Slippage

On the ease in which we lose vulnerable people.

This week I had one of those writing experiences where I set out to write one thing, and another thing kept intrusively inserting itself into the work. So, I gave in. I will share it with you.

Last week, someone who lived in the house next door to us, for a decade, died. He was in his mid-50’s. His name was Matt. He was found by the smell of his decomposing corpse. Stuffed in a crate inside a storage facility. Murdered. I spoke with him the weekend before.

Matt no longer lived next door. For years, the landlord of that house carried him, month to month, letting him pay late, or skip a month, pay by the week. The landlord lived abroad and was content to have a friend he trusted watching his place. Matt knew he couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. He worried about the day the landlord would sell the house.

Housing is stability. Matt knew he was vulnerable.

In many ways, we made our life here in Vegas alongside Matt. There was a hole in the fence that separated our houses. Our dogs, and his Jack Russell Terrier (named Jack), went back and forth between the houses, getting treats, snuggling on our couches, and taking advantage of two yards and two sets of dog bowls. Sometimes I hunted for our dogs, and Matt would tell me that my pug, Smudge, had fallen asleep in his bed. He came for Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Years and watched my kids gather easter eggs in the backyard. I often brought Matt lunches and leftovers from dinner, passed in warm bowls over the fence. He liked curries and stews. Soups. Things that were homey and warm. Sometimes these dishes, and the eggs from our chickens, were simply a nice treat. Other times a check hadn’t been mailed or an unforseen expense popped up, and the meal was more about staving off the paltriness of an empty fridge.

When we moved into our house in 2014, Matt was a gainfully employed writer. He had edited and written for pretty much every alt-weekly and magazine that Vegas offered. There is a limited pool of writing and editing opportunities here. All the writers know each other, especially the ones who came up together in the aughts and teens. They talk about it on literary panels, the stories they collaborated on, the adventures they had together, the infights and lasting friendships. I envy these stories of the time before the economy tanked in 2008, decimating Vegas. Before writing jobs dried up. Before journalism changed everywhere. I would’ve loved to be a part of all that.

When I think of Matt. I think of slippage. The act of watching someone or something, slowly, almost imperceptibly, lose their contours, their structure, their bones and then, form into something else entirely. But it’s so slow, you don’t realize. It’s not trackable. The day-to-day feels like no movement at all. I wrote about this phenomenon a lot in my book, The Meth Lunches, because it happens so often, to so many of us. Slippage was originally coined by Stephen King and Peter Straub, in their novel, Black House. In it, the house is just there. Not taking up space. But over the slow decay of years, under the weight of its own invisibility, the house and its spirit slides into a barely distinguiable decompensation. And then, because it’s King, it decompensates further into darkness. Then, evil.

This feels a bit like aging, doesn’t it? (not the evil part, obvs.)

Like when we talk about the stigma of falling - as if the fall that breaks the hip is the first thing. It’s not. There is a long, slow, decay that happens before that, imperceptibly to the outside world, even though we feel it and push it back, and fight through it. The daily weakening and loosening of our bones and tissues and muscle and cells. The collapsing neuropathways, until... One fall. One diagnosis. One visit to the emergency room. One breathing tube. One surgery. The fast decay. Noticeable decompensation. Etched on faces. Racked in the bones. The unstoppable cannot be stopped.

Which is why we live hard until we can’t, right?

The beginning of the slippage for Matt started when he wrote an article that pissed off a lot of people. It was tone deaf, off. He didn’t read the room. The response was brutal. It felt like all of Vegas seized up and formed a posse against him. People posted. People commented. People sent him nasty messages. He sent nasty messages back. It was hard to see who was the victim and who was the villain, because the venom and immaturity came like furies from all sides. He laid on the floor of our living room, screaming, hyperventilating. He cried for days. Spiraled. Obsessed. He wrote people shitty messages, high, drunk, paranoid. There were places he stopped going. His world got smaller. People stopped calling. People stopped working with him. He couldn’t understand why his friends didn’t stand up for him online. He felt like everyone had abandoned him. And they did. But he didn’t help himself either.

This is the way for vulnerable people.

So he tried again: He fell in love with a girl who didn’t love him back and yet, he didn’t read the signs. He insisted. He persisted. He held out hope when there was none. He manufactured romance that wasn’t there. He came across as a stalker-weirdo. More people made fun. More bridges burned. More places to no longer go. He drank Maker’s Mark alone. Smoked pot alone. He stopped cleaning his kitchen. The house smelled stale and old, like old pot. Dust and grease in gritty corners. He never opened a window to let in sun or fresh air.

He couldn’t hear advice or counsel. He spoke only to vent. To pummel you with news about new diagnoses and more diseases he thought he had, and constant internet self-diagnosing, where each new imagined diagnosis brought momentary relief and euphoria. Every diagnosis was a path to reclaim the life he lost. His efforts to figure himself out. Matt played his music until he decided he had a copper allergy and couldn’t play on his guitar strings anymore. And then another allergy, movement problems, autoimmune stuff, autism, diabetes, stroke, ADHD. It was always changing. The ground shifting under his feet. Him running over to tell me, tell anyone, who was left to hear it. I understand why I acted this way, he would say, excitedly. There was a reason!

