The Past Revamped (Arizona)

I left New England almost 17 years ago and never looked back. I haven’t missed it or returned to visit since and I doubt I ever will.

They say we all have things we’re both blessed with and cursed with in life. Well, some of my definite curses were money and noise. I loved being in Arizona with its then cheap and modern apartments which included so much more for the money, like laundry rooms and pools. I loved the warmer weather and being able to look forward to winters without snow. I loved the cacti and the cool monsoon storms. But I was broke, hungry, and not sleeping very well. The apartment walls were paper thin and I could hear everyone around me. The outside activity could be a bit much as well.

I spent my first 10 days in Andy’s studio before I got one identical to his a couple of buildings away. I hated being on the first floor and so I eventually got a studio behind Andy’s on the second floor. Now no one could walk by my windows, but it wasn’t any quieter.

I eventually began work as an exotic dancer, doing this on and off for about 8 months.

I relocated to another apartment complex nearly a year after arriving in Phoenix but was greeted with the same annoying buzz of activity, making it very hard to sleep in. To make up for it all, I met my husband Tom there who lived right next door. Tom was one of the very few guys I’ve ever been attracted to. Never before had I ever met anyone so smart, accepting, and understanding.

Tom, a native Arizonan with one sister and 4 brothers, moved into a house a few months after we met. He bought an older house from his brother who had just gotten married. I joined him at this house in the fall of 1993 and was both shocked and dismayed to find that it was just as noisy as the apartments were! When the less-than-quiet Mormons sold the house and it ended up in the hands of the city, thus bringing in wild freeloaders, a pattern became obvious enough for me to realize that I had a “noise curse” on me for some reason.

We were married in Las Vegas in June of 1994. Together we would embark on a fast ride filled with all kinds of adventures and even some disasters.

During the 6 years we lived in the Phoenix house, we had to deal with noisy neighbors and occasional problems with money and intimacy. I even thought I was infertile for a while until testing showed that I wasn’t and I might have had an early-on miscarriage. By the time we’d been married a few years, however, my desire for a child would fade as my interests and priorities in life shifted and changed. I came to realize that I simply didn’t want that kind of burden and expense in our lives. I liked to have some me-time every now and then and I valued my freedom. There was so much I wanted to learn, do and experience and I didn’t want anything hindering me.

When I was 29 I had two surgeries to drill a canal in my left ear and to restore hearing. I never got nearly as much hearing as the other ear, but I still got some. The frame that had been constructed as a child became very sensitive and it was dismantled.

At 31 I quit smoking.

At 32 I had braces put on after an impacted baby tooth started making its way in. I ended up regretting this, however, as my teeth would only soften over time due to a lack of strong enamel. Yet for a brief time, I was actually proud of my smile, even if it was still a bit more yellow than I’d liked.

After the Mormons left, a black family on welfare moved in and were a problem for 3 years with loud music, noisy kids, and uncontained trash. After they moved a Hispanic family moved in and things got worse. My stress and frustration grew and I found myself wanting to go over and do things I won’t bother to mention after asking them politely to quiet down proved useless. Instead, they would turn what was an issue of behavior into an issue of race. The Mexican people called the cops on me when I yelled at them to turn their music down. While they were at it, they lied and said I called them racial slurs.

Fed up with a never-ending circus just a few feet away, and wanting a bigger, newer place in a more rural area, we sold the house and headed an hour south to Maricopa, just a couple of hours above the Mexican border. On my way out, I sent them a piece of my mind in the form of some typed pages from my journal. In my mind, it was my way of expressing my anger towards them without using my fists. Besides, the Mexican family was a wee bit large to be getting physical with anyway.

After 4 months of bouncing back and forth between a suite in Scottsdale, and a trailer that someone lent us, our 2100-square-foot manufactured house was finally hauled onto our 10-acre parcel of land. This house was certainly bigger than the 1400-square-foot house we’d just sold in Phoenix. In these days bigger was better as far as I was concerned, and certainly more fun. That was until I realized how bad the cooling costs were, as well as how long it would take to clean and vacuum all the space.

While it was certainly quieter than Phoenix, there were sonic booms we had to deal with on and off. People would sometimes blast their stereos in which the sound could easily travel across the flat, open land. Everyone around us had dogs, most of which would be allowed to roam loose. So while it wasn’t perfect, I was much happier there.

And then the past returned to haunt me. Just days after we were settled in our new home, a knock on the door woke me up while Tom was still at work, working nights. I opened the
door to find several squad cars, some uniformed cops, and one black guy whose shirt read: Biased Crimes.

I stared in shocked disbelief at the number of squad cars and cops. It was like a swat team! I knew right away that the old neighbors were involved. Certainly, this can’t all be over some journal excerpts, I thought to myself. Then the fear of them accusing me of something big, something I was totally innocent of, crossed my mind. But nothing was explained to me at the house. Instead, I was allowed the so-called luxury of getting dressed in the bathroom before I was hauled into the police station in Phoenix where I was then interrogated. At one point I was handed a threatening letter which I was supposed to have sent, then questioned about it.

Naïve to the law and having only gotten little more than slapped on the wrist before in a different state for prank phone calls, it would be a while before I’d realize I was being tricked, conned, manipulated, and lied to in just about every way imaginable. It would also be a while before I would learn that the cop was personal friends with the black woman who’d been our neighbor before the Mexican family moved in. Promising never to contact the old neighbors again in writing, I was then let go after being reassured that it was “done and over with.”

But now I was stranded. Cops were quick to give you a ride when they wanted you, but after that, you were on your own. So I had another cop contact my sister-in-law Mary. At that point, she and Tom’s mom had never been a real problem for us despite all the stories I’d heard about them being selfish. Oh, we’d been used, alright, when Tom’s dad died and mom wanted us to not only do things for her, but for others as well, and always at our own expense with the false promise of paying us back. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to help. It’s just that as soon as Dad died, that selfish side of Mom that he’d kept suppressed, for the most part, came out in ways that ran us ragged and cost us money to the point that we finally had to put our foot down.

Life went on and once again I thought these vindictive, hateful neighbors were a thing of the past until a cop came knocking one hot July evening. He had actually come to talk to me about a different problem I was having with my sister at the time. I had stopped communicating with my entire family, including Andy, right before we left Phoenix. I found it much easier to simply ignore those I didn’t get along with than to try to change them into being someone they weren’t.

But our old neighbors were determined not to let me ignore them, and so we would learn that a default warrant had been issued for my arrest the previous April when he ran a routine check on me. But because we had a PO box since there wasn’t any regular mail service where we lived, we didn’t know it existed. This was the day I knew I could never and would never forgive my sister. Or the old neighbors for that matter.

So I was taken to a jail in Florence and was degraded and humiliated beyond belief by my own perpetrators. And enraged. I just wanted to strangle them! I was also angry at God above for allowing them to use and abuse me through the law now that they couldn’t do it from a 3-foot distance. But their obsession with me lived on, and after I was bailed out of jail the following morning after spending the night on a cold hard floor with all kinds of strangers begging me for a million different favors - to get them an extra breakfast by saying I didn’t get my own, to call someone for them once I got out - I would have a series of court dates until late October of 2000.

At first I was all for a public defender, determined not to spend another dime on these assholes. So I was bribed into a guilty plea so as to avoid the trial I was told and convinced would only land me in prison for 3 years by the public defender that was assigned to me. I could still kick myself for not knowing the guy was not on my side since he worked for the very state that was against me. And even as ridiculous and as impossible as a 3-year prison sentence seemed for what I believed at the time was all about the journals. After entering my plea, the Mexicans were dropped from the case altogether and now it was just me and the state who would then decide that the black woman and her people should be the victim, and the appropriate label and charge for me would be stalking. Don’t ask me how sending journal excerpts constitutes stalking as I honestly don’t have a clue. When I think of stalking I think of following someone, taking their picture in a sneaky manner that invades their privacy, leaving unwanted gifts by their door, constantly calling them, befriending their associates, etc. Yet my “victims” were everything they said I was. They hated me because I was both white and Jewish, they were obsessed with “getting me,” and they had left nasty messages on our voicemail and tossed sexually explicit notes in our mailbox at one point during the time they lived next to us. Only I was the big one to simply delete the messages and throw the notes away. After all, no one forces us at gunpoint to read any “mail” we don’t want to read or to listen to any phone messages we don’t want to hear.

