After Perfect

by Christina McDowell

  They called my number over the loudspeaker, and I walked up to the second window. An old lady with curly gray hair and glasses sat behind the glass wall that separated us, and I spoke to her through an intercom. Calm. Composed. “Hi, I’m here to request a new Social Security number,” I said.

  She gave me a look. “What is the reason?”

  “I have been a victim of identity theft—of fraud,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t notice that my voice was shaking.

  “All right, do you have proof your Social Security card was used?” she asked.

  “Um, no. I mean, I could get you a credit report.”

  “Nope. No, that won’t do. Do you have a police report?”

  I glanced at the people standing at the window stations on either side of me, hoping they wouldn’t hear me. I moved closer to the glass and kept my head down.

  “No, I never went to the police. It was my father. My father took my identity. My father used my Social Security number. He left me in one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of debt, and there’s a chance he’s opening accounts under my name in Europe. I don’t know.”

  She took off her glasses to get a good look at me. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” the woman said, “but, honey . . . I need proof.”

  Her compassion broke through me. I couldn’t hold back my tears any longer. “But he was my dad. I never went to the police. I didn’t know at the time what was happening. I believed him. I believed him for so long.” She had no idea what I was talking about. I had completely disassociated from who it was I was talking to, as if she should know my entire story—one that even I couldn’t articulate fully.

  “Are you in any danger?” She seemed concerned and tried to keep me focused. “Are you the victim of any violence or abuse? Are you being stalked?”

  I wanted to scream “How does someone prove abuse when you cannot see it? When it’s abuse of one’s sanity, of emotions, of one’s entire psychological makeup?” And when she asked me if I was in any danger, I thought about the information I found on my father’s computer about the stabbing in Albania. What if my name was being used to do business with these people? How could I prove this?

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I could be in danger. He might be doing business in Albania.”

  “I’m so sorry; there is nothing I can do to help you,” the woman said at last. “I would go to the police station and file a police report. That might help.”

  “But this happened eight years ago. I never sued him! I never sued him!” I began sobbing harder, begging her to let me change my number.

  “I’m really sorry; there is nothing I can do to help. I need to call the next person in line now.”

  I turned around to see everyone in the waiting area staring at me. I sobbed with my head down and walked out.

  I got into my car and sped to the Hollywood police station a few blocks away on Wilcox Avenue, pulling over in the blue loading zone. I ran up the ramp and startled the police officer standing behind the counter.

  “How can I help you?” he asked, hands on his belt.

  “I need to know what the statute of limitations are for credit card fraud,” I said. The officer laughed at my sense of urgency. I was just another lost girl desperate for an answer, desperate to take care of herself, and didn’t know how.

  “Did the crime take place in the state of California?” he asked. I grunted and doubled over in frustration. “No!” I groaned. I was losing my mind. “My father took my identity. He left me in a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of debt, and I never sued him. I never sued him, and the Social Security office won’t give me a new number because I never filed a police report, and I can’t prove it even though my credit was destroyed. Even though I was homeless once. Even though I’ve been chased by creditors for seven years. I just want to see if I can file a police report.”

  “Damn, your own father?” The officer shook his head. “And you never sued him?”

  I just looked at him, out of breath, out of answers, out of anything. “It was complicated.”

  “Okay, where did the crime take place?” he asked.

  “Virginia, I guess, where I grew up.”

  “What you need to do is call the local police department there and ask them to help you.”

  I sighed. “Okay,” and then I left.

  I sat in my car and Googled on my cell phone the Fairfax County Police Department’s local number. When a female police officer picked up, I explained to her my situation, and that it had been over eight years—although, according to my credit report, I’d had a credit card with my name on it since the age of fourteen, thirteen years earlier. The woman told me that she wasn’t entirely sure; that it might be too late. Then she asked, “Would you be willing to file a lawsuit?”

  I was exhausted. Exhausted from this life, this story, this nightmare. I wanted it to stop, to be over and behind me. If filing a police report to obtain a new Social Security number would mean going to battle against my father in court, I wasn’t up for it. I was still processing my feelings of betrayal, and I couldn’t fathom any more years of my life being wasted on a matter of money. He’d served his time in prison, not once, but twice, and it didn’t do him any good. A third time certainly wasn’t going to make him love me any more, or any less, and it wasn’t about the $100,000. I could give two shits about the money. I had wanted a father. I finally—finally—was beginning to realize that going to court would not give me a father, my father, a man who had broken so many laws to always get whatever he wanted. He didn’t want me. I told the kind officer that I was not up for it, thanked her for her time, and hung up.

  But I wouldn’t stop there. I would not give up. I would not remain a victim when I was just beginning to feel myself moving in the right direction, even after seven years. I knew this was my chance at regaining control of my life; there was still time to take back my power. I stopped drinking. I quit smoking pot and popping Adderall to numb the pain. If I was going to face the truth, I’d have to live in reality to do it. No matter how painful the feelings, I’d have to feel them—it was the only way to reach the other side of this. It was my only way into the truth.

