Tales of the Crazy

by Charles L Cole

  I was waiting at the courthouse, and she walked in. Damn.

  I saw Michael Vincent at the courthouse while we waited to go into the courtroom. He was with a sleazy-looking guy I assumed was one of his seedier clients. I said hi and told him that today was the final divorce judgment; soon I would be a free man.

  Michael was very happy to hear this and said, “Good—that woman is toxic.”

  I agreed with him. Michael asked me, “Do you have any weights in your pants?”

  That comment took me by surprise, and I had a puzzled look; I did not know what he meant by this.

  He said, “When you leave with the divorce papers signed, you will be floating and will need weights to keep yourself on the ground.”

  We both laughed at that and chatted a bit, and then he left.

  Prior to this court appearance, I had prepared a long list of all Jess’s violations of the court orders. I also had a two-page summary of all the abuses she had committed against me, detailing the more severe false accusations she had made to the court. Based on all she had done, I was ready to submit to the court my “proposal for a judgment of divorce and nullification of the consent judgment of divorce proposal without a trial.” I prepared a radical reduction of what she would receive from my 401(k), pension, and equity in the home. I had this ready just in case Jess flipped out again by not agreeing to the judgment we had worked out. I was not sure if it would be considered by the court, but I wanted to be prepared just in case.

  While we waited to enter the courtroom, I was very nervous, wondering if Jess would lose it again and reject the consent judgment. Nothing was a given with her out-of-control emotions. Luckily that didn’t happen. Jess was sitting in the hallway next to her attorney, James. I hadn’t met him yet. A few minutes went by. I looked over, and she smiled and waved at me to come over.

  Wow, this was different. Normally she had an evil-incarnate look when she saw me, but other people were present, and she wanted to look good. I walked over to them, and she was extremely pleasant. She asked how Diva was doing, and I said she was mad at me. Jess gave me a puzzled look, and I said she was mad because I had given her a short summer cut.

  Jess beamed with a huge smile and talked tenderly about Diva to James. She spoke about the many times we had worked together to cut her fur and the difficulty we had trimming her nails. I told Jess I had taken Diva to a groomer to get her nails trimmed and that she’d sat there calmly while the groomer took her paws and cut her nails. Jess was shocked, and her eyes flew wide-open at hearing how calmly Diva had acted.

  Jess described in detail to James how we’d had to wrap Diva in a flannel shirt and hold her tightly because she pulled and jerked so badly when we tried to trim her nails. I told James that I’d been afraid she might get hurt from pulling and jerking her paws away so hard. Jess chimed in, agreeing with me and smiling at the genuinely fond memories of Diva and us together. All during the pleasantries, I knew not to trust her, as I knew she could flip at any minute. I thought about her PPO—one of the statements in it had said she was afraid I would shoot Diva. There was no way I was going to fall for this nice-girl act.

  Jess asked if I had a current insurance certificate for her car. She had received a ticket a few days ago and needed to give the certificate to the traffic office within thirty days so she could get the ticket dismissed. I told her I’d look for it. I also reminded her that after today, she would be responsible for her auto insurance. Her attorney chimed in and said she would be responsible for health and all other insurance after today. I immediately realized it had been a mistake to tell her she would be responsible for insurance. Anything could set her off and ruin the consent judgment, but I was lucky nothing happened. When I got back home, I thought, No way will I help get her the insurance certificate after all the hell she did to me. She never followed up to ask for the insurance certificate again.

  Our time in court was very brief. The judge had reviewed the consent judgment while we waited outside the courtroom. We were the only people in the courtroom besides the judge and his staff. Ray spoke and asked Jess if she understood that the support payments were unmodifiable. She said yes. Her attorney repeated the same thing to her, and she said yes. The judge asked us if we both consented to this judgment and if we agreed to the unmodifiable spousal support and the fact that we would not be going through the friend of the court for her support payments. We both said yes, and the judge approved the divorce. We were in the courtroom for only about fifteen minutes.

