A shadow was cast on an otherwise pleasant Thanksgiving—just the frau and me and the younger brother—with news, conveyed by the latter, that my youngest sib, my late mother's son by her second marriage, has contrived to reach new depths of folly and irresponsibility.
By the time my half-brother S reached the age at which a youngster of that era might reasonably expect to be pushed out of the nest, my mother had been sharing her premises with varying numbers of her children for about 45 years, and had become rather accustomed to this. All the rest of us bailed between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, but S apparently never felt the impulse, and no incentive was ever provided. In this my mother (a lovely woman in her way, of course, but one abundantly provided with colorful neuroses) did him no favor: born at the end of 1968 he grew into legal adulthood as a pampered, amiable slacker with no educational attainments to speak of (he finished high school without distinction; did a few courses back in the day at the local JC) and no discernible dissatisfaction with life in his arid Southern California suburb. He was a convenience store clerk for a few years and has worked in the stockroom of a largish retail store (a chain targeting approximately the demographic of, well, Target) since 2000.
We never lived under the same roof, and while relations between us have always been perfectly, ah, cordial, they have never been close. Younger brother G, just seven years older, has long functioned as the link between S and the other sibs.
My mother died suddenly at the end of 1996 and her husband, my stepfather—a shy, kind and inarticulate man who worked like a dog his entire adult life—sixteen hours a day, as a machinist and as a night guard for much of it—checked into the hospital eighteen months later after getting off work and died the following day. S then inherited a completely paid-for suburban house (assessed, thanks to Prop 13, at a fraction of its market value) and about an eighth of a million dollars in savings and insurance. He blew through the cash in five years (cars, electronics, "clubbing"), and when he got married in 2003 he had to apply to G and to me for a thousand dollars to fix up his car (brakes, tires) so he could drive to Las Vegas for the wedding. Since then he appears to have used the house as an ATM. Then: divorce, house sold, remaining equity split; S buys mobile home, falls behind on space rent, walks away from mobile home.
Now he lives on friends' sofas when he can; in motels now and again; in his car lately.
Geez, if the kid (kid? —39 next month) had the sense god gave a goose...
Hindsight's twenty-twenty, of course. G and I talked about this over the holiday. Had we seen this coming in 1998 we probably could have bullied him into signing over his assets to a trust (G: "I thought of that years ago, and then I thought, suppose he wants to get married? Won't that be humiliating, telling his intended that he doesn't control his own finances?" R: "Yeah, right, like living in his car makes him a chick magnet." G: "There is that"). At the time, precisely because he had never been off-leash—he'd seemed the very model of a dutiful and respectful stay-at-home son—we did not understand that he lacked the aforementioned goose-sense. That the entire maternal/step-paternal estate went to S was neither contested nor resented: all of the first four children were older (by 7 to 21 years), the veterans of one or more marriages, and settled in varying degrees of security and prosperity. Had I known in 1999, when I was sweating bullets and shifting counters to assemble the down payment for my stately manse, that S was burning through his $140K in a round of parties, I might have registered a dull resentment, but at the time I did not think of it. Even when I learned in 2003 that he'd squandered the cash, I stupidly did not think that he'd have the imagination to tap the house for cash. He may not have. I suspect that his bride did.
I feel bad for my mother and stepfather, long dead as they both are. They bought that house in 1973 just before the price slope started steepening (my younger readers will probably not remember that detached single-family dwellings were once readily within the reach of the proletariat) and paid it off well in advance of the mortgage term. They essayed sundry improvements and enlargements to the premises, financed by my stepfather's brutal 80-hour workweeks for much of this period and by my mother's part-time work as a waitress and later as an LVN. She loved that house, and the 23 years she spent under that roof were both the happiest and by far the longest sustained period in a single dwelling. And the kid has
pissed it
all
away.
All that toil and all that care came down to less than a decade of partying. Everything they worked for: gone.
G, a kinder man than I am, has told S that as long as G has a place to sleep out of the rain so does S. S, still working, is four months away from being "vested" at the retail chain, and is reluctant in any event to leave Southern California, the only venue he has ever known. G and I agree that any succor sent southward before March will likely not be spent wisely, that he must be replanted in Santa Cruz and, with luck, installed in one of the retail chain's nearby stores. Thirty-nine is a little late to begin, but G is a practical man (G and the eldest brother got most of those genes; I was apparently vouchsafed the entire remainder) and will take charge of the finances of errant S with a mind to training him in some of these basic skills. We'll have to see how it works out.
morosely,