It was almost three o’clock. My eyes were tired. I got up to look inside the last box, and there was a document: United States of America v. Thomas T. Prousalis, Jr., Defendant. It was a transcript dated April 9, 2010, between my father and Judge Cote.
Dad: First, excuse me, I have a very bad cold. Sorry for my voice . . . I am sorry it has taken so long and my hard head to deal with the realization that if it’s cash flow, if it comes into the Bank of America account, then 20 percent is due to the government. Fundamentally what happened here is that I did not timely pay 20 percent of my cash flow until a hammer was held over my head. For that I apologize. Secondly, going overseas on that business trip and even though it involved a serious amount of money, an $187 million contract for which my clients are grateful that I have put it together, and they are very happy, nevertheless I violated a ruling by this court and for which I am profoundly apologetic. That is not something that I would do intentionally. It was inadvertent, nevertheless I did violate it, and I am sorry for that.
Judge Cote: Hardly inadvertent. You knew you didn’t have permission to go.
Dad: Ma’am—you are exactly right. My probation officer said that I could go to Los Angeles and instead I went overseas and that was wrong. So I think going forward, Your Honor, I have learned a severe lesson. The MCC is not a happy place, and I am sorry about all of this, being out for 2 years and screwing up like this, it was awful, and I feel very bad about it. My daughters—it’s a sad situation, and I am sincerely apologetic.
Judge Cote: Well, I found it tragic. I think the probation department’s request that you receive mental health counseling is a good one. I think there is something profoundly, profoundly wrong here. You lavished gifts on your daughters, engaged in travel, took money from your father, did everything to please yourself, misled and lied to the probation department . . . doing everything you could do to evade your obligations. And your submissions to me in connection with this sentence, again, with falsehoods and obfuscation and denial and shifting blame to others. Now, fundamentally you were convicted of a fraud, and fundamentally what has been happening here while you have been on supervision is very similar behavior filled with falsehoods, evading your legal duties, depriving others of funds that they were entitled to receive, and the truth of a lot of what you have had to say is hard to pin down, but when one does enough work, one finds that underneath it all there was no “there” there. So I am not hopeful, Mr. Prousalis, that you truly understand what it would require for you to live a law-abiding life and take responsibility for your actions as opposed to shifting blame on others and taking money, really, from others that doesn’t belong to you. It is tragic that your first term of imprisonment did not have any significant change on you whatsoever, just tragic. So I am now going to send you to prison a second time. This will give you a second opportunity to reflect on what course you want your life to lead. And when you come out, I want you to treat your probation officer, whoever that person may be, with respect, to deal with that person honorably, to participate in good faith in mental health counseling to try and understand what is driving you to do these very self-destructive things.
Please stand. I impose a term of imprisonment of 9 months to be followed by a term of supervised release of 2 years and 3 months.
I got up from the desk, shoving the chair so that it tumbled backward. I left my wallet. My ID. My sanity. I ran into the bathroom down the hallway, flung myself over the toilet, and threw up. As I gasped for air, with my hands gripping the sides of the toilet bowl, my heart heavy from all of the years I defended him, blinded by this life of false evidence—there were signs—and I chose to ignore all of them. I did that; they were flashing before my eyes:
Stratton Oakmont popping up on the caller ID at the dinner hour, and my father screaming, “Do not pick up the phone!” The dinner party for the Albanian government official. The $300,000 he said he would wire into my bank account but never did. Matron Tequila and my two million shares of stock, the Legends, Americana Library: A Library of 20th Century American and Classical Music, and the Gulfstream, and the Porsches, and our future houses in Beverly Hills—wherever and whatever he told me to do, it was coming to me in a vacuum: “Let this remain confidential, Christina Bambina.” It was deception, illusion, strategic manipulation filled with lies, allowing my instincts and intuition to be smashed away because the truth was too impossible to swallow. My childhood was just a fractured reality—and now the revelation I had, along with the documents, showed I had been conned by him over and over again. His being a repeat offender solidified that for me. It was proof. I had been addicted to his ambiguity, never knowing the whole truth; squashing those voices inside of me with reckless abandon, leaving me capsized on the other end of a battle that would only remain inside myself. My only way out of his insanity—out of my own insanity—would be to let those voices scream.
-27-
Memorial Day to the End
It wasn’t denial. It was the truth that took me down. Lower than I’d ever gone before. It was Memorial Day weekend, and I drank, did drugs, and had sex to stay alive because I thought reality would kill me.
I wasn’t sure how much Adderall I had taken. I stopped counting. After every few drinks, I seemed to pop one more each hour to keep me up. Afraid to sleep. Afraid of the nightmares. I sat next to my friend Matty, whom I’d met when I lived with Mara and Brian. He had lived in the unit below us. We swiveled on the bar stools at Jumbo’s Clown Room, an exotic “dance bar” in Hollywood where girls who look like Disney princesses pole dance wearing American Apparel hoodies. I had told him what I discovered in New York. “Let’s get fucked up,” I said.
