Porch Light
Tuesday, 9 April 2019 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59Part One:
This story takes place between August of 2018 and whenever in 2019 I finish it. Since none of the participants—particularly me—are dead, the story is not over.
In August, I got a letter from the city. From the Department of Business and Neighborhood Services, to be exact. That's what the Department of Code Enforcement changed its name to, to sound more friendly. Somewhere in there, there was also the Department of High Weeds and Grass (would I make that up?) and the Board of Health. They're still around. They might all still be around, I don't know.
The letter talked about the three abandoned houses and what I needed to do to fix them up for them to be . . . up to code for abandoned buildings? I don't know.
First, let me explain the set-up.
I live in a single house on the corner of a busy street. To the east of me is a double—an around the corner double. The half directly next to mine has an address on the same street as mine. The conjoined house has an address on the cross street. Two buildings; three houses. My paternal grandfather and uncle built these houses. My grandparents lived in two of them. My parents lived in one of them. My cousin Patrick lived in one of them. I've lived in two of them.
I'm the only one still alive. All three houses are mine.
The double had been built as rental property and my grandparents gave it to my father after my parents got married, so they'd have a steady income when my father was hospitalized. I feel about this the way I feel about a company giving you a check for a hundred dollars after you slip in their store—they do it to keep you from suing, for ever asking for more.
When I started high school, we moved into the house on the cross street so I oculd walk to the Catholic high school a few blocks away. At that time a man named Mr. Butler lived in the other half of the double and my grandparents lived in the single house. Mr. Butler had been a tenant there for a long time, but he was moving out. I don't know why.
I lived in that house for seven years, during which time my grandfather died. Then I moved in with Patricia, the love of my life. We moved around for six years and then my grandmother died.
My grandmother had been senile for some time and my father and uncle were her legal guardians. They'd tried to sell the house, but ended up renting it instead. When my grandmother died, my parents bought his half of the house and gave the house to me. My mother's reasoning was, why should I have to wait until they were dead to have a house?
And we laughed and laughed.
Don't for a second think I don't know how lucky I am: that I got along well enough with my parents for them to want me so close; that they had the money to do it; that I was an only child (because you can't give one kid a house and the other a box of Lipton's tea). It was luck and I'm grateful for it.
There were various renters in the half of the double next to me, then my cousin Patrick got divorced and moved in.
So, for a while there were five of us on the corner. One big happy family. Then, in 2003, my father died. In 2004, Patricia died. There were three of us in our three houses, happily close but not too close.
In 2016, my mother died.
She had said many times she didn't want to leave me the double. This wasn't malicious; we were very much alike and she had hated dealing with tenants.
Technically, she didn't leave me anything. She died intestate and the house became mine by default, sort of. (Technically, it still isn't mine since I haven't finished the legal procedure necessary. This will come up again later.)
Patrick died in July of 2018, of cancer. He had been living with his father for the previous eight months or so. Sometimes he'd call me and we'd talk about how he'd get better and come home. He had to have his leg amputated and I told him we'd build him a ramp if he needed one.
So, the double was uninhabited in August of 2018, but you couldn't really call it abandoned. My washer doesn't work and I've been doing my laundry at my mother's for years now . Sometimes I'd stay and watch a movie.
I didn't go in Patrick's house. I didn't have a key. Patrick had replaced the locks and never gave my mother a key.
There's a lot wrong with all three houses, inside and out. There are plumbing problems on both sides of the double. I had a broken window in the basement, and Patrick's garage door was nailed shut. (He did that after one of the times he got robbed.) There's a weird strip of land that runs parallel to the busy street. Nobody really understands it, and it runs to weeds and trash trees, and debris from the dollar store and the liquour store in the area.
In August, I got that letter with a laundry list of what needed to be done to fix up these abandoned properties. It was overwhelming.
Some of the stuff had to be done within a week, and I hired some guys to take care of that. Other things—like the fences leaning, a gate that needed replacing, things like that—I wasn't sure who to get to do them, but I had until the end of October to get them done.
I managed to get a hold of my godson, Steve. He's my cousin's second oldest, on my mother's side of the family. He's a professional painter, and one of the things on the list was that the garage doors needed repainting. I wasn't expecting him to be able to handle all of it, but I figured he might know guys who did these kinds of work.
I'd also been thinking about the fact that I'm a childless widow with no real next of kin except for a cat, Meg. And I own three houses. That's ridiculous. I have one godchild, and he has four kids and his income is unpredictable. Seemed like a great idea, not to mention it would give Steve a vested interest in helping me out. (I don't believe that people won't help you out of the goodness of their hearts; I know some of them will. I just think giving them a good reason to help you can't hurt.)
