After I retired, some more money came in, my former employer’s last quarterly payment into my 401K, which happened months after I had stopped working. An email came informing me my $900+ dollars had been transformed to about $575 dollars in a tax withheld disbursement, as if my last paycheck had come in the mail. I endorsed and photographed the check, front and back, to deposit it into my account from the phone, and left the now-valueless check in the output tray of the laser printer. It was a dead document. Gone. Processed. Disposed. Cashed.
At the time I had a roommate. Roommate may be a bit of hyperbole. Janessa was my mate. She didn’t pay rent, but she was queen of the house. She ruled the roost, and she controlled who came in and who did not. Janessa was 5’7”, had a big elegant ass, longer than shoulder length brunette hair, and green eyes. Her voice is a deep and liquid alto whisper. At the time, I found Janessa to be beautiful and charismatic. She could light up a room with her presence. One reflects how she might light up the room by setting it on fire, but only by mistake, in a state of complete inattention, a spazz-out, a hiccup, a drug addled display of incapacity and vulnerability, because she would “never, Never, EVAR” do something like that. She might play the room, less likely that she’d burn it. But, who knows, right?
Janessa was the weather—always there, sometimes mis-forecast, mostly noticed when everything turned foul. Janessa was a bad drunk, was addicted to and injected herself with heroin almost every day and made sure to enjoy half my stash of cocaine in half the time I’d usually take to use it, day in and day out. She also protected my stash from other bitches.
And Jan was mine. She listened when I talked, and I talked endlessly. Jan was Scheherazade, telling stories and listening, fending off the inevitable by staying awake until the new dawn vaporized away whatever scraps remained of the night before.
Janessa was at this time trying to come up with an alternative living situation. I had become more and more of a problem for her, mostly because I controlled how much she spent on up, and especially on down. Janessa was deeply addicted to opiates and made no excuses. I believed she was addicted to down because she was addicted to the slippery, mostly black guys who sold her the stuff, and they adored her when she had cash. I reliably paid for her down in the quaintly misguided belief that if she didn’t have to worry about the money for down then she’d be able to use the same mental resources to get her life together. She always had cash because I gave her cash.
I supplied the up myself, out of my own supply, and gladly, happy to have someone fun to smoke with. Jan helped by keeping our suppliers simultaneously numerous, diverse, and happy. We had removed as much friction as was possible from the whole process of acquiring and consuming heroin and our magical crack cocaine. We kept our vendors happy and they kept us reliably high and proffered us the real “city experience” of acquiring large amounts of expensive, highly controlled drugs, and driving on adventures, waiting in a dark and silent car at 3:18 am in February, wind chill way below zero, parked a half dozen houses away from our dealer, who as long as we had the cash, and he could stay awake that long, would at 3:30 am sell us five rocks for 200 which would keep Jan and me awake and enmeshed for another 12+ hours. We’d drive to sketchy neighborhoods, concoct plausible sounding cover stories, stop at convenience stores and drive-thru’s, park in motel parking lots, take any of several back ways through Westbrook or South Portland. And all those adventures only happened when we weren’t having the drugs delivered. Heck, the deliveries themselves were often their own crazy, over-the-top-experiences. The city had become for us a theme park of drug traffic and loose morals.
At that time, I was just beginning to understand a grim new fetish which I indulged, of always feeling wounded, that Jan had fucked me over, and I was taking it very badly. My mood would spiral down into a dark and angry place, and the next time Jan let me down in the slightest way–if a mirror had streaks, or she didn’t have her lighter–I would fume, rage and throw down ultimati (that’s maybe plural of ultimatum?). Jan would get spooked, then either fight back or disappear. I knew exactly what to say to make Jan go nuts. I could be cruel and loved to hurt, tried to injure her with my words. I inflicted the maximum possible pain while still being able to hold onto my own legitimate feelings of resentment and injury. So, it’s no surprise Jan was looking elsewhere.
Simultaneous with trying to find another living situation, I also encouraged Janessa to use and leverage the situation I had set her up into, to help her move on. She invited her friends and her family over, as I urged. “Spend time with them instead of with pushers,” I gaily offered, naively assuming values I’d not tested. I met Janessa’s third cousin Tammy around that time, when Jan brought her around. Tammy, predictably I guess, and like her cousin, was a piece of work and a hot mess. Over the course of a couple days, I had already engaged in two very loud, messy arguments with her, and most recently related to how she treated me when I was driving her, her cousin Jan, and my friend Delilah around the West End of Portland, ME at 2:00 in the afternoon so Janessa, our collective cousin/bestie/lover/junkie/crack-ho could score for us, up and down. Everything about this ‘adventure’ (the term I had started calling our clowns-in-a-Volkswagen antics, driving around during the day or night all over the city with unlikely front and back seat passengers, and only avoiding scrutiny by always being so outlandish, in our constant quest to acquire drugs and more drugs, though the tinted rear windows helped a lot) was bad all round.
Jan made us wait, often so she could socialize with her connections, which was arguably necessary, but then while we waited all tweaked out in a parked car on the edge of the hottest neighborhood in the city while the local schools let out, Jan stopped responding to texts or phone calls. Today, this specific day, after all the dozens of times this had happened with me, this behavior today, set off dear cousin Tammy, because, she complained, we looked suspicious and she had just recently been released from prison and was under parole conditions. and I was a freak or a rat for exposing her to this danger, and that argument made Delilah explode in screeching protection of me, and in firm disavowal of the putative drug deal which might or might not be going down this very minute, we drove off, ditching Jan in mid-deal midtown, and I yelled and honked the horn and drove like an insane person, sent texts to Jan quoting what was being said to me in the car by our passengers, how I was wrong no matter what I did, and voices eventually cooled and then the idiot black dealer Janessa was hanging with called to yell at me to stop disrespecting his cousin on the phone, and I had to call him back and interact with the fucking guy and talk him down, and after that I basically lost all of my remaining composure and sanity altogether. That adventure finally closed, hours later, a different day.
