Phillipsburg NJ – The Traumatic 90s

Countdown to Blair House. Part Three: Bill in the Multiverse of Madness

And it looks so normal from the outside.

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.

Count Down to Blair House: Part One- The Nearly Fatal Gas Leak

It looks the same as when I lived here 30 years ago. I wonder if they ever abated the lead paint?

It was the second day after Christmas in 1991. I was on a holiday layoff, and my unemployment was beginning the following week. My toddler played on the floor while my stepson played his Nintendo. I told my partner that I’d be back in ten minutes and went out for cigarettes. I came back about eight minutes later, and all hell had let loose. I opened the door, and a rush of natural gas hit me. My stepson lay back in his chair, half-conscious. He dropped his controller and was too dizzy to pick it up. My partner sat in the rocker, her eyes closed. I yelled at them to wake up. Their eyes opened immediately they staggered to their feet. They got our toddler out while I pulled my stepson to the porch. The toddler had been too close to the floor to be affected. The fresh air revived the other two.

It was a damned good thing I had only run to the corner; otherwise, I would have come home to a tragedy. There was no question about us going back into that death trap, but most of our friends were two hours away in New York City. My Mother-in-Law, bless her kindly heart, would have driven from Little Ferry to pick us up, but she didn’t have room to house two adults and two children.

We had no choice but to call my parents for help. They lived in the same town and had a large apartment. Yet we stood on the porch discussing alternatives until it started to rain. You see, my parents were barking mad. And I’m not talking casually narcissistic. I’m talking about the kind of crazy that should have put them in managed care before they spawned.

Mom had been outright civilized since her bipolar diagnosis the year before. And foolish me, I thought she was staying on her medications. Dad was shaping up to become a fair grandfather. So we decided that we had no choice. I called them up and asked for their aid. Dad brought the car over and even helped me open every window in that apartment and pack a few overnight bags. And so began six months of hellish torment that landed me in the Blair House Apartments.

It wasn’t an ideal situation, to say the least. Both my parents were cat hoarders but were down to only five. That meant there were litter boxes in every room, which my father cleaned three times daily. He was forever walking around with a plastic scoop and a plastic bag. But we still had to keep an eye on the toddler every moment. There was also the matter of tobacco smoke. My mother had quit cold turkey while recovering from a heart attack. My father still smoked like a chimney but stayed in his room with it. So the only hazards were Mom and Dad. Bored from making each other’s lives miserable, they focused on us.

As I mentioned before, my mother was bipolar. She had slow cycles and became psychotic during her depressive stage. Which lasted for years. She used to accuse me of hiding in the closets and swearing at her, and I had to get notes from my teachers proving I was in school. She was also a toxic narcissist and suffered from extreme agoraphobia. She hadn’t set foot outside her apartment for the three years before her heart attack. She went right back to not leaving her home when she got home from the hospital. She spent her days with the shades drawn so she could pretend it was still 1953.

Mom was totally dependent on my father for everything, from the shopping to driving her to her dialysis appointments. So, of course, she hated my father with every fiber of her soul. This is because she was a toxic narcissist who drove off everybody who ever gave a damn about her. My father was literally the only person she had left, so he got the brunt of her venom. I have no clue why my father put up with it, except he was as crazy as she was. He was also a narcissist, and they reinforced each other’s narcissism. To my father, Mom was an unappreciated put-upon artist. To my mother, Dad was a genius nobody else could appreciate.

Dad was a mystery wrapped in an enigma. He had an official diagnosis of “Psychosis,” but nobody had the first clue why. He lived in a waking dream that he believed with incredible sincerity. Intelligent people fell for his gibberish, and many of them lost money. My mother never failed to assure them that he was right and the people who wanted his head were wrong. Together they formed an invincible wall against reality. And this was the shit storm we walked into.

My mother was very gracious to my partner when we arrived. She was even nice to my eight-year-old stepson. Both my parents hated my family. They loathed the person who “stole” me from them. My father hated my stepson because my partner wouldn’t let him express his Munchhausen by Proxy. Dad used to love to diagnose my brother and me, and his “prescriptions” usually involved taking away a favorite food. We didn’t let him pull that with either of the boys.

It was different with my mother. She had been the stepchild while growing up, and she delighted in trying to inflict every abuse she suffered on my poor kid. My partner and I set limits. And limits sent her into a fury. She also couldn’t stand that she was not the toddler’s guardian and fought the boundaries we put on that. We also wouldn’t let her pit the brothers against each other, which drove her into mad furies.

I was pleasantly surprised that my mother was being nice to everybody. I was under the misapprehension that she was still taking her psych meds. And I was getting optimistic they were helping her. Then, as soon as we had a few minutes alone, she shook me down for 60 bucks. Once she had cash in hand, my mother was her usual nasty self. I spent more time between Mom and my family than I spent trying to resolve the situation.

Our first step was to have someone from the gas company come and look at the apartment. The tech came the next day and confirmed what we already knew, the place was a death trap. The gas leak registered 10 points over the lower explosive limit. It’s a wonder the building didn’t blow each time I lit a cigarette on the porch.

My suggestion was to turn off the gas and install an electric stove. The landlord turned us down flat and conveyed he was very upset we left the windows open when we left the building. So I went to the city safety inspector and explained the problem. He told me he’d look into it. He called me back the next day. He told me the problem was solved, and we could move back in, but he was vague in explaining the solution. So I went to city hall to talk to him personally.

He was just as friendly as could be. He told me that he installed a new gauge that would warn us if there was another gas leak. So I asked the question he didn’t want to answer. “When are you going to install it?”
“It’s already installed,” he said with a big grin. “The problem’s solved. You can move back in right now.”

“Where did you install it?” I asked

“In the basement,” the weasel replied.

“So how am I supposed to know if there’s a gas leak if the gauge is in the basement,” I asked. “Are we supposed to sit in the basement and watch the meter in shifts?”

That was when he started getting nasty and sarcastic. I listened to him, and I interrupted. “This is not acceptable,” I said, and he got even more abusive. I left intending to call in the state. But I wasn’t sure who I should call.

So I got out the blue pages and called every office remotely concerned with housing. I left a ton of voice messages that were never returned. I spoke to an even dozen secretaries and gatekeepers. I wasn’t even paying attention to whom I was calling. I just called. And finally, I got a guy on the phone who started asking me the right questions. He said he would like to help me, but the state only regulated buildings with four or more apartments. I thought I was in a duplex, so my hopes were dashed. The nice man gave me his name and direct number and told me to call him if anything changed. I held on to his name and number like a magic talisman.

