Overstaying Your Welcome
I hold an arm out and give out a lot of welcomes. Oftentimes, those welcomes are overstayed.
It's no mystery that I live at home with my mother and my little brother. The economy is tough right now, and I've always been a family homebody type. But man, sometimes I wonder what we're doing as a household.
A little back info
My brother's best friend, we'll call him H, lives with us. He's generally a nice dude. Rough childhood. Moved here from Puerto Rico as a baby. His mother essentially abandoned him. He's lived on and off with other family and friends ever since. He's stayed out of trouble for the most part, no worse than what anyone else in this godforsaken town is up to.
Lately, he's been overstaying his welcome. Work nights disrupted by screaming while he's playing FIFA. Coming home completely shitfaced.
Tonight, he came home completely drunk again with my brother and some girl I've never met. They're loud and drunk as all hell, and quite frankly, I've had enough.
My brother has his own issues, and it doesn't help having a second disruptive person in the house keeping us up at night and introducing new stresses.
Not so street smart for a guy who's always been down on his luck
A few months back, H lost his phone on a drunken stumble home. He had his insurance send him a replacement. Okay, cool, right? I helped him out by letting him put my email on file, just so I could keep track of everything. Not once, not twice, but three times did this replacement phone get hijacked by somebody else he had on his cellular account. H was sitting there, confused about what was going on. Dude, your "friend" is trying to steal your stuff. He keeps changing the info on your cell account and locking us out.
You'd think it would just click for him. He's been around some shady people before. But nope.
Not the most savory of company
Let's rewind to last summer.
H has a friend over. They play video games, they chill, you know how it goes when you're young. One day, H gets home and can't find his PlayStation 5. It's missing from the living room. Here we fucking go.
I check the security camera footage, only to find his friend entering our house through the back door and walking off with the PS5.
H gives him a call and heads out to handle it. A few hours later, he comes home with his PS5. You'd think H would drop this guy from his friends list, but nope. Guess who's back in my living room the next day?
Fast-forward a few weeks.
I get a security camera notification. It's the camera on the fire escape leading up to our living room. It's that same friend of H's. He's trying to crawl through the living room window at 3 a.m., but the floodlight spooks him. He's lying down on the fire escape. I open the window and confront him. He's like a deer in headlights and stumbles over his words: "I'm—I—I'm just passing through and using your Wi-Fi." All the while, I keep hearing beeping from a car out front.
Nah, man. You were trying to break in and steal more of our stuff, and your getaway ride got tired of waiting.
Where do we go from here?
My family and I try to be nice people. We hold a hand out often, but I feel like we should keep our hands in our pockets for a while. My brother's issues are annoying enough to deal with, and my mother enables them. Neither of us needs to be enabling more of this. I don't live in a damn flophouse, for fuck's sake.
It's time for H to pack his bags and go elsewhere, again. Did I mention we told him to leave once before, a few years ago?
Gordon Ramsay voice: "Damn..."