My Dear Cousin - A Poor Gift

20^th May 2021

 My Dear Cousin,

 

After (Yule) sold that car the family expected me to give up my third of a paid off home for the family offered me three gifts that were of no interest to me. This was not all at once but over a bit of time, perhaps a year or two, but I would accept none of them. I had learned what happens when I accept things from my family.

 

The first was a check from the old man for two hundred dollars. I was out of work when this happened. I was out of work, because the ordeal with the car had left me so depressed I could hardly get out of bed. What I honestly needed to do was contact the company I had been working for to be reassigned.

 

The check wouldn’t cover two days of the suffering I was feeling because of how (Yule) had harassed me over that car so I returned it to (Yule). He didn’t really react as far as I could see, but after I handed it back to him I just walked away.

 

My grandmother told me it was my fault, because I had given him the car back. I felt I had no choice, as no matter what I did they wouldn’t stop harassing me about that car. My family here in California tends to be the kind of people who will listen to nothing short of violence, and I didn’t want to get violent.

 

Two hundred dollars wouldn’t have replaced two days of lost work. It wouldn’t have covered the money for college I had been promised. It wouldn’t have even been the money the car that was supposed to have been a gift to me had been sold for. Keeping it would have been a deal with the devil, and them giving that to me as if it was supposed to mean anything was like having them spit in my face.

 

I never spoke to my grandmother again. I believe I spoke to (Yule) one more time. This was the first of the three gifts and it had told me once and for all that family was useless to me.

 

Best,

 

Richard Leland Neal

My Dear Cousin - I Refused to Speak

 19^th May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

 

It has been a few days since my last letter, but you never answered me anyway. Maybe my life is just too dismal to take. Well, I assure you that I need to keep writing regardless of your reading just to bleed the pain from my mind. A bad memory can be like a cyst; bleed it and it may scar, but leave it and it can get worse.

 

Well, a point I forgot was that before the wedding, and after I called the cops on (Pony Girl)’s husband to be I refused to speak to (Pony Girl) for about eight months. I don’t think you can blame me for that, talking had never done me any good so far.

 

(Pony Girl) brought this situation to a head when she started hounding me and calling me childish for not speaking to her. We spoke and that was when I learned that the car they wanted me to give up my house for was sold for four hundred dollars. They expected me to pay two hundred thousand dollars for it, and it was worth four hundred.

 

There were two points of this conversation. The first was that (Pony Girl) was to pay me back for the time I had paid bills for her when she was in college. The second was that she was to disclose the amount of money dad gave her for college.

 

She never fulfilled the second part of that promise. She knew how much it was but laughed out “I don’t remember” when I brought it up. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe I deserved the money, but only that she so loved steeling from me.

 

I remember once I got a sheet of stamps and put them on the old bulletin board next to were the landline used to be in my home. The next day they were gone and I asked (Pony Girl) if she had seen them. She admitted to taking them but wouldn’t give any of them back.

 

I overreacted to this, and was very upset, I should have just let it go. I recall my grandmother saying “maybe she needed stamps”. I explained that this was not all that true, but the old woman refused to believe that her family could ever do anything wrong. The whole family had a ‘turn a blind eye’ attitude to abuse.

 

I remember when I complained that (Yule) had given her and (Pickle) money for college and not me (Pony Girl) laughed out “You’re older now”. I had been in college since the age of eighteen and he didn’t give me money then.

 

It was just like that white car. (Pony Girl) decided that it was her car that I would pay for. When I didn’t like that she decided that I had to get rid of my other car. When I wouldn’t do that she tried to kick me out of my own home.

 

Well, for the second or third time at that point, but you get the idea.

 

Best,

 

 

Richard Leland Neal

 

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