Text From DYS on Monday: Hi r u
busy today Tex came had a little confr. Called cops….. would u b able to take me to
the police station I need a restran.order
tod
WISIMH: Why not? The only other things I had to do today
- the only day this week I don’t have appointments or other commitments - was
to clean the house, do the laundry, repair a leak to the pond plumbing, and,
wait for it, do some fucking sewing on my quilt. At least I know that you got a
restraining order against your first husband (prior husband, anyway) so at
least you know the drill Right? (Spoiler alert: wrong.)
Me. Ok, I just saw this message. Can come and get
you. I know turn from main road but pls provide directions from there.
DYS has been without a car since
Sunday. So she’s been stranded at her trailer park less than 24 hours. And by
trailer park, I don’t mean mobile home estates, or other pretentious place with
white gravel landscaping and whimsically named streetlets. This place actually
has Trailer Park in its name and lives up to the kinds of trailer parks I
remember along Route 1 back in the 1950s where descendants of refugees from the
Dust Bowl lived.
So I found the place despite her absolutely incorrect directions and lack of street signs, but rather
than hop into the air conditioned car and be on our way, I was waved into the
last remaining single-wide trailer in the park, so I could enjoy the
un-air-conditioned ambience while I heard the whole story. The trailer was
bought used circa 1985 – the last time I visited – and was not aging gracefully
back then. So let me pause in my tale to describe the place:
The metal siding on the trailer was either bright aqua blue or a once bright algae-green color
that was initially merely unfortunate; but has now passed into the realm of
what a paint store color card might call Acid Flashback Bile Green, only faded and rust-streaked. The front
and back entrances are so rotted and squishy they felt like walking on steps
made of cheap foam mattress material. Inside, there is what you might
optimistically call mostly-wall-to-almost-opposite-wall post-shag carpet of an indeterminate greyish color; foam ceiling panels falling down in places between the aluminum ribs and
stained with brown that one only hopes is from leaking rain and not dried blood.
The kitchen floor has antique linoleum whose pattern has been worn down to grey
in places where it’s not actually down to the plywood subfloor. Sparse furnishings
include a three-piece upholstered sofa with at least one broken spring, easy
chair and rocking chair - all covered in what might have once been a colonial print
that included tea pots, tobacco leaves and aborted fetuses, but now at least
has the advantage of disguising coffee stains and other stains that coordinate
beautifully with the ceiling stains.
Outside the back door is a
two-car long (not wide) cement slab covered with a home-made wooden wall and
tin sheet roof once painted a hopeful shade of eye-save green, now faded to a
monochrome series of dirty streaks. The contents of this covered workspace
included miscellaneous motorcycle parts, a clearly broken drill press, a red Sears
Craftsman two-tiered wheeled tool chest, an air compressor without hoses, boxes
and too many cartons stacked too high and deep and collapsed upon each like
something Dali might have painted during an earthquake while he was high on
crack; and dusty tarps covering mysterious other stuff that seem to murmur menacingly"Don't ask." The overall effect made
my old pre-cleanup carport look like an “after” picture in one of those home
organizer commercials.
WISIMH: I’ve got a bad feeling about this Scooby. Something
tells me this could take the rest of my day. That laundry isn’t going to wash
itself.
DYS: Hi. I was making coffee and
Tex came and was all belligerent and aggressive like and said he wanted his
tool box and I said I don’t think so because my lawyer said I have to keep
something he values for negotiation purposes and he already has all but one of
his guns so then he says yes that’s all he wants is the tool box and I say I don't think so and if he wasn't being so mean I would have said he could have any of the stuff along this side of the shed but not the tool
box and then he started to unlatch and open the front of the shed so he could
roll the toolbox out and….
WISIMH: And thanks for coming! And yep, this is all one sentence, punctuated by gasps for breath and some strangely
familiar familial dramatics that I’ve never seen performed by anyone but TOG so
I’m kinda creeped out here. And of course Tex would want the toolbox because
it’s clearly the most valuable thing in this shit pile. By all that’s holy, why
don’t you just walk away from this and back to your daughter in Tickville, Mo?