My partner was out with the kids while I was on the phone. Of course, that was when my mother decided to strike. Mom was furious over my partner doing some basic cleaning in the kitchen. She felt it was disrespectful. And I got to hear all about it while trying to make my calls. Finally, Mom demanded that I send my partner and stepson to stay with my mother-in-law. Were it possible, we would have done that instead of moving into crazyville. But my mother didn’t care that my mother-in-law lived in a studio. I also pointed out that we would lose our Section 8 voucher if my partner left the county for more than a week. Mom kept saying I was wrong until I showed her the handbook.

Mom instantly went on the attack, which she always did when I didn’t fall for one of her cons. And the more I refused to fall for her con, the angrier she got. Finally, Mom got so mad she told the truth. She called me an idiot for not getting sole custody of “THE BABY” so I could have the AFDC. Then I would never have to work. We could buy a house and all move in together. That way, I would all be safe from the misfortunes waiting for me in the outside world.

That was not going to happen, and I repeated to Mom that I intended to remain with the mother of my children. Mom saw that as a challenge and started trying to anticipate my objections. And. Without any provocation from me, she swore that my partner could have visitation, and she would never dream of getting between them. Which pretty much told me that was precisely what she planned to do.

“Let me think about it, Mom,” I said because that was what I always used to say before giving in. She left with the cat-that-ate-the-canary grin Mom always wore when she got her way. But this time, I wasn’t giving in to her. I told my partner what was up as soon as they came home. We agreed that we would be better off back in that hellish apartment than where we were. So I told Mom that we decided not to risk our Section 8 but would return to the deathtrap and negotiate with the authorities.

My father was all for it and offered to get the car. There were too many people around for him to handle. He was spending more and more time in his room playing solitaire instead of starting his yearly tax work. Mom began to scream that we couldn’t go. My partner ignored her and started packing our toddler’s things. I started getting my stepson’s stuff together, and the kid was so glad to be going he helped me! Then Mom shocked the hell out of me by calling my mother-in-law and begging her to stop us. I didn’t even know they were in contact.

Unlike my parents, my Mother-in-law has good sense. She begged us to stay because she was convinced our window sills were filled with lead paint chips. I knew my mother-in-law too well to dismiss her concerns. And neither my partner nor I were eager to return to that apartment. So we compromised by agreeing to get our toddler a lead test before deciding to leave.

Then my mother-in-law told me Mom had been calling to ask her to take in my partner and stepson. Plus, she told my mother-in-law I asked her to do it. Which only meant she kept doing it, did it harder, and was twice as sneaky. I was furious and asked my mother never to do anything like that again.

We didn’t see much of Mom for the next few days. She hid in her room, only leaving to eat or spoil her grandson. When Mom did show her face, she mocked the idea that “her grandson” could have lead poisoning. I made a doctor’s appointment for the day after New Year. So far, we lived with my parents for five days, but I remember it as being forever.

1992 was starting with a real bang. We had been in hell for almost a week. It was zero-degree weather, and Mom had forbidden my father from driving us to the hospital because the entire blood test was absurd. She mocked us about it while we got the toddler ready and walked to Warren Hospital.

We got the test results immediately, and they were terrifying. Our little boy had a toxic level of lead in his system. The doctors were adamant that we couldn’t return our son to that apartment. And Mom couldn’t have been happier. Suddenly it was her idea to get a blood test. I don’t know how I held back, but I let that slide and let her crow.

You would think that Section 8 would have some regulations about children not growing up around lead paint. Or maybe the state or federal government would have some sort of law to protect children from lead paint. Surprise, there wasn’t any. In fact, the Section 8 handbook was careful to mention this. We simply hadn’t been paying attention. Section 8 insisted that we either move back into that apartment or face eviction and the loss of our voucher. And they gave us a week to change our minds.

This is where my training under Larry Marra Sr came to my rescue. I spent the rest of the day at the library and discovered a loophole. We could demand a new apartment if we could prove our current residence was uninhabitable. The doctor was willing to back us on the lead paint hazard. I figured we could use more proof, so I called the country health board for a lead paint inspection. Then I tried to find a loophole where I could get the state to inspect the apartment, but I couldn’t find anything.

I returned to chaos. My stepson had befriended my mother’s favorite cat, and her jealous rage traumatized both the kid and the cat. Mom blamed my stepson for upsetting “the baby,” and my poor partner comforted both kids while ignoring the raving madwoman. The toddler was frightened to tears, and my partner did everything to keep things together.

My partner hadn’t been having an easy time before we had to move into the madhouse, and I don’t know how they had survived it. I had to put my foot down again and tell my mother that we would take “THE BABY” back to the deathtrap. She knew I meant it because I had followed through on other threats.

Once I had everything quieted, and my mother was stewing in her lair, I left. It had been a hard day. First the lead test, then my few hours in the library. And after confronting my mother, I found out we got an eviction notice. I excused myself and did what I always did when under pressure. I took a long walk and found myself at our apartment. And I just stood there and willed myself into finding a solution.

Somebody once said that we see, but we don’t observe. That was certainly true in my case. I had been living in Phillipsburg for nine years. I had passed by the building I had been living in a billion times before moving in. But I never really observed it. That night I looked carefully at every inch of the building. First, the front. Then I went to the side where the blue paneled building met the row of brick-faced row homes my landlord owned. There was something off about the gap between the buildings. If they were detached, I should have been able to see lights from the windows on the other side. I got closer and really looked and found a wall. A wall attached my building to the row homes. Further examination showed I stood on a shared foundation.

Counting apartments, I came up with eight. Eight flats meant that the town had no jurisdiction over safety enforcement. The city inspector and his bogus gas pressure gauge had no business in this affair. And I had the phone number of a state employee who promised he’d help if he could. I laughed and danced and yelled, “motherfucker!” People walking past must have thought I had lost my mind.

I decided to stick my head into the apartment and make sure everything was in order. The laughter died in my throat. The door had been jimmied, and the whole apartment had been tossed. Drawers had been taken out of the dressers, and the contents were thrown all over the floor. The kitchen cabinets had been ransacked and furniture overturned. The only thing taken was an expensive rocking chair my mother-in-law gave us. That kind of killed my buzz. My mood had turned back into cold anger when I went to the phone booth to call the constables and make a report. It was a good thing we already removed everything of value.

