I learned other things about Welfare and child support I never knew before. For instance, none of the money ever goes to the child. The money garnished from parents goes into the general appropriations fund. It is used for office supplies, furniture, company cars, etc. And as enlightening as all that was, it wasn’t pertinent to my goals. So I went to study the next enemy, child support. I only found a few cryptic references to them in the welfare handbook, so I started looking elsewhere.
Three days later, I wasn’t anywhere closer to my goal. The Child Support Unit was like god. Everybody claimed they existed, but nobody could define them. Reagan’s Child Support Act mandated that every county welfare office have a child support unit. Still, there was no instruction on how it was organized or to who it was responsible. There was absolutely no accountability on the federal level. After a few more red-eyed hours, I discovered that there was no state oversight. Every county child support unit was an entity unto itself and not beholden to anybody for their actions.
Another two days were spent double-checking my work because I couldn’t believe what I had read. Welfare and Child Support were two different entities. And even if I could overturn Welfare’s child support order, the child support unit was obligated to arrest me until they received the proper notice from Welfare. I was utterly screwed. My only hope was to demand a blood test. Under those circumstances, the hearing officer would have to give me an extra thirty days under the condition of my immediate compliance.
A friend suggested that I let them put me in jail. His name was Ronnie, and I met him in High School. He claimed his cousin had the same welfare and child support problems I was suffering. His court-appointed attorney filed the appeal, and his cousin was out in less than a month. He didn’t seem to understand my reluctance to go to jail. Ronnie was black and unjust incarceration was a part of his life like the common cold.
I was convinced I was going to jail. Knowing that I might get a lawyer in jail was cold comfort.
I had rebuffed all of Virginia’s tries at tempting me to sell my son for my freedom, and she hadn’t even poked her head out to say goodbye. Then Bob spent the whole trip telling me what a shit parent my partner was and how it was in my son’s best interests to have them help raise him.
Bob wasn’t happy to see my partner waiting for me with the kids. He warned me not to stay away from them. He said it was a mistake, but the kids were already running to greet me. Then my partner gave me the two hundred dollars I needed to stay out of jail. They had sold our refrigerator for seven hundred dollars. They slipped me the balance after the hearing so my mother wouldn’t know I had it. Now you know why my partner and I are still together after 39 years. I would have to be brain-damaged to leave a person like that.
The hearing officer was my high school American history teacher to make life more surreal! There was no mistaking him. There couldn’t be two people who looked like Charles Laughton crossed with a frog.
Too bad my old history teacher wasn’t wearing a kangaroo suit. It would have given a spark of humor to what was essentially depressing bullshit. I was given two choices, pay two hundred dollars or go to jail. No arguments. I wasn’t even provided the courtesy of a blood test. So following the teachings of Larry, I requested to speak for the record. My least favorite teacher of all time gave me permission, and I said I was paying under protest because I was homeless at the time of the order. I then cited the regulation and its reference number, all proper. And pulled out the two hundred dollars for the bailiff.
Draw Charles Laughton as a frog with a shocked expression, which was close to the look on that old bastard’s face. I had just set up an appeal as neatly as an attorney, and he fell for it. He glowered at me as I paid the bailiff, and he hit the gavel and gave me another ten days to become current on my child support. My partner supplied the money for that, and I left Belvidere with over three hundred dollars my parents never found out about. I filed my appeal before returning to the car so Bob could drive me home.
I can still picture Ronnie pointing at me and saying, “You could have saved your woman that money if you went to jail.” He may have been right, or he may have been wrong, but I don’t think I would have gotten a fair deal from Warren County had I gone to jail.
Virginia wasn’t pleased to learn about my freedom, nor was she happy about who was responsible. I was verbally abused for about ten minutes when she found out. At that point, I treated her like I used to treat other bullies and tuned her out. But then she went into rationalizing mode and decided my partner kept me out of jail out of guilt, and I was entitled to that money. And since I didn’t have to worry about prison anymore, I could spend more time researching how to get custody of THE BABY.
