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Because of my grandparents working class values and abiding faith in G-d, they tried to instill a sense of productivity and societal participation into their children with very limited success, given the innate seriousness of their disorders. And because my grandparents were forced to leave school during "The Great Depression" to support their dependent families, they saw education as a ticket to a better life, even if it meant that their children failed abysmally. They paid for fancy parochial schools and degrees that were way beyond their children's intellectual capacities, just so they could be financially solvent enough to move out and be on their own.
It wasn't easy. On my mother's best days, she can talk to me about science, but barely, especially if she's sick. She becomes argumentative about something she feels she's an "expert" in, even though the highest work level my mom ever achieved in science was a a lab manager who ordered supplies for the rest of the staff. I should know. She spent my youth calling me on her lunch breaks to chew food loudly into my ear and gossip rudely, because she was bored.
Her compulsive habits were so bad that my brothers couldn't give her their work numbers anymore. She'd deliberately goad me into anger over my work phone, just to have the satisfaction of knowing that my reaction to her might shock my cubicle neighbors, because she did the same thing with the other weird lab rats she worked with. She complained so much about us that her co-workers were nasty to us if we happened to be at home, which is what she wanted as a revenge for being a somewhat working mother part-time.
I felt terrible for my grandparents. They'd paid for her posh undergraduate degrees after she had been on academic probation while living at home, which is so easy compared to the lives me and my brothers have that I know they did it because she's handicapped like the rest of her siblings. Ditto for my father; my mom bitched and moaned so much about being "forced" out of work to become a mother that my father paid for her to go back to graduate school, then had to sit down with her at our kitchen table to help her through her coursework after working 16-hour days at his own job, just so my delusional arrogant mother could get a job as a bottom-level lab technician who cleaned glassware all day long, in between her lengthy phone calls from work on the company's dime. Some deal, right?
A pattern formed within my mother's family that her siblings and their children replicated with the same codependent degrees of success. I thought one of my cousins was, like, an astrophysicist with a Ph.D, when really, he was just a horrible student stymied by his thesis adviser (always an excuse for their incompetence), and that's why it took him and his then-girlfriend 7-9 years to earn a Masters degree from a college I got into directly out of high school, and that included blowing off my senior year of studies. Didn't need them anymore. And so it continued...this aching annoying bravado coupled with a deep insecurity that completed the next generation of pencil-pushing nobodies with over-blown ego's, condescending conversations, and terrible attitudes. They totally fucking suck.
They don't actually do anything really worthwhile. It's all a cover-up for their mental illnesses. I worked with tons of pseudo-intellectuals in publishing. They had to have advanced degrees to be able to compete with average people in the workplace. But, perhaps the most egregious over-educating of a sick person has to be with my one female cousin on my maternal side. After graduating with some generic Bachelors degree from a local no-name school, she worked poorly at a series of doctors/dentists office in Riverside, because after living with her father who paid all of her expenses, she then moved into the exact same building as her alcoholic mother who's a nurse. Yay!
She simply switched her needy codependency to her mother instead of her father. At work, she was told numerous times that she was extremely anti-social to the patients, so, guess what my aunt and uncle decided to do? Pay for her to go to nursing school! Of course! That's what you do with incompetent mental patients. Put 'em in a position to abuse with impunity! It was one of the worst decisions I'd seen yet from my mom and her siblings, but with my elderly grandmother ailing, her family went right down with her, without her constant advice and care. I'd seen it up close, too, what the doctors and healthcare aides complained about firsthand, because I observed my cousin at Nyack Hospital when my grandmother was there.
I could read the drug name and dosage from my seat at the foot of her bed (it was clearly marked as a saline solution in her IV drip), but my cousin made a big dumb show out of trying to read it (she failed), then requisitioning my dumber aunt to go get a real nurse so she could quiz her about an obvious thing like that, but only after I supplied her with pen and paper, because she had none. We had enabled her from the beginning of the visit to the end, and she was supposed to be the one in nursing school. It was an abomination and a tragedy, but I knew my uncle was desperate for her to be economically independent enough so she couldn't be a burden on him any longer, and that I understood.
My mom is also a huge burden, even though she lies about it, and at every level: economically, financially, psychologically, socially, physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, both domestic and abroad. You should try taking a mentally ill woman with Multiple Sclerosis on the road sometimes, without consulting an expert like me, and good luck with that. My life is like planning a series of small military operations, because if me and my brothers forget just one small piece of the puzzle that my mom and her family surely neglect, then our lives are ruined before theirs. They make sure that they always come first. Try it with a group of the disordered, and you can start to feel a sense of what our family "vacations" are like: brutal hard work, in addition to all the work that piles up on our office desks in our absences, because we run businesses for other people, too.
