Broke, Part I.

I have a valuable tip for you: Never, ever, ever hire an attorney you saw on TV. Do not hire an attorney that mass mails circulars. Do not hire, say, a pair of attorneys that have giant portraits of themselves painted and positioned to loom ominously over the Stevenson Expressway, pointing threatening fingers at you. There may come a day when you'll desperately need a lawyer. You'll think you don't know one. You'll wrack your brains trying to remember everyone you ever met in hopes one of them went to law school, and spend valuable hours kicking yourself for dropping out of college and not going to law school yourself. Finally, as a last resort, you'll turn to the painted mural with the pointing fingers.

Step away from the ledge! It is a far, far better thing to represent yourself than to hire these people. Sure, you'll still be fucked, but you won't be fucked and out the $2000 non-refundable bucks you paid them to blow off your paperwork and skip your court appointments.

You do know an attorney, by the way. You read blogs. You may even have one. If you desperately need a lawyer, the internets are lousy with them. If they're not in your state, they know someone who is. If they're a constitutional lawyer and you need a divorce attorney, they know someone. Blogger still in law school? She has professors. Who are lawyers. Who know people. And in my experience, most lawyers are happy to give referrals.

I'm sitting here trying to think of the best way to word this as strongly as possible, so you will never, ever make the mistakes Steve and I made. We thought we didn't know any attorneys, and hired a lawyer who was almost, but not quite, as good as this one:



Please, take this advice and go forth into the world, free to avoid attorneys that got their degrees at Costco. Don't be like Steve and me, who started out declaring bankruptcy and ended up two years later embroiled in a federal investigation defending ourselves from accusations of terrorism.

There! Was that worded strongly enough? I thought it might be.

We had to close our brick and mortar store when I got double pneumonia. It was the last straw in a series of unfortunate events, and slipped neatly into the comfortable cliche that everyone is a lost job and a catastrophic illness away from bankruptcy. With us it was a new business, a new baby, and a disabled child whose therapy wasn't covered by insurance, but the rule still applies, I think. This was more than a little heartbreaking, because Honeysuckle, from the get-go, was breaking even. We didn't lose money our first year, which is really great for a new business, and plus, you know, it was ours and we really loved it.

During the bankruptcy proceedings, we hired a lawyer, whose name was Slepp, but due to his inherently evil nature we came to refer to him as Snape. Snape took our last $2000, and in return for it did nothing. Nothing. He filled out no paperwork, he failed to inform us of when we had to show up for court, and didn't even show up himself. When I was hospitalized on the day of our hearing because there was more fluid in my lungs than air, he didn't bother to tell the judge about it, and she thought we'd skipped the court date. He was, in short, the Devil.

We arrived at our first court date, sans Snape, and were met at the door by a woman we'd never seen before. She handed us our paperwork and said, "They're just going to ask you a couple of questions, you'll tell them everything filled out here is true, and you'll sign a statement, and it'll be over."

"Where's Snape?" I asked. She just looked at me and said nothing until her silence was interrupted by the county trustee calling us in to start our appointment. Where we found that Snape had filled in all the blanks on our paperwork with zeroes. Zeroes. The county trustee looked over his glasses at us, handed us back our paperwork, and turned us over to the feds.

We waited for our federal appointment for 18 months. As it turns out, we had several summons. Snape just didn't bother to tell us about them. We didn't find out until we received a registered letter from the Federal government finding us in contempt of court and inviting us to kiss our asses goodbye.

Although I'm probably the least confrontational person on the planet, I was so completely terrified of what was going to happen if we didn't straighten things out, I called an entertainment lawyer I knew, begged for a referral, and got one. I'd like to say we fired Snape, but we just quit trying to contact him, and he never bothered to contact us, meaning basically there was really no post-Snape behavior that was different from active Snape behavior. I don't even think he noticed we were gone.

Our new attorney fixed everything, but not before telling us that because we'd handled things so poorly so far, there was a chance we'll...

"We'll what?" asked Steve, and the lawyer glanced down at our kids and didn't pick back up where he left off.

"Go to jail," I mouthed, and he nodded.

Steve seemed surprised, but since I'd been dreaming about debtor's prison for months, I had absolutely no trouble envisioning this.

"That's the worst case scenario," he said, "but of course we're going to meet all our court dates now, and get the paperwork straightened out, and I'll make sure it doesn't come to that."

The day of our 5th or 6th rescheduled hearing finally arrived, and we pulled up to the federal building. Steve was going to drop me off with the kids when he suddenly realized he'd left all the paperwork, a big cardboard box with three years of accumulated stuff in it, at home on the dining room table. I started crying, Steve called the attorney, the attorney called the investigator, and she said she wanted to see us anyway. Steve drove back into the city and gave her the paperwork the next day.**

We finally made it into the building and up the elevator to the correct suite, where we were greeted with some very heavy stares. Men came out into the waiting area to stare grimly at us before retreating back into the cubicle maze. We were called, first me, then Steve, to a back office to have our hearing.

"It's nice to finally meet you," said the federal investigator in charge of our case. "I have to tell you, we thought you were running a phony business that was possibly channeling money to terrorist groups. If you'd been Muslims, we'd have arrested you."*

Second piece of advice: Never underestimate how deeply paranoid our federal government has become.

Finally, for the first time since this entire debacle began, we got lucky: The officer investigating us was a feminist, and was totally down with Honeysuckle. She'd tried to research our store from work, but the site was blocked due to offensive content.

"Thanks to John Ashcroft for that. When he took office, he blocked all sites with adult content."

"Did you look at our website at home?" I asked.

"I did," she said.

"So you had to research us as part of your job, but you weren't able to do your job while you were at work?" I persisted.

"Nope," she said wryly.

"But our website is pretty conservative, considering what it is," I said.

