Escape Points (13 page)

“Why would I want to mail myself to the music teacher?” Colin said when I asked him about it later.

After Weldon’s win, Brendan, Colin, and I went to the concessions stands. I felt so giddy I bought three overpriced gray hooded sweatshirts for the boys, with the official IHSA Individual Wrestling State Championship logo on the front. I signed up for the official photos to be mailed to me. I ordered the plaque. Heck, I would have ordered a pony if they sold one. On the sweatshirt for Weldon, I had the saleswoman iron on letters on the back that read his name, plus 140 A
LL
S
TATE
. For Brendan, I had her iron on his name, plus T
HE
N
EXT
O
NE
. For Colin, I asked her to iron on his last name, plus III. The two boys put on the sweatshirts immediately and we held onto Weldon’s to give to him later. He would get what he came for; he would stand with the champions on the winner’s boxes.

Hours later Weldon wrestled a Geneseo wrestler with a 28–1 record. Weldon won 3–2, a tough, pretty even match. He could win third or fourth now. At the end of the match, Weldon knew he was a placer. He was slated next to wrestle a Glenbard North wrestler with a 33–5 record for the season, one more win than Weldon but also one more loss. We went down to the railing and screamed for him, but Weldon couldn’t seem to score on him. His opponent was
several inches shorter than Weldon, a way different build, not lanky and muscular, more compact. Weldon lost 6–1, earning him fourth place. This was good enough and I knew Weldon was pleased. When he walked away from the mat, I knew he still felt proud.

When the 140 championship was over, a ceremony was held on the main floor, as it was for every championship of every weight class. Only one parent was allowed to take photos near the winner’s boxes, where all the boys stood after the red, white, and blue ribboned gold medals were placed on their necks. I reported to Aisle A26 and stood next to the fathers or mothers of the top three winners. In some of the photographs Weldon’s face was marked with bruises and cuts, the medal around his neck hanging to the middle of his blue-and-orange Oak Park wrestling sweatshirt. In other shots, he was smiling, but he looked tired, spent, young.

After watching Peter, our team’s heavyweight, take second place, Dorothea and I raced to the car in the iced night cold, the snow glistening in the parking lot like spun sugar, Brendan and Colin tired and eager to sleep. We drove the three hours home in a caravan, three families in a row following each other on the unlit stretch of highway. Weldon rode in the van with the team. He said on the way home all the wrestlers stopped at McDonald’s and he ate four cheeseburgers. He wouldn’t have to weigh 140 pounds for a very long time, if ever.

When we got home, our next-door neighbors, who had been following Weldon’s wins online, put a sign on our front door and draped toilet paper on the small evergreens that flanked the entrance, a tradition in the suburb where we lived when someone won at state in any sport.

A few days later, Powell e-mailed the Huskie Wrestling Family:

Coach Powell then offered a synopsis of each wrestler’s highlights. For Weldon he wrote:

“Nothing is as satisfying as having your hand raised,” Weldon told me later. “I can’t describe it. It’s recognition and happiness, contentment. If you train that hard, you’re supposed to win. When you lose you have to think about why you lost and what you’re going to do to get better. Fourth isn’t bad; it could have been better. Of course it was worth it.”

The outdoor marquee at the high school soccer fields ran the names of the boys who placed at state flashing in neon. Paula drove by and took photos. I put a photo of Weldon on my bulletin board outside my office at work. The next week were team state finals, anticlimactic after the individual competition.

A few weeks later at the wrestling banquet in the school’s north cafeteria, every wrestler and his family from freshman to varsity brought a dish for the potluck collection of comfort food that ranged from chicken wings and fried chicken to lasagna and salad, desserts and cookies. Weeks after the season ended and making weight was over, the boys all looked rounder, their cheekbones no longer as prominent, their faces full, their hair growing back from the clean-shaven bald they all sported in December.

When he called each wrestler to the podium, Powell talked about him with keen detail, respect, and personal insight—telling jokes, complimenting him, showing how well he knew each wrestler. Most years, when he talked about the seniors, he fought back tears.

