My Bio - Part 44

Early 2010:

Tom has been laid off for nearly 17 months. I appreciate not having to worry about him being on the road so much and enjoy seeing him have more time for the things he loves. But even though we get along well, having him home all the time is getting old. It’d be nice if he could find a job, even if it didn’t pay much or come with insurance. With our online jobs, we’d only need something part-time.

Thinking back to our adventurous days, we once boldly moved to Oregon, then to California—jobless and homeless—which nearly did us in. Sometimes, if you want out of a burning room, you’ve got to charge through the fire headfirst, not that we were necessarily in a burning room. But each long-distance move has been harder than the last, so I think it’s time to retire that adventurous side I never knew I had until I met Tom. It was fun and a learning experience, but one can only walk a tightrope so many times before falling too far to get back up. Even though the winters here are a bit colder than I’d like (it’s snowed a couple of times since we’ve been here), I love the woods. In Arizona, the flat, open land meant you could hear loud car stereos from miles away. Here, I love the hilly terrain and all the trees, even if neither cacti nor palms are native to this area. I miss the desert at times, and I sometimes think it’d be neat to live in a tropical place, but for now, it looks like we’re staying put. No guarantees, but that’s the plan. At least for now.

I’m trying to become a more forgiving person, though I know I’m not alone in struggling with this, despite all the talk of forgiveness out there. While I’ve mostly moved on from the anger I felt toward my sister, I still don’t know that I can forgive her. And I definitely can’t forgive those who created the “evidence” that cost me half a year of freedom, time with Tom, thousands of dollars, and untold degradation, anger, and fear. Forgiving people who don’t believe they’ve done anything wrong is a challenge, to say the least.

Late 2010:

There are only two hours left of 2010 as I write this. I decided I would update this bio at the end of every year rather than wait a few years. It’s easier to remember things that way and a lot seems to be happening to me at the same time not much is happening.

We still live in the old trailer on Jesse’s land. This is the longest time in the three rentals we’ve rented since we left Arizona. Jesse still drives me crazy at times too, with his dogs and his loud vehicles. But it still beats the city. Jesse’s now out of work, so that means we hear more of him than his dogs. And I don’t mean home as in fired or laid off. He hurt his back, so he told us, and is trying to retire or get on disability.

On Christmas Day of 2009, I was chatting with Marie. Had someone told me I’d be chatting with Maliheh of all people on the next Christmas I never would’ve believed it in a million years. Yeah, for me California’s definitely been the “state of reunion.” And a place full of surprises despite its disappointments.

I first found Maliheh on Facebook last May. I messaged her the day after her 53rd birthday, though I didn’t know at the time that the previous day was her birthday. My intentions at first weren’t to be very nice. I didn’t care to bully or harass her, I just thought I’d “surprise” her, so to speak, and casually drop my journal link on her.

I said something to the effect of, “Remember me? From the Deerfield/Northampton area in 1991? You were 34 at the time and I was 25. You weren’t very nice to me either.”

At the time I didn’t plan to ever contact her again, and as expected, I didn’t receive a reply from her.

Just two weeks later in early June, someone started harassing me on a site called Formspring where people can ask questions in total anonymity. I thought it was a neat idea and would be interesting to see what questions people hit me with. They were nothing out of the ordinary at first – what’s my favorite color, what’s my favorite movie, what chore do I hate the most…

It was soon clear to me that the person not only kept regular tabs on my journal but that they had personally known me at one point in my life.

My first thought was that it was either my sister or one of my sister-in-laws. But knowing it just wasn’t any of my SIL’s style, I quickly dropped them as a possibility.

Maliheh and Andy were next on the list. Especially Maliheh since I’d recently contacted her. I figured she took the time to comb through my journal and then decided to play around with me, even if she too, seemed like the serious, no pranks type.

At this time I believed Andy and I would never be friends again because he couldn’t “forgive” me for this tape of his he was so sure I had.

Either way, the “questions” kept coming.

Why is your husband such a lazy bum he can’t find a job…?

Does Tom fart more now that he’s gained weight…?

I hear you want a dog. How are you going to feed the mutt when you run out of money…?

Why did you marry a man if you haven’t been with a woman since 1992…?

Don’t you think you deserved to go to jail and pay for those you harassed over the telephone…?

This last question had me suspecting Maliheh most of all as it did not seem like anything Andy would ask.

And so I began not only doing more research on her but also sent her an accusatory message, warning her to knock it off and to never contact me again.

