Official Book Club Selection

by Kathy Griffin

  I still really didn’t think it could be Matt. I was already thinking of who had been in the house over the last few months, and my mind was racing. “I just got a call from the accountant, and what they’re telling me is somebody has taken my ATM card, gone to a Universal City ATM and systematically taken out twenty thousand dollars from my accounts over the last few months. So I have to ask, have you been taking my ATM card and stealing money?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, because you and Jessica are the only ones with my PIN number, and I’ve already asked Jessica.”

  “It wasn’t me,” he said.

  For some reason, the phrase “due diligence” came into my head. I was trying to think rationally. Suspicion started creeping into my mind, so I just wanted to stay with the facts. I wanted Matt to know everything that I’d been told by the accountant. “All right. Well, you should know the accountant is on the phone with the bank, and they’re going to look at the tape, and he’s going to call me back in about five minutes. So, I know it sounds crazy, Matt, but if you’re on that tape, they’re going to know, and it’s going to be all over their office.”

  That’s when he said, “It was me.”

  I have to say, that moment was absolutely like being socked in my heart. Not like being punched in the gut or the face, but cold-cocked in my heart. My heart started beating really fast, the way it does when you’re faced with having to realize something you don’t want to accept as true, that a horrible inevitability is at hand. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear it. He came right out and said it. But only after …

  That’s when I thought, My God, he only admitted it when he knew there was a tape and he would get caught. Ouch.

  The accountant called back, and all I said was, “Matt admitted it. I’ll call you later.”

  I was physically shaking. But I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t hysterical. Several things were flying around in my head. Number one, obviously, was why? Number two, what have I done to set the stage for this? In what way have I created an environment where this could happen? Number three, we’re in the middle of shooting a reality show. The crew is coming back tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. How does that work?

  When shitty things happen to me, I go into processing mode. I wouldn’t say my approach dealing with the situation was matter-of-fact, but I started thinking about the actions I needed to take right then and there. I set aside feelings and emotion and instead began taking care of business. I wanted to tell Jessica immediately that she was off the hook, because I felt it was my responsibility to put her mind at ease after my uncomfortable inquiry. But that meant, by process of elimination, that Jessica was going to know it was Matt. I wanted him to know that I had to go do this.

  “I understand. You need to do whatever you need to do right now. I’ve done a horrible thing to you, so whoever you need to tell, whoever you need to process this with, I understand. You’ve earned the right to get through this however you see fit.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Let’s take this one step at a time. Why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  He was very still. He didn’t cry, he wasn’t cavalier, and he seemed to be grasping the gravity of the situation. I told him to walk me through it, and while his reaction wasn’t exactly shifty—meaning he wasn’t making up crazy lies about it—what he was saying just wasn’t adding up. “My business isn’t going well. I’m not really making money. I just didn’t have any money.”

  “Okay, but what made you think that you were entitled to just take money from me?”

  All he could say was, “I just felt I needed more money.”

  My head was spinning with big questions. What did that mean, he needed “more money”? Did I now have to start questioning everything with this guy? Did I marry the wrong man? Did he really love me? Ever? Did I think I was overlooking a small thing when in fact I was overlooking a giant thing? Because I don’t know why just because there’s a piece of paper saying we’re married that I have to lose half of my income to someone, half of what I earned from my own hard work. In fact, if Matt had asked for a joint account—which he didn’t—I would have been instantly suspicious. If I’d married Steve Wozniak, I certainly wouldn’t have expected half his money, or half his earnings during the time we were together. I know California is a community property state, but these were ATM cards that had my name on them, that were accounts to which only I had contributed. Matt had his own ATM card, and his own income from his job, as far as I knew.

  At this point, I asked Matt to walk me through the process of obtaining this money. I was obsessed with wanting to know the details of it all.

  He said he would get up early in the morning and while I was asleep—because if I can sleep in, I will—he’d sneak into my wallet, take out both ATM cards, and race to that Universal City ATM, which was three minutes from the house. He’d then take out the maximum amounts you could—$1,000 from one card, $500 from the other—and return home with the cash, put it in his pocket, then put the ATM cards back in my wallet. Then this man—who knew more than anyone in my life how hard I’d worked to earn that money, who’d witnessed all the crappy gigs, the exhaustion, the long days that started early in the morning with filming and ended with getting on a plane at night to fly to the next show—would crawl back into bed with me.

  Does that not sound like a betrayal of trust? You can argue the whole “his money is your money, your money is his money” thing all day long, but I’m not sneaking into anybody’s wallet and taking their personal ATM cards.

  This was not a situation where he’d come to me and said “Can you loan me twenty thousand dollars?” It’s the secretiveness that got to me. Regardless of California state law, I’m sorry, in my book it’s stealing. I was beginning to feel like a wife from one of those Dateline episodes where the husband has another family in Wyoming.

  After I confronted Matt, I did say, “Why didn’t you just ask me for money?”

  “Because I knew I couldn’t justify why I didn’t have my own money.”

