I Had Just Missed the Paramedics and a Rush of Cops...

If you’re just joining me, go here and scroll down to “The Beginning of a Nightmare.”

My mother in law tires of Hopeless’ children real fast. It seems that they have some serous problems. Who knew? So she sends them back to their house, with their oldest brother, Don. A few days later, she realizes that children probably shouldn’t be there alone—neighbors are complaining—and goes to the house to watch over them.

I also need a break, so I take them back home, with Miss Debra, too. I feel really bad about this at first. But then, that night, I got decent sleep, for the first time in over a month, and I got over it. Real quick.

The next day she calls me and asked if I could come over, ASAP. When I get there, the guy from the water company is there, bent down doing something to the meter. I ask him, “Are you shutting it off.”

He stares at me with this expression that says, ‘are you kidding?’ but he said, “I removing it.”

Removing it? Removing what? I find out later that there’s a meter in there that they remove only in extreme cases (this, I think, was an extreme case). I walk back up to the house, looking back every couple of feet, making sure that I wasn’t what the guy was hoping to remove. Seriously, I felt like I had been caught doing something wrong, by just being there…but it got a hell of a lot worse when I went in the house.

Don is standing there, a big, white bandage wrapped around his head, over and over again, blood was seeping through the cloth. His eye was completely covered with the dressing, which binded half the boy’s head.

“What in the world happened to you?” He just kind of stands there looking stupid.

Mrs. Debra runs—I mean runs; you have never seen a large, old woman run like this—down the stairs, toward me. “It was Jon. He’s crazy.”

Well, as it turns out, Don and Jon had gotten into a fight, and when Jon started loosing—as all creeps are wont to do—he got mad and broke a glass bottle over his brother’s head. Evidently, I had just missed the paramedics and a rush of cops asking all kinds of questions. Jon had left the house and no one knew where he was.

Just what you’d do in that situation, right? I mean think about it; your mom’s in jail, your grandmother’s sick, there’s no water in the house, and the police has, only a few weeks before, threatened to take you away. And what do you do? You break a bottle across you brother’s face, because you don’t like what he said. Yeah.

I don’t know how they managed to get out of that one. If you could package luck in the bottle, they would own the paten. I swear…

So, Miss Debra asked me to take her to the water company—as if I’d say no—and so Don got the bill. I took one look and almost passed out. $1049.62.

“What?” I could have had a baby right there on that floor, and not only wouldn’t they have noticed there was one more child, but I wouldn’t have been more surprised.

The water company refused to take anything less than what they were owed. It seems that ol’ Hopeless and Fool had been in that house for six months and hadn’t paid a single water bill. Not only that, but they hadn’t paid a bill from their previous house, and somehow it all caught up with them. Right now; while I have to try and figure out what in the hell to do.

So, what did we do? We started carting water, from my house to theirs. We brought lots of water, too; in gallons, bottles, jugs. All kinds of water. But water’s one of those things that you just don’t realize how much you use it, until it’s gone. Doing dishes, the clothes, brushing your teeth, washing your ass, flushing the toilets!

Also, just so you get the idea: there were 11 children and one adult in that house.

So, then we started carting children over to my house for baths.

But no worries, it gets better, because, just as I think it can’t get any worse, the electric bill arrives.