I have been looking forward to today for weeks now - years actually, if I put it all together… All the pain, the loss, the heartbreak, the embarrassment, the sheer waste and diluted value, the meltdowns - oh good lord, the meltdowns. That’s right, not just tears, the fucking MELTDOWNS - tears? Pfffft. The tears would just add to Lake Baikal. I mean, even the bigger meltdowns, the huddled-in-a-heaping-mess-in-a-random-room-corner-shaking meltdowns have happened so often that I’ve lost count. My poor parents, how it must kill them inside. It is one thing to endure your own hurts, but when we hurt for others we love it is even more intensified… My poor, beautiful, good-hearted parents who have only ever asked one thing of their children: to be happy.
They let us choose our schools, our friends, our clothes, our hobbies and our sports, our brand of computers, our first cars, our majors (or my lack thereof)… they gave us all the freedoms they could afford with only one request in return: that we follow whatever it is that makes us happy. That sets our souls on fire. And this is how I repay them? I digress.
Don’t you wish you could really do that sometimes? Digress! Just be Aladdin with his three wishes, like: “Please god, just give me three re-do’s in my life. I promise I’ll make them count!! I just need three, in my entire life - I’ll spend them wisely! Please, please, just let me go back in time for a do-over. Just let me explain to my Younger Self what happens if I make that choice, even though my Younger Self will try to ignore me however she can; she’ll think and tell me (no, she’ll yell at me) that there is NOTHING in the world that would - or even could! - make her agree to give up whatever it is my Future Self is asking her to… But god, please, just let me go back long enough, and give me power enough, to try and convince her anyway… Please. Please just let my Younger Self know that what will come if she doesn’t give it up, is actually her losing even more than she can conceive…”
March 15th, 2019 is the day I agreed to be out of my house, relinquishing possession to my mentally unstable, recreational drug addict, exceedingly wealthy via a nouveau riche situation, cowardly estranged defacto spouse. That’s quite the title these days, isn’t it? In the interest of time from here on out I’ll just refer to him as the cunt, hope you’re not too offended. He’s Australian after all, so it’s quite socially acceptable. Fuckwit fits the bill nicely too though? I tell you what, you can refer to him however you desire going forward because sometimes I too change my mind, depending on what he’s most recently inflicted on me…
He has taken any and everything he can from me, and from those I love. And the loopholes geared toward the rich in both the American and the Australian judicial systems have allowed it.
I finally, once-and-for-all, left him in early 2014 after he embarrassed me quite publicly on my 28th birthday. I have since lost both homes we shared in Australia - although in all fairness our main apartment in Sydney was always his via the trust - I knew that going into it. But oh good lord, how I adored it, the family members who all lived around it, and the life we could have built together in it. I never wanted the beautiful (and again very expensive) apartment in what I like to call Buttfuckbrisbane and I was very open about that before we purchased it. So the agreement with that acquisition was to also buy a home for us to share in my locale of choice: near both sides of my family, in West Hollywood… We spent over a year choosing the right one.
When I left him I said Sydney’s out (as it belongs to the trust), he wants Brisbane (spent a couple mil purchasing it off the plans) and all I want is to go home. That meant I chose our humble little $416,000 condo over staying with him in a fraudulent relationship where he lied about his coke and pinger habits, maybe his sexual preferences and god only knows what else, and oh yes, how can I forget? I chose to both be, and require, authenticity in my life over staying with him, and ALL. THAT. MONEY.
How is it so difficult for some people to tell the truth?? I just don’t understand it… Maybe some of them lie to themselves so much that they actually believe it, and then it becomes easy to lie to everyone else as well.
You know I read a book when I left him called “Difficult Mothers” by Dr. Teri Apter and the 40-something-year-old cunt who I was defacto married to for years has identical behavior to that of the 14-year-old girl living in the American Northeast in “Chapter 4: The Controlling Mother”. I mean, everything made sense after reading it, but that image still terrifies me.
In the subsequent years I have drained my IRA, borrowed money from friends and family around the globe, maxed out my credit cards, taken bank loans, given up various elements of my hopes and dreams all to pay my various lawyers for the various (and frivolous!) lawsuits he’s brought on me - his aim to bleed me dry in litigation. I’ve lost untold amounts of time and energy that could have - no, should have - been spent building my business and career to now over five years and FOUR (but perhaps soon if his threats aren’t empty six) lawsuits.
