Step Inside

by Molly Hoffer

  “Do you have any uninsured discounts?” I asked.

  “For low income, unemployed, or for the homeless,” the clerk told me.

  “OK. I think we’re pretty low income. What’s the cut-off line?”

  She handed me a packet of forms, “Fill these out and we’ll let you know what you qualify for.”

  “I don’t have to pay the bill today?”

  “Er… right. You don’t have to pay it today, but at some point, somebody has to pay it. When you don’t pay it for a while, there are financing charges that accumulate, like you’ve taken out a loan.”

  “Can we take a loan out for it?”

  “There are medical loans out there, but the only thing the hospital offers is charging a percentage of unpaid bills.”

  I filled out the packet and handed it to her. Only then did I go up to see Nick. They had told me earlier that he was sleeping, so it didn’t seem urgent to go up to see him. I did want to see him before I left the hospital for the night to check if they had left him in a dirty diaper, or if there was some other horrid misdeed that he had suffered while barely conscious.

  He was in a small room with a tiny window, with only a curtain separating him from his roommate, who was not in a good shape, and had an amputated leg. I noticed that amputated leg sticking out from behind a curtain when I came in, and my first thought was that Nick had his leg amputated when they couldn’t put it back in place.

  I thought, “Jesus! He really should’ve said over the phone they cut it off!”

  But, as I took a few shaky steps, I realized that it was only Nick’s neighbor, and that Nick’s leg, while bandaged, and propped up, above his head, was still in one piece.

  Nick was asleep, and his eyeballs were moving around behind his closed eyelids as if he was seeing a very energetic dream, which was making him smile. He was clearly on so much opium that he didn’t remember his injury or the pain.

  I definitely didn’t want to wake him up to remind me about either of these, so I sat quietly, watching him for about half-an-hour. Then, I noticed that the nurse hadn’t thrown out his neighbor’s lunch, so I tossed it out in a trashcan down the hall to avoid it stinking the place up, if the nurses forgot to toss out the trash in that room. I straightened up some other little things, and went down to the snacks machine to buy him a couple of chocolate bars. When I returned on the next day, they told me that he couldn’t eat any of that chocolate because the opium was supposed to calm him down, while the chocolate basically had coco in it, or an upper. At the same time, I found out that because we had claimed we were impoverished, they were not feeding him because this was a paid expense. After consulting with the doctor about what he could eat, I bought him snacks to last that evening and for the next few days. Thankfully, the opium made him noxious, so he wasn’t very hungry, and hadn’t really realized that he hadn’t eaten for a day. Either way, when I bought the chocolates for him, I just thought it would be a sweet little something for him to wake up to, and went back home. I had already stayed too long, and it was 7pm, and just after sunset as I walked home alone after taking a semi-abandoned train. There were a couple of drunk rowdy guys that were throwing something or someone around at the other end of my car, and I was on edge the whole way. I kept grabbing my purse and imagining the basic self-defense blocks and kicks that I could attempt if somebody tried to snatch my purse or attempt to rape me in the darkness.

  I worked full days for the next three days to avoid getting fired just when we needed the money. I also gathered my bravery and visited him every evening in the hospital. I started getting used to the crazy people on the train at night, they were all pretty much the same, just screaming, hollering, drunk, hitting on me, hitting each other, etc.

  At the end of the third day, the doctor was insisting that he should stay there longer, but when I looked at an updated bill, I insisted that if it was safe for him to travel, I really needed to take him home. The bill was $75,630. Out of this amount, $26,809 was for “pharmaceuticals.”

  “It would’ve been cheaper to ask your dad to get you some street opium,” I told Nick as we were reviewing the bill together, while waiting for the nurse to come back to check him out.

  I wasn’t even sure if I should accept the wheelchair to get Nick downstairs, saying at first, “It’s OK, he can just lean on my shoulder.” Of course, I let them put him in a wheelchair, but it was pretty pointless as we took the subway home, so he had to limp along all the way to the subway stop and then home from out stop. The idea of taking a cab didn’t even occur to me at that point.

  Maybe it was from all that physical training, but Nick’s leg was steadily recovering and in a few months, I couldn’t even feel the bump where there was previously some bruised tissue. Of course, he stopped working in construction at that point, and stayed home for a full month, not even leaving to grab a coffee down the street because limping back home via the subway was pretty painful and served as a negative reminder that he was disabled. I didn’t push him much, and just tried to entertain him. I even got him a gaming consul and some cheap games, and they did the trick, as between them and the TV, he got through his days without much free time.

