The Swollen Lug Nuts
I recently had a temporary roommate, we’ll call him Steve (not his real name), for the last 5 months. I know Steve because his partner, Mark (also not his real name), started cleaning my house for me some 20 years ago. Mark initially had another partner, who passed away from AIDS. Then he met Steve about 8 years back. Both are HIV+. Mark became very ill a couple of years ago from pancreatitis (I think) and was hospitalized for months, and he suffered from untreated clinical depression as well. While he was ill, Steve came and cleaned my house instead. About a year ago, Mark took his life by overdosing on pills.
Steve was quite upset by Mark’s death. The two men lived together on a fixed income (disability checks) and made extra cash here and there cleaning houses. They had a good rental deal on a small two-bedroom house, but Steve couldn’t afford the rent on his own after Mark died. Mark left no will and had no insurance, and came from a lousy family who at least were gracious enough to let Steve have Mark’s car, a 2018 Ford Focus. I felt bad for Steve and in order to help him save up a little money and ultimately relocate to his native state of Alaska, I offered to let him stay with me, rent-free, for a few months.
Steve is 60 years old and if I’m doing my math correctly, he’s been on disability since 1995. He takes whatever the current drug regimen for HIV is and apart from some lower intestinal issues that he felt compelled to tell me about (TMI), he seems fine. By my calculations, he’s earned over $500,000 in disability payments and hasn’t worked in over 25 years.
Initially, I took pity on Steve and assumed his poor decision-making abilities were a result of grief. Over the next few months I came to realize that he’s simply an idiot.
Maybe it’s a case of (whatever the word is for assuming everyone else is just like you), so I’ll admit to being guilty of that, but I figure most people, by the time they’ve been on the planet for six decades, have figured out a few basic responsibilities of adulthood. If you’re 20, there’s a lot you haven’t experienced yet. I’m 61 myself, and while I’m hardly worldly and experienced, I guess compared to Steve, I have the wisdom of Methuselah.
So let’s start with Steve’s car, the one he inherited after Mark’s passing. It’s a gray 2018 Ford Focus with around 26,000 miles on it. Recently, Steve came home from running errands and approached me with his usual breathless, “Do you mind if I ask you a quick question?”. At this point, he’s been living here long enough that I should know better and bolt from the room like one of my cats upon seeing the pet carrier, but I was stuck on the sofa folding laundry. “Sure, what is it?”
“The check engine light in my car is on.”
Me, avoiding rolling my eyes: “You should probably take it in for service.”
Steve: “Well, it’s actually the oil change light.” Nice feature. My older Camry just has a generic check engine light, although based on the mileage, I can usually predict when it’s going to come on for an oil change. Okay, not a crisis, I think.
Me: “How close is the mileage to the sticker in the window?”
Steve: “Oh, I don’t know!” (Races outside to check). “It’s about 500 miles lower.”
Me: “Ok, that’s normal for the oil change light to come on. Who do you usually take it to?”
So we get around to him telling me that Mark normally took it to the local Ford dealer where he first bought the car. It’s only about 15 minutes from my house. I suggest he call and schedule an appointment to take it in. He gets an appointment for that Friday, but by Thursday he’s a nervous wreck at the prospect of DRIVING HIS CAR WHEN IT NEEDS AN OIL CHANGE. Again, Steve is SIXTY years old. This has me wondering if he’s ever owned a car before in his life. He asks if I could possibly follow him to the dealership in case he needs a ride home while it was being serviced. I patiently explain that I usually just wait at my dealership, they usually have coffee and vending machines, a TV set, etc., or if the car is going to take longer than they initially predict, they offer me a free Uber ride home.
He boldly decides to “just chance it” and heads to the dealership on Thursday rather than waiting for his Friday appointment. I wish him luck. For his oil change. My older son is 25 and manages to get his car’s oil changed just fine, I should ask him how on earth he learned such an impressive skill.
After a few hours at the dealership service department on Thursday (since he didn’t have an appointment until the NEXT DAY), Steve comes home, despondent and flailing about in the manner of Nathan Lane in The Birdcage.
