I figure the best place to start writing memoir is from the back. So let me show you the back half of my story.
My grandfather died on New Year’s Day. I went home for the first time in two years for the funeral. I saw my father for the first time in ten years. Not that I hadn’t already been kind of a big smoker, but from the time I left Kalamazoo to go north until just a few days ago, I’ve been pretty much high non-stop. Some of it was good and fun bonding with my uncle, who can’t smoke much because of his job, and my little brother, who is an MRA and possibly the angriest MMJ patient I’ve ever known. A lot of it was me toking up by myself every few hours. To be perfectly honest, if I hadn’t taken that job working for my friend’s fledgling law office, I’d be baked now, not writing this memoir, and my rent would be paid.
When we first met, my employer-to-be was a prostitute. She worked under the name of Sophie St. Clair, servicing the men of Kalamazoo to pay her way through law school. She was also my primary source of marijuana. I used to come visit, smoke and watch Game of Thrones with her, and duck into the kitchen when a gentleman came to call. She had two kids, a live-in partner who was super chill but had a nasty temper and scared the shit out of her kids. Fun to smoke with though, fascinating human being. The kids were pretty cool too. They weren’t super verbal, but they were toddlers, so it’s to be expected. Over the next year of knowing Sophie they grew into awesome little kids, and I would begin to learn how messed up things were.
Sophie was smoking quite a bit of pot until she started actually working in law, then she transitioned to harder drugs with much shorter half-lives. I never realized the extent of her drug use, but only because I was in my own head too much and ignored the obvious signs of very serious addiction. I also understood having an opiate problem. I had watch my mom struggle with her addiction to prescription pain-killers following several hospital stays complete with very regular administrations of morphine. Sophie had been a veteran and was badly wounded in Iraq, so her replacement parts caused her a great deal of pain. She had gotten addicted to morphine and transitioned to heroin when the VA cut her off, as it was cheaper than pharmaceutical drugs. She had borrowed, as well as stolen, several hundred dollars from me. It all culminated in my paying an electric bill for her and then having her ghost on me, moving a few times, business, rehab, what have you. After rehab she’s still hooking, and she’s smoking crack now, but I never saw her injecting drugs again. Progress, I figure. I introduce her to my roomies because we play D&D and I want to provide her with some social support so she can stay clean and happy. Sometime around the holidays I meet her new assistant, who does not remain her assistant long, leaving after he learned of her prostitution days, taking the dog with him. Enter Rain, grieving my grandfather, smoking too much, and desperately needing a distraction other than my single graduate class.
So it started normally enough, I was given some tasks and we had a lot of boring lawyer talk. I made my own contract on RocketLawyer and did W4 and insurance. Her retainer accounts were apparently messed up however, so I needed to cover some retainers to keep handling business. No big deal, I have some cash from student loans and can loan my lawyer friend some money, it’s in my contract that I get reimbursed for out-of-pocket costs. Her daughter gets a bad urinary tract infection and her ex hits her up for money to take care of it, which I agree to because I adore her children and want them well and happy.
We have to cancel our first business trip because of an unreliable driver (she isn’t allowed to drive because of seizures related to a TBI), and then a client who fucked up really bad and got locked up. Steadily and surely our trips get canceled, I wonder why I ever try to plan anything with her, and I keep smoking to deal with the stress that she’s causing me.
Then she started getting sick. Frequent seizures, general tiredness, bad shit. She had some scans done, there was a shadow on the scan, which upon biopsy would turn out to be a malignant tumor pressing on her TBI. A month goes by, I’ve loaned her money without a scrap of repayment, much less my wages. She’s sleeping on my couch with my youngest roommate, who has taken it upon himself to look after her health. They’re also fucking. It’s sort of cute, so I enjoy it for a bit. We keep doing lawyer things, I am suspicious but not enough to not continue going along with it all. Eventually, my accounts are drained. That’s when I notice a lack of documents coming my way and she’s started doing her lawyer talk stuff with her nursemaid. Every time I mention to her that she owes me 10k she says I’m next in line, she’s being hit up by everybody and has these medical bills and all. Predictably, she is never able to go out and get me my money or to go to the office to pick up the mail with my bar card and insurance information. She says her colleague Mark was going to drop it off, but then got stuck in Detroit helping sort out the travel ban, which was among my early work for her and a cause that I care about very deeply as a person of faith.