Steve was enthusiastic. He had fond memories of coming over to see my parents and his uncle, and he wanted to keep the property in the family.
Everything went along fairly well for a while. Steve cut down a lot of the unsightly vegetation. The city came and boarded up the window and charged me $77. No, the boards are not platinum, and the nail heads are not studded with diamonds. Also, Meg used that window to go in and out in bad weather.
I can't tell you right offhand how much I paid Steve before November, because in October my house was broken into. Yes, after the city nailed up that window for me. Of all the times my house has been broken into, it has never happened by way of that window. This time, the back door was kicked in. Steve boarded it up for me.
At the end of October, the not all of the work needed had been completed—in spite of Steve's assurances that he'd have no trouble doing so. So I got a bill from the city for $4200.
Now, unlike the window, this wasn't an exorbitant fee for ordinary work. No, the city would be doing exactly zero work for this money. It was a punishment.
I was freaked out.
Steve contacted the DoB&N and an inspector came out and basically said we were on the right track, and he didn't understand a lot of the charges. But they still stood. I contacted the DoB&N and found out that I should have gotten an extension. Well, two extensions. In my defense, in all my other dealings with all of the above agencies, they sneer at you if you ask for an extension. Also, this was a thing that required me calling and talking to people.
You have to understand—though you probably won't—I used to make Pat make my doctors' appointments for me because I couldn't make myself call the office. The weight of other people's (possibly imaginary) disapproval lies heavy on me. It's the source of my procrastination where doing things that involve other people is concerned.
Anyway, we were given a couple of six month extensions. I could breathe again.
And then I got a call from a payday check place saying somebody had tried to pass one of my checks. The information I got was sketchy, and when I tried to pass it along to the police, they weren't particularly interested. I went to the banks whose checks had been stolen, closed those accounts, and opened new ones.
(I have four bank accounts at four different financial institutions—well, I did—which is a stupid number for one person who doesn't really have any money. One account was mine from shortly after I started working. One account is my HSA, which, because my employer contributes to it, I have to have it where they say. And the other two were my mother's bank accounts, which she put my name on after my father died. I just closed the old one of mine because they're just not convenient. I plan on closing one of my mother's soon. Soonish. Sometime before I die.)
So, for that reason, I can't check my account any further back than November, at least not without assistance. But I probably paid him about $800, which for the amount of work he did, wasn't bad.
Between my resources being depleted and having to save $4200, the amount of money I could pay Steve dropped sharply. But for me, the big problem was that he'd ask for loans, and always on the basis of him needing money right away for something.
I'm not saying that's unreasonable. But I was paying him to do work. What he did with the money was his business. I told him as much, that if he needed money, he was to tell me what I was paying for with regards to what job he was doing. The weather had gotten cold and inclement, so I wasn't expecting him to be doing much right then, and I would have happily paid him in advance for work he could take care of in better weather.
But that never happened. It was always, "I need to get the kids their lunch money," or "I need gas for the truck."
I loaned him my bank card to take out $40 and he took $60. I asked why he didn't just tell me how much he needed (and didn't get an answer) and pointed out that if I didn't have that much, him trying to take it out wouldn't have worked anyway. He apologized and told me he loved me.
But it happened again. And again.
Are you wondering why I was so stupid? I had made the decision to trust him and was trying to show him I trusted him. He had keys to everything. I gave him my bank card. I honestly believe you can't trust someone who doesn't trust you. And I wanted this to work.
But, no more bank card for him. I told him that since he couldn't seem to handle the bank card, if he needed money he'd have to let me know before I left work, because once I was home, I wasn't going back out again.
Instead, I had him texting me before I left for work in the morning, and following me to the bank.
At the outset, I told Steve he could stay at my mother's house. He and his girlfriend have a decidedly stormy relationship, and usually when things are going bad, he stays with his parents. But then he had an argument with his father and walked out. He stayed at my mother's for a while after that.
And I was happy to have him there. I'm all alone on that corner. Having somebody else around made me feel safer.
I'm not entirely sure when he left. Sometime in December, because he wasn't living there when I decided to turn off the water.
There's a leak in Patrick's house that he was able to manage to a certain extent. With him not there, it was costing more and I was only using the water to do my laundry. I figured I could turn off the water, go to the laundromat, and save some money. (Please don't ask me why I didn't have the washer moved to my house. I have no answer. This is why very often crazy people won't tell you what's going on with us: the fear of your perfectly reasonable questions to which we have zero answers. "I couldn't" just doesn't cut it.)