DYS: …and so I tried to stop him
and pushed him and he threatened me if I touched him again and I couldn’t get
my phone to work so I could call 911 so I ran next door to the manager and
asked her to call the cops and went back and the cops came and asked me if I
have a restraining order and I said I have a lot of papers (about the pending
divorce) and I went inside and couldn’t find the right papers and blah blah
WISIMH: Yep, all day, if I’m lucky, and this isn't looking like my lucky day. There are no
papers saying your legal spouse can’t remove some of his own personal property
from the premises where he lives. As you mentioned last time I saw you, you
have no signed court orders of any kind. Which I already knew so why don’t you?
Rhetorical question: in my experience, people in the deep end of this gene pool
don’t do well under pressure.
Me: (When DYS finally ran down) Let’s get out of
here. We’ll get a cup of coffee and calm down then go to the police station.
Well, after lunch (which of
course I bought) we went to the police station where we were told we had to go
to the courthouse for a TRO. I think it was about then that I began to suspect that DYS
does not, in fact, have the slightest clue about how to get a restraining order.
While I sat next to an overweight mother of several small children who moved
too fast for me to get a precise count, DYS stood in line to get the forms. While
waiting, I googled Domestic Violence Restraining Order and learned within 5
minutes that there was no way we were getting this done today. Eventually, when
she got tot he front of the line, the clerk directed DYS to a shelf on the wall (by the
entrance) where the forms are. Yes: we could have picked up the forms without
waiting, but I would have missed getting sticky lollipop goo on my pants from
one of the various loose children, not to mention learning all I needed to know
to give free unlicensed legal advice about this process.
DYS: (Taking the ½” thick packet from me because
all she could do was stand in front of the shelf of forms and wait for me to
find it for her) Let’s go to the cafeteria to fill this out.
WISIMH: Yes, let’s do that. Because the blisters I
mentioned getting on my feet at the beach the yesterday are about killing me
and walking around some more will be thera-fucking-peutic. And, I might get to
buy you more coffee.
DYS: (Sitting coffee-less in the cafeteria working
on page 2 of what I estimate is a 10 page form) I don’t know how I’m going to
get this completed.
WISIMH: I don’t know how you didn’t know you weren’t
going to get this completed. Coincidence?
Me: Should you complete it, we have to turn it in
upstairs and wait for a judge to give us a TRO that’s only good for 5-7 days.
Then you get a hearing date for a more extended Domestic Violence Restraining
Order and you have to serve Tex in person, not by mail, about the hearing. And you told me you
don’t have a physical address for him, just a PO number, and your (braindead) lawyer
hasn’t called you back, and The Google says that if you complete the form, and
include the report of the cop who came this morning, and if Tex returns and
threatens you again, and you call the cops again, they can issue an Emergency
Restraining Order that is as good as a TRO. Even better because we don’t have
to wait for a judge.
DYS: I don’t know, maybe by then my lawyer will be
back from vacation.
WISIMH: I don’t know, maybe by then I’ll be in a
locked ward with my new best friends and all the drugs I need to forget how to dial
911 on my own phone.
Me: And I don’t recall that you
said he threatened you, and in fact, you were the one that initiated physical
contact by trying to push him away from the tool box. So, are you really in
fear of physical harm? You know even if you get a restraining order, he could
still manage to get the toolbox anyway. Toolbox beats paper.
WISIMH: And you’re keeping it to
negotiate for what? A share of the broken drill press? The mysterious shape
under the tarp in the corner that might be a pirate’s treasure chest? One of
those dumbed-down senior cellphones where you just push a button to dial emergency
numbers?
So I persuaded DYS to let me
drive her home where she’ll complete the form and call the cop tomorrow and ask
him to mail her a copy of the incident report. One of the funniest parts of the
day what that shortly after I returned home, before the room AC had even
brought the temperature down to a level where my blistered feet stopped
throbbing, my crazy houseguest returned. She asked me how my day was. I told her I spent it limping
around the courthouse trying to get a domestic violence restraining order for
DYS. She replied, yeah, so my day was pretty rough. Here’s what happened…
No comments:
Post a Comment