The Tribunal of Bourgie B*%#tches

Anyone who has ever had the displeasure of taking care of an elderly or disabled person knows that visitors are few and far between. Friends and family may come around for birthdays or special occasions, but day-to-day? Hardly. It's too depressing. Boring. Smelly. Weird.

In the days after Great Aunt's second drink-and-fall, three invisible friends decided to pay me a visit and give me a piece of their mind.

The first was Mrs. Battleaxe and her assistant, Betty Boop. Mrs. Battleaxe, a 70-something long-time friend of Great Aunt, lived in Baldwin Hills. Betty Boop was her 36-year-old personal assistant, a silly, vapid, pretentious, materialistic, keeping-it-young-while-still-posing-for-lingerie-calendars Los Angeles snob.

I was in my bedroom, about an hour into the three-hour job of braiding my hair, when they realized I was home and demanded that I join them in the living room. So there I was, half Buckwheat and half braids, facing down perfectly coiffed bourgie bitches.

Neighborhood Watch, the loudmouth from across the street, was in on the action, too. He had a key to the house and was a constant, nosy presence.

They were full of concern about bruised and confused Great Aunt. They'd never seen her look so bad. She was too thin. What in the world was the problem?

"You want to know the problem? This is the problem."

I shoved a recycling bin in their faces. It was filled with empty liquor bottles. One or two gallon-sized jugs of wine. Two or three empty bottles of hard liquor. All of it consumed by Great Aunt, with a little help from her drinking buddy, Neighborhood Watch.

The phones must have been busy that evening, because the next day, Cousin Inglewood paid me a surprise visit. I came back from early-morning grocery shopping to find her sitting in the living room. She had previously been cordial to me, but now she was fixing me with a hard, beady-eyed stare. Cousin Inglewood obviously thought Great Aunt had hit my fist, not the floor.

She watched me like a hawk as I stuffed a thousand TV dinners in the freezer.

"What? Y'all don't cook?!"

No, in fact, we did not.

Cooking was never my thing to begin with, but living with Great Aunt made a dreaded chore an impossible one. It took infinite patience to fix something as simple as a pot of grits. Because if I left the kitchen for even a minute, Great Aunt would turn off my pots.

So TV dinners it was. And the kicker was, that's all Great Aunt had eaten for years, even before too much vino and too much gin turned her wits to mush. She herself didn't cook.

I left the house and went to acting class. When I came home, court was in session.

Battleaxe and Betty Boop (who normally didn't visit at all) were back for their second visit in two days. Joined of course by Neighborhood Watch. And by Mr. Sweet Talker. He greeted me with, "You are the subject, and I am the predicate. Sit down here and join us."

I was on trial, and before it ended, I cussed all my elders out.

(Semi-Homeless Diaries Part 3 of 12: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | Lessons Learned 1-2: 1 2)

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