And it goes something like this.
The place we were living in through January went away; there's a story to that, too, but it's not really a concern at the moment.
So we moved. Except that didn't work out quite the way we'd expected.
First of all, we went to this place at the corner of Potomac and Potomac--which was not easy to find at all--to get a flat. We talked to the people, gave them a hundred bucks for the little application fee, had them look everything over, and got told that we were fine to move in the next week.
Which was annoying on its own, since we needed a place right then; the place we were moving out of had only given us a week's notice about it.
Anyway: based on that information--that we had a place at Potomac and Potomac--we wound up staying with Greenback's parents for the few days until the new place was ready for us.
Then a couple of things happened.
First of all, the place we had all lined up suddenly went away. No explanation; it just wasn't going to work out for us. Great.
Second: Greenback's mother noticed that there were more people in the house to, like, do her bidding. And that's where the story becomes long.
The house itself was condemned. Some HUD project thing. So these people bought it and made it even worse. The entire place is decorated in early fried chicken and the house itself is composed laregly of soggy GrapeNuts. That's the starting point here.
Susan--Greenback's mother--is shorter than Hunter and weighs four hundred and fifty pounds. Sadly, I'm not exaggerating. Her licence reports WT: 400. Granting the general formula of $weight times $female_estimate, we're looking at no less than four fifty here. Fine.
Strangely, she's not big on moving around.
What she is big on is screaming incessantly at anyone who isn't me [I never fully worked that out; Hunter's theory is that she's afraid of me at some primal level of self-defence], including the air conditioner, telephone, television, and other such appliances throughout this dilapidated house. Typically, she's screaming about what a mess the place is, and how everyone who isn't she or I should be cleaning it and/or rebuilding it.
That's not a new thing. Several months ago, when the only people in the house were Susan, Henry [her husband], Patrick [their kid], and Greenback, the latter three decided to stop cleaning up after her, just to see what would happen.
What happened was that nothing got cleaned up at all. And, when the colony of maggots in the fridge began to outweigh her, Susan called a refigerator repairman to come out and see what the problem might be.
He never found out. He made it a metre into the house before fleeing to call Social Services.
There was a hearing. The result was a judicial mandate that the house remain spotless more or less for ever, and that each member of the household was responsible, under penalty of contempt, to handle certain areas.
That solved the problem. Susan went back to sitting there playing LARPer games on the PlayStation all day, and left the entire house to Patrick and Greenback.
Enter us.
Now, you might wonder why, with this house sucking as much as it did, we didn't just go off and find another place. We nearly did. Except that Susan wouldn't let Greenback leave for the office until the entire house was cleaned and repainted. Oddly, he got sacked for staying home and cleaning up her mess. So, since apartments rely on observable income--like a normal job--and Greenback was the only one capable of doing anything normal, we had to wait for him to get something else which sounded more like a job than writing books and things.
So he applied at various places, which called him back at home to discuss interviews, and Susan never gave him the damned messages. So that was a dead end.
This mess went on from the end of January until the end of June. That last week in June, when I was offline, had a lot to do with Susan deciding that having the computers online--except, of course, for hers, which is more of a static TeamDumbass/EverCrack console--was allowing 'hackers' to get into her computer and instal viruses which couldn't have come from her warez downloads, because she'd know all about that, because she knows all about computers.
I'm surrounded by fucking idiots.
About the time we dropped offline, a couple of things happened. First, Susan was using Hunter's hub to connect to everything; since we were offline, Hunter went to get the hub back, and Susan, Hunter tells me, got angry and actually whipped her with the network cable. Presuming that's true [and, based on Susan's tirades to date, I suppose that it probably is], then it's definitely time to get away from this creature, one way or the other.
So I started thinking about other options. One, of course, was to call Social Services and let them know what was going on. Patrick is supposed to be in school, according to the judicial mandate; instead, Susan--who hasn't got anything resembling a teaching licence--'homeschools' this kid, which amounts to flunking him if he fails to give her the cheatcodes for her videogames or to answer the phone in the first second after it's started to ring.
