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White Trash Jamboree

The Players

Grampa: Spent many years as an accountant, eventually reaching the point where he was responsible for auditing banks for the city. Since it was during the most corrupt period of Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, it goes without saying that he made far more money than he should have, and much of it was probably ill-gotten.

Aunt White Trash: The second of ten children. She was very sickly as a child, and as a result became my late grandmother’s obvious favorite. A serious coke addict in the ’70s and ’80s, she finally met a man who got her clean by beating the hell out of her, then knocking her up. Three times. Then he left her, so she accepted an excess of “secret” handouts from my grandmother. Around the time my grandma retired to Arizona, Aunt White Trash hauled her kids to Berkeley to live off the state of California while she spent ten years trying to get a bachelor’s degree. This was not ten years of hard work and part-time work; this was ten years of being a full-time student, with nothing resembling a full-time job, and no real parenting (her usual M.O. was to lock herself in her bedroom and turn up Pink Floyd when the kids were being particularly obnoxious, which was often). When the state of California decided they no longer wanted to support her, the post-collegiate plan was to move in with my grandmother and leech off of her full time. Unfortunately, she died before that could happen, so she moved back to Illinois to leech off my grandfather. Despite him being a hard-ass who didn’t particularly like her, Grampa gave her way more opportunities than anyone expected. We have the feeling he made some deathbed promises.

Becky: White Trash Aunt’s oldest daughter, now 20. She had a baby two weeks ago. I’ll reluctantly admit that she’s really smart; in fact, she’s way smarter than her mother and has been since roughly the age of four. The combination of tricking and outsmarting her mother and having an obsessive desire to be the center of attention has led her to rule her entire family, like Billy Mumy on that Twilight Zone where he could make mysterious things happen…with his mind! She stayed with her family until she graduated from high school, at which time she moved back to California as quickly as humanly possible. She got pregnant and threw her back out, and has now quit her job and is living off a disability check and the earnings of her manseed provider. Nobody knows what he does, but based on his Middle Eastern name everyone in the family except me and my sister assume he’s part of a sleeper cell.

Darlene: The forgotten middle child. I barely know anything about her except that she has serious anger issues. Oh, and she’s 19.

D.J.: Or as my dad calls him, Damian. My dad seems to think D.J. has demon eyes and is a potential serial killer; I never got that vibe from him. He’s 17, into skating, video games, playing terrible faux-punk, and being a jackass.

Aunt Matriarch: The de facto matriarch after my grandmother passed, in charge of finances and mediating goofy-ass family affairs (of which there are many in a family of ten kids with a lot of ridiculous history).

Aunt Twin: My mother’s twin sister, who has lived for many years in New Jersey. Last summer, she decided to buy a house in Rockford, where Grampa lives. She had been talking for years about moving back to Illinois and has finally made good on it now that both of her daughters are out of college and away from home (in addition, her oldest daughter moved to Chicago). She chose Rockford because, in addition to the proximity to Grampa, it’s also far enough away from Chicago that she can separate herself from the rest of the family when they get too irritating.

Uncle Drunk: The baby of the ten, who has made a lifelong career out of embarrassing, Arthur-like drunkenness. He had a wife, two kids, and a good job, all of which were lost many years ago because he chose the bottle instead. Now he lives in Grampa’s basement and acts as a manservant in lieu of paying living expenses.

There are other bit players in this story (including my immediate family, but these are the most important figures. Now, on with the story…

The real inciting incident here happened in late 2001. Unexpectedly, my healthy, active grandmother passed away. She had been doing a lot of traveling and, as a result of many hours spent on disgusting airplanes, got a disease that wouldn’t have killed her if she’d gotten it checked out sooner; she didn’t have it checked until she got back home to Phoenix, but by then it was too late. A House-like diagnostician attempted in vain to figure out what was wrong as she withered away in the ICU, even going so far as having a team at the Mayo Clinic try to figure it out (this is where ill-gotten Grampa money, plus his late-in-life career-switch to auditing insurance companies, comes in handy). By the time they figured it out, it was either too late or still a misdiagnosis.

