Drinking and Tweeting Read Online Free PDF

wait for him to file first, so that he would incur the cost. That was the stupidest advice ever. When it comes to divorce, the $2,000 charge that the city charges you to process the divorce isn’t even a blip on the radar. After nearly two years of back-and-forth, Eddie’s and my divorce cost north of $250,000. I know that doesn’t seem like a costly divorce to certain people in LA, but to us, it was beyond substantial. We had been living beyond our means for years—and despite the occasional hints from his mother (“Brandi, you guys are spending too much money,” she would say), I was pretty much in the dark about it. I figured she wanted us to be frugal since the downturn inthe economy, but Eddie never stopped buying expensive toys or planning luxurious vacations. Toward the end of our marriage, he even paid cash for a new Harley-Davidson. I went with him to the bank and saw him pull out the wad of cash. So I didn’t worry too much about it. That wasn’t my job in the relationship. I had a hot dinner served on time every night, and I looked great on his arm. That was my role.
    Not until we started the divorce did I realize how truly broke we were. Yet another opportunity for Eddie to smack me in the face with something I was so unprepared for.
    I grew up in a modest home with a modest household income. My father was the local pot dealer, and my mom was a hippie who rarely wore a bra. I was the middle child between my older sister, Tricia, and my younger brother, Michael (both of whom still live in Northern California). My mother breast-fed us far too long, and my father worked three jobs, besides the pot dealing, so we rarely saw him. I know it sounds awful—“my father, the drug dealer”—but it truly was a means to an end. He sold pot because it was an extra income that could help to send all three of us to a private Lutheran school outsideour neighborhood. We lived in a terrible neighborhood, and the public schools around us were dangerous.
    Sure, I became used to the fancy house and the nice things, but I was never afraid of living a modest life again, if we needed to. I would have scaled back enormously, had I known how much we were hurting, and tried to pitch in any way I could. It was a marriage, a partnership. We lived in Los Angeles, surrounded by some of the wealthiest people in the world, but Eddie and I were never truly rich. We were ghetto rich—we had the nice cars, the nice house, and the nice jewels, but we probably had a second and a third mortgage. We were living paycheck to paycheck, with little savings.
    You can imagine the insane frustration I felt when it cost me a quarter of a million dollars just to divorce a man who was parking his Harley in every available spot in town. In hindsight, I wish I’d had the emotional satisfaction of filing first, so I wouldn’t ever have to hear again that it was Eddie who left me. In actuality, I ended things. He would have come back if I let him, but that wasn’t an option. I would never be able to look at him the same way again.
    The divorce would probably have cost us less than50 percent of what it did if we had chosen a mediator, but what did Eddie care? He had a sugar mama now. He was angry, and he always had to win.
    After the news came out that Eddie and LeAnn were having an affair, gossip reporters bombarded me hoping to score some outrageous quotes (and, boy, did they eventually get some juicy one-liners from me). I have no idea how they figured out my cell phone number, but the calls were coming morning, noon, and night. And they weren’t harassing just me, they were going after my friends and family, too. During the early stages of the media chaos, I kept quiet, because Eddie and I were trying to make things work. We signed up for couples therapy before news of his second affair, with the cocktail waitress, made headlines. (Word to the wise: if you need to see a couples therapist, your marriage is probably already over.) He even bought me a