“Okay. So tell him pretty brunette girl pay for dinner. But after you leave.”
“Exactly,” I said, grinning.
Ten minutes later, the waitress brought me his check. After paying it, I took the itemized receipt and wrote in red pen at the top: “. . . Because I know you need the money. Xo Christina Prousalis.” I folded the receipt, handed it to the waitress, and said, “Give this to him for me, will you? It’s a little note.”
The waitress thought this was so cute. “Yes, of course.” I gave her a $20 tip. “Let’s get out of here,” my girlfriend said.
“A little bit of forgiveness mixed with a little bit of revenge never hurt anybody, right?” I fantasized about the questions his wife might ask him: “Who paid our bill?”
My girlfriend couldn’t stop laughing. “You’re so crazy.” We high-fived each other, and I walked out the door with my head held high and thought, Eh, Pacific Palisades ain’t so bad anymore.
A few days later, I threw on jeans and a T-shirt and ransacked my closet. Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstenberg, Stuart Weitzman, Prada, Burberry, and Ralph Lauren went flying into a pile on the floor. I threw my Tiffany watch, Michele watch, pearls, and gold bracelets into a pile on my bed. I grabbed the fake Birkin, the classic Chanel, and the Yves Saint Laurent handbags I had forgotten about, and dumped them in another pile. With each item I discarded it felt like I was peeling away a layer of dead skin. I threw everything into trash bags and lugged them downstairs and out to my car. I had made a deal with myself: I would sell half to pay my bills for the month, and I would donate the rest to Goodwill.
There is no greater feeling than watching all of these expensive name-brand fashions and accessories being dumped into a dirty blue tub at the Goodwill in Hollywood, knowing that they would go to people who actually needed it. And I don’t mean they needed a Chanel purse; I mean simply a purse. Or a pair of shoes—no, not Stuart Weitzman shoes. Just shoes. Not because they needed to prove to someone that they were of a certain class or that they were more beautiful or better than other people, but because they needed it for a job interview so they could put food on the table for their three-year-old. The old man who handed me my receipt didn’t say “Wow, thank you for these designer labels!” No. That would never even cross his mind. He was grateful for the donation of functional clothing and accessories. I thanked him, and I was off to the next location.
Wasteland is a hip vintage clothing store on Melrose where you can sell used clothing and accessories. I walked up to the counter and dumped the Hermès purse in front of a tall hipster wearing suspenders. “It’s a fake,” I said. “How much is it worth?” He told me to wait a minute, took the bag, and showed it to his boss, who seemed interested. After a minute of looking at it, the hipster came back and said, “We’ll mark it at three hundred seventy-five dollars. You get thirty-five percent of that price.”
“Sold.” I didn’t care about selling it myself online or pocketing the full amount; I just wanted it out of my life. Gone! Good-bye! I couldn’t believe I had kept it for that long. The hipster wrote me a check for $131.25, and I was out of there. On to the next location. That bag had no emotional significance. I had wept over it long enough.
The pawnshop on the corner of Melrose and Cahuenga Boulevard was a little terrifying on the outside: bright yellow with bars on its blacked-out windows and a doorbell you had to press to be let inside. A young Native American man with a long ponytail opened the door. I had never been inside of a pawnshop before. I imagined it would feel dark and sleazy; maybe gangsters smoking cigars in the back. But I looked around at all the old trinkets and things, guitars and old music equipment displayed on high shelves, and it felt completely the opposite. Shoppers strolled around, and the staff was friendly. I scanned the jewelry cases filled with old watches and silver bracelets as I made my way to the bulletproof glass window to have my Tiffany watch appraised. The man came back through the side door and said, “I can give you a hundred.”
“One hundred dollars, that’s it?” I replied, dumbfounded at how worthless it was. But given the way I responded, it didn’t feel so worthless. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll probably only be able to sell it for around a hundred and fifty.” I paused.