She was pretty much the rock holding the family together. Grampa was always the kind of guy who would hide in his sanctuary-like den, watching television, during family parties. Not to say he didn’t love his family; he just didn’t like all the “excitement” of having 800 relatives over, which happened often when I was a kid. We had scheduled family parties every month for birthdays, but I seem to recall family parties breaking out for no particular reason; if more than three of their kids showed up at the house, it was a party. I could see how someone who likes to quietly smoke a pipe and watch Rockford Files reruns would be annoyed by the chaos.

So the family splintered; many animosities that had existed for years came out at her rather unpleasant, alcohol-fueled wake, and that was that. A few clumps of siblings got along, but for the most part everyone was separated by either physical or emotional distance (or both). Aunt Matriarch was forced to step in as “the rock,” but her heart wasn’t really in it. Not as much as my grandmother’s, anyway.

As I mentioned, Aunt White Trash’s big plan was to move in with my grandmother and leech full time. When that didn’t happen, she tried to beg Grampa for money; he said he’d co-sign on a condo if she did two things: graduate from college and get a decent job. She did both of those things, but the job she got was back in Illinois. They bought a condo in a slum in the suburbs of Chicago. Aunt White Trash worked for about three months, then remembered how much she liked not doing anything ever. She faked an illness and, after many weeks of calling in sick, was finally shitcanned.

Somehow, Aunt White Trash managed to work her crocodile tears on the usually-tough Grampa. Was it because he reclaimed his faith when his wife died? Was it because he made some kind of odd promises to his wife or to God or possibly to a nurse’s aide he mistook for Jesus? Nobody has the answer there; we’re all pretty baffled as to how her usual manipulations worked on someone who was, for much of his life, a total hardass (especially when it came to money). But she called him and wept, and he made a deal with her: he’d buy a house in Rockford, where the housing market was starting to boom, and she could be his tenant. She’d need to find a job, but in the meantime he’d lowball her on the rent as long as she took care of him in his old age.

Perhaps now is the time to explain why he ended up “retiring” to Rockford, commonly regarded as a shithole, in the first place. You might have noticed that my grandmother retired to Phoenix. Well, Grampa had a mistress for a few decades, and they had an “arrangement” for the sake of the kids. Plus, they’re Catholic; divorce doesn’t happen. Even when she moved to Phoenix and Grampa moved to Rockford, into his mistress’s home, they were still married according to the laws of both God and man, preserving the sanctity of marriage.

She passed on about two years after my grandmother, so Grampa was left alone and semi-terrified in his old age. Having somebody out there permanently would be good for his own sake. Unfortunately for him, having Aunt White Trash and her brood out there was not good for anyone, especially him. The only clear incident I recall of them “taking care of him” is when he fell down on the driveway and got disgusting, old-man welts and cuts all over his arms, knees, and face. And instead of bandaging him up, they ran and got the camera, uploaded the photos to the family’s Yahoogroup, and wrote a few sarcastic comments about how useless old people are.

Say, did I mention Aunt White Trash never got a job? Yeah, so she was freeloading and then accusing the freeload of being useless. Hardass Grampa would have tossed her ass onto the street (and they live on a busy street, so that would have meant instant death by Rockford-pickup), but Loving Old Man Grampa just took it.

So, shocker of shockers, about a year after Aunt White Trash moved out there, Uncle Drunk moved in. If you’re following the timeline, this is around early 2004. Uncle Drunk had been leading a confusing, largely itinerant lifestyle. He had a somewhat secure job at a glass shop (the kind of place that does things like, for instance, airbrushing the Bears logo on a mirror), and an apartment over that shop. So he had a small source of income that, 99% of the time, he’d blow pretty quickly as soon as he met some woman on the Internet who agreed to meet him. He’d run off with them for a few months, but inevitably he’d end up back at the glass shop, until the glass shop finally canned him for taking too much time off (they didn’t care much about him being a drunk, so don’t think he cleaned up or something).

