Sometimes Karma Is A Bitch For A Reason

Once again a week is gone (nearly) and we didn’t manage all the entries we require of ourselves; nor did we write any more stuff, or post any more things, about the other girl. Whatever, we’ll flog ourselves later.

Yesterday we probably would have written but instead we finally checked the mail (something we don’t do sometimes for weeks at a time – we forget). Low and behold in the mailbox was a letter from the local electrical company regarding the property that we own, that we rent to a local woman that has five children and is on government assistance. We know. You’re thinking WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

Don’t think for a minute we didn’t get a watered down ‘I told you so” from Fuck Face today when we told him about this situation…and we’re sure if you had been around when we were renting the place out this past October, a few of you would have told The Other Girl to reconsider. She was the boss at the time.

We’ve been getting letters from the electrical company for months, following each one up with a phone call to our tenant, and then to the electrical company, to tell them that we had contacted her; relaying what she had told us – that she was going to call and set up payment plans. (at one point though she had told us she DID call…and then we found out she had in fact not called…)

Guess what? She lied to us; big shock, right? She’s the type of woman who will propagate negative views of people that live on social assistance, so if you’re one of those people you can thank her for our lack of confidence in those such as her/you…etc. (we don’t want to use “them” …it’s apparently judgemental to lump peoples into an “us” and “them” category…)

Anyway, we were a little drunk (duh) when we checked the mail last night, and were already upset because one of us is a fucking freak, and had a bit of an emotional breakdown, that ended with us at work, crying in the washroom for about 10 minutes before we slapped her up, pulled us together and headed home – so by the time we had gotten home we were still…a bit sensitive.

We opened the letter from the electrical company, dated June 7^th… (had it really been that long since we checked the mail…we don’t know…) and it said that the electricity had been disconnected on our property due to non-payment of the bill.

Despite the fact that the bill was in her name and we are not responsible for the payment of it, we got very angry and stressed out. We called the electrical company that by some fashion of a miracle was still answering the phone by the time we had ambled home. They informed us that indeed, they had shut off the electricity on the 7^th of June (the date that had sent the letter). This meant that if she was still living in our house (and we could only assume she was, rent being paid by the government for the month of June), she had been doing so for almost an entire month without electricity. Fucking dumb bitch. That was what we thought.

We called up Fabulous Person to see if she could give us a ride over to the property and the entire time there we yelled, cussed, tried to make light of the situation and inquired to her…

“Can we yell at her? Will we get in trouble for that?” we asked.

“No, you probably have a right to yell at her at this point”she answered.

“Can we call the worthless lazy cunt names without getting in trouble?” we asked, our blood boiling.

“Probably not a good idea” she answered. Of course we knew she was right.

We got to the property and sure enough…all of our window coverings (which is to say blinds and curtains that we left for her to use) were gone; so we peeked into the house. She wasn’t there but from what we could see it was abundantly clear that she was in the process of skipping out on the lease. The house was mostly empty, there was a sofa up on it’s side.

We checked to see if the BBQ grill that we had left for renters to use was still chained to the house, and it was. We couldn’t get in to check the storage room to see if they had broken in and took anything – we’ll have to do that this weekend when we go put a padlock on the doors (which we are apparently in our legal right to do at this point).

We were furious, obviously, and it being the beginning of the holiday weekend, when we called the government agencies this morning and tried to contact her case worker, we got nothing but answering machines saying not to leave a message because they wouldn’t be checked.

That’s all sorts of awesome.

Anyway.

So, this morning, before the phone calls, as we were leaving for work we begin thinking about karma…we think about it a lot. We all don’t necessarily believe in it, as a whole…but sometimes it’s hard to deny that there is not some sort of balance in the world.

Back when we resided in The Mountain State we were living in a renovated pool house of a motel that had been converted to an apartment “complex” of sorts. We’ve written about this place in one of our big pieces regarding our history, the History of Frank, the time right before we got mis-diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Us, and Body Piercer, were living in the shitty little building behind the KFC, which was basically in the parking lot of the apartment facility. The pool house was small, and you had to go through our bedroom and the bathroom to get to her bedroom. The pool, now empty of water, had simply been filled in with dirt. The tenants were comprised mostly of drug dealers, prostitutes and people on financial assistance (which we were none of). Routinely we would be asked by the “girls” for tampons and if they could borrow the phone. Police officers regularly patrolled the alley that ran between out little “house” and the fast food establishment.

At some point Body Piercer and us decided we would move out…and you guessed it…skip out on the lease and the last month’s rent. We, us, were all of 22 years old, clearly it’s not something we would consider doing now, but at the time…caution was something we routinely threw to the wind.

In the middle of the night we attempted to pack up our dog, a black and white Border Collie-Keeshond mixed breed little darling which The Mother now takes care of, and what little belongings we had and move it on up the trailer park…yep, we upgraded from a renovated pool house in a dingy part of town to a trailer park.