Once I avoided jail, I could focus on other important matters, such as a new job. The job I had was supposed to be a placeholder until I could find a good job, anyway. But the job situation in 1992 was just as bad as today. More people ran out of unemployment than actually found real jobs. Today, I wonder why more people haven’t figured out how the unemployment statistics are rigged. The increasing number of homeless families should really give people a clue.
Of course, I didn’t trust my parents to take messages for me. All prospective employers called my partner in the hotel room. I made it a point to call three times daily for my replies. I didn’t get any. But I haunted the unemployment offices and perused the classified ads constantly.
My primary purpose in life became avoiding Bob and Virginia at all costs. And when I had to be in their presence, I’d put on my Walkman and drown them out with The Who. And believe me, the shit got really crazy. Virginia was determined to get custody of “The Baby to the point where she got paranoid about it. She left her room to accuse me of being on my partner’s side instead of hers at random times. She frequently woke me up with that crap. I had to keep assuring her I was not planning on moving back in with my partner, even though I had to lie through my teeth.
As luck would have it, my job started a week before I found out about it. I had forgotten to give my manager the motel room number, and Virginia didn’t pass on the message. I just happened to pass the Allentown office while searching for a new job and saw the outfit was back together. I came home with a job that night.
The good thing was I was working a split shift. We were on the phones from nine to one in the afternoon. Then from five to nine in the evening. That meant I left the apartment before the gruesome twosome woke up, and they were in their respective rooms when I came home. The bad thing was I never got to see the kids or my partner. I had to satisfy myself with phone calls.
Another good thing was the half shift on Saturday. That was not only time and a half; it meant another morning when I didn’t have to wade through Virginia’s bullshit. Bob had pretty much retreated to his room and left me alone. But Virginia was still determined to gain custody of “THE BABY.” So I would take the greyhound to New York on Saturday Afternoons. Only I found fewer and fewer people to hang out with. The scene had moved forward without me. Most of my old friends had either moved on themselves, moved to California, died, or became megastars. It got to the point where I felt lonelier during my New York expeditions than I did back in the Lehigh Valley.
The best thing was I made more in commissions than I did on my hourly. And while this raised my child support payments by twenty bucks, my mother never found out about it. So my rent didn’t go up, and I still had a few dollars after expenses. Besides, working in that boiler room was the best thing to have happened to me after the emotional roller-coaster I survived. It was dirt easy work, and I ended the week with a half-decent paycheck.
It was also strangely comforting to be working with a bunch of guys who survived the same shit I did. All of them had child support horror stories. That included my friend Jules who couldn’t live with his family due to Lehigh County, Pennsylvania’s primitive welfare rules. Yet every Saturday, he’d stay at the office, have a beer, and then go to the park with his girlfriend and their three kids. Those guys taught me I had more in common with them than the middle-class pretensions my parents imposed on me.
Don’t think for one second that Mom had given up her opium dream of getting control of my son. I came home one night, and Virginia was waiting for me, and it wasn’t rent day. She was there to “warn” me that my father was going to report my partner as an unfit parent. Then Virginia told the biggest whopper of the evening. She said she tried to talk my father out of it.
Of course, I didn’t believe it. I knew my mother to be a habitual liar since grade school. In junior high, I noticed that they played good cop/bad cop on me when they wanted to get me to do something I didn’t want to do. Usually, Bob was the good cop begging me to calm my mother by doing whatever she said. But if they were being really sneaky, Virginia was the good cop.
Bob had a weird form of Munchhausen by proxy. He loved diagnosing my brother and me with strange ailments, which he treated by changing our diets. Thanks to him, I have an extreme reaction to lactose and other dietary-based disabilities. Bob wanted to diagnose and treat my stepson, but there was no way my partner would put up with that.
One Sunday, he and I ran down to Easton for something and had a surprise meeting with my partner and the kids. My mother-in-law had driven down from civilization and took them on an outing. Stepson had a bag of fudge and ate a piece right in front of my father, who had a meltdown over it.