Having lost his only prospect, who put up with a lot more than he should have, Uncle Drunk moved into the basement. He was a freeloader, too; this can’t be denied. But he was doing crazy things like cleaning the house, running errands, making food, and making sure Grampa was all right. Which begged the question: if he was doing all that, what the hell was Aunt White Trash doing?

Answer: nothing. She certainly wasn’t having a job to support herself, wasn’t taking care of her kids, wasn’t helping Grampa in any way, and then constantly lied about everything to make herself out as both victim and hero. Which is something she’d been doing since her coke-addict days, so by this point everyone was used to the lies and just kinda smiled and nodded while talking shit about her behind her back.

The entire White Trash brood, as well as Grampa, were pretty quiet for awhile. Nobody liked the situation in Rockford, but there was little to be done about it; Grampa was the man in charge, and if he wanted to waste his money supporting her and Uncle Drunk, that was his prerogative. A few of his greedier children were obsessed with the money, which is why Aunt Twin moved out to Rockford: if he was going to be leeched dry before he died, she was going to get while the gettin’ was good. But then the bombs started to drop.

Last summer, just as Aunt Twin was finalizing plans to return to Rockford, Aunt Matriarch sent a long, detailed e-mail to all of her siblings explaining what, exactly, had been happening in Rockford since they moved into the house in mid-2003. Some of the highlights:

• Darlene had never been to high school. Ever. They moved just after she finished junior high, and they never signed her up. Rockford’s school system is such a clusterfuck that nobody called her on truancy. Which is not to say public education is the greatest, especially not in Rockford, but it wasn’t like she was sitting around with her nose in books, educating herself (unless Meth Labs for Dummies counts); she just didn’t want to learn and her mother didn’t care enough to force her to go to school.
• D.J. had a live-in girlfriend for reasons nobody could explain.
• The entire White Trash family had basically become shut-ins in the house they didn’t own, not allowing Uncle Drunk or Grampa inside, and they rarely left the house, especially Aunt White Trash. She only left occasionally to go to Grampa’s house (across the street) and demand money from him. Because of the nasty tone, which was so serious it constitutes verbal and emotional abuse (we’re unclear as to whether or not this escalated to physical abuse), Uncle Drunk would intervene, but he’d usually end up getting berated by Grampa until he went back down to the basement. He stopped intervening except when it got really severe, but again he’d be insulted and told to go away.
• Because of the shut-in thing and complete and total laziness, the new house — you know, the one that was supposed to turn a huge profit in Rockford’s booming market — was a den of filth.
• There’s approximately a $75,000 inheritance set aside for all the kids; Aunt White Trash, in less than four years, has spent double that. This doesn’t include back rent (because Grampa qualifies the house as an “investment,” so the rent they never pay would really just cover a mortgage he would be paying anyway; yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me, either) or the untold thousands given to Aunt White Trash in the past, before our grandmother died.

The purpose of the e-mail was to go into details about what had been going on so we understand why they served Aunt White Trash with an eviction notice, giving her 30 days to pack her shit and leave, and why they might be escalating this to something a little more serious because the 30 days had already passed when Aunt Matriarch sent the e-mail. She was urging the in-state family to rally together in a demented intervention to show Grampa we are not overly fond of him being abused and bled dry, which was guaranteed to be the greatest family event in the history of time. I was really looking forward to it, and I was allowed to go because they wanted as much support as they could get (they also wanted potential movers, since one strategy was to stage an intervention, but if that didn’t work we’d just move all their stuff out onto the front lawn).

But the intervention was canceled. Apparently it’s a slippery legal slope to evict tenants, even if they don’t pay you rent for three years and trash your property. They wanted to “do it right,” so things were a little more complicated than forcibly removing them. On top of that, Grampa was wishy-washy to a confusing degree: every other day he seemed to change his mind, going from extreme “get them the fuck out of here now“-type rage to “they’re family, we can’t just throw them out on the streets”-type kindness. With such mixed messages, Aunt Matriarch e-mailed on several occasions that she was “washing her hands” of the business; she never quite did, though.

