If I’d known that we’d end up stuck in motels the first 8 months in California and that he would be denied Unemployment, something we were counting on until he could get a new job, I probably would have killed myself on the spot.
Although he did get hired as a temp at a warehouse a few weeks later, the cost of the motels and storage was sucking every last dime out of us. Gas prices soared out of control, too.
After shopping around for the best motel, we ended up at an extended-stay motel in Sacramento that was quieter than most motels, though it did have its noisy moments.
About a month later, the best pet rat we’d ever had, Tinkerbell, died of a tumor.
In early October all hell would break loose and I would experience a kind of stress that I never felt before in my life that was so intense I can’t believe it didn’t kill me. In some ways, it was even worse than being in jail. As stressful and as infuriating as that ordeal was, my life was never on the line and I knew what was going to happen and when for the most part. But this was different. This was a new kind of hell. We didn’t know much about anything until it actually happened and for about 11 days I truly believed the end had come for us and that we simply weren’t meant to live anymore. Try as I would, I just didn’t see any way out of our predicament. Time slowed to a sludge and I even thought of myself as already dead, picturing our tombstones, wondering what state we’d be buried in, how people would react if some of them even still cared.
You know you went through a highly traumatic experience when even a year and a half later you feel your heartbeat quicken and your body start to shake just remembering it. Therefore, I’m going to blow on through it as fast as I can with just enough detail, although I don’t expect most people to fully understand the feeling of total inventible doom, and I hope they never do! The best way I can describe it is this: Imagine some psycho holding a gun to your head, threatening to shoot you for days on end, and never knowing when he’s going to make good on that threat. That was the kind of stress and fear I endured. It took my stomach a whole month to recover just from the havoc both the stress and a lack of food wreaked upon it.
Our debit card expired and the incompetent assholes sent our new card to our old address which was returned to them because we moved, and they never even had the decency to notify us by phone. Instead, we were rudely surprised one day to find that we couldn’t access our money as I had dreamt the night before.
We frantically started selling whatever we could pull out of storage - the X-box he’d won, guitars, that sort of thing. But every time we got a step ahead we’d be thrown 10 steps backward.
Unable to pay for the room the next night, we ended up having to stay in a Wal-Mart parking lot in our reliable, but beat-up 1979 pickup that was less than comfortable and now uninsured and sporting expired plates.
We’d sold a bunch of CDs and DVDs I’d won which did get us food and gas, but not a roof over our heads.
I was now totally beyond infuriated at God. I hated Him with a mad passion and I thought about how a friend of mine said that pushing Him away only made things worse and that I needed to reach out and accept Him. But I didn’t just alienate him. No, I went a step further than that. I cussed Him out every chance I got. I’d actually been doing this for a few months by the time the shit really hit the fan in our lives.
I felt like a total underdog. Just totally helpless and like a huge failure. I felt we were being picked on and singled out simply for trying to better ourselves and our lives. I found myself analyzing the situation like crazy, trying to understand why God could possibly hate us so much that he would want to punish us to such extremes.
The next day we went to pawn our laptop and a loose diamond I had won. While he was inside talking to the people, I decided to try praying to God for help. Especially since no one else would take the diamond despite trying a few other pawnshops. I figured that the worst that could happen was that I’d be laughed at and then ignored, and we’d be left to die. Tom is no doubt tougher than me in many ways. He could survive the streets, but there’s no way I could. I’m simply not cut out for that.
After my prayers, Tom emerged from the pawnshop with enough money for one night. So we returned to the motel and even the same room.
But our troubles were far from over, though I now prayed constantly. The debit card company was giving us the runaround on the phone and promising to send us our new card and also insisting that we could transfer the money. Yet an attempt to transfer it to a card we bought from a different company failed to go through on the old desktop computer Tom dug out of storage.
Next we found ourselves hit with a real Catch-22. There wasn’t enough money for gas in order to get to work which meant we would have to try to sell more stuff with gas we really didn’t have in the first place. Luckily, though, his boss was nice enough to loan us $100. Even so, and as kind as this was, this wouldn’t nearly get us out of the hole.
A few days later was when things would come to a head and we were backed into a corner like never before. We weighed the options that were available to us at the time. We could either kill ourselves, resign to losing everything and life on the streets until it killed us, or we could try one last idea that came to mind. It was a long shot. One hell of a long shot. But if I had gotten us into the mess we were in by constantly swearing at God, then I felt I should be the one to save us.
But could I really save us or was it too late?
