Serving Divorce Papers to a Cheating Lesbian from New York

Some days I feel like I'm less living a life than I am completing a video game with countless side missions and as a result, I probably possess the most diversified resume of anyone I know. I grew up working construction where I did everything from dig holes to operate cranes. I spent years in high school as a mechanic/body-man. I've owned my own custom guitar shop and clerk'd everywhere from gas-stations to record-stores. I've assistant-edited multiple seasons of a television show and even spent more than a year as a driver/bodyguard. Quite a few of these gigs are the result of being the guy to call when my friends experience issues in their normal lives that they need resolved by someone incredibly loyal.

That's me. Someone's sister is getting kicked out of her house by an aggressive landlord? Call Josh. Need a music video shot and you have no budget, no cast, and no equipment? Call Josh. Someone about to get the shit beat out of them at a bar? Call Josh. You get the point. So when my buddy back in New York called and told me he had a friend who needed something taken care of in Los Angeles, I was the one that got the call to serve divorce papers to a cheating lesbian in North Hollywood.

I was in Olympia, WA hanging out with my family at a goth bar at the time I got the call. "Josh, I have a friend in New York who's wife ran away with another woman. She needs someone dependable in Los Angeles to do a favor." He sent me her details and I got in contact with the woman the next day. Her name was Dianne and she was absolutely heartbroken that not only had she been cheated on (with a woman she described as a Yeti), but her Ex, Sabrina was using her social security number to create an ever growing mountain of credit card debt. As if that wasn't enough, the woman was actively avoiding being served papers and had dodged two Process Servers thus far. The first of which gave up for unknown reasons while the second lost the element of surprise by presenting the papers to her girlfriend and not her. He shortly gave up as well.

I looked into it, and as luck would have it, she seemed relatively easy to track and only lived a few miles away from me. She still had New York plates and worked at Saphire's, a chain of local make up stores. But that was the end of the good news. Dianne described Sabrina's girlfriend quite vividly as "a violently angry guerrilla" who apparently dwarfed me in every way. After a week I received the paperwork and the affidavit in the mail. Under California law, anyone may act as a process server assuming they over 18 and not actively involved in the case. My job was to approach her, get her to acknowledge her name, and if she didn't willingly accept the paperwork, drop it at her feet. Seems easy enough on paper, but the fact that two people who did this as a professional-vocation had failed was a somewhat frightening notion.

So I set out at 7:30am to go and stake her house out. I knew they lived in a very suburban area so I dressed myself in a long-sleeve, black shirt to cover my tattoo's. I immediately found the SUV with New York plates and the girlfriends accompanying white SUV in the driveway. I parked around the corner with their house barely in sight and sat there for the first hour as the neighbors walked their dogs and gave suspicious looks. The only way to not stick out while unavoidably sticking out is to completely own it. So I smiled and waved at the local inhabitants. When one finally approached me I gave my already well coached line that my little sister had sent me to this cross-street to pick her up, but the little bugger must've drained her cell-phones battery and wasn't answering my calls. Having mastered this line many times before, she bought it hook line and sinker.

Eventually the white SUV turned out and left. I struggled with whether to follow it or not, but ultimately it wasn't listed to me as her car, so I let it go and played it safe. I sat there and followed up my lead that she worked at a local cosmetic supply store. I was amazed and bewildered to see that there were 15 of these damn stores within a 6 mile radius. Women, truly love their damn makeup. Realizing that I in no way wanted this woman to have my contact info, I downloaded a "Pranking" App for my phone and made it seem as if I was calling from the local pharmacy. At 9:25AM, the first ten local Saphire's received a call from "Jake the Pharm-Tech" representing the local CVS pharmacy. Each time he asked to speak with Sabrina about a "personal matter".

One lady I spoke with told me she wasn't sure of the Sabrina from her store's last name, but that she should be in around 11am. I thanked her and hung-up. Another I called hesitated in speaking to me me, but ultimately laid on me that she USED to work there. This made me suspicious, so I put this location at the top of my list. Just then the Black SUV pulled out of their driveway in a fury. I started my car and waited until she turned the corner and gunned it to catch up. From the time I first played Grand Theft Auto 3, I had been preparing for this moment. I stayed behind, leaving her just in view so I could track her every movement, but not close enough for her to notice me.