No, we do not have children. As my father says, “They didn’t even have a pet?” The cunt was never allowed a pet as a child, which I find so sad. And so revealing. Now he claims to want a monkey to make up for it, but really it’s just another lie; another one of his sad, empty begs for attention.
What on earth could he want from me anymore? More importantly, what does he want from me anymore? What in god’s name is any of this about anymore??
Fuck. It. All. That’s what I thought every time I gave up something else to him just to get away - just, fuck it! I’ll get a different one another time… It doesn’t matter. It isn’t worth all this - nothing is worth all this! This waste and pain and stuck energy of refusing to move on in life… None of it matters anymore - whatever has been lost is worth my freedom - just an ugly part of life that some of us endure… Today was the day I was supposed to be free. FREE. Free. Just like Bobby McGee…
“Freedom’s just another word, for nothin’ left to lose…
Nothin’, don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t free…”
THAT is what I wish I could go back and tell my Younger Self - I mean, apart from running the other way from him of course! Is it better to have loved and lost - EVERYTHING - than to have never loved at all?? I just don’t know anymore… Imagine what value I could have saved for the world if I had chosen to stay away from this toxic human in my early 20’s… when I was a beautifully ignorant moron with my whole life ahead of me.
I had today perfectly organized: I would remove my SmartLock & custom glass doorknob (that I ordered based on my all-time favorite Disney flick and brilliant Lewis Carroll story) from Alice In Wonderland…
I would grab a midday yoga class down the street from one of my lawyer’s offices, (my newest lawyer happens to be in the same bloody building as the cunt’s team of ethically void lawyers - because you need an entire plaintiff’s team when lying and harassing so blatantly)…
I would walk over, pass off the set of door locks (because I did NOT know how to put those back in, nor could I find the keys to the tragically ugly door knobs from seven years ago), garage door clickers, the mail keys, & a painting from the same series as a birthday gift we gave his father years ago (- oh, I have got to post a photo of this for sheer amusement)…
AND I WOULD BE FREE.
Done. Forever. He’d feel like he won, and I would have my freedom back to move on with my life. Win-win, after so much losing. But that is NOT what happened today.
Can someone please explain this to me - is there a psychiatrist in the audience? Please? There is NOTHING else I can come up with, for the cunt to take from me - surely with a wee bit of logic on board he would drop the remaining lawsuits (with court dates stretching INTO NEXT YEAR) and stop filing on the two more he’s threatening: get this, one is against my American ex-fiance (whom he is obscenely jealous of) and another one against one of my past lawyers. Is the cunt sounding as crazy to you yet as he does to those of us who have been in this for over five years now? Anyway… walking into my midday Vinyasa class I had one, very focused vision in my mind’s eye: VOILÁ! Freedom.
But… Cue my lovely (super hot) yoga teacher as we moved through the meditations…
“Okay, we’re going to move into some more restorative poses before Shava - OH MY GOD!” he shouted.
I opened my eyes and looked up from my mat to find a dozen or so odd SWAT team members making their way from the back patio of our gym into the yoga room.
“SWAT” (in case you were wondering - American or not) stands for “Special Weapons and Tactics”. They straight up had helmets, shields, half of them shotguns (and not the pretty, slow, old wooden Weatherby’s I grew up on) and the other half Glocks, all firearms raised & ready. They had the smoothie bar kid (probably just graduated college) 6’4” tattooed, ripped and just plain sexy, handcuffed as they rustled through his backpack: (we would later find out he was on his break on the outdoor, fourth story patio, when the lockdown happened, AirPods in ears rockin' out, which made for a very dangerous and uncomfortable interaction when the SWAT team arrived, creeping through a flush-with-mall-wall-stucco emergency door…) his sexy wrists were bloody from the metal restraints behind his back.
As they asked us to leave I, of course, acquiesced, and got up to put my socks and shoes on; a SWAT guy apologized for interrupting us: “No, no,” I said, “Don’t apologize - thank you for being here. I’m guessing.” Two of them stood above me, weapons raised, as I completed my lace-tying. I then made my way over to the hand sanitizing wipes: “Excuse me, so sorry to bother, you but I just.. need… to.. get - there.” They partied ways for me to clean my hands and wipe down my water bottle. I think they were afraid I would turn into SNL’s “Angry White Lady” because not a minute later as my male yoga teacher only tried to put his shoes on they snapped at him to do so in the main studio where they were huddling us together doing a head-count of the day’s check-in’s.