Steve moved back in in January, with a friend, Jesse. I had told him there was no water, but he said that was fine. Jesse, he told me, was living with his in-laws and needed to get out of there. He could rent Patrick's house, as soon as they got it cleaned up.
Jesse seemed like a nice guy, but I had the unpleasant feeling he wasn't going to be reliable about the rent. I thought about it for a while and proposed a plan: Jesse could stay and pay the rent directly to Steve, who would use it to do the needed work. That, I explained, would keep Steve from having to come to me for money. I didn't mention the part where if anybody got stiffed, it would be Steve.
I was happy to have Steve around. He had a place where his kids could come and hang out, and it was nice seeing them. He did a few things I needed done—got me a new tire when a chuck hole took out one of mine; shoveled my walk, and took my trash to the curb. He had, he told me, chased off a black guy who was on my front porch.
I was paying the utilities, which of course had gone up, and he was still borrowing money. He said he was doing work inside the houses, which made sense, what with the weather.
Then he got a pit bull puppy named Bella.
She was a sweet thing, and very quiet. I bought her a chew toy and played with her when I went over. Steve wanted her for protection.
Then, one day in mid-February, he called to tell me that the house had been broken into and the TV had been stolen. He was all upset, the way you are when your house gets broken into. Jesse hadn't been there because Steve had kicked him out for not paying his share of the expenses. (I was unsurprised.) Bella hadn't been there because Steve took her to work with him. It was the only time he'd done that, and he was glad he had because whoever broke in would have killed her if she'd been there. He couldn't stay there, where people just take your stuff whenever they want.
I sat quietly while he went on and on, and agreed that he should go.
I should go too, he told me.
I didn't respond to that.
He was gone about a week. His parents had left, moved to Utah. The house they'd been living in belongs to his aunt, but she's already angry that her sister hasn't been paying the rent. There's no way she's going to let Steve live there for free. So his return wasn't exactly a shock.
And, again, I was happy to have him, though I was getting tired. There was always something he needed money for, and whatever he was doing, it wasn't anything on the list of things the city wanted done. It was possible I could contest the $4200, but not until the property got a clean bill of health from the city.
He'd kicked Jesse out, for not paying his fair share. He had another friend with him whose name escapes me. At least, I think he did. It got confusing. His son, Steve, and Steve's friend and girlfriend were there a lot. (Me talking about my present day family gives people the kind of headaches usually reserved for doing geneology.)
And there was another dog, a bigger, older one. He was part pit bull; I don't recall what his other parts were. His name was Rooster, and he seemed fiercer than Bella. (He was bigger, anyway, and he barked at you. I don't know if he'd actually attack.) This dog could protect the house until Bella was big enough.
Things continued pretty much the way they had been. Some of the gates got fixed, to keep the dogs in the yard.
Then, a few weeks ago, I was home from work for reasons I don't remember. It was a Wednesday and I was outside with Meg—
Let me stop here and tell you about Meg. Meg had been upset ever since the original guys came and cleaned up. Steve, et al. didn't help any, then he lost his basement window, and then his home was broken into. He found himself some good hiding places and he stopped going outside. Some days he couldn't do more than put his nose out. He was very unhappy, and I was trying to coax him out, so that he could run around outside again.
Back to our story. I was in the driveway when I saw a man casing the property. I watched him drive around slowly, looking at everything. Meg went to the front porch and tried to open the door to get back in the house and hide.
The man saw me and pulled into the drive. He was with the Marion County Public Health Department. He told me his supervisor had been out already and that he was there was making notes to file a report. Much of the brush that Steve had cut down was still there, and he had bagged up a lot of my mother's stuff and dragged it to the front porch. Along with that were some old tires. The MCPHD was not happy about any of this.
I asked when I could see his report and he said he'd mail me a copy. I made sure he had my address, since from what I can tell, they haven't been delivering mail to either sides of the double. He said I had about a week before they sent someone out to do the work themselves. Since I couldn't afford another $77 board, I assured him I'd get it taken care of.
I told Steve, and he assured me he'd get it taken care of.
By Sunday, St. Patrick's Day, nothing had been done and I was panicky and pissed off. I stormed over and knocked on the door (because I didn't want to find out if Rooster really did bite) and while I was waiting, I looked at the porch light.
It pissed me off even more.