  On the other hand, the application for a discount on the medical bill didn’t pan out because my salary was in the calculation due to our co-habitation. It wasn’t much for two people, still our bill only came down to $10,000. I made a bit more than this for the year, so imagining serious paying it out without some major change in our finances was impossible. I didn’t mention my trust on that form, counting it as non-existent until I actually once again had access to it. I asked them to give me a minimum payment program, and they cut the bill into segments, so that we had to pay around $500 monthly. Of course, after the first of these payments, and the costs for the drugs Nick had to keep taking I realized that I really couldn’t afford another month of all that extra expense. So, I returned to my research into my trust and made a concrete plan of action that would get both of us back to good health and happiness.

  Talking about happiness, I was too afraid to make a move on Nick while he was still on painkillers, and he for once had a low libido, and didn’t jump me either, so we had a monkish existence in the month after the surgery. I started to feel like Nick’s nurse and mommy, as I helped him wash up in the shower or bathed him. I also cooked and cleaned for him, as I really couldn’t imagine nagging him about any chores when his leg was still swollen and those stitches were still visible.

  As I was worrying about this, we kept getting weekly calls from the hospital’s collection agency, which was saying that they had been hired by the hospital because we weren’t enough monthly payments and that if we didn’t want to damage our credit scores, we had to start paying more every month towards the bill. It’s hard to describe how stressful these calls were. I think they were only looking at Nick’s credit report, as I had used his information, only mentioning my salary. If they had seen my credit report, we would’ve been stuck with the full bill and they would’ve just called my parents to collect.

  Every time they called, I was reminded about the fact that I had some of my own money to collect. Their shameless insistence to get doe from a poor construction worker with a broken leg made me question why exactly I was so shy about pressing my parents to give me back what was rightfully mine. Also, money suddenly had a very different meaning to me. It wasn’t just something that could buy me a nicer house, or a boat, but something essential without which all those poor people in the world starved, or died from sicknesses that a bit of money could wave away.

  I think I always carried guilt about being rich. Since I was little, I’d look at homeless people in Atlanta’s streets begging for money, and I’d feel like I didn’t deserve to have money. I felt as if money was something dirty and corrupt, and frequently it was won through corruption and dirty business. The more I had learned about my family business, the more I was ashamed of my inheritance, and the more I thought that if I could make my own fortune indepe
ndently of all that dirty money, I could really be happy dedicating my life to the business.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My appeal on behalf of my own trust might seem like a crazy idea to almost anybody in America. I mean, let’s say your granddad leaves you a bicycle in his will, and your dad claims that he meant to leave it to him, and takes the bike. Well, you might be a bit sad, or you might not have wanted that old rusted bike to begin with, so you let him have it, or you bitch and moan and he gives you the bike back. But, it’s very different when millions or billions of dollars are involved. I mean we’re talking about enough money to buy a small country. So, if your dad just doesn’t want to handover what’s legally yours and you don’t file a lawsuit; you’ve lost in the battle for the survival of the richest.

  I come from a family of Eastern European origins that came to this country to find the basics, some bread, some potatoes, some clean water, and a cot to sleep on. They were fighting famine, diseases, and religious persecution and they had to escape to stay alive. Then, they arrived in America, and instead of finding the land of their dreams, and bananas growing in the streets, they found a country just plunged into the Great Depression, and with less essentials to go around than they had back home. But, the trip spent-up all of their savings, so they had to stay and make it work. Grandpa Karl Szabo was a teen son in this new family. He took on manual construction, cleaning, and other odd jobs to at least pay his own way and to help the rest of their extended family. He had already helped on his family potato farm since he was a child, so he didn’t mind hard labor. He didn’t go to school, but necessity drove him to find better paying construction union jobs. Meanwhile, the family was frugal and saved up enough money to buy a little grocery store in their town. While most grocery store owners just stay in that one spot and labor in it across their lives, Karl was ambitious and he used his savings to buy another shop, in a slightly different industry. His businesses kept expanding, and he started investing in businesses to make money on giving money to struggling business. That’s basically how most American billionaires are made. Nobody can build millions of computers themselves, but if they buy a company for a little that will make millions of computers and sell them for a lot, then they’re making money of having money.

  By the time Karl was of retirement age, he had amassed a fortune worth around $300 million, with numerous subsidiary companies around the world. He had brought his two sons, including my father, James, into this family business early in their lives, letting them try everything from manual jobs to top executive positions. At around this time, Karl also became aware how his family had grown over the decades when he was busy building his empire. Both of his sons had half-a-dozen, or so, kids each, and these kids were now starting families of their own. Karl realized that his time was nearing an end and that if he didn’t establish some logical rules for how the fortune would be divided; the whole estate would crumble amidst the dogfight that would ensue.

