No Good Deed...

You know how that proverb ends, right?

Yep--so do I.

(Note: this post was written over the space of three days. I started it Sunday; it is now just after midnight, which makes it Wednesday. I would say the three posts in a sequence--this one, the "OMFG..." post, and the "Disclaimer-ish" post--give a pretty accurate picture of the state of this house from Saturday evening til the present--to say nothing of the state of my mind.)

So Saturday evening, I get home from my first Saturday of work. I arrive with a 12-pack of beer, to find the house empty, and, expecting an evening of peace and quiet based on this fact, put the beer in the fridge and turn on the TV.

First problem: the cable is off. I calculate the date in my mind, then realize yeah, shoulda paid that one about 2 weeks ago. The bills in this house are in total disarray; basically, the squeakiest creditors get the cash, and anyone who can shut something off will be paid before someone who can't. Once we move, I will change that; I plan to be the...

pause.

This pause in my blog has been inserted because in light of the story I am about to relate, I need to add this interruption to show you all what I'm up against.

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(written Sunday night) I was writing this post, here in my living room where the computer desk is, at 11:00 PM--even though I have to be up for work before 6 this morning--because Tim and Squeaky had gone into their room at last and FINALLY, for the first time ALL FREAKING WEEKEND, I was reasonably assured of some privacy.

As I wrote the sentence just before the pause, they came out. Tim came over and whispered gibberish at me, to make it seem like he was talking about Squeaky. It's a game, I guess, that they play. Then, he went to the fridge for some ice cream. They sat down on the sofa, talking to me all the while. (Actually, Tim was mostly silent; Squeaky was yammering on about some TV show or something.) I listened for about three sentences and went back to reading whatever page I'd brought up when they came out--neither of them, as you might imagine, know about my blog.

After about ten minutes, Tim said to Squeaky, "Okay, leave her alone and let her read. She gets cranky if you don't let her read." (True enough.) After some more jabber, she followed him into the room, and I brought my page back up.

NOT TWO MINUTES LATER, from the room: "Gladys!!!"

I put my head in my hands. "What?"

"He called me fat!" Door opens. Squeaky and Tim emerge.

"Leave her alone," says Tim.

"I AM leaving her alone," she tells him. "He called me fat! Make him stop calling me fat!"

"Will you LEAVE HER ALONE!" Tim said.

"I AM leaving her alone!"

"Actually," I piped up, "you're really not. Actually you're sorta...still talking."

"I SAID, leave her the fuck alone!" Tim said. "I swear to God, I'm gonna smack you..." (He's not. We threaten horrible lingering death to each other a million times a day; I know of exactly one incident when Tim has hit a girl, and that was fifteen years ago and he was blackout drunk. So that threat, though it's obnoxious and dickheaded and all the rest, is not anywhere near as threatening as it seems--and what's more, Squeaky knows this.)

"I AM leaving her alone!!!!" To me: "Did you hear what he just said to me??? You're supposed to save me!!!"

I put my hands over my face again. "Okay, actually? No I'm not. That's what all that bullshit was about last night. I'm so totally NOT supposed to save you."

After some more squawking and yammering, and the background sound of a vein in my forehead throbbing, they finally went back into the room. The odds of them staying there long enough for me to complete this post are roughly nil.

end pause

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As I was saying:

Once we move, I plan to be the soul of order and punctuality as regards the payment of bills; now, however, it seems to be too Herculean a task to even contemplate the masses of unopened and opened mail which has accumulated on every available desk, much less to undertake to pay it all. I will continue to dwell on this shoestring, and take it as a lesson learned.

Anyhow.

As I was on the phone with the Automated System of the Damned, paying the Comcast bill, the door opened and in came Tim. Since my back was to the door, I didn't realize Squeaky was with him til she came out of the bathroom a couple of minutes later.

Here's the thing, though: Tim wasn't speaking to her. He went into his room, leaving her in the living room, and slammed the door and turned his music up loud. She made several forays into the room, and every time emerged looking crestfallen.