  This seemed a bigger issue than I realized. “So not only do you need money, but you’re now telling me that you haven’t been working as much as you led me to believe? I thought you had several clients, and you were making three hundred dollars to five hundred dollars a day.”

  Shaking his head, “No.”

  Okay. I began steeling myself for the next revelation. “How many clients do you really have?”

  “Sometimes I have weeks where I make two hundred dollars,” he said.

  Okay. “Well, you’re getting up every single day at six or seven in the morning, and you come home at five or six at night. What are you doing? Where do you go?”

  “I drive around.”

  Okay. “Drive around where?”

  He told me he’d go to the movies, go to the park, and go to the drive-thru. This is where he confessed to compulsively overeating. I remember him saying one thing that did make sense. He told me the real reason he had put on so much weight was because he felt so guilty about taking the money. Now I knew where the 100-extra-pounds issue came from. But then I remembered how he’d tell me in great detail about his clients and workday, the computers he was fixing, the people causing him trouble, how he was trying to get $110 an hour instead of $100, all of it.

  I didn’t know what was true anymore. This bright, capable guy was apparently living and building a life that was this very intricate lie. It seemed so odd to me. Why couldn’t he put all that energy and time and thought into his work instead?

  “Matt, I have to ask you, what did you do with the money? It was cash. That’s a lot of tax-free money. Did you buy stuff? Do you have anything to show for it? Is there anything else you need to tell me?” I was desperate for answers.

  “I just kind of pissed it away.”

  “On what?” Because it’s not like Matt ever showed up with a Rolex, or a sports car, or a $1,000 suit. I never saw any evidence of what he did with it,
aside from the occasional trip to the electronics store to buy some new gadget for his computers, but it never seemed exorbitant. He just kept maintaining he didn’t know how he spent the cash. To this day, in fact, I have no idea what he did with it. Later that day the accountant told me that at that one Universal City ATM alone, the withdrawn amount was $72,000. So that’s $72,000 completely unaccounted for. He says he has no idea where it went. He never really gave me an answer.

  At this point I went into fix-it mode. That’s what I know. It’s my comfort zone. Yes, it was devastating emotionally. Yes, I was in shock. But like so many people who the night before found out their partner was cheating or lying or stealing, or who received some sort of earth-shattering news and still have to get up the next morning and make breakfast and drive the kids to school, I was no different. I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart and bringing everything around me to a halt, anymore than anyone else does in these situations. I believed we should continue with the show, because I wanted Matt to continue making money from the show, and I needed the stability of work. I didn’t think the answer was for both of us to quit working and cry in separate homes for two years. Besides, I just couldn’t make a colossal decision only an hour after getting the initial call from my accountant.

  I started spewing whatever suggestion came into my head. I was trying to make sense of everything at this point. I needed an action plan.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do,” I said. “You’re going to go to a program called Debtors Anonymous. It’s exactly like AA. It’s twelve steps, and it’s free. Or maybe one dollar a meeting. You never have to give more than that. It’s a program that helps all kinds of people that are having all kinds of money problems.” I was hoping he’d get the tools he needed to help him through whatever problem this was. I was grasping at straws, but I knew that I had friends who had had great success in various twelve-step programs. I told him he had to go tonight, and could go to a meeting every day if he needed to. I also suggested he go to Overeaters Anonymous meetings, because it was a program that I had attended several years earlier and found incredibly helpful in dealing with my own food issues.

  He agreed, and then I went to talk to Jessica.

  “Look, I can’t go into the details, but I know it’s not you,” I said. “You probably figured out that it’s Matt. There’s no sense in trying to hide it.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Well, let’s see if this is an insurmountable problem or not.”

  Matt and I started couples therapy shortly thereafter, and I began to feel good about the future of our marriage. During those sessions he’d express remorse, saying what he did was a bad thing, although when the therapist would ask if he had a reason for what he did, he’d usually give the same response over and over, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  Through the course of therapy, he did admit to entitlement issues. “I understand it’s not a healthy thing for me to feel entitled to all of your money and everything you have,” he said. “I understand you worked really hard for it, and I basically goofed off.”

  Times like these made me think we could work things out. I took our marriage seriously, and while I’d been hit with a real whopper, I knew couples could have big problems and still be together for decades. One of my attorneys, however, did try to have the “come to Jesus” talk with me. He’s an attorney. I’m his client. It’s his job to be direct. And I’ll never forget the way he worded it. “I know you love Matt,” he said. “He hit you for seventy-two thousand dollars this time. Next time it could be five hundred thousand dollars. And at that point, you have no one to blame but yourself, because you won’t be able to act like you didn’t know what you now know.” It was the whole fool-me-twice-shame-on-me scenario. But I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t argue with his logic, but I still wanted to make it work. At the insistence of my attorneys, who were thinking more rationally than I was when it came to protecting everything I’d worked so hard for, I filed for divorce. But the idea was still to try to work it out. Even if it led to some uncomfortable moments, like on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

  “I heard you’re getting divorced but you’re staying with your husband,” Jimmy said.

