Sunday, December 2, 2012

Ch 13 Part 1 – Bulldogs and Pinchers

Back to Chapter 12 part 2

Chapter Thirteen – Bulldogs and Pinchers Part 1

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September 29, 2009, court was a library Tuesday.  I waited nine and a half months.  The same length of time to bring Penelope into this world was the same length to find out if I would lose the greatest part of Penelope for the rest of her legal “minor” time in it.  I knew what it meant to be an in-law and not a son, a brother, or bound by hemoglobin.

On the previous Friday, I got a list of questions from my attorney Martha that she planned on asking my parents and me.  That was the same day Martha told me about Ashley’s offer of trading the house for Penelope.  As if Penelope’s life could be broken down into a financial transaction like a detailed receipt.

I spent the weekend with Penelope.  On Saturday we saw a 3-D movie called “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” based on a book we borrowed from the library.  We had an afternoon play date with Penelope’s friend Annabelle and her little sister June with their dad David at my house. 

David’s wife Molly had come by with their kids on a Saturday back in August.  We were reading Rapunzel when Annabelle knocked.  While we were waiting we read the Little Mermaid and The Emperor’s New Clothes.  Penelope always remembered in the non-Disney version how the Little Mermaid felt like swords sliced her legs with each step. 

Penelope and Annabelle were two peas in a pod.  In August, Annabelle and Penelope played dress-up and  created a makeshift stuffed-animal hospital by applying tape as bandages.  We painted ceramic ponies.  I fixed ham sandwiches with strawberries.  The kids played camp out with Penelope’s pink camouflage sleeping bag.

I spoke with Annabelle’s mother, Molly, while the kids cavorted.  I appreciated the novel opportunity to converse with a fellow parent.  Ashley had Molly over at the porch-house in this interim.  Molly was privy to details of rationale built up in Ashley’s gerrymandered voting community.

Penelope and Annabelle were best friends.  Molly had no idea what had really happened.  Molly was told I had some sort of anti-social disorder, that I was a negative presence in Penelope’s life.  Molly said, “I had no idea what she is doing to you.  I came over here to look out for Penelope like you had her locked up or something.  Ashley told me not to come, but you asked me at the school, so I came over here for Penelope.”  I told Molly, “Ashley is a good mom, but this is all rationalized heroism.  This is manufactured drama where there is none.”

On this fast-forward day from August to September, Molly felt a divided allegiance, gender ties bound to what the left ear received versus the right.  Molly felt it simpler to send her husband David.  I understood.  This was a play date.  I was not going to subpoena anyone.  All I wanted was for Penelope to know she had one life, one body, alive in both houses and her friends were welcome in each.

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On Sunday Penelope and I went to church together.  My parents and Tim came over on Sunday afternoon.  We watched the Saints march over the Bills 27 to 7. 

On Monday, like most days of work in the past year gestating this court date, focusing on anything, but the inevitable was problematic.  My productivity was infertile.  My schedule was inherently flawed for procrastination and legal preparations.  After the stillbirths in March and June, I was praying for a September resolution. 

I took Penelope to the library a day early.  We read some anthropomorphic Berenstain Bears.  On Tuesday morning I treated the routine with Penelope as normal as I could.  I dropped Penelope off at school.  I said good morning to Ms. Linda.  I did not know for sure if Penelope’s teacher knew exactly what day it was, but Ashley had sent Linda a subpoena to testify against me only a couple of hours from then.  I was not sure if the teachers would really show.  I set my drive to the courthouse to Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown complete with my ringtone for Ashley, “Know Your Enemy.” 

I was in suit, with my old rolling audit trunk.  I wheeled my green albums, notebooks, legal pads and shrapnel hope through the metal detector.  I met my lawyer, Martha in the lobby of the courthouse.  We were ready.  

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When we got into the courtroom, like a perverse classroom desk one side was my bulldog and the other Ashley and her pincher, ready to snarl at each other for pay.  The attorneys seemed to be friends as counterparties.  The legal-ladies cracked jokes about other trials zooming through the office storylines.  Apparently court gossip included one Nottoway guy who wrapped his house trailer in aluminum foil to prevent radio waves.

Ashley had her Nottoway pinstripe New York Yankee lineup with her multimillion dollar payroll to my Pittsburgh pirates.  Ashley’s attorney and my attorney chatted like two game managers before the first pitch, conversing about everything but the day’s events.