About 5 days into our 11-day nightmare, I got this idea on how to try to save us, though the odds didn’t seem very good. But I had to try something, even though it’d be like jumping from one rooftop onto another. We’d just have to hope to hell we got across without falling!
The plan was to see if my parents, despite all the years of not having any contact, would be willing to help. Only problem was that they didn’t accept collect calls and our cell phone was dead and its charger was in storage. So, while we were unable to call long distance from the motel room, I decided our only choice was to try calling Mary collect and ask that she contact my folks. Only I was doubtful that she’d care to help because of the letter I’d sent giving her a piece of my mind about them abandoning us after all we’d done for them.
My first attempt failed because no one was home. But my voice was on her machine now, so I was hopeful that she’d want to answer when she got in in case I was calling with bad news about her brother, and I figured the possibility of this might cross her mind. She did eventually answer, and after quickly briefing her on the situation, she agreed to call my parents collect.
About 5 minutes later I was hearing my parent’s voices for the first time in a decade. Atfirst I wasn’t sure that they understood the problem I was trying to explain to them. After all, they were now in their late 70s and I was rather frantic. Eventually, they understood what was going on and they paid for a couple of nights at the motel, then overnighted us a surprising $450. This turned out to be the perfect amount to hold us over until the new card finally came, and when it did I learned the true meaning of the word “relief.” I was laughing and crying tears of joy like a mad idiot. It felt so good to have enough food again and not to have to worry about ending up on the streets and losing everything, yet as I would learn, this can happen to anyone. Anyone. Not just the drunks, druggies and lazies.
I have since come to appreciate the little things in life all the more and to see things in a different light. It was such a traumatizing experience that no matter how much money we may have, I’ll probably always worry about losing everything and ending up homeless.
I dreamt of the woods and of looking at the neighbor’s house through binoculars, but I wrote these dreams, which suggested we were in a secluded place, off to wishful thinking.
Over the next 6 months, we slowly climbed back into the land of the living. I went on to win things like crazy, and when the news came that I won 9 grand we were ecstatic, knowing that we’d finally gotten our ticket out of the motel. We had to wait a frustrating 4 months till we received the money, but when we did we finally escaped the place I thought we’d never get out of.
Tom got a new used car that was much newer and much more comfortable. Then we found the perfect little hideaway which is, ironically, in the woods. I even browsed the wooded mountains around us through binoculars! Only you can’t see much in the way of houses through the trees. That was just over a year ago and we’re still here. We hope to one day own a home of our own, perhaps in a senior community, though we don’t know for sure if this will happen, when it will happen, or where it will happen.
We never spoke to Mary again since that fateful October night, though I do keep in touch with my folks regularly now.
Although he did get hired as a temp at a warehouse a few weeks later, the cost of the motels and storage was sucking every last dime out of us. Gas prices soared out of control, too.
After shopping around for the best motel, we ended up at an extended-stay motel in Sacramento that was quieter than most motels, though it did have its noisy moments.
About a month later, the best pet rat we’d ever had, Tinkerbell, died of a tumor.
In early October all hell would break loose and I would experience a kind of stress that I never felt before in my life that was so intense I can’t believe it didn’t kill me. In some ways, it was even worse than being in jail. As stressful and as infuriating as that ordeal was, my life was never on the line and I knew what was going to happen and when for the most part. But this was different. This was a new kind of hell. We didn’t know much about anything until it actually happened and for about 11 days I truly believed the end had come for us and that we simply weren’t meant to live anymore. Try as I would, I just didn’t see any way out of our predicament. Time slowed to a sludge and I even thought of myself as already dead, picturing our tombstones, wondering what state we’d be buried in, how people would react if some of them even still cared.
You know you went through a highly traumatic experience when even a year and a half later you feel your heartbeat quicken and your body start to shake just remembering it. Therefore, I’m going to blow on through it as fast as I can with just enough detail, although I don’t expect most people to fully understand the feeling of total inventible doom, and I hope they never do! The best way I can describe it is this: Imagine some psycho holding a gun to your head, threatening to shoot you for days on end, and never knowing when he’s going to make good on that threat. That was the kind of stress and fear I endured. It took my stomach a whole month to recover just from the havoc both the stress and a lack of food wreaked upon it.
Our debit card expired and the incompetent assholes sent our new card to our old address which was returned to them because we moved, and they never even had the decency to notify us by phone. Instead, we were rudely surprised one day to find that we couldn’t access our money as I had dreamt the night before.
We frantically started selling whatever we could pull out of storage - the X-box he’d won, guitars, that sort of thing. But every time we got a step ahead we’d be thrown 10 steps backward.