The next day, I was on the phone at nine sharp, and the man I had spoken to before answered, and he remembered me. I told him about my discovery that my supposed duplex was actually an octoplex. He asked me about the gas leak again, and I answered all his questions and added about my son’s lead test. He wanted to come over the next day, but I had to watch the toddler then, so I rescheduled to Thursday at Two. Which was when the board of health inspector was due. I thought that having the two inspectors at once was an incredible stroke of luck. And it was!

Tuesday afternoon, I let Dad play with the toddler while I was on the phone with Warren County Legal Aid. We had the eviction coming up, and I wanted to counter sue the landlord for moving expenses. My father was in rare form. He had enough reality for the next decade and needed to vent. Of course, he bitched about what a horrible person my partner was. Then my mother came in demanding to know when I would leave my partner. She had a lawyer lined up to help me with custody. I have no idea how I kept it together.

My nerves were shot on Wednesday. I walked my stepson to school and went straight to the death trap. The landlord had brought in an electric stove sometime since I had last visited, and it just sat in the middle of the kitchen. The gas stove was still set up, and I had to pick up the kitchen around two stoves. God, I must have smoked half a carton of cigarettes before the state inspector showed up. Only he wasn’t an inspector; he was a detective with the Attorney General’s Housing Law Investigation Division. You could have knocked me down with a feather after he showed me his badge. I hadn’t paid attention to whom I was calling, and I accidentally called the state attorney general’s office on my landlord. And things got better from there. The first thing he did was scoop up paint chips from the window sill and sniff them. “Have you had this place inspected for lead yet?” he asked.

“The board of health inspector should be here any minute,” I replied as he shook his head at the thermostat that wasn’t hooked up to anything. Then he found the new thermostat the landlord scabbed in. He didn’t seem happy with it.

“Good, I want a word with him,” he said ominously, referring to the board of health inspector, who was already ten minutes late. The landlord’s office was only a few doors down, so I sent the detective over to get acquainted and give a tour of the basement. At that point, I was beyond mere joy and had something akin to a religious experience.

The County Health inspector arrived a half-hour late. By then, I had seen the detective walking to the basement door with the landlord behind him. The detective looked professional in a stylish leather raincoat and really sharp boots. The county inspector looked like he had just stepped out of a dive bar. I remember him as looking like Dwight from “The Office.”If Dwight was 20 pounds overweight and sported a hostile sneer.

He got out the lead meter which made scary noises as he approached the walls, which were five times the maximum safe amount of lead for an adult. The window frames were up to 40 times the maximum safe amount for an adult. It was slow poison for a toddler to be in that building, and it wouldn’t be too healthy for my older stepson or my partner and me. To this day, I’m glad I listened to my mother-in-law and did not move back into that death trap.

Then, the county health inspector started this bullshit speech about how high lead isn’t really that toxic. He added that it would be his professional testimony if I sued. I couldn’t believe the bullshit was coming out of his mouth.

Please note that I never said or made any threats about suing. And I never said anything about lawsuits outside my immediate family. Larry Marra used to give long lectures about never warning anybody you’re going to sue. So I was kind of shocked Dwight mentioned it. I bet an attentive reader will have figured out that my mother was behind it. I don’t understand why it didn’t occur to me at the time. But it didn’t, and I didn’t find out about it until I started to seriously lawyer shop.

The detective returned before I could ask the county inspector what the hell he was talking about. He came up the stairs by himself. I could see the landlord’s van speeding up South Main St, so I figured something big had gone down. The detective came in with stains on his raincoat. And something had taken a big bite out of the toe of his boot. I could see his toes through that hole.

“Are you from the board of health?” the detective demanded, showing the county inspector his badge, who paled when he saw it. He gave me a “how-the-hell-did-you-do-this?” look. I wonder if he would have believed it was blind luck?

“Yeah,” the county inspector replied, looking frightened.

“There are rats in the cellar,” the detective said, wiggling his big toe.

The city of Phillipsburg, NJ (or Pee-burg as the locals called it) had been built on the banks of the Delaware River. The Pee-burg rats were larger than New York sewer rats. They were also super-aggressive and known to chase and kill cats and small dogs. The detective and Mr. Landlord went down into the basement, and the rats literally rat-packed them. The landlord resorted to the slowest friend defense and ran the hell out. The detective managed to escape with a bit of shoe gnawed off, but not before he saw the state of the basements. Rats had been gnawing at the gas pipes.

“There are rats down there,” the inspector repeated, outraged. “They attacked us!” He put his foot forward to show where a rat had bit off the toe of his boot. There was blood on both boots. The detective fought back.

“I don’t do rats,” the county health inspector replied. “I do chemical hazards like lead paint and old dry-cleaning fluid.”

“Well, I’m heading to your office to talk to the rat guy,” the state investigator replied. He picked up the lead meter’s readout and whistled. The county inspector looked like he wanted to kill me. “Jesus Christ! You said you had a kid, Bill?” the detective asked.

“Two,” I replied. “One is nearly nine, and the other will be two in April.”

“Whatever you do, don’t bring them back to this apartment. I’m begging you.” The detective said.

“We already got the baby a lead test, which was extremely high,” I replied. “That’s why I called the county inspector.” The said inspector was flop-sweating. I think he was afraid of what else I might have told the state investigator.

“The city inspector said he installed a new gas pressure gage down there,” I said casually and loved how the rest of the blood drained out of the health inspector’s face.

“Nobody’s been in that basement in twenty years,” the detective replied. “The lock was rusted, and I had to break it to get inside. All the gas pipes are rotting and rat-chewed. I’m having the gas turned off at the source and yellow tagging the basement.”

A Yellow tag meant that the landlord had a specified time to bring the basement up to code. Usually, it takes about 60 days, and only authorized personnel with safety gear can get down there. It got red-tagged if the repairs weren’t made, and the whole building was condemned.

The detective left with the county inspector, and the county inspector’s expression was priceless. There was no excuse for Section 8 to make us move back in. My knees grew weak, and I found myself choking back tears. I won! That hadn’t happened to me much in the last few years. This was the biggest win I had since my youngest boy was born. I was escaping my parents and their madness. The sheer relief made me shake. It took me a few minutes to get to the phone and report back to my partner. We had won. It was like a miracle. Of course, I was wrong.

The Tao of Larry Marra Sr.

