“You Can’t Fix Stupid”
The following story is perfectly true. I leave it to the reader to decide what conclusions about human nature and public policy to draw, if any. Also, I preface this by pointing out that a frequent criticism employed against foes of the welfare state are that they are morally corrupt, uncaring, and vicious when it comes to the sufferings of their fellow man and I hope those criticisms will be borne in mind.
About 9 months ago an old friend of mine from High School called me. I hadn’t seen him in a couple years but I talked to him now and then and we were on pretty good terms. He asked me for a favor. It seems his brother had gotten kicked out of his apartment (he was vague on the details and I assumed he had been thrown out by his wife) and he asked me if I knew anywhere he could stay so that he didn’t have to sleep on a park bench. Now I am a pretty soft touch and will usually help a person, even against my better judgment, if they ask for it. I couldn’t offer him a room in my house because I, humiliatingly enough, still live with my mother ( I’m pretty broke myself) but if he just wanted someplace out of the rain, where he wouldn’t have to worry about someone beating him over the head he could sleep in my carport. My friend relayed this to his brother who promptly gave me a call.
Now this guy, my friend’s brother, was about 40 years old. He had a wife and six or eight kids and I learned he had been out of work for about a year. His last job was with a pest control company doing fumigation. The reason he needed a place to stay was because he had been kicked out of his apartment and while his in-laws had taken his wife and their kids in they refused to even let him set foot on their property. Additionally this guy, whom I shall call Lou, like most dunderheads, was involved in a lawsuit. Seems some lady had hit him with her car while he was biking about a year ago, leaving him with chronic back pain and he was merrily suing her insurance company. I felt pretty sorry for him and took him out to a relatively trendy hipster bar down the street where he kept trying to order Budweisser to the exasperation of the barman who tried to explain that he only had fancy imports and microbrews on tap.
In any case, I agreed to let him sleep in my car port provided that my mother not discover his presence which, surprisingly, was not hard, being that my mother is fairly oblivious. So for the next week he would stay off and on in my carport (I outfitted him with a blanket and some pillows, dry towel, etc. Some nights he would sneak in to his old apartment and sleep there, though his old landlord caught him a few times and threatened to give him a beating. I also gave him the use of a bicycle of mine and, with fair regularity drove him around town so he wouldn’t have to walk.
His wife worked at a YMCA about ten miles from my house and there was a library nearby; so most mornings, when he was here, I’d drive him up to the YMCA so he could shower and change his clothes and then he would walk over to the library to screw around. For food his wife would give him her food stamps card which he would use to buy sandwiches and pork rinds and snack cakes. Whenever she gave him some money it would go to cheap cigarettes and the occasional beer.
Now I was under the impression that this arrangement would only last for a week or so. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience for me, but it was still an interruption into my usual routines, and that was somewhat bothersome. A couple interesting things happened that first week that also threw up warning bells for me, though I ignored him. Firstly, my friend called me one night to ask me where my gun was. I keep a loaded pistol in the glove compartment of my car (one never knows when one might have to bust some caps, does one?) and told him that that is where it was. His response was to make sure because Lou had called his sister and said he was going to commit suicide with my gun. “Oh great,” thinks I, “that’s exactly what I need, this guy shooting himself in the head, in my driveway with my gun. Wonderful.” My friend also cautioned me against leaving out any valuables while his brother was there. At this I became a bit leery, but my friend assured me that his brother wasn’t dangerous or even malicious, “just an idiot”. Also that week Lou managed to get my bike stolen from outside of my house one morning when I invited him in for a cup of coffee. Finally one night he showed up at my door, bleeding from the head to tell me he had been robbed at gun point by three teenagers down the street. Now none of this really affected me too much (except for the possibility of him killing himself with my gun) but it showed that a certain bad luck just seemed to follow this guy. There was always some craziness associated with him. I think most of us know someone like this, who is just a mess and who trouble seems to always follow them, and if it doesn’t they go out and find it.
Well things went on like this for about a month. Lou slept mostly in my carport but some nights would find some other place, either a friend’s house, or an empty house down the street from his in-law’s, or even in their neighbor’s patio. Finally Lou found a job. It was for another pest control company that was practically just down the street, not half an hour’s walk from my house. I was thoroughly relieved because it meant I could get rid of him as I’d grown tired with driving him around and buying him cigarettes. Not that I disliked him, just that I was glad to have the situation over with.
So he started working, still sleeping in my car port until he made his first paycheck. And already he began to complain about the job. He didn’t like the people who owned it, he didn’t like his coworkers, he didn’t like some of the things they said, he didn’t like how some things were set up, etc., etc., etc.. This from a man who was out of work for a year sleeping in a carport. I was unemployed at the time myself and would have been happy to work for anyone provided they paid me a decent salary. Despite his whining though, things were starting to look up. After a couple weeks he was able to rent a room at a cheap motel so he was out of my hair and his employers liked him enough to where they offered him a deal. They would pay for him to get his state exterminator’s license, give him an healthy raise, and sign him to a 2 year contract so that they could fire the lady off of whose license they were running (every pest control business is required by law to have at least one person there with a license). Now this was like a god send for Lou, because not only was he guaranteed a pretty good income for 2 years, but once he had that license he could pretty much take it anywhere. If after two years he wanted to go to a different company, he would have no trouble at all.
