as it turns out, my younger brother is a real son of a bitch. a greedy, selfish one at that. and the more i'm hearing, the more i'm regretting allowing him to "help" us come out here and the more trapped i'm feeling. he rarely mentions the actual dollar amount, he never says "after all i've done for you," but he still gets it across: he's helped and continues to "help" us financially -- which means there's strings attached.
and i'm getting pretty fed up with the bullshit.
let's start with the whole car thing. our car broke down to the point of beyond repair. we're in a state with a horrible transit system, so a car is pretty much necessary, especially for me to work. i was pretty much ready to give up my checks, our rent money, so we could get a car and then figure out a way to pay the rent back. in the meantime, my brother has my husband trying to qualify for a loan and is asking of we can make payments for a car. the answer no doesn't satisfy him -- i honestly don't know what kind of mess we'd be in now if we had actually qualified for anything. however, we don't, so mcat hatches up this whole plan for us to find the truck he wants that he'll pay for then we'll switch vehicles and he'll keep the new truck while we use the old one (which he's planning to sell, by the way) -- but we'll each be paying insurance etc on the truck we own.
oh, it gets better!
this doesn't work out. instead of just buying some cheap vehicle that we need, he goes off and starts looking for a truck on his own. we even found some reasonably priced cars that would have worked out nicely, but, no, he had to have his truck. when he finds it, he still "loans" us his old truck -- which is quite expensive even when you don't count insurance and all that since it guzzles gas like crazy and mcat tends to send saxy all over the damn place on errands for him -- and then this week he drops the bombshell: he's taking ALL of saxy's paycheck to help pay for the insurance and all that. over $400 for a truck we didn't ask for, can't afford, and won't even freaking own! and he's going to start charging us this every damn month!
and why did he choose to do it all at once this time instead of taking out a little at a time? because everything is coming due and he can't afford it.
but he could afford his trip to hawaii over thanksgiving. after which he delayed paying anyone because he didn't have any money.
why didn't he warn us that we would be paying on the damn thing until he sells it (if he EVER sells it)? your guess is as good as mine. probably because i would have told him no. i told him we couldn't afford the $250 he wanted us to do on payments. how the fuck does he think i can afford $400? we even suggested a car being sold by an acquaintance for $1500, but, oh no, he can't afford that.
it's like he doesn't have a damn clue that we're barely making the rent and utilities (in a house he found for us, by the way -- one that costs a fortune in heating and cooling because it has no insulation). but he knows. trust me, he knows. even if we didn't tell him, it would have to be clear we're nowhere near being on our feet. unless, he somehow thinks i like sleeping on the floor and having next to no furniture and still living out of fucking moving boxes 2 years after the fact.
maybe he just wants to keep us in the damn hole so he can keep "helping". he's got to be getting something out of it.
it gets worse. now he's saying that he's going to start paying people "by the piece" -- meaning he pays by how much work they do rather than an hourly wage. and the results of that will be that everyone gets paid less. so, he's saddling us with a truck payment we can't afford and then he's cutting our income. meanwhile, he pays himself before his employees (at least $1200/ week, last i heard), going on trips, then coming back and saying he can't pay anyone till the next week because he's broke. and he turns around and asks us how were doing and can't understand why we aren't doing better. he tells my husband about how we're "killing him" financially.
it's to the point where the job isn't helping. it's a detriment. my husband gets treated like dirt, we're so deep in the hole it's not even funny, and then, to "help" us out, my brother saddles us with a truck we can't afford, takes a check we need, and cuts the amount of money my husband is making. some help. no, he's not using the "after all i've done for you" card. instead he's finding ways to force us to do things his way, whether it's good for us or not. we don't need it. we need to get back on our feet. if he genuinely wanted to help us do that, he'd be finding ways to help that help us.
but mcat's help is all about himself. and everything comes down to money for him. his business practices are so unethical it's almost impossible to believe he's still in business. one of these days he's going to step on the way wrong toes or step on someone's toes too many times and find his ass in jail. he's done this kind of shit before. "come out to disneyland! i'll pay for it!" i should have known better -- he had us pay, saying he would pay us back, then only paid part of it back. "let me take you out to dinner!" we can't find the place he's at (because it's in a whole other town) so he says to bring him the bill, then decides it was too much for dinner and chooses to pay what he thinks is reasonable. really, with his history, we should have known a price tag was coming for that truck.
i can get a ride to work for the rest of the year, if i need to. saxy can probably make as much or more than what he will "by the piece" at another job. the truck goes and, at this rate, the job with it. i rarely see him these days -- he makes no effort at all to keep in touch with me except to find my husband, but, at this point, i want him out of my life. i can't afford his "help" either financially or emotionally. we'll figure things out. we always do. and i certainly don't need his brand of "help" to do that.
word of the moment: picaresque
belonging to or characteristic of a type of prose fiction that features the adventures of a roguish hero and usually has a simple plot divided into separate episodes; relating to or characteristic of rogues or scoundrels; picaresque fiction - prose fiction featuring the adventures of a roguish hero