Looking past the nutty old shitbird at the wheel, I could see the abandoned strip mines out the driver’s side window. It was like looking at pictures from a distance, each mine framed by rectangles of roads. Nature was already taking over those abandoned coal mines, and trees and bushes grew out of the ugly scars on the earth. We were almost halfway up the mountain, and it was a hundred-foot drop to the bottom. The higher we got, the prettier the strip mines became. And to make it even more terrifying, we were riding a twenty-year-old Oldsmobile van with bad struts. It wasn’t bouncing much because there was a seven hundred pound Xerox machine lashed down in the back. And the driver had two pacemakers and could keel over dead at any moment.

This was the home of Larry Marra Sr, and it was a dump back in 1990

It was late in June, and the year was 1990. Poppa-Doc Bush was still in office. Bethlehem Steel was closing down, and I couldn’t get my old payroll clerk job back if I wanted it. There were no accounting jobs to be had. I tried to get out of sales, and I figured this job might get me the experience to get into real estate. And it did. But I worked for two fifty per hour with nothing taken out for social security or income tax to earn the experience. This was the beginning of the gig economy.

Today, you can apply to Lyft or Uber as an independent contractor. Back then, you needed to know someone. The guy I knew ran a mineral store as a front but made his real money dealing PCP and guns. My acquaintance also got cash awards for employees sent to people who wanted to avoid paying taxes. That’s how I met the madman driving us up the mountain.

So I went to see Larry the one evening in his home on Wolf Avenue in Easton, Pennsylvania. It used to be a wealthier part of the city. Most of the Victorian mansions had been converted to apartments. At one time, Larry owned every house on the street. His was the shabbiest on the road. The lawn hadn’t seen a mower in years, and shrubbery blocked off the front door. It looks much better today than when I worked there. A big guy with a black beard and biker denim intercepted me on the way to the door to demand my business. He brought me to the back door. The Pagan MC was Larry’s next-door tenant and security as part of the rent.

The house looked even worse inside. Larry waited for me in the kitchen, which had the sink pulled out and a jumble of pipes and wires coming out of the wall. The stove was all dried grease and rust, and I didn’t want to know what was in that refrigerator. Larry sat at the stained wooden table, and I thought I was in the presence of a two-day-old corpse. Until he looked up at me with those furiously angry blue eyes. My new boss looked like the “The Portrait of Dorian Gray,” stepped out of the frame and went into real estate.

According to Larry, He had over twenty million dollars tied up in various properties. I inventoried them and came up with twenty-five million and change. Larry also claimed that his son and ex-girlfriend stole about fifteen million dollars worth of properties from him. And it all happened when he was in the hospital recovering from having a second pacemaker put in. Larry was especially furious that his son served him with papers while Larry was fresh out of the operating room. Then he came home to discover deeds had been stolen and replaced by falsified sales records. Plus, Larry’s girlfriend left him and took a few of his properties with her. And I thought he handled that betrayal the hardest. It was the first of two times I saw him hold back tears.

Unfortunately for me, I already had much of the experience Larry needed. I learned to do title searches from my father. Plus, I was an accountant. So I took the job out of desperation and survived the most brutal paralegal course this side of bedlam. The first thing I learned about Larry was he loved to hate. I swear, his pacemakers worked off pure hatred. Only the power of hate kept those pacemakers from frying when he stuck a frozen dinner into the microwave, pushed the button, and ran like hell. My own heart stopped in fear of having to give him mouth-to-mouth. Larry was utterly mad.
On the first day of the job, we absolutely had to go to Quakertown for a new copier. We could have bought one in Allentown or Bethlehem, except Larry was a wanted man in those cities. He had outstanding warrants for the board of health violations on several properties. He couldn’t afford the fines due to his legal fees. We were already in the car when he got around to telling me I was also his bodyguard. My duty was to get between Larry and the process servers.
Road trips were the best part of working for Larry. He was almost human when he drove, and I got a glimpse of the genius the man used to be. Larry had fifty years of business experience and shared them freely. I got a solid grounding in real estate, finance, and the legal system just from riding with him. Otherwise, I would have left after the first day.

Larry predicted that Donald Trump would run for president during that first road trip in 1990. Larry made his money the same way Trump’s father made his fortune; through income tax refunds. Between 1946 and 1987, all you had to do was buy a few apartment buildings, and the government would give you large tax subsidies for renting them. If you purchased enough residential housing, you could get millions in tax rebates. The US Treasury became a perpetual money machine, and if you added local rent control ordinances, Section 8 housing, and state programs. Even an idiot like Fred Trump could become a millionaire.

Then in 1987, Congress changed the tax code, and millions of dollars in tax rebates ended overnight. It wasn’t possible to maintain high profits on just rent. Rent subsidies like Section 8 were being cut yearly. By the time I met Larry, he had lived on loans secured against his properties. That was how most private landlords survived after the tax code changed. Trump was no different Trump needed to create a reputation of success to expand. He certainly made himself attractive to Russian banks. So there’s no doubt in my mind that Putin owns Donald Trump’s body and soul.

We came home with a late model Xerox copier about the size of a living room sofa, and he ordered me to bring it into the house by myself. That s when I realized how nuts the man was. He yelled and shouted at me until I told him I quit. That stopped him dead. He looked a little sheepish and asked if I would still show up the next day. I said yes as long as I didn’t have to break my back on that copier. We ended up driving around with that damned thing for a week.

That’s how we ended up driving up a mountain with a 700-pound copier in the back. Sane people would have taken the highway to Jim Thorpe, but Larry had warrants out on him. Not to mention we were riding in a van with his name emblazoned on the side. He insisted on driving the back road to avoid the police. That’s how we ended up driving up a mountain with a copier lashed in the back of the van. The van was climbing at a forty-degree angle, and the rope was fraying along with my nerves. My sphincter tightened every time we took a curve.

We were close to the top, and the twists and turns were getting pretty intense. Larry had been expounding on the finer points of judge shopping but fell silent as the road got more challenging. We were so high up the strip mines looked like postage stamps, and there was a solid wall of granite out my window. We took a hairpin right, and the cheap rope snapped. The copier started clog dancing, and Larry had to fight the steering wheel to stay on the road.

The van tipped on two wheels. I heard the mountain scraping paint off the roof. Thank god we tipped towards the mountain instead of the long drop. I could only see sky and clouds out the driver-side window. Larry’s face had turned pale green. I held back a scream, and it hurt my chest. The road straightened. Two wheels slammed back on the road. A second rope snapped, and nothing stopped that copier from rolling all over the back of the van. I don’t know how Larry managed to keep us on the road. The copier came down hard, and I heard a strut go boing. The left wheel bounced up while the rest of the van slammed down hard enough to make my teeth snap. Larry pulled over, and I had to check to see if I peed myself. We looked at each other and cracked up, just like in the movies.

