My Dear Cousin - From Carpet to Concrete

3^rd May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

As you’ve read in my last few letters my life was rather hard up until my mother’s passing. When my mom was well I had a mother most of the time and a father one day a week. When she got sick I had a father from Friday night to Monday morning. When mom died my music lessons stopped because they took place during the week and the old man didn’t want to make the drive. Therapy for my nerve damage also stopped.

There I was, a ten year old living in a house with a fourteen year old mental case as the closest thing I had to a guardian. I have to ask why no one on my street said anything about this.  How do people just turn away from so much in this world? How do we make ourselves blind? Three children, two boys, one girl, fourteen, twelve, and ten, who had just lost their mother and were living alone.

To add injury to injury, it took my old man about six months to turn my house into a slum. He made no attempt to keep up the garden, and he ripped out the carpets. They did replace a few old electrical fittings with new ones that made the house safer and we got fire extinguishers. However, the old man replaced my carpets with acrylic tile which was laid over the old wood floors. The wood rotted and the floors came up. I was walking on concrete before long.

This was the time that (Pickle) got used to using me as the scapegoat. I would complain about him breaking my toys or using my toothbrush for something abnormal. I once went a week without brushing my teeth because he got petroleum jelly all over the brush and I had to wait for the old man to come home to take me shopping.

Every day he would say “I’m under so much stress, Ricky says you did this to me two years ago.” About once or twice a week this would culminate into a beating from (Pickle). He was four years older than me and the old man got him thousands of dollars in weight equipment.

I’m still bitter about the fact that I had five thousand dollars of weights in one room and nothing to cover the foundation of the house in the other. Between the ages of ten and fourteen I figured out that I was white trash, what else to you call someone like that, and I’m still trying to get the stink of trash off me today.

Best,

 

Richard Leland Neal