Who lives in the house? For a while it was my dad alone. But then he started to get lonely. Having as we did wildly mixed feelings about growing up there, given how constantly my parents argued and how unhappy our mother grew, it’s not as if Kaitlin and I made it a point to visit often. So when my father reached his seventies, he decided he should procure a new Chinese immigrant wife to help him into his dotage. As opposed to “difficult” Western women, like my German mother had turned out to be, an obedient Chinese wife would accept the distinctly nonfeminist role of cutting up his fruit and massaging his bunions in exchange for U.S. citizenship. And indeed, after several spectacular misfires, on his third try he found Alice. A Manchurian twenty years younger than himself, Alice was able to bear him, it seemed, because of a particular innocence and sweetness of her own that allowed her simply to block him out when he started raging (often).
In addition to Dumpster-diving, a love for which they shared, the thrifty Chinese couple soon cobbled together yet a new cash-positive scheme: renting out Kaitlin’s and my bedrooms and even the den in their Miss Havisham house to boarders. Where did they list the ad? Craigslist, of course. Do I help him post listings? Yes—because it’s something I can do from a distance, and the longer he thrives in his murky ecosystem the longer I can stay away. Is there a vetting process besides seeing if a check will clear? No. So we’ve had some problems. Once, when I posted a listing with the clearly too-optimistic title “For the Adventurous Beachcomber!” to my surprise I got a deluge of letters from people frantic to spend $550 a month to live in my dad’s (eerily not pictured—which I thought was a dead giveaway) hellhole. These eager renters were, almost to the last man, twenty-nine-year-old British construction engineers from London—by unusual coincidence, too, all were nonsmoking Scorpio vegetarians who had to get out of the UK immediately due to the strict requirements of their twelve-month construction contract and who thus all wanted to rush me cashier’s checks for two months’ advance rent. In short, they were Nigerians.
Even more exotic, however, were the renters who were not scams. There was the transsexual alcoholic whose operation was apparently not 100 percent totally completely successful. He/she would call me at home late at night and accuse me of trying to steal his/her identity. There have been sixty-something beachcombers, vitamin sellers, hollow-eyed Manson-looking types on disability. There have been knife fights at midnight over misplaced sprouters and juicers (vegans can be very edgy). There has been some lightly botched drug dealing. One guy was a diabetic (he said) who left an explosion of blood and medical supplies in the kitchen.
Kaitlin has described my father’s place as less halfway house than all-the-way house.
Then again, some of the tenants are “pretty nice.” Overall, barring some of the obvious spectacular misfires, my dad says he generally enjoys his tenants’ company.
And what do I say? I say fantastic. It may not be pretty, but if you saw their spreadsheets, you would know that my dad and Alice are actually making money. They’re completely independent. They are continuing to sock away cash. Dumpster-dive away!
But of course now the first wrinkle in this madcap Craigslist adventure is apparently this bench warrant. The bench warrant, I learn, is because Janice, a former renter, apparently had a yappy dog even though my dad claims vociferously she was not supposed to. There is little way of confirming anyone’s side of this story. My father is my father, and Janice was, I recall, the sort of tenant given to writing notes to other tenants literally on paper towels. Here is a sample excerpt (because I track all the paperwork) to a fellow tenant named Douglas:
You don’t need to know that God made my receptors-magnetic field down When I get BAD HEADACHES the medicine changes me May God strike you down with the DEVILS BIBBLE after the other day you told me all about your GIRLFRIEND MARIA and I heard you with her Doing It with ur marijuana muffins and CRYSTAL PILLS??? Dr. Loh’s house is all your dishes dishes dishes cups and cigarettes GET A LIFE Is rooted in you Americans—Me—Me—Me. Lost my dog Pebbles and then lee came behind me call me a WHORE f— YOU!!!