Unable to pay for the room the next night, we ended up having to stay in a Wal-Mart parking lot in our reliable, but beat-up 1979 pickup that was less than comfortable and now uninsured and sporting expired plates.
We’d sold a bunch of CDs and DVDs I’d won which did get us food and gas, but not a roof over our heads.
I was now totally beyond infuriated at God. I hated Him with a mad passion and I thought about how a friend of mine said that pushing Him away only made things worse and that I needed to reach out and accept Him. But I didn’t just alienate him. No, I went a step further than that. I cussed Him out every chance I got. I’d actually been doing this for a few months by the time the shit really hit the fan in our lives.
I felt like a total underdog. Just totally helpless and like a huge failure. I felt we were being picked on and singled out simply for trying to better ourselves and our lives. I found myself analyzing the situation like crazy, trying to understand why God could possibly hate us so much that he would want to punish us to such extremes.
The next day we went to pawn our laptop and a loose diamond I had won. While he was inside talking to the people, I decided to try praying to God for help. Especially since no one else would take the diamond despite trying a few other pawnshops. I figured that the worst that could happen was that I’d be laughed at and then ignored, and we’d be left to die. Tom is no doubt tougher than me in many ways. He could survive the streets, but there’s no way I could. I’m simply not cut out for that.
After my prayers, Tom emerged from the pawnshop with enough money for one night. So we returned to the motel and even the same room.
But our troubles were far from over, though I now prayed constantly. The debit card company was giving us the runaround on the phone and promising to send us our new card and also insisting that we could transfer the money. Yet an attempt to transfer it to a card we bought from a different company failed to go through on the old desktop computer Tom dug out of storage.
Next we found ourselves hit with a real Catch-22. There wasn’t enough money for gas in order to get to work which meant we would have to try to sell more stuff with gas we really didn’t have in the first place. Luckily, though, his boss was nice enough to loan us $100. Even so, and as kind as this was, this wouldn’t nearly get us out of the hole.
A few days later was when things would come to a head and we were backed into a corner like never before. We weighed the options that were available to us at the time. We could either kill ourselves, resign to losing everything and life on the streets until it killed us, or we could try one last idea that came to mind. It was a long shot. One hell of a long shot. But if I had gotten us into the mess we were in by constantly swearing at God, then I felt I should be the one to save us.
But could I really save us or was it too late?
About 5 days into our 11-day nightmare, I got this idea on how to try to save us, though the odds didn’t seem very good. But I had to try something, even though it’d be like jumping from one rooftop onto another. We’d just have to hope to hell we got across without falling!
The plan was to see if my parents, despite all the years of not having any contact, would be willing to help. Only problem was that they didn’t accept collect calls and our cell phone was dead and its charger was in storage. So, while we were unable to call long distance from the motel room, I decided our only choice was to try calling Mary collect and ask that she contact my folks. Only I was doubtful that she’d care to help because of the letter I’d sent giving her a piece of my mind about them abandoning us after all we’d done for them.
My first attempt failed because no one was home. But my voice was on her machine now, so I was hopeful that she’d want to answer when she got in in case I was calling with bad news about her brother, and I figured the possibility of this might cross her mind. She did eventually answer, and after quickly briefing her on the situation, she agreed to call my parents collect.
About 5 minutes later I was hearing my parent’s voices for the first time in a decade. At
I have since come to appreciate the little things in life all the more and to see things in a different light. It was such a traumatizing experience that no matter how much money we may have, I’ll probably always worry about losing everything and ending up homeless.
I dreamt of the woods and of looking at the neighbor’s house through binoculars, but I wrote these dreams, which suggested we were in a secluded place, off to wishful thinking.
Over the next 6 months, we slowly climbed back into the land of the living. I went on to win things like crazy, and when the news came that I won 9 grand we were ecstatic, knowing that we’d finally gotten our ticket out of the motel. We had to wait a frustrating 4 months till we received the money, but when we did we finally escaped the place I thought we’d never get out of.
Tom got a new used car that was much newer and much more comfortable. Then we found the perfect little hideaway which is, ironically, in the woods. I even browsed the wooded mountains around us through binoculars! Only you can’t see much in the way of houses through the trees. That was just over a year ago and we’re still here. We hope to one day own a home of our own, perhaps in a senior community, though we don’t know for sure if this will happen, when it will happen, or where it will happen.
We never spoke to Mary again since that fateful October night, though I do keep in touch with my folks regularly now.
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