Ever since he'd first stayed there, Steve had kept that light on 24/7. I had turned it off in the daytime, but he never did. To me, it was emblematic of everything that was wrong with the way things were going: it was a pointless waste of money, and showed how little I really mattered in the scheme of things. I could just pay for a light nobody was using because I was a bank with unlimited funds.
So while I was waiting, I unscrewed the bulb and put it in my pocket.
When the door was opened, I yelled at everybody there. They were all sitting around playing video games (Steve wasn't; he'd been in the basement. He said he was using a roto rooter to solve the plumbing problems).
Steve and I yelled at each other for a while, then he said he was leaving. I explained that if he was going, so was everybody else, and since they were still ignoring me, I cut the power to the TV. That got their attention.
Steve didn't actually leave, though everybody else did. Instead he was talking on the phone, complaining about me to someone, while I yelled corrections to his account.
Eventually we talked. I cried a little. He said he didn't know what to do with the stuff on the porch and I refrained from asking why he'd taken it out of the house—or brought it there—in the first place. Instead I suggested that it be dragged over to Patrick's garage, where nobody could see it. He agreed with that idea, everybody came back, and it sort of got done. (Some bags were just thrown in the driveway.)
There was still the leftover brush that had been sitting there since autumn, but it could be burned.
Things seemed to be going pretty much OK until Wednesday, when he texted me that the needed $275 for a matter I don't want to get into. He was very grateful when I gave him the money; he was never going to ask me for anything again.
Then Friday I got a call at work from Steve. During the night, someone had broken in and killed the dogs, turned on the hot water in the bathtub, and flooded the bathroom.
So I left work.
This time, Steve called the police. The officer arrived around the same time I did. I went into the house and, yes, there was hot water spilling from the bathroom into the hall and living room. Rooster was in the bathtub and Bella was on the floor.
The officer came in and asked questions. Steve told him that he'd spent the night with his girlfriend last night (a different girlfriend). His son had come over about 5:30 to feed the dogs and left about 6:30. The house had been empty all night. And Steve had lost his keys few days ago.
(I asked how he had been getting in and out of the house without them. He told me he had found the key to the door that leads from the garage to the basement—one I don't think I've ever even seen—and he's been using that.)
That part was particularly disturbing, since back when my mother and I got new outer doors, I had the locks rekeyed so they all used the same key.
Steve had come back at eight that morning to feed the dogs and let them out. He found them in the bathroom, dead. He thought they'd been poisoned.
The officer asked more questions, but instead of answering him, Steve told him about the black guy on my front porch. He had been watching the house. He had been responsible for every break-in on the property. He was a drug kingpin who lived cattycorner across the street from us and was trying to drive us out of the neighborhood.
The officer kept trying to get some kind of responsive answers, but Steve just got more and more upset, going on and on about this black guy, and the officer left.
After that, Steve ranted for a while about the police and black people and how oppressed he is and how he was leaving and I should, too. I told him I was getting the locks rekeyed and he said he'd change he locks. Since he was leaving, I didn't see the point in him having access to keys, so I declined his offer.
I went home. He was there the rest of the day, gathering up his stuff.
I did nothing. Well, I looked up locksmiths, but mostly I watched TV and ate popcorn and played solitaire on my phone. Yes, I know this was not the smart thing to do, and I know that I am required to always do the smart thing, but I didn't do it. It was a pretty day out. I opened the door for Meg, who sat in the doorway for a while. I talked to a couple of friends about the situation.
Steve texted me to tell me one of the dogs had been drowned in the toilet.
The next day, Saturday, I went to the credit union to close my account, so now I’m down to three bank accounts. Then I came home and a couple of different friends came over and helped me clean things up. They decided it was too big a job for the three of us to handle, so they hired people to come and do it. By Thursday the job was done.
(While they were working on it, guys from the city came to do the work, but they left again. Apparently they had a sheriff with them. I have no idea what's going on with that.)
I heard from Steve again that Monday. He wanted me to help him out with fifty bucks. I told him I was going to be putting a couple hundred into changing the locks, and then things got ugly. I'm not going paraphrase; it's all in text and the transcription will be the next chapter.
Since then, I've bought a new double deadbolt for my front door and replaced the old one.
Steve texted that he was coming over to get some of his stuff, which he did, neglecting to make sure the door was closed behind him.
I rekeyed the lock I'd removed and switched it with the one on my mother's house. Now there are two locks nobody else has keys to. When Steve texted me again about coming over, I told him he wouldn't be able to get out the front door, so he'd need to make arrangements so I'd be there. So far he's told me two different times and not shown up.
