Authors: Christina McDowell
The woman came back, took a seat in front of me, and slid a piece of paper across the table with the estimate: $15,000 to $20,000. I couldn't believe my eyes.
“We can't guarantee that's what it will sell for, but this is the estimate,” she said. I didn't even think about it. “Sell them.”
I
t's pretty hard to get fired from a dive bar where it's normal for customers (mostly men) to vomit in paper cups during football season, but I managed to do it. Just another night at work, and I was late again. Fiona had already left, and Jimmy was taking orders. The bar was a mess, napkins floated about the floor, dishes piled up on tables that needed to be cleared. Before I could get settled, Jerry, the owner, walked in with a date. I cleaned up as fast as I could and took his and her orders, hoping he wouldn't notice that I'd just arrived. At the end of the night, he pulled Jimmy aside, whispered something to him, didn't look at me, and then left. When I turned in my money and credit card slips at the end of the night, Jimmy sat me down and told me I was fired. “I'm just the messenger. Sorry, baby. You've had more than three write-ups, and you know how nightlife goes in LA: girls are always comin' and goin'.”
It wasn't long before I received the letter that I had been denied any financial aid from Loyola Marymount University. But three days after I was fired, I received my check in the mail from Bonhams and Butterfields. The Lichtenstein prints had sold for $13,000. I shook with relief. It felt so
good
, like I could breathe again without a man's hands on me demanding drink orders with cigarette breath.
Although the money wasn't technically mine, I'd never had that much money before. It felt like someone had just handed me a million dollars. I was reckless with it. Irresponsible. Underneath it all, I knew that I didn't deserve it; and with all the seeds of doubt and confusion emerging around my father, a part of me felt dirty from it. I certainly didn't appreciate it or use it to take care of myselfâlike, see a doctor or a dentist, which I hadn't done in years and desperately needed to do. I bought food with it, but mostly I ate out. I met Rob and some friends up in Lake Tahoe to go skiing. I bought memoirs and psychology books like
The Glass Castle
,
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
,
The Myth of Sanity
. I discovered the cable TV series
Six Feet Under
and locked myself in my room for a few months, consumed by death and stories of survival.
I was blinded by this vain pain, as well as the feeling that because I was going through hardship, I could look down upon anyone who hadn't experienced something similar. You just think they're a waste of your time because they'll never understand you, on top of this feeling of “I am
owed
this; can't you see how hard I've been working? Hustling without the help of a man!” (Was this true?) It was the perspective of the privileged, entitled, and impressionable girl still in me, the only difference being that she was just hanging upside down, not taking responsibility for any of it.
As my bank account decreased from $10,000, to $7,000, to $5,000, to $2,000, to $1,000, I was slipping into a defiant rebellion of sloth and pain, waiting for my father to come home and save me. I wasn't looking for a job. I didn't clean my room. My tub was layered with scum; my sink, toothpaste-splattered; and my floors, covered in dust. I woke up at three o'clock each day. My hair was so long, it hung nearly down to my waist. I hadn't bothered to cut it. I'd never suffered from depression as a young girl. I was always happy, running after things.
I'm going to be a movie star!
The lead in all the school plays: Wendy in
Peter Pan
, Cinderella in
Into the Woods
. I wanted to be seen! But now I wanted nothing but to hide; to walk through the world invisible and voiceless.