  It took another fifteen minutes between the attorneys and our signing five copies of the divorce judgment and other documents. One of the documents from the court stated that the court found that no spousal abuse had occurred during the marriage. I was very happy to see this. It was a moral victory but shallow and bittersweet. The court recognized that all the accusations Jess had made were without merit, but she received no punishment or sanctions for her lies. Then I left the courthouse. Driving home, I was elated. It was over. I was now legally a single man, and I was free! I gave my dad and sister a call to tell them the good news.

  The next day I removed Jess from my auto and medical insurance. I reviewed my other records and purged her from them. I called human resources and had her removed from all other work benefits. That felt great—purging her from my life. I wondered if she had followed through and signed up for Cobra coverage to continue the existing medical coverage she’d had through my job. If she hadn’t…oh well—not my problem anymore.

  Finally, after all this hell she had put me through, the divorce was done. Had she acted in a decent manner and not caused all these problems, the divorce would have been over very quickly and with minimal cost. All the lies and malicious stunts she had pulled accomplished nothing positive. They only brought on more pain, misery, and exorbitant legal costs through delaying the divorce with her constant stream of false accusations. The only people who made out were the attorneys.

  I was out more than $33,000 in attorney and consultant fees, with fighting the DV charges and all divorce costs. Add in another $10,000 for paying other attorneys for her bankruptcy, DCFU coming after me for her debts, and the state of Michigan garnishing my checking account. Ray told me that Jess’s divorce costs would probably be much higher than mine due to her constant badgering of her attorneys and wasting their time. All her legal costs would be subtracted from what she got from her portion of the equity on my home and her marital portion of my 401(k). Any legal funds paid by her from her portion of the 401(k) would also incur a 30 percent penalty from the IRS for early withdrawal. I suspected her attorneys may have hidden this little tidbit from her.

  On the way home from the courthouse, I stopped and bought $20 of lottery tickets. It would have been poetic justice if I’d won and Jess couldn’t get a cent of it because we were no longer married. As an engineer who is not math challenged, I know the odds of winning, and this was just a fantasy. The next day I checked the lottery numbers; I had won nothing. Oh, if only!

  I got back home and, too excited to sit down, started pacing around the house. I texted a few people to spread the good news. After a while, I calmed down and started planning what to do next with my life.

  The next day at work was great. People came up very happy for me that this was over. Many of my coworkers knew all that had happened and wished me the best for rebuilding my life. One guy who had gone through two divorces was still very angry at what had been taken from him financially. He told me, “Never forget that if it flies, floats, or fucks, it’s cheaper to rent than buy.” This was very crude, and I don’t agree with the last part. But I understand where he is coming from.

  The next big task was to clear out the entire store inventory from my home and get all her personal stuff out. Ray specifically put in the judgment that “the inventory, supplies, and equipment of Formal Diva, LLC, will be sold with the proceeds used to pay the tax obligations of Formal Diva, LLC.” Jess’s name or approval on how it was done was kept off, because I was sure R
ay and her fifth attorney both realized she would only cause problems.

  Later in the evening, I went on the computer and saw a post on Facebook by Pastor Sturly, which said, “I am doing research into finding the top 10 best places for Christian singles to meet other Christian singles. Please suggest ideas, and I will compile your answers and share them down the road! This is a church project and not personal (but I may use the findings! LOL).”

  I posted this in reply: “The two women I cared about the most, married one and proposed to the other, I met in church. They also lied and screwed me over the worst more than all the other ones I dated outside of church.”

  Yes, my reply was a bit bitter. At this point, I was very disillusioned about finding a good woman in church. I had little to no trust in women and didn’t want any of their emotional issues in my life, but I was sure this would change after I had time to heal all the emotional wounds. Reflecting on all the women I had dated over the years, I realized that the vast majority who had caused the most trouble or wronged me the worst were all churchgoing women. The most beautiful ones were the absolute worst. It sure wasn’t supposed to be that way, and I had thought I could find a better class of women to date at church.