Like I said, this story is not over.
This story takes place between August of 2018 and whenever in 2019 I finish it. Since none of the participants—particularly me—are dead, the story is not over.
In August, I got a letter from the city. From the Department of Business and Neighborhood Services, to be exact. That's what the Department of Code Enforcement changed its name to, to sound more friendly. Somewhere in there, there was also the Department of High Weeds and Grass (would I make that up?) and the Board of Health. They're still around. They might all still be around, I don't know.
The letter talked about the three abandoned houses and what I needed to do to fix them up for them to be . . . up to code for abandoned buildings? I don't know.
First, let me explain the set-up.
I live in a single house on the corner of a busy street. To the east of me is a double—an around the corner double. The half directly next to mine has an address on the same street as mine. The conjoined house has an address on the cross street. Two buildings; three houses. My paternal grandfather and uncle built these houses. My grandparents lived in two of them. My parents lived in one of them. My cousin Patrick lived in one of them. I've lived in two of them.
I'm the only one still alive. All three houses are mine.
The double had been built as rental property and my grandparents gave it to my father after my parents got married, so they'd have a steady income when my father was hospitalized. I feel about this the way I feel about a company giving you a check for a hundred dollars after you slip in their store—they do it to keep you from suing, for ever asking for more.
When I started high school, we moved into the house on the cross street so I oculd walk to the Catholic high school a few blocks away. At that time a man named Mr. Butler lived in the other half of the double and my grandparents lived in the single house. Mr. Butler had been a tenant there for a long time, but he was moving out. I don't know why.
I lived in that house for seven years, during which time my grandfather died. Then I moved in with Patricia, the love of my life. We moved around for six years and then my grandmother died.
My grandmother had been senile for some time and my father and uncle were her legal guardians. They'd tried to sell the house, but ended up renting it instead. When my grandmother died, my parents bought his half of the house and gave the house to me. My mother's reasoning was, why should I have to wait until they were dead to have a house?
And we laughed and laughed.
Don't for a second think I don't know how lucky I am: that I got along well enough with my parents for them to want me so close; that they had the money to do it; that I was an only child (because you can't give one kid a house and the other a box of Lipton's tea). It was luck and I'm grateful for it.
There were various renters in the half of the double next to me, then my cousin Patrick got divorced and moved in.
So, for a while there were five of us on the corner. One big happy family. Then, in 2003, my father died. In 2004, Patricia died. There were three of us in our three houses, happily close but not too close.
In 2016, my mother died.
She had said many times she didn't want to leave me the double. This wasn't malicious; we were very much alike and she had hated dealing with tenants.
Technically, she didn't leave me anything. She died intestate and the house became mine by default, sort of. (Technically, it still isn't mine since I haven't finished the legal procedure necessary. This will come up again later.)
Patrick died in July of 2018, of cancer. He had been living with his father for the previous eight months or so. Sometimes he'd call me and we'd talk about how he'd get better and come home. He had to have his leg amputated and I told him we'd build him a ramp if he needed one.
So, the double was uninhabited in August of 2018, but you couldn't really call it abandoned. My washer doesn't work and I've been doing my laundry at my mother's for years now . Sometimes I'd stay and watch a movie.
I didn't go in Patrick's house. I didn't have a key. Patrick had replaced the locks and never gave my mother a key.
There's a lot wrong with all three houses, inside and out. There are plumbing problems on both sides of the double. I had a broken window in the basement, and Patrick's garage door was nailed shut. (He did that after one of the times he got robbed.) There's a weird strip of land that runs parallel to the busy street. Nobody really understands it, and it runs to weeds and trash trees, and debris from the dollar store and the liquour store in the area.
In August, I got that letter with a laundry list of what needed to be done to fix up these abandoned properties. It was overwhelming.
Some of the stuff had to be done within a week, and I hired some guys to take care of that. Other things—like the fences leaning, a gate that needed replacing, things like that—I wasn't sure who to get to do them, but I had until the end of October to get them done.
I managed to get a hold of my godson, Steve. He's my cousin's second oldest, on my mother's side of the family. He's a professional painter, and one of the things on the list was that the garage doors needed repainting. I wasn't expecting him to be able to handle all of it, but I figured he might know guys who did these kinds of work.
I'd also been thinking about the fact that I'm a childless widow with no real next of kin except for a cat, Meg. And I own three houses. That's ridiculous. I have one godchild, and he has four kids and his income is unpredictable. Seemed like a great idea, not to mention it would give Steve a vested interest in helping me out. (I don't believe that people won't help you out of the goodness of their hearts; I know some of them will. I just think giving them a good reason to help you can't hurt.)