Well, a couple weeks later, it came to my attention that, during an ensuing recent period when I had completely banished Janessa from my home and my presence, she and her cousin and their friend Heidi, who had a checking account into which they could deposit my 401K check for almost $600 bucks, took and deposited said check that was lying in the paper tray of the laser printer and used the proceeds to finish off a drug run into which they had just entered the fifth day. They did this, but apparently Jan and Tammy cheated Heidi out of all but a few bucks of the proceeds, and I believe Janessa herself got ripped off for more than $200 more. By the end of the weekend Heidi’s bank had caught the error, began collecting the funds back from her, and she sheepishly and gratefully allowed them to garnish every cent from her paychecks until all the funds were paid back, five weeks later, after they said they would refrain from charging her with wire fraud and forgery affixing. I believe the bank was very “firm” in their dealings with Heidi, and she was understandably shaken. All three women had treated each other as badly as it was possible to treat someone whom they called a friend or family member. The ripples of bitterness and mistrust linger to this day. Excuse the editorializing, but these were vile bitchez, actin’ vile.
The entire escapade was haltingly, half-hysterically, and misleadingly, explained to me by Jan at about the time Heidi got caught and sanctioned by the bank. It took three or four days for me to catch the entire story as it unspooled from the bitches (not Tammy, who had conveniently disappeared) at different rates and with different emphases. Heidi was furious because her friends had led her to believe there would be no repercussions from depositing this clearly good, original, and unmarked check into her account, to which I believe she affixed her signature. Heidi had gotten about $25 bucks from the deal, but she paid back every penny of the $550+ bucks the ATM had handed her friends. One day Heidi brought over three beers (all different), one for each of us—Heidi, Jan, and myself– to drink together so we might declare peace, and put this incredibly stupid escapade behind us. One beer was supposed to be mine, a Guinness Stout in a can with one of those fizz machines inside the can. For some crazy and nit-picking, tweaked out reason, I wouldn’t drink the beer she brought. I wouldn’t drink it because it was warm, and I was high, and I couldn’t in fact, make peace with this crazy stupid check scheme. Heidi left, confused but relieved, I think, that she had emptied her head and heart to me. She left for work and I confronted Jan, who was pouty and defensive, and I believe truly contrite.
Jan’s explanations in reaction to my prying would yield small nuggets of truth but were never enough to string together onto an actual necklace of narrative that could explain anything in context. It took me weeks to figure out the whole story; that what really happened was Jan and her friends took the check, knowing it was mine and thinking it bore some value, they talked Heidi into endorsing it and depositing it, then Jan and her cousin ran off with the cash, and I believe Jan screwed cousin Tammy out of her “share,” and then got ripped off herself.
In the end, the money was wasted and went for nothing. This happened often in dealings with Jan. It’s harder to blame her for ripping you off if she got no benefit from the gambit, right? When Jan had my money and she got ripped off, it was as if I hadn’t gotten ripped off, only her. Shit for her was so incredibly unfair. But this wasn’t even cash. It was a cashed check, a deflated balloon, litter. It’s hard to say the money was wasted, when there wasn’t ever any money– just fraud, fast fingers, larcenous friends. When the money stopped moving, it disappeared. Poof!
Janessa insisted that every one of the three bitches involved was most freaked out by the possibility that their stealing the check would have hurt me somehow, taken money out of my pocket, and she so, So, SO wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. She couldn’t bear it if she and her friends stole something that had value for me! [Oh, of course not Jan, perish the thought]. I’ll admit I used the opportunity presented by this masterful cluster-fuck whenever I could, to emphasize that I was never in any way liable for the funds on the check and that the whole scheme was incredibly, wackily, over-the-top stupid. S.T.U.P.I.D.! I emphasized that aspect of the gambit, that it never occurred to me someone would be so stupid as to steal the valueless check I had already deposited by phone camera, and now that I know there are bitchez in my house who are that fucking stupid, I will endeavor to keep that kind of temptation away from them, who might otherwise accidentally use the opportunity to steal by mistake, and inadvertently get themselves into trouble. Uh Uh. No way.
I only wanted to know one thing; I insisted on knowing the answer to one vital last question. One of the three bitches involved, at some time, concluded that the check in my laser printer’s output bin bore some value, and only had to be lifted and cashed. For that, it just had to be deposited somewhere. The zeitgeist itself (mistakenly) understood that the overlooked check itself bore the almost $600 bucks in value it displayed on its face. The check was obviously “mine,” and taking it was stealing that value from me. That has to have been the train of thought at some point in the ‘deliberations’ that preceded the ladies’ “heist” by ATM deposit. That’s all I wanted to know, which one of the bitchez was it? I used every ruse at my disposal to get Janessa to admit she had initiated the whole plan, and that she truly believed she could steal the value borne by the check she had found in my office, from me, to use for herself.
I stripped away every separate fact, compensated for all the distractions and false starts and diversions and impugnings and cross-talk and pointing elsewhere, so that this last question was the last opening. The ultimate clarification. The bottom line. The truth. At some time in the planning and execution of this plan, some one of these three bitchez perceived the value apparently borne by the check in my office could be acquired and converted to cash. At some point one of the bitches believed at the bottom of her junkie crack-ho heart that she was stealing this directly from me. I needed to know, which one? I used this last question, this last ultimatum, this koan of hell, to eviscerate Jan whenever I felt like inflicting pain. I never got the answer I hoped for. But I knew the answer, I already knew.
Bitchez 