He got his oil changed, BUT, horror of horrors, they couldn’t rotate his tires because apparently his car is one of the models/years that have defective lug nuts (shown below), and the dealership would have had to break the existing ones to get them off and would have charged him $300 for the service of installing new ones. Steve: “I simply can’t afford that kind of money! (A quick reminder, he is living with me rent-free). What am I going to do?!”
Me, feigning a migraine so I have an excuse to put my hand over my forehead to try and prevent my eyes from doing a 180-degree turn in their sockets: “Have you done any research on this issue?” Of course he hadn’t, and has ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA where to begin. In about 3 minutes of searching on my phone, I’m able to determine that there is no recall, there was an effort at a class action lawsuit that failed - so Ford isn’t on the hook for replacing the lug nuts, and there are entire Reddit threads of the best recommendations for replacement ones, available on Amazon for $26 for a set of 4 with next day shipping. (I should note here that Steve also has a cellphone, a newer Samsung that I foolishly got for him in a moment of weakness because I got tired of him complaining about his government-provided free phone always dropping calls. Yet apparently he has no idea how to search for anything on it.) While Steve is saying he isn’t sure what his Amazon login is (this becomes a recurring theme), I just go ahead and order the stupid things from my Amazon account to get him to shut up. We get them delivered the next day, he bravely ventures out to the Ford dealership again and they are kind enough to remove his defective lug nuts, rotate the tires, and put on the new nuts. Crisis averted!
Steve has always voted Democrat, has been on disability for over 20 years but is still able to clean houses, for cash, and sees nothing wrong with taking federal and state assistance even though he is quite capable of working. He watches CNN or MSNBC non-stop and seems to be particularly fond of The View as well. He is convinced that Trump is responsible for an insurrection on January 6th and that all Republicans are anti-LGBTQ+. (I have a Trump sign in my yard and welcomed him and Mark into my home for years.) He thinks socialism is a wonderful idea but seems to forget that it is my capitalist tendencies that afford me the ability to let him live at my house for free. He was, and still is, terrified of Covid, despite having at least 4 vaccines that I know of and actually getting Covid at least 3 times. (After he recovered from his last bout, he immediately went and got another booster shot.) His native Alaskan tribe was giving out hardship checks of $500 a month at one point to anyone affected by Covid (even if they weren’t living in Alaska), but of course he couldn’t figure out how to fill out the paperwork for it, so he needed me to fill it out online for him and then email a PDF on his behalf. I hesitatingly asked him exactly how he was affected (presumably financially) by Covid, to which his response was, “Well, we were all scared of it!”.
Sigh.
I have other friends and family who vote Democrat who hold down jobs and seem like functional people in most respects. Steve, however, is probably one of the few people I’ve encountered who seems helpless in most of his day-to-day life and obeys absolutely everything he hears on the news, without even researching anything on his own or questioning the accuracy of what he hears. I had to share the lug nuts tale here as one of the most memorable examples of just how clueless he is. And of course, he’s voting for Kamala Harris. I would pose the question to my readers - how many people do you know like Steve?
I work in the non profit sector and I know many people like Steve. I don’t know if it’s upbringing, personality, or government handouts creating a psychology of dependency (probably a combination of things) but it’s devastating to the dignity of these individuals.
When something inevitably goes wrong, such as things in life tend to do, they have no safety net (socially or financially) so they rely increasingly on the dwindling few who are kind enough to try to help them out, which leads to burnout for the helpers as they watch the Steves make the same mistakes over and over.
There are crisis situations (the single parent of five in a minimum wage job whose house burns down) and there are persistent situations (learned helplessness exacerbated by very understandable depression).
What might help the persistent situations most are micro communities where people in similar economic situations band together to share resources on a roughly level playing field. That way the Steves can give and not just take, as well as bear witness to certain habits of thinking and/or behavior in others that is to their own detriment.
Anyway, bless you for looking out for Steve. You’ve done so much more than most. It sounds like it’s definitely time for him to be on his way.
If voting mattered, I'd be concerned. This type of government resembles a collective effort to destroy the working man while the thugs in government retain power. Most of the country is asleep in more ways than one.