My wife told me I should have gotten out and hitchhiked home. I might have if I weren’t halfway up a mountain heading to a place I had only been to once before. At least I managed to get the copier lashed down without Larry getting in my way. His face had turned cadaver green while the second pacemaker kicked in. Larry recovered when I finished, and we headed into the city of Jim Thorpe.

Larry was there for a tax sale. I was there to follow him around with his briefcase, so he could feel important. We got to the auction just as the house the nut wanted was on the block. I got to watch while he stood and raised his finger for each bid until he won at $6000. This was the genius that was Larry. His corporation let go of that property for taxes. Nobody else wanted it, so Larry waited until it hit the distressed property auction and saved himself tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes for recovering it. And he had still another useless house he could finance for a couple of million dollars.

I decided to ride home with him since he promised we’d be going back via the highway. It was early evening, and the police would be changing shifts. I was following him back to the van when I spotted a narc. He was a short fat guy staring at us with beady little eyes. He practically had “petty authority” tattooed on his forehead.

Larry saw him too and made a low bestial sound in his throat before pushing past me and striding towards the fat guy in the three-piece suit, who was marching towards Larry. I thought they would start beating on each other, but they stopped inches away, and Larry started screaming in the guy’s face. His face blotched red and green while the little fat guy just turned beet red. Larry was tossing out all his favorite insults like faggot and homosexual, while the shorter guy was calling Larry a cheap crook and fucking slumlord.

The short guy just turned on his heel and walked away, letting Larry crow in victory. He was grinning like a ghoul when he got back to the van. “That was the Carbon County Health Commissioner,” he explained, “The little faggot wants my real estate license.”

That was life with Larry. He lived for hate, and he hated everybody. But the person he hated most in this world was his son. One day I took a call from Larry’s ex-wife and handed her over to the boss. The old lady did one of those deals where she handed her son the phone, hoping for reconciliation if she could get them talking. Larry totally lost his shit and started screaming over the phone. Larry must have shouted non-stop for ten minutes without losing his breath. He called his son the foulest names you can imagine, as well as accusing him of homosexuality. He slammed the phone down and smiled in bliss. There was nothing that put him in a better mood than dumping on his kid.

One moment he could be the soul of patience. He spent hours teaching me the finer points of writing a legal brief, and the next second he was a raving madman. There was no way to predict his temper, and it got worse over the three months I worked for him.

Once that copier was up and running, Larry’s entire life became an open book to me, and Stephen King couldn’t write such a terrifying story. Not only did I get to watch his charming phone manners, but I was privy to his private legal files. I was shocked when I found out he divorced his wife for incest. She was his stepmother, and she was still suing him for ownership of the house she lived in. I lost count of the board of health complaints. Then there was the criminal complaint the EPA leveled at him for trying to illegally dispose of a warehouse full of expired paint. But, most shocking of all was the wrongful death suit. Larry actually killed a Northampton County Deputy who tried to serve him with a subpoena. The poor guy’s wife was suing on behalf of his infant son.

I told myself the situation with his stepwife wasn’t my business. Still, I had to confront Larry about the dead deputy. To my surprise, he showed genuine remorse over the incident. According to Larry, he was pulling out of a restaurant parking lot, and the deputy got in the way, and Larry hadn’t seen him. The coroner ruled it an accident, so Larry didn’t go to jail. He refused to contest the wrongful death suit and let his insurance cover it. That was the second time I saw him fight back the tears. It was touching to know there was some humanity left under the madness.

Then there were times he seemed to act crazy for the sake of acting crazy. Like the time I had to serve my first eviction notice. It took me thirty years to figure this one out. The house was in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Bethlehem. And the house was just too well kept to be one of his properties. He gave me some papers and told me to keep knocking on the door and make sure I hand the papers to whoever answered the door.

I leaned on the doorbell, but nobody answered. I did get the dogs excited. There were too large dogs barking up a storm. I tried to go back when it was apparent nobody was home, and Larry would have a fit and screamed at me to go back. Finally, he said, “I can see them hiding behind the curtains.” The dogs were utterly freaked, and I could see them through the picture window.
“Those are dogs!” I said with as much patience as I could muster. In another couple of weeks, I’d be screaming right back at him, but that was before I learned that manners were wasted on Larry. He shut up and walked to the window. Those dogs must have been as crazy as he was. They barked loudly enough to wake a statue.

He came back with a look of horror on his face, like a priest who found a turd floating in the holy water font. “That house has hardwood floors,” he said. “What the hell is she doing letting dogs in that house?”.

That’s when he got around to explaining that the house was one of the properties he was suing his ex-girlfriend over. He wanted to establish that he was the legitimate landlord to improve his legal claim. We came back that Saturday afternoon, but this time the plan evolved. Instead of having me serve the eviction papers, Larry went up to the door with me following behind with his briefcase. The lady of the house answered, and every nerve in my body screamed, “don’t fuck with her!” She was an attractive brunette in expensive sweats and perfectly done. She was every inch a professional and not the type of tenant Larry was used to dealing with.

Larry acted so damn nice it didn’t seem sincere, but that was just how he was. He couldn’t do nice if his life depended on it. Larry explained his side of the story, but it didn’t look like the tenant was overly impressed. She was less impressed when he magnanimously offered her a new lease instead of an eviction notice. The new lease included a hundred buck raise in the rent and an extra deposit of 500 dollars per dog. I was pretty sure he was opening himself up to a fraud conviction. I figured the tenant thought so by the look on her face. She pointedly ignored the pen that Larry hopefully waved at her.

“My husband won’t be coming back until tomorrow night,” she said coldly. “You know we have to sign it together.” Pennsylvania’s a joint property state, and Larry seemed shocked that she knew it. He had no idea how to handle a tenant who wouldn’t be bullied.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to evict you if you don’t sign it,” he weakly threatened and seemed to shrink when the tenant said, “I’ll show this to my husband, and we’ll get back to you.”

We got a letter from the tenant’s attorney a few days later. The tenants were paying their rent into a court-supervised escrow until legal ownership was established. And Larry went nuts in a way I never saw before. I expected him to start yelling, screaming, and chewing the furniture. But he went dead pale and silent. For a moment, I was afraid that both pacemakers stopped, and he was about to keel over. But he told me to get the van ready in a dangerous voice.

I followed him into the Bethlehem Police Station near Moravian College a half-hour later. Usually, Larry avoided police stations like Dracula avoided hallowed ground. But he fearlessly approached the desk sergeant despite the warrants. He declared he had squatters on his property, and he wanted them out. I never heard him speak with such conviction.

