It was James’ testimony that irritated me the most. He was very bitter and blamed me for making him move out of our house. I’m not going to deride James as much as I could here because I feel bad that his father abandoned him, and once his mother got remarried and had another child, he ignored him. Plus, I suspect James had always lived pretty much in poverty. Rita cared a lot about James, as he primarily lived with Rita and her parents for a few years when Rita was in high school. He is a decent person but has some major character flaws that I hope he has addressed.
After he graduated from high school, he went to trade school to be a diesel tractor-trailer mechanic. One of the difficult things about starting as a mechanic is that employers expect you to have tools, and the ones for working on tractor-trailers are costly. Thus, the plan was to let James live with us for a year to work and save money to buy tools. This plan never happened. First, James seemed to be utterly incapable of saving money. I’m not exactly sure where his money went, but I know he bought many “toys,” and he weighed nearly 600 pounds, so I have to assume a lot of money went to food, although I think my income was feeding him. James worked at a lot of different restaurants delivering–and probably eating–pizza, etc. He would continually claim that he didn’t overeat, and he would not accept that you cannot weigh that much and not be overeating. His weight was seriously affecting his health, too, as his blood pressure was ridiculously high. I recall him saying at one point; it was like 300 over 150. He seemed proud of this and his “enlarged” heart.
Although it should have been clear that he wasn’t brilliant, he always thought he knew best. At one point, we decided that maybe we could convert half of the garage into a small apartment for him. The plan was to turn what had initially been a laundry/utility room adjacent to the garage into a bathroom. We would then build a wall splitting the garage in two, another in front of the garage door, and insulate everything. James said he could do all this, and, for whatever reason, I agreed with Rita and let him start work.
The first project he started on was converting the utility room into a bathroom. It seemed like it was going okay, although it was clear James was cobbling things together. Then one day, I came home from work to find a door-sized opening between the utility room and the garage. I had explicitly told him not to do it until the very end. However, he said it was a hassle to use the door from the garage into the house–which was adjacent to the utility room–to get the work done, so he decided to make the opening for the door. It was not significant at the time because it was summer, but since there were plenty of examples of projects James had abandoned around the house, I anticipated that this project would take a long time to finish, or it wouldn’t get finished at all. In the end, he never finished, and we wound up trying to seal off the utility room from the rest of the house once it got cold. We should have just hired someone competent to do the work, as he also destroyed the basement bathroom to the point that it was unusable trying to access the plumbing.
James was also very racist and had a Confederate flag hanging in the furnished part of the basement, which he had turned into a bedroom. I’m sure he’s a huge Trump supporter. When I started to see some of these racist views–especially towards Asians–showing up in my children, I told Rita I thought it was time for James to move out. At that point, he had been living with us for about three years.
He then found a place in a trailer park just outside of State College, and I think Rita’s parents helped him pay for the trailer, so he only had to pay the lot fees. This arrangement turned out to be an utter disaster. While the mobile home was in pretty bad shape when he bought it, it was utterly worthless when he moved out. It was clear he was not capable of living on his own. He lived there for about a year before he wound up with congestive heart failure and moved back in with us. I think he simply abandoned the trailer.
I’m not sure how long he stayed this time, but over a year, I believe. He then decided to move back to Michigan under the auspices of helping his grandparents. I think he lived with them for some time before finally finding an apartment. I didn’t keep up with what he was doing once he moved out, but I suspect his grandfather would have grown tired of living with him.
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