Apparently one of the tenants saw us making our get away and called the landlady who showed up in a fit of anger. She obviously wasn’t happy about what we were doing, and even threatened to keep our dog hostage until we paid the final money we owed her.

In the end she of course didn’t get to keep the dog with her, because let’s face it, that’s fucking stupid and yes, we did end up paying the money we owed her.

It doesn’t change the fact that when we waited for the elevator on the fourth floor of our apartment building this morning, one of us all of a sudden pulled up this memory, and while we had a good chuckle, the first thing we thought was…sure, Karma is a bitch…but she’s usually a bitch for a reason.

There is no conclusion for this so far, we have to wait until next week to make the calls, to deal with this and find a new renter. When all is said and done, last night wasn’t so great (we sorta went into a shut-down mode for a bit), today was much better…but we’re sure this issue is going to become a bone of contention at some point in the near future, and while most of us don’t handle stress nearly as well as others, we can only hope when the time comes we can keep our ducks in order.

Sweet. Check out all those clichés we threw into this entry.

The Emergence of Frank: Frank's Failure

We had finally fled The Ex Husband, leaving him in Chicago, and moved back to The Midwest to live with The Mother. The Other Girl figured she must have told her about the diagnoses we had received in the Northwest, and the experiences we had as a married woman, however, we have not asked The Mother; at this point it is irrelevant.

We tried to stay there, with The Mother in The Midwest, but it was difficult to find employment; turned out “housewife” on a resume didn’t scream “employable”. There were other difficulties, like trying to be happy living with someone who had hurt us so many times and was as hurt and damaged as we were; someone who we never had a good relationship with; someone we had hoped could provide us help by this point in her life, but she couldn't.

In those days I may have been there for The Other Girl, to assist in getting her away from The Ex Husband, but I just wasn’t strong enough to help her heal then. We were weakened by her sharing the stories of her marriage, and reliving our own painful past together, and not being able to understand any of it yet.

This is the story of how Frank, how I, failed The Other Girl.

I thought I had control of the situation, having been brought back into The Other Girls life again…we were going to try to heal.

Bananarama, a friend from high school that The Other Girl used to talk to on the phone with a lot while she was suffering through the unhappiness of a terrible marriage in The Northwest, and her diagnosed mental illnesses, was living in The Mountain States. After a couple of months back in The Midwest, after leaving The Ex Husband, we high-tailed it out of town to try to rebuild our life with this female friend we had known for years.

Bananarama was a gal pal from high school; we had had a very big crush on her all throughout school and even after, when we would take trips to The Big City to visit her – memories for other stories. What we felt for her in high school may have bordered on love, these feelings for her. We love her now, to this day, even though she is likely the person who had alerted The Father to our current situation. We love her in a different way now, in the way you love, and respect, a person that has been through their own personal hell over the years, has come back on the other side bruised and broken and still battles against the hell that life likes to provide the unfortunate.

It didn’t take us long after getting to The Mountain State to fall in with an interesting group of people. We lived with a Tattoo Artist, a Body Piercer and Bananarama; and her young son who was there only half the time. When we weren’t looking for work and unable to find it, we hung out at the tattoo parlour where our roommates worked with other tattoo artists. Our days were spent with these people, our nights at their homes drinking, spending time with their children, having fun; weekends attending tattoo conventions. They became a family to us very quickly.

The combination of all Us, and these new people, was a turbulent experience. The Tattoo Artist was dating Bananrama, but detecting our infatuation for her became very angry, untrusting and defensive. It didn’t help that he was an abusive asshole either. We were very protective of her, as we are with people who are special to us, who are broken in some way, like us.

Body Piercer turned out to be a kindred spirit of sorts, at first. In the couple months of association we became a team of chaos, driving to nearby cities and creating adventures for ourselves; both of us suffering from Manic Depression, something she had been knowingly living with for years; she had also come from a history of abuse at the hands of Adults and had also lost people she had cared about at a very young age, to unusual unexplainable tragedy.

The Other Girl started dating a lot, meeting men online, inviting them over. She started learning about Wicca, dyed her hair black and wore clothes to match. She got a few tattoos.

Bananaramas allegiance to Tattoo Artist, her abusive boyfriend, and his hatred for Us, hammered a wedge between Her, Us and Body Piercer. After only a couple months, it was time for us to flee, and leave behind Bananarama.

Us, and Body Piercer, packed up our belongings, Our dog, and her cat; with our Ford Bronco II and her car, we headed Southeast, driving for couple days on no sleep, to Florida. Body Piercer had family there in the panhandle and so we thought it would be fun to start a life there, in the sunshine, away from all the brown of high dessert.

It wasn’t more than a week and a half before we realized that we weren’t going to be able to stay there, in Florida, for a variety of reasons. So we packed up everything again, and headed back to The Mountain States.

