A "Snippet" From A Book I'll Write

This is a "snippet" of the book that I am writing. It is based widely on the truth with possibly a few embellishments due to old age and not remembering it the way it was for real. I re-live every moment while writing about this and have no clue why I am doing it other than I might possibly just need to clear it out of my mind once and for all. This is a rough around the edges no planning, no forethought type writing so bear with me. Thanks!

While looking over the forms and requirements to apply to UNLV’s school of law I started to write the essay they request that explains why I feel I should be admitted to the law school. I have lived in Las Vegas since the end of 2002 and have left and returned several times due to the hardships this town delivers to the newest arrivals. The help wanted ads even say…...” If you haven’t lived here for at least a year do not apply.” I understand now why that statement was there. I was asked in interviews how long I had lived in Vegas and when I replied three months or, whatever it had been, the mood in the room changed. It took me over four years to find a “real” job that believed I was staying. In that four years I was homeless more than once, kicked out of what I thought of as home so many times by the man who had convinced me to move in that I have forgotten how many times it was. I know that it was so often that I finally just left my things in a storage unit, as I was tired of packing and unpacking it all. It stayed in a storage unit for about three years.
There has never been a simple answer for me it seems. No matter what I did from an early age to yesterday. Having to learn that swinging in and out of a second story bedroom window off the curtain rod that was so easily within reach from the top bunk bed is not a good idea. Especially after the rod gives out in mid-flight. Learning that my motorcycle had a limited number of gallons of gas and that meant after so far it just stops. It does not care if you are half way between your summer cabin and the town you call home thirty miles away. Every mile by way of back roads discovered over summers of pure freedom to roam. Learning that the opposite sex will do what ever they want if you do nothing to stop them; even if fear is what stops you from doing something.

I have attended law school in the past at Quinnipiac University, School of Law in Hamden, CT. It was the third year (I believe) that "school was in session" after Quinnipiac took over the law school at the University of Bridgeport. “Pumping up” its new reputation, new school, new town and brand new building with state of the art everything. Quinnipiac maintained accreditation throughout the entire transition. They had no plans for allowing students to slack off their ratings either.

I graduated from the University of Oregon in Spring of 1996 with a Bachelor Of Science in Sociology. I had spent the summer of 1996 in Carlyle, Pennsylvania attending a six week Continuing Legal Education Opportunity, the “CLEO” program, that I had begged and pleaded to be allowed to attend. None of the law schools I had originally applied to offered a seat for the coming Fall. Even though I convinced the Oregon Bar Association that I was scholarship worthy; I had to be accepted in an Oregon law school to receive the scholarship. That did not happen. I was a minority, Native American, and the CLEO program is designed to assist minorities who might not otherwise make the grade into the field of law. We completed what was a large portion of the first year of law school in one summer. At the end of the program, we had a Mock Trial and I came out of it with “Most Convincing Argument.” I was sure to get in somewhere after this…

The first mistake in planning had been convincing myself that my fiancé' of 2 ½ years (2 ½ of our 8 year partnership) would survive my being away from home for such a long stretch of time. He asked me to marry him in hopes that marriage would sway me from completing my “mission.” I had set out in 1989 (having been a 10th grade drop out who was 15 & pregnant at the time) to return to school at age 30, get a degree and go to law school. That was all there was to it; I also planned to raise my two sons and still assist all those stray cats that mysteriously show up to my door. I was 29 years old when we met, I told him within days of meeting him that I was starting college at the local community college that Fall. Then when I completed all I could there, I would transfer to the University three hours west over the Cascade Mountain Range. From there I would enter law school for the three years it required. It never really occurred to me that I would have to travel out of state to attend. I applied to all Oregon schools, all of the surrounding states, and eventually ended up in Hamden, Connecticut.

I believe the road began several years before; at the age of 21. I was married to the father of my two sons. We had been married for six years. We had not reached the same place at the same time when it came to planning our future. I found it was possible to justify ending the marriage and moving on without him. I probably should have hung onto that one as he turned out to be a notch above what I was headed for.
After being in Connecticut for about three months I found myself receiving the bookkeeping for our Excavation Company in packets of mail with notes asking "please, can you do the PUC's or, the insurance/bonds, etc. The guilt ruled me. I maintained my studies, my job and working as a researcher for a Professor and "did the books.” I probably would have done fine had he not called me two weeks before my first year exams (hammering down in study groups, an entire school year on one exam, reading, near "legal death" limits you might say. Then he said it, "I think I need more space and time.” I nearly fell off the chair dropping the phone that emitted words I thought never to hear from him. I could not help but scream back at him in sheer exhaustion..."MORE SPACE AND TIME?” “ I AM THREE THOUSAND MILES AWAY FOR THREE YEARS...HOW F#%@& MUCH MORE SPACE & TIME COULD YOU POSSIBLY NEED?!!?!? Not him, he was "the one.” After three failed marriages; at ages 21 (married at 15), another ending at age 24 after almost three years of trying to re-create what is supposedly "the norm." And finally again at 26 when who knows what possessed me, I married a Washington State Prison Inmate who was a “great guy,” ...until there were no guards within ten feet of us. That is when the abuse, anguish, pain, manipulation and confusion began. He swore he was "over-sentenced" and that corrections had to be brought to the State Board of Prisons & Parole and the Department of Corrections. He would be there forever and according to him; he did not deserve that! After all, his arrest came during the time Ted Bundy was doing his thing and "every sexual crime was committed by the one who was still out there." I finally got tired of listening to him and told him "...if you are so sure, send me the papers to prove it." I soon found myself literally "buried" in documents dating back to his early prison career beginnings of age 17 at Walpole, MA. One of the worst institutions in the US (so I have been told anyway). I was soon to become a one woman army against the State of Washington as once I put all the "pieces" in the proper places....he HAD been over sentenced. Even the worst of the worst require uniformity in the rules, laws and penalties against them. My belief in our system was unwavering so I believed if this could happen to him it could happen to someone else; My brother? My friends? And what if, unlike Mac, they were innocent and not just “over sentenced?” Mac’s record reflected misdemeanors that were calculated as felonies, felonies that were too old to be considered yet there they were, holding onto every point value the State could possibly attach.. Charges that were dropped in reality somehow showed up alive, well, and ready to count in the calculations for the State of Washington to consider in their "sentencing guidelines" act. And they did; to the tune of a still undetermined amount of time. More than should have been calculated. The State of Washington also had to make an example of him as once he was arrested and charged for his crime, he conveniently disappeared for about seven years. Going to the furthest point he could manage, Montreal, Canada. He had taken his current wife with him (I was #7; #3 to marry him within the prison walls). She would turn out to be his undoing. And her own as well. Being the abusive controlling person that he was she could not resist someone else’s gentle attention. When he found out she was sneaking around without him, he made her aware of it with more abuse. She called Washington and reported his location. That was also a mistake as from what he told me (maybe the truth? Maybe to scare me?) he arranged from within the prison walls to have her and her new lovers’ car blown up…with them in it.