“If you need cash now, I can always give you the loan with interest, and as long as you give it back by a certain date, the watch is yours again.” I felt tears coming on and a lump rising in my throat. “I need a minute to decide,” I told him. Was I just doing all of this out of anger, and would I be sorry later? Or was I really ready to let go, and be happy and free from all of these possessions and gifts from my past that I thought meant something? Even if I decided to keep the watch, it would never feel the same on my wrist. I would feel the shame from the possibility that it was bought with stolen money, and maybe at somebody else’s expense. And if it wasn’t bought with stolen money, was it really a symbol of my father’s love for me? Was this what love meant to me?
I stood there, and I remembered what happened the only time my father ever physically hurt me. I was eight or nine. Mara and I were fighting over a hairbrush in the bathroom. My father was in the other room on a business call. He heard us, threw down the phone, stormed through the door, grabbed me up by my arms, threw me up against the bathroom wall, and screamed at me. When he dropped me, I curled up in a ball on the bath mat, heaving and crying so hard that my mother ran in to see if I was all right, but I was covering my face—I wouldn’t let her see my face—and my mother kept yelling, “Let me see your face! Let me see your face!” until she had to pry my fingers away. She was so afraid he had hit me and that I was bleeding and didn’t want her to see. My father was gone for a few hours after that. I remember the sound of his engine as he peeled out of the driveway.
And when he came back, he brought me a present. It was wrapped in white paper with a velvet green bow on top. I opened it up while sitting on his lap. It was a Madame Alexander doll of Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind.
I dumped the watch back on the counter. “Take the watch,” I said. “I don’t want it anymore.”
“You sure? You don’t want a loan?”
“No. Take it.”
The only possession left was my BMW. But I wasn’t planning on giving that away. I wanted to keep it. And not just because I thought it made me look cool and sexy. That it got me attention, and made me feel good enough. But because it meant I could still hang on to my father, and to my story. The truth was that my mother had sold the Chagall painting to pay off the lien a few years earlier but had forgotten to tell me. I was living with my actor friend Dillon above the crack addict’s apartment when she told me.
“I sold my Chagall to pay off your car,” my mother had said.
“Wait, what? When did you do that?”
“I don’t know, Christina.” The question made her exhausted just thinking about it.
“So, I’ve been able to sell my car this whole time?”
“You have to get the title back first.”
“What’s a title?”
“Proof you own your car. The bank has it.”
“Which bank?”
“I don’t remember. Whoever we were banking with.”
“How am I supposed to remember?”
“Washington Mutual?”
“Washington Mutual doesn’t even exist anymore, Mom!”
“Well, it was over a year ago, because that’s when I got the money.”
“I was homeless and driving around in a BMW! How could you not tell me this?”
I had to retrace my steps to the Wells Fargo bank in Pacific Palisades where it all began. A banker pulled my credit history, and I was able to get proof that the lien had been paid. After filling out a series of paperwork and going to the DMV, the title was finally mailed to me. But when I got it, I didn’t sell the car. My father taught me how to drive stick in that car. It was one of our last moments alone together before he left for prison, and I wasn’t ready to let go. I wanted to keep it forever, for as lon
g as I could, until I was an old lady and it would be declared a vintage. But, the universe had a different plan.
A few days before I was to appear in court for my name change, I was driving along the 101 Freeway near Coldwater Canyon. I remember feeling numb. There was so much change happening in me. I was driving the car but I wasn’t driving the car—someone else was driving the car, and I remember it was quiet. I wasn’t listening to any music, and I wasn’t on my cell phone or even looking at my cell phone, which was buried somewhere in my purse. It was clear and sunny, and I was cruising at forty-five miles an hour in light traffic. I put on my right blinker and moved into the right lane. The freeway was splitting ahead and I continued on toward Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I needed to move over into the right lane, so I checked my wing mirrors and put on my blinker again, then looked over my right shoulder. Before I could glance back at the car in front of me, all I remember seeing was the blue, white, and black BMW logo on the steering wheel before my head smashed against it, accompanied by the sound of crunching metal. Breathing hard, I lifted my head. I touched my face, my nose, to see if I was bleeding. There was no blood. I looked at myself in the mirror. I had hit my head. A bump growing on the left side of my forehead. I looked up and could see the hood of my car smashed like a folded accordion. In a daze, I stepped out of the car and into the middle of the freeway, I began walking into the mirage wavering off the asphalt, squinting my eyes, cars whipping past me blowing my skirt and hair all about. No one stopped to see if I was okay. Then I spun around. The person I hit was sitting in his car. It was a Toyota Sierra. There was only a small dent in his bumper, and he never got out of the car.