Unemployed and living off of a credit card all this time; we, along Body Piercer, rented a renovated pool house attached to what had once been a motel, but had been turned into housing for drug dealers, prostitutes and low-income people. We would get a visit weekly from women asking to use our phone, or to ask if we had tampons to spare, or loose change. We remember the police being outside our bedroom window on several occasions, in the alley, to monitor the hookers next to the KFC, which was across the alley from our bedroom.

The Body Piercer was dating Drug Dealer, even though she was married to Stationed Military Husband. We smoked quite a bit of pot in those days, the access to it so readily available. One night we smoked opium, another night we smoked something we can only imagine was laced with a peculiar substance because we lay in bed that night, and every sound jumped out at us, everything was loud, we couldn’t sleep.

After a couple jobs like selling vacuum cleaners door to door; a job based whose income was based on commission of a machine hard to sell. The experience of this is the most valuable thing we could have gleaned from it, having made no money for months, but being forced to pretend we were personable and develop some communication skills.

All of us were unhappy living in that little pool house, so one day we decided to skip out in the middle of the night. We got caught, the details of which, for this story are not important.  We moved into a trailer park after that, Us and Body Piercer; who was still unemployed all this time and liked to overspend. We used to loan her (and before that Bananarama) money from our credit card, each time with her promise being paid back, each time with the realization she hadn’t given us money from the last time; but she was The Other Girls friend, I couldn’t control her and stood by while she began to realize that you could buy friendships with gifts, money, favours. She thought this was the way it worked. Eventually the debt collectors began to call.

We ended up getting a better job than stocking the shelves of a porn store and soliciting vacuums door-to-door. We became, once again, a security guard, like we had been before we were married in The Northwest. It was fun work, we enjoyed it. We didn’t have to work with people too much in the beginning and it gave us time to talk to each other. Then they transferred us to The Airport, in the wake of 9-11, right before the TSA took over. We were a security guard at the gate, flagging people and their belongings, searching for imaginary things that the government was trying to convince people we could find.

We, and Body Piercer, started a blog about being Bipolar, and being Two Bipolar Girls living life together. We had fun with that blog in the short period we were working together on it, she auctioned Us off for a date one day, in a chat room when we were working to promote our writing. We would stay up late hours, drinking pots of coffee and going online in chat rooms together, to pick at people, and call them sheep.

Gradually they increased our hours at work, being short staffed, and we were working long hours seven days a week. It happened gradually, the things we didn’t understand. We began hearing The Other Girls name, whispers from nowhere. Then one day we saw giant fuzzy spiders, and they began to multiply; things began to jump around at the corners of our eyes, we saw more things that weren’t there. We heard more than just our name being whispered. These things increased, our anxiety was raised. We got scared.

Luckily we had held onto our wedding ring, an expensive piece of jewellery. We walked out on our job one day, hocked that ring and locked our self, with our dog, in our bedroom of the trailer house. We avoided our roommate, only coming out at night while she was sleeping, or when she left the house.

We spent a lot of time on the computer, in chat rooms; it was how we spent most of our time. The irony is not lost on us.

We ended up meeting a nice young man, who eventually became Special Boyfriend; he got us to leave the house and meet him. He was quirky, and sweet, and different, and smart; he was attempting to study English but had yet to register for classes. He was also equally as ill as we were.

About a month after we had locked our self away in our room, Body Piercer, our only friend, having been abandoned by Bananarama after we moved to Florida with BP, approached us.

“You have to move out. You not leaving your bedroom is making me uncomfortable”

We called The Mother, we talked to Special Boyfriend; we packed up all our belongings and slept in our Ford Bronco II a couple nights, with Our dog, before taking Special Boyfriend back to The Midwest with us to, again, live with The Mother; where he would teach us a lot about life, people and love.

This was a year after we had left The Ex Husband in Chicago, and had tried to start a new life. When we got to the The Midwest we filed for bankruptcy to the tune of $30,000. We went to a State Department that offered counselling services to the low income and it was here we told them what had happened in The Mountain States, the spiders, the voices. It was here, in The Midwest, that we got the diagnoses of Schizophrenia, and became once again a test subject for prescription antipsychotic drugs.

We talked to Fabulous People about our past recently, we share with them before we share with others; and as the words tumbled out of our mouth we saw the patterns of our past. The Sheep had turned to Sheeple; the Bedroom we locked our self in has become our Apartment, our Fortress. The chat rooms… Twitter.

Now that we see and understand our life in a complete way this time around, and have gotten rid of The Other Girl, and are stronger, we can share the stories that continued to shape us; the stories that have made us who we are now, 9 years after our final diagnoses; 6 years after we got separated, unwillingly; to more recently, the last year and a half, trying to hide who we really were because The Other Girl never wanted to leave this place called Home, and never wanted to suffer the rejection of friends