It's Kind of a Long Story... about MY SISTER EXES (Part V)

There's more than one kind of bankrupt.

A few people have asked me if I’m concerned about using Cris’ real name. I’m not.

I’ve low-key looked into the legalities, and while most of the advice is to *not* use real names, I’m done keeping his secrets.

If he wants to sue me for libel, bring it on. I’ll sell tickets for that trial.

Everything I’ve written is true.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” - Anne Lamott

If I wanted to impact his life I could. I could have contacted B and shared the screenshots of the texts he sent me while they were together. I could have contacted his employer about his debts.

I’m not interested in doing anything like that. This isn’t about him. This is about me.

I mean, I can’t deny I’ve thought about it.

He’s more than welcome to start a Substack and write his version of the story. I’ll be the first subscriber. Heck, I’ll be a paid subscriber.

Speaking of subscribers, I want to welcome everyone new.

And speaking of paid, I want to thank everyone who has pledged to pay if I ever push that button. There are 20 of you who have collectively pledged over $1,000, which absolutely blows me away.

New or not, pledged or not…

I’m so glad you’re here.

-Lara

The Next Chapter is Chapter 11

Short story: 

Crystal, my 2nd Sister Ex, contacted Cris’ fiance, and I went full Nancy Drew and uncovered even more secrets and lies.

Long story:

When Cris told me what little he did about his new life, it was very frustrating. He didn’t use his girlfriend’s name or reveal any details. You could say it was none of my business - he certainly did - but it was such a quick 180 from where I thought we were in our friendship it left me hurt and confused.

My best friend at the time, Melissa, who was herself a very good detective said, “Don’t worry, in about 6 months we’ll be able to find his address online and figure out who owns the house he’s living in.”

And darned it I didn’t. It may have been ill-advised, but:

1. I wasn’t in a great place in my life. I probably wasn’t making great decisions.

2. I am super curious. I like to know things.

3. I’ve got more than a little of a Drama Goblin in me. I’m attracted to intrigue.

And darned if it didn’t work. In January of this year, I found his new address in Santa Rosa, and the name of the woman who owned it, B. Her phone number also came up in the same search.

Her online footprint is very light. I saw a few photos. Where she works. A small handful of Facebook posts. It wasn’t much, but it added up to a woman a couple of years older than him, who was into travel, although to places he told me he specifically wasn’t interested in visiting, and animals, that he had specifically told me he didn’t like.

She didn’t appear to be much like me. She’s more outdoorsy. Less glamorous. I’m not proud to admit I gave her the nickname North Face.

You have to understand I have never been an Ex before. I had never had to navigate knowing about the person your Ex goes with next. It’s a process most people go through in their teens and twenties multiple times. When it comes to this kind of thing, my development is arrested and I behaved not entirely unlike a teenager.

It may be unbecoming and petty, but I admit I was gratified to not be replaced “like-for-like.” I thought he might have gone younger. A party girl who would look up to him. I pictured her as cute and wearing a lot of mini skirts and high heels and them laughing about poor ol’ Lara while they stumbled home from a night out drinking.

That wasn’t what this picture was painting. I did remember at one point the previous summer he said his life was very “settled.” Which was about as low and boring a bar as you could set. He continued to reach out after they had moved in together. He wasn’t acting like a man head over heels in love.

Was he acting that way to spare my feelings, or had he Angelica-ed?

In Hamilton, Angelica sings:

“I have found a wealthy husband who can keep me in comfort for all my days. He is not a lot of fun but no one can match you for turn of phrase.”

Those lines rang in my ears on the few dates I have been on other than with Cris. A few of the fellas had money, but they bored me to tears. I remember thinking, “Oh Angelica, I just can’t. I’m sorry you had to.”

I came up with what I call “The Netflix Test.”

After a date, I ask myself:

“Would you rather spend more time with him, or watch Netflix?”

None of the other men have passed, and say what you want about Cris, he passed the Netflix test every time for the better part of five years. I was never bored when we were together. We always had fun. We never ran out of things to talk about. Although now I know he never runs out of things to talk about because he has an endless supply of lies.

After I met Susan and learned so much, I stopped calling his fiance North Face. I stopped telling myself he had settled and started to think of her as a sister. As a lovely, genuine woman who likely had no idea who she was making plans to marry and spend the rest of her life with.

---

It took a while for Crystal to connect with B because she wanted to call on the landline and not leave a message. In late May of this year, Crystal reached her on a Sunday evening. She was very gentle and kind and said, “I know this is out of the blue. I know this is hard to hear, but I’m in touch with several women and we have reason to believe that Cris is not being honest with you. There are emails and screenshots as well.”

