“I’m so sorry,” Josh said without any judgment. I felt relieved, but I also felt the sudden need to defend my father.
“The government’s just making an example out of him. He’s filed an appeal, so hopefully he won’t be gone for long.”
“So he’s not guilty?” Josh asked, slightly skeptical.
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. The government forced him to enter a plea deal; otherwise, if he lost, he’d go to prison for a very long time. I had a really happy childhood, like a fairy tale.”
“Well . . .” Josh paused. “If it makes you feel any better, I did too, and now I think my dad is fucking Becky.” I didn’t tell Josh that I already knew; I was glad to know the truth was out between us and didn’t feel the need to tell him. After all, it was hard for me to talk about the truth of what went on around me. The commonality of each other’s newfound pain and our once-perfect childhoods would glue us together with an intensity far too great for either of us to understand at such a young age. We fell madly in love.
Josh took on the role of “man of the house,” helping my mother get situated, sometimes surprising us with sushi or pizza for dinner in the gaps when we weren’t sure how we’d put food on the table. Josh had met my father a few times before he left for prison. They bonded over their favorite directors, such as Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick. My father would send us letters from prison talking about Scorsese’s latest film, like The Aviator, which was the last movie he saw before he surrendered. We had gone to see it on Christmas to distract us from the bleak and friendless holiday, with only a few presents that my mother bought from Santee Alley downtown, where street vendors sell knockoff designer purses and shoes.
Overwrought with anticipation, I ripped open the first letter I received from my father in prison. It was addressed: Movie Star! And Future Porsche Driver. His handwriting was written in flawless cursive. He told me once his father would make him practice words, letters, and sentences over and over again on lined paper until his writing became, itself, a work of art.
The very first thing he told me to do was send him a copy of The Aviator screenplay. He would write our story, he would tell the whole world about the injustices our family was facing. And I was happy to help. He let me know that he was safe. That his stay in prison was like a big Boy Scout camp with fighter jets flying over your head. “It’s funny—they expect me to climb in an F-16 and take off, not polish it,” he wrote. He reminded me to help out Mom as much as I could and that we should be grateful. Then closed with, “Hurry up and become a movie star and buy me an airplane. I would like a Gulfstream V, white with blue and gold stripes and tan leather interior. XXXOOO Dad.”
When I told Josh about the phone calls from the lawyers and creditors, he didn’t understand it either. Josh had grown up in the heart of Beverly Hills, a West Coast version of my own upbringing: raised around celebrity instead of politics; never having to worry about money, with a trust fund waiting for him. He thought that maybe the partner of his father’s business manager could help us.
Ralph Adler agreed to meet my mother and me the following weekend. We drove to his palatial home, and my mother rang the intercom on the iron gate. “Hello?” a chipper voice answered.
“Hi, it’s Gayle Prousalis and my daughter Christina.” My mother’s voice was soft, the way she sounds when she’s nervous, giving me the feeling that if she spoke too loud, something might break.
A loud buzzer sounded, and the gates opened. We drove down the long driveway and parked next to a Maserati.
A maid wearing a gray dress and white apron opened the front door. We entered the foyer. The walls were covered with framed photographs of politicians, famous bands, musicians, and other celebrities with Ralph. I was staring at all the celebrity faces on the wall when Ralph bounced toward us. He was hyper and a bit disheveled.
“Ralph Adler, nice to meet you.” He smiled as he shook my mother’s hand. He had a clunky braces on his upper and lower teeth and tan rubber bands that stretched in between them, making him look like a skinny walrus. He gazed at my mother a little too long for my liking, and when he led us into the kitchen and family room, he stared at the sequins on the back of her jean pockets. My mother had started dressing more “LA” lately, which I found unsettling. I preferred her in a St. John knit, or jeans and a navy blazer.
We took a seat on the couch and pulled out the letters from the creditors, credit card bills, and IRS documents. Only recently did my mother find out that my father owed more than $500,000 in back taxes.
“Why don’t you start with telling me what happened.” Ralph sat on the ottoman. My mother told him our sob story. That my father left, and we didn’t have any idea what a financial mess he had made until he was gone. Ralph placed his hand on my mother’s knee—to express his compassion.
Then I showed him all of the bank statements and letters. Ralph looked at me with serious concern and asked, “Are you close with your father? Do you have a good relationship with him?” he asked. Why was he asking me this?
“Yeah, I am.”
“Because the only way to clear the debt is to sue him. Are you willing to sue your father? Otherwise you can write letters to the creditors telling them it’s not your debt, and see if they’ll lower it, but there’s no guarantee.”
I sat on Ralph’s sofa with my sweaty hands between my legs, feeling like I wanted to cry; not wanting to look at Mom, paralyzed with fear. I had never heard of credit card fraud before, and Ralph, gauging my reaction, careful with each word he spoke, never actually said the word fraud.
So I couldn’t believe he was asking this. There was no way I was going to sue my father for the sake of money. I told myself there had to be another way. I had no tangible proof of my own that my father deserved to be in prison. And I didn’t want to believe anyone else’s. It was an impossible situation where, no matter how I looked at it, as a family, we couldn’t win. There was no light at the end of this tunnel.