As I heard the story from her: apparently she was supposed to be staying at her dad's house. (Not her stepdad the sexually-abusing asshole; her real dad, who I guess is a wee bit of a jerk but otherwise mostly harmless.) Tim apparently had a long talk with Squeaky's dad a week or so ago, affirming that they both care a lot about what happens to her, and making an agreement that she could alternate between staying at her dad's and staying here. (In case you're wondering--no one asked me, no.) And it was that agreement that touched off the whole conflagration.

Apparently she'd stayed a day or two at her dad's, then gone to visit a "friend" of hers on the South Side. "Friend" gets quotes because it's a guy, and because her choice of "friends" in the past has led her into all sorts of situations. This was no exception; apparently, as she got off the Red Line at 95th to meet him, she was followed by a guy she knew, a guy who had raped her in the past, who she'd seen several weeks ago in a public place and who she'd apparently told off, made brave by the fact that he couldn't do anything to her while there were people around.

Well, this time, she wasn't so lucky; he grabbed her and choked her, telling her "This is for last time--you think you're so tough?" According to her, that was all that happened; she has bruises all around her neck, so either she's telling the truth or something else happened that she isn't mentioning.

She didn't want to tell Tim about getting choked, allegedly because she was afraid Tim would get mad and insist on finding and killing this guy. (Do I believe this story? Not entirely.) All she told Tim was that she left her dad's and spent the weekend with "a friend".

That's HER story. Tim's story--which came out after four hours of the silent treatment, during which I was left to entertain Squeaky and listen to her kvetch about Tim's treatment of her, all while I would have MUCH rather been relaxing with my Coronas, my onions-and-beef over rice, and my NASCAR race--Tim's story was: she was supposed to be staying at her dad's, and then all of a sudden she calls him and leaves him a message that she's staying with a friend--a GIRL, in the original story. And then halfway through her story, that girl becomes a guy. She claims she has no recollection of telling him she would be staying with a girl. She claims she was stung by a bee and because she's allergic, she took Benadryl and it made her sleepy and she doesn't remember that phone call because she was half-asleep.

I wasn't sure who, if anyone, was telling the truth. I didn't like, though, the way Tim was talking to her--like the ONLY places she was permitted to stay were either here or at her dad's, like she had no say-so and she wasn't allowed to change her plans. That was MY main objection--that he was talking to her as though he owned her, and that regardless of how angry he was, it was NOT okay for him to bring someone to the house and ignore them, leaving them as MY responsibility. "She's not your responsibility, though, G!" he said. "You shouldn't even be mediating this situation."

He claimed, after the fact, that the sentence "You shouldn't even be mediating this situation," meant "please stop mediating the situation." I didn't take it that way. So when he started yelling at her about her "friends" and her changing stories and her general lack of trustworthiness and consistency, I tried to calm the waters.

Big mistake.

At one point, he said something about Squeaky having no job. Now, she had told me that she'd just gotten a job, at a coffee shop, and would be starting in a week or so. I mentioned this, and he scoffed. "What, after waiting around for six months for a job?"

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Tim," I said quietly, "You really shouldn't judge people for making the same kind of decisions you made." He wasn't listening; apparently something in my expression showed my amazement that he would even have the nerve to say such a thing, because his voice started getting louder as he started talking about jobs she'd apparently turned down.

I was running out of words, not to mention patience, and so I just pointed at him. And apparently, this was exactly the worst thing I could have done, judging from the explosion that followed. The sum of what he was yelling--in my face, at the top of his lungs--was that he could have three or four jobs, and yeah he'd turned down a job, because he was entitled to do whatever he wanted if he thought a job wasn't worth taking, and don't you point at me, and blah blah really loud and ineffectual and probably at least somewhat guilt-ridden blah.