He was kind to our children, particularly our foster kids, who I think he identified with, their brokeness. But then those kindness for our kids would turn into obsessions. We supervised him relentlessly. He told me once that my youngest was his best and only friend. She was six. He called animal control on me when I put up boundaries for her. He called CPS on the mother of the profoundly disabled child across the street, because she put boundaries around her child when Matt’s obsession with him grew. CPS opened a case on her that she would have to manage - on top of all her other life duties - for the next three months until it was discharged. He yelled at a five-year-old neighbor girl, demanding she tell him what her mother, one of his haters, had said about him. David had to physically remove him from our house. He gave our struggling nine-year-old son, a bb gun, with amunition. He didn’t ask us. We found the gun by accident in Raffi’s room. He got my daughter high on her 18th birthday.

Living next door to someone makes the relationship tricky. We didn’t want a war. So when he texted me hostile things, or did dumb shit, I ignored them. I put up my own boundaries. You couldn’t be around Matt and not have boundaries. And that makes me wonder about all these posts and messages and the people talking about him now that he has died. How much they cared about him. Loved him. Respected him. Tribute pieces. Heartfelt social media posts. How they knew about his weirdnesses and struggles and still loved him. There were a couple pillar people who kept him employed, but where were these other people who respected him so much?

I wonder: Where was everyone who loved him when he was in slippage?

What do we do with people who have burned every bridge? Strangled every friendship? Fucked every opportunity. And not because they want to. Because they can’t get it right. They try and can never get traction. What do we do with people who are in decay, almost imperceptibly? How do we make ourselves see the slippage? Especially when slippage is defined by its imperceptibility?

I didn’t see the murder coming.

A couple years ago, the landlord sold Matt’s house. This is the point where the slippage ends and full on decompensation begins. He wasn’t anchored to the neighborhood anymore. To kids lighting fireworks in the street on July 4th. To us. To celebrations. To curry passed over the fence. To dogs snuggling under warm sheets.

Jack grew old and died. But Matt still had his magazine job. He found an apartment downtown. New building. He was writing. Making electronic music. He cut his hair and it suited him. He looked good. He was hopeful. But I was happy to not have him next door. It was permission for me to slowly drop out of his life. My own slippage that he felt abstractly, and couldn’t stop. I didn’t have to keep the peace anymore.

And then, a terrible accident: Baby, our sweet pitbull, was left in the car after an exhausting day out running at a dog park. She died. It was awful. I blamed myself. He found out. Wrote me messages accusing me of killing her. Of being abusive to our dogs. He said he was going to out me on social media as an animal abuser. People like you, he said, but they will turn on you, the way they turned on me. I wrote the essay myself to get in front of it. (And I write about it every spring so it won’t happen to other people). I didn’t care what people thought. No one could beat me up more than I had beat up myself. But something about his threat untethered me from him.

I was done. I refused to come to the door when he rang.

The weekend before Matt died he came by the house. He dropped off an envelope with a bill of sale and $20 for my youngest, Desi. She loves painting and art and making things. He wanted to be the first to make her a professional artist. To be paid for her work. To encourage her. It was the kind of thing that was truly Matt at his core - trying to do the right thing, trying to make the connection.

I opened the door expecting someone else. I was not happy to see him. I made it obvious. He asked why. I reminded him about the Baby texts. He looked surprised. Like he had forgotten he sent them. And then a moment of remembering. A look of sadness. He touched my arm and apologized. Heart felt. I was in a bad place, he said. I’m so sorry. I gave him grace. We had done this dance before.

I don’t know why he left the last apartment, but it didn’t surprise me. This is the way of vulnerable people. This is the way of housing instability. He had found a place nearby with a roomate. He told me his roomate was gross. That it wasn’t working out. His roomate said he owed him money, Matt said he didn’t. They were going to court. Matt was looking to move again. It felt to me like vulnerable-business as usual.

A week later I got a message from a fellow writer that Matt was missing, believed dead. Then the news that he had been blugeoned to death with a hammer. The gross roomate was a killer.

When I wrote The Meth Lunches, I was writing about vulnerable people here in Vegas. People who were in various stages of slippage. People who were walking around and talking and functioning, but were one car accident, one fall, one job loss, one relationship ending, that could launch a death spiral that they might never be able to recover from.

Many of the people who have been reading here for awhile might remember Johnnie from The Meth Lunches, who had been starved as a child, and the implications of that hunger on her life, and how it has made her vulnerable. When she was was evicted for being late with the rent, one time in 12 years, you all raised $6,000 dollars, so she could get a place. She has a home now. Because of all of you. She even still has some of that money banked in case she needs emergency cash. That money makes her less vulnerable.

But many people do not have that life-line, the social capital to have a group of people crowd fund for you, or give you a temporary place to live while you are in transition. Sometimes vulnerable people do not present as easy to be around. Their stressed brains make stupid decisions. Their cognitive functioning is off. They suck at saying and doing the right things. Often times the vulnerability is baked into being unlikeable, or not being skilled socially, or not being attractive and relatable in some way. Sometimes it’s about race and gender and disability and mobility and language fluency and age, but poverty is the stealth co-morbidity.

We, as a community, walked away from Matt, because he couldn’t walk along with us.

I don’t have any answers. There are so many Matts. Self-preservation matters. Extending ourselves to people who need it matters. Meeting people where they are matters. I guess, this is a small reminder that if you are a vulnerable person, try to reach out to someone today? You deserve that connection. You do. And if you’re doing well, maybe, pick up a phone and call your vulnerable person? We don’t have to solve all their problems, or create life-changing solutions for them.

Just show up for your Matt in a small, do-able way. And when you do, think of my Matt, as a kind of tribute to his life.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim