A California Nightmare

The “California Dream” is long dead and buried, and I know this because I have experienced it firsthand.

As a former activist in the marriage equality movement, I believe that, especially now, as protests are roiling the western world, we must share our stories so that the rampant injustices of our abusive police and distorted criminal justice systems can be heard and understood. I still believe in the idea of America that I took a pledge of support to uphold every day of the week in my childhood, and it is the America that I have strived for most of my life to make into a reality through community activism and support.

I have lost all trust in my government and their supposed “justice” system, which I now believe is really an underhanded way to throw struggling socialists like me who disagree with our administrative regime in prison. As many Americans of color will attest to, our current probation and parole systems are systems that have been very carefully and purposely set up to make us fail, not to help us to succeed. I have been forced to go into exile abroad because of it, and I doubt that I will ever return home to live again.

The “California Dream” is long dead and buried, and I know this because I have experienced it firsthand. As opposed to the free-wheeling, laid back culture that this popular mythology espouses, what I found in reality was a police state ruling over a population that is so fragmented and docile that they are willing to let their government basically get away with anything, and the government is more than happy to take full advantage of that. The sad truth was that, in my day-to-day life, I found that I had enjoyed far more freedom overall when I was living in Singapore, which seems to be incessantly accused of being a police state by westerners, than I ever did living in the reality of the obsessively regulated and heavily policed California that exists today.

I arrived into LAX in late January 2013 to start my new life in California after a stint living in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the first things I noticed about living there was how barren, sprawling and cold it was, and how everyone stayed really far away from each other.

Most Californians think that they live in the best place in the world, so they both love to talk and love to exaggerate, and I found that in reality, unlike in my native Chicago, many of them seemed to spend more time talking about doing things than actually doing them, and that the things they espoused as being so “awesome” were actually rather glaringly ordinary. I had visited the previous fall and had come to a deal to buy a local business there from a native Californian. The client base was a bunch of talk and the earnings were exaggerated, so I backed out of the deal, which in reality was very overpriced, deciding that I would be better off starting my own business instead. This was when I really discovered this phenomenon. People were really friendly and just loved to talk to me, but when it came to signing contracts and moving ahead, it never seemed to happen. I spent more time selling than I ever did actually working there.

Strike 1

My nightmare started in late 2014 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was paying $3000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, so after I lost my sub-6-figure job my savings evaporated like the alcohol in cooking wine when poured into a hot pan of food. I just couldn’t find a job in the Bay Area, and since I had lived in La Jolla for a year and a half before moving up to Berkeley for the job I had just lost, I had some friends down there and everyone there, unlike a year before, suddenly seemed to be hiring, not to mention I could find an apartment in Uptown San Diego for half of what I was paying in Berkeley. I had put some of the last money I had into the gas tank of my old red Saab convertible and drove down and stayed with a friend for a few days while I interviewed for a few jobs — and was on the way back up to Berkeley from an interview I had in Santa Barbara after long day on the road back up from San Diego, having an argument with my then boyfriend. He had decided that he was going to stay in the Bay Area with his much younger French lover instead of coming back down to San Diego with me.

So after that lovely discussion another car appeared on the road, passing me and then sliding in front of me and then gradually slowing down. So I slid over and passed him. Then he comes passing me again, gets in front, and very gradually slows down. So I get over again, and he does it yet again… so I sped up, pulled in front of him and hit my brake. He passed me and disappeared — good riddance in my opinion. So I turned on some music and started telling myself to calm down and that everything was going to work itself out and my boyfriend was just going through a phase [we ended up breaking it off 8 months later]. Suddenly, 20–30 minutes later, I hear these incredible popping sounds in the passenger side of my car, the hissing sound of air and saw the car from before speeding off at a close to a hundred miles an hour. Two bullets had been fired through my passenger door, one of them lodged in my seat, puncturing the adjustable lumber air sack in the back of the seat within a couple of inches of my spine. When I finally realized what had just happened I was in shock, so I pulled over and called 911. Two officers from the California Highway Patrol responded, who seemed incredibly amused by my shock. I had to give them permission to take the bullets out of my car so they could tow it away, at my cost, and “investigate” — which I doubt they ever did, and I was left with a mess of my car interior, far more so from the police than from the bullets. This and the military-style invasion I had witnessed of the peaceful Black Lives Matter protest down the street from my Berkeley apartment a month before was the beginning of my dislike for the police in California — I thought that some of them were bad in Chicago before, but these cops made even the bad ones back in Chicago look good…

I had mistakenly thought that because of all the gun regulations in California I would actually be safe from this kind of a thing, and even having grown up in a bit of a rough-and-tumble former factory city in Illinois, I still had never been shot at before. The Bay Area news called, but I prefer to deal with things privately and ignored them. It made the local news anyway, but I just moved on, got what insurance money I could and used (most) of it to fix the car, leaving the bullet-punctured interior and instead spending a lot of time and money on fixing the broken and problematically low front bumper — the ground effect had been lost months ago on a gravel road on the peninsular coast. I set off on a long and lonely ride in a U-Haul to San Diego a couple of weeks later with my drugged cat next to me and towing my newly repaired convertible on a trailer behind.

