This blog entry is a long time coming. My hubby would probably prefer that I don’t write it, that I let bygones be bygones and take the high road. Trouble is, sometimes when you do that, you end up with an ulcer, or worse, you have W as president.
So here it is: the story of a humble blogger and her husband, who took in a long-time acquaintance down on his luck as a houseguest. This person, I’ll call him Harold, had moved to Vegas from a town in the Deep South. Back story: Harold and my dear friend, “Tennessee,” have known each other for many years, when both were struggling actors in NYC. Tennessee went on to produce and direct theater in Los Angeles. Harold faced the music and started selling janitorial supplies in a mid-size southern town. They kept in touch; Harold more so than Tennessee.
Let me stop you at this point and say that if at anytime in this story, you should get bored, I urge you to keep reading. Aliens make an appearance toward the end. Not just any aliens, either, I’m talking shape-shifting lizard aliens who worship demons from the fourth dimension. Uh-huh. Now you want to keep reading.
Anyway, Harold got tired of his Deep South town and set his sights on Vegas. He found a girlfriend on the Internet and moved in with her. Strangely, the relationship didn’t last, and within two months, she kicked him out. That’s where I come in.
I talked hubby into letting Harold move in with us. We had known him for about twenty years, though not well. He struck us egotistical and odd, but he seemed to have good intentions, which I appreciated as so many people don’t (Dick Cheney, are you listening?). Many (okay, all) of Tennessee’s other friends had at one time or another been deeply offended by something Harold did or said and refused to even talk to him. At one point, Harold even did something that offended me, and I had stopped talking to him, but that was years ago and I couldn’t remember what he had done. Besides, people change, hopefully, and I thought I should give him another chance. His only other option was to return to the South, something I wouldn’t wish on anyone except moronic cowboys from Crawford, Texas.
Hubby agreed to let Harold stay three weeks, and no more. He understood what I was ignoring: A) it would hard have someone else live in our home and B) Harold is egotistical and odd.
In all fairness, Tennessee warned me. I think his exact words were, “I’m warning you, this is a mistake. Don’t blame me when he pisses you off.”
One reason I offered Harold a room was that he had just quit a job he started a week earlier. They lied to him, he claimed – a pattern of Harold’s. People/companies lie to him or flake on him, repeatedly.
Nonetheless, the boy needed money and shelter. The other reason I offered him a room is I imagined my self as a modern-day abolitionist, freeing victims living in the red states. I’m a dumbass, what can I say?
Harold soon got another job, but quit that because the hours were unappealing to him, and also, they lied to him. Anyway, he was sure that he was going to get this “too-good-to-be-true” job where they would pay him a ton of money to be a marketing director, something he knew nothing about (sales people are not marketing people, end of story). The job never came through because as everyone but Harold knows, if it’s too good to be true, it ain’t gonna happen.
The job situation, not to mention the Internet girlfriend kicking him out, were signs enough that Harold is trouble with a capital T. But, as mentioned, I’m a dumbass. So for me, the first sign of trouble I noted was when Harold repeatedly jumped in and took hubby’s side when he thought I was being too tough on him, which is often. I’m short, a bit chubby, overworked, am far from rich and there is a Republican in the White House. Being nasty to my husband from time-to-time is the one great pleasure I get in life.
That aside, there were times when both Hubby and me recognized that I wasn’t being hard on him, and Harold was still jumping in and defending perceived offenses. Once, when we’d been drinking, Harold started in on me about hubby, and I said, “Oh shut the f*&k up.” I say this expression the way most people say, “Hey, how are you.” It’s kind of my version of Bob Hope’s “Thanks for the memories.” Harold teared up. The next morning, first thing, he told me that I was mean when I was drunk. I was quite offended. I’m mean when I’m sober, too.
There were a thousand small things, too, that warned me of trouble ahead. Every time I opened a bottle of vitamins, drank water, looked sideways, Harold had an opinion on ways to do it healthier. Harold is a “health” legend in his own mind. Example: my doctor suggested I take chewable calcium. Harold told me that they would just float around in my stomach., never to be absorbed by my system. I imagined my little semi-digested calcium chew floating in my stomach like a mangled glob on a raft. It seemed peaceful in a way. I wanted to down a glass of wine so they would have some beverage to make their experience complete. Harold had two boxes full of vitamins and supplements, meant to do everything from keeping Harold in shape (didn’t work) to mentally health (really didn’t help).