Here's the trick with Social Services. Greenback--who gets kicked out of the house weekly, for various bullshit reasons--threatened to call them and let them know what was going on. Susan counterthreatened to testify that Greenback had been hitting Patrick [that Hunter and I could countertestify, and that it wouldn't save her from Social Services or contempt wasn't something she considered, I guess] if he exposed her. It was easier, at the time, to let it go.
Which is not to say that it was never reported to anyone, of course.
Hunter's psychiatrist is aware of the situation, and obligated by law to send in Social Services once she has enough information. So far, she hasn't; although, by the time I upload this, she'll have the address.
Oh: about the new place? Funny story.
We'd pretty well given up altogether. In fact, I was thinking about calling a few people who had nothing to do with this to see what they could recommend. One of them was my publisher.
I've got this neat little thing in my contract. They provide me with a place to live.
So I enacted the living hell out of that clause. And here I am in a new place.
AT&T [the only thing really available in the suburbs] should have my cablemodem up and running on Tuesday the ninth--about four hours after Hunter goes in to see her shrink for her weekly appointment and drops the address of that fucking house on her to do with as she will. Then I'll be able to upload this, and we'll be back online in general.
Here's the best part--and the reason I'm actually angry now.
We've moved out. Timing was tight. I didn't want to announce that I'd got a place until I was certain of it, after what happened last time. So I went off to make sure everything was done, got the keys, and called Hunter's StarTac from mine to let her know that we were all set up and we could call in the people lined up to help move everything in things larger than a Formula.
Amazingly, and coincidentally, I called her while Susan was out. Susan leaves the house about once a week to buy five hundred bucks' worth of food which Patrick eats in one day [he's about three hundred pounds], and then claims he has no idea where all the food went, so she blames people like Greenback and Hunter for eating fifty pounds of fried chicken and high-fat ham in one afternoon. Brilliant.
Anyway: she wasn't there at the time, and didn't get back until after everything was moved. Which bugged me at the time [despite Greenback's and Hunter's admonitions that she'd actually try to prevent us from moving out if she knew about it] because it seemed kinda sudden that way.
However: Susan has--unfortunately enough--Hunter's mobile number; and she's decided, being an idiot, that the number is logically hers to appoint to Greenback and call more often than the average creditor to harrass him. Incidentally, calling more than once a week qualifies as harrassment, in case you didn't know that. I looked it up.
Here's what I found out from one of those calls.
Some blanket--apparently one of those goofy carnival thingys with the tiger printed on it, which might have a street value of fifty bucks if it were new--is missing. Which means that I stole it. What this has to do with me is a bit of a mystery. But, from what I heard from a few feet away over the phone, I stole this thing, and--get this--I'm now guilty of grand theft.
I've never heard of Grand Theft Blanket. That's a new one to me. I suppose it could happen: there are blankets out there with values above a thousand bucks or so; they're usually called tapestries, but they exist.
Anyway: since I'm clearly guilty here, they're going to get a search warrant and come over here [where they haven't got my new address, but they've worked out the area and keep driving back and forth watching for my car--we've seen them do that much over the last few days] and A) get this blanket back, and B) have me arrested for stealing it, when I had nothing to do with moving anything out of the house since I was here getting the keys to the place at the time.
Incidentally, the blanket is in her laundryroom, where it's been for months; that's usually a good place to hide things from this creature.
So: since I'm being accused of a crime I didn't commit, which never even took place, my lawyers are advising me to break all contact with the behemoth pending this bullshit investigation she's launching. Then, once she's been found guilty of contempt for failing to do a fucking thing to keep her house clean, and once HUD have reposessed her house, if there's anything left of her, my lawyers want to sue the shit out of her for wrongful accusation in this Grand Theft Blanket issue.
Okay; why not.
On the bright side, now that she's not screaming at the air conditioner within my zipcode, we can get back to doing the radio show again. Gimee a week or two on that.
More later....
--Gremlin