Strike 2

Of course the job in San Diego ended up being a sales scam, so after several months I figured it out and quit. I was fed up with taking jobs that were never actually the positions described to me, so I rented out the second bedroom of my apartment to roommates, and later on AirBnB, while still struggling to find work on my own and pay my rent every month — my credit had been destroyed in my attempt to save my former business from the 2009 recession, so taking on debt was not even an option. It was really stressful constantly living on the edge of homelessness, and I found myself slowly becoming more isolated because previously enjoyable social events became as stressful as sales appointments since I always had to put on a show that I was “doing fine”. I had witnessed the San Diego Police relentlessly harassing the homeless on far too many occasions, so that possibility was too terrifying to consciously acknowledge.

I simply couldn’t find enough work in my profession to keep myself afloat I was trying to help a friend of mine sell office supplies, which I was absolutely terrible at doing. I was out making follow-up sales calls I had one stop left before lunch, and I circled again and again, check several side streets and simply couldn’t find anywhere to park, so I parked just a few feet into a yellow loading zone while I quickly ran in and dropped off a gift to a friendly office manager who had shown some interest. When I came back out about 6–8 minutes later, I saw an Asian meter maid rifling through my things inside my open convertible with his baton, which I had purposefully left open to make it clear that I would be right back, in an absolutely stunning violation of my 4th Amendment rights. As I approached, parking enforcement officer Roy Bunband saw me, stopped going through my things and as I got closer I bit my tongue, kept my cool and politely asked him if there was a problem. He told me that I was illegally parked in a commercial zone, because my convertible didn’t have commercial plates, and proceeded to write me a ticket. I explained that my business partner had our delivery van and I was just making a quick delivery to a client, and I proceeded to point out that it was illegal for him to be going through the things inside my car without a warrant and I would be happy to report him for it. He told me he didn’t care, and it was at that point that I lost my temper and tore up the ticket he handed me right in front of him. He was at least a foot shorter than I am, so he scampered back to his cart and drove off, shouting an arrogant retort at me as he drove off.

I was so incensed and upset by his arrogant attitude and utter violation of my privacy rights that I took a moment to collect myself before I got into my car. I remember getting into my car, pulling out and seeing his scooter parked - illegally, of course - at the stop sign at the end of the block. The next thing I remember is when my convertible bumped into his scooter going maybe about 15–20 mph. I had momentarily lost consciousness and had failed to hit the brake. Considering the time and expense spent fixing the front of my car, why would I ever do this on purpose? [It was later confirmed by a brain MRI that I have suffered from absence seizures for my entire life - as with most people who have them, I was completely unaware of it.] However the truly shocking part was just beginning, because instead of coming to a stop and getting out of his scooter like any rational person, he decided to release his brake, sharply steering his scooter from side to side back and forth across the width of the street a few times, ultimately accelerating until he finally managed to tip his scooter over on its side, hitting a parked car in the process. I was so completely shocked by this that I panicked, turned left and drove about 100’ away out of fear for my own safety — this guy was obviously completely insane with rage after our argument, and I had seen a taser on his belt in addition to his baton — looking back to make sure he was okay. As I sat in my open convertible watching, he literally leapt up out of his scooter and glared at me with the most hostile look I have ever seen, so I drove off and hid in a nearby alley while I called my attorney to ask him what I should do, because I already knew that I was screwed.

While I was doing this, NBC 7 San Diego showed up at the scene and created themselves a ratings feast, immediately concocting a story accusing me of “ramming” the cart in a fit of rage at high speed and interviewing the meter maid, police and a couple of supposed “bystanders” — who had only heard, not actually seen, what had happened — so little did I know when I came back with my lawyer and turned myself over to the police for questioning that any hope I possibly had of getting a truly fair and unbiased trial were completely gone due to the ensuing media circus over the following days. The SDPD detectives, led by Phillip Worthington, were more than happy to go along with their concocted story, despite the many statements I made to the contrary, not to mention the fact that I was clearly showing symptoms of shock and kept making so many apologies when they initially questioned me that they asked me to stop. They absolutely ignored everything I said during my interview and I was accused of purposefully ramming into his cart at a speed of 30–40 mph and knocking his scooter over directly, and a factually incorrect police report was filed saying exactly as much, despite evidence directly contained within that same report clearly showing that I couldn’t have possibly hit him that hard.