“We try to give the boys the most difficult, trying, comprehensive, loving, athletic experience you can have. When you love someone enough, you can have high expectations,” Powell said. “You can have great athletes and they can find out what it means to be men.”

That afternoon Weldon won the MVP (most valuable player) award along with Peter Kowalczuk. Weldon was listed in the program for making it to US Nationals off-season for Team Illinois, as well as Junior Nationals and as an Academic All-Conference wrestler. He was All-Conference as well. His season record was 37–6, making it to the “Thirty Wins a Season” list with five other teammates. He won the Takedown King award, for 223 takedowns that season, a record for the school that was not broken until two years later.

Powell called Weldon to the podium. Weldon stood beside him, hands clasped in front of him.

“He was such a terrible wrestler his freshman year,” Powell said.

Everyone laughed.

And then he talked about what kind of man he was now. “I would want my daughter to marry him,” Powell said. “I want him for a son.”

T
hankfully, bankruptcy court was different than divorce court, more like traffic court or the waiting area of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Luckily, no one was taking a photo of me that day that I had to carry around in my wallet for four years.

Still I wanted to look responsible, respectable; I wanted to show the trustee that I was not at fault, I was not delinquent. My former husband had filed for Chapter 7, claiming he had no assets to pay any of his debts, including child support. It was three years after he moved away, two years after he stopped paying child support, and almost one year after he last saw his three sons. I was his biggest creditor; really, the boys were. The lump sum of unpaid child support at that time was approaching six figures, more if you added the refused extraordinary medical expenses he was ordered to pay in the original divorce decree. And tens of thousands every year when you added in college expenses.

It was an amount that was growing and eventually would reach more than $300,000.

“I choose not to participate in Brendan’s braces at this time,” their dad told me two years earlier when I informed him of his court-ordered share of the bill.

The collectors on his defaulted law school loans had been calling our house for about three years, asking for him, insisting he lived there over my denials. My byline is my maiden name and I did not change my name to his when I got married, as I had a decade-long journalism reputation under that byline by then.

Sometimes the boys said their father was dead when the collection agency asked to speak to him on the phone. I was never listed on any law school loan paperwork as responsible for it, even though we were married at the time that he borrowed. Our current home was never an address where he lived; I moved there with the boys a year after the divorce. But the collectors hounded me, they hounded us. Letters, phone calls.

Even when I explained to the collectors that he likely owed me more than he owed them, they were not understanding or even civil and kept calling the house and demanding to speak to him. Early in the morning, late at night, on weekends. If we were all home and I could account for each of the boys, we stopped picking up any call at home that was an 800 number or listed as “private number” on caller ID. It was either the law loans people or the solicitors for aluminum siding. We had a brick house.

A few weeks before on my forty-ninth birthday, June 5, a summons of this meeting of creditors arrived at our house. The notice said it would be held in the office of Allan DeMars, a partner in the Chicago firm of Spiegel & DeMars. I was sure the timing of the delivery was deliberate. My former husband had e-mailed me the same day with an e-birthday card saying I didn’t look fifty. Never mind he had not seen me in two years. Never mind I was one year shy of fifty anyway; it’s those kinds of details he often forgot. A few weeks later I received a polite letter from DeMars informing me of my rights as a creditor and the process of collecting back child support. The trustee and the state of Illinois would be able to help.

The hearing was not about me, it was about their dad; really, it was about the boys and what I needed to do for them. I placed in my briefcase files and letters plus an eight-by-ten framed color photo of the boys taken in Michigan, laughing. I thought if the hearing steered away from my purpose of collecting child support, I would place the photo of the boys on the desk and remind their dad exactly who it was he had stopped supporting. Look at them. They are of you. OK, it was a little
Judge Judy
, but so what.

Around my neck I wore my father’s gold medal of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It weighed heavy on my chest, underneath the simple black top. I guess I was hoping it brought me peace of mind and luck, reminded me of saying the Rosary every night after dinner while I was growing up. Wearing his medal made me feel close to my dad; he was a good father who died in 1988 before any of my sons were born. Seeing me go through this now would have made my father cry, and it would have also made him hell-furious.