And he'd been drinking, and I'd been drinking (and yes, you are all entitled to crawl up my ass for the decision I made immediately thereafter, but I was, SERIOUSLY, not drunk) and Squeaky was in the background talking about "fuck it, I'm getting out of here, I'm going back to my dad's" and Tim was yelling at her about "no you won't, if you leave this house you'll just go right back to the South Side to fuck around some more," and I had now officially had ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY ENOUGH, so I said "C'mon, Squeaky, I'll give you a ride to your dad's house." And I grabbed my bag and my car keys and walked out the door, got in the car and started the ignition.

And waited.
And waited.
No Squeaky.

About five minutes later, I called the house number on my cell phone. "Squeaky," I said. "I am outside in the car waiting for you. If you want a ride, you need to come outside, right now."

Five minutes after that, out came Squeaky.

"Tim says to tell you that no way are you driving and no way am I getting into a car with you in your condition. He wants you to come inside."

"Oh," I said, turning off the car and getting out. "So now I get to look like the idiot for stepping in and trying to help somebody else. Good. That's wonderful."

"I think he's gonna apologize," she said.

"I don't give a fuck either way," I replied, largely because I know Tim well enough to know that an apology was not forthcoming, at least not for an hour or so. As I walked in the door, I repeated that sentence, and added "I really have nothing to say.'

"Ohh," said Tim. "So if I don't want to talk, that's terrible, but if YOU don't want to..."

"I don't use it as an everyday strategy!" I said, walking up the stairs. " 'I don't wanna talk about it!' 'I just want to be by myself.' 'Leave me alone--I don't wanna talk,'" I said, doing my best (and, might I add, extremely childish) imitation of Tim whenever he's faced with some negative consequence to HIS actions. "Well, now it's MY turn: I don't want to talk."

I went upstairs and put a sign on my door: DO NOT KNOCK. I put another sign on a string at the top of the steps: I WOULDN'T. And I went into my room, got out my yarn, and sat down in front of the TV to crochet.

It took about half an hour, but Tim came upstairs, ignoring all notices to the contrary, and knocked on my door. And A Conversation was had; I explained to him that yelling at me was a very, very, VERY bad idea, for a myriad of reasons including but not limited to: if you're yelling at me, you're not hearing my point. (I managed, with Herculean effort, not to add "...and you'll never see another cigarette, can of beer, dollar added to your bus pass, dollar 'loaned' to you, meal shared, personal-care item purchased, cell-phone bill paid, or financial obligation ignored EVER AGAIN." Never let it be said that I have learned nothing from my mother's money-is-power issues.) "And my point WAS," I added, "that you shouldn't judge people for doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING YOU DID."

He conceded the issue, but added, "Yeah, but when you point your finger at me like that...."

"Yeah, I know. That was maybe not the best way of expressing myself," I told him.

We talked some more, and he did apologize; I told him that I really didn't appreciate a lot of the stuff that had been going on, and he told me that he would really, REALLY appreciate if, in the future, I didn't take it upon myself to mediate their arguments/bickering/complaining/disputes/whatever. "It's not your job," he said. "Don't put yourself in that position."

"I DON'T put MYSELF there," I reminded him. "SHE comes to ME when she wants to bitch about you."

"Well then, shut her down," he advised. "Tell her 'Look, I'm not going to put myself in the middle of this--if you have a problem with Tim, go talk to Tim.'"

"And then when you don't want to talk, and YOU shut her down TOO...?"

"That's between her and me, though." Which...okay, yeah, he's right, but it's tough to see a person with a problem, who's TRYING to talk to the other involved party about the problem, but the other person doesn't want to talk and so the wounded party is left with no recourse than to just deal--and it's very hard for me NOT to try to help, under the circumstances. Especially when I know that--for the most part--I can usually manage to remain objective...

...until people start yelling, and not listening to me, and claiming that true things are false, and the sky is green, and rain falls up, and they could have three or four jobs ANY TIME THEY WANTED THEM. Apparently that's my breaking point.

Anyhow, Tim and I worked it out, and had a hug, and the problem was mostly solved...

Mostly. As the other posts in this sequence will show.