Bottom line, Janice got into some sort of altercation with my father, she accused him of harassing her dog, and then she threw a lawsuit against him with a court summons. Thanks to the advice of his legal counsel (a mellower tenant with a few years of law school who was a practitioner of the Bahai religion), my father did not bother showing up. But unfortunately this was like traffic court: No matter how whimsical the charges, you have to show up, otherwise you owe the suer fourteen hundred dollars, which my father now owes Janice. He hasn’t paid it, and that’s why there is a bench warrant for his arrest.
• • •
I ARRIVE at 10:00 A.M. on a Monday at the Malibu courthouse, over an hour’s drive from my home. My father looks pretty close to a bag person today. His unmatched clothes hang limply, he carries his usual “briefcase” of a brown paper shopping bag, his unshaved gray beard looks, no way around it (shaving accident?), a tad bloody. He shuffles a bit with his Parkinson’s—sometimes he uses a wheelchair, though not today. Alice sits next to him, anxious, birdlike, fuzzy black Smurf-doll hair, in strange girl-doll clothes with white socks in tiny buckled sandals. She carries a clearly repurposed Abercrombie & Fitch bag.
On the other side of the courtroom, several rows behind, is Janice. Her shoulder-length hair is wet and severely combed back; her eyes are red, her mouth is grim, and she is dressed in a wrinkled gray business suit.
Judge Connor calls the court to order, and summons my father and his ex-tenant to their respective stands. My father wrongly believes that this is his cue to heatedly argue his case. Bench warrants aside, he enjoys a good lawsuit. To be sued is to know you’re alive. (At one point both of his previous Chinese wives had thrown million-dollar liens against his house, but as a precautionary measure, he had already gotten his kids to throw million-dollar liens against him first, so the ex-wives won’t get anything. I think.) My father immediately begins bellowing a mile a minute about how terrible this woman Janice is, what a bad tenant, what a criminal, and how menacing her dog Pebbles.
Judge Connor stops him cold.
“That’s all well and good, Mr. Loh. But that has nothing to do with the fact that a court date was set and you failed to appear. There is nothing I can do about it. By county law the fine is fourteen hundred dollars. It is not my decision to make. It’s county law. How are you going to pay this fine, Mr. Loh?”
The ensuing dialogue has a predictable rhythm—the sort of circular cadences one associates with small children.
My dad: “But blah, blah, blah! Over and over again I told her about that dog! Bad tenant! Bad tenant! Blah, blah, blah! You should have heard the barking—”
Judge Connor: “Yes I know, Mr. Loh. But the case is closed. Sir, how are you going to pay this fine?”
My dad: “Oh but blah, blah, blah! Late with her checks! Oil-leaking car! Terrible disco music!”
Judge Connor: “Mr. Loh. As I said, it doesn’t matter. How are you going to pay this fine?”
My dad: “But Mr. Judge! I am an old man! I need quiet! I need ice cream! Where is the ice cream?” My corns! My bunions! The nation of Islam! Seventeenth-century Flemish haberdashery!” (You see the general point I am making—he is getting more and more worked up about matters entirely unrelated to today’s case.)
Judge Connor: “As I said, the fine is fourteen hundred dollars. How do you plan to pay that today?” Repeat loop eleven times. Eventually my father runs out of gas. Perhaps he has not consumed enough calories from the Dumpster to draw this all out into a second hour. When the judge finally threatens to cut him off, he delivers his final braying statement:
“I won’t pay it because I can’t. I am poor! I am an old man, I have no car, and I eat out of the garbage.” I do a quick calculation of just how severely he has perjured himself. The last three statements are, yes, technically true. However, he does own a paid-off house in Malibu, although arguably it is a teardown. That said, due to his p
enny-pinching habits, he has accumulated all that cash. Were I to point this out he could—and would—respond: “Well, but where is it? Eugene Loh has no money!” And that, of course, is also true.
This is because he has transferred a great deal of his money into accounts bearing my name—I don’t know exactly how much, as he has forged my signature for so many years now to evade the tax consequences. I only tend to discover that my name is first on things via the occasional odd penalty notice from the IRS.