  Two weeks later at church, my friend Ron came up to me and commented about my Facebook reply. He said, “Sinners go to church, not saints.”

  I told him, “That’s true, but you would think that a woman who has Christ in her heart would at least try to act better and be more honest, but that was not the case in my experience.”

  So at least for now, I was not even considering dating any women in my church. There were hardly any single women in my age group there anyway.

  The issues remaining were the division of property and Jess’s tax debt. I knew that the division of our shared property would not go well, as she wanted everything she could take just to be malicious and feed her sense of entitlement. We had prepared separate lists of what we wanted, and her demands were outrageous. She wanted my band saw, drill press, thirty-foot extension ladders, half of my tools, large toolboxes, grinders, framing nailer, scroll saw, half the lumber, and many other items she hadn’t used or was not even capable of using.

  My band saw was not a normal hobbyist saw. It was a 240VAC, four-hundred-pound beast of a saw and was something only a serious woodworker would ever use. Jess was being spiteful and trying to take anything she could from me.

  When I told my coworker Dale about her demands for my band saw and half of my lumber, Dale said I should agree to give her the lumber with the stipulation that she build a coffin for herself within thirty days. We laughed about that remark. Dale then asked me if I had ever heard of the song “Crazy Bitch” by Buckcherry. I Googled the song and saw the video. It was crude but very fitting. I played for Dale the ringtone I had made just for Jess. It was from “Devil Woman” by Cliff Richard. Dale laughed even harder. It was juvenile behavior on my part, but it fit how I felt about her. She hadn’t called since I’d set that ringtone, so I had not had the pleasure of hearing it ring.

  Ray told me the list I submitted for our proposed property division was very fair. He sent Jess an e-mail about her demands:

  If you are asking for the heavy duty framing nailer, 30 foot yellow extension ladder, drill press and other large tools and toolboxes just to “get back” at Chuck by taking his tools, that is not going to work. Every judge and arbitrator can see this type of behavior from a mile away. Additionally, you have to ask yourself “who is really being disadvantaged by the delay you are causing with these types of requests?” Chuck has the use of the property while all of this is dragging out whereas you have every interest in getting this matter concluded.

  Jess still would not relent and refused to be reasonable.

  I contacted an auction house, American Eagle Auctions, and spoke with Ken to come get the store inventory. In the meantime, I put a couple of ads on Craigslist to sell the sewing equipment, cloth, and easy-to-sell items. The sales went well, and the $1,500 I received would be split between Jess and me to pay off her tax debt. I wanted to get more for the machines, but they were old with many hours of hard use on them.

  In the beginning of June, when I was going through all the store items to get ready for selling, I found a very large stash of her pills she had forgotten. The amount was shocking. One Ziploc bag contained hundreds of Vicodin tablets. Also in the stash were bottles of oxycodone, morphine sulfate, and a bunch of other bottles of pills for pain and mental conditions. No wonder there’s an opioid crisis in this country if one person could get all these narcotics.

  The day before Ken came over to pick up the inventory, I moved a bunch of stuff up from the basement to the garage to make the move go more easily. Halfway through, I was carrying a little twenty-pound box when I went out the door and down one step to the garage, and my ankle just folded over. I hit the ground feeling searing pain in my ankle. Out of all the extreme outdoor activities I did, a little step I had gone on thousands of times before did me in. I immediately hobbled to the kitchen, took a couple of ibuprofens, got a bag of ice, and put my foot up with the ice pack on it to help stop the swelling.

  On June 14, Ken and his crew came over and picked up the entire store inventory. It took two trips with his twenty-five-foot enclosed trailer. Ken was amazed at how much stuff there was. I was able to see my dining room walls for the first time since 2008. It felt great to have my house back again, and now I could start fixing it up. Bruised and swollen, my ankle was really hurting, but when I saw how clear my house was of all her store inventory and clutter that had been there for more than eight years, I thought, Damn it, spraining my ankle was worth it!