  “Well, you know, Jimmy, love is odd! Sometimes it’s not till you get divorced that you realize you really love the person!”

  But it was kind of true. It’s what I was feeling. So Matt and I kind of carried on as we had, with not a lot changing on the surface. Matt seemed to understand why filing for divorce was in my best interest, but he also appeared to go along with the notion that we were trying to mend the relationship. Sometimes we’d fight about what happened, and there’d be tears. But he never denied his actions, never said I was crazy or I made things up. He didn’t argue about the fact that he did it. If it came up, he’d say, “Yeah, I’ve got to work on that.”

  He started leaving the house on a regular basis, and while I never attended OA meetings with him, let me tell you something: I have never seen anyone in my life so dedicated to healthy eating and rapid weight loss. He dove into that program headfirst. He shed pounds so quickly, that it led me to believe that he really wanted to change his entire life. That gave me a lot of encouragement. I was actually concerned that he was getting a little too obsessive about losing the weight—he took his own low-calorie food with him everywhere—but I thought, he’s bettering himself. Good. What I didn’t know until later was that while he was committed to a weight-loss program, he had been lying about regularly meeting with folks to deal with his money issues. It became the same old thing. He’d say he was going to Pasadena for a DA meeting, tell me the details about it: about his new sponsor he’d had coffee with, the work groups he’d joined, the columns of numbers they’d have him write out on notepads. Then a month later he’d admit, “I didn’t go.”

  “What about two nights ago when you came back at nine thirty and told me about the meeting?” I said.

  “I didn’t go.”

  “You made that up?”

  “Well, I just drove around.”

  “Look, Matt, it’s great that you’re steaming broccoli three times a day, but I think the debt and the compulsive lying is your core issue to deal with. The overeating is a symptom of that. I think DA is the program you need to focus on. Matt, if you can lose one hundred pounds, then you can do anything. You’ve clearly got the discipline and the strength.”

  He would agree halfheartedly, but it was clear that he had completely thrown himself into losing all this weight. If actions speak louder than words, then by his rapidly shrinking body it was obvious he had focused on his weight-loss program over anything else.

  But he’d also tell bizarre little lies, too. Small things that made no sense. Matt would say he talked to a mutual friend of ours, then I would talk to the friend and they’d say, “No, I haven’t talked to Matt in weeks.”

  When I’d ask Matt why he said that, it was again with “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  What did he gain by telling little lies? Would it ever end? When I tried to discuss it, and God knows I tried many times, he seemed very shut down, and really, you can’t force someone to give you answers. So anytime this came up, I would liken his reaction to that of a little kid who’s gotten caught doing something, has just checked out in his mind, and tries to end the conversation as quickly as possible. While I was frustrated by these moments, I kept thinking there must be an answer; I just hadn’t figured it out yet.

  A big change happened when Matt and I were watching a program on compulsive liars on Oprah, of all things. Of course, it made me uncomfortable. The similarities to Matt were weird. Well, one of the liars on the show wound up in prison. When the show was over, I turned to Matt and said, “You know, Matt, if I wasn’t your wife, you’d be in jail right now. I hope you’re smart enough not to embezzle from one of your clients, cause they’d put your ass in jail in two seconds.”

  And incidentally, when we were initially dating, Matt told me that
when he was in the army and stationed in Germany, he’d gone to military jail, for stealing a buddy’s ATM card and trying to use it. At the time he told me this, I just chalked it up to being nineteen years old and stupid. Now, in retrospect, I realize I didn’t have the appropriate reaction. I focused on the honesty of him telling me it, rather than the fact that he was caught stealing.

  Anyway, when I mentioned prison to him, he had the oddest reaction.

  “I think I’d be fine in jail,” he said.

  “Oh come on, pasty white guy,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I really think I could survive in prison,” he said. “I would know how to assimilate, I would know how to blend in to the point where I just don’t think anyone would bother me.”

  That was a chilling moment for me. The fact that he’d given consideration to how he would assimilate in prison scared the shit out of me. What it told me was, this guy’s not afraid of anything, and more important, not afraid of getting caught. I don’t know about you, ladies, but I’d want a husband who’s actively taking steps to stay out of prison. It freaked me out enough that I made a drastic move that night.

  “This is really hard, Matt,” I said. “But you have to move out.”

  Matt found a roommate to share an apartment, but I still held out hope for a miracle reconciliation, because despite the gravity of the situation, I couldn’t stomach the notion that things wouldn’t work out. Filming for the second season of The D-List was coming up, and I wanted my husband to be at home, and to be honest, I was determined not to act out my divorce for a comedy-driven reality show. Like anyone else, my responsibilities were such that I couldn’t afford to take an infinite amount of time off to fix my personal life. I actually thought we could film the show during the day and when the cameras left, we could run to couples therapy or somehow work on the damaged part of our relationship off camera. Besides, that’s not what the show was. Then we had a therapy session in which the therapist actually told Matt, “You have to start doing things to help Kathy. I’m suggesting you go back to work, Kathy, and Matt, probably the best thing you can do for her is go back to work as usual.”