“I don’t want to sue him,” I stated calmly, as if I weren’t responding to the most painful question anyone had ever asked me.
“What about your sisters? Are they in any debt?” Ralph asked.
“No,” I said. Well, that wasn’t true. Mara had a bill from one collection agency in the amount of a few thousand dollars, mostly from unpaid doctors’ bills for treating her depression. She had told me over the phone a few days earlier. I told Ralph again that I would do anything except sue my father. So instead, he helped me draft a letter to each credit bureau and helped my mother draft a letter to LMU explaining our circumstances without incriminating my father any further.
To whom it may concern,
I am writing this letter in an effort to explain that my credit score and previous debts have not been a result of my own irresponsibility. My father was sentenced to five years in a minimum-security prison. In an effort to protect my parents from further debts, my father placed several credit cards in my name, leaving me, at the age of eighteen, in over $80,000.00 worth of debt. As you can imagine the unbearable pressure at such a young age, I would like to request the understanding that these debts were not my own, and I continue to work hard at making sure payments are sent in on time. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Christina Grace Prousalis
Loyola Marymount University
Office of the Controller
To whom it may concern,
Fourteen months ago, my husband, Christina’s father, was indicted by the federal government for securities fraud. He subsequently went to trial in June 2004 in New York, lost, and is currently serving fifty-seven months at Nellis Federal Penitentiary. At my husband’s sentencing, the federal government required restitution of $12 million, which will stand until paid. Furthermore, the SEC has sued him civilly for an additional $12 million, which I believe he has defaulted on. We are under dire financial circumstances, which have prevented Christina from returning to LMU at present, I am writing this letter on her behalf. All of our financial assets were exh
austed as a result of the trial. My husband has been disbarred and will be unable to resume his legal career when he is released from prison.
We have lost our home in Virginia, and I have recently moved my other daughter into a rental in Los Angeles, so that I can be close to a support network of family and friends. I am currently working for minimum wage part-time while trying to reenter the workforce after twenty years of raising my children. I am trying to keep both Christina and her sister, Mara, in college. Their younger sister, Chloe, hopes to attend college as well. I hope that she will be able to do this. All three girls have pitched in, taking part-time work when they can find it, but we are rapidly running out of the small funds we have left, and I may have to move us in with friends.
Thank you for giving every consideration to Christina and her request for assistance. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions.
Sincerely,
Gayle Prousalis
After we went over the letters, Ralph demonstrated how to use an accounting software called QuickBooks in order to help us budget and keep track of incoming and outgoing monies—especially with the last wire transfer coming in from Gary. But I felt so intimidated by it. I’d never learned about managing money in high school, simple things like balancing a checkbook, nor had I learned about it my freshman year of college despite being offered numerous credit cards in the mail and around campus. And I wondered why it was so rude to talk about money. For fear of looking closely and seeing the reality of our financial situation, it was easier to live in the ambiguity of money rather than the specific details of it.
While Ralph showed us where to input all the numbers, I nodded earnestly at his computer screen, feigning enthusiasm and pretending to understand it—even though I knew my mother and I would never use it.
Before we left, Ralph said we could call him at any time with questions or concerns about anything at all. “Keep me posted on any responses you get from the credit bureaus or LMU, okay?” I began fantasizing about Ralph becoming a surrogate father figure. It felt comforting and familiar having a man take charge, showing us how much he cared, infusing my need for my father to come home, to protect me, to take care of me.
-9-
Sinking in Delusion
Rent was $7,000 a month. That’s what it costs to keep up with the Joneses in Pacific Palisades, yet we were sinking fast, living in the delusional conceit that we could maintain a lifestyle of privilege and comfort. I was able to pay off about $12,000 of one of the American Express cards, $2,000 of LMU debt, and a couple thousand on my car payments because of Gary’s wire transfer. The rest I would default on, and my credit score would continue to crash. There was still a lien against my BMW, so I couldn’t sell it. The bank held the title. The Range Rover eventually gave out and died. My mother defaulted on the payments to her Jaguar, and the bank said it was on its way to claim the car in just a matter of days. And that was it. We would be on our own until my father came home. (That’s what I told myself, anyway.) The four of us were hanging on by a thread.
The greatest news was that Mara was able to receive some financial aid for the rest of her time at SMU. My mother continued working at the stationery store and had began taking classes part-time in hopes of starting an interior design business. Perfect sense, since she had spent the last fifteen years decorating our home in Virginia.
Meanwhile, Chloe would come home each day from school and complain about how much she hated it even though her grades were better than they had ever been. She was making straight As.
“Well, what the hell else am I supposed to do other than study? It’s not like I have any friends.”
“What about Spencer?” I asked. “He’s your friend.”
“Spencer doesn’t count.”
Chloe came home one day crying because she had heard someone talking about a student who got stabbed in a fight the previous year. She was scared to go back after that, threatening to drop out and get her GED. I avoided being at the house as much as possible. And as much as my mother tried to re-create a home for us with the furniture we had left from the sale, it felt cold and lifeless. I knew we wouldn’t be able to stay there much longer. We couldn’t afford it. My mother said I needed to find another place to live as soon as possible because she and Chloe were going to have to move into a two-bedroom apartment.
