For the skint Rent isn't a musical.

When the other shoe drops.

The other shoe is always about to drop when you’re skint. Bad luck, and you are on a first-name basis when you are poor. So, you know that shoe has got to drop and wreck your chances of survival as if it was a foot of a child coming down to squash a bug on the pavement.

If you don’t have assets, a line of credit, or a reasonable paycheque, coming in regularly, you know calamity is just around the corner. All you’ve got is cunning. The problem is: if times are harsh for everyone like in the era we now live in, everyone is as, cunning as the fox. So, it’s a fight to stay ahead of an infinite number of desperate people, all attempting to stop that other shoe from dropping on them.

I wasn’t surprised when the shoe with my name on it dropped for me this past weekend. I was expecting it like a pizza delivery that promises thirty minutes or free. For a long time now, I’ve been gliding through life like a transatlantic airliner with engine failure over the Atlantic ocean that tries to ride the jet stream to a crash landing on terra firma rather than the hard black water below.

But since the weekend, I’ve been getting a brace for impact feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew what little luck I had ran out when my brother’s widow showed up at my door on Saturday.

It’s not her fault that she came to me after another one of her very many crises in life. She’s 67 and since my brother died over a decade ago has only me. So naturally, when a storm ripped through her neighbourhood on Saturday with the ferocity of a Kansas twister tearing down trees; and powerlines and making her neck of the woods unliveable, she came to stay.

My brother’s widow found sanctuary at my apartment during a time when I should be hustling for next month's rent with the tenacity of a character in Berlin Alexander Platz. And, if someone other than my brother’s widow had come to stay, maybe I could have kept to my plans to make the rent by hook or crook.

But the problem is my brother’s widow brought to my apartment all her woe and angst from years of trying to keep ahead of her clinical depression. It’s not her fault that she is in as rough shape as Naomi Judd was through most of her tortured life. My brother’s widow drew a short straw in life, which is probably why she and my brother became lovers because he also drew many short straws.

My brother Pete just couldn’t help getting those short straws because he was born with the genes that gave him schizophrenia, when he was in his twenties . After that, you would think, the fates would have stopped playing practical jokes on him. But they couldn’t because they are pricks. Peter was given the genes that produced, in him, interstitial pulmonary fibrosis. He kept pulling short straws until he died at fifty when the disease stole the oxygen from his lungs and left him to die like a fish pulled from the water and put on the dock of a lake.

My sister-in-law never really recovered from my brother’s death 12 years ago.

It’s sad, and it is tragic how life soured for my brother's widow. The stories about her life have the taste of week old wine to them. But there is something heroic about her as well. She’s like a character from the novel Valley of the Dolls if Solzhenitsyn had written it rather than Jacqueline Susann.

But in my small apartment, her despair is like an invasive species that can’t help itself and takes over everything in its path. Again, not her fault; this is the cruelty of mental illness. It affects both the sufferer and those emotionally close to them.

So my hustles to stay afloat are harder to materialise, and I see ruin loom before me. Will I make it past rent day next week? I haven't a clue. What I do know is, that I am under no illusion of what being homeless would be like for me as I am near the age of 60. It’s not going to be like a Steinbeck novel where I camp in the woods and other homeless people who kip on the ground near me call me “Pops," while I teach them about socialism. No, I know it would be a brutal and short end for me. So I better keep hustling.

By the way, I finished the book about my dad, me, my family, and the political times we lived in. It deserves to be published because it is a good book. But considering my dad’s agent won't return my emails, finding a publisher will be a hustle in itself. Take care, John

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