As of today two months have passed. I am unpaid. She is still on my couch, fucking my roommate. By this point I had started to shake off the haze and bothered to do some research. My active mourning period had mostly ended, or at least paused. My partner has been immensely helpful to me. She’s a student, an activist, and worthy of far more respect than I afford her due to her age and experience. She happened to meet Mark (the very same) at a meeting regarding the creation of a new county ID (we’re a sanctuary city, so the county is creating identification cards to help refugees and immigrants get around more easily). They had the chance to talk and as it turns out my boss has never been a lawyer. This disturbs me greatly, as I realize I don’t have a signed contract because of reasons. First it was a lost file, then it was her just never getting around to it, so I had asked my partner to print off a couple of copies so I can just make my “boss” sign. She claims to need her notary stamp, which brings us to the meeting. My partner had the good fortune to not interact much with Sara and brought fresh eyes and a sober mind to my life. She found that super sketchy and made a point of helping me when I wasn’t sure how to help myself or sort out what I believed about anything or anybody. Nobody is objective about their partners, but it’s nice that she’s better at addressing my suffering than I am. What she learned from Mark was that Sophie had worked with him once on an assignment in law school and then proceeded to throw his name around a lot. He was also never stuck in Detroit helping out refugees, she did not rent the office space next to his, and he’s really tired of having people call up to ask about her. Upon further research we determined that the registration number she gave me belongs to a lawyer with a very low internet profile a few towns away, and I had never bothered to look into it until now. It was fairly clear that I needed to force a signature and begin preparing to take action.
Thursday, March 16, Sophie told us her five year-old daughter had just died. I loved this child like one of those friends your kid calls auntie or uncle but actually isn’t. The thing is, I’d begun to suspect something was up with the kids for a while. I messaged a friend who had been ripped off by her, who told me to message the children’s grandmother, who could answer my questions for me. I was then contacted by the children’s stepmother, who very angrily informed me that the children are secure and happy, with parents who love them. She shamed her/us for having the nerve to intrude into their lives with Sophie’s scams and lies, that she had plenty of chances to get her shit together and be a mom to the kids. That it was her choice to be a hooker and abuse heroin. That the police keep coming to her home trying to arrest Sophie, that she’d received a letter from the Sheriff stating that she’d jumped bail too many times and would remain in jail until trial, and that if she ever wanted to leave Kalamazoo forever, this would be a damned good time. Then she promptly severed the line of communication and I was unable to reply. Today I sent a message to her husband to thank him and assure him I’d do what needs to be done. I assured him that Sophie had not been using my Facebook to access photos of the kids for one of her schemes, that I had been burned by her to the tune of 8-10k, and all I needed was answers. He asked for her new phone number, just to try to keep tabs on her. I gave it, and he began to answer my questions.
He told me she has around six active warrants for her arrest, and some waiting for her back in California. One of them for prostitution, one for impersonation of a court official, three theft warrants (one being for guns), and one for failure to pay child-support. He also told me she was never in the Marines, and that her hips are 100% real and made of bones growing in her body. He told me they split because the Sheriff picked her up and took her to prison in another state. That the “rape” (quotations his) she had blamed the dissolution of their relationship on had occurred when she got released and started turning tricks down there. He told me she’s got a teenage kid somewhere in Arizona, and that this isn’t the first or even the second time she has pretended one of her kids had died so she could run a new scam on somebody.
Hours later, an old friend visited. We’ll call her Alyssa. She had overdone it one night and struck a housemate in drunken rage. Police were called. She went to jail. She just got out today and she’s not allowed in her house while the housemate is still living there. She had contacted Sophie for help with the situation. The moment she and Sophie had stepped outside to talk I immediately informed her partner that Sophie was not a lawyer and that Sophie’s daughter had not died. He seemed puzzled, but also like he’d expected to find out that Sophie was a fraud. I shared as much as I could before they returned inside. Alyssa’s partner told me about her situation and that she didn’t have a place to go at the moment. I offered my bed should she require it, and he went to retrieve some things from the house and bring her an overnight bag. Shortly after he left I retreated downstairs while Sophie and Alyssa talked. I began to hear powerful weeping and realized that Sophie was telling Alyssa about her daughter. I bit my tongue while waiting for an opportunity, which arrived shortly. Alyssa joined me in my bedroom and we talked. I told her what I knew and showed her what I had gathered. I told her of my plans to file a police report after the holiday weekend (St. Patrick’s Day, I expect the police to be processing drunks through Sunday, so finding time to meet me for paperwork seems unlikely).
Alyssa and I make our reports on Monday.
