My Dear Cousin - Pray for that Child

8th June 2021

My Dear Cousin,

I should mention at some point that (Pony Girl) had a child. I guess you know that, but I’ve never met him. She didn’t want him and her chances of having a child were always low, but what can happen will and she had a son.

(Pickle) has told me that he looks just like me. Or rather he looks just like I did at his age. He is the picture of our kind. It’s funny how my roots come clear at times. I wonder what he’s like or rather what he will be like, but then knowing my family he’ll turn out broken like the rest of us.

(Pony Girl) has never spoken of him to me and only (Pickle) has mentioned him and is love for the boy is somewhat worrying. (Pickle) killed mother’s chickens in play and burst blood vessels in his dog’s ears. He can be a dangerous man to be around.

If the boy knows of me at all, or ever will, I know (Pony Girl) will speak ill of me and so poison him against me. It is better that he never know me. Let me be a ghost in his mind even if he thinks of me as some demon.

I do recall once (Pony Girl)’s mother in law coming to my house and babbling on about if I wanted a choice in anything I should pay for my own repairs. I doubt she was told that I had been promised money for college and was only trying to get what was mine. I know no one told her that I had been told I would never get my money out of the house.

You can turn anyone into a villain if you don’t tell the world what you did to them. (Pony Girl) can really spin a yard of how horrible a man I am if you don’t mention the fact that she tried to turn me into her servant. (Yule) told the world what a bad son I was without mentioning how little he did as a parent.

So I will never see my nephew, and he could be better off without me complicating his life. Being an only child he could become a narcissist like his mother.

I remember that I once found a cat that (Pony Girl) adopted. She took the cat when she moved out and once brought it back when she went on vacation. That cat had been a loving animal when it left my home. The last time I saw her she was mean and would hiss at anyone who touched her.

Pray for that child,



Richard Leland Neal

My Dear Cousin - Mental Health Declined

                                7th June 2021

My Dear Cousin,

One of the things that happened after (Pony Girl) became  (Pickle)’s conservator is that his mental health declined. I believe he would stop taking his medication and try to commit suicide or maybe he was just that bad off.

I once got a call from a woman saying he was walking down the middle of the street and told her he was “looking for answers”. I told her to call the police, because he was having a psychotic episode. 

I went to work that night. When I got home I found that he had raided my refrigerator and was eating my food. The man got his hands into anything with sugar in it and had made a mess. He walked up to me and said “A lady said you wouldn’t hurt me again.”

Then he started screaming “Stop hurting me, stop hurting me!” He punched something on the kitchen counter and sent glass into the sink. His next punch hit me dead in the chest and he left. He was in lock up for a few days, and I had trouble breathing for four. Something about bruising the pericardium sack that contains the hart.

There was another time he lost his remote control and blamed me. I can tell you that I wouldn’t have known which remote control was the right one because he had at least ten of them at the time. He trashed all kinds of my things and filled the trash with my stuff. He had another fifty one fifty which is a seventy two hour mental health hold.

By this point I often feared he would become violent. He was never permitted in a car with me after those fits of violence. We would have a strained relationship after that but there was still more to come.

Best,


Richard Leland Neal

My Dear Cousin - Sign it Away

3rd June 2021

My Dear Cousin,

One of the offshoots of (Pony Girl) becoming (Pickle)’s conservator was that they decided it was time to resolve mother’s estate. She has been dead for thirty one years now and I don’t disagree with this point. Frankly, when I was in college I wanted to sell the house so I would have the money for school.

They told me I would never get my money out of the house. I felt that this should have absolved me from paying for repairs as I was effectively a prisoner in my own home, but if they had wanted to play fair this whole situation would never have come up.

Anyway, I remember the contract being somewhere in the house and (Pickle) asking me if I was even going to look at it. This was the first time he had identified the contract to resolve the estate, and I wasn’t one to go sticking my nose in things.

I read the contract and it listed me and my two siblings as sellers of the property but only (Pickle) and (Pony Girl) as the buyers. Had I signed that contract I would have signed away my home. I’d be living on the street now I believe. After all, I had been told to leave and never come back.

Needles to say, I never signed the contract and I was plenty angry about it and mentioned this a few times to (Pickle). At the third or fourth of these he claimed it was just a mistake, but that was months after the fact. I talked it over with a lawyer or two and they agreed that if it had been a mistake the lawyer who drew it up would have had to correct it for free.