After a few moments she turned into a gas station and my pulse pounded. It's not often I get nervous, I go years at a time without feeling the kind of nerves so many speak of, but I damn-well did at that moment. I took off my seat belt and prepared to pull in behind her car in order to block it in so that she couldn't escape without dealing with me. Just as I was about to make my turn she got out and it was her mammoth-mountain of a girlfriend, not her. Bust. I took the next corner without being noticed and downtroddenly continued on to the first store.

I parked in Hollywood and walked up to the local Starbucks, after all, I wanted to look natural. I ordered my coffee and mosy'd over to the first Saphire's. Though I could make out several employees... there was no Sabrina. I walked away and called my wife who was delighted at my inquiry of what makeup I could buy her to establish my front. She texted me the name of some unholy expensive nail-polish and I walked in looking like a confused husband (something I excel at as I've done so many times before). I snooped around playing stupid and eventually was approached by a worker. I asked for the shade of ultra-rare polish and she walked me over to the area and picked it out for me. On the way to the counter I asked about my wife's old friend Sabrina and whether she worked here anymore. It's then that I was informed that she had quit and moved to a new area. Damn. Bust 2.

I pulled out of the parking garage when I suddenly noticed a Chevy Suburban speeding away from a hotel and toward my window. I screamed at the man as he looked down at his phone. Just as he was about to hit my door I sped out of the way and he creamed the back of my car. My head hit the side of the car and the world went all spiny for a few moments. I grumbled and growled nonsensically at the man as I stumbled out of my car toward him. As I watched him climb out of his ridiculously monstrous automobile, I noticed that he looked dazed as well. So, like a damn fool, I asked if he was ok, a question to which he did not reply. After somewhat-less politely asking him exactly what the hell was going through his head, we pulled over to the side of the hotel and exchanged information. I suppose it was in a failed attempt to diffuse the situation that he brought attention to his name being Mellick and my middle name being Milton and what a funny little world it was. At that point, I turned to him and deadpanned, "Yeah, we're practically fucking brothers."

I drove away still in a bit of shock and messaged Diane that today was not to be the day and that I had gotten in an accident. As I drove home I figured what the hell and routed myself past Sabrina's house. No one home. I sat there for a moment and realized that if she was gone this long, she HAD to be at work. I continued down my list and called the other five Saphire's and the last one was the winner. CVS (heh) called the Saphire store in Glenview and the lady put me on hold for Sabrina.
Fuckin' Bingo, Mother Fucker.

I took off, pissed off due to my car's new wounds for the Glenview Mall. After all, zombie-like consumers walking in hordes was what I was in the mood to deal with. I arrived, walked in the mall and found the map directing me to the center of a huge department store. I no longer possessed the patience to deal with the "needing to buy nail-polish for my wife" front and darted around the store analyzing all of the workers. Once I was sufficiently convinced that the target was not in the showroom, I asked a lady if Sabrina still worked there. She told me that she knew her, but that she worked at the other Saphire store about three blocks away.

Incensed that there would be two such stores in such a small proximity, I again stormed off, this time on foot. However, once I got a foot outside the door, paranoia creeped in. She said she knew Sabrina. What if she would warn her about my impending arrival? There was no way I had came all the way to the Glenview goddamn Mall just to be evaded at the last second, so I sprinted across the street, paying no mind to the oncoming cars. Once I arrived at the destination and had sight of the front door, I took a moment to regain my breath before my approach. After all, the building didn't appear to have any exits out of the back and I had the front more than covered.

I stalked around the area for a few moments before I walked towards it and paused. I caught the reflection of blond hair with black roots that matched hers. I peered around until I could get a full sight of her face... it was her. She was stationed to the left of the main door so I walked in with confidence and spoke to the door greeter. "Hello! I'm looking for a friend of mine." Her eyes perked and I swung my head around to her. "Oh my god! Sabrina?!?" I exclaimed. Her eyes went wide and she dawned a flirtatious smile. "Yes?" she said. I then spun around, grabbed the papers out of my back pocket and released fake the smile from my own face and hers followed suit immediately. "I've been served haven't I?" she groaned. I handed her the papers "Yes ma'am, you have, enjoy your day." and I walked the fuck out.