Steve was enthusiastic. He had fond memories of coming over to see my parents and his uncle, and he wanted to keep the property in the family.
Everything went along fairly well for a while. Steve cut down a lot of the unsightly vegetation. The city came and boarded up the window and charged me $77. No, the boards are not platinum, and the nail heads are not studded with diamonds. Also, Meg used that window to go in and out in bad weather.
I can't tell you right offhand how much I paid Steve before November, because in October my house was broken into. Yes, after the city nailed up that window for me. Of all the times my house has been broken into, it has never happened by way of that window. This time, the back door was kicked in. Steve boarded it up for me.
At the end of October, the not all of the work needed had been completed—in spite of Steve's assurances that he'd have no trouble doing so. So I got a bill from the city for $4200.
Now, unlike the window, this wasn't an exorbitant fee for ordinary work. No, the city would be doing exactly zero work for this money. It was a punishment.
I was freaked out.
Steve contacted the DoB&N and an inspector came out and basically said we were on the right track, and he didn't understand a lot of the charges. But they still stood. I contacted the DoB&N and found out that I should have gotten an extension. Well, two extensions. In my defense, in all my other dealings with all of the above agencies, they sneer at you if you ask for an extension. Also, this was a thing that required me calling and talking to people.
You have to understand—though you probably won't—I used to make Pat make my doctors' appointments for me because I couldn't make myself call the office. The weight of other people's (possibly imaginary) disapproval lies heavy on me. It's the source of my procrastination where doing things that involve other people is concerned.
Anyway, we were given a couple of six month extensions. I could breathe again.
And then I got a call from a payday check place saying somebody had tried to pass one of my checks. The information I got was sketchy, and when I tried to pass it along to the police, they weren't particularly interested. I went to the banks whose checks had been stolen, closed those accounts, and opened new ones.
(I have four bank accounts at four different financial institutions—well, I did—which is a stupid number for one person who doesn't really have any money. One account was mine from shortly after I started working. One account is my HSA, which, because my employer contributes to it, I have to have it where they say. And the other two were my mother's bank accounts, which she put my name on after my father died. I just closed the old one of mine because they're just not convenient. I plan on closing one of my mother's soon. Soonish. Sometime before I die.)
So, for that reason, I can't check my account any further back than November, at least not without assistance. But I probably paid him about $800, which for the amount of work he did, wasn't bad.
Between my resources being depleted and having to save $4200, the amount of money I could pay Steve dropped sharply. But for me, the big problem was that he'd ask for loans, and always on the basis of him needing money right away for something.
I'm not saying that's unreasonable. But I was paying him to do work. What he did with the money was his business. I told him as much, that if he needed money, he was to tell me what I was paying for with regards to what job he was doing. The weather had gotten cold and inclement, so I wasn't expecting him to be doing much right then, and I would have happily paid him in advance for work he could take care of in better weather.
But that never happened. It was always, "I need to get the kids their lunch money," or "I need gas for the truck."
I loaned him my bank card to take out $40 and he took $60. I asked why he didn't just tell me how much he needed (and didn't get an answer) and pointed out that if I didn't have that much, him trying to take it out wouldn't have worked anyway. He apologized and told me he loved me.
But it happened again. And again.
Are you wondering why I was so stupid? I had made the decision to trust him and was trying to show him I trusted him. He had keys to everything. I gave him my bank card. I honestly believe you can't trust someone who doesn't trust you. And I wanted this to work.
But, no more bank card for him. I told him that since he couldn't seem to handle the bank card, if he needed money he'd have to let me know before I left work, because once I was home, I wasn't going back out again.
Instead, I had him texting me before I left for work in the morning, and following me to the bank.
At the outset, I told Steve he could stay at my mother's house. He and his girlfriend have a decidedly stormy relationship, and usually when things are going bad, he stays with his parents. But then he had an argument with his father and walked out. He stayed at my mother's for a while after that.
And I was happy to have him there. I'm all alone on that corner. Having somebody else around made me feel safer.
I'm not entirely sure when he left. Sometime in December, because he wasn't living there when I decided to turn off the water.
There's a leak in Patrick's house that he was able to manage to a certain extent. With him not there, it was costing more and I was only using the water to do my laundry. I figured I could turn off the water, go to the laundromat, and save some money. (Please don't ask me why I didn't have the washer moved to my house. I have no answer. This is why very often crazy people won't tell you what's going on with us: the fear of your perfectly reasonable questions to which we have zero answers. "I couldn't" just doesn't cut it.)
