How I came to know Ray in the late 1980s is a story in itself. Ray and I adopted each other after my dad's passing in 1996, I call him pa, and he's Bulldog Security for his little square of dirt in West Huckabuck, just north of the Soy processing plant in Marion, Ohio. He's has done 3 bits with the state correctional facilities and has been living in a tar paper shack insulated with cardboard in the poorest section of the city, and up until a month ago, his sole source of income was his SSI check.
Ray loves 3 things, mainly, not necessarily in this order, his Kessler's, his pets and strays and scratch off lottery tickets. After his mom's passing in 2016, his hovel and the house next door that his oldest and youngest brothers live in, were deed transferred to both Ray and his oldest brother so that neither party could sell part of the Roberts' family estate, estimated aggregate value, 10-12 thousand dollars. The imaginative bureaucrats at SSI without looking at either property or the living conditions estimated that Ray was earning $12000 in annual income from those two properties. He was paying his youngest brother's rent to his older brother, not the other way around, anyway, that is no nevermined.
Have a look at Ray's custom interior design (taken from my Droid camera earlier today):
Ray may be an alcoholic, but has been a bedrock of consistency in my life since my father's passing, consistently drunk, consistently funny, consistently magical, planted solidly at 459 Decatur, West Huckabuck. And now he ain't Gotta Buck.
Will keep you posted on our progress getting his benefits back. In the mean time, he is penniless, with a pug, two indoor cats and anywhere from 4 to 6 feral cats he feeds twice a day for this entire New Millennium.
That's All Folks?