Candice - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/105/take-a-negro-home

After being married for just over a year Alicia and I, or rather Alicia decided and I followed along, to help out a friend of hers from back home - Candice.

Candice, as great a friend as she is to Alicia, is also one of the worst friends and influences on Alicia that I can think of. Whenever Alicia gets around Candice, she is a different woman. Instead of being the college educated individual that she is, she turns into a very ghetto version of herself. Even with that horrible personality influence on Alicia, we agreed that without our help Candice was headed in a bad direction.

Candice had a history of bad decisions. She made multiple bad choices with boyfriends, her jobs she always seemed to shoot herself in the foot with making it impossible for her to keep a steady paycheck which lead to an excessive amount of debt, and then let's not forget the moments in Candice's life that we try not to talk about that include her being a prostitute. There's no nice way to put it, Candice made some bad choices in her life and decided to be a sex worker to pay the bills some weeks.

That's where we came in. Alicia wanted to get her out of that downward spiral so we invited her to live with us and to get her hair license in Utah so she could start fresh up here. The set up was simple. We would provide her with a place to live, and she didn't have to pay any rent. Meanwhile she had to go to cosmotology school so that she could get a job here in Utah.

It did not work out that well.

Throughout her entire stay with us she always wanted us to pay for things for her and she was powerless to be active in her own life. If we asked her to take the bus to school so she could get a job, we might as well had been asking her to walk 50 miles barefoot in the snow uphill both ways. Without fail she would spend more time in our apartment doing nothing, and her excuses always astounded me. No matter how kind people were around her, she never fit in here.

She was the super minority in Utah, and everything reminded her of that. As friendly as people were, she was constantly reminded that she wasn't comfortable with the weird little culture that is the Provo bubble. As much as it was VERY possible for her to get a job here, live on her own, and get away from the world that she was living in, she chose to go back to Las Vegas.

To this day Candice is one of the must frustrating things that you can talk to Alicia and I about because we constantly try to help her, and instead of trying to use our help to change her life, she uses our help to pay off quick debts because she got into the habit of knowing that if she needed an extra $100 that Alicia would be kind enough to give it to her. To this day we have a plan to get Candice out of Las Vegas, but she refuses to do what it takes.