I was turning into the roommate everyone hates: who doesn't clean up, who strolls in late at night from God knows where with my latest “Josh rebound.” There was the guy in law school I met at a nightclub and ran down thirty flights of stairs to get away from. (He lived in a high-rise.) Then there was the guy who owned a clothing store and gave me free designer jeans. And the Mormon: “
Soooo
 . . . you're a virgin who doesn't drink?” Baffled when he kept calling and asking me out again before I finally texted him back, “
So sorry
, this isn't going to work out.” I would leave trails of shoes and articles of clothing in the house's common area. And I started stealing food. Mostly Dave's, because it was always healthy and fresh. I would tiptoe into the kitchen like a burglar, making sure no one could hear me downstairs, holding my breath as I opened the refrigerator door. Then quietly removing the turkey, the salami, the sugar snap peas, and the hummus, eating as much as I could all at once like a starving hyena scavenging through the African wild. For a while, I thought I was getting away with it, stealing shampoo when I needed it, hoping no one would notice. And when I ran into Noah or Dave in the hall, it was that look you give when you know you've wronged somebody; that gaze that bores into the other person's eyes and that speaks only denial. And he or she knows what you've done. It is called incomprehensible demoralization.
I started getting sick a lot. At least every two months, shivering in self-depravation, snotty tissues below the bedside table, dry mouth from Nyquil, and the sour nausea from an empty stomach with only the slight swish of cheap orange juice at its bottom.
“Hi, you've reached Gayle Prousalis. Please leave a message . . .”
I
wish I could remember which came first: wanting to go back to school and applying for financial aid and getting rejected, or receiving the money from the Lichtenstein prints. I can't assume one or the other because the explanation of how I acted might reveal something different, although it is ugly either way. And the truth behind both possibilities remains the same.
It's possible that I had sold the Lichtenstein prints first. I blew through the money and then decided to try going back to school. And once I discovered I was still technically a student there, and could have gone back had I not blown through that money, I fell down a dark black hole of shame. Meanwhile, I was still paralyzed financially and ineligible for any monetary aid, because I believed my father was sure to rescue me from this godforsaken mess and any skepticism growing inside my head would lead me back to the water well of a deep depression.
But there was also another possibility: that I had tried to go back to school first, was denied financial aid, and by the time the money arrived from the sale of the Lichtenstein prints, it was too late. So I gave up. I felt nothing mattered anymore while some invisible tattoo artist continued inking the word
shame
across my heart. And I blew through that money, perpetuating the oncoming self-fulfilling prophecy of self-defeat while I continued stealing, speeding, cheating, and spending money that wasn't earnedâI was becoming just like my father.
I
t was cold outside. I stood looking at Josh's furrowed brow under the willow tree. He was staring down at my right leg. There was a metal wire sticking out of my thigh. I yanked on it, tugging at my muscle tissue, and pulled it out as though it were a thread unraveling the seam of something intangible. I turned around. The ivy of our estate was alive and stirring around each shutter. I became lightheaded and my thigh turned black and blue, as blood began to pour out of me. When I turned back around, Josh was looking at my chest. Another wire was stuck in between my ribs. I looked down calmly and pulled on it. As it grazed each hollow rib, a sound and feeling like the crescendo of a xylophone passed through me. I felt dizzy and collapsed onto the grass. Josh rushed over. He wanted to take me to the hospital. “I'm fine, Josh, stop.” Then I sat up, and there was another wire poking out of my chest, and another wire and another, and I pulled out each one as it passed through my empty torso, and more blood gushed out of me until I couldn't breathe.
I woke up wailing, drenched in sweat, with my hands clutching my chest. Dave and Atticus ran into my room as I cried for Josh. “Here, baby girl.” They handed me a pipe full of weed and instructed, “Suck on this.” I inhaled before I could regain consciousness of where I was, in this strange room, in this strange house. When I turned on the light, I thought I would see my bulletin board with my prom corsages and bumper stickers, and the door to my bedroom (
It's on the right, not the left
!
) and the yellow chandelier (
It should be hanging above my bed
). But there was nothing, just a blue wall and a spinning ceiling fan.
People say that when you lose a limb, you experience something called phantom pain, where after the limb is removed, you still sense it there. You still think it is attached and part of you. As if your brain is wired over and over again to believe something to be a certain way, waiting for it to arrive at its wanted destination. But when it's goneâthe wires, severed, don't know where to go, lost in the illusion of something tangible that makes you feel insane.