Matty sipped his Miller Lite as I rested my elbow on the bar and looked at a young girl with silky hair and a perfect body dancing onstage while men threw money at her. “I want to save her,” I slurred. There was an innocence to her, and I was obsessed with wanting to know her story. I wondered if it was anything like mine. How easy it was to feel that this was the only choice. I looked around at the red leather chairs, and the men who would leave to go jerk off to her in a booth at the XXX video store down the street. I know because I stumbled past it while trying to hail a cab. I marched inside to yell at the man behind the counter in a drunken rage, when Matty grabbed my arm and pulled me out to the curb. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he hissed. I flinched back, left him and my car somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, hopped into a cab, and told the driver to take me up the canyon to my mother and Richard’s house. They were out of town for the weekend, and they’d given me a key to watch their dogs while they were away.
What I remember: The cab fare being $50. Standing at the kitchen island and pulling ice cubes out of the freezer. Dumping the rest of a bottle of Grey Goose into two crystal glasses I knew were a gift from my parents’ wedding. Opening the front door for Chad, a man I’d met at the Standard Hotel a month earlier. Chad standing at the kitchen island telling me of the last conversation he had with his father as he lay dying from colon cancer in a sterile hospital bed before he took his last breath. Me trying to listen with my elbow on the table, fingers running through my hair as I floated in and out of consciousness.
I woke up to feel my head banging against the guest bedroom headboard. I was on my back. My legs were bent and spread wide. It was dark. My right arm reaching for anything but air. Chad jackhammering his entire body hard against my lungs. My heart beating fast from all the Adderall. I thought I might not ever breathe again. “I can’t breathe,” I mumbled. Chad kept going. I never told him no. I never told him yes. I was a wilted leaf blowing in his wind. And when I looked up, he looked angry, and I wanted to cry, but my tears felt stuck in between the palpitations of my heart until he came with my hair bunched in his hand, and the world went black.
“Dad! Dad! Guess what?” I was beaming, wearing my green choir jacket with the St. Patrick’s shield my father had sewed onto my pocket the night before. He had learned to sew while in the air force. I was i
n the sixth grade, and his red Porsche made a rare appearance in the carpool line. He’d left work early to surprise me.
“What? What?” When my father knew I was excited, he exuded an equal level of excitement to match mine.
“I won the election!” I exulted. “I’m the president of the upper-school choir!”
“That’s my girl! I’m so proud of you,” he said.
I was a loser, a failure. I stared into the mirror at my blue eyes, the round tip of my nose, my lips, my dark brown hair. They were his. I didn’t recognize myself. I was twenty-seven years old with a death wish, standing under the pale and sober light. And I wanted to die. My childhood—it was only in my imagination, wasn’t it?—its perfection, because the truth, no matter how it rippled and roared and escaped through me, would eventually come back around again covered in the echoes of my father. The euphoria that had dealt its own hand in my version of what was and what wasn’t penetrated my nervous system so profoundly that I had missed the whole truth. Only now did I realize I would have to kill it if I wanted to cross the threshold into reality.
I called Mara first. She picked up, and I told her where he’d been; why he’d disappeared. “I just spoke to him the other day,” she said, nonchalantly. “What?” I asked. “Yeah,” she said. “He’s doing business in Albania.”
“Mara, stop, stop!” I yelled as she continued rambling on as though she were proud of him. Mara didn’t want to hear the truth. She argued with me. She wanted to keep my father locked in the light of his glory days—our glory days. She had recently become engaged to a local musician and part-time fitness instructor, and I could feel her slipping from me too into the darkness of denial. She and her fiancé couldn’t afford an engagement ring, so she wore our mother’s. The ring my father had proposed to her with. “Like fate.” I couldn’t stand looking at it, for all that it represented. I couldn’t understand how she could wear it, and as a symbol of what? The conversation would instigate the beginning of a torn relationship between our differences of perception, of reality, and I couldn’t change her. I couldn’t make her see the truth, just like Atticus and Liam couldn’t make me see my truth. We fall when we fall, and it’s not up for anyone else to decide when or if it ever happens.
I got off the phone. Disoriented, I had been driving somewhere in a neighborhood in Beverly Hills, and when I hung up, I had no idea where I was. I needed someone to believe me so that I didn’t feel insane. I had photocopied the statement that Judge Cote made when resentencing my father. I kept it in a folder in my purse, so I could look at it when I needed to and be reassured that I was right and he was wrong.
Then I called Chloe. My little sister was doing well. She’d begun working for an event planning company and had established herself in the Santa Barbara community, with many friends that were now her family. When I told her where our father had been, she said, “I’m not surprised,” as though she had let go of him long before I had. Still, after I read her the judge’s sentencing statement, I could hear in her voice the pain that she still carried. It had reopened and solidified old wounds. After my argument with Mara, self-doubt was inevitable, the thought again that maybe I could be wrong; it was hard to shut it out without the help of others. But in that moment with Chloe, I felt safer. I felt connected to her. I felt I wasn’t crazy, just hearing a glimpse of the commonality of our pain as sisters, as our father’s children, pain that wasn’t, for once, hostile, but real. It was all I needed—not to feel so alone so that maybe I had one more chance of reclaiming my life.