I went a step further and friended some of Maliheh’s friends. Not to say mean things about her, but to learn about her through them because I was curious about her, as I realized that ironically enough, I still had a crush on her. Yeah, despite our past problems and her so cruelly breaking my heart even though she never quite had it to begin with, I’d wondered about her from time to time throughout the years. I didn’t understand why I’d still have a thing for such a bitch 19 years later, but I did.

All I learned, before she contacted her friends and had them unfriend me, was that some guy used to play drums for her.

I remembered her being into the guitar, but that was pretty much all I knew about her other than that she quit smoking before we met and made me feel led on even though I didn’t handle it well back then being young and all that.

Still pissed over being “dumped” nearly two decades ago and convinced that she was the one harassing me, I deliberately badmouthed her in my journal (never using her full name) just in case she cared to check it out, though I doubted she cared, and I had no way of knowing either way at the time. Or if her friends would read along and end up turning against her for it, another thing I would later come to feel guilty over.

I even got a story idea with us as lead characters and thought it’d be funny if I sent her bits and pieces of it to read on Facebook, and also via email, now that I knew her two email addresses.

I pleaded in my journal and on Formspring for the person to identify themselves. I wasn’t scared, but I was a bit nervous. Especially before I knew what their true intentions were. But I sensed that I would eventually learn who they were. After a few days, the questions became less mean and it became more obvious that it was Andy.

And it was.

Andy, who I eventually spoke on the phone with and swapped emails with, had asked me the question about deserving to go to jail for the calls to throw me off his scent, and it worked.

At first, I was hesitant to bother with him for condemning me on how I handled my mother-in-law and basically defending the sickos that victimized me in Phoenix as well. I was not only shocked that he would take their side, but it especially shocked me because he himself was in jail if only for a day. He told me it was an experience that opened his eyes to the fact that he was a very angry person and needed to calm down. This was after he quit smoking pot and was dealing with withdrawal. He pranked some younger guy that was interested in him. I guess it wasn’t that Andy wasn’t interested back, he just didn’t like some things about the guy. And then one night they got into an argument over the phone.

“See that blue car parked on the street?” Andy had screamed at him. “Well, I’m in it and I’m watching you!”

Meanwhile, Andy had no idea there was really a blue car there. But the guy was not only terrified enough to spite him for that one but also because he was angry for having been rejected and so he went a step further by saying he tried to fondle him.

Andy spent the day in jail and did a year of probation. He felt the judge judged him before he even got a chance to have his say. This was why I was a little shocked at his defending my perps when he himself knew what it was like to be legally victimized.

After we both got some things off our chest and he agreed not to judge me for the way I live my life and handle things (though he wouldn’t keep his word), we’d continue to have fun on Formspring, only in a different way, as well as on Twitter where he would tweet his “tour dates” with his imaginary Fire Flies band, a game he’s been playing for decades.

I will admit that while it’s nice to be in touch with Andy again, who has since moved back to Springfield, so I was shocked to learn, it only made me feel bad for Maliheh. I really thought it was her for a while, even if it didn’t seem like anything she’d do from what little I knew about her. A part of me was bummed that it wasn’t her, for I kind of liked the idea of getting attention from her, even if it was in an unexpected and unusual way.

I also learned that Andy quit smoking both cigarettes and pot. He was so pissed that I could tell he was high (and said so in my journal which he had quietly followed for about a year before jumping out at me on Formspring) when he left some voice messages a couple of years ago that it’s part of what motivated him to quit nearly two years ago. I was glad to be of help!

He quit smoking cigarettes in 2002 and, having a harder time handling the heat, moved back east to a condo that is next to his mother’s condo in 2007. He’s still single but is doing well financially. He even owns his own cleaning business. I am both surprised and happy for him! He hates the cold and the snow but likes having his family around and the universal healthcare that Massachusetts offers.

My Bio - Part 43

I sent a letter to Andy’s sister Marla since I couldn’t find his address, asking her to say hello to him for me. I admitted that moving away without telling him where I’d gone had been mean and that I missed him and was curious about what he was up to these days.

Shortly after, I received a message saying that the only way Andy would forgive me for dumping him was if I sent his old recorded phone message tapes to his sister.

I was stunned by how much he still sounded the same, though I was disappointed to hear he was also clearly stoned.

I thought back to when I would record his phone messages for him, as he didn’t have the means to do it himself. But I mailed that tape to him before we left Phoenix and wrote another letter to Marla letting her know this.

