It Started With A Text

It all started with a text.

The Lost Girl whose children were so well behaved at the museum texted me, hysterical. She thought she was being evicted. She has four children at home, only two of them old enough to be at school, and their baby sibling is due in the early spring. They’re all crammed into a tiny slice of a block of townhouses at the edge of Steubenville, far from the bus route. Her abusive partner who walked out in July doesn’t pay his child support because he can’t keep a job. She works at a fast food restaurant while the older children are at school. It has to be either fast food or housecleaning because she never got her GED. She grew up desperately poor, she got pregnant for the first time at fourteen, and it’s been a flurry of babies and low-wage jobs ever since.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you don’t have any money and have never had any money, when you have no one to look out for you because your family has had nothing for generations.

The next thing I got texted was a photograph of the letter, which was not an eviction notice but the step before it, a termination of lease. The reason stated was that she never gave them the extra deposit for having a pet dog, or the paperwork to prove the dog had his shots. But my friend explained to me that she’s never had a dog. She said she has a rabbit which the landlord knows about and is in conformity with her lease, but no dog. The dog, she explained, is her father’s registered companion dog, who came to visit daily when the grandparents were babysitting the children so my friend could work. My friend checked verbally with the apartment complex’s security guard that this was permitted. The security guard said it was fine. The landlord sprung this on her just before Christmas. She’d been waiting for her paycheck so she could buy the children presents, but she got this instead.

I don’t know anything about evictions and termination of lease. I found out a little because I showed the letter privately to a friend who’s a social worker and another who’s a Welfare caseworker in another state. I would be as lost as my friend is, if I got such a notice.

I funneled information back to her, as I was given it by my friends. Document everything. Get paperwork from your parents about the dog’s registration and have it ready. First of all, file that grievance before the hearing. You can’t have a HUD eviction on your record. If you do, no more Section 8 and no other landlord will want you either. As a last ditch effort we’ll find you a new apartment before the lease is terminated, but you cannot under any circumstances get an eviction. File that grievance and then get the dog’s papers. Show up in court and prove that it’s not your dog. Meanwhile we’ll try to find you another place and crowdfund the deposit. We’ll think of something.

I can’t  count how many times I’ve said “we’ll think of something” in the past 24 hours.

I didn’t know any of this before today. I didn’t know anything. I’m not a lawyer or a social worker. I graduated cum laude as an English major and got too sick to finish a master’s degree in philosophy. My thesis was all I had left, and it was going to be in the field of aesthetics, a thesis about horror and other extreme content in a work of art. I could tell you about unannounced dream sequences in Stanley Kubrick films. I can quote you Charles Dickens. I can read bits of Chaucer with the proper pronunciation. I’m your girl if you want to put on a Shakespeare play.  But I don’t know anything about landlord and tenant laws in the state of Ohio.

Meanwhile, my friend texted to say that her mother must have been hitting the sauce again. She taunted my friend that she will no longer babysit for the children without getting paid. She has taunted just that many times. My friend doesn’t like her to babysit anyway because she leaves the house a mess and doesn’t make the children follow any rules. But this time, the grandmother also mocked that she won’t give her paperwork to prove the dog’s true owners. If my friend becomes homeless, Grandma Dearest will get custody of the children and Grandma would like that. And by the way, Grandma is not giving the kids their Christmas gifts.

My friend got into this mess in the first place because she came from generations of mental illness and abuse as well as poverty. Those cycles usually feed into one another.  She’s trying to make things different, without any resources at all. I can tell she’s making a real difference because her children are such happy and well-behaved children despite having next to nothing. But I didn’t know what to do if Grandma was threatening to legally kidnap them.

My friend panicked again, and again I didn’t know what to say. “She’ll probably get sober and forget the whole thing again. I’m sorry it has to be this way for you. We’ll think of something. We’ll think of something. We’ll think of something.”

And then I panicked as well.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I have issues with anxiety. My trolls call me “mentally ill” as a pejorative and they’re absolutely right. I am mentally ill. I struggle with OCD and anxiety all the time. I have panic attacks. I had one just now. I got offline to play video games, because I couldn’t stand it anymore. While I was playing games, my friend from the Welfare department wrote out a list of just what to do to file that grievance Monday morning. That would buy us time before they were allowed to start an eviction. My friend who’s been a very poor mother, and for a short stretch a homeless mother hiding out in a campground between places to live, chimed in with what a homeless mother needs to do to keep the children safe.

All I want is to buy my friend a house, but I don’t have any money either. I never know how I’ll live one week to the next.  So I’m trying to buy her time. And my other friends helped.

I hope no one is using what I’ve written here as a blueprint of what to do in an eviction case. For all I know what I’m saying is nonsense. I  don’t know anything about this. But I am telling you about what is happening because you ought to know, and so should I. We all ought.

I was a great English major. And because of that I can quote Charles Dickens to you:

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

I was a great English major, so I can tell you that Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a beautifully written book as well as the best book to read if you want to start understanding what the poor face when they try to find housing.

I am a bad Catholic, but I am a Catholic, and I can also quote you the Bible.

Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him.

I am a bad Catholic, but I can also tell you that Matthew 25 informs us that when we neglect to house the poor, we neglect to house Christ, and Christ will remember.

We have to know all about what the poor face.

We have to learn about it so we can help, and so we can change the systems that make it this way.

That’s our business.

I am uncertain about a lot of things, but I’m certain that if anybody goes to hell, they go for neglecting this most important business.

I don’t know what I’m going to do to help my friend. Please don’t dump money meant for her in the blog tip jar because it will get mixed up with my money and I’ll end up paying taxes on it. I’ll tell you when I think of a concrete plan. You can suggest plans too if you want.

I know that we all have to try to help, and then we have to try again, until Jesus comes back or until there are no more poor people left, whichever happens first. And Jesus said “The poor you will always have with you.” We have to learn what the poor need and what challenges they face, or we’ll never be able to help.

So let’s start now.

image via Pixabay