Now that I think about it, if it were a mistake then neither (Pony Girl) nor (Pickle) had read the contract before signing it. I guess I could believe that of (Pickle) but (Pony Girl)? She really had to have read it before she signed it.

I would also have to say that (Pickle) wasn’t surprised when I pointed out that the contract listed me only as a seller. I don’t believe it was a mistake. I believe it was just one more attempt to take what is mine away. It would not be the last time.

Best,


Richard Leland Neal

My Dear Cousin - Contract

1^st June 2021

My Dear Cousin,

I guess this is getting a bit hard for both of us. I was reading through these letters yesterday, and I had to take a walk then I had to put them away for today. Family is a really sore topic for me and, well, I haven’t seen (Pickle) for a while.

I’ll tell you about that later, but this letter is still about him. It turns out that in addition to the bad experience we had with the remodeling he has had problems with contractors. 

I overheard (Pony Girl) saying that he had a window salesmen over to the house one day and signed a contract just because the man wouldn’t leave and he knew that would get rid of him.

(Pony Girl) had to get him and make him tear up the contract after telling him that (Pickle) wasn’t competent to sign it in the first place. Then there was that ridiculous coin collection of his. He had spent more than twenty thousand on it, from what I gather, then sold it all in a day, and I don’t know what he got back but not much.

Anyway, (Pony Girl) became his conservator after this last mess and he wasn’t supposed to spend more than two hundred dollars without her approval. I remember (Pickle) coming home from the court hearing and then him saying that the judge had told her she wanted too much power. That didn’t surprise me.

There was a time after this that he had asked me to take him to the store to buy a fan for his bedroom. I took him to the store and helped him pick the fan out. A week later he got in my face like he was ready to throw fists and yelled “next time buy your own fan!”

I looked at him like he had grown a second head and said “why would I buy a fan for your bedroom?” I mean, he had asked me to take him to get the fan, asked me to help him pick it out, and (Pony Girl) must have seen the bill and put the idea in his head that I had gotten him to buy the fan for me.

I did have three or four hundred dollars worth of fans around the house at the time. We have no insulation and this is California. Still, it comes to me that I should have told him to have his sister take him to the store to get that fan.

I brought this up with (Pony Girl) once and she said “I don’t remember what you’re talking about.” This is typical narcissistic behavior. The natural response to hearing that you nearly got your two brothers into a fistfight over a fan would be to ask what happened rather than dismiss it.

Where she not guilty and really didn’t remember it would have been more of a “what are you talking about” than an “I don’t care”. The always did laugh at my pain. I guess she’s still laughing.

Best,

 

Richard Leland Neal

 

My Dear Cousin - Unclean Home

30th May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

Where was I? In my letter of the 28th I had talked about the mistake I made trying to get the money I was promised for college. Expecting it to go towards the repairs to my home was half the issue, and the other half being a bad contractor who did the work with the cheapest crap he could find.

I’m going to have to say that one take away from that is that your home should be very clean before you call a contractor. I don’t know why, but I think my home being that much of a mess attracted that fellow. It could be that slobs are seen as gullible or that people who live in messy houses rarely hire contractors and don’t know what they’re doing. It could also be that I’m wrong.

One of the points I have to make is that (Pony Girl) said that you could get the whole house remodeled for what we were paying. This is not true, not done right in any case. If you know someone and don’t mind half ass work that takes forever to get done that could be true. I’m told she also has a bathroom that has been in the worked on stage for years.

The re-piping was ten thousand dollars which is what it was going for at the time in California. We had galvanized pipes which are the kind of pipes responsible for all the brown water you may have heard jokes about in sitcoms about poor people. That brown is rust from the pipes braking down.

I think maybe half a dozen times (Pickle) screamed at me “we didn’t need to get the house re-piped”. I would explain that the old pipes would have rusted into the valves and made the whole thing brake down. (Pickle) never believed me, but I told him to ask any contractor and he finally stopped bringing it up.

I made a mistake and got taken by a scum bag. It happens to all of us to be honest. I think to this day (Pickle) is still angry with me about it but that runs in the family. The last time I heard my father’s voice he was complaining about something I did when I was three and I was twenty six at the time.

Best,



Richard Leland Neal