Crystal described her as soft-spoken and passive. She said, “This is a lot to take in.”

Crystal said, “I know. Take all the time you need. If you want to know more or ask any questions, you can call this number anytime.”

She never did. She never has.

---

That should have been the end of it, right? B is happy and planning her wedding and future and doesn’t want to know what we know.

I’m just a few days away from moving back into my house and finally getting back to a normal life.

By all rights, I should have closed this chapter and focused on the not-inconsiderable tasks ahead. I should have made my life as calm and easy as I could. I did not need more drama.

And… I couldn’t. Friends asked, “How much more evidence do you need that he’s not a good guy?” But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t what I was looking for. That wasn’t what I needed.

I needed more truth to counteract the lies. I needed to reclaim my power. Power that had been taken from me without me even knowing it.

At one point Susan had said that she saw in an online search that he had filed for bankruptcy sometime after he moved out of her house in 2016. I thought, “Huh, I wonder if bankruptcy records are public?”

They are.

They’re not easy to get, but they are gettable. You have to go to this website called PACER: Public Access to Court Electronic Records. The site is so janky I thought, “This is either a total scam or the Federal Government.” You have to go through a byzantine process to register which ends with them sending you a code in the mail.

The mail.

I’d pretty much forgotten about it when a few weeks later darned if there wasn’t a letter in my mailbox from PACER with my code.

I logged in and was presented with a website that was even weirder than PACER.

It was like going back in time. What is CMECF? No idea. #YourTaxDollarsAtWork

It wanted my credit card to charge me $.10 a page up to thirty pages.

Whut?

Now I was really suspicious. I opened another tab and Googled, “Is PACER a scam?”

I clicked around randomly and got results like this (you’ll note the $.10 charge)

I wish you could see how crazy this site was. I must have clicked a hundred times going back and forth finding little that made any sense and getting charged a dime for each page I opened until… BINGO

There in black and white was a 48-page bankruptcy filing with details in plain English about his:

• Income (decent)

• Expenses ($800 more a month than he was making)

• Debt (almost exactly twice as much as his assets)

• Assets (the overwhelming majority of which were cars he owed a lot of money on. He also had a retirement account worth exponentially less than the cars, and combined checking and savings of around $220

What. The. Hell

So about a month before we first connected on Match, and about 6 weeks before we met, he’d filed for bankruptcy and had $220 in liquid assets. There are homeless people with more cash than that. While he was taking me out to nice dinners in his flashy car, he had not yet come out of bankruptcy.

Now, the bankruptcy in and of itself wouldn’t be a dealbreaker. There are plenty of good people who make poor choices or despite good intentions and best efforts have financial difficulties that can lead to bankruptcy. Heck, the United States leads the world in medical-related bankruptcy. USA! USA! USA!

That wasn’t what this was. This was pages and pages of credit cards, tax defaults, and other creditors including a former employer.

This was debt Susan had no idea about during the two years they lived together and talked about marriage and a future.

This was him living beyond his means in the months before we met.

This was the guy who on one of our early dates talked about his plan to buy “my house” as though it was an actual plan he had been working towards.

This was a guy whose To Do list in Q4 ‘16 was:

1. File for Bankruptcy

2. Get on Match.com

This was a whole new twist.

Cris had never, ever asked me for money during our relationship. Not a dime. He prided himself on being frugal. He earned a good salary and his rent was low, but he’d say at various times he was “broke.” I assumed that meant he wasn’t feeling flush due to an unexpected expense, not that he actually had no money. I was under the impression he lived pretty close to the bone month to month, and had significant savings for “my house.”

I certainly wasn’t with him for his money. Although he did accuse me of rejecting him because he didn’t make a lot of money. In the Fall of 2021 (when he had been seeing B for months) we talked about what it might take to live together. Setting this issue of his drinking aside, I said, “We don’t even know how much the other makes.”

He got all huffy and said, “Why does it matter? We’ll each pay our half of expenses.” He tried to make me think that talking about money wasn’t a perfectly normal - actually essential - conversation to have with someone you’re going to live and build a life with.

Now I couldn’t help but think about B and her house and any other assets she may have.

I didn’t think he’d try to get her house put under his name, or take her for all she’s worth and leave her like some film noir gigolo. It was more about her hitching her wagon to someone with a history of poor financial decisions.

And, the very strong likelihood that she had no idea about his financial history. She had a right to know. She had a right to know what she was saying “Yes” to.

And, I had to respect that when given the chance to know more, she chose not to. I chose to honor that.

