Break Ups - Part 4

Drilled Heart

We had not spoken in years, not since we were teenagers… many moons ago... in the same school. We were friends back then. I think we were close friends, though she was close with everyone. Her heart was trusting and open.

30 plus years later we connected on Facebook.

She emailed me and we caught up on three decades in short sentences. Then I got a longer email, it said a great deal about the hardships she had been through.

She said she had two holes drilled in her heart in the past five years. She described the pain as unbelievably intense, centralized in their throat initially. Ultimately, settling in her feet. It was, she said, life altering.
She described abandonment of family and friends, people she trusted.

Being a private investigator, I was confused.

I see all kinds of things on the job. I know a whole lot about the insides of the human body.
I meet many clients, conscious and in comas in intensive and trauma units.
I also see other clients only in their autopsy photos, their innards bared; their organs removed, photographed, weighed.

So when she told me she had two holes drilled in her heart the investigator in me concluded she really did.

I just couldn’t figure out how they’d drill a heart; how big the drill would be; why they’d drill a heart and how they’d avoid the veins. Beyond that, I couldn’t how anyone would survive two heart-drilling operations.

It occurred to me perhaps I was taking her too literally. We P.I.’s tend to do that. So I emailed her back asked her two questions that went something like this:

Did you really have two holes drilled in your heart by surgeons, for a medical condition?
Or were you talking holes drilled by acts of betrayal, deception, and heartbreak?

While I awaited her response, I pondered each possibility and concluded each of the heart drillings–the surgical one and the emotional drilling aren’t all that different. Except, the medical drilling might be easier because you’d be asleep.

In the latter case, when a hole is drilled in your heart by another -- a partner, spouse, new woman, man, there is no anesthesia. No nurses to care for you. Just one massive fall from grace marked by however many holes in your heart that may or may never fill themselves.

The liver is called the liver because it lives.
The heart does not regenerate itself like the liver does. In heart attacks, pieces of it die in percentages and never wake up.

The heart is the nexus, the core, the atom, the engine, and the origin. The heart is the rhythm that our blood moves, grooves and soothes to.

My friend’s reply was that the drilling was not medically related. Rather it had to do with two betrayals from demon women after her husband.
What added insult to her injury, she said, was these women were once friends.

She described the process of processing it all.
She wrote beautifully and admirably. I appreciated the trust she placed by sharing her story with me and told her so.

More Drilling

Then I got a follow-up call on a domestic I’d worked.

It was another friend, one I hadn’t heard from in maybe two years. He wove a tangled tale that spanned about a year’s time. His life had only now stopped unraveling.

It was another Break Up.

He was 41. He’d moved south to be closer to his ex- wife and kids. He met a girl in a bar. They fell in sex, not love, he laughed.

So she moved in. They both hung out together happily for one year. They both had jobs, though he owned the house, the pick-up, the Smoker Craft. She had nothing but about 20k in credit card debt and a car loan. Though she did have a job.

She declared bankruptcy, she confessed to him early in their relationship. It was the result of an emergency hysterectomy and no health insurance. He was fine with that; he didn’t want any more babies anyway. Especially with her.

She drank way too much and she loved gambling, especially the slots at the nearby Casino. She never won, but she spent almost all her paycheck there every Friday night after work with the girls. He didn’t know it, but she also stopped there once or twice a week during lunch, with two of the same girls from work.

So about one month after their first year together, he took a business trip to Denver. He was gone five days. On day six he called me from his home. He said they had this huge fight about something really stupid and she moved out the very night he came home.

Another five months passed without hearing word one from her. No sightings of her in the bar, nowhere at the Casino. She moved two states away to Las Vegas Nevada, gambling Mecca.

He was too busy taking care of problems with his ex-wife, who was now on Meth, to worry about the gambling ex girlfriend.
He had to fight for custody of his boys. Hire lawyers. Get the state involved.
Somewhere in all this mix, some things got ignored. In his case, the mail.

He put all the mail from his bank in a pile and left it there for five months. When he finally studied the statements, he discovered his entire life savings was gone from one of his secret (or so he thought) checking accounts. The one he kept the account book for hidden in his underwear drawer.

Enclosed in the bank statements, were the checks she’d forged... he being the ex-girlfriend who moved out. It amounted to $60,000.

He asked me what to do.
I told him.
He called the police. Filed a police report. Pressed charges.
He called the bank.
We went down the list of everything you do in such circumstances.
She was found at her mother’s home in Vegas, also hooked on Meth.
And all of it was to no avail.

She plead guilty and went to jail
She said she gambled everything away except 10k... and that was what went into her silicone breast implants.... which he never saw until her hearing. That was when my friend said she was sorry, then added something about not squeezing a turnip from a rock and they led her away.
While restitution was ordered, he knew he'd never get it.
Everything he worked his whole life for, all the money, gone.

She will be out soon or maybe already is.

The bank refused to return the money because my friend, the customer, had signed an agreement with them when he opened his account. It said that any discrepancies must be dealt with in a certain time period, which had lapsed. Clearly she forged his signature, but they would not refund his money.
He considered suing, but no attorney would take the case and he had nothing to pay an attonrey anyway because she stole it all.

At the end of his story he said to me,
“She drilled a hole in my bank account.”

Sound familiar? He too was drilled. Through the heart and the wallet.

He learned a valuable lesson and lives alone now.
When the right gal comes around, I’ll check her out first. Turned out this last one, the gambler/thief, had two priors – one for forgery, one for theft.

The morale of this story is to be very careful whom you let into your heart and home.
The most dangerous people can be the ones who wear the nicest masks. Ted Bundy was quite the looker.

Truth be told, in some cases, there is no way to avoid an evildoer.
Good news is, there is always a way to recover from one.
It’s the recovery that turns the problem into an opportunity for change.