Teenage Runaway...NOT!

Now fast forward a month from the timeframe of the last episode and we are a week before Walter, Jr.'s court date on the shoplifting charge where he will find out if he goes to Juvenile Detention or gets his hand slapped with a little probation. He hasn't quit smoking and his girlfriend is providing him with the cigarettes because, of course, she's gainfully employed while her loser boyfriend, a.k.a. Walter, Jr., can't seem to get a job. I've already told him he was going to quit because I was tired of him hawking up phlegm during the night and spitting it on the walls of his bedroom.

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you - you just read that the boy spit on his bedroom walls. In fact, he spit so much that it ran down the walls and dried phlegm accumulated on the baseboards to such an extent that the baseboards were brown. The walls were streaked with brown. The two walls next to the head and to the side of his bed were the absolute worst. It was extremely disgusting. What I really couldn't understand was that this boy would sleep next to and probably touch something so utterly disgusting but he wouldn't use a towel more than once because as he said, "I don't want to dry my face with something that's touched my balls." This is also the boy who wouldn't eat the bit of french fry he had touched with his fingers. He ate down to the part that he was holding and put the little bits of leftover fries in a pile on his plate.

Back to the story...that Walter, Jr. disagreed with my assessment of the situation would be putting it mildly. He was adament that he wasn't quitting his nicotine habit until he was good and ready to do it. I was adament that he was and told him that his girlfriend wasn't coming over until he was more compliant with my wishes. In my mind, no girlfriend equaled no cigarette supply equaled COLD TURKEY. Oh, and he could hand over his cellphone as punishment for his attitude and language.

With my proclamation made, Walter, Jr. had a proclamation of his own and that was that he was leaving - packing his stuff and moving out. And by 10:00 PM, he was out but not quite where he had thought he was going to be. He was relocated from his girlfriend's house by police escort to the local teen runaway shelter where they took his phone and his cigarettes. Sometimes kharma is a cruel mistress but you've got to love the irony of it.

On Friday, I popped over to Alltel and had his phone service switched to an older phone I kept as a backup and boy was I in for a surprise. I was absolutely amazed at the number of text messages he was receiving from different girls and each one thought she was his one and only girlfriend. I later found out that he had been able to convince at least one girl from Mississippi to send him money! People hear me now - the economy isn't our nation's number one national crisis - stupidity is!

That evening, Walter, Sr. and I paid Walter, Jr. a little visit to see if there had been any improvement in his attitude. He was crying and begging us to let him come home. It seems he had encountered some kids who had really had it rough and weren't just pretending to be tough. I'll admit it - he touched my heart strings and I talked his father into letting him come home that night. Sometimes, I can be so gullible!

The next day, Walter, Jr. was right back to his same old tricks - attitude and saying he wanted to go back to live with his mother. As far as I was concerned, I was fine with him leaving to go live with his mother. Don't let the door hit you on the butt on the way out was my attitude but Walter, Sr. didn't see it that way. He wasn't ready to give up on his child yet and I could sort of understand that but then he wasn't physically there dealing with it every day and I was tired of having to deal with everything on my own while he went back to Perry, FL to his childless home full of peace and quiet. I couldn't understand what was taking so long about getting the renovations at his place done so we could put his house on the market so that was getting on my nerves too. He had been at it for eight months. An entire house can be built from scratch in that amount of time. However, we'll cover that storyline in another episode.