So of course he dithered. He wasn’t sure if he should accept it because he didn’t like the people he worked for. “I dunno,” he would say “they got me doing all this stuff, and the one lady keeps bitching at me… . I dunno if I could do that for two years.” To me this was quite incredible and told him that I thought he should certainly agree to the offer.
I also gave him some other advice that would go unheeded. Being an exterminator, Lou had to drive a company truck around to various jobs. Now he didn’t have to turn the keys in at the end of the night. So naturally he got in to the habit of waiting for everyone to leave, then he would walk back over to the company and use the truck to drive around town without permission. Now this was a truly horrible idea and I told him so repeatedly, particularly after he had a scare where the thought his boss had found out. But he went on with it anyway.
And so it came to pass that one morning his boss came to work early and found the truck missing (Lou had not yet returned it) and she promptly called the cops. Lou was instantly fired and the matter was referred to the state attorney’s office. By this time three months had passed and Lou was still living off and on in my carport. At this point I didn’t see him too much, he had apparently found someone else to take him in. Then one night in January I get a call and it’s Lou.
Turns out that a few weeks after he was fired the state attorney decided to file charges against Lou and the police promptly arrested him. To bond him out would have only cost around 250 dollars, money his wife had, but instead she bought her son a PS3 for Christmas while Lou sat in Jail for a month. At the time I thought that to have been a bit crazy on her part, but now I wonder that maybe her priorities were a bit straighter than I gave her credit for. The up shot was Lou plead guilty to felony grand theft auto just to get out of jail. The judge agreed to with hold official judgment if he served 6 months of probation.
Now probation, especially felony probation is no joke. It’s pretty damn-well easy to violate that. The sooner your off of it the better. And once more, by then Lou had the means to get off pretty quickly. He had something like 100 hours of community service to do which, considering he had no job, he could do in a few weeks. On top of this, his settlement finally arrived so he had the money to pay his fines almost immediately.
But of course, instead, he dithered. Also, to my annoyance, he listed my address as his place of residence even though he rarely was there anymore, and I certainly didn’t want to get involved in his mess. One thing Lou didn’t realize was that on felony probation you are required to pass drug tests and he had been taking Rx Vicodin for his back, so his drug test came up positive. His PO called him to ask him about it and, instead of coming down right away to show him his Rx, Lou waited until his next scheduled visit, which he missed due to some kind of family emergency. Naturally he didn’t say anything to his PO about it so a warrant got issued.
Lou turned himself in and spent a couple more days in jail, went before a judge who warned him a further violation would result in prison time, and then put him on even more stringent probation. Again I cautioned him that he needed to get his probation over as quickly as possible, that he needed to be in contact as often as possible with his PO, and to get a job and a permanent address (besides mine).
Well a couple months later I get a knock on the door one morning and it’s a sheriff’s deputy asking if I had seen Lou. I told him the truth, that I hadn’t seen him in a few weeks and he left. Forty minutes later Lou called to tell me that his PO wanted to know where he was. He had been staying with some friends of his but had, typically, failed to notify the PO and continued to tell him he lived with me. He sounded pretty concerned and said that he was going to go to see the PO tomorrow. Now even though I had done nothing wrong, I was also worried because I didn’t want to get Lou in trouble, even if he was an idiot.
A few days later the avalanche of fliers from attorneys began to arrive in the mail signaling that Lou, had in fact, been arrested. I decided to check up on him via the County Sheriff’s website. Turns out Lou had a decent criminal record. Mostly idiotic stuff. Stealing cable. Writing bad checks. Selling someone football tickets and then reporting them stolen. Possession. Stupid things. But to my relief I discovered I was not the cause of Lou’s most recent misfortune. He’d been charged with petit theft from an elderly person, fraud, and uttering a fraudulent instrument.
At first none of that made sense to me until Mrs. Was Drunk figured it out. Lou must have gotten a-hold of his father-in-law’s checkbook and signed his name to a check. And his father-in-law reported him.
So now Lou is facing a year’s worth of prison on the GTA charge (that will surely be reinstated) alone, on top of the violation of probation, and the charges relating to the fraudulent check. As I recounted this entire story to Mrs. Was Drunk I wondered outloud if maybe I shouldn’t go bail him out of jail, poor guy. It’d only cost me $160. To this Mrs. Was Drunk made the following reply: “I’ve never told you that you can’t do anything you wanted. But I absolutely forbid you to bail him out. It sounds like even if you did he would probably wind up right back in there and frankly jail might be the best place for him. You’ve tried to help him enough and there isn’t anything more you or anybody else can do, this guy is obviously stupid. And you can’t fix stupid!”
I thought about that for a while and realized that not only was she right but also that maybe the whole thing would serve as an instructive political point. Again, I leave it to the reader to decide what if any lessons can be drawn from my experience in helping Lou. But certainly one lesson I’ve learned is that when your old friend from high school calls you and asks for a favour hang up on him.