Then came even more railroading. Strange questions that should’ve raised a red flag in my mind during my “interview” with the probation department. I mean, sure, I thought it strange that I was asked how much our property was worth and as if they wanted to see how much they could take me for, yet I truly believed at the time that being cooperative and going along with their so-called moves was the best thing to do.

I was also asked if I intended to fight the case to which I made a huge mistake in saying no. As much as it’s a waste of time, I still beat myself up for not seeing through this question. I feel I should have known that they would take advantage of that “no.” Phoenix had been growing rapidly for years. So the more people they could get on probation and in jail, the more money the city made, not to mention the sense of control and power it gave some people.

I was given false promises from the public defender of just one year of probation, as unfair as even that much seemed. After all, I’d sent them words on paper. I hadn’t harmed them in any way. So if I hadn’t attacked them in any way, then why was I being punished for exercising my right to free speech? I gave the state everything. I gave them my word not to contact anyone involved ever again. I even sought out a counselor before being ordered to do so. But nothing was ever good enough!

Just minutes before sentencing, we were shown “evidence” we’d never seen before filled with tons of racial slurs and threats galore. Then we were back in the courtroom where it became very obvious very fast that the cop and the sick bitch out to screw me were personal friends. Maybe even more than friends. It was just evident in the way they carried on as they sat on the benches across from us. Then after the vengeful nut took the stand to say she was “very lucky to be alive and had to move twice,” the prosecutor came out and added that my complaint to the city, which was actually made by Tom, caused her to be evicted and that she had been 8 months pregnant at the time.

Yet there’s no way she could’ve been pregnant during any of the time she lived next to us. Druggie or not, no druggie’s stomach is flat as a pancake at 8 months pregnant. I also doubted she lost the house on account of our complaint because of how peacefully they moved out. I know I’d personally want to spite the person on my way out and I think most people would agree. And even if we were the cause, shouldn’t she have thought about that before she and her cronies drove us crazy?

But nothing I said mattered, and the public defender’s pitiful performance about how I was oh so fragile and how people got off that had actually punched or kicked someone didn’t matter either. Instead, I would end up wishing to hell I had gotten that ridiculous and unfair year of probation when in fact I got 6 months in county jail instead, followed by 2½ years of probation with some very stiff stipulations for when I got out of jail. They included a $40 monthly “processing” fee, 100 hours of community service, and a slew of counseling sessions. I also had to report to my probation officer twice a month and deal with him making random house calls.

Then came the media circus. I couldn’t believe the attention the case was getting. It was the kind of attention only celebrities or murderers got. Yet suddenly, the world was obsessed with whether or not Jodi Lin was a racist.

I was beyond angry at God above for using these people to beat me over the head and for no reason whatsoever.

Then I was even more pissed to learn that it wasn’t the journals that got me in jail, it was the threatening letter. The one the sick twist’s cop friend thrust into my hands during interrogation to get my prints on. Obviously, he had either typed it up himself, or it was sent to her by someone else she pissed off.

But it was too late. I’d already fallen for their trap and pled guilty. Yet guilty or not, I couldn’t believe I was doing half a year for a letter! Plus all the stuff I had to do afterward! The community service turned out to be kind of fun, but the rest was anything but fun.

Jail was both everything and nothing I imagined it to be. It’s not like on TV where they’re all beating each other up and having sex with each other constantly, but the cold showers, the inedible food, that much was real. I was, however, surprised to find that most of the officers were cool. One in particular that I had a crush on liked me and she and I had fun flirting with each other. I was hurt by her as well. She and I agreed to see each other after I left, but this never happened, and an inmate I kept in touch with informed me that she was transferred to another jail after too many rumors about her flirting with other inmates surfaced.

The only so-called break I ended up getting was the last 6 months of my probation cut at the urging of my probation officer. I knew getting let go early would really piss the sick bitch off and I felt like a sitting duck so much of the time in the open desert where there weren’t many people around. It wouldn’t matter for long, though, for our next round of trouble that would disrupt our lives for years was about to occur. That was when Tom got fired from his job of 8 years which paid $16 an hour. This was because he didn’t agree with mixing business with pleasure or bringing religion into the workplace. So in June of 2003, he lost his job. His mother gave us 5K to help us, but it only went so far for so long because he couldn’t find a job that paid well enough to manage the expenses. We sold things on eBay, but we only had so much to sell.

We knew that if a miracle didn’t happen soon enough, then we would lose our house.