Crazy Lady Attacked My Car

3^rd February 2015

Dear Cassi,

       

A crazy lady attacked my car. It wasn’t the only car she attacked, but the fact that it was my car puts me in a mood. This happened at work, and we have it all on tape, but it is unlikely the police will put much into searching for her because this is misdemeanor vandalism.

She came to the door just as the janitor was mopping the floor in the front there, and I leter her in thinking she was a client. She looked just like another one of our clients on the crappy video system we have. In fact, I’m not sure she wasn’t a client or a recent discharge from the shelter.  She knew the place and knew she had to be buzzed in.

 I knew there was something wrong when she grabbed the mop wringer from the janitors bucket and threw it on the floor screaming at him. I was on my feet at this moment going to help the janitor but as soon as I got through the first set of double doors she was gone.

The janitor and I looked at each other confused and then. I went back to my desk to see her on the cameras again. She was ripping the windshield wiper off my car. When she had succeeded in this she just walked off talking to herself.

Sometimes life is crazy,

Richard Leland Neal

Night of Bad Dreams

1st March 2015 

Dear Cassi,

Last night was a night of bad dreams, but in waking I found the sink a mess and the laundry in need of doing. Were the dreams so bad as my reality? I had to hold off on proper food and eat only something to keep my body going. Until nearly midnight I could make myself no proper meal because of the mess I had to address.

I had taken nothing into my gut for nineteen hours and so was feeling drained and weak. I guess you know this life, but I can only guess. I do not recall when I first started doing dishes, but I know it had hard to reach the counter top when I did. You must remember that back then my mother was too weak to wash and the rest of my family to lazy.

I stacked out the dishes and started addressing the jumble in the linen closet having to wash everything over again. I can’t imagine how Pickle finds it so hard to fold towels. Then the cabinets get rumbled after he washes dishes and the mess grows until I pull it all out and start over.

For more than twelve hours the washer or dryer ran with most of it being both at the same time. The dishwasher ran twice and the long run of cleaning only made a dent in the detritus.

In the end I finally when back to sleep and had more bad dreams, but not as bad as my waking nightmare. Now in the twilight of the day I sit before the computer logging this misfortune.

Live as you can, little sister,




Richard Leland Neal

A Sad Voice

1^st June 2012

Dear Cassi,

There are times in the doing of my job that voices come from the darkness. Each voice has a story to tell and none are happy tales of wonder. All too often when I lift the receiver to my desk phone the voice on the other side needs to tell me the horrors of their life.

       

Such was the case not too long ago when a woman called apologizing for not having money to donate to the homeless. This is a funny thing about working with the homeless; those who hold a tender part in their hearts for the folks I look after are often odd folks themselves. 

       

On the phone this woman with such a deep pain within her that she had to lance the wound and let it drain into strange fabric of the night wile she spoke. She was an aging hippy with the withered sound that the hard party lifestyle in her voice.

       

She told me of how she had been kicked out of her family home the night of her high school graduation by a mother calming to be protecting her. She was given a fifty dollar bill, that was a lot of money at the time, and told to make her way before her father took her life. This was back in the seventies before I was born and it was a different kind of world.

       

Unable to find work she had turned to friends who viewed her as an accessory to the lush accommodations of the era. She kept her place by satisfying carnal appetites. To live with herself she took drugs and lived in her ugly dream for an undisclosed time.

       

This had left her body ravaged and her womb broken. The injuries to her body left a hole in her heart where should have lived a child that she could never mother in biology or household. Those, the unfortunate, had become her children, and I shepherd to that brood. She had no idea if it was staff on that phone or client and said “if your homeless, god bless you”.

Live with who you are, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal

Misfortunes in a Heap - Socrates

Do Not Go to Detention

10^th April 2012

Dear Cassi,

Yesterday I told you of the one time I was given detention. If it had ended there I think I would have forgotten the whole thing by now. No this was an illustration of the failed support network that I had as a young man.

       

I took this issue to Alan who, as my guardian, had the responsibility to defend my interest. First, the old man made a dirty joke. “Look, Rick, there are only so many times I can sleep with your teachers to get you out of trouble.” Making my problems a perverted joke was a bad idea for a man who earned his Master’s in psychology.

Then the old pervert said that I should pick my battles and that the principal was in the business of being in charge. I think the reason why this stuck with me is that I had a person I was to call ‘Dad’ who refused to look after my interests. It’s a cold feeling to know so much injustice and be so unable to defend yourself.

       

That empty spot in my chest where family should be over the years filled with ice. I have always been a cold man, but I am so because it is who I needed to be to live in this world.

       

As an epilogue, I never served detention as I arrived for it and was told I could leave. The darkness and the dim of my life is not without those points of light we would call stars.

I still am without the knowledge of why I was paroled. Did that fellow know of my character or did he know of the misconduct of his superiors? The truth is unknown.

Stay strong, little sister

Richard Leland Neal

Naked Truck Drivers

I remember this, and I’m ashamed of myself for writing it, because it’s not all my experiences. I worked at all these locations, but the last bit didn’t happen to me but to a fellow Security officer. I wrote about it in hope of getting my story on the slick pages of a men’s periodical.

I can tell you that back in 2005, when I wrote this, I was as much a habitual lyre as the rest of my family. Now days I abhor lies because I have been told them so often.

  26^th May 2005

Dear (Magazine),

           

You want crappie work environment I got one for you. I was a security Guard on a loading dock. I had to stay outside in the cold rain or shine. If the ice on by boots wasn’t bad enough, I also had to wake up truck drivers to let them know there load was ready. This would not have been so bad if about a third of the drivers didn’t roll out of there sack naked to ask were their trailer was. Now I had worked in a shopping center were part of my patrol was to walk through the men’s locker room in a gym, so naked truck drivers were disgusting, but I had already mastered the art of looking away. Then one day I walked out to give a husband and wife team there paper work, and the wife got up wearing her night gown, no big deal until she stepped one foot outside the truck to grab the paper work, and I came face to face with the heaven’s gate of an old nasty truck driver. Gee grandma put that thing away, or at least wear some panties.