It was his contention that my stepson had behavior problems due to diet. And he obsessed over that piece of candy for days! I suspect Virginia kept pressing his buttons until he worked up enough crazy to report my partner for letting their nine-year-old eat a piece of fudge.
I was still trying to get my head around the situation and devise a counter plan. At the same time, my mother jumped into a long rant about how my partner was an unfit parent. (I hope everybody is enjoying this irony because I wasn’t.) Then launched back into her favorite hallucination. I was going to sue for custody of “THE BABY” and get control of the AFDC. And we could all buy a house together.
Looking back at it, I think Virginia drove me into a psychotic episode. I should have been furiously angry, and I think Virginia was as unnerved by my calm as I was. I was on the other side of anger, where everything is as clear as crystal and violence is the solution to everything.
“He’s not calling DYFS,” I said, referring to the Department of Youth and Family Services.
“I don’t think I can stop him,” Virginia said, looking more green than usual. She had never seen me ice cold like that before. And I doubt anybody else ever has.
“Then I will beat the son of a bitch to death with a baseball bat,” I said, and I meant every word. And if I had a baseball bat, I’m not sure if I could have held back.
“What did you say?” my mother asked. She was scared. It’s totally out of character for me to threaten actual violence. I might jokingly threaten to slap somebody with a dead halibut or some other slapstick, but never real violence. And it took my mother to reduce me to it.
“I said I was going to beat him to death with a baseball bat,” I replied.
Bob chose that moment to enter the room. “Look, Bill, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and you have to agree that your ex isn’t a fit parent,” he said and stopped dead from the expression on my face.
“She’s been seeing a psychologist,” said my mother, the bipolar who didn’t take her medicine. I silenced her with a look.
“Dad, if you even think about calling DYFS, I’m going to beat you to death with a baseball bat,” I said.
He grinned at me like I was joking. “I am dead serious,” I told them. “Now, if you will excuse me, I’m heading out to find somewhere else to stay.”
They stared at me as if I grew a second head or something. “But what about the $60 a week?” my mother asked. They were spending that money on necessities since my father had refused to do much tax work since I moved in.
I got out my backpack and started stuffing my few changes of clothes into it. Virginia unfroze and started explaining how this was a huge misunderstanding. I let her talk me into staying because I was hungry and wanted my dinner.
Knowing them as well or better than they knew me, I called DYFS on Monday. I explained the situation, including Bob and Virginia’s diagnosis. The woman I spoke to was quite sympathetic and assured me I wasn’t the only person with crazy parents. While I appreciate her support, I don’t think many parents were quite as batshit crazy as mine. They were only inches from being Turpins.
Bob and Virginia left me alone for a few days. Then they tried to ratpack me. When they couldn’t amuse themselves through the art of manipulation, they always went with brute force bullying. They were yelling at me that I had to sue for custody of “THE BABY” because it was the best thing for the kids. Especially if my stepson went into foster care.
“No,” I said before they even got halfway started. Then I looked my mother straight in the eye and said, “that AFDC is there to take care of my son’s needs, not yours. You have no right to it, and you damned well know it. Now lay off; I had a long shift.”
Believe it or not, they stopped. I had a wonderful week where my parents avoided me as assiduously as I stayed away from them. It was an enjoyable time. Not only that, but we got good news. My partner and kids got a new place to live, The Blair House Apartments in Belvidere.
And on top of that, my mother-in-law managed to scare up a car. The problem was my partner was told that I wouldn’t be allowed to join them. Please note, this was not County Welfare’s orders, nor was it County Section 8. It was the apartment manager who made that decision. But we had been subjected to so many weird rules and rulings we believed it.
They moved into the new apartment at the beginning of June, and I wasn’t due for my child support appeal until September. And we didn’t learn the apartment manager had been bullshitting us until the hearing. So I spent three and a half months in the Multiverse of Madness that I didn’t have to. And a fun-filled three months they were.
It looks the same as it did 30 years ago. That is so damned depressing
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 