Steve moved back in in January, with a friend, Jesse. I had told him there was no water, but he said that was fine. Jesse, he told me, was living with his in-laws and needed to get out of there. He could rent Patrick's house, as soon as they got it cleaned up.
Jesse seemed like a nice guy, but I had the unpleasant feeling he wasn't going to be reliable about the rent. I thought about it for a while and proposed a plan: Jesse could stay and pay the rent directly to Steve, who would use it to do the needed work. That, I explained, would keep Steve from having to come to me for money. I didn't mention the part where if anybody got stiffed, it would be Steve.
I was happy to have Steve around. He had a place where his kids could come and hang out, and it was nice seeing them. He did a few things I needed done—got me a new tire when a chuck hole took out one of mine; shoveled my walk, and took my trash to the curb. He had, he told me, chased off a black guy who was on my front porch.
I was paying the utilities, which of course had gone up, and he was still borrowing money. He said he was doing work inside the houses, which made sense, what with the weather.
Then he got a pit bull puppy named Bella.
She was a sweet thing, and very quiet. I bought her a chew toy and played with her when I went over. Steve wanted her for protection.
Then, one day in mid-February, he called to tell me that the house had been broken into and the TV had been stolen. He was all upset, the way you are when your house gets broken into. Jesse hadn't been there because Steve had kicked him out for not paying his share of the expenses. (I was unsurprised.) Bella hadn't been there because Steve took her to work with him. It was the only time he'd done that, and he was glad he had because whoever broke in would have killed her if she'd been there. He couldn't stay there, where people just take your stuff whenever they want.
I sat quietly while he went on and on, and agreed that he should go.
I should go too, he told me.
I didn't respond to that.
He was gone about a week. His parents had left, moved to Utah. The house they'd been living in belongs to his aunt, but she's already angry that her sister hasn't been paying the rent. There's no way she's going to let Steve live there for free. So his return wasn't exactly a shock.
And, again, I was happy to have him, though I was getting tired. There was always something he needed money for, and whatever he was doing, it wasn't anything on the list of things the city wanted done. It was possible I could contest the $4200, but not until the property got a clean bill of health from the city.
He'd kicked Jesse out, for not paying his fair share. He had another friend with him whose name escapes me. At least, I think he did. It got confusing. His son, Steve, and Steve's friend and girlfriend were there a lot. (Me talking about my present day family gives people the kind of headaches usually reserved for doing geneology.)
And there was another dog, a bigger, older one. He was part pit bull; I don't recall what his other parts were. His name was Rooster, and he seemed fiercer than Bella. (He was bigger, anyway, and he barked at you. I don't know if he'd actually attack.) This dog could protect the house until Bella was big enough.
Things continued pretty much the way they had been. Some of the gates got fixed, to keep the dogs in the yard.
Then, a few weeks ago, I was home from work for reasons I don't remember. It was a Wednesday and I was outside with Meg—
Let me stop here and tell you about Meg. Meg had been upset ever since the original guys came and cleaned up. Steve, et al. didn't help any, then he lost his basement window, and then his home was broken into. He found himself some good hiding places and he stopped going outside. Some days he couldn't do more than put his nose out. He was very unhappy, and I was trying to coax him out, so that he could run around outside again.
Back to our story. I was in the driveway when I saw a man casing the property. I watched him drive around slowly, looking at everything. Meg went to the front porch and tried to open the door to get back in the house and hide.
The man saw me and pulled into the drive. He was with the Marion County Public Health Department. He told me his supervisor had been out already and that he was there was making notes to file a report. Much of the brush that Steve had cut down was still there, and he had bagged up a lot of my mother's stuff and dragged it to the front porch. Along with that were some old tires. The MCPHD was not happy about any of this.
I asked when I could see his report and he said he'd mail me a copy. I made sure he had my address, since from what I can tell, they haven't been delivering mail to either sides of the double. He said I had about a week before they sent someone out to do the work themselves. Since I couldn't afford another $77 board, I assured him I'd get it taken care of.
I told Steve, and he assured me he'd get it taken care of.
By Sunday, St. Patrick's Day, nothing had been done and I was panicky and pissed off. I stormed over and knocked on the door (because I didn't want to find out if Rooster really did bite) and while I was waiting, I looked at the porch light.
It pissed me off even more.
