Chronicle of a journey from youthful
know-it-all to old-fart astonishment.
First, I DON'T drink whiskey ever. If I really had to drink the stuff and had any choice in the matter it definitely would not be "Old Grand Dad" [pictured]. I'm no prude nor even a wine snob. From politeness I'll nurse the same drink all night, toast whoever or whatever at parties and leave it untouched. When my Bride and I hosted we tried to supply what we had a hunch people liked to drink. Same thing: She at least could stand the taste of alcohol: I hate it. I lost friends over dope. "Have a hit, man! This stuff gets you there!" Like Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists and die-hard Marxist-Leninists they could not accept I was fine where I was. Win a few, lose a few..
What I'm getting to [more Truth here] is how I came to have
a TransUnion and Experian Credit Score as Non-Credit-Worthy as these scores get. First, It wasn't easy. Second, DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! At least don't UNLESS you have the same or very similar Weltanschauung as my own.
Pictured to the right is a single-family home that's scarily close by the single-family home my late, great dad bought in 1954 where I've lived since 1993. That home's foreclosed. Mine's paid for, taxes included. My huge wish is that anyone reading this doesn't sense self-satisfaction and smugness. "Live within your means" was my dad's dictum to me from jump. He may have been the least afflent resident in this neighborhood. I am equally "least." I try to earn some of the respect and friendships he enjoyed. Any homelessness is wrenching.
One need not have lived and worked for decades in South-Central LA to know it or to have seen it first hand. first hand.
. .
My first "real internship" was 7760 South Central Avenue in Watts. The 1965 riot was fresh. No brand new Ph.D. in his or her right mind wanted to practice much less intern anywhere near Central Avenue. No "better site" for post-Doctoral Internships would have a new minted spastic, stuttering USC Ph.D. The black MD who founded the then-new Watts Clinic didn't want me there any more than I wanted to be there. The staffing grant said "One Psychologist." None would go to Watts. 
We settled for leftovers. After a year of seeing clients other staff feared or didn't want State Boards were a snap. I stayed far longer than one year. Beverly Hills is even an easier snap for an Ofay spastic Jew-Boy shrink who's faced down Bloods, Crips, Cons, suicidal druggies AND the homeless on Central Avenue. By then Beverly Hills
was too dull.Homelessness was here long before this was my neighborhood. We we moved from South LaSalle Avenue the same week the
Rodney King riots shook up LA
and made national news. Looters looted stores and burned places where my family and I had shopped and laughed and generally had hung around at for the past 18-years. http://www.emergency.com/la-riots.htm. Playwright Anna Deveare Smith
http://www.cateweb.org/CA_Authors/smith.html
wrote and starred in a one-woman show about that event which my sweet bride and I went to see a few years later at LA's fashionable Mark Taper Forum. By then the "Dot-Com Bubble" was expanding and so, except during intermission, who in the hell cared about the Homeless anyway. About then, my bride's Alzheimer's kicked in hard. Suffice it I let my licenses lapse. Didn't renew Mark Taper season tickets and did a noteworthy Spastic, Stuttering Juggling Act: Bride, Kids, School, Meds, Appointments, Children's Court. 24/7/365, Five years. NO COMPLAINTS! Why? Given the opposite circumstance, my Bride woulda done for me just the same, but with less mess.
While I got what I had to get, Boiler-Room Cold-Callers swarmed like locusts
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi900333849/ selling thousands of dollars of worthlessness to my Bride http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/quotes. As fast as it came I "Returned-To-Sender." A Trickle became an Avalanche http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuVsCRQkXvw&feature=related. I work by priorities; Drek doesn't make the cut. Courtesy ends before the Telemarketer says "Hi!" When my work finally ended and my bride was settled I slept long hours for two weeks. Then I noticed stacks of envelopes on which was printed: "You Have Given Us No Choice Except To Seek The Court's Most Extreme Legal Remedies!" Oh yeah: Those.
I like novelist Nelson Algren
I envied Algren being periodic shack-partner with Simone de Beauvoir 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir. When a mortician dunned Algren for interest on the money Algren's mother put aside for her burial he wrote back: "My loss is greater than yours." Apocryphal? Beats me. My point is that my Credit is ruined past all repair because I remained polite and courteous to each and every nasty, threatening Collection Agent who called about my Bride and her so-called "purchases."
She would have bought none of these unopened gimcracks absent Alzheimer's "Want them back?" I asked. "They're here." FAR, FAR TOO LATE! ran their prepared blustering. IT'S YOUR WIFE'S LAST CHANCE TO AVOID THE LAW! "Why not talk to her?" I suggested. "Hold on." Putting the reciever into the desk-drawer and closing it I went on with whatever had been occupying my attention before the phone rung.
Calls slowly but certainly vanished over the next 18-months. I heard only the click of a disconnecting Malaysian, Indian, Irish, Kazhak or Taiwanese telephone. Even this most loathesome, humiliating and lowly telemarket job Outsourced for the sake of some Off-Shore shell-corporation's "Bottom Line." Still some Straw-Boss somewhere had crunched the numbers and realized no profit was possible with me, the Cordial Scofflaw, using an "888" number even at subsistance wages.
I'm not proud. Preoccupied with my family, I missed the great Refinance-Your-House-Now! musical-chair match: "The biggest No-Brainer in the history of Mankind!" screeched one oh-so-reasonable, ubiquitous LA SoCal mortgage weasel http://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/countrywide_mortgage.html
NEXT: Who hosed the Foreclosure-winner and how?
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