There is absolutely no way this woman from my family should be working with sick people. She cannot take care of herself. Her parents made sure of that. My uncle and his daughter are negligent of other people's needs in the extreme. She barely sent me a few sporadic, tepid, generic, cheap Christmas cards, let alone show genuine emotion for me and my family. From him? Nothing. Not one thing ever. She has also never sent me a card, or a gift, or an email, or even talked to me openly at family gatherings unless she had to. This is the woman they let graduate from nursing school?! And do you know what she told me in my grandmother's hospital room, after I noticed her lack of clear observation? "I'm not going to be, like, a real nurse. I can do the paperwork the other nurse's don't have time to do."
Two college degrees costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for my uncle to shell out—and by extension, all of us—for a mentally ill healthcare aide who wants to sit in a chair and file papers all day. That's what you get for your time, effort, and money. Does that seem worth it to you? It's like my friend Cotto; we spent, as a society, millions of dollars in free programs pretending that a man who should be institutionalized just needed a condescending "helping hand" from the taxpayers, because he's seventh generation Hispanic. It's unreal! But, that's exactly where we wound up with him and so many other sick people of the world.
It's time we stop pretending that these poor slobs need jobs. They need a home, medicine, and healthcare. But vocational training in the healing arts? You've got to be kidding me. She can't tie her own shoelaces without help. Can you imagine your grandma needing her help with an IV drip? That crazy kid can't even look at blood! And yet, some city school in "tha 'hood" desperate for cash did that very thing. They took my uncle's money in exchange for his waste of a daughter earning a diploma from yet another city school that we all paid for with our taxes. And guess what her graduation photo looked like? One short, fat, ugly, and unpleasant-looking white girl posing with a bunch of proud-ass black women from around the way, and ain't that always the way, though? Enough. It's enough. I've had enough of it.
My friend Elvis had a lot more problems than his over-priced "caffeine delivery system" cleverly marketed to addicts. He hoarded beyond control when circumstances in his life caused him stress, like helping out friends in need, or waking up in the morning without a hangover, or not having a stash of coke hidden somewhere in his rat's nest of a room. So, it wasn't like I took it personally when he "kicked me out" of his place during my bout with homelessness, because I knew it freaked him out that he couldn't abusively control me, like he does with the sicker people in his life around him, so he can feel like he's the "king of the hill".
Quite a tipsy structure to maintain isn't it? His life was never built on totally solid ground, besides his ethnic parents who had emigrated to New York from Puerto Rico. I could tell he missed it there, too, with his morning mango/guava Entenmann's danishes out on the kitchen counter for his work crew of illegal immigrants. You can tell when a person is homesick, you know? He had adored his mother, who was ailing and under his brother's full-time care (he's also disabled) when we first became more acquainted. After we knew each for awhile, he told me that her death had rocked him to his core. She had bed sores his brother had to dress every day, and neither of them were mentally stable enough to handle such a mature scene.
He told me more than a few times that she had sores on her vagina that caused her pain, which I could have surmised from the medical term "bed sores" (which regularly occur in elderly people who are hospitalized long-term), so I knew he had sexual identity issues to go along with his obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, schizoid-affective, addictive personality disorder. When I was forced to couch surf with him for awhile, after I lost my rent-stabilized apartment in a rigged scheme designed to do so, I knew he would think I was his captive to pore over and possibly romance, though in an interim period of our friendship, I found out that he had repeated his psychotic pattern of severe relationship dysfunction without any help from me at all.
He'd done work in a building for a family made homeless by a strong hurricane we had in the city years ago that had greatly affected the lowest-laying, poorest neighbors of Brooklyn. During that process, he'd made friends with a disturbed young woman who was fragile, vulnerable, and needy. Perfect! He could swoop in as her "rescuer" to give her items that she and her dependent family needed. She had her parents and brother living with her in the cheap basement apartment, too, when it flooded out completely. I met her briefly after I left my apartment, when Elvis gave me a lift to a nearby hotel in Park Slope that was, ironically, housing hurricane victims through a city agency, as the residents there wrestled with complex legal paperwork that was out of their depths, given their socio-economic strata.
