In 1997, due to 3 years of series back injuries, I was filing for bankruptcy, including the money I owed creditors for my sons car and my wifes car that were voluntarily repossessed because I could not make the payments. That hurt and struck to the core of my identity as a provider. My wife was now trapped in a house in an area too dangerous for a paleface wench on foot.

That was bad enough.

But in 1999, when the house I had bought for 48k in 1982 was now only listing for 42k and not selling, even if I had 3k to give a buyer for closing costs, and our youngest son was headed to Junior High school in Baltimore City and I could not afford catholic school and could not move.

I let the house payment go for 3 months. That gave me first months rent, a moving van and crew, as I had a bad back and no friends or family, and a security deposit on a Baltimore County rental.

I had been the last ivory to move in.

My neighbor, Kevin, had been the first ebony to move in.

He was so upset that I was leaving and I felt bad.

I had Wednesday off and did not want crackheads to know that the house was unoccupied. So every Wednesday I would stop by 4711 Luerssen Avenue, check for water in the basement, make sure the place had not been broken into, bring in the mail, and then sit in the living room, for hours, alone in the half-dark in the recliner that we did not have room for in the rental. Sometimes I would lay on the matching love seat.

Once I cried there, where no one could see.

Mostly, I just died a little more inside with every visit.

I was a total failure at this point, physically wrecked, earnings dropping, a renter with rent scheduled to increase 10% every year.

This was a suicidal period in my life. I was long past wanting to kill myself. But I was so beat down I stopped avoiding trouble for the next few years. As I hoped that some Bantu overrun of my bus stop position one night would result in me killing and being killed. Almost by accident, I began a new, misspent youth.

I was done, had no way up any conceivable ladder in a world that had broken my body and spirit, and finally I was content to be hated and alone. The constant threats and sneers of Bantu warbands and redneck cokeheads just made me smile, like some beautiful woman whispering to me that our time together was almost nigh.

If I had been smarter and or stronger I might have kept that house, might have paid it off by now. At 58 I could finally start writing my 4th book. That’s the true price that keeping that house would have cost me had I been smart enough to play the money game and strong enough to keep working two jobs, that would have cost me about 210 books written on the down side of a failed life. Had I been capable of sustaining the quest for the American Dream of an empty house in a worsening area in my old age, I would just now be embarking on this task, that would never be fulfilled, this article never written, entire series of books un-researched and unwritten, fiction unimagined and imagined, never seeing the digital or paper page.

Losing a room, in each instance, was more traumatic than losing the house, as no burden was being lifted. I was simply being dispossessed by my own failure to earn, unable to pay the rent. Having to fill a dumpster halfway with a library that cost me some 25k over 30 years to accumulate for my sons and grandchildren, plagued by the sorrow that they did not want these books and no library or book seller or goodwill store would come and get them, and having to move residency by bus, that was a hole in my heart as big as the lost house.

The only thing that had survived of what I wanted to leave my sons was that library, heaved into a dumpster one Sunday afternoon in September 2010.

But each lost room, each trashcan load of hardback history books consigned to the landfill, steeled my determination to write, because writing was the one thing that every person in my life who loved me and hated me and disliked me, told me that I could not do professionally.

They were right. I have still failed to make a living above 50% of the poverty floor. As Jack Donovan told me two years ago,

Quote:

I do not understand why you are being censored—you do not sell.

...

I write because the world hates me and I hate the world and the haters and invalidators in it told me I could not write, just like Dad, Mom, Grandpa, Uncle Fred and Doctor Young told me that I could not box, because I was white, and therefor weak and inferior to the sainted warrior race. Well, I was a poor boxer of zero distinction, and I am a poor writer. But I have cast more darts into the lying eye of this evil world than I once imagined were possible and feel almost alive for it.

I am more hated by the world than I was when I was sitting in that half-dark of my failure to be an economic man, and that failure propelled me here, to this better place of hate.

I should be thankful.

So, the point behind this recounting of fallen times in my life, is that the coming dislocation and loss of jobs, and vehicles and cars by the hated debtors of guilt and targets of Reparations Recovery, can, in spots open a new way outward from the wheelhouse of this increasingly out-of-sync machine we echo within.