The desk sergeant was a heavy-set African American going bald and sported a cop mustache. He was the kind of desk sergeant who smiled no matter how crazy the person at his desk was. And he smiled in an avuncular way as he called down a superior to deal with Larry. Two plainclothes cops came in to see us. The lieutenant was a big sandy-haired guy who looked like an athlete doomed by too many donuts. The other cop was younger and in better shape. I assumed he was there in case of an arrest. So there I was with my long hair tied into a ponytail and my George Harrison mustache and Grateful Dead shirt standing at the police officer’s desk. At the same time, two cops brought my batshit crazy boss into a glass conference room. I was frozen in terror like a deer in the headlights.

“You know I only work for him,” I said to the desk sergeant, trying to sound calm.

“The MacDonald’s in South Bethlehem’s hiring,” he replied. “Mention my name.”

Larry sat at the oval conference table with the other two cops. He turned back to watch the show. My boss took a copy of the Bethlehem legal code from his briefcase. He repositioned it so the detectives could better see the paragraph was pointing at. I couldn’t hear through the soundproof glass, but both plainclothes cops stood and looked at the book.

“I’m not really a part of this,” I reminded the desk sergeant. Things seemed to be going well, which made me even more nervous.
“It’s okay,” the sergeant replied and laughed harder. The senior cop with the lighter hair had back down and calmly explained something to Larry, unaware that god almighty himself didn’t explain things to Larry. And Larry’s face was getting the tell-tale red and green splotches that warned of an oncoming temper tantrum. I knew what would happen and looked away for a moment and shuddered. When I looked back, Larry was screaming at the cops. The cops shouted back. And the desk sergeant leaned back in his chair, laughing. I wondered if I would look guilty if I just left at that moment and stopped caring. My legs refused my order to run like hell, and I stood there waiting to go to jail.

“It’s a civil matter.” The lieutenant yelled as his partner opened the door. And Larry was saying in his high-pitched shriek, “it’s right there in the property laws! You have to arrest them.”

They passed me on the way to the door. The younger cop rushed past me to open the door, and I took a step closer to the desk. The lieutenant shoved Larry out the door and yelled, “come back, and I’ll arrest you!”

Then the lieutenant turned on me, and his younger partner came up behind me as if to block my escape. “That’s the way it goes,” I remember thinking. “He gets kicked out, and I get arrested.”

“Your grandfather needs to be in a home,” the lieutenant growled at me as he left me a direct route out the door. This time my legs carried me out before I even had a chance to give the order. “He’s not my grandfather. I’m just his trained monkey,” I called over my shoulder as I left. The spot between my shoulder blades itched as if I were about to be shot.

“Mention my name at MacDonald’s,” the sergeant yelled to my retreating back. Of course, I went to the MacDonald’s first chance I got, but the position had already been filled, and I was stuck with that madman.

I spent the next thirty years wondering about that incident. I put it down to Larry cheering himself up by making a new enemy. And while it was consistent with Larry, there were too many other unaccounted factors. That answer didn’t even make Larryish logic. It never occurred to me that Larry was the actual owner.

Last year, I was working on an earlier version of this memoir, and I googled Larry’s name. I found a newspaper article about Larry’s estate finally being settled after thirty years. And the hell of it was is that both Larry’s son and ex-girlfriend had stolen from him. In the case of his ex, I like to think it was an honest mistake. She took the opportunity to grab her deeds and run from the abusive sonuvabitch. Some of Larry’s deeds ended up with her, and she left a few of hers with Larry. The properties were swapped back. In the case of Junior, it was much more sinister.

Poor Larry was experiencing Homer Simpson’s dilemma. He didn’t care if he was called on an actual lie. Hell, I did that three times daily, and he always took it in good grace. (At least for him.). But Larry was in the situation of telling the truth, and nobody believed him. His mind was also as distressed as his properties, and he was no longer competent to represent himself. It must have been so frustrating!

There was also the fact that Larry was always the sort of goniff who gave other crooks a bad name. I was the guy who spent at least 24 hours a week arranging his files for court. And I wasn’t a fan of what I was learning about Larry and his business practices. Then came the day I came upon a copy of a note about oil right negotiations. Larry requested the negotiations be kept secret from his son. That did it for me. I was convinced that Younger Larry was the injured party from that moment on. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Younger Larry actually stole the most valuable properties his father owned.

It was pretty evident that the police lieutenant was right. Larry needed to be in a home. He lived in filth and refused to let me do any cleaning. His memory was so bad that I got calls at home because Larry couldn’t find things. Sometimes he would be such a pest I had to come into the office after midnight to find them where they belonged. Of course, he never showed any appreciation. Plus, the rage was getting worse and even less predictable. He would give me carefully detailed instructions and have a temper tantrum after I did precisely what he told me to do.

One time he told me to serve a summons to a lawyer. He repeated that I was only supposed to give the papers to the attorney. I thought he was wrong at the time. Usually, I handed the summons to the receptionist and went about my business. But I was near the end of my third month and knew better than contradicting him. The attorney disappeared into his private sanctum as soon as I stepped into the waiting room, and I stood there for a good fifteen minutes before I gave up and served the secretary. Of course, Larry had a temper tantrum and denied telling me not to leave until I served the lawyer in person.

His mind was slipping. But at the time, I was more pissed than concerned. I was ready to quit before I found a new job. After the lawyer incident, I decided that Friday was my last day. I was going to get my pay and walk out. That way, the old coot wouldn’t stiff me.

I admit I made that decision twice a day. Still, the bleak employment situation kept me coming back for another week. But as that day progressed, the decision was engraved in stone. We had a tax appeal to prepare for, but he took me to Allentown instead. It was on a street of wooden townhouses the city was famous for. And there was no doubt which house Larry owned. His front lawn was overgrown with crabgrass and dandelions escaping to the yards on either side. Also, the porch was sagging and full of debris. Somebody was living there because I could hear a TV behind the door.

Larry pulled out his giant s keyring and made a big show of finding the right key, opened the door, and we stepped into the outdoors. The whole house was fire gutted. The back wall had burned down entirely. Both side walls had been fire-damaged, and the entire roof had collapsed. Still, all I could focus on was the missing back wall, and the sound of “The Price is right coming out from under a stairway to nowhere. It would have been funny on TV, but it made me dizzy in real life.

