Nearing the end of my tether

Life is a blur. I am putting in 25+ hours a week with Joanne P across the way but thus far only getting paid for 20. And some ridiculous wage like $19. I was approved by the care manager (Dana or Noni) for 25 hours a few weeks ago but the Anchor coordinator still hasn’t listed them. So I’m not getting paid. I clock in for maybe 5.25 hours and get paid for four.

I can do this because the weekly total gets padded out with another 300 or whatever from do-nothing shifts with Grimm and Rem. This shortchanging may be a good excuse for cutting ties with JP in the near future. She’s too difficult too often. Was ready to call it quits with JP a couple of weeks back, just too stressed out, but we’ve had moodswings all along, and I don’t want to leave her be until we at least get her to the DMV on Tuesday. Get that driver’s license renewed.

She also needs to pay some rent (4 or 5 months behind; this is where I got nabbed with a Rent Demand), and pay Gloria. We paid Gloria via Zelle but evidently it did not go through; it bounced, perhaps. Gloria shows up on Friday (3/20) at 9 and says she hasn’t been paid. That means Zelle for $150 did not to through on Wednesday. By 11am we were scurrying around, JP in a vicious temper, trying to pull out a long stray hair out of her chin, and I did so with her tweezers. But she took offense when I told her to stand over by the window. I pulled that hair, another hair. She told me i was dictatorial. Kept yelling at me when we had to pay the Spectrum bill which evidently they’d cut off because although she paid $330 a few day before she still owed $303. This issue arose because I couldn’t get on the internet to find if Gloria’s payment had gone through. Wifi dead. We paid through her new debit card after calling the Spectrum 800 number. Then she was mad because I was keeping Current Bills in a manila folder marked Current Bills and she didn’t know about it, supposedly, although we’d gone over it a few times. Finally we shuffled out and went to the Blueribbon Estate Sales jewelry buyers at the Courtyard by Marriott at 866 Third Ave. She got $360 for this and that and afterwards we deposited this into the WF bank next door. Taxi both ways and we paid with her cash.

I drank a double scotch, last of the 1.75 of Dewars, with her after clocking out at two. All better now. I went home and went to bed, maybe after getting a couple more handrolls from Maki. In the evening I rented The Man Who Would Be King from Amazon Prime. Watched it in bits and pieces through the weekend. Not that great a picture, though I suppose on release it impressed a lot of people. Greg Robison thought it was the best. And you don’t often get a John Huston picture with Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Christopher Plummer. It’s an imaginative anecdote spun out into a big-screen spectacular, and there just isn’t enough substance to the story.

At 88 and disabled (cannot walk without cane and support person) and increasingly scatterbrained, JP is pretty close to the edge, drowning in the chaos of her own clutter and confusion and probably delusions. Her friends and former bankers all believe she has been taken in by a scam artist. I think that’s a reasonable assessment but am noncommittal. She does seem to have some sort of connection to the real-life fellow in question.

JP believes she is having an unconsummated affair with Pedro P____. I did not recognize the name at first, but he’s a famous film actor. The fascination with him has something to do with his Chilean origins. He and sisters grew up in SoCal, however. Somehow she got hooked up with him via Telegram messages a year or so ago. And has been sending him money.

Every week she believes he is coming into town, arriving Friday from Greece. This has been going on for months. Then he popped up in some social-media pictures at the Bowery Hotel, and then at the Superbowl, and now at the Oscars last weekend.

I figure she’s sent him about $100,000 so far. Not in any traceable way. She lets herself get conned into putting $10,000 or so into a shoebox and sending it via UPS to some address in Missouri or Ohio. At present she has $1000 left in her Edw Jones broker account (down from maybe $85000 a year ago) and about that in her new Wells Fargo checking. She also had Citibank and Chase accounts along the way but they’ve been closed out for fraud. She’s let her Pedro people, or her Alejandro J. people (AJ being famous avant-garde filmmaker and theatrical director, from Chile and now living in Paris) get her bank account ID and password on several occasions. Each time it got flagged for fraud. (This is not entirely her fault; banks have tightened up online accounts in recent years, and something as simple as a login from an unknown smartphone can be a flag.) Yet, she would close out one account at Citi, open another, get a new User ID and pw, and do the same damn thing.

I have several reasons for not agreeing with JP’s sister and friends and bankers that the Pedro person is not really a scammer, and that’s that she has actual ties to people in common with him. It’s that Chile fascination she’s had most of her life. (From Lafayette, Indiana, herself, b. 1938. Half J though of mid-1800s German J stock on the paternal side, old-stock American, a mix of Irish and English and Palatinate German on the maternal. Raised RC, but probably not very ardently so.)

There’s that other guy in Paris, whom she also sends money to, for no conceivable reason. The other guy, Alejandro, is likewise from Chile but of Ukrainian J stock, is nearing 100 and seems to have a particular loathing for the Pedro person. He’s jealous of him. So if her Pedro is a cipher, a scammer, there are other people she knows whom we know to be real, and believe Pedro is real.

Once every week or so we wander over to the Chase on the corner to find what’s happened to the $5000 check that was supposed to be returned to her, but got hijacked internally. That was our major expedition the first day with her, end of January. Or we go to the Citibank on Broadway to sit around for an hour and then withdraw some large amount representing the last sale by the Jones broker. $15,000, $10,000, whatever. Last time it was $1595 from the residual checking account, mainly her last SSA payment. Now we have to transfer Direct Deposit to the WF account. Something that could be done online. But we’re going to have an in-person visit to E 102nd St (SSA office) because we haven’t, and the in-person thing she prefers.

She’s a political naif, knows only that Allende was some kind of martyr for killing himself on 9/11/73 when there was the coup in Chile, and that Donald Trump is the devil incarnate. Watches the dreaded MS-NOW (formerly MSNBC) most of the time. I have not told her of the Brian Burns connection to Trump. If I did it would be with much jocularity, describing Laura’s visit last August and her horrified face at seeing the Brian and Eileen picture with Donald in between.

I made artisan bread this weekend, two narrow loaves. Ate many tiny sandwiches last night and today with Boars Head honey-glazed turkey and domestic swiss. And washed a few dishes. I could actually finish cleaning most of the kitchen this evening.

I missed mass. Couldn’t get out of bed after watching end of the film. Drinking lots of coffee, that Nescafe Gold Intense…which is quite intense after two big mugs.

Big trip planned Saturday to New Haven, to Sterling, for the Tame translation of Brasillach book. Didn’t, didn’t get out of bed. Another little trip planned for today, Sunday: going out to Brooklyn to pick up a Henri Bendel grey fabric crossbody purse. Too much trouble to revise ticket for pickup. Seller is posting via USPS.

I now have the big teal Jetsetter backpack-convertible bag (handle needs repair), and probably the orange crossbody Moki bought me in 2016 (but which disappeared, probably to the big anodized aluminum trunk the subbasement…I hope!), and the Lululemon orange crossbody which I cleaned last week (an inky mess came right off with dishwashing soap) and the Lululemon olive green one I bought a week ago Friday when I knew I had to retire the orange one for at least a little while. That’s when I had two stiff drinks and calamari at Bad Roman, and conversation with the Ricky barkeep who knew Ray Dirks.

Tonight I will make a stab at the next Brasillach translation. You know I have not had anything in CC since August or Septemper? Did nothing with Fredericka Yockey.

I bought crazy adjustable-lens glasses online this afternoon, possibly no good. We’ll see.