I received a phone call from Emily, who had just finished filming the pilot episode of the Partridge Family remake. She invited me to come live with her at her apartment in Park La Brea, an enormous apartment complex that had been built in the heart of Los Angeles at the end of World War II. “Yes!” I told her. I wanted so desperately to have fun again, to be around friends again. These were supposed to be my wild college years, but I knew that leisure of mine was over. Maybe I could focus on acting more, and living with Emily would help inspire that. But I was worried about rent. I’d had only a few job leads. Josh’s parents made a phone call to the manager they were friends with at an upscale restaurant called La Scala in Beverly Hills, but I hadn’t heard back yet. Emily said that as long as I could manage $500 a month, I could have the smaller bedroom. I thanked her and told her it was a deal, and prayed that I would get hired for the restaurant job. In the meantime, my father had written a letter asking me to help him with a few things.
He had begun to write the screenplay of our life, but that it would remain top secret until he finished. He raved about The Aviator, obsessively, as his inspiration before he told me that I must go in search of his computer to download documents to a disk. “There are very, very important documents and information in this area and I am afraid I might lose them if something happens to the computer. Once the download is complete, please keep the disk in a safe place . . . Break a leg on your auditions . . . XXXOOO Dad.”
Josh was busy working on a new reality television show about flipping houses, so I went to the storage unit on my own to find my father’s computer. I pulled up to the bleak building underneath the Santa Monica Freeway, punched in the code to the garage, and parked my car.
There were no windows inside. I walked down the fluorescent-lit corridor, passing numbers on consecutive metal doors, and wondered if prison looked like this. I turned the lock and yanked on the metal door, kicking up the smell of dust and old memories. My father’s suits dumped on top of the brown boxes, just as I’d seen them in the front hallway a few weeks back. My mother hadn’t bothered to cover them up. It was like she just wanted them to rot away with time. His wooden airplane propeller was leaning against the wall in the corner. He kept that propeller next to the giant globe in his library, which would light up when you touched it. It was the propeller of a prop airplane, and he refused to sell it with the estate sale, while the globe sold fast.
I threw his pile of suits to the side so I could get to the brown boxes. I searched, digging down for his computer. My mother had dumped all of our old framed family photos in these boxes. I found the photograph of my parents sitting in a booth together at Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, the landmark restaurant and frequent hangout for presidents like Nixon and Kennedy, where plaques with their engraved names hang above their designated booths. The picture used to be in our family room on the console next to the fireplace. My mother in her signature burgundy lipstick and gold Tiffany mesh bracelet, and my father in his pin-striped jacket and red Hermès tie; they were laughing, and they looked so happy. I set down the pictures in a neat stack. I couldn’t look at them anymore.
I was coughing from the dust when finally I found the box with his computer in it and other work files. “BusyBox” had been written in black Sharpie on the side. I remember my father was so excited about the prospect of BusyBox. He had just finished talking to Steve Madden, the successful shoe company bearing his name. Only later would I learn that in 2002 Steve Madden was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for money laundering and securities fraud. I had bought my first pair of platform shoes from Steve Madden and was ecstatic at the thought of m
y father and him doing business together. My father also mentioned he was speaking with the Nantucket Nectars guys, Tom and Tom, about other potential businesses. We had boxes of their juices in the kitchen pantry. But BusyBox was what excited my father the most. It had something to do with selling digital pictures and videos online. He told me he was going to meet with Bill Gates about possibly investing. There were piles and piles of BusyBox pitches on the floor of the library, and every time I carried my juice box near them, he would yell at me and tell me to finish my juice before I entered so I wouldn’t spill it on anything.
Most of the documents were leftover court papers and depositions full of legal jargon I didn’t understand. I couldn’t bother to keep reading all of it. I grabbed his computer, put the boxes back, and tossed his clothes back on top. I just wanted to get out of this storage unit. It was dark and felt haunted. I locked the door, and on my way home, I stopped off at Staples to pick up a disk so I could save all the necessary documents he’d wanted.
When I got back to the house, I closed the door behind me, sat on the floor in front of the TV, and opened up his laptop computer. I scrolled through “My Documents,” searching for something, but I didn’t know what. I was curious. I found information on General Edward Ratkovich, my father’s mentor, a decorated air force general who would visit the house with bags of Tootsie Rolls and Nerds when I was little. He was the director of intelligence in Stuttgart, Germany, for the US European Command. I didn’t know it at the time, but the general had recently died. My father had never mentioned it. When I scrolled through the information, it said that he was the one who purchased MVSI Inc., a company taken public by a firm called Stratton Oakmont Inc. It said that he was the one who purchased Socrates Computer Systems, and when I Googled it, I wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with the earlier Project Socrates: a classified US Defense Intelligence Agency program first started under the Reagan administration to determine America’s economic competitiveness. “It’s the government’s fault, Christina.” So I kept scrolling through.
After Perfect Page 8