A door tiny under the stairway opened, and this hairy creature crawled out. I stifled a scream and jumped backward. I didn’t recognize it as human until it got up on its hind legs, and my brain reconfigured the monster as a naked old man with a bandage wrapped around his loins. It took me another second to recognize him as one of the more colorful street people who wandered around Easton and Phillipsburg. For a dollar, he would tell your fortune with his pendulum, which was a massive nut from an old truck engine suspended from a piece of greasy rope. You asked yes or no questions, the pendulum would swing, and every answer was wrong.

“Everything’s okay with the rent, Larry?” he asked. I was suddenly so angry my stomach turned to a burning rock. That old bastard was charging the old man rent for sleeping in a burned-out building? I don’t think I ever hated anybody as much as I hated Larry right then.

“You’re paid up until December,” Larry assured him. “You go rest now. I brought this guy to help me.”

The old man’s name was Harry, and I was fond of him and enjoyed the show he put on with his homemade pendulum. Larry informed me he had just had a hernia operation. The state wasn’t going to pay for him to recover in a decent room, so Harry’s cousin paid Larry to give him a place to stay. I knew Larry was looking at a total financial disaster because he didn’t have the money to cover all his loans. But I couldn’t believe he was so desperate to charge somebody to live in that dump.

We came to finish restoring a tiny room that could have been an office in better days. And Larry even had a tenant lined up for that. But at least that part of the roof hadn’t fallen in. There was a power saw, a toolbox, and paint. I painted the soot-covered ceiling while Larry finished putting up new paneling. It could have been a bonding experience if I hadn’t been so freaked out about Harry. All I could think of was how to budget my last paycheck to last until I got paid.

Salvation came at the hands of my wife. She had discovered that I was eligible for unemployment. She wanted me to quit right then, but I insisted on staying the week to make sure I got paid. Not only that, but I was going to pull some overtime. That way, I’d have a better bridge.

Larry didn’t show up until three o’clock the next day. It had gotten to the point where I cherished infrequent times when he would hole up at the Burger King in Phillipsburg. The old skinflint would shamelessly refill his soda cup with decaf and work on his legal papers. Sometimes he would call and tell me to meet him at a courthouse so I could run into the clerk’s office and file something five minutes before closing time.

This time was different. I no sooner got to Larry’s house when a deputy came to the door and knocked for five minutes before he went around to the back and shouted for Larry. Following instructions, I hid upstairs until he left. These were the days before everybody had phones in their pockets, so I had no way to get in touch with the boss. This was very unusual because the deputies usually dropped their paperwork on the front porch. I was afraid that Larry died owing me for three days of work.

I was almost glad to see him when he showed up late that afternoon. He informed me that the deputy at the door had a bench warrant. Since Larry wasn’t home, the Easton PD picked him up when he stopped to get a paper. They booked him and stuck him in a cell for an hour or so. Then they brought him up before a county magistrate. He was served with a half-ton of papers from four counties that included nearly a hundred grand in fines. The magistrate also gave him two weeks to mow the lawns on his problem properties or face months of jail time. He pretended the whole thing was funny, but he knew he had reached the end. Larry didn’t have the resources to keep fighting his son and ex-girlfriend, plus all this other stuff. He declared that we would have to prepare for bankruptcy. But first. the tax appeal.

The logical thing to do was for me to do the lawn work. But I think Larry was very scared and making even worse decisions than usual. He insisted on going out to mow the grass by himself, leaving me home to prepare for the tax appeal. At the time, I didn’t even know you could appeal property taxes, but I could operate a lawnmower with the best of them. The old l lunatic went off on me when I suggested reverse jobs. So Larry went out into the early September heat to mow the lawns while I tried to teach myself property tax law. Of course, I accomplished nothing, and Larry took all his frustration out on me when he came back. But I stuck it out until Friday.

Friday came, and of course, my last day was filled with drama. Larry was asleep on his air mattress when I got in, and he started screaming as soon as he opened his eyes. Around noon, he got dressed and went to mow a few more lawns. At that point, I looked forward to a long leisurely lunch and to amuse myself until he came home with my pay. Then it was going to be “see ya’, Larry.” I spent my last morning following his pointless and contradictory orders.

I didn’t even get lunch. Larry had a trailer hitched to the van with the broken strut, and he tore through his narrow driveway like a bat out of hell. The van ran its bad wheel over the curb and bounced like a super ball. The trailer jumped to the side, and a back tire blew. And Larry kept on going with his back right wheel setting sparks from the rim. I watched the whole debacle from the bathroom window. A I wanted was to get my pay and go home. But under twenty minutes later, he called and told me to bring a jack.

The only jack he had was in his van. But I took a long leisurely look around anyway because I didn’t want to deal with Larry’s crap. I walked the two blocks to where he was parked in a residential neighborhood. H was lying on the pavement, trying to lift the trailer by himself. The only jack he owned was bent and useless on the ground next to him.

“Did you bring a jack?” he asked.

“Sorry, I told you that was the only jack you have. If you like, I can call my father and ask if we could borrow his,” I offered.

“Then lift up the trailer so I can put on the spare wheel,” he commanded.
“Larry, that’s impossible,” I said as gently as I could.

He was usually reasonable in these situations, and the verbal abuse was saved until after I saved his ass. But this time, he just snapped. I think I witnessed the madness winning over the genius. The old bastard went nuts and started screaming at me. He blamed me for busting the tire and for breaking the jack. I was accused of sodomy, homosexuality, and sundry acts of faggotry. His fists came up in a boxing stance. His heart stopped in the middle of it and caused him to stagger forward while the backup pacemaker kicked in. People came out of their houses to see what all the shouting was about. They recognized Larry, and suddenly, I had a cheering section wanting me to knock his block off.

I was close to doing it. I was so mad I was in tears. I decided to walk away; instead, salary be damned. I was stopped by one of Larry’s biker tenants. He pulled up in an old panel truck, got out, and gentled Larry like a horse. As the biker had everything in hand, I stuck around because I wanted my pay. He was a tall thin guy with a gray streak in his long black beard. We took the tractor off the trailer used his jack to take off the bad wheel, which he managed to fix with the tools he had in the back of his truck. It was a mobile service station. He even had a tire for the wheel. All all the while, he tried to gentle me like a horse and assure me that Larry didn’t mean it.

After five, the helpful biker got back in his truck and drove off. I let my spine stiffen as I prepared to demand my pay. He acted like I was holding a gun on him on payday at his best. He was worse this time, demanding that I go back to work and he’d pay me when he finished mowing the lawns. I reminded him that I missed lunch, and he could either pay me now to get a burger, or I could go home for dinner and come back in the morning.