  -28-

  Funeral, Car Accident, Name Change

  I couldn’t help but feel that my name was tainted, publicly tarnished, stepped on, and filed away in FBI boxes, shared by estranged family members, his father, his brothers who weren’t there for us and a constant reminder of the power my father wielded over me, his name overshadowing mine. I couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t use it again. I needed to let go of the girl with two happy parents and a perfect life. It was never perfect. The light of my memories seemed dim in the days after I arrived home from New York. I would wake up and wonder if it had ever been real, if we ever were as perfect as we seemed, because, in hindsight, the perfection was exacerbated by the loss, and I couldn’t see my past clearly. I didn’t want to believe that perhaps my upbringing, all of our happy memories together as a family, was merely a facade, an image to please the surrounding community, something for my father to use only for himself to prove to others how much better we were. It was a historical pain, along with getting sober; a realization that had me in withdrawal, sweating and dry heaving on the bathroom floor for weeks, the pain shooting throughout my entire body, and I thought my feelings were going to kill me. I finally surrendered and asked for help.

  I took it upon myself to go back to therapy, to find someone who would hold me accountable for the choices I had made and for the choices I would make moving forward; someone who believed in me and supported me until I could learn to believe in and support myself. I had to turn my life around. No one was going to do it for me, and unless I wanted to remain paralyzed in broken dreams—afraid of the future and tortured by my past—I’d have to do something about it. I continued cocktail waitressing at the Roosevelt Hotel, knowing it was a means to an end, while I began writing during the day; a steady thread to help me heal, to make sense of the world around me, and to un
derstand myself better.

  I had no idea what steps to take to legally change my last name. I couldn’t afford a lawyer. I’d have to figure it out on my own. One morning I woke up, threw on black slacks and a white blouse, and drove down to the Los Angeles Superior Courthouse.

  “How do I legally change my last name?” I asked the woman behind the glass window near the security line. She explained that I would need to pick up paperwork on the fifth floor, fill it out, then file a Petition for Name Change form. I picked up my Name Change Packet, complete with a list of steps to take, took it home, and that afternoon sat at my desk for four hours with dictionary.com and law websites opened up on my computer screen for the definitions of words I didn’t understand.

  1. Present Name (specify): Christina Grace Prousalis

  2. Proposed Name (specify):____________________

  I had thought long and hard about the last name I wanted to take. Over the course of a few weeks, I had written down a thousand signatures and practiced autographing on endless notepads. I didn’t want just any random name. I wanted one that I could feel proud of, that was still rooted in family, a name that kept me tied to the blood that, no matter what I did, I knew I could never change. McDowell is my mother’s maiden name, and though that side of the family has its darkness too, Mimi, my mother’s mother, was a writer. She wrote the social column for the Long Beach Independent newspaper. Her name was Carolyn McDowell, and my great-grandfather was a pioneer in building and operating local radio stations during Hollywood’s golden age, promoting films for Warner Bros. and Fox Studios. His name was Lawrence McDowell. My mother would tell me stories of how he used to go hunting with the likes of Clark Gable on Catalina Island, how elegant and kind he was. I could be proud of those roots. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I was done with perfect.

  The next day, I went back to the courthouse, paid the $395 filing fee, and my petition for name change became official. Then I was given a criminal history assessment form to fill out, and after I turned that in, I paid a $95 fee to have my name published in an approved legal newspaper giving those who might oppose my changing my last name an opportunity to deny the petition. Even though it was in an obscure legal newspaper, I feared that someone—anyone—might try to stop me. But there was also a part of me that wished my father would find out, and that he would show up at the courthouse to beg my forgiveness for all of the broken promises and the lies that he told, and that he was sorry. But I knew that was just a fantasy.

  A few weeks later, I received a notice in the mail. I had been approved for the name change, passed the criminal background check, and received my official court date. I would need to appear in court before a commissioner on August 12 at nine o’clock in the morning. I had two months left as Christina Prousalis.

  White candles lit my apartment, which didn’t take many for only four hundred square feet of space. I was lying on top of my coffee table, pretending to be dead. One of my acting headshots was framed on the table against the wall in memoriam, and I’d set out an assortment of chips and dip for my friends. A funeral seemed appropriate. Christina Prousalis needed to die. I wore a long black sundress, and my feet dangled over the edge as Rob, Noah, Dave, Audra, Liam, and Carter, Nancy and John Palmer’s daughter, sat in a circle around me. Carter and I had reconnected when she moved out to Los Angeles. I wanted my friends to share their favorite memories of Christina Prousalis.

  As each person began to tell his or her story about me, what I heard was not what I had wanted or expected. There was nothing I was proud of, nothing I would miss, nothing I thought was funny or a reflection of the kind of person I wanted to be. And though I knew that girl in me needed to disappear—that she was sad, lost, and didn’t know who she was—I had been thinking about the funeral only in terms of letting go of my connection to my father, as opposed to my connection to myself. What I heard was entirely different from what my friends were saying:

  The time someone spilled milk on her cashmere sweater. The time she got so drunk at the Beverly Hills Hotel that she walked over to the concierge and demanded a bungalow, exclaiming, “Do you know who my father is?!” The time she walked from West Hollywood to the La Brea police station to file a lawsuit against the bartender who’d thrown her out of the bar because it was after hours. The time she showed up at the courthouse in a sexy pencil skirt and blouse and cut in front of the line of “ordinary Americans” because she told security she was a lawyer, and they believed her!