Looking back at the entire ordeal, I gotta say that it was fun. I always wanted to be a detective when I was growing up and this was probably about as close as I'll get. I'm just extremely glad that I was able to confront her in public rather than at her house with the gigantic apelike girlfriend that could have torn me limb from limb. And I don't feel bad for the girl at all. She cheated on the friend of a friend and ran away. Sure she looked sad when I served her, but fuck her. This wasn't Karma coming back to bite her in the ass, this wasn't even justice, this was just the mathematic-like result of repeatedly doing horrible things to someone who loves you and I'm glad I got to help that out.

Rebelling Teenagers or just Ahead of the Curve?

As I previously stated in this blog, I have had many groups of friends in my days. It just seems that as life progresses, I gain and eventually leave groups of friends to go on and do my own thing somewhere else. That is not to say I am still not completely and totally loyal to my friends, I still hang out with people from nearly every group that I have ever been a part of. Some groups form from necessity, some I've joined and they have become closer than my family, and some I will probably never encounter again in my life. For whatever reason, this just seems to be part of my natural ebb and flow of my life. This entry is another attempt at explaining THIS group so that readers can have some insight into my bigger, more ridiculous stories down the road without having to explain a ton of backstory.

At age 13 my friends mainly consisted of Nash, Fred, and James (names changed to protect the guilty). These guys were just as ahead of the curve as I was and were already smoking pot and drinking in abundance when I began to hang out with them that year. Fred was the brains of the group and I had known him since we were both in diapers as our mothers were friends in high school. Nash was a huge source of inspiration to me as he got me into Nirvana during this time and we both got into guitars and making music at the same time. James was good people but came from a shit family, he was rough and tumbly, but as long as you were on his side, you eternally had a good friend in your corner.

At this time I was little more than someone who was wrongly looking at his father as a rolemodel. Up until this point I had modeled myself directly off of my father (for lack of any other male influence). A few years prior to this I wore cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, thick rimmed aviator 80's style eyeglasses and blue jeans. I wanted to be just like him in a big and bad way in these formitive years.... at least until I realized what a miserably repressed piece of shit he genuinely was....

The Alcohol Incident:
We four would crash at one anothers house and drink each others parents booze and just generally raise hell with one another all in the name of good, clean anti-establishment fun. The biggest of these nights began and ended at my mothers house. She worked at Miller and 3 weeks before the party I stole a 12 pack of Miller Genuine Draft and hid it for the get together. Now... by hid it, I mean I hid it from humans. I didn't hide it from just her, I hid it from the world. I thought it best to make it disapear from public eyes by taking it deep into my woods, and burying it 3 feet into the earth. Overkill? Yes. But my Mom was crazy overbearing... so, better than being busted.

There we were, fireside and drunk. Completely annihilated on three beers a piece. At least we thought we were annihilated, as far as we were concerned this is what drunk was, this was the beginning, middle and end of drunk. After a while we noticed by the lights in her room that my mother went to bed and Nash and James snuck in and amongst at least 10 bottles of alcohol... they stole the bottle of lime gin. We then proceeded to my room, where they drunkenly spilled 2/3rds of the bottle all over my bedroom, making my room stick like potent 7-Up. In a panic, I deluded some food coloring and Sprite in water, added some lime juice and stuck it back in the cabinet where it sat until the day she moved, unused and un-drank.

The First Pot Incident:
Our first group attempt at smoking weed was less than fruitful. We had a solid lead in Jake (of whom will HEAVILY be involved in one of the next stories). Of all of the shady people I knew, Jake was the only one of them seemed as if he wasn't a total piece of shit. He lived near Jason's house, on the "wrong side of the tracks". Jake had an older brother and we all knew that they smoked pot together, so we decided to pursue him to acquire some. Upon calling. Jake instructed us to wait quietly down the street until he gave us a signal to come and pick it up so as to not arouse his Fathers suspicions. So, not fully trusting the situation, we each grabbed a weapon, mine being nun-chucks, and headed down the street.

We sat there for the better part of a half hour, lurking in the shadows before we suspected somthing wrong. Not wanting to split up for fear of missing Jake, Nash and Jason went back to the house to recall Jake. Jake instructed that he had hid the stuff in the car and to come and collect it, which upon their return, they immediately got to. They were gone an entire 2 minutes when we saw a shadowy figure approach us. We assumed this to be Jake until we saw that the person was holding a baseball bat tightly gripped in his hands.
Fred and I both readied to pull out our weapons when we discovered it was Jake's father.