We were the only case on the docket; a full-day, no waiting, just Baker versus Baker to be decided.  Ashley did not look at me.  My parents and her parents were draped in their country flags and family crests out in the lobby.  I added Tim and Conrad to my witness list.  Tim was supposed to drive Conrad up from New Orleans.  Conrad was missing.

I found out around lunch time Conrad got food poisoning the night before.  Conrad being gone made Tim late by ten minutes.  Both were absent for the initial commencement, which negated their ability to testify for me.  I was back to my parents.  Anyone testifying had to leave the room, so the only people besides the judge, the lawyers, the court reporter and Ashley and I that saw the whole trial were Jeffery and Tim who sat in the audience silent.

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This was family court, division F Osceola Parish.  I was finding out the gender rolled-up differences between courtship and a courtroom.  Certain roles are assumed.  Ashley was on a mission brimming with sophisticated conceit on her mother highchair to convince her home town that she was this righteous Amazon.

In court someone has to be the unfit parent; one to win, one to lose.  If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be there.  Even if one of you is not competing; you are in a competition.  Emotional scars are not like physical scars.  Physical marks stay the same size on the skin, independent of growth.  They are static to the body.  Emotional scars can shrink and swell depending on the waves in time.  This was a day about sizing emotional scars.

Ashley’s lawyer was a hermaphrodite-sort of Doberman woman; feminine enough externally to appease the female judge.  Ms. Tracey Trunchbull was set to argue custody of the female minor to her female parent, but underneath that paired-peach power suit, Trunchbull most certainly had a dick and balls.  Trunchbull was planning to do some fucking.  She was dildo’d up for this paternal parent.  Trunchbull mobilized in a unit capable of sowing and growing seeds of fruition in one body.  No donor needed.

Arguments rested in blabbering apparitions of events like bullets in dueling gun chambers.  The ghost gunpowder was mixed in an oral history chemistry no one could ever validate except Ashley or me.  The only certainty was that this was happening now in Nottoway.  According to Ashley’s parents, brother, chief of police, town attorney and every kid in every thirty-five person graduating class from 1989 to 2000, from Nottoway high school after service time at St. Mark’s elementary Ashley had never done anything wrong ever.  How does one combat an infallible being?

The town treated Ashley like a nun, the mayor, a good house keeping Martha Stewart imClone country-mouse and mother of the year.  Ashley was a volunteer for everything, a selfless community hero of bake-sale warfare ruling on a porch-throne.  Ashley pumped out platitudes to please like a machinegun.  Everyone, but me; I was the one man Ashley could be honest with everything she would lie to them about. 

Ashley was the most dangerous kind of pathological crazy.  Ashley was functioning and appeared exemplary from a distance.  The atmospheric level of Ashley’s life was a halcyon cloudless azure cerulean blue impeccably manufactured in what nature would paint in reflective oceanic molecules without effort.  Ashley’s life’s flaws were explained away in my assigned determents as a trial of endurance advertising her strengths in a marketing yokel-political campaign so well funded that no one dare ask the name of the empresses’ fashion designer. 

Ashley preached from a bully-pulpit, pre-informing potential witnesses with the tranquilizer-dart assumptions of gender to sedate her arachnid endeavors.  One by one former faces predisposed to the sticky confines of her spider web congregated.  Flies for the slaughter, happily consumed in the barter of my ignominy and the extraction of my daughter in exchange for the guise blanketing Ashley’s what-if concupiscent deeds and her warped-ascetic mind ready to disparage my input without qualm.

Ashley’s gaze was Medusa shepherding the fields of a pastoral hick-town utopia.  Ashley’s forest fencing the fields was a thick boreal labyrinth of assumptions.  No one could identify the timber Ashley used to construct such an encompassing fortress of solitude, beautiful and perilous; they were all on her side.  I was no Perseus.

Despite all of that, I felt sorry for her.  Her rage was fueled not from vengeance, but from a sadness dripping from her frailty.  I knew, but courts do not abide such discussions or peace negotiations built on aiding ones enemy.  For any such overtures will be mistrusted as a Trojan gift.  Fear will spoil the crop.

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Inside I knew Ashley wept.  The taint of husband still in me could sense her fear.  How many test subjects had been converted in these street pews, these grocery-store eyeball-shelved witnesses leering at me like a man that must register notification before establishing inhabitance?