He didn’t like it, but he pried a hundred and fifty dollars out of his wallet. It doesn’t sound like much today, but that’s what you could expect from a minimum wage job after taxes. Prices were low enough to contribute to necessities until that first unemployment check. M hand was in my pocket, pulling out his keys, just he said, “I’m cutting your pay. You’re not worth two-fifty an hour. If you want the same pay, you’re going to have to work twice the hours.”

He looked pretty damned surprised when I dropped his keys on the dashboard and turned away without a word. ” ll, suit yourself,” he said as if I were about to negotiate.

“Fuck you, Larry,” I replied, and those were the last words I ever said to him. It would be the perfect line to end this story. But alas, Larry was a curse that wasn’t finished with me.

He came back to haunt me during my unemployment interview. Larry sent unemployment a handwritten letter denying I’d ever worked for him because I was “unqualified for the position.” Needless to say, I was outraged and demanded an immediate appeal. T guy at the desk promised me he would approve my claim if I could prove that Larry was lying. I told him I’d be back in under an hour.

Thanks to Larry, I knew exactly what to do. It took me forty-five minutes to walk up to the county courthouse and back. In between, I went to the court clerk’s office and copied a few legal papers with my name as Larry’s agent and/or employee. I had become such a familiar face in the county clerk’s office that I was greeted by name and chatted with the secretaries.

I returned to the unemployment office and dropped the forms on the interviewer’s desk. Of course, my claim was approved. . He gave a few weak arguments, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

A few months went by. It was heading to Christmas, and my family had just moved into a new apartment. I was sitting on my porch with a cigarette, minding my own business, and what should I see but Larry’s van bouncing down South Main Street. He slowed and parked right in front of my new place. I panicked, ditched my smoke, and ran inside. I didn’t understand how he could know I was living there. I peeked through the curtains as he got out of the van and walked to the front of his truck.

It would have been horrifying enough if he had come to see me, but what happened next was worse. He stopped in front of his vehicle, pulled down his zipper, took out his Johnson, and drained the lizard right on my sidewalk. I broad daylight with foot traffic. I squawked in horror, and my wife and kids came running to see what was going on. I spreadeagled myself against the door to keep the kids from being traumatized for life.

There was no doubt that Larry’s mind was completely gone. T poor son of a bitch had become a hate-fueled shell of his former self. H was wandering around following the call of nature anywhere he happened to be. T problem was convincing somebody to do something. T police wouldn’t even take a report. Larry was a millionaire, and no upstanding law officer would believe a millionaire would piss on a proletariat’s sidewalk. The same class protection that keeps outright crooks like Donald Trump from being prosecuted also protected Larry from the help he needed.

What other ethical choice did I have except to call Larry Junior and offer to help him put his father in a home? I had been considering doing it while working for Larry. The only thing holding me back was the niggling doubt that Larry Sr. might be innocent. If I sided with Junior, I might be causing an injustice. But I decided that letting Larry run lose and piss all over the world would be an even bigger injustice.

“Good morning,” I said over the phone. ” my name’s Bill Dunlap, and I used to work for your father. I’m afraid for his safety. I’ve seen him urinating in public, and he is not safe behind the wheel.” He hung up between “good morning” and “the wheel.” I was handing him his victory. The state would take over his affairs once Larry Sr. was declared incompetent. Larry wouldn’t be harassing Junior with endless court cases, and Younger Larry’s life would become much easier. It took me thirty years before I realized how close I was to sending Younger Larry to jail.

Larry Junior covered his own ass by letting his senile father go feral and peeing on everything. Not only had he swiped properties from his father, but he conspired with a notary to hide the theft. If the state authorities had gotten involved, Junior could have spent at least two and a half years in prison and lost his real estate license.

I was infuriated at Younger Larry’s lack of concern. At the time, I attributed it to him being so furiously angry at the old man. I spotted Larry pissing in a supermarket parking lot and wasn’t willing to let it go. As a last resort, I went to see Mr. Dave Boyer of the Easton Express. He had been such an influential voice against Larry and his scofflaw ways that the old loon was ready to initiate a libel suit against him. B er was a physically impressive fellow who was built like Bruce Wayne. H was sympathetic and agreed with me that Larry needed professional care. But there was nothing we could do. So I let him interview me about Larry’s living conditions hoping to shame Junior into doing something. Of course, nothing did but at least I tried.

Larry Marra Sr. died on March 11, 1992. An Easton press reporter called me a few minutes after it happened. “Di d you hear Larry Marra died?” she asked point-blank. She must have put it that way to shock me. Because I couldn’t possibly have known, the body was still lying on the Northampton Courthouse parking lot. She told me he had died in bankruptcy court while screaming at his son. I ould picture him having one of his hissy-fits while the judge banged the gavel demanding order. I ended up laughing, which was an entirely inappropriate response.

The truth wasn’t so funny. Larry died after the court was adjourned. H ran into his son in the parking lot during a cold rain and started screaming at him. The Allentown Morning Call reported it as a massive heart attack, but eyewitnesses told me it was a stroke. His brain exploded in his skull while both pacemakers tried to keep the body alive.

Of course, it wasn’t the end. Larry had an entire cabinet loaded with different copies of his will and only one person who knew which was the one he wanted to be executed. M A that point, I was done with Larry and his affairs. T Northampton Sheriff’s department tried to contact me to help them find the will. I also knew his affairs were such a mess I could end up involved for decades to come. Besides, there was no way I could testify that Larry was of sound mind. So I avoided Pennsylvania for a while and let events sort themselves out.

Which was a sound decision on my part because regardless of the will, Larry had a sister who was determined to prove her nephew was a thief. I had spoken with her on the phone a time or two. But I had no idea they were that close. I guess Larry wasn’t always the human toothache I knew. It couldn’t have been easy for her because Larry was not making good decisions and rampaging through the courts like a bull in a china shop. He might have made things harder. I felt like a total sleaze after finding out Larry was innocent. I totally rewrote this memoir because of it.

Larry Marra Sr. may have been a crooked landlord, but he was my mentor. Without him, my life would have been very different in a bad way. Frankly, I’m grateful to Larry’s sister for defending her brother. He was a human being who deserved better than the neglect he suffered in his final days. She also kept me from wronging a man who had been betrayed by his own son. Junior died the year before the courts decided in his father’s favor. At least his aunt never left him to enjoy the fruits of his crime. I hope Larry found the peace he never had in life from it.

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