“Stay away from the windows!” we were warned, “…with an active shooter & a bomb on the premisses you don’t want to be near them of something goes wrong!”
The entire time all I could do was lash out in my head: “NO. FUCKING. WAY. There is no fucking WAY this is happening today!! Today is my day of FREEDOM!! Goddamnit!”
You know, it wasn’t so much the situation that scared me, what I remember most was the metallic perfection of the weapons and the immense amounts of ammunition strapped to these people’s bodies. These people who I didn’t find particularly possessing any type of superior intelligence to hold such power in their mediocre little power-desperate hands.
From there we were lead, single-file, out the back patio to the secret staircase, down the flights of stairs into the bowels of the newly remodeled billion-dollar mall, (ironically owned by an Australian man! Hahaha!) hugging tightly against walls and pausing every time a police officer needed to take armed post at some kind of a possible danger: a door, a lookout, a command from a walkie-talkie and we were constantly being shushed… until we were safely across Century Park West.
I had to laugh at more idiocracy when we passed a Westfield official who repeatedly inquired loudly and authoritarian-like, as if she now considered herself some type of law enforcement since the active shooter arrived: “Where is your group coming from?! Where is your group coming from?! WHERE is your group COMING FROM?!” The man in front of me sported a (quite lovely) leather weight-lifting belt, most of us sweaty with sweat towels around our necks, holding water bottles and nothing else - others were still dripping wet from the showers their hair wrapped in larger towels, and pretty much every single one of us was in a version of workout clothes…
“Ummmmm… Equinox,” someone finally responded to her vocally with both hands stretching outward. Like, duh, please use your head instead of getting us shushed again.
I have never wanted to be that girl who can’t be without her phone, even at yoga, so here I was now, really proving my confident hippie point: no wallet, no phone, no chapstick - sweaty and surely soon-to-be smelly as well, my face not washed, my teeth not brushed… and a meeting with my lawyer to hand off my home for the past eight years.
Put yourself in my shoes for a moment and you will realize that I make a point to be intimidatingly hot when I approach the cunt and/or his counsel. I rarely take the time for hair or makeup, but man do I relish in it when I know I will make them uncomfortable. They’re all quite short, small, very insecure and very easily intimidated. I love pointing awkward things out on the record about their choices between their stutters: one of my favorites was the junior associate’s bottle opener middle finger ring as he stammered and froze amongst another one of my abusive depositions. I wear heels and fabulous ensembles, and walk directly up to them so I can look straight into their terrified little eyes. These stories are for another time though!
Today I walked in as is. Sweaty, towel around my neck, water bottle in hand, no shirt of course - because that’s in my locker too - I was sports bra only… I walked straight into the cunt’s lawyers’ office and told them, “Sorry! I don’t have what I promised to bring. It’s in my car. And the keys to my car are in my locker. And that locker is in my gym, which is in the mall with the active shooter and bomb that made the Amazon bookstore smoke out the roof. You are of course welcome to go get it though - please. I’d adore it if you did: everything’s in one box in the backseat of my Range Rover.” In this moment I loved taking care of my body (more than I usually do) just to stand there, letting it all be right there, unavoidable in the poor, scared, evil little puppy’s face. Even as insecure as I was for not being done-up, I think my sheer rawness actually might have been more effective at intimidating him.
And thus bringing us back to the upshot of this story: irony.
I am now sitting at the shorter side of The Beverly Hilton’s lobby bar (if you know it, you know it) in my sweat-dried and yes, stench-floating yoga clothes, drinking beers and writing this story on little pieces of receipt paper the bartender is kind enough to keep bringing me when I’ve filled the front and back of the last trailing one he brought me before. What an image, right? The day I’ve been looking forward to for months if not years!
And I don’t have any money - I didn’t have my ID, I had the front desk print out one of my old bills to use as proof that I’m of-age! I promised him I’d either recite my AmEx number for him to type into the machine to pay, or that I would be back if that didn’t work - and of course I promised him I tip well, when I am allowed back into my gym, and into my locker, to get my wallet, and my car, and put on the rest of my clothes… He said he believes me.
What now? Well, I’m looking forward to Monday: my freedom will come Monday. I think, anyway.
This too shall pass. This too, shall pass.