The Son Of A Land Lord

My Father is a land lord, and, when I was young,
He frequently tired to teach me to work,
by forcing me to paint smoke-stained walls
or mow overgrown yards
or hold a Monkey wrench while he repaired the busted toilets.

One house in particular holds the worst of my memories of learning to work.

The Manion house,
upon the removal of the previous occupants to a nursing home,
had new retners for the first time in years, and
'Eens' was their name.
I remember meeting matriarch Eens, the head of the household, for the first time.
She was wearing cutoff sweat pants with plastic flip-flops,
and her claw like hands and pinkish explosion of hair made her look like an
exotic bird that you would find in a trailer park.

The Eens' were numerous
and each one of them received a government check of some kind.
Cycling in and out, few of them,
other than the matriarch,
stayed in the house for more than a couple of weeks,
but there was always at least six adults living in the three bredroom house at a time.
They were like a pack of mangy stray dogs that you'd find rummaging around the Illinois river
and rolling in the remains of a dead cow.

Innumerable children were part of the cycle too.
I remember one of them in particular.
Crystal,
who, upon our first meeting, was wearing a t-shirt that read,
"you make me throw up a little."
A nice enough girl who collected bibles and had a baby cousin who'd been born without a brain,
she had a rash on her scalp and was constantly scraping through her blondish locks
with dirty broken fingernails.


The Eens' replaced all other forms of entertainment with bizarre and wonderful tales of living in a state
of self-inflicted hysteria;
-This week the uncle wrecked his golf cart in the woods again.
-The next week the brainless baby's mother had a seizure.
-The next week the goldfish was euthanized because it had cancer,
-and the next, matriarch Eens won $1000 on a scratch card, all of which would be devoted entirely to Christma
-and then one week,

They were gone:
-Perhaps their luck ran out,
-perhaps some tragedy had taken place,
-or perhaps they just got tired of living in their own filthiness.

Whatever it was, when we found the house abandoned they appeared to have been taken by the rapture:
-a pot of chili sat cold and solid on the stovetop.
-piles of clothes and random shoes decorated the corners and floors.
-dog feces were scattered throughout the house.
-urine stained the carpets in every room,
-and legions of roaches charged down the walls in an assault on cleanliness they were clearly winning.

After we overcame the shock, my father,
again teaching me how to work,
allowed me to rip out the carpet, and appropriately enough,
it made me throw up a little.