plaintiff: madison from westland, michigan. black pantsuit, fitted black top beneath, hair parted in the middle and pulled back. looks as prim and proper and meek and mild as the leader of the usher board down at your mama’s church. accordion of truth™ in hand.
defendant: marcellas from westland, michigan. tight navy dress shirt, skinny plaid tie, navy slacks, chinstrap-ish beard. damn, his shirt is tight. i’m not saying it’s not aesthetically pleasing? but you know how as you get older you start appreciating shit differently? like, when your first thought about a bar is “ooh, that place has good comfy chairs?” anyway, when is see tight clothes i can’t help but think about how hard it must be to reach something on a high shelf or to take a deep breath. marcellas is definitely breathing slowly through his nose. he looks good, though.
the complaint: madison is suing her brother for a playstation and, yes, they are adults!
what does she want: $1192 for unreturned property and loans
how it went down: madison begins by saying she and her brother are from the west side of detroit and grew up “in a stable home.” wow must be nice, madison! she says they were never in the street and always did well in school. you know when people talk like this it’s a prologue to their telling you that they swindled an old lady or stabbed a bus driver or some shit. maybe i’m just salty because i come from a poor, poverty-stricken, extremely unstable home, but whenever people start that shit about “i got all As and i come from a great family” get ready for them to tell you about a recent grand larceny or some shit.
plot twist: she said all that so she could present her brother as a wannabe thug. he smokes, he drinks, he got shot, then he smoked and drank some more, but on crutches. honestly i should’ve seen that petty betrayal coming because if you met me and any one of my sisters i’d introduce us like “hi i’m sam and this is my mother’s stupidest kid.” greg comes to marcellas’ defense by saying that even if you grew up in a “good” home, if that home is smack in the middle of a shitty environment then some of that badness might ooze past your white picket fence and infect you nonetheless. then he goes on to give a lengthy history lesson about displaced black factory workers who came from the south to live in detroit and i bet madison wishes she had just got on with the loan and shit.
marcellas says that he grew up in a house with his mom and grandma and didn’t meet his father until later in life, but he was basically a good kid until he started fighting in high school. i’m not going to unspool too much of this thread because bitch i’m not 23 and me, but WHAT THE FUCK WAS OL GIRL TALKING ABOUT. are we redefining “stable homes” by some new metric now? if you don’t meet your father until sophomore year of high school you gotta hop off that pedestal you’re looking down on the rest of us from, babe.
greg asks madison for more details on how bad marcellas is and she can’t provide any, and if i am sitting through this nonsense just to watch some standard-issue sibling rivalry i could instead just pick up the phone, call my sister jane from a blocked number, and start relitigating a fight i should have won in 1989. listen to me, if my sister dragged me on television to argue about some old shit and tell judge mathis what a brat i was in middle school when she could just pull the fuck up and slap box me in the street in front of my house like a normal person, i would run over her in the parking lot outside nbc studios!
marcellas contends that it is madison who is the “bad” one, and he pulls printed screenshots from his accordion of truth™ of her instagram, on which (in which?) she is posed with her ass out and claiming to be in a gang. lmao what! she’s dressed like a nun on her off day and she’s got her cakes out on social media?! somebody get their mom on down to the goddamn studio so she can spank them both.
the ruling: madison purchased a ps4 (yes i had to look up what that is, fuck y’all!) off a website called flex shopper dot com. flex shopper dot com, according to her, is a website where you can purchase things based on how good your credit is. as the product of a shitty home, i am very well acquainted with all the scams companies use to prey on poor people. i didn’t really have to check to know that it’s the kind of rent-to-own scam where you end up paying $9 a week for approximately 637 weeks for a pair of airpods that will be obsolete by the time you’re done paying for them, but I DID and IT IS. i have ended up in every predatory debt trap imaginable, and it’s such a hard way to go through your early life. seriously, a payday loan is like shooting yourself in the foot the day before a marathon, but at the time you’re most in need of one it feels like a goddamn lifeline. it’s only when they come to collect that 100% interest that you realized you’re screwed. poor people can’t get a fucking break. [enter liz warren/bernie sanders stump speech here]
madison lent marcellas the playstation for two weeks. when she asked for it back, he sent her a picture of a pawn ticket (put capitalism in jail!) from when he pawned the console and said “if you give me $20 i’ll go get your game out.” she called the pawn shop and found out he’d never given them the money. marcellas says that madison had the ps4 and never used it so he asked if he could borrow it, and that in exchange he’d give her a pair of beats headphones. he has printed text proof™ that this was their agreement. madison pulls out her own printed text proof™ that marcellas had agreed not only to give the game back but to also repay a loan of $90. she circles a bunch of stuff on her evidence, gregory looks it over, judgment for the plaintiff.
if these numbers are correct, that means she spent $1102 on a playstation. target, walmart, and best buy all have the current price for a brand new ps4 listed at $249.99 plus applicable sales tax. madison paid an $800 poverty tax on a gaming unit because, you know, free markets or whatever. someone get the ceo of flex shopper dot com in front of the judge, this should be a crime!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: no not really, but man when he goes off on a teaching/preaching tangent? GOOD LORD.
*bangs gavel*