She was twitchy and weird, pulling on her hair repeatedly and answering Elvis' questions abruptly, leaning over to play with her smartphone so her hair would cover her face. If she was the "stable" one in her family, it was small wonder that Elvis saw an opportunity he could manipulate to his advantage. While they dated (or whatever the fuck two head-cases like them do), I cleaned up a tenement room on Ninth Street and went back to work. After that situation went bust (or "Cotto Crazy"), he offered to help me out, per his typical pattern. I was originally going to live with his brother temporarily, but that deal went bust because they can't do business properly, so I couch-surfed on a sofa made-up for his brother, while Elvis stashed his slightly sicker brother in the apartment of their chain-smoking Nuyorican friend.
His brother complained incessantly that I had deprived him of his "home" while I slept on a couch, which is a crazy thing to think about some guy's sofa, but that's family for you. While I stayed there, his cardboard boxes remained in the hallway, as if in limbo, and Elvis quickly lost his mind over a woman too beautiful, brilliant, and healthy to be in his company for any real length of time, but that's my life. I don't have any reliable help in my family. I am the help! And so, Elvis started going downhill almost as soon as he realized I wasn't going to be his fellow shut-in/nursemaid, like his cousin living in an illegal apartment in his basement (he'd bought a Park Slope townhome with his parents money), and his nervous brother who stopped working years ago, so he could use their mother and her age as an excuse to live with her for free, as her makeshift caregiver.
They pretended he was starting an "Internet business", which was laughable to me, because they were also embroiled in a crazy lawsuit over the apartment deal that went bust after Elvis did work there, leaving his brother effectively homeless, too. Elvis also told me he had "put his hands" on his last girlfriend (also while homeless), who had moved in with him shortly after he bought her and her family used clothes, so she felt like she owed him, hence the speedy courtship. They "broke up" after he probably tried to choke her to death one drunken evening together, but with me, he played it wayyy cooler. He knew about me and my martial arts background because his brother had a black belt, and he kept a samurai sword (a rather cheap display one, not the real kind) behind the sofa where I slept, which I effectively displayed one night after he tried to get "touchy feely" with me.
He had tried to get me to touch his stomach because he stopped eating while I lived there, hiding it behind some diet-and-training routine along with his snake oil pill cabinet. I freaked, which put him on notice for the remainder of my stay. He grew paranoid, rifling through my stuff while I worked days at an insane office in Manhattan, saying it was the price he charged for my non-payment of rent, even stealing a street sign from me that I had found cleaning up the other place I lived in for a short while. He tried to play it off like I had problems with touching and intimacy, which I blew up like the phony case it was. He grabbed me and forced me to touch his body while he lifted up his shirt, in a move that gave him a taste of my body and muscle that must have stayed with him long after that night, because he almost immediately dropped my hand after grabbing it. I don't feel like his soft crazy women.
And so I came to understand that his make-believe coffee machine was deeply anchored to his delusional fantasy life, and that he desperately wanted me to be in it with him, as a savior to his rotten life. He'd made a fake picture in his head of me in his garden during the summertime as his maid/cook/lover, beautifully dressed and expertly serving him and his friends wonderful iced drinks. Huh. I then told him how many weeks I was out from getting my own place due to my calculations, now that I'd secured a gig as the design lead for a small publishing company headed by some trust-funder looking to go bust in a financial scheme with his publisher dad. I made (and spent) a lot of money working at professional houses around the city, but only enough to support me and my expenses in a place as expensive as New York, where most natives are only one paycheck away from homelessness and bankruptcy.
He immediately grew anxious after I shattered his artificial construct, as so often happens with the very sickest among us. He could earn a living if he was enabled by the sometimes sicker people around him, but on his own? Elvis merely drowned, clutching at people madly to help him out of yet another mess. He also told me he was guilty over a murder he and his friends committed many years ago; he and his friends had killed a bum sleeping in the park, in an end-of-the-world vibe that sat over the entire city during its last down-spiral in the crack-fueled 70s and 80s. My college boyfriend had also tortured a bum sleeping on a park bench with his best friend in a similar scenario as a teenager, too, as the city veered out of control into anarchy.
As soon as he realized I'd be moving on quickly without him, he began planning his attack, packing my stuff into garbage bags while I worked hard, padding himself with his fucked up brother, his dependent cousin, and an old girlfriend of one of them, who gave me a fake look of sympathy (really, it was fear), because those poor muthafuckin' Nuyoricans finally realized that they had actually met one of the kind of people who had originally inhabited a land they can't live on peaceably.
They had actually done battle with their first real ethnic minority: me. And guess who won? As he and his brother shook my hand (after putting my stuff in the trunk of Elvis' car), I could see that they learned from my lesson well enough. No more. No more abuse. And just like that, I was back on my way to a nice hotel with cable t.v. and a free Continental breakfast, like the rest of my homeless Brooklyn people. Thanks for that.
