Remember the Nabes?

Yeah, those nabes... the ones always borrowing money from me and highly reluctant to pay it back? Well, about a month ago, they received notice that their home was being foreclosed upon. Supposedly they had brought the loan current but turns out due to bad bookkeeping or soaring interest rates or something fishy of that nature, it wasn’t enough. Now, the whole thing started smelling worse when I realized that not only weren’t they paying the mortgage nor the gas bill nor the cable bill nor her cell phone bill nor the garbage bill nor had they paid the taxes on the house, but also the water was delinquent enough that in the week they were given to get out, their water was also turned off. They didn’t have a car payment and insurance I know with minimal limits would surely have been fairly reasonable, $50 or so a month, and given that she made a little less than I did at my last job, they should have been rolling in the cash. Ya know? I mean, if you’re not paying any of your bills, doesn’t it make sense that you wouldn’t suddenly go broke from Thursday to Tuesday when on Thursday your paycheck was approximately $400 - $450 and you get paid once a week? I mean, money coming in, no money going out to pay anything... Yeah, smelly, at best. So, this past weekend, a former friend of their’s stops to see me. This guy’s wife and the nabe had been best friends, worked together, partied together, the whole nine yards, until this guy’s wife had a triple bypass and the nabe just couldn’t be bothered to even call her (even from MY phone) to see how she was. So, this guy tells me that the nabe, in addition to her husband losing his job and not bothering to get off his lazy ass to get another one, lost her job last Tuesday for missing too many days of work. Know what she did with her last paycheck? Bought $200 worth of a prescription medication that she does NOT have a prescription for. Obviously, this has been going on for some time. Everything fell neatly into place. Being broke all the time, having the desperate need for money, to the point I couldn’t even walk from my car to my house that one of them was accosting me for funds. The nabe came over after her cell phone was turned off wanting to use the phone, where, following me saying I didn’t have $5 or $10 or $20 to loan them (for an indefinite (read: forever) period of time) I watched nabe scroll through the phonebook on her cell, and proceed to call one person after another. This guy told me that they were indebted to another friend to the tune of $700. It’s hard to tell how much they owe everyone in her family, since he’s pretty much not speaking to his (since his brother-in-law fired him because he was taking prescription meds that he didn’t have a script for), so, yeah, this has been going on, I guess, since last summer. Now, neither one of them has a job, and The Lonely Child, calls me from his grandma’s wondering if I have seen them since they’ve been gone for nine hours. Some of their shit is still sitting on my porch and the promised funds that they were supposed to pay back some time ago are still, well, promissory. You know, I wish I could say that I feel sorry for them, but I don’t. Yes, people, everyday, ordinary people can get hooked on drugs. You have to realize that though and have some damn pride instead of laying on your ass and thinking the world owes you something and at the same time, don’t be so prideful that you won’t work ANYWHERE to keep a roof over your child’s head, and food in his stomach. I was prepared to do what I had to do, within reason, to keep the things that I’ve busted my ass for. Yep, that’s who I feel sorry for, The Lonely Child, for having two parents as selfish as those two are. Who would rather cry and whine about life and about how they can’t afford to buy him a winter coat so someone else will, and then use the money to go party on. Yep, that’s who I feel sorry for.