By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
‘My check didn’t come.”
Eviction court is not the saddest place in the world, but
if you were taking a Dantean descent through the underworld of underclass
despair and dysfunction, it would be somewhere around the fourth or fifth
circle. Because my Virgil on this journey is an actual attorney, with a suit
and tie and everything, the judge has moved us to the end of the docket on the
theory that there might be arguments
in our case, that this litigation might turn into something resembling
litigation. There are not going to be any arguments, but we get to sit through
a few hours’ worth of very sad stories. I think the lawyer enjoys this even
less than I do, even though he gets paid by the hour.
The woman whose check did not come is on disability.
(There’s a lot of that here.) That is the check she was expecting, which did
not come, for . . . some reason. But whatever her disability is, it does not
appear to be the worst of her problems. She has a daughter and a man in her
life (it is not clear whether he is her husband or the girl’s father or both or
neither), and they are obliged to maintain two separate households, “because of
the domestic . . . event . . . that happened,” she explains.
The teacher in me cannot help but notice that when it
comes time to explain the facts of the case, the people in this courtroom
rarely appear as the subjects in their own sentences. A “domestic event” just
“happened,” and now the man in her life cannot reside under the same roof as
her daughter — or Child Protective Services will take that daughter away. Which
means that after her eviction (which is never seriously in doubt) she cannot
rely on the person upon whom most people in her situation instinctively would rely.
She is not the only person whose check didn’t come. The
passivity and subjectlessness of these narratives is striking, and strikingly
consistent. Domestic events happen.
Checks come or don’t come. (Mostly they don’t.) Husbands are sent to jail,
children are taken away by the clipboard-toting minions of Authority, disease
descends. The money isn’t there. And, in the end, they are evicted. Bad things
just happen, and, today, I am the bad thing that is just happening to one of
these luckless and unhappy children of God. I am eviction, I am CPS, I am the
check that didn’t come. I am diabetic amputation. I am cancer.
I am, as it happens, evicting my mother’s fourth
husband’s fifth wife from a modest house (much more modest than the condition I
left it in) in which she resided rent-free for a decade or so. I inherited the
house from my mother when she died, and her husband inherited a “life estate”
in it, meaning a legal right to reside there so long as he kept current on the
taxes and such. He remarried (these are marrying people) and lived there with
his new wife until his life estate ended the way life estates end, and I came
around to take possession of the house and sell the damned thing. They’d had
years and years to prepare for this moment, and, of course, they hadn’t.
“Why are you doing this to us?” the woman’s daughter
demanded. Because I am the bad thing that
is just happening to you today, the unforeseeable event that has been hanging
over you by a single hair of a horse’s tail for a decade, the inevitable end of
a terrible lamentation.
But people love their sad stories. They feel compelled to
tell them. Local law here is pretty straightforward on the matter of evictions:
If you don’t pay your rent (mine is the only case today not involving rent), then
you have to go. “Did you pay any rent in February?” the judge asks two dozen
times. “Did you pay any rent in March?” The judge’s power in these matters
extends only to ordering (or not ordering) an eviction and ordering the payment
of unpaid back rent. If a tenant wants to sue the landlord for violating the
lease, or if the landlord wants to sue the tenant for failing to pay an
electricity bill or damaging the property, that is a separate action. But even
though the judge repeatedly explains that the sins of the landlords are
irrelevant at this moment to the immediate legal question before his court, the
tale must be told: He didn’t return phone calls or text messages. There were
repairs left unmade. There were bedbugs. Tenants put scarce and desperately
needed money into making unlivable rental properties just barely livable.
“Did you pay any rent in April?”
It is different in other places that have laws making it
more difficult to evict non-paying tenants. One Californian whose family owns a
number of residential rentals reports that he routinely pays people cash to
vacate properties rather than endure the trouble, expense, and uncertainty of
eviction proceedings. I had had the same thought myself, but it quickly became
clear that eviction would be the more economical route. They very much wanted
to stay in the house, though not enough to offer to rent it or buy it. But
certainly enough to sit tight and hope that the situation would somehow just
resolve itself in their favor.
The woman I am evicting does not show up in court. (About
half of those evicted decline to attend the proceedings today.) Her son attends
on her behalf. My lawyer asks me five or six yes-or-no questions. The judge
asks the son if he has a response. “No.” He asks if he would like to present an
argument. “No.”
And that was that.
Of course, that’s never really that. Many people who have
been evicted simply refuse to leave after being ordered to, which means that
they will in the end be visited by constables who remove them and their
belongings from the property, often to a chorus of wailing and lamentation. And
another bad thing just happens to people who, for whatever reason, have no
sense of agency in their own lives.
“I’ll give you a break on my rate,” says my lawyer,
looking at his watch. He is the son of Mexican-American farm laborers, who
learned at least one thing from his hard and poor childhood: Don’t be a farm
laborer. Law looked like a pretty good alternative, and it seems to be working
out pretty well for him. The idiomatic English would be, “He became a lawyer.”
The better English would be, “He made himself a lawyer.” How did that happen?
It must have begun with decisions he made as a child or as a very young man: A
leads to B leads to C leads to a good income and a nice house and a bass boat.
A few months ago, I recounted the story of Preston Smith,
a man from a very poor background (think outhouses and bare feet) who walked
across a wide stretch of Texas to attend college at the beginning of a career
that would see him become (make himself) a successful businessman and, later,
governor of Texas. He and a friend made a living in college by opening up what
at the time would have been called a “filling station,” a gas
station/convenience store. By the time he was out of school, he had a few of
them, and a movie theater, too. The reaction to that column surprised me:
“That’s great,” critics wrote, “but he lived at a time when someone in his
circumstances could open a gas station without backing and financing, and
without all the taxes and regulation we have now.” As though the Indian,
Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrants who operate convenience stores from coast
to coast show up in the United States with a $1 million line of business credit
from Chase, an MBA, and a gas station waiting for them in Oklahoma. Next time
you’re filling up in some country location late at night, take a peek around
the back of the place, and see how many of those immigrants are quietly living
in the gas stations they operate. It is not uncommon, for a time. But they
don’t stay there long.
And while I am not much of a hard-ass on these kinds of
questions (we have a positive moral obligation to help the poor, and not just
the “deserving” poor), I cannot help but think of those hustling immigrants
when I encounter the native-born sons and daughters of this sweet land of
liberty who, if it were raining jobs and opportunity, would find a way to walk
between the raindrops.
“My check didn’t come.” “Did you pay any rent in
January?” “The factory closed down.” “The textile jobs moved to Thailand and
Vietnam.” “My little town is dying.” “My check didn’t come.” “Did you pay any
rent in February? In March?”
“My check didn’t come.”
Your check didn’t come. It’s never coming.
Now what?
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