When I called my mother, we decided to meet at Mel’s Drive-In on Sunset. I pulled into the valet parking lot and saw her standing under the retro-neon sign, waiting for me. She looked like Mom. There were moments when I would catch glimpses of her the way I remembered her to be, and I tried to hold on to them as long as I could before they would disappear again. Her red hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore jeans, ballerina flats, and a white blouse. I was surprised at how happy I was to see her. I felt I understood her more for the choices she was forced to make and that she too had been conned. And even if she’d had the slightest intuition to run from him, I understood how difficult it was to do without any real proof. We sat in a booth by the slanted glass windows. It was sunny, and I ordered a Coke and a cheeseburger. She did too, like we used to do on days when I played hooky in elementary school, and she would take me to the McLean Family Restaurant just to talk, like grown-ups do.
When I told her what I had discovered about Dad, she asked warily, “How did you find all of this out?” She asked it as though she were guilty of something; as though I were talking about her.
“I went to the federal courthouse and went through his records,” I said. “It was easy.” With the look of guilt written across her face, my mother told me she had known about my father’s resentencing all along and had kept it a secret from everyone. She knew back when we’d had sushi together. Deborah, the lawyer representing her in the Cohen Milstein case, had called to tell her. It’s why her fibromyalgia flared up. It’s why she ended up at Cedars-Sinai hospital for what she claimed was a kidney infection. But I knew it was her body’s breakdown, her own experience of the truth being forced upon her physically, as it had been for me soon afterward.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Because your dad and I were already divorced, and I didn’t want to get involved. I didn’t know how your relationship with him would go.” She picked at her french fries. “But it seems as though history continues to repeat itself.” My mother was referring to her relationship with her own father, the parallels of our stories. How both of our fathers left our lives on the edge of adulthood.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Her pain was my pain; her story, my story. I was only just beginning to see this. How it was up to me to break the family cycle.
I pulled out Judge Cote’s remarks from the sentencing and read them to her at the table. She wanted to hear every word. We were putting together the pieces to the puzzle of a man we loved and hated, who’d shattered our moral compass that our only hope for healing would be to detach completely. To let go. But my mother had known this long before me. And though she jumped into the arms of a man who claims to have saved her, I wanted the ending of my story to be different.
I realized the very person I had continually and delusionally thought would save me had just destroyed me. And I had let it happen. I didn’t know how I would forgive him or how I would forgive myself. The difference between my mother and me was that I had a great big future ahead—one she could never get back.
“I can’t take back all of those years. I gave my life away to him. I gave him my beauty, my youth, all of the love I had inside of me. But you can. Let him go.”
The MCC Trust. I had forgotten about the contract my father asked me to sign in order to obtain dual citizenship between the United States and Greece. He’d wanted a Greek passport to open up European bank accounts. I never signed the documents he sent me after the fight I had with Atticus on the streets of Brooklyn. Subconsciously I must have known that my friend was right. The two of us never talked about it again; we just slowly slipped back into our old friendship. After seeing my mother, I went home and frantically searched through my emails, and found the contract. The contract was drawn up by the Law Offices of Jennie Giannakopoulou, Esq., but there was no contact information. I Googled her name, and she popped up. She was real. Her offices were located in Athens, Greece. I found her email address on her website and emailed her that night.
Hi Jennie,
This is an agreement that was sent to me by my father, Thomas Prousalis Jr. of Richmond, VA, in 2009. He mentioned that you were the attorney working with him on obtaining dual citizenship for my sisters and myself. I am just trying to get clarification on what the final status is, as I am no longer in communication with my father.
Thank you in advance for your help on this matter. This is a time-sensitive issue.
Best,
; Christina
Dear Christina,
I am in receipt of your email, which has made me thinking. We were never retained by your father on this or any matter. The name Prousalis sounds familiar (he may have contacted me for information), but I only found a George Prousalis informational letter in our files and no client under the name Prousalis (for this I am certain).
I will be happy to be of further assistance if you need.
Kind regards,
Jennie Giannakopoulou
The next day, I drove to the Social Security office as fast as I could. The line at the office on Vine Street in Hollywood reminded me of the line that Josh and I stood in waiting to visit Dad in prison. When I made it to the front door, I was greeted by two armed security officers who checked my bag before letting me enter and then asked me why I was there. I told them I was there to request a new Social Security number, a new identity, and that I was a victim of identity theft. It was the first time I said the words out loud. My entire face was quivering, and I tried not to cry as they directed me to the kiosk ahead. “Sign in there.” I walked over and tapped the electronic screen, indicating the purpose of my visit, and then sat down in the waiting area. The more I waited, the more my paranoia grew. How would I know if I had accounts opened under my name in Europe? My heart raced, and I prayed to God someone here could help me.
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