Meanwhile, Aunt Twin moved to Rockford with the intention of protecting Grampa (and her all-important inheritance) from Aunt White Trash, documenting nasty behavior and generally being around him at all times for protection. Believe it or not, while she did want to leech quite a bit, she had a hefty chunk of change from a surprisingly successful home-business and an even more successful divorce settlement, so with the help of a small per diem (mostly in the form of free food), she could buy a house without having anything resembling a job but still come across as less of a freeloader.

Several months passed where nothing was accomplish; we’d hear a lot of weird stories about the White Trash brood sneaking around, wait until Aunt Twin and Uncle Drunk let their guard down so they could sneak in and demand more money. We’d hear about continuing efforts to get them out but Grampa being thoroughly unhelpful with the process. Aunt White Trash mysteriously broke her leg trying to get a suitcase from the attic (to pack!); unfortunate “accidents” like that kept giving them a stay of execution. Not much was resolved until things reached critical mass a month ago.

Sitting in her van, just about to pick up her seven-year-old product of alcohol and a broken condom from school, Aunt Twin caught a rare glimpse of the White Trash kids leaving the house. Darlene, D.J., the live-in girlfriend, and…Darlene’s mysterious Texas boyfriend, whom she met on the Internet and had gone to visit on several occasions, who had apparently moved into the house. The freeloading was bad, the live-in girlfriend joining in on the action was worse, but now there were five people holed up in that house, and two of them weren’t even family.

Livid, Aunt Twin called Aunt Matriarch, and they phone-treed the hell out of the family until the intervention was back on. But there was a downside: no grandkids. They figured the situation would be humiliating enough, they didn’t want to worsen things by having us around. I was pretty disappointed; I wanted to film it. Cops would love this kind of thing.

When the intervention happened, unfortunately nobody thought anything had come of it. In a preemptive strike, Aunt Matriarch had led the siblings to the police to ask if there was any way they could have a police escort. None of them knew the live-in girlfriend or the Texas boyfriend, but they already knew of Darlene’s penchant for violence and D.J.’s “demon eyes,” so there was obvious suspicion that their choice in lovers would have similar issues. Plus, with them being half as old and with Winnebago County’s hilariously relaxed gun laws, they had real safety concerns.

The police told them they’d have a squad car coming by, but they don’t generally do security detail for domestic squabbling. Ironically, Aunt White Trash refused to leave the house or let anyone inside, didn’t want to talk to anyone. She called the police with the intention of having them all arrested, but the surprisingly fair-minded cops took both sides of the story and used their intuition to realize something shady was happening. They were allowed into the house to talk with Aunt White Trash and her kids; when they came out, they were asked about the condition of the house. One of the cops non-answered that he’s seen young children returned to worse environments.

With that, they were sent packing. Grampa was enraged by what he perceived as jealousy from Aunt White Trash’s sibling, the cops refused to do anything, so they all drove home a little disillusioned…

…until they heard word a few days later that the cops were just trying to keep the situation from reaching a Cops-esque shirtless battle royale. My dad didn’t misread the cops’ nauseous looks as they emerged from the White Trash domicile, and they surreptitiously went back to the station and contacted the whoever it is (the EPA?) who investigates squalor pits. Nobody actually looked at the house; the White Trash brood pretended to not be home, so whoever came by just dropped a business card in the mailbox.

Aunt White Trash called Grampa with a fictitious story that the EPA condemned the house and they’d be forced out; she was doing this to get more sympathy, but the plan backfired: the combination of his kids’ anger (which he finally realized was jealousy) and the supposed condemnation of his investment snapped him out of it. He kinda-sorta cut her off, giving her only enough to get the fuck out of the state, to get back to California, move back in with Becky, and never bother him again. Oops!

But it wasn’t over yet. They continued to squat until Grampa literally called up a moving company and had a truck parked out in front of their house. It sat there for three days until they finally decided to load it up. This was confusing since Aunt White Trash had stated several times that at this point, with the family turned against them and Becky giving birth a few days earlier, she just wanted to get back to California. So she demanded $5500 for a “fresh start,” plus another $1000 to repair Darlene’s car (which had mysteriously disappeared, along with Texas boyfriend — nobody knows where either of them went, and it’s assumed that the $1000 is just her wanting to milk it).