The danger of two parents eyeing it up on the savannah to the world is raw.  As if for a male to fight for the continued presence of his offspring under the care and concern of his dominion is so anti the laws of natural order that even human-kind in our ineffectual wisdom has stimulated and gerrymandered gender cattle-guards to ensure that only the fittest males can pass what the ovary-bearing female is granted in gratuitous assumption.

Parents brawl in a war over predetermined genetic web-workings encoded inside their child.  One side represents the accentuating mother, the other the father.  The chromosomes are on high alert of appearances and mannerisms slipping past the fifty point zero-zero-zero one percentage entitlement.  Breeching such thresholds wields the power to extricate the other forty-nine point nine-nine-nine away from the opposing party and in turn their offspring’s predominant political consciousness. 

Child support laws banked between schedule A and schedule B based on a less than forty-six percent threshold.  If a parent was at forty-five percent or less, that time equated to basically nothing in mathematical equations that allowed the other to force the minority partner to pay exponentially to not see his or her child.  Lawyers would battle over day fifteen out of twenty-eight with lion teeth ripping the crucial sinew from the savannah bone.

That marginal day in a child’s schedule was like Jack creeping in to filch the giant’s golden goose for his mother.  Cloud-realities pit woman against man with the female claiming the testicular sad-sack fellow only wants the beanstalk to stretch so high to breach the cumulonimbus-threshold to avoid payments, regardless of the stack of beans he was sold on his wedding day. 

Over the last nine months Ashley had me complete income and expense affidavits, credit card statement submissions, and W-2’s to play liars poker.  Basically in Louisiana if you do not meet the forty-six percent threshold, you equate to a deadbeat by using the alternative schedule intended for sole custody situations.  Ashley made over seventy percent of our income, yet I was the one dodging Donkey Kong’s barrels coming down the staircase with my daughter on top behind the ape. 

The money was one thing, the principle another.  My job, my one day I may be able to afford again smaller home, and my life were shackled to Nottoway to have Penelope.  So be it.  This arbitrary diabolical estrogen-oiled worksheet machine salivating to consume my financial freedom sat there like a hedge-maze monster.  The crux of this conundrum was another ton to the anvil that hovered above my head. 

The worst thing was if the anvil came down, Penelope was gone.  I probably would still live in this cartoon-town full time for those two nights a month.  I was a fractured shell too weak to depart.  I knew Ashley did not need the money to support Penelope, neither of us did.  I use to debate if Ashley even wanted the money.  I figured Ashley just wanted to fuck with me and follow the game plan she could passively rationalize as what her lawyers told her to do in a Milgram experiment. 

Child support is lawyer-ammunition.  Lawyers are like nuclear weapons.  Once you pull them out you have already lost.  Mine told me to counter pursue spousal support, which I did contingent on if I had to pay half the mortgage on top of the rental.  I would have gone bankrupt.

Money and blood drenched the room in the two extremes of American marital justice.  I prayed before each iteration of court back in March, June and now September to focus on Penelope, not fear and not funding.  I tried to envision the best-case scenario for our family.  Judge Wolfe, the genuine ringmaster arrived.  We all stood.

We were the Dutch versus the Cajun French on a Gettysburg civil war battlefield locked in Louisiana.  Each of Ashley’s subpoena-sheep was a weapon.  Some were M11’s. Others were Lupara shotguns.  Ashley was the Howitzer.  I knew at some point Ashley was going to send me up there to try to suck on the barrel of a blunderbuss.

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Ashley put the secretary of Penelope’s school Lucy Jones at leadoff hitter.  Penelope’s teachers came in a rotation through the day so the school would not be understaffed.  Thank goodness our daughter’s education would not be hindered by Ashley’s summons.  Thank goodness the judge announced she knew all the teachers so well since her kids went to the same school.  Thank goodness.

Ms. Jones talked about how I did not talk to her enough and seemed “weird I guess.”  Lucy did not understand why I had asked to meet with her and the other teachers after the orientation a few weeks ago. 

Written to me: June 17, 2009: (They have concerns about Ethan’s parenting ability and his constant failure to participate in school activities, Mental state.)

Mental state was printed as a psychological evaluation from kindergarten teachers.  Only in a family courtroom could a man shudder at these Kumbaya ex-hippie-led candle snuffers.  If psyche-assessments negated parental rites we’d be a billion-member Price is Right audience of orphans. 