  Ken and I chatted a bit about all that had happened to me, and he told me, “Don’t let someone live rent free in your head.” That is good advice.

  Ray and I had also been trying to get Jess to come over and pick up the rest of her personal items and the shared property we had agreed she could take. We got nothing but inaction from her. I was getting extremely frustrated with Jess refusing to get her stuff. We made multiple requests for her to come get it, but still there was nothing from her. I even told Ray that I was at the point of throwing all her crap away. This was my house, and I wanted her stuff out of my life.

  The attorneys went back and forth frequently during the rest of June and July trying to get Jess to pick up her things, but Jess would not act. She broke multiple appointments we made for her to come over. On July 15, Ray sent me an e-mail saying Jess’s attorney, James, had withdrawn. That was five legal firms now that had withdrawn from Jess during this divorce. I wondered if that was a record.

  After her attorney withdrew, Jess had the nerve to file a motion with the court demanding a walk-through of my home. It was crazy; we had been trying to get her over, but she would not act. Because she tried to do it on her own, she filed it incorrectly. The court would have tossed out her messed-up motion without a response from us, but Ray put together a response anyway, citing the issues we’d had with her, including her breaking appointments to come to the home.

  The court smacked her down after seeing evidence of her nonsense. On the ruling given on August 4, 2016, she was ordered to remove all her “not at issue” property by August 31 or it would be forfeited, and I could do whatever I wanted with it. In addition, the court ordered us to attend arbitration to resolve the remaining issue of the “at issue” property, which we could not agree on how to divide. Arbitration had to be completed by September 30. The arbitrator would determine the length of time Jess had to remove the at-issue property awarded to her.

  Jess came over on August 21 with five people and a fifteen-foot moving van to get her stuff. She had a very large amount of property to move, and the van and other people’s vehicles could not hold it all. During this trip, Jess wore a very snug and revealing outfit. I wondered why she had dressed like that. It was not the type of outfit a normal person would wear for a move hauling stuff.

  When we were in the basement alone,
she gave me a hug, kissed me, and said, “I will always love you.”

  This was very bizarre, and there was no way I was going to be swayed at all by her display of affection. However, to be civil and try to keep the peace, I gave her four quarts of my homemade canned chicken stew and told her I wanted her to take these just in case she got sick. She really appreciated this. We talked a bit more, and I asked her if she was working. Jess replied that she couldn’t work because of all the problems my attorney was causing and all the motions he filed. It was another crazy excuse. Jess could not comprehend that she was the one who had caused all these problems and my motions were in response to all the false accusations she had made.

  After Jess and her friends left, a very large amount of her personal items remained. She needed another trip to load a large van with a couple of helpers, but she made only one more trip on the very last day allowed by the court order. She came by herself with only her small Ford Focus to pack things in. A huge amount of her stuff remained after she left. The result of her inaction was that now all her remaining items were forfeited to me, including the large $1,200 kiln she never used, her hobby supplies, garage-sale junk, books, magazines, and many boxes of knickknacks. The next day was trash day, and I maxed out what I could put out for curbside pickup. What I threw out were useless knickknacks; the other stuff I saved to use as a bargaining chip for the property arbitration that would happen later.

  I could write another book on all Jess’s other bizarre and hateful behavior since September 2016, the mess property arbitration became, the incompetence of the arbitrator, and her multiple filings of more motions, but there’s already enough of her craziness to read through. Any more would be overload.

  Many unresolved tax and property division issues remain, and it will take months or even years to complete. When dealing with Jess, nothing is easy, and she will always throw a wrench in the works and make simple issues extremely difficult. I’m really looking forward to the day when she is out of my life for good. I’ve been able to forgive her, but she can never be trusted. The farther she is away with her issues, the better.