We breathed a sigh of relief; with them on the road, at least they couldn’t continue to be abusive and bilk Grampa out of more money. Right?

Wrong. Aunt White Trash demanded a wire-transfer of $700 on the road because her shoddy minivan broke down in Springfield, Illinois, and she wanted to buy (not rent) a new van. I’m no expert on cars, but I’m pretty sure any minivan you buy for $700 might get you as far as St. Louis before the transmission falls out. Again, we’re operating under the theory that it was a lie to get more money.

Ten days passed with no word; we assumed they had made it to California and ditched the family who had turned on them “for some reason.” Then we received an e-mail from another uncle, who pretended to be neutral so he could hear both sides of the story. They had made it to the Arizona-California border when, trying to exit, both cars were rear-ended by a truck that was out of control. Even if we’re ignoring the fact that, even in a jalopy, it doesn’t take ten days to get from western Illinois to the Arizona-California border, the way the accident was described made no sense.

Here’s the scoop: one car had rear damage, the other car had front damage. Neither car had both front and rear damage. I’m not an expert on the laws of physics, but I’m pretty sure if a truck slammed one car from behind and it rear-ended the car in front, both ends of at least one car would be damaged, or if we’re to assume the truck somehow hit both separately, how is it possible that one has front damage? The obvious conclusion is that these two cars hit each other and then they made up a story about a truck for more sympathy; it’s harder to sympathize with “we suck at driving and all have substance-abuse problems so we may or may not have been driving under the influence of something.” Uncle Drunk actually called local hospitals until he found one where five people has been admitted after a car accident and the rough descriptions matched. So that, at least, means the car accident really happened.

I have no way to explain what transpired next. Grampa wired more money for them to rent a car to “tool around town.” I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of car rental agencies, but don’t they all require credit cards for transactions? I guess I could see them accepting cash if you slip them an extra hundred or something, but it struck me as fishy. Even fishier, both cars were irreparably totaled, so…what’s the deal with the layover? Why do they need a car to tool around town? Why do any of them need to stay in town for any reason? They were discharged from the hospital, they have no usable vehicles…

This leads back to conspiracy theories about substance abuse issues and people being arrested and the cash more likely being used for bail or bribe money. Finally, we were left with a still-shady-but-far-more-likely scenario: they needed an additional one-way car rental to get them all the way back to San Francisco, the rental contract for which was purchased over the phone with a credit card and corrupt, silver-tongued Grampa talked them into charging his card without having to be there in person to sign for it.

There are so many logic and continuity gaps here that you can tell most of this information was provided by liars and then interpreted by confused people trying to create a coherent story out of shit that makes no sense. The one thing that’s clear is, now that they’re back in San Francisco, they have been cut out of the family. All of Becky’s not-even-veiled begging for gifts and money after having her baby? Unanswered. Baby photos? Unacknowledged. Nobody really knows what will happen to them now, and it’s unfortunate to say this, but nobody really cares. After decades of lies, manipulation, and laziness, they’re on the opposite end of the country, and everyone’s okay with that.

It’s really a weird feeling, being so numb to family, not sharing in the joy of a new life because we know that Becky is only keeping this baby to start up White Trash: The Next Generation. Yes, she’s on disability and has no plans to go back to work; worse than that, she’s had several abortions and is only keeping this baby because she’s finally old enough to exploit California’s overly generous welfare program. How are we supposed to feel good about bringing new life into the world for such disgusting reasons?

And then you realize that, just as they’re using the first granddaughter of my parents’ generation as a cash cow, they’ve done the same with the family — not just my grandparents, but everyone, when they could, only reaching out for fistfuls of cash or free gifts whenever they thought they could get something out of us. How do family members get to be like that?

I have no choice but to blame Matthew Lesko.

Posted by Stan on April 21, 2007 1:57 PM  | Permalink | Family: The Horror… | Digg It