“Get out of the road!” someone shouted from an ambulance. Before I could respond, a young woman in an EMT uniform had grabbed me by the arm and yanked me over to the shoulder.
“You’re going to get hit by a car!” she yelled. I turned and looked at her.
“You’re in shock,” she said as I touched my head. The air bag hadn’t deployed.
I sat in the back of the ambulance as an EMT wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm and started pumping to make it tighter. I looked out at my car and realized what I had done. I exploded into sobs, crying as I looked at my totaled BMW. The emergency medical technician kneeled down in front of me. “Breathe,” she said. “Breathe. It’s going to be okay.”
“My car, my car, my car, my car . . .” I started hyperventilating. “It’s gone.”
I had shut down both lanes of the freeway. Gridlock was emerging. Drivers slowed down and saw my mascara-streaked tears in the back of the ambulance.
“Look at me,” the EMT said sharply. Her cheeks were glowing from the heat. “Do you believe in God?”
“What?” I asked, breathing in and out.
“Do you believe in God? You know, something bigger than you? Big breaths now.”
I exhaled. “I’m willing to believe in anything at this point,” I told her.
“Then repeat after me: God—”
She grasped my hands in hers.
“Repeat. After. Me,” she reiterated. “God—”
I looked out at my totaled BMW. A tow truck with flashing yellow lights was pulling up behind it as a police officer paced around it filling out the accident report.
“God—” I said at last.
“I’m giving this to you.”
“I’m giving this to you.”
“Thy will be done.”
I let out one more exasperated sob. “Thy will be done.”
I was still sore from the accident as I waited in the security line at the Los Angeles Superior Courthouse once more.
I had never noticed her before, the statue above me. The word Justice carved below her feet, a terra-cotta goddess draped in judicial robes, all-powerful, and holding a sword in her right hand. Two men kneeling on either side of her; the scales of justice balancing on her head, while an American eagle perched above, its wings spread.
I don’t remember what I was wearing and now, perhaps, it doesn’t matter. Raw to the tip, I walked inside of the courtroom. I sat on the wooden bench in the second row. Humbled. Across the aisle from me, a Hispanic man sitting next to a young Hispanic woman held a baby girl. An Asian man sat behind me, and a girl of mixed race sat next to me.
“I’m Gloria,” the girl whispered. “Are you changing your last name too?”
“Yes,” I whispered back.
“To what?”
“McDowell.”
“Pretty.”
“Thanks. What about you?” I asked.
“Jones. You wouldn’t be able to pronounce my birth name. It’s hard to find work with it, you know? So this is much better.” She smiled.
“Sounds perfect,” I said. Gloria tapped her fingers on her folder and waited.
A few minutes later, Commissioner Matthew St. George, a soft-looking man with a white beard, entered. He took a seat and called the first person to the podium. For each person, he stated the reason for the name change. I squirmed in my seat at the thought of him saying for all to hear, “She is estranged from her father, Thomas Prousalis Jr. He is a convicted felon. She does not want any association with him, his family, or his name, as he illegally took advantage of her Social Security number. She wants to protect herself.” I panicked. Oh God, why did I write that? Now everyone will know. For a minute, I debated leaving as I watched the Hispanic man carry his baby to the podium to be granted a new name. It would be too humiliating.
But it was too late. “Christina Prousalis.”
That’s my name! That’s—was my name, will not be my name anymore, almost not my name—oh God, he just called my name.
I stood up. My hands were shaking as I squeezed past Gloria, and my purse hit the back of the wooden bench making a banging noise that everyone heard, which was embarrassing, as I made my way to the podium to stand before the commissioner.