On January 24, 2008, I received my father's last letter from prison. He would be departing his “Chateau” on February 11, and would call from his cell phone when he was free. Literally.
BILLIONS LOST AS STOCKS CRASH!
NIGHTMARE ON WALL STREET BRINGS MORE BIG LOSSES!
LEHMAN COLLAPSE SENDS SHOCKWAVE ROUND WORLD!
WHO CAN RESCUE THE ECONOMY?
T
he world was stricken with panic. Millions lost jobs, lost their homes, lost their life savings as white-collar fraud made international headlines.
I remember exactly where I was when I read about Bernie Madoff's arrest in December 2008. I was sitting alone at my desk, the boys were swinging on the rope swing in the backyard below me and smoking under the umbrella tree, while I obsessively read and Googled articles about the mastermind of the multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme and his family, fixating closelyâmy nose just inches from the computer screenâon the images of FBI agents escorting this sophisticated businessman up the same steps that I had walked along at 500 Pearl Street in New York City four and a half years earlier. And when I read about his two grown sonsâthey were the ones who called the federal authorities, claiming they didn't know about the massive fraud. The feeling I got was unsettling.
Something's wrong. Something's very, very wrong
. Did they know? I didn't want to admit it to myself; it was invoking an investigation inside of me, and I squashed it as best I could because the fleeting thoughts were unbearable. Besides, Senator Barack Obama had won the presidential election and I was leaning on a glimmer of
hope
! I wanted to be done with crashes, losing homes, and debt. I wanted the chance to recover. I believed that the crash I had experienced personally would be it for me. Done! Finito! Oh, but it wasn't even close to the slow-burning wreck about to wreak havoc in my life and take me down farther than I'd ever gone.
My father was back.
I
n 2003, before he was arrested, my father filed a malpractice suit against a law firm he'd hired to sue a stockbroker that had lost him millions of dollars. The law firm was Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll. He was seeking $25 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages. I don't know specifically what it was about. I was around thirteen or fourteen. It had something to do with the dot-com crash, and the case had been pending ever since his incarceration. In August, after my father's release, when he was living in a halfway house in Anacostia (a Washington, DC, neighborhood formerly known as “the murder capital of the world”), my divorced parents were forced to appear in court together as a “married” couple for the trial.
My father was convinced that he could win my mother back. They would come face-to-face for the first time since he had visited us during his surprise “furlough” two years earlier. But a few weeks before the trial, Richard proposed to my mother while they were on safari in Africa. I was sure Richard had done it on purpose; calculated, a strike for the win! The dates were too close together for him not to have known. I'm not sure if my father knew my mother was engaged when they showed up together for the trial, but many years later, my mother would tell me that my father had, in a desperate bid to win her back, leaned into her and said, “Babe, what if I can get all your jewelry back?”
My father was keeping my sisters and me updated on the progress of the trial via email each day. “Hi Girls, Mom finished her testimony this morning in court today and she performed beautifully . . . and she held up well. I think the jury likes her sincerity and her pretty Escada outfit. This afternoon I was called to the stand, and I testified all afternoon. Dad was asked to state your birth dates (silly question) . . . and of course, he knew them all by heart. Of course, Dad wowed all the women jurors with his Brioni suit and Hermès tie . . . Stay tuned for more! Dad.”
H
e stood by the curb of American Airlines in a Burberry trench coat, popped collar, and brand-new aviator sunglasses. His hair and mustache back to black. He had gained a little weight after being released from the halfway house. He had moved into a house in Virginia that belonged to the parents of an old friend from law school; in exchange for free living, he would take care of her ailing father in the retirement home down the street while she lived in San Francisco with her husband.
It was Christmas again. An unusually chilly afternoon for the typically 72-degrees-and-sunny California, and Los Angeles International Airport was jammed with angst-ridden drivers. I stepped out of the car to greet my father.