Trunchbull – Can you describe the school events each year?
Ms Jones-Sock Hop, Fall Festival, Winter Solstice, Mardi Gras, May Day, graduation.
Trunchbull –Do you recall seeing Ashley Baker at those events?
                Ms. Jones-Oh, every one.
Trunchbull – Do you recall seeing Ethan Baker there?
                Ms. Jones – At the Father’s Day Picnic usually.
Trunchbull-Did Mr. Baker have a conversation with you after orientation this year?
Ms. Jones – He met with the teachers after.  He was basically saying he was a good father.  I was uncomfortable.  He brought albums of pictures of him and Penelope.  I did not look at them.  Mr. Baker cried and then got better.

On cross, my attorney asked the secretary of my daughter’s school if she had any idea what had been represented to me from Ashley about what the teachers intended.  Lucy Jones said, “No.” 

How could those mental state concerns make sense?  Sure, anti-social was maxed out on my cranial credit card.  Bullet holes build character.  Penelope’s daddy was still standing.  Perfection tastes like a vanilla-lard-gasoline latte.  Kids need USDA monitored water with grit questions of what the fuck is in this cup, not Starbucks.

Lucy did not even know me or what I was going through, yet was willing to espouse on uncomfortable air and Ashley’s four-year perfect attendance record.  How dare we stare humanity in the eye before we are ready?  Lucy was the first swing of the bat.

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Second up was Ashley in her pink power suit of passive aggressive vitriol and little make-up.  Ashley seemed cold and broken.  Ashley was consistent, but not sturdy in her bombastic sermon.  The script Ashley wrote in her discovery information was like an unbroken text bullet-point list for her talking points.  She seemed primed to let her Gatling gun of spinning words fly after standing up as the Athena-mom Ashley believed she was; perfect as her parents told her. 

Ashley talked about her pregnancy and how uninvolved I was.  The menagerie of painted wood animals on the chair rail was muzzled.  Ashley was proud of all the books she read and how I refused to read them.  Ashley said Penelope would scream and flail her legs when I tried to change her diapers.  Little did Ashley know I did DNA testing and fingerprint analysis to find over four-hundred of Penelope’s old diapers still yet to decompose in the New Orleans landfill to prove who was really shoveling the shit. 

I did not participate in Penelope’s life.  Even when I got up in the middle of the night Ashley calmed Penelope with her Vulcan mind-powers during R.E.M. sleep, while I rocked our daughter. 

Ashley said she tried to cover up “who I really was” to the rest of the family for years.  Ashley contended every supportive display of my beneficial qualities as Penelope’s father, were actually counter measures of positive reinforcement to get me to change past all my horrible deficiencies. 

After Katrina I was cast as a font of apocalyptic revelations where the Beast of the Earth was calling out the star of Wormwood with seven angelic trumpets that New Orleans was going to hell.  I handcuffed myself to the generator run television gaping at the thousands dead that only I could see. 

I never researched the preschools.  I did not bring Penelope to the doctor.  Worst of all after my obsession with the Simpsons was cured; I played Magic the Gathering and Fantasy Football.  Holy Fuck Batman, arrest this man!

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Ashley let out a barrage of bullet claims.  Ashley did everything for Penelope.  Ashley constantly asked me to change and get help.  Ashley constantly threatened to divorce me over this.  Pop. Pop. Pop, where’s the blood?

Trunchbull- What efforts, if any, did Ethan contribute to the research and discussion about the Montessori School of North Dallas?
Ashley – Very little.  It was never his interest.  I’m the one who visited the school and signed her up and enrolled her.  I brought her that first day.

Trunchbull – Did you have a special routine on Friday nights?
Ashley – Every Friday night, save a few, Ethan plays a game called Magic.  Penelope and I would go to the mall and play with other kids and go to kid-themed restaurants.  He would obsess over it.  First it was the Simpsons, then Magic.  He would leave at five-thirty and be out past midnight.

Trunchbull - Six months in Dallas what happened?
Ashley - I agreed to move, and yes we did, yes.  I was homesick.  I missed my parents, his parents, our brothers, everyone.  I was very lonely.  Ethan worked for a big CPA firm.  He traveled a lot.  So just not knowing anyone, or having any friends, or family, it was just Penelope and I.  We talked about it and Ethan agreed to move to Nottoway.

We purchased a lot a few blocks from my parent’s house.  We were supposed to stay with my parents for a little while.  That ended up being two years.  Ethan was very concerned about financial stability.  So he didn’t want to rent a place.  Ethan chose, and preferred to stay with my parents.

Oh, I preferred to house with her hovering mother and alcoholic-autocratic father?  Oh, and I must have preferred to keep paying on a Katrina house and saving up $640,000 for her porch-Antebellum dollhouse with my salary just cut in half to move to Nottoway.  Oh those two fiduciary wonderlands were all my idea.  Oh, let me dip my forearm in gasoline and fist my ass.  Here’s a match, light my arm hair.  Living with your parents is my fetish.  Maybe I can lick the shit off after and pretend it’s chocolate.   

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Trunchbull-Describe a typical weekend once you moved back into your parent’s?
Ashley –It was pretty much the same as in Dallas.  Friday night was Magic, so Penelope and I would do something fun together.  My mom would come, my brother, my dad, my brother’s wife.  It got bigger and bigger.  We’d go out to eat Chucky Cheese.

On Saturday’s I took Penelope to gymnastics, birthday parties, play dates, the zoo, the aquarium, the Children’s Museum, Global Wildlife.  We are a member at all of them.  Ethan would come sometimes, but it was always Penelope and me. 

Sunday in football season, Ethan watched football all day and on Saturday.  He is obsessed.  He watches all the games pro and college and maybe even a little bit on high school because they’re going to feed college, which feeds the NFL.

Trunchbull-During the time you were living in your parent’s house describe the interaction with Ethan and Penelope?
Ashley- Very little. When we lived there, my mom and Penelope have a very close relationship.  They probably next to me, her, and my mom are very close to one another.  Ethan would watch T.V.  Penelope played with my mom.

Ethan is more the disciplinarian.  He’s very demanding, strict.  His words are harsh.  When he speaks nicely to her it is after he’s broken her down after a huge knock-down, drag-out fight and she can barely breathe.  He talks down to her like a baby, like a child. 

Trunchbull- Does that concern you?
Ashley –Yes, very much.  I talk to her like an adult.  I treat her like a child.  I explain things.  It concerns me that they don’t have a strong relationship.

Trunchbull -In May of 2008, where did y’all move to?
Ashley - That’s when we had finished building our new house a few blocks away.



Trunchbull- Is that where you’re still residing?
Ashley - I am now.  In December, about mid-December when we had talked about divorce, he had asked me to leave, and so Penelope and I went to live with my mom.  In May we filed to move back into the house, and he moved out. 

“Talked about divorce, asked her to leave;” the word divorce never came up, not once.  No pleas, no major complaints, no arguments, change or perish speeches.  Hell, there was no speech, because Ashley does not discuss her problems.  Ashley lip-sticked a smile for the world.  Maybe it was that behind closed door thing she grew up with Hilton.  December 15, 2008, came.  A board meeting was called.  The D-word was not uttered.  The canvas Ashley email-approved a few weeks before hung on the dining room wall.

The idea that I asked Ashley to leave is Ashley’s complete psychological rejection of our marriage.  When Ashley said this in her mind she was not lying.  The scariest part is that Ashley did and actually does believe herself.  (If one wanders far enough into the external moment, one never has to leave the immediate; and therefore the ramifications of what one says never find their way into the accountancy of recollection.)

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Prior to the time that you were separated, did Mr. Baker every read Penelope a story at night, or lay down with her and talk to her about her day?

Ashley- I think, yeah. There would be occasion where he would read her a story. 

On Tuesday nights, I help some friends with their accounting work.  He opened his new business and for free I go and help him.  He’s been a life-long friend, a friend of Ethan’s as well.  I’m usually home by eight o’clock, but there were occasions where I wasn’t.  Then it would be Ethan’s responsibility to bathe her and read her a story.  A lot of times, I would come home and she wouldn’t have taken a bath.  She’d still be in her clothes.  But yes on those occasions he would go to the library, check out books and they would read together.

Ethan and Penelope’s relationship has always been very strained.  I have always been involved with libraries.  I volunteered in high school everyday at lunch.  I suggested they go.  To me it was a public place where you couldn’t lose your temper and yell.  You were forced to be together calmly. 

To ever be the man bringing Penelope to the doctor, giving her a bath, performing any task that could in any way be completed by mommy-juggernaut martyr Ashley; I would have had to have a court order. 

My only chances were when Ashley was sequestered by an employment task for some other father figure.  There was never a moment of encouragement to share those tasks after Dallas.  In my exhaustion from icy trips to the New Mexico desert and the reprieve of something post-Katrina normal in Friday night Magic I was usurped as a father and apparently lost my wife.  

