While my mom was forced to leave the “retirement village” owned and operated by the corrupted nuns of Nazareth for her own safety about a decade back, I had a side-job as maintenance man for a small complex of duplexes in Elizabethtown. So when a vacancy in the back corner was available I reserved it for her.
There was another tenant there named Jaime, the only other tenant the property owners liked, as Jaime’s poor health had kept him landlocked there for years, allowing him to serve them as eyes and ears. Not because he was the busybody sort, rather he wanted a safe place for every family there no matter their story. He looked like a younger Abe Lincoln and was a cross-dresser more often than not, usually parked on his porch throughout the daylight hours on his wheelchair. He invited junkies to stay with him from time to time, which always ended badly for him, getting beaten or robbed or raped or all of the above. When the city quietly announced bounties for stray cats, suddenly his porch filled with about 50 or so, not overstating that, as he had time for any life in need even if he himself seemed to have nothing left at all. His declining health eventually had me driving him to doctors, and personally carrying him into the clinics of Elizabethtown lacking wheelchair access. A complication with his diabetes resulted in losing both of his feet over a month, the second surgery ending with his heart attack on the operating table. Because healthcare in Kentucky is the work of inbred hillbillies who like everyone else there rides their clocks to payday.
The couple who owned his home were able to reach his grown kids many days later, a son and daughter, who lived all their lives in that same city but were strangers to us all. They came together with their girlfriends, and spent all of 15 minutes in Jaime’s living space, just long enough to look for cash or credit cards. A big part of my responsibilities there were what we called the trash-outs, persons evicted or vanished leaving behind apartments full of their belongings with no place for it but the dumpster. The owners were set on remodeling the complex piece by piece hoping for an eventual sucker to purchase it from them, so with each newly vacated apartment I’d have to tear out the carpets, perform whatever minor repairs including hundreds of hours on patching drywall alone, and repainting everything, all after throwing away all that remained of entire lives and livelihoods. It was an emotionally difficult job, erasing people and histories.
Jaime’s place was filled with home medical equipment, which the kids could have taken time to sell had their needs been deeper than a needle. His place was also filled with curios stuffed with collectible ceramics all from the first half of the 20th century, all in celebration of cinema’s earliest years. Thousands of little statues and figurines accumulated across decades, the kind of assortment that I would imagine auctions could replace with tens of thousands of dollars. But there was no time or space or interest for anything beyond quick fixes from his family or the property owners so into the bin it all went. The owners succeeded in nothing but increasing their debts, but those kids of Jaime’s…I’ve a vivid memory watching his daughter both physically and metaphorically step over her father’s mounds of family photo albums. I was the only person from the duplexes who went to his memorial service. We weren’t exactly friends, he and I, but I wanted to make an appearance as he had been a part of so many lives there, even if all those lives had other priorities.
How a sweet soul could have raised and attracted such vultures was beyond me for a long while. But really, it’s how Americans have always perceived one another and everybody else- How can you immediately enrich my experiences and if that is not your goal why do you waste air?
When authentic life or death needs of others are weighed less important than any private interest, you are a capitalist no matter the pleasing lull of disposable culture. Where the actual needs of others are of less priority than self-interest, you are a right-winger regardless what you feel you deserve more. There are as many non-Capitalist, non-right-wingers here, as there are people who still remember that lonely guy baking cookies for all the neighbors’ kids every weekend. Which I actually yelled at him about after learning he was going without some meds to help cover the costs, him wanting these poor children to have something to look forward to every week and me wanting him to have money for his own fucking medications. Because with him gone nobody would be left to give a rat’s ass, for all those in that city’s dead-end who could use a hand or an ear or a cookie his feebleness somehow reached, as everyone else stepped over on their respective ways to quick fixes. I’d follow my mom and sister into their next home the next county over, me being the only one not sleeping in a hospital bed. If he himself had sold his pride and joys he could have done better by others than snacks, but Jaime pops to mind on occasion, as do the handful of people like him I’ve encountered in my life, all dead now and all leaving voids which none can replenish as the massive crowds of self-serving asses kick their ashes into the dusty rear-view along with everything else they think they can do without.
And the government to introduce weapons of mass destruction is not one capable of any course correction. Its systematic conundrum is the natural result grown from the neglect which all its citizenry past and present have brought to the proverbial table, meaning that until Americans one and all change, their government absolutely shall not. How people vote or pray has nothing to do with it, as politics and religion in the states have never been anything but methods for the justification of ego’s vanities.