“Guess I’m not the only unforgiving person in the world,” I’d written in a journal entry of mine on Kiwibox before I left that site, which was later sold and changed entirely. A young woman in Maryland responded, making a good point: she said Andy should forgive me because he wanted to, not because of anything I could give him.

Damn right, I agreed silently, feeling a bit embarrassed to be learning from someone half my age.

One day, I was browsing a prison inmate locator site and, out of curiosity, started looking up people I’d known in jail. Mary had told me about Myra and Hope, who each got forty years for child abuse, but I wondered about some others.

I studied Hope’s booking photo—she looked exactly as I’d expected: depressed and anxious. Myra, though, wore a wide smile, looking happy as ever. What could be so exciting about a forty-year sentence? I wondered. But then, if someone could be sick enough to abuse children, perhaps they could also be crazy enough to smile about forty years behind bars.

Yeah, smile, Myra. You’ll be an old lady when you go home. :)

Over the years, I’d wondered about Rosa, regretting that we hadn’t kept in touch, though I’d assumed she was deported to Mexico.

But there she was! I recognized her picture immediately. I was glad to finally find out what had happened to her, even if the news wasn’t good; sadly, she was serving twenty-five years for second-degree murder.

In late September, my worst fears for Mary came true. I knew she wanted to be hopeful and trusting, so I tried not to express my fears that she wouldn’t be released in exchange for her testimony against the man who killed her child, as she’d been promised. If anyone knew that cops, lawyers, and judges could be dishonest, it was me. And sure enough, even though she’d signed a plea agreement stating she’d be free after testifying, the judge, who clearly had a preconceived opinion about her, ordered her to prison at the trial’s end. So, after a decade in jail, she now had to serve two years in prison, with her release date pushed to June 2011. Understandably, she was very depressed, and I haven’t heard from her much since the sentencing, as she’s much busier now. She described it as a “modern-day boot camp.”

In late September, Tom learned from a news article about a site that pays people to complete artificial intelligence tasks requiring human input, which has been a great supplement to our income!

If I thought finding Rosa, despite her grim circumstances, was thrilling, nothing could compare to the surprises I’d receive on October 3rd and again on Christmas!

One day, while taking a break, I found myself thinking of the kind woman from the camp I was in as a kid who had shown me such compassion. Who was she? Where was she now? What was her life like? Fourteen years earlier in Phoenix, I had tried to find her, but with no luck. But the internet has come a long way, I thought to myself as I logged onto Facebook. Searching for a group for that camp, I found one and messaged the group’s owner with my story. He said he loved helping reconnect old campers and counselors and would do his best to identify her.

At first, I’d thought I’d attended the camp at age 9, but on reflecting on one of my few memories, it hit me: I’d been about 11. I remembered a bunch of us kids trying to convince some of the counselors that we were “bionic.” But had The Bionic Woman even aired when I was 9? A quick internet search confirmed it hadn’t been released until 1976, so I must have been 11.

I let the group owner know, adding that she hadn’t been a regular counselor. He tracked down a list of names from 1976, and a few people in the group recalled a woman with a dog who matched my description. “It’s Eileen,” they said. “She had a dog named Sydney.”

Finally, a name! I messaged her and to my delight, she responded within hours, confirming that yes, she had been at Camp Naomi in 1976 and she even remembered me! Today, she has kids and grandkids and lives in eastern Massachusetts. We’ve kept in touch since I found her.

If finding Eileen was a surprise in itself, my next surprise truly floored me: reconnecting with Marie from Valleyhead. A couple of years ago, I’d set up an account on Classmates.com to enter a drawing. While there, I looked up Valleyhead, my old school. Despite its dark history—closed in the ’90s after an FBI investigation into abuse and embezzlement—I was curious about any familiar names, and I spotted Marie’s. Tall, dark, Italian, and very much my type, she looked fantastic.

While browsing the group page, I left a public message with my Facebook details, just in case anyone wanted to reach out. To my shock, Marie did! She remembered me, asked how I was, and shared that she was living in Trumansburg, New York with roommates and studying criminal justice. I was surprised by how excited she seemed to reconnect, even saying she’d love to chat.

As we talked about our Valleyhead days, I mentioned my crush on a staff member named Mary, which led to a surprising revelation: Marie had a crush on me! I couldn’t believe it. We’d rarely interacted and never shared a room or any classes.