I saw my capability from being on my own.  Ashley repressed my offerings.  She spun my anti-social crutches against me in court.  Those Tuesday night’s Ashley was supposed to be home by six-thirty for us to eat dinner together.  I fixed her plate.  There was no plan of hours.  Tracer came to the house once, but there was no Ashley library suggestion.  I was already bringing Penelope to the library.  Library night was why Ashley picked Tuesday as the day to help Tracer with Ben.  Now I did not even have dibs on libraries.

I would call Ashley’s cell phone and like most of my calls Ashley would not answer.  Ashley would not even listen to the messages I left on her voicemail.  Ashley would eventually see that I called and respond at her leisure with a, “What’s up?” 

There was no commitment to be home at a certain time, only an understanding in my head, which was far different than the one in Ashley’s.  Penelope and I sat on the couch reading stories listening for the Dutch door on pins.  Penelope would get excited waiting for Ashley.  Time drifted into instability. 

I would find out Ashley ate dinner with Tracer and Ben hours later.  We were in the new house transitioning from Lacey’s bathroom to Penelope’s own.  My assertive gonads were still in the battery charger.  I should have usurped and given Penelope her bath, told Penelope, “Mommy is coming later,” and put Penelope to bed on my own from the start. 

Eventually I did put Penelope to bed on those nights, but we would usually skip bath.  With all the change Penelope had been through, I felt feeble to hurdle the bath time mental-necessity for mommy Penelope had in her head on my own, especially not with Penelope looking around the corner every other second for a straggling traveler.  Penelope was not ready.  Ashley never helped Penelope or I transition, because Ashley did not want us to transition. 

On one hand Ashley clung to every measure of control over our child and with the other she demonized me for not doing more.  Sister fingers of Cain and Able.  Ashley liked that Penelope needed her.  Ashley got off on it.  Where the fuck was my life partner? 

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Trunchbull – Do you have a custody schedule to suggest?
Ashley- Ethan would have Penelope every other weekend nine a.m. to Monday morning to school and visits after school on Tuesdays, but she would come home before bath time.

Trunchbull- What have you observed about Penelope’s behavior under the current schedule?
Ashley – Penelope is reluctant to leave on weekends.  She hides under the sofa and finds excuses, something she forgot to pack that she absolutely can not leave the house without.  When she returns she is very clingy to me.  Over time I have seen Penelope improve quite a bit.

Trunchbull – Do you recognize Exhibit Number 3?
                Ashley-It is my check stub from Winfield Enterprises.
Trunchbull – It says $62,377, through September 15, 2009 is that correct? Does it contain every penny that you have earned?
                Ashley – Yes

The court called a smoke, bathroom, Coke break.  I was at the pisser next to Hilton.  I stared into the urine pondering the handy-work consequences of my unit playing out today rather than Hilton’s gruff.  Ashley was droning her damndest to paint a picture. 

The first money-shot spit-wad for cash and Schedule B went up on the stall-door like a “call here for a good time” number.  I knew Ashley made way more money than whatever that paper said Ashley said it said.  That was the kind of day this was, even two people reading the same piece of paper could come to segregated conclusions.

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Cross Examination Martha Bertrand

Martha- In reference to Exhibit Number 3, you refer to the sum of $62,377.  In fact rather than $62,377, your actual gross income for 2009 as of September 20, 2009 is in excess of $89,000?  Is this correct?
                Ashley-Yes the net is $62,000?
Martha – Is this $11,080 profit sharing?
                Ashley –Yes
Martha – I heard some testimony from Ms. Jones earlier at the Pine Montessori School that you told them you didn’t want any child support from Ethan.  Is this correct?
                Ashley-I heard her say that.
Martha, - I’m going to presume that because this is being introduced into evidence that you are no longer of the position that you don’t want child support from Ethan; is that correct?
Ashley-That is something that I never asked for, no.  I am comfortable without it. I am fine without it.

In one swoop of playing to Ashley’s white-gown ego with dancing double-negatives, Martha laid this monetary-Sisyphus boulder weight from being anchored to my Nottoway nut-sack.  Surely Ashley had talked to the teachers at Penelope’s school to assure them this was not about money.  Why was this paystub presented?  Narcissism and pride trumped greed and wrath.  Although if she had asked, I would have had to pay; justice is often a flavored technicality.  I could feel my wallet in my pant pocket celebrating its own Cinco de Mayo.  Puppet King Maximilian, fuck that French debt.  

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