And it was killing me. Around this time my friend Ellen had started to see someone new. I told her over lunch about the Cris sitch and she said, “If there’s a girlfriend in this guy’s past who knows something I should know, I hope she comes forward and tells me”

Ellen was at the tail end of a long, messy divorce from her cheating husband, had two little kids, and a job with a lot of responsibility. She didn’t need any more drama in her life. Unfortunately, coincidentally, and I’m learning not uncommonly, her new man turned out to be a dangerous liar. Ellen would end up connecting with two of her own Sister Exes. She learned the truth about the man she was dating only a few days after our lunch and she called me shaken, “Did you know something? Were you trying to warn me?” I didn’t and I wasn’t. It’s just all too common.

Another friend of mine, who I volunteer with, had told our group that her new husband, whom she met online, had had his bank account wiped out in some kind of internal fraud at Wells Fargo. Every month when we’d gently ask how that sitch was going, the story got increasingly complicated and unbelievable. He turned out to be a textbook scammer who took her for tens of thousands of dollars.

Before I met Susan, I had two friends Lynne and Wendy - smart, savvy, professional women - who had connected with Sister Exes. Lynne and her Sister Ex arranged a surprise ambush at Lynne’s house when their mutual mistake was there clearing his stuff from the garage. They were serious/not serious about a scheme to plaster posters with his face and the caption “Don’t Date this Man!” and “CHEATER!” outside his workplace.

Lynn and her Sister Ex didn’t maintain a friendship, but were there for each other to navigate the lies, and confirmed and validated each other’s facts and feelings.

While all of this was going on - June and July of this year - I was moving back into my house which, brought with it a lot of emotional and logistical work. My best friend Melissa coldly dropped me like a hot potato for reasons I will never fully understand. Work was becoming very demanding. I was in the midst the difficult time that led to the events I wrote about in It’s Kind of a Long Story About… The Kind of Wands. It was a lot to juggle and I know many of my friends thought it was ill-advised at best to continue the Nancy Drew-meets-Crazy Ex-Girlfriend stuff. They wanted me to let it go.

And yet I knew in my gut I needed to keep going. I needed to get to the end of this. I believed I would know where the end was and wasn’t there yet.

I’d put a line in the sand several times.

In March, I bought myself a Tiffany diamond ring to remind myself of my worth. It wasn’t a response to him getting engaged. It was something I’d been thinking about doing for a while. But I can’t deny the symbolism. I told myself when I put the ring on my finger I would be saying yes to my needs and engaging with myself, my life, and my future.

Isn’t it pretty?

I told myself after the LEEP procedure in June to “remove the abnormal cells” and literally cut the last of Cris out of my body that I’d move on.

But the LEEP procedure wasn’t cut and dry. Literally. They sent me home with one maxi pad so I optimistically thought that’s all I would need. I needed many more. He continued to leak out of me for many weeks, and the drive to find more truth continued as well.

Susan, Crystal, and I continued to chat. At one point, Susan typed something about another one of Cris’s exes, Monika.

I had heard the name Monika many times. Cris talked about all of his exes a lot, but I had never seen it written. I thought, “With that unusual spelling, I’ll bet I can find her.”

I did.

To be continued…

Know someone who would get something out of that story? Please share.

Lara sez…

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80s deep cut of the week! This charming ditty was as close to a one-hit as this wonder-ful Scottish band got. Their entire eponymous debut is delightful.

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I’ve been a loyal follower of TLo since they were known as “Project Rungay: They Sew, We Rip” and doing epic, wicked, and very well-informed episode recaps. They have since become a mini-industry with Pop Style Opinionfest, a podcast I also highly recommend, and several books.

I have learned so much about fashion and costuming from them. Their Mad Men recaps and costume deep-dives are essential reading for any fan.

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Mopping is my worst chore. I will do almost anything before I’ll mop my grody kitchen floor. My friend Hilary recommended this mop, and my friend Denise said, “It makes mopping fun!” I don’t know that I’d go that far, but it absolutely makes it much, much easier.

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Julien Temple’s ambitious musical was released to scathing reviews which for the life of me I will never understand. I absolutely love it. The songs are fantastic, the visuals are gorgeous, and the quippy lines are eminently quotable. This scene got a shout-out (and a little side-eye) from Robert Altman in The Player

Side Story: When I was in college, Julian Temple screened Absolute Beginners at a funky theater on a sketchy section of Market Street. I was super excited and… John and I were two of about 12 people there. After the movie, Julian said it felt weird to do a Q&A in that big theater, so we trooped up to the manager’s office and sat on the floor. I wish I could remember more than that, but this was in the Before Times. No cell phone photos, but I swear it happened.

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Before I let you go…

You can keep your OED! Thanks to yours truly, the Urban Dictionary now includes entries for “Sister Ex” and “Drama Goblin”