One Bad Day

I don't think that most people who become great plan for greatness. I also don't think that most people who become desperate plan for desperation. Sometimes it boils down to one bad day.

He had been walking around all day, carrying his life in a worn and stretched out hefty bag. The yellow strings had been reinforced by some duct tape he had picked up at the labor pool job. He needed somewhere to sleep and his feet automatically led him here.

 His name was Jordan and he was having a bad day. A really bad day that had him out here walking around, looking for somewhere to sleep.

 Jordan wasn't particularly good at anything, not a strike to his character just fact.

He couldn't focus on things long enough to become an adept. Jordan was on the Autism spectrum and suffered from ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and as a poor meth loving mechanic’s nephew had remained undiagnosed.

 One bad day had changed his fortunes that time as well.

Jordan had been working, on and off all day breaking down a Volkswagen Cabriolet. Jordan thought it was a hideous car, a waste of a damn fine motor. Uncle Wayne had demanded that he finish the work before he returned home, so as much as he disliked the car, he knew he had to finish.  

The police had arrived with drug-sniffing dogs and riot gear. They discovered Jordan’s uncle’s Meth lab.

 The then 16-year-old Jordan had been remanded to custody and would have slipped through the court system if the Judge had not been adamant that Jordan prove he understood the significance of the 5-year sentence he was pleading to.

His mental illnesses got the attention they deserved for a while. The court saved him that time.  Not so much the next. After Jordan turned 18 there was really nothing the court system could or would do but release him.

 No more foster care meant no more medication. His uncle had OD’d while he was away.

He no longer even had the trailer that his Uncle lived in, the fool had borrowed money against it and forfeited.

All he knew to do was find his way back to the trailer park.  He needed some food and a place to lay his head.  

 The answer came in the form of Alisha. Alisha was obese. So obese that walking from her trailer out to her car was a challenge.

 She saw Jordan from her window trying to clear a spot on the ground to go to sleep. Soon Jordan was living with her and became the one preparing her meals and as she grew larger the one who bathed her.

Alisha at least made sure that Jordan received enough medication to remain compliant and docile. It worked in his and her favor.

Jordan didn’t have to worry about anything while he lived with Alisha. He played video games and fed her massive amounts of food. He took her grocery lists to the store and he bought the things on it. He prepared the food the way she instructed and he had sex with her.

To Jordan, the sex was like anything else the morbidly obese woman asked of him when she called him to have sex with her she might as well have been saying “Jordan clean the living room.”  Or “Jordan, wash the dishes.”

Alisha’s unhealthy lifestyle caught up with her in the form of a massive heart attack.

 It took Jordan four days to call someone and then he simply told the neighbor because she was beginning to smell.

In the course of the investigation, the now 25-year-old Jordan once again began to receive the help that he needed. A caring investigator made certain that Jordan was remanded to the state hospital as he was not mentally capable of caring for himself. The caseworkers saw the sense of it and made sure that Jordan was cared for.  

Until the next election. The new Governor had been elected on a trim the fat campaign and some of the fat happened to be the state hospital that Jordan had called home for the past three years. With no one taking advantage of him and receiving the training and medication that he really needed Jordan had been doing well and was being reintroduced to life outside the facility.

Suddenly Jordan and at least 12 other state hospital residents deemed not a threat to society were turned out onto the street.

The first day Jordan went to work at the Ready Labor. The state hospital had sent him to work there before and taught him how to receive and cash the checks from there.

That first day his mental illnesses, both diagnosed and undiagnosed were in check. However the sheltered young man wasn’t able to deal with peer pressure in the real world, he had never been taught how.

That was how Jordan came to smoke meth, just a one-time experiment. It didn’t mix well with his medication. Maybe that is why Jordan broke into the trailer that used to belong to Alisha and strangled the woman who lived there.

Without his medications, he saw nothing wrong with moving her body into the back bathroom and taking over her house. He had been in the house with a dead person before.  This time he figured the smell wouldn’t bother him as much.