I drove downtown, parked, and walked to my sister’s firm where I met with her law partner, Bob, my attorney. We walked the block south to court. We showed our driver’s licenses, registered, and were given bar-coded green-and-white stickers that would allow us into the hearing. When we got to the thirty-third floor, my ex-husband was there sitting near the door of room 3360. The sight of him made my stomach cartwheel.

My former husband was wearing tawny crushed velvet pants and a silky yellow shirt—an absurd outfit that made him look like Rod Stewart or an
American Idol
contestant voted off early in the season, and too silly for a bankruptcy hearing. He was more slender than I remembered, his brown hair rock-star long. He was remarkably tan, his skin the burnished tortoise color of someone who sunbathed for a living. That must be what he did with his time and why he claimed he only made $300 that year.

I headed to the right of the room with Bob. Dozens of sad people appeared consumed by a similar pathos, the same deflated admission that life was hard, money was elusive, and this was a destination of last resort. No one looked pleased to be there.
Most everyone in the waiting area looked down at their shoes and avoided eye contact.

We sat a few rows in front of my former husband, with our backs to him. Pink sheets of paper laminated in plastic pinned to cork bulletin boards reminded everyone to have their driver’s license and proof of social security number ready. The debtors needed to prove who they were.

Thirty minutes later, his name was called.

The trustee’s office was the size of our breakfast room at home or a small office. Molded blue plastic and chrome chairs, plain walls, Formica desk. The trustee looked like a car salesman: white hair, oblong face, wire-rimmed glasses, plain white shirt, tie, no jacket. It was fitting as his office resembled one of the small offices in a car showroom where they insisted you could not get any more off the list price and you were lucky to get this car because someone else wanted it today. Allan DeMars was polite and straightforward.
He must have heard some doozies
, I thought. This was a man who couldn’t be shocked.

He introduced the federal US bankruptcy trustee seated in the back row of the room. I sat two seats away from the boys’ father, with Bob seated between us, across from the trustee’s neat desk. After asking permission, DeMars turned on a small black tape recorder, one that looked like something Radio Shack sold in the 1980s, not digital but with real tape. I wonder if it worked.

He swore in my ex-husband under oath. DeMars asked him his name. He asked him his address. My former husband gave the address of his elderly parents as his own, a place he stayed when he was in the United States no more than thirty days a year.

“I object,” I said with a loud, broad indignation, having seen more than a few
Boston Legal
episodes. I felt like the Candice Bergen character, without the facelift.

“You can’t object,” DeMars said politely. “He is under oath and subject to perjury. You will have time to question him later,” he explained.

I fidgeted and my heart raced.

“Relax,” Bob whispered.

But it was all coming back. The deceit, the 10 percent truths sold as reality, the arrogance. Perhaps less than ten minutes later, the trustee was finished.

“Do you have any questions?” he asked me.

“Yes, and I need about twenty minutes,” I said, and pulled out my file from my briefcase.

“All you have is five,” DeMars responded matter-of-factly.

He asked my ex-husband if he would submit voluntarily to questioning by his creditor.

My former husband mumbled something.

“You can be subpoenaed to answer questions at another time and place, but it is easier to do it now, right here,” DeMars said. “As your creditor, she has the legal right to ask you any questions pertaining to assets.”

He agreed.

“Where do you live more than three hundred days a year?” I asked him, my voice shaking.

He placed his hand over his mouth and gave his address in the Netherlands.

“Do you have an Illinois driver’s license?”

He said he did.

“How can that be if you are not an Illinois resident?”

He didn’t answer.

“Keep your questions to the subject of assets,” DeMars said, shuffling papers on his desk.

“How could you afford the $1,600 airfare from Amsterdam to Chicago three times this year if you have no money?” I asked.

“My ex-wife paid for one trip,” he responded without looking up.

“Your second ex-wife,” I reminded him.

He said Ingrid, his current partner, paid for the other two trips.

“How can you afford to have counsel from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom?” I asked. It is a prestigious top-shelf law firm.

“My attorney is my cousin,” he said clearly annoyed.

“And he’s Brendan’s godfather,” I snapped.