Judge Connor terminates the proceedings and dispatches a nonsmiling African American lady bailiff to give my dad some forms. My father hands the forms to me with a trembling hand. I look at them. They are requesting disclosure of all of his bank information—names, branches, accounts, routing numbers—as well as such personal data as his social security number. He is to write down all this information and give it to red-eyed Janice so she can go after his assets personally (CRYSTAL PILLS! BAD HEADACHES! THE DEVILS BIBBLE!).
Mechanically, because the judge has requested it, I begin to fill out the forms for my dad. But then I stop and think: What am I doing? Pen in hand, I am getting that feeling in my chest—the involuntary aorta squeeze, the fluttery palpitations, the shortness of breath. It might be the change of life, or it might be an actual reasonable cortisol-firing stress response. I realize that if we fill out this form we can well lose everything, every cent of it, including the house (even just the Malibu land must be worth—what?—half a million?), over a silly fourteen-hundred-dollar fee.
I realize how much I have been counting on my dad’s money being there, how much I have expected some kind of inheritance one day and college tuition help for my kids. It is a vague kind of—I don’t know—remote distant financial island I have been swimming toward all my life. It has lent a sense of emotional security, a sense of not being left abandoned.
And now? Over a single crazy tenant?
I step into the hallway to call Kaitlin.
“What should I do here?” I ask. “Instead of having him disclose his social security number and all of his personal bank account information to an insanely litigious person, isn’t it simpler if I just write the fourteen-hundred-dollar check myself and give it to the judge? Without telling Papa, of course.” We know that with our father it’s not about not having the money, it’s a matter of principle. Pretty much giving anyone any money at all for any reason offends his sense of justice. And this is bad tenant Janice! Rather than give up a dime, he would prefer to come to court every day for a year. As I said, he loves a lawsuit, even if he loses.
My sister is having yet another of her amazing Pema Chödrön days. She is able to look deeply into the prism of her own long experience with our dad to give some extraordinarily wise advice. “Walk away,” she intones. “Walk away. He’s a lizard. He has his own ways. Getting involved just pulls you into the muck and won’t solve anything. You have to just let it go, let it happen.”
Some stories have an elegant shape to them. Sadly this is not one of them. Which is to say what happens is that I give the forms back to my dad, crying out with an awkward angry bleat, “I can’t help you!” My father takes the forms and stubbornly begins to fill them out with his shaky spotted hand, and I leave. Somehow the whole procedure sort of trails off, and another court date is set.
WHICH IS to say—yes, people—three months later on another Monday morning at ten we are all back at the Malibu courthouse again. The principals arrive, three months older and in different and wilder outfits (Janice has dropped the business wear and is in what I can only describe as a paisley gypsy skirt and space-age turban; Alice appears to be oddly in one brown and one black shoe), and the exact same proceedings occur. Again my father steps up to the podium with his exact same braying speech, again the judge (same judge) reminds him that he is here for one reason and for one reason only—to pay Janice fourteen hundred dollars.
Do you see what I am saying?
As if in a dream, we are here again.
I have sometimes come to feel, in midlife, as though my life is in a loop. I have stared out of my car window at an El Pollo Loco parking lot, waiting for my dad to finish going to the bathroom or something, and have literally seen paint dry. Literally! Seen. Paint. Dry! While my body ripples up and down in flame.
Anyway, again my father and the judge have their interchange. Again the humorless black lady bailiff brings forward exactly the same form. Again my father and Alice murmur, and peck at their brown paper and Abercrombie & Fitch bags in bewilderment. The shaky pen drops. The effort grinds to a halt. Once again.
Now the judge calls Alice forward. “Mrs. Loh?” he asks. “Do you have a checking account?”
“Ye-e-es,” she says, in her unsure English.
“Where?” he asks.
“Bank of America?” she replies.
“The Bank of America on Point Dume?” Judge Connor asks, as though speaking to a hearing-impaired person.
“Point Dume,” she says. “Yes?”
“And, Mrs. Loh, do you have a savings account?”
“Chase,” she says. “Malibu. Chase.”
