My Sociopath, John

What is it like to be under the glare of a sociopath? A real one; a dark triad of malignant psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. 

Here’s the thing: sociopaths aren’t wearing trench coats and creeping around playgrounds. (Well, some of them are.) You know them. Or perhaps you don’t really know them. They’re utterly charming. They can gaze into your soul; they know parts of yourself that remain in shadowy corridors. They find your weaknesses; they anticipate your joys. Eve knew him as the Beguiler. A shapeshifter, a snake, a temptor of fruit. A trap.  

I was beguiled. My sociopath’s name was John. (Funny how I take ownership. My sociopath.)

Looking back, I can see the mists forming, like a storm brewing, a foreboding symphony of cellos and violas playing in a minor key. But in my case, it was the squall of my son, just a toddler, and the shrieks of my two little girls, ages four and six. Three children under the age of six and me the sole provider. Adding to this, it was late 2007 (before the storm broke in the upcoming months) and I was thirty-two years old- with a full head of hair and the optimism of a career path on the uptick. I was living on the east coast, and I was one of the hapless millions who’d bought a house with a balloon mortgage. I can remember the closing- the conference table with the realtor and brokers, the hesitant inquiry.

“Just to be clear, there’s no deposit?”

“That’s correct,” said my realtor, smiling brightly, and there was a beat of silence- like we were all in on the joke, this comedy of errors. 

How much later had I lost my job? A year or so? I lost my job and then I tried to hide from my wife that we were losing our home. A Great Recession trope, that now seems well-worn, but when you are living it, when historians haven’t parsed through it with their societal judgments, you cannot perceive that it isn’t personal; that you, and not the country at large, was a fool. To be fair, it was before the great wave of foreclosures, when so many people gave the middle finger to the banks and tossed away their keys; before the term “short sale” had become part of the everyday parlance. I was part of the first wave, which meant that societal shame had not yet crested over into apathy. When Bernie Madoff made the airwaves with his Ponzi scheme, and while the world raged, I watched the news somewhat impassively. People had lost their fortunes, imagine that. At any given time, I had less than eighty dollars in my bank account, less than fifty cents in my savings. I had no skin in the investor game, so it was hard for me to relate.   

I was young enough to still feel hopeful; the world had not yet collapsed, and I had no insight into its portent of doom. And yet, imagine the pressure. Every day my wife would look at me with a panicked expression. Despite my tepid assurances that so-and-so was looking into my resume, that I’d called this person and that person, her face would crumple and she’d cry, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” My little girls, bless them, were content to play with Barbies, and my son to waddle around and put things in his mouth. At least I didn’t have brooding teenagers. 

Years later, my wife and I would discuss how it all came to pass. Not so much losing the job, or even losing the house, but how, in the midst of such tribulation, did we fall into John’s trap? (She generously added herself into the equation. We.) How had we not seen? How could we have been so hoodwinked? The years of anguish John had caused. Red flags! Due diligence! 

Bernie Madoff was also warm and endearing and utterly beguiling. He fooled his family and his investors and even the SEC. So what began my courtship? What was my proverbial apple? It wasn’t an ever-increasing return on my investments. 

It was Disney World. 

John is a gangster- I know this now- but in a corporate manner, a huckster of the white-collar variety. He owned a cell phone manufacturing company, supplying small businesses with flip phones, back before the reign of smartphones. It was a lucrative business, and a shady business, and little did I know I was one of the many appendages he was attempting to bribe. Did I know he was bribing people at my company? Sure I did. I saw an email from a coworker that thanked him for his kids’ braces, a boss that hinted at kickbacks, all the while keeping contracts that never went to lower bidders. I suppose I felt inured from scandal. I’d been working in telemarketing since college, and I’d seen how “dirty” the business of cell phones could be. I was employed by a small wireless company on the east coast, and I traveled to China a few times a year, to small villages where I’d witness overworked employees warehoused into dormitories, picking through tiny cell phone parts among vast assembly lines. I did feel bad. I’d give my wife some benign commentary about how bad I felt. But what could I do? Classic avoidance. 

Anyhow, I was not going to take a bribe. I was of a higher moral caliber. Which is why I find it laughable now (a cynical sort of cackle) that when John told me he frequently gifted his clients with vacations as tax write-offs, I so readily accepted. My wife, who I used as my yardstick for moral integrity, did not protest. Looking back, I think we tip-toed around it- is this ethical?- and yet we so easily capitulated. 

Everything was paid for- plane tickets, hotel, amusement park tickets. At the airport, we were even picked up by a limousine. (Later I’d learned, like a true gangster, the limousine service was family owned; the driver, a cousin, or some other tenuous association- he even wore a gold chain. He called me years later, appealing to me to help in a lawsuit against John. Take a number, I thought.)

As everyone knows, red flags- those beacons of warnings- do not