There I was standing in front of him. I exhaled slowly.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning, sir.”
“You have also filed a petition for name change, I see here.”
“Yes, sir.”
I was ready for him to say the words out loud, in front of everyone, why I had done it. My heart held still—ready for his words to hit me, more painful to hear the truth about my father from someone other than myself.
The commissioner looked down at my file and paused. He looked up at me, and his eyes grew kind, as though he had read my thoughts.
“Congratulations on your new beginning, Ms. McDowell,” was all he said.
My eyes flooded. “Thank you, sir.”
I was finally safe.
-29-
Amalia
The building sat isolated down the street from an abandoned warehouse with bars on its windows. “Jobs Not Jails!” was painted in blue across the side. I stepped out of the used Volkswagen Jetta I bought with the insurance money I got from the accident. I was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. The building wasn’t far from the old nightclub I’d worked at near skid row. Cars whizzed above me toward the bridge over the Los Angeles River. A homeless man, the only person in sight, moped by, pushing a shopping cart filled with blankets, backpacks, and trash. I looked both ways to cross the street. The address was marked inconspicuously on the sidewalk a few feet down. I walked up to the steel door, which was propped open by a giant rock. “Office of Restorative Justice,” it said. Afraid to enter unannounced, I rang the intercom button and waited.
A man with a bald head swung open the door. “It’s open. See?” he said. He was no people pleaser.
I took a step back. “Yeah, I know. I just wasn’t sure. I’m here to see Amalia. Is she here? She told me to come by today.”
“Yeah, yeah, Amalia’s always here. Come on up. I’m Francisco.” He held out his hand.
“I’m Christina,” I said. His arm was covered in tattoos. When he turned around, the back of his neck was red and swollen. Gang tattoo removal. He must have just been rele
ased from prison.
He led me up a dark cement staircase. Crosses and candles lined the stairwell.
Upstairs was a typical office space. Francisco led me down to Amalia Molina’s office at the end of the hallway.
She was more elegant than I had anticipated, sitting behind her desk in a blouse, pearls, and black slacks. Her hair was long and dark, with a few gray streaks. She got up from her seat to shake my hand.
“Hi, I’m Christina McDowell. I called you earlier this week.”
“Yes, yes. Hi, Christina, have a seat. Please.” She pointed to the chair in front of her desk. A few days earlier, I had Googled “families of the incarcerated, Los Angeles.” After all that I had been through, I thought maybe I could be of use and help.
“So what can I do for you?” Amalia exuded a wisdom and serenity that any woman would hope to have in her later years. I noticed stacks of handwritten letters on her desk. I knew they were from prison. No one handwrites letters anymore except people in prison.
“I’d like to help,” I said bluntly. “Put me to work. I can come in three days a week to volunteer.” Amalia smiled at me, wondering why I’d come all the way down there demanding I be put to work without any pay. I was young, not wealthy, and not doing it to fulfill some social elitist expectation or for my college resume. I was still cocktail waitressing and nannying when I could, wondering what I was supposed to be doing with the rest of my life, wondering if I had any kind of purpose or use on this earth. I was searching for something, and Amalia knew what it was before I did.
Each day that I showed up at her office, I sorted through mail and filed letters from prison inmates while I watched Amalia take meetings with mothers, wives, and homeless children who’d come seeking her help. One woman came in panicking because her electricity had been turned off; she could no longer pay all of the bills because her husband had been the main breadwinner, and he was gone. She didn’t know how she would care for her daughter. Amalia held her hand. She listened. She took notes, and she told the woman she would help her look for more work. But I knew there was only so much she could do. I could see the surrounding community drowning in these issues. Ones I related to, yet, because I was white and from a privileged background, I didn’t feel right bringing them up. Dare I say I understood, because I didn’t. The reality of my childhood was starkly different, because even if it was based on some fantasy of my father’s, the things—those material things—I did have, I did touch. I did have an education, and I was privileged. And the shame of it all permeated deep inside of me.
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