And now, without changing his expression, Judge Connor turns to Janice and says: “Ms. Kolakowski, I am satisfied that you have enough information you need to go secure your payment.”
Janice’s face turns white.
“What? What about his social security number?”
“No, Ms. Kolakowski,” Judge Connor replies, friendly yet firm. “I am satisfied that you have all the information you need to approach the Lohs directly for the money they owe you. Best of luck.” He raps his gavel.
My father stands still for a moment, ingesting this sudden turn. Then he erupts.
“Oh thank you!” my father bellows operatically. While a slow mover, he is a very quick thinker. “Oh thank you, oh wise and intelligent judge! You’re a very intelligent and honorable man, not like that bad tenant Janice—”
“That’s enough, Mr. Loh,” the judge says curtly, rapping his gavel again, harder.
And that is the end of the bench warrant.
What—?
One take-home is that, if you’re going to violate the law, do it in Malibu.
The second is that, upon reflection, I have to acknowledge some grudging admiration for my father’s Byzantine techniques. It is not just my signature my father has forged to open checking accounts but those of elderly mothers-in-law in remote parts of China who are actually dead. This is the brilliance of ghost checking accounts. If dead Chinese people—with unpronounceable names like Xi and Qi—are on a checking account that only my father knows exists, and that only he has the paper checks to . . . Well, I’m telling you—as opposed to how everything online today is in danger of being hacked, it’s actually an amazingly secure system.
The third take-home is probably the best, though. It’s a story my sister shared when I gave her the final report.
“Ah!” she says. “It reminds me of the Chinese folktale I once heard. A restaurant owner was upset by the fact that above his restaurant lived a poor student. Every night the poor student would eat his simple bowl of rice but would be able to smell the aromas of the delicious food being cooked below him. The restaurant owner believed the student should pay him a fee for the privilege. The judge heard the case, and then asked the student to come forward. ‘Do you have any money on you?’ Whimpering, the student said he had very little, emptying his pants of just a few copper coins. The judge took the coins and passed them back and forth between his hands three times. Then he handed the coins back to the student. ‘So there,’ he said, to the restaurateur. ‘For the smell of food, you’ve just enjoyed the sound of money!’ ”
And this is why I enjoy the taste of vodka.
Which is to say his money is safe for another day.
But little do we know how those days are numbered.
Losing It
WHILE MANY AMERICAN WOMEN are obsessed with their weight, I, for one, am calmly and happily not, thank God. Can you imagine?
On top of everything else?
This is because after spending forty-nine years together, my weight and I have finally struck a deal. Yes, by necessity, we still cohabitate. We eat together, we sleep together, I still drive the two of us—somewhat heavily—around town. But it doesn’t ask after me, and I don’t ask after it. You’ve seen my life. I have enough on my plate without having to worry about that next volatile personality, my weight.
In the eighties and even the nineties, we used to check in anxiously with each other every day, in a minute-by-minute dialogue. But over the decades, with our far-too-close relationship, my weight and I have become increasingly dissatisfied with each other.
My weight is clearly disappointed with my inability to ingest only eight glasses of water and some steamed broccoli a day, and makes its displeasure known by eternally serving me papers filled with these ridiculously inflated numbers.
In turn, for my part, I’ve come to the realization that I will never have a weight I’m going to be proud of, or that even looks nice on a page. I will never weigh 115 pounds, 120 pounds, or even 125, which for some reason has always been ingrained in me as what adult women—or at least adult women mannequins—should weigh (in the same 1960s way, I suppose, that one’s dinner table should be set with folded cloth napkins or that your purse should match your shoes).
I don’t even weigh what it says on my driver’s license: 137. I’m going to guesstimate I’m maybe ten pounds heavier than that, which I consider essentially identical, given the vagaries of wildly differently calibrated scales and water retention. Even when I was eighteen and first got my driver’s license, 137 was a random dart throw, and to be even anywhere close to that, three decades later, I think is absolutely amazing.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 9