"What the fuck are you boys doing here?" he asked, bat pulled back as if he were readied to strike us. We concealingly held our weapons, me with my nunchucks and Fred with his knife as I answered "We were waiting on Jake, he said he wanted to come and hang out." His crazy, drunken eyes darted back and forth at us with his bat at the ready as he began screaming about how much trouble Jake was in and how we were the cause of it. Fred and I just sat back under the dim light of the one streetlamp in the neighborhood while Jake's fucked up dad went on about our being terrible human beings.

Eventually he walked off muttering to himself, leaving Fred and I to just sit in bewilderment. We discussed our options about whether to stay on the street, awaiting the other two of our crew, or to return home when Jason and Nash returned. We then all darted off back to Jason's house at top speed. When we got there, we sat and discussed the hilarity of the event over Coca-Cola and popcorn.... because there was no booze, weed, or alcohol to be had.

What Doesn't Kill You, Can Make You Stronger

Many, many things in life shape the people we are to become. Many of them are the good influences like family and friends and the people who are truly positive examples of whom to aspire to be and how to act in life. Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of those growing up (which isn't to say everyone in my family are bad people). Now, this isn't meant to be a pity party, but in an effort to maintain complete and total truth in the representation of myself on this blog, I would be leaving out a huge chunk of my story if I was to not speak of some of the terrible events that shaped my formative years, no matter how brutal it may be. It’s important to me that I be 100% honest on here because when it comes down to it, I am writing this blog for no one but myself. After all, even the worst events in life make you who you are, and bring you to where you are today.

At 8 years old my parents divorced. That was a damn good thing, although in retrospect, it did cause my mother to often inwardly freaked out and worry that I would blame her for breaking up our family unit. On the contrary, I could not have been happier when the news finally broke. This to me signified the end of brutal fights that often resulted with them destroying one another's property in the most malicious of manners. Many times it would even reach incredibly violent levels, building ultimately to my watching my Father hold a gun to my Mother in the hallway outside my room. He maintains to this day that he was attempting to show her the gun was empty. She maintains that he was holding it to her neck. My young recollection only puts them together with me glancing my father holding a gun pointed in her direction and my beginning to sob uncontrollably. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of all three accounts.

Upon their divorce concluding, my Dad nearly immediately met a woman and got engaged. Her name was Teresa and she was from the hills of Kentucky. She didn't have a lot of money and she had two kids much older than I, but she seemed nice enough... at first. She even made it a point to tell me she thought I was a good kid and that I must have a good mother. Looking back, she is the reason I am completely untrusting of anyone who immediately fills you full of compliments before seeing who you actually are. This overcompensation usually masks a hidden agenda.

Right before they tied the knot, I noticed a distinct personality change in her as she moved into my house. She began to become cold and extremely judgmental of everything I did. This escalated in the coming months ultimately building toward her openly hating a 9 year old boy without attempting to conceal it in any way. I was very overweight at that point in my life and was a bit of a nerd. I had the highest scores in class and didn't have a lot of friends. And although I wasn't picked on at all, I was most definitely a shut-in.

Her hatred built and eventually culminated in her taking over my bedroom at the house. She took what had been my room (that I only used every other weekend when visiting my father) and stenciled hearts and apples on all of the walls. She decorated the room with creepy as fuck Raggedy Anne and Andy dolls and placed other inanimate antique-toys on the shelves that seemed to to stare at you with a look of rape and torment in their eyes (this bitch even had a stuffed cat in her living room). She threw away my bed and substituted two twin beds located 3 1/2 feet off of the ground so that I may share the room with her mid-20's son when he would come home from college. I eventually resigned myself to spending all of my time in my father’s barn playing around with woodworking tools and watching the Pittsburgh Penguins play hockey on his $3 TV in his "office” that consisted of a vacant desk and an empty refrigerator. I left my sanctuary only to sleep, and upon waking, immediately returned and spent the rest of the day there with my dog Bullet.

