Side B of tape (12.19.02)
We are still arguing about the WVC house. I told him I can’t afford to work the coffee trailer for him for 5 days if he is only going to put 2 of those days into the house. I told him I have bills piling up on my desk and I need to get back to work. I had given him 2 weeks and he hardly touched the house.
Then he swears under his breath and says he has got to go, but then realizes he is on his cell phone so the conversation continues while he is driving. Except now you can barely hear what I am saying because the road sounds etc are louder than my voice coming through his recorder.I have held the recorder right up to my ear and can make out some of what I am saying. He is loud and clear on the tape of course.
He says he is on his way to pick up the Quit Claim deed for me to sign the West Valley City house over to him. The day before we had spent hours discussing the WV house and he had convinced me somehow that it would be a good idea to put the house into his name and he will fix it up and split the equity with me when we sell it. That night I lay in bed thinking and I realized the only debt on that house was a second mortgage he took out on it to pay his restitution fine (11K). Being in the Real Estate business I had run the numbers on that house and knew we could sell it for about $120K. If I signed the house over to him and he mortgages the heck out of it again and then leaves the country, I will have no way of getting my equity from that house.
So I told him I have thought about it and don’t want to sign the house over to him. I want my name to stay on it until we sell it. This made him very mad. He started yelling at me and said we would be lucky to get $20K out of that house. So I said then we can split that. He said no, he wants his name taken off of it. I told him his name was not on the house, and then he yelled “THE DEBT! THE DEBT! I want my name off THE DEBT!” I told him I am not taking on the debt of his restitution fine. So he then said he was going to sign something that would convict me criminally in his felonies and I would have to get attorneys to fight the FBI and prove my innocence. He said I will need an attorney, so will my dad and so will another friend of mine he named. Then he proceeded to tell me how many thousands of dollars that will cost me.
He then continues to yell at me for the rest of this conversation. He says “I….am….dead...I...lose my children….I lose everything….I have nothing”.
He asks me “How many times have I hurt you? How many times have you hurt me?”
I asked him how I hurt him. He yells back…” You put me in JAIL!! He repeated that a number of times. I told him if he would leave me alone he would not get in trouble. He took that as a direct threat. He is yelling even louder now. “YOU SHUT THE F*** UP because YOU are VULNERABLE!” I asked him what he was talking about….he repeated it loud and clear “YOU ARE VULNERABLE”.
Then he calmed down a little and told me to go back to him. I told him I don’t have to go back to him to get what is legally mine. That triggered him again and he started yelling about what is legal and what is not. And let’s discuss legalities.
I hung up on him. I couldn’t listen to another word.
I think a few hours must have gone by and he called me back. You are probably wondering why I even answer. If I don’t (like apparently I had done the night before) he assumes the worst and gets very mad at me. He will come hunt me down and find me to fight with me, so it is usually easier to just answer his call when I can.
This time he is not angry anymore. Now he is very emotional. I ask what’s up? He said he wants to discuss the protective order and if I really did try to get it dropped (see blog #17). He says he has to go to court on the 6th (I think Jan 6) and he wants to know if he can fight it or if he has to roll over and die.
He said “Tell me you are not doing this to me. Tell me someone else made you do it” He sounds like he is begging. I told him the Victim's Advocates (VA) had told me to keep it in place.
Craig: “Do you remember you telling me you were going to drop it?”
I told him I spent 2 hours talking to them. I told them I didn’t want him deported, I didn’t want my children to lose their Dad, I didn’t want him to go to jail. I just wanted him to leave me alone. The VA told me they had seen this scenario so many times, where the girl comes in and begs to drop the PO because she is afraid of the consequences of having it. So when I left it was up in the air and nothing had been decided upon.
I told him they would not let me leave the building by myself because they thought he would be out there waiting for me so they had someone escort me to my car. Once I was in my car and the doors were locked they went back into the building, but my car wouldn’t start. To this day I don’t know what was wrong with my car, but it wouldn’t start. So I sat trying to figure out what to do. The people in the building came back out to me and asked me why I hadn’t left yet so I told them my car wouldn’t start. They wouldn’t let me stay in my car, and took me back inside to call for help.
They were scared of Craig. I told him they knew he was angry. To this he yelled in the phone “ANGRY! HURT! CRUSHED!” I told him all of that comes across very scary to people, especially me. He then gave me a lecture on how everyone knows that anger is a form of fear and it’s good to vent it and get it out. So I told him I can’t deal with it. It’s too much for me.
He went back to the court date coming up on the 6th and asked me what I am going to say. He asked if I will be positive toward him or negative towards him. I said it depends who is asking the question and what the question is. I will not lie. He said “So you want me to go to jail, you want me kicked out of the country. Do you want me kicked out of the country? Do you understand what you have done to me?” He is crying now. You hear me say I’m sorry. I really was feeling sorry for him, and didn’t want him deported or sent to jail. I told him it was the violations that got him into trouble. I needed him to leave me alone and when he got violent I had to go to court and get a court order to tell him to leave me alone. And then he violated them. I am not the one doing this to him. He could not see that. In his eyes, this was completely my doing and my fault.
C: “You have perpetrated vicious, vicious things against me!”
I replied that it wasn’t all my fault. So then he got sarcastic and said “Oh that’s right, I reported myself to the police, that’s right, I took myself to the police station and told them I want to go to jail. That’s right, I told them to lock me up and kick me out of the country!”
Then he said I could have walked away. I told him I did leave, and he followed me. He doesn’t leave me alone. Life was becoming unbearable. More sarcasm “Unbearable? I hit you, I slapped you around and I harassed you!” He rolled his tongue when he said harassed to make it sound like a terrible thing, sarcastically.
Then he brought up Michael again. He told me I cheated on him and he had to get over it. I reminded him that the 3 times I had been with Michael were all orchestrated by him, it was hardly an affair.
He thought it was ok to have affairs for 3 years because to him his heart wasn’t in it. But since I’m a girl I obviously felt emotion and therefore it was cheating.
He goes back to the court thing. “Are you telling me there is nothing you can do to help me in court?”
I said I won’t lie in court.
“So you want me out of the country.” He started crying again, and said he was going to get dumped into some other country, go through their kangaroo court and then get stabbed to death in some alley. We talked about this for a minute. He was talking about going back to SA and them killing him because of the unit he was with back in his military days. I told him that wasn’t going to happen, that was a long time ago.
“Do you want me out of your life?” I said no, I just want him to be able to leave me alone. He said “Help me! Come to court and help me!”
The conversation went back around to the court again.
Then he got mad again and said that I took all of his mother's money. He said I stole her entire retirement, and now I’m killing her son, the one and only person who is capable of looking after her.
Pause. I will briefly fill you in here…..in the next post!
It has been surreal listening to these tape recordings of our arguments. Is it hard? Not so much anymore. I have waited 14 years to do this. I have had all that time to turn this over in my head and deal with it. Yes, there are times when I have had to turn the recorder off, close my computer and walk away for the rest of the day. Today I am looking forward to meeting up with a friend of mine to watch a movie together. Drink wine, break some bread with brie cheese and grapes. Living alone is the hardest part of doing this blog. Thankfully I have good friends who I can go to and forget everything else behind me. And my dog, my beautiful dog, who lies on the bed next to me all day while I type away.
Thanks to all of you for your support, more will be coming next Sunday.
Keep love in your heart.
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