So I was forced to take full responsibility for what happened, the SDPD seized my convertible and I took what I thought at the time was the best plea deal I could get, since a fair trial was virtually impossible given the rewriting of the truth that had already been done by NBC 7 San Diego along with other local media. I even got up in court in front of the cameras and make an emotional public apology on the local news for what I supposedly did, even though I knew that I hadn’t done all of what I was accused of. As part of the trial process I was interviewed by another police officer and I explained to her how I had been a victim of police abuse in Chicago when I was still only an adolescent, and how the media had completely distorted what had actually happened and that the officer had tipped his own cart over in a fit of rage, but she already her mind made up before I even walked in the door, so she picked out a few words I used, distorted them and wrote a hostile report characterizing me as an angry and racist person — which is quite ironic since I am in an extremely loving marriage with an Asian man. Her report incensed the judge and she threw me in a work release program for 90 days, despite the fact that I had already accepted a felony plea specifically to avoid incarceration. The SDPD also insisted that I had mental health problems, and so I sought help on my own, but I ended up walking out of both my psychiatrists’ and therapists’ offices thinking that they were the ones who were crazy and never going back…

Strike 3

By early 2019 I had completed all of my community service and had been struggling to find enough work to pay off the ridiculously exorbitant monetary fines that had been levied against me. As I later discovered, any form of regular employment was now completely off limits to me because of the felony plea I had taken, despite the fact that I was now being actively recruited for multiple director-level positions in my profession.

In December 2018, Air New Zealand kept repeatedly trying to rip my husband and myself off for changing our ticket for our honeymoon — which had been paid for by our family and friends as our wedding gift — from December to February. I got into a nasty argument with a rude, anti-gay bigot of a call center representative and threatened to sue them if they continued to ignore me and hold most of our wedding gift as ransom to extort more money from us. Unbeknownst to me, he filed a criminal threat report against me with airline security at LAX, which was automatically forwarded to the airport police. I found out later that my nasty probation officer, Steve Blatchford, and a DA in San Diego found out about this and orchestrated a scheme to punish me further that completely abused the law.

In the mean time I calmed down, called Air New Zealand back a week and a half later, finally talked to a manager there and he made (an apparently fake) rebooking for our tickets. When my husband and I went to LAX a month and a half later in February to board the flight for our honeymoon, LAPD ambushed and arrested me, paraded me through the Bradley Terminal in handcuffs and threw me in LA County Jail for 5 days without bail. Because of my anxiety problems, it took me 2 months to recover from this to the point where I could even run my business and work again. It was the worst experience of my life.
 
 San Diego County District Attorney Paul Reizen would not relent on the call center representative’s distortion of the truth, and forced the matter to trial in his outrageous zeal to punish me further, in clear violation of the double jeopardy clause of the 5th Amendment, and despite the fact that the employees of the airline in LA that he wanted to testify knew what he was doing was wrong and refused to participate. After already paying thousands of dollars in bail and attorney fees to try to end the matter, I simply couldn’t come up with the 5-figure legal fees required to pay an attorney to represent me through the trial, so I requested the services of the San Diego County Public Defender. When I showed up for the next court date, Judge Polly Shamoon wrongfully and illegally threatened to throw me in jail for a year, maybe two years, without any trial because I was still on probation for what had happened 2 years before. The San Diego County Public Defender would only tell me that I was going to jail and showed no interest whatsoever in protecting my rights or properly defending my case.

…and ‘UR OUT!

The late model yellow Toyota sedan flew east down California 905 at about 2:30am with my bicycle case, suitcases and backpack in the back seat. It was a late spring night in mid-June and I will never forget the smell of the cool, dry desert air blasting in through the open windows. The Mexican soldiers at the border crossing into Baja California could care less as we sped by them — it was obvious that my Mexican driver was already a known entity, and that they knew exactly what was happening. My husband had dropped me off half an hour earlier near the San Ysidro border crossing, and within no more than a few minutes I had been approached. I had hired a driver, known colloquially as a “coyote”, to take me across the border to Rodriguez Airport in Tijuana, where I boarded the first of three flights through China that would take me to Ngurah Rai in Bali about 30 hours later. The only thing I wanted to do at that moment was to get myself as far away as possible, and the mountains of Bali were a place far outside of the reach of any law enforcement where I could hopefully begin to heal from the years of struggle, poverty and abuse that I had endured. I’m sure that the coyotes are all still there every night, waiting for the next customer fleeing the insanity of California.

[Part 2 “A Philippine Nightmare” is now available!]