It even got worse as the time went on. Eventually I wasn't even allowed to make food in her house. When I would make a sandwich, she would literally walk behind me and throw things away as I placed them next to my plate while vocalizing derogatory comments such as "Who ever left this out must be a worthless fat piece of garbage" in her extreme hillbilly draw. She said this as I was standing next to the plate. I hadn't even left anything out, I was still using it. This treatment eventually got so bad that I started to form depression and by 11 years old I was suicidal. I would carry a serrated steak knife up to my room nightly and hack away at my arm. Why? It’s hard to explain, but physical pain was much easier and more immediately dealt with than the mental pain and instability that I was experiencing. I took great solace in that knife blade and unfortunately I still carry the scars of it to this day.

Whenever I was stuck there, my father would ultimately leave during the days and go to work on the weekends without me, leaving me to the care of a woman who would have been happier if I were dead. She would take money from my father under the guise of taking us to the mall, and upon getting there, give my step-sister $100 to go and spend and leave me with whatever I had in my pocket, which at age 12 was absolutely nothing. I would spend hours sitting in the center of the mall staring at the fountain and wishing I were dead while they walked around with my father’s money and gleefully wasted it while rubbing their purchases in my face.

At age 13 I was finally discovering who I was by being consistently beaten in the face by people I never wished to be. I got into music and guitars, and for the first time in my life I wasn't listening to what my parents told me was good music. I began to wear flannel and listen to early Grunge and Punk. During this time my father would periodically force me to attend dinners with him and his new family on a bi-weekly basis where I was clearly never wanted by anyone but him (and even that was debatable). It got to the point where I refused to eat with them and would pretend I was sick and hide in the truck the entire time while listening to my bootleg tapes of Nirvana on the truck stereo. I'm fully convinced that music is the only thing that actually stopped me from taking my own life during these days, although that did not stop me from attempting to do so.

During this time I was not only discovering music and who I was, I was also discovering drugs and alcohol. After one particularly terrible Christmas at my fathers which ended in the cops coming to break up my father and his wife, I ended up hammered for the first time. In his eternal wisdom, my dad told me that everything would be OK and that I should just have a shot and forget about it. One shot with him turned into five and five shots with my step-sister turned into ten. By the end of the evening I had consumed 13 shots of Jim Beam before passing out in my twin bed and falling flat on my face from the 3 foot fall when the room began to spin.

My early onset alcoholism was made worse when my father purchased a houseboat for his family. When I would attend I was given free reign over the alcohol and I put it to good use. After a day of directly discouraging remarks to my 14 year old face by someone in her 40's, I began to use both drink and drugs heavily as a crutch to get through the day. When I would eventually get hammered enough to get a little sentimental, I would inquire to my father why he would let his only son be treated like that. His answer was simple enough, I needed to grow up and stand up for myself rather than let myself be beaten down. It is because of this that my father is the single biggest influence I've ever had in my life. He is an easily manipulated, self-absorbed, coward of the highest level. Instead of telling his wife to fuck off and treat the only blood he will ever have in this life like they deserve to be, he chose to place the blame on the shoulders of a 14 year old boy. He is an ever shining beacon of all things in my life that I wish to never become.

This all culminated in my attempting to kill myself at age 14. One night, after a girl I was crushing on made it apparent that she did not feel the same way, I ate 50 aspirin and laid down in my bed for what I hoped would be my final time. This was not a spur of the moment decision, this was calculated. I had determined that it was easier to not exist than to live life as I was being forced to. It was a stupid move that only ended up with me eating a hole in my stomach and not able to eat for a week. What's worse yet is that no one noticed that I was not eating as they couldn't have given two shits about me and my mother was busy attending night school after her day job ended.

But the story ultimately has a happy ending, or at least thus-far it does. At age 15 I started doing a heavy introspection of my life and concluded that all of these people were pieces of shit and deserved each other. My father deserved the wife that would fill her Kentucky home with his furniture anytime they chose to separate for a few weeks, and my Father deserved the cold, unloving wife that resembled a frightful troll more than a woman. They all deserved each other and I was better than all of them put together. My life improved noticeably the day that I quit concerning myself with having a family that I deserved, and instead used the pieces of shit surrounding me as anti-role-models of how a human being should conduct affairs in this life.