"Yes, I saw that," she said. "I do hope Ashcroft gets the help he needs."

Ha!

She liked the store, and I managed to convince her I wasn't in league with either Eric Rudolph or Al Qaeda. I elaborated on the importance of making it a safe, appealing space for women and blah blah blah, and she smiled and nodded, and from that point she was on our side and once we went over the paperwork, it was over.

At least, that part was over. Then our neighborhood association went after us. While we were in bankruptcy, they refused to accept our monthly association dues, which we were prepared to pay, saying that due to some by-law they couldn't. After the bankruptcy was over, they socked us with a bill for $3,000, demanding back payment of the dues, accumulated late fees (with interest), and thousands of dollars in legal bills from their lawyers. We had two months to pay it. We wiggled our way out of that one in ways too tedious to get into.

Then after that, a $36,000 loan came due. We had been working with a lender to roll that loan into another loan and combine the two. The lender let us know they were unsure of whether to work with us or not. We started putting money aside to cover the deposit and first month's rent on an apartment for when we lost the house. Because of this, we got behind on the mortgage, which caused the lender to tell us they weren't going to work with us because instead of paying the mortgage, we were hoarding it. Which we wouldn't have done if they'd let us know they'd work with us. We (read: Steve) managed to talk ourselves out of that one, too.

While all this was going on, I have a vivid memory of the day our Link cards*** and state health insurance cards showed up at the same time two women arrived from the bank to repossess our cars. When they were attaching the front of the car to the tow truck, a man drove up, also from the bank, and walked around the property, appraising it for when the bank came and took it back.

By this time I was expecting a Balloon-O-Gram and a basket of government cheese to be delivered along with a nice card that read "Congratulations! You are now officially poor!"

I read somewhere on the series of tubes, and I'd link to it if I could but I honestly don't remember, that a lot of people who call themselves poor are really just "grad school poor" as opposed to "poor poor", and the main difference between the two was hope.

Being nearly forty years old with two small children, one of them disabled, and having to start all over again from the bottom doesn't give one a lot of hope.

We didn't share a lot of this when it was going on. There's not an awful lot of reward in talking about what it's like to be totally broke; in fact, there's a lot of punishment when you do. Empathy, even among those champions of the poor, Liberals and Feminists, was in extremely short supply, which suddenly caused the allegations from poor women and women of color that feminism is a movement for middle class white women to snap quickly into focus. Oh yeah! Look at that! It totally fucking is!

As with any crushing personal situation, you find out very quickly who your friends are. It is a fact that at least two people who I thought were very good friends dropped me like a rock when they found out how bad things were. Poor people are hard to use, I guess. The most common responses to our plight were a flat-out dismissal of our fears, accusations of "whining" or "begging," or angry diatribes about the Ways We Could Have Prevented Being Poor If We Hadn't Been So Stupid, sometimes presented with an itemized list.

"You're just behind on bills," was a great comment we once got. It reminded me of that scene in An American Werewolf in London when the Doctor Hirsch wakes up Nurse Price, who fell asleep at hospital while awaiting word as to the whereabouts of David, her missing American boyfriend, who thinks he is a werewolf running around London killing people.

"The police just called," he says calmly, shaking her awake. "There's a disturbance in Picadilly Circus involving some sort of dog."

Cut to Picadilly Circus, where dozens of cars are smashing into one another. People are getting run over and blood is bursting out of their bodies as they're crushed between two cars. A wolf the size of a grizzly bear leaps into the camera frame, sinking his fangs into the neck of a policeman. Two seconds later, the policeman's severed head bounces across the hood of a car.

But yes, my Banana Republic credit card is a week overdue. Thank you for pointing that out.

I was also informed that some people in the Philippines have it worse. This from a woman who would freak if a man told her to quit bitching about abortion rights because at least she's not in Afghanistan. I know we're not living in a refrigerator box down by the river, but nevertheless, the word "poor" is in the phrase "working poor" for a reason.

So you end up just shutting up about it, because apparently the working poor are easier to sympathize with if we're an abstraction, and if you see someone who claims to be poor but doesn't have flies and vultures circling their heads, they're just whining, and need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.

Which Steve and I did, goddammit. Now, after three years, we're "just behind on bills," about two weeks behind. Now, we're "grad school poor." Which, by the way, is not as romantic as it sounds.

I'm not likely to forget what it was like for those two years, when Steve and I would sit down after the kids went to bed and tried to figure out what to do and where to go when we were evicted and all the things that hadn't been taken by the bank were outside on the curb. How all the cruelty and stacked decks our middle class upbringing had insulated us against became exposed.

And interestingly, how a small network of kindness emerged between equally broke strangers. How the poor, in infinitely small ways, have each other's backs.

I'll talk about that tomorrow.

_____________________
*I swear, she actually said this.

**"You should make that part funnier," said Steve.

"I can't," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because I still don't think it's funny."

"People who read it will think it's funny."

"No, they won't."

"Sure they will."

"No, they won't, because I can't make it funny. I don't think it's funny."

"It's a little bit funny."

"No! I wanted to kill you! I wanted to hire a divorce attorney! I have never hated you as much as I hated you at that moment! That was the worst thing you have ever done! I thought we weren't going to walk back out of that building! I thought social services was going to take our kids! And you FORGOT THE PAPERWORK THAT COULD HELP US AVOID THAT?"

"Okay!"

"Okay."

whispers: "kind of funny."

***For those of you who don't know, this is what food stamps are now. It's a credit card with a monetary amount ranging from $100 to $400 bucks put on it by the state every month. When there's no more money in it, you're out of luck for the rest of the month. This new method is a great way of preserving the dignity of the poor, keeping their personal information personal. But as you will see later, that largely depends on the kindness of others.