Harold likes to help, and he told me that he would try to get me a job at the too-good-to-be-true job working for him, but that they usually hired “hot” babes, so it might be tough. Then he told me not to get offended because I was too old to be hot, and hey, “you look better heavier, anyway.”
I’m not the only cantankerous person in the house. Hubby is quite the crabby ass. When hubby disagreed with him about anything, Harold came running to me to complain. When I disagreed with Harold, he ran to hubby complaining. It reminded me of a child playing his parents. What did he expect us to do? Side with him? Actually, my hubby probably did, that SOB.
After meeting my rather wealthy friend, “Uma,” (I think she’d like that alias) Harold proceeded to hit on her in very aggressive, almost mental-rape type of way. “You have nice lips,” he said to her. “I’d like to kiss them.” This was not a fix-up, by the way. Uma came to see us and Harold happened to be there. Anyway, Uma laughed off the kissing comment and tried to be nice (her mistake, it’s like feeding a stray dog). Later she told me she was very “grossed out,” and that Harold had a “bottomless ego.”
Three weeks turned into six and I told him it was time to end our little roommate adventure. Had I not said that, he would have given me the perfect out anyway when he told me that not only did he believe in aliens, which I had known — I just thought he meant androgynous gray men — but that W, Cheney, Queen Elizabeth, the Rothschilds and Chris Christopherson were all actually a shape-shifting race of lizard aliens bent on a new world order. Chris Christopherson? That explains “A Star is Born.”
Harold’s theory on 9/11? The terrorists didn’t do it. W and Cheney had the towers wired with bombs. There is “verifiable evidence,” on the Internet, which we all know is about as credible as this blog.
I disagreed with him, of course, but I looked into some of the “research” he cited, which all turned out to be written by a variety of quack charlatans with jail records and other nefarious histories, and I told him so. Did that piss him off! There I go again, being too tough and difficult.
We emailed each other our rebuttals because by this time he had gone back to the South for a week to get out of our hair for a while (the nicest thing he did for us). I held to my facts, and with no facts to stand on, Harold’s emails took on the quality of a nutty old guy. There was no punctuation and lots of run-on sentences (kind of like this blog). He got belligerent. The correspondence ended with me telling Harold, yet again, it was time to move out. He had to have the last word and hurled a variety of insults at me.
A week passed and Harold didn’t return. He didn’t give us the courtesy of letting us know when he’d be removing his junk from our house. Finally hubby contacted him via email and Harold eventually came back weeks later and removed his stuff. He had a gift for hubby. A baseball cap. He loves my hubby, who oddly didn’t want Harold to live with us and was the one who told me to kick him out after three weeks, and again at six weeks. About two months later, Harold sent my husband a thank you email. My husband wrote back and said that I was the one he should actually thank. So I got a two line email from Harold.
What did I want? Too much. I wanted an apology for the many small offenses he made under my roof. I wanted an acknowledgement of his deep ingratitude. I wanted him to say that he would get therapy. I also wanted him to apologize for making me defend W. I actually heard myself saying, “W is not a lizard alien.” I don’t like giving W credit for anything except for being a complete jackass.
People need a reason to believe. They need a reason to blame their sorrows on something other than themselves. In Harold’s case, he believes he has terminal bad luck, that he is a good and noble person abused by all the lizard aliens who worship demons of the fourth dimension.
There are many Harolds in the world. There is no rehab for them. They can’t accept that their life is their responsibility. They blame their failures on everything from W being a lizard, to corporate America being big fat liars. Of course corporations lie. That’s why work is called a job.
The moral of this story is, of course, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. I know I sound mean, and it’s probably awful of me to write a blog entry about this episode. But, I am awful, so get over it. What’s truly depressing is that those few times in life when you want to help someone, they take it for granted, they show no gratitude and they try to convince you that W is a lizard.
W is many bad things, but he is not a lizard. He’s a snake.