  I mentioned that Karl’s sons had worked in the family business; well, they did so not entirely out of their passion for Kashion. Karl had a work ethic that American was famous for when it was called the “land of golden dreams,” and which is not exactly popular today. Karl believed that regardless of how much money one had, a life lived without toil was equivalent to the life lived by a pig in a giant shit pile. James was not only encouraged to work for a living, but Karl tied his trust and his inheritance to his engagement in “significant occupations.” James could decide to take the money he already had and retire in Hawaii, but if he stopped occupying his time productively, he would not receive another cent from Karl. There were some companies that James was put in charge of, but up until his last days, Karl maintained total control of around 61% of stock in the entire Kashion corporation.

  As Karl aged, he started noticing that the third generation of Szabos was being raised in mansions, and without any motivation to do more than a prince who has no other royal duties than prancing around at parties and parades. They were spoiled beyond Karl’s outer tolerance limits, and he had to come up with a new system to reign them in before he ran out of time to discipline them. With the help of his sons, the Szabo fortune was gradually expanding into billions by this point. Enormous sums were taken out of active business investments and diverted into simpler investments that could be precisely divided between the Szabo grandchildren. This fund was called the Szabo Children’s Trust. Initially this trust was split in portions that would be handed out to each of the grandchildren in two parts, some on the 25th birthday, and some on their 30th birthday. The assumption was that their parents would be obligated to provide for their needs up through the 25th birthday.

  By the time that I realized I had to file a lawsuit, all of my siblings had at least received that first part of their trust. If they received any additional money after their 30th birthday, and how much money they received on the 25th and 30th birthdays depended on their ability to maintain a “significant occupation.” This test meant the difference between getting half-a-million and a billion dollars in the end. And the man Karl put in charge of judging who had passed this test and who deserved nothing, before Karl died when I was in my second year of high school, was James.

  James was the natural choice to control the holding company because grandpa appointed him as the CEO of the business when he finally had to step away from the post. James was also the best educated, with an economics degree from Harvard. Karl’s majority shares were split between James and his brother, with only some of them going into the Szabo Trust.

  So, to return to the present that I was telling you about, where I decided that I needed to take action to defend my trust. I had a year left until I would’ve turned 25 and the matter might have settled itself; this was the reason I had waited that long after my parents kicked me out. Nick’s broken leg meant that our health and wellbeing was too fragile for me to sit around, waiting for money to come in time. One of the things I was concerned about when I pictured making my first appeal for my funds was that I had missed around half-a-year of required monthly family meetings. These were required by the Szabo Trust, and missing even a single meeting without an emergency was grounds for serious financial repercussions.

  I decided to begin my campaign by attending the next scheduled family meeting. I put on an outfit that I was saving for a special occasion like this one. I did my best to groom myself to look as I did back when I last attended a meeting to avoid getting dirty looks before I even made a vocal appeal. If I could convince the “family” that I deserved some reasonable level of funding, I wouldn’t have to take any other steps.

  I didn’t tell Nick much about all this because whenever I tried to explain the intricacies of my family’s business, he’d space out, tuning me out. So, I took the subway by myself and arrived at the downtown headquarters of Kashion. I stared at the humongous Kashion log on the side of the skyscraper I was entering, and considered how odd it was that out of billions of people on the planet I was born into that family. Hundreds of other workers were piling into the building to get to their offices. I checked in at the front desk because I didn’t have the key to get to the top floor, since I had left on bad terms, and the key was changed regularly. The security guard at the desk knew me, but was apparently also told that I was away under some mysterious circumstances. He gave me a long stare, like he wanted to ask me if I was in a secret service protection program, or if I was returning from rehab, or something else that would’ve been outrageous in other families, but just another day in ours. He didn’t ask anything of the sort, or he would’ve lost his job a long time ago. Instead, he called the secretary stationed at the top floor and announced me. As was her usual habit, she called James’ office and forwarded the message about the arrival.

  James must have immediately given the green light because a couple of minutes later the guard handed me a new key and said, “Go on up Ms. Szabo. It’s great to see you back at Kashion.”

  “Thanks, I’ll be back sooner next ti
me,” I said and took the private elevator to the top floor.

  The secretary that I had greeted there so many times before said, “Hi Vanessa!” when she noticed me coming out of the elevator.

  She didn’t have to point me to the right room. I knew where it was and I went there on my own. I had high heels on and I was a bit self-conscious as they made a loud clanking as I entered, echoing in the giant room.

  A few dozen faces turned to examine me as they heard my heels. Five of my older brothers and sisters were there, as were the six kids on my uncle’s side. James and his brother, their wives, and a dozen more distant relatives, including a couple of grand-grand-kids, were also there. Then there were the lawyers, secretaries, board members, and top executives that had to be at that particular meeting for legal or logistical reasons. This was a pretty normal turn out for an average “family” meeting, and I think that while when it was just Karl, his sons and their wives, it could’ve been called a “family” meeting, but now it really was a Kashion enterprise meeting.

  I was a couple of minutes ahead of the appointed 9am start time, but I was last in because everybody else lived nearby in Manhattan, or had other early-morning business in that building.