“Your questions must be limited to the topic of assets,” the trustee said again. “Please have your client ask questions pertaining only to assets,” he said to Bob.

But I had other questions.

“How could it be possible without assets to afford the $11,000 annual tuition to Wisdom University?”

This was my long shot. I inquired about the school that was an offshoot of Damanhur, the spiritual organization he told me he had belonged to for more than five years. He had told me years earlier he was earning a degree to become a spiritual healer at the University of Turin in Italy. I told him on many occasions that he was better off banking on his law degree from a top midwestern law school to land a job.

God bless Google. The night before the hearing I went hunting for more information on him on the Internet. I figured that since he could not speak Italian, he wasn’t really studying at the University of Turin, since the site was in Italian and it appeared all course work was in Italian. So I typed in “spiritual university in Turin and Damanhur.” I had surmised that he attended a university in Turin run by Damanhur, the spiritual community described on its website as “a Federation of communities with over 800 citizens, a social and political structure, a Constitution, economic activities, its own currency, schools and a daily paper.”

No wonder he didn’t pay child support; his cult has its own currency.

Months earlier I found his website for Damanhur consultations by typing in his name. Both he and Ingrid were pictured in the same deep red color shirt; she was smiling brilliantly and he looked uncomfortable, as if he had been caught in a lie.

Their site explained they offered spiritual trips to Egypt and Italy, and the costs. “Let a Wonder of the Ancient World, The Alhambra in Granada, Spain Inspire You” read the brochure in .pdf form with his name listed as coach and his home address in Delft. The website was in Dutch, but I clicked for an English translation.

His bio read:

With the prices listed for these trips, clearly he would make more than $300 a year.

The text continued, “It also has a university that attracts philosophical and spiritual students from all over the world. Damanhur is named after an Egyptian city located one hundred miles northwest of Cairo in the middle of the western Delta,” the website stated. “It was once the site of the city of Tmn-Hor, dedicated to the god Horus.”

The text went on. “Damanhur exists to build and service its Temple of Humankind which the community has been building deep within a mountain for nearly two decades.”

Areas of study include Dancing with the Missionary, Environmental Intimacy, and Intermediate Digital and Ancient Storytelling. I printed out twenty-four pages of description. I was hoping not to run out of ink. And I saw the price tag that would equal roughly a semester of tuition for Weldon. I was bluffing in my question that I knew this is the school he attended.

He didn’t blink.

“I make an arrangement to trade out work for tuition,” he said, agitated.

I almost jumped out of my seat.

“What is the verification process of his claims?” Bob asked the trustee.

DeMars explained there was no verification process, but he could pursue criminal sanctions if he believed my ex-husband had perjured himself. “He testified under penalty of perjury,” DeMars said.

My former husband looked rattled.

“He signed a statement that these documents are true. Child support cannot be discharged,” DeMars explained.

It was something I gathered their father did not internalize. And good luck collecting from a man with $300 in reported income from spiritual tourism.

“Be a man, be a father,” I told him when he called to wish me a happy Mother’s Day the year before. “Words are cheap. The woman at the grocery store wished me a happy Mother’s Day, too, and she doesn’t even know me. At the very least, be a man and pay the financial support you are required to pay.”

“I didn’t call to hear this.” Then he hung up. He hadn’t asked to speak to the boys.

My last round of questions in DeMars’s office began when I asked him his name. He sent correspondence now as “Matthew,” but he filed for bankruptcy under his legal name. My ex-husband said he changed his name to his middle name.

“You ought to sign your e-mail responses to him with a different name every time,” Madeleine suggested. “Barbie,” or “Esmeralda,” she said. “Whatever you feel like.”

His legal name was the same, he explained. But now he preferred to be called Matthew. “Will you call me Matthew?” he asked me.

I shook my head. No, and I won’t call you Grumpy or Sneezy or Sleepy either. It’s not your name. Your boys’ names are still the same.

He asked Bob to call him Matthew.

“Sure, I’ll call you whatever you want,” Bob answered.

My ex-husband guffawed and whacked Bob a slap on the leg, a little too hard, a little too intense.