  The time she went to a sex club; did drugs instead of work; the times she cheated on all of her boyfriends and had promiscuous sex with so-and-so because of his last name; the time she believed she was entitled to become a famous movie star because her father told her she was one; the time she believed she owned two million shares of stock in a tequila company and acres of farmland in Puerto Vallarta, and $300,000, and $500 million worth of American music; the time she carried around an Hermès Birkin bag, thinking it was real, and hoping other women would be jealous of her; the time she needed love so badly she invited a stranger home and instead was sexually violated.

  I heard once that when you hit bottom, you are really meeting yourself. I was listening to the product of an upbringing that paved the way for a sense of entitlement and narcissistic dreams. Though that is only how I heard it, the stories that my friends shared about me, even if they didn’t see it (but I knew that they did), bless them for loving me anyway. They laughed and continued reminiscing, but I could hear only my flaws, all of the things I hated about myself and about where life had taken me, or where I had taken life. Changing my name wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t change me. I needed to bury all of those things that defined me from the inside out. My entitlement. My self-righteousness. My fantasy thinking. My judgment. My fear. My being and acting like a victim. And I needed to get rid of all the things—the possessions I had left—that I’d let define me, that represented a history of me that was not grounded in reality, in truth, or in my authentic self. I wanted to get back to the eleven-year-old who had not yet abandoned herself to fashion magazines, material possessions, drugs, stealing, promiscuity, and an obsession with wealth and fame. I wanted to get back to the eleven-year-old girl who didn’t give a fuck what she wore to school that day because she had an endless curiosity for life, and for creating and going on adventures with friends rather than projecting an image for attention. I wanted to get back to the girl who felt so free to be her true self that she wasn’t even conscious of it because she lived.

  One of the first things I did was apologize to Liam. I wanted him to know that my inability to love had nothing to do with him, but that it was time to let him go so I could grow into the person I had the potential to become. The person I wanted to be. It wasn’t easy. There were some mornings when I didn’t even get out of bed because I was so afraid to face the world alone with the knowledge that everything inside of me would have to change; that everything would have to be different if I wanted to create a new life for myself. I would start by taking action.

  I had stolen money when I worked at Jerry’s bar. I would need to pay him back even if he had illegally denied us breaks and fraudulently sold alcohol. This was about righting my wrong, not his. And the fake Hermès Birkin—I still had it in the back of my trunk. And my mother’s Chanel bag, pearl necklaces, gold bracelets, my Tiffany watch, and designer clothes. After my amends, I would have to sell and give away everything.

  I had received a check in the mail for a few hundred dollars from a law firm or a corporation—I can’t remember. But along with the check came a document that said several cocktail waitresses from the bar I worked at ended up suing the company for not giving us legal breaks and paying us wages owed. It was a sign: justice was on its way. And I could do my part. I sent him a financial amends along with an anonymous letter of apology.

  A few days later, I drove with a girlfriend of mine to eat dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Pacific Palisades called Kay ’N Dave’s. I told her that I needed to make peace
with the neighborhood where it all began. As we drove into the village, I noticed that the Wells Fargo bank on the corner was gone, replaced by Chase Bank. The stationery store, remodeled. The rental house, filled with another family, one that I hoped was happy. It all felt a little more real than the way I had remembered it.

  We walked into Kay ’N Dave’s and sat down at a little table near the front door. The restaurant was quaint and quiet. As the two of us were talking, in walked an older couple: a short man with white hair, and an elegant woman wearing a pink cashmere sweater with perfect blond hair and makeup.

  Ralph Adler.

  I leaned over the table and whispered, “Oh my God.” My friend looked at me and then at the couple, who stood no more than five feet away. “What?” she asked.

  Ralph saw me and looked away quickly.

  I could barely speak. I told my girlfriend everything that happened nearly ten years ago, about the porno and what he’d said to me: “because I know you need the money.” That he had helped my mother pro bono, and when I confronted his business partner about what Ralph had said to me, he refused to believe it—and then wrote me a letter “firing” me as a client. For so many years, how I fantasized about how I would get my revenge.

  “Holy shit! You have to do something!” my girlfriend exclaimed as I watched the Adlers sit down two tables away: Ralph, with his back to me, and his wife looking almost straight at me. “Here, take my plate; dump it on his lap.”

  “No,” I told her. “Look at him. He’s so sad, and his poor wife. You have to be in a lot of pain to be living a lie like that.”

  I would know.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Our waitress came over to the table, and in her broken English asked how we were doing.

  “Fine,” I said, “except can you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Take my credit card. I’d like to pay for that man and his wife’s dinner,” I told her. “He’s an old friend of the family’s.” I winked at my girlfriend. “But don’t tell him I paid until I after I’ve left. I want it to be a surprise.”