Ever since he'd first stayed there, Steve had kept that light on 24/7. I had turned it off in the daytime, but he never did. To me, it was emblematic of everything that was wrong with the way things were going: it was a pointless waste of money, and showed how little I really mattered in the scheme of things. I could just pay for a light nobody was using because I was a bank with unlimited funds.
So while I was waiting, I unscrewed the bulb and put it in my pocket.
When the door was opened, I yelled at everybody there. They were all sitting around playing video games (Steve wasn't; he'd been in the basement. He said he was using a roto rooter to solve the plumbing problems).
Steve and I yelled at each other for a while, then he said he was leaving. I explained that if he was going, so was everybody else, and since they were still ignoring me, I cut the power to the TV. That got their attention.
Steve didn't actually leave, though everybody else did. Instead he was talking on the phone, complaining about me to someone, while I yelled corrections to his account.
Eventually we talked. I cried a little. He said he didn't know what to do with the stuff on the porch and I refrained from asking why he'd taken it out of the house—or brought it there—in the first place. Instead I suggested that it be dragged over to Patrick's garage, where nobody could see it. He agreed with that idea, everybody came back, and it sort of got done. (Some bags were just thrown in the driveway.)
There was still the leftover brush that had been sitting there since autumn, but it could be burned.
Things seemed to be going pretty much OK until Wednesday, when he texted me that the needed $275 for a matter I don't want to get into. He was very grateful when I gave him the money; he was never going to ask me for anything again.
Then Friday I got a call at work from Steve. During the night, someone had broken in and killed the dogs, turned on the hot water in the bathtub, and flooded the bathroom.
So I left work.
This time, Steve called the police. The officer arrived around the same time I did. I went into the house and, yes, there was hot water spilling from the bathroom into the hall and living room. Rooster was in the bathtub and Bella was on the floor.
The officer came in and asked questions. Steve told him that he'd spent the night with his girlfriend last night (a different girlfriend). His son had come over about 5:30 to feed the dogs and left about 6:30. The house had been empty all night. And Steve had lost his keys few days ago.
(I asked how he had been getting in and out of the house without them. He told me he had found the key to the door that leads from the garage to the basement—one I don't think I've ever even seen—and he's been using that.)
That part was particularly disturbing, since back when my mother and I got new outer doors, I had the locks rekeyed so they all used the same key.
Steve had come back at eight that morning to feed the dogs and let them out. He found them in the bathroom, dead. He thought they'd been poisoned.
The officer asked more questions, but instead of answering him, Steve told him about the black guy on my front porch. He had been watching the house. He had been responsible for every break-in on the property. He was a drug kingpin who lived cattycorner across the street from us and was trying to drive us out of the neighborhood.
The officer kept trying to get some kind of responsive answers, but Steve just got more and more upset, going on and on about this black guy, and the officer left.
After that, Steve ranted for a while about the police and black people and how oppressed he is and how he was leaving and I should, too. I told him I was getting the locks rekeyed and he said he'd change he locks. Since he was leaving, I didn't see the point in him having access to keys, so I declined his offer.
I went home. He was there the rest of the day, gathering up his stuff.
I did nothing. Well, I looked up locksmiths, but mostly I watched TV and ate popcorn and played solitaire on my phone. Yes, I know this was not the smart thing to do, and I know that I am required to always do the smart thing, but I didn't do it. It was a pretty day out. I opened the door for Meg, who sat in the doorway for a while. I talked to a couple of friends about the situation.
Steve texted me to tell me one of the dogs had been drowned in the toilet.
The next day, Saturday, I went to the credit union to close my account, so now I’m down to three bank accounts. Then I came home and a couple of different friends came over and helped me clean things up. They decided it was too big a job for the three of us to handle, so they hired people to come and do it. By Thursday the job was done.
(While they were working on it, guys from the city came to do the work, but they left again. Apparently they had a sheriff with them. I have no idea what's going on with that.)
I heard from Steve again that Monday. He wanted me to help him out with fifty bucks. I told him I was going to be putting a couple hundred into changing the locks, and then things got ugly. I'm not going paraphrase; it's all in text and the transcription will be the next chapter.
Since then, I've bought a new double deadbolt for my front door and replaced the old one.
Steve texted that he was coming over to get some of his stuff, which he did, neglecting to make sure the door was closed behind him.
I rekeyed the lock I'd removed and switched it with the one on my mother's house. Now there are two locks nobody else has keys to. When Steve texted me again about coming over, I told him he wouldn't be able to get out the front door, so he'd need to make arrangements so I'd be there. So far he's told me two different times and not shown up.
Like I said, this story is not over.