How I Ended Up Frozen To a Dock

One random Winter day during my 14th year of existence, I woke up on a dock in Cave Run Kentucky with very little memory of how exactly I got there. What I do remember is that it was freezing cold, my head hurt, and it seemed to be early in the AM hours of the fog-laden lake. After taking a moment to analyze my lot in life, I tried to raise up and rub my weery head, but I could not... my arm was stuck. I rolled over and looked down as to see what had taken hold of my stuck arm. It was when I viewed the devastation to my arm that I began to question exactly how I had gotten myself into this situation.... and slowly, partial-memories flooded back into my consciousness.

My first thought was the last thing I could fully recollect which was riding in the back of my fathers Ford Expedition, sat directly behind my then step-sister and her boyfriend, and sitting next to his brother Mike, while my father was driving the beast with an attached cigar boat trailing wildly behind. We were on our way to his house boat. Dearest Dad was weaving maniacally between trucks while doing 85 as we all sat in the back passing back and forth a bottle of Apple Pucker and chasing it down with a case of nut brown ale that we had just bought for the trip.

By the time we had completed the 4.5 hour trip, we were all loaded, save for Father who was only half in the bag due to his being "responsible" and drinking only during the final hour-long leg of the journey. When we finally got to the house boat, we quickly unloaded and shortly thereafter began an impromptu game of "Up and Down the River". Now, I'm sure this game has rules in some book, and I'm sure someone cares about them... however we did not, we played the Jack Roush way. This consisted of passing out five cards per person involved, then turning the remaining cards up one at a time, and anyone that had a pairing card had to take a shot of Pucker. Generally most people would get 3/4 through the game before relieving the high-fructose inebriate from their churning stomach. Good times.

However, we were old hat's at the game, and managed to put two games of it under our belt.... and then came the whiskey... Jim Beam precisely. After about 4-5 shots, my father who had been at work all day went back into his private bedroom and crashed. That's when the fun began, Mike and I heard some faint yelling across the lake, the more we listened, the more it began to sound like females... so naturally we went to inquire as to what they were doing.

When we finally found the sources of the squeels down a random dock, we were disapointed to see that there were only two females and they both were taken, however the other 3 guys with them seemed to be drunk frat boys and down to drink with Mike and I... which my being 14 probably doesn't say much as to the caliber of human beings they were. We were drunk and I was once again drinking people nearly twice my age under the table... a talent that has lasted my entire life. It was around this time that I noticed a few of them were on another "plain" so to speak, I asked the guy to my left what was up with them and he informed me that they were tripping on ecstacy... it was around this time that I really began to lose my grip on reality, but I was later informed that I didn't in fact take anything that night besides smoking a little grass... but I honestly cannot tell you what happened in the next 4 hours. To hear the tale though, it involved me pissing off of what I thought was their boat onto the dock, when in actuality, it was the other way around and I got kicked off for my pissing on their boat.

So there I found myself the next morning, still-drunk, frozen to the dock... in what was apparently my own vomit. My arm literally a vomit-sickle containing a gross combination of last night's steak and my own bile. I tried to pick up my arm, but it was met with strong resistance. It was obviously early AM, and though my father didn't mind my drinking, I knew that I had to get to bed before he got up, for if he found me in this state in front of his neighboring house-boaters... he would be none too pleased to say the least. I briefly considered throwing water to melt the vomit-sickle encapsulating my arm, but I had no way to get it. I even considered pissing on my own arm to melt it, but I didn't feel like dealing with the explanation that may come along with being caught in such an act. So I held my breath, looked away, and ripped my flesh off of the dock.

Not as much of my skin was removed as I had feared while enduring the pain, matter of fact only a small patch was noticeably seeping with blood, most of it just looked as if I had a massive rash. It was the huge rush of endorphins that accompanied the pain combined with the fact that I was still drunk from the night before made me fall back to the ground as soon as I stood up. It was due to this momentary lapse of consciousness that caused me to not realize that my Dad was standing there on the bow of the boat. "Hey boy, what'd you get sick or somin?" I looked down, the vomit was beginning to glisten and thaw in the morning rays of sunshine, enough to where I felt safe in acting as I had just spewed it up. I stood up, hid my arm behind my body, mumbled "Yes sir, it was a rough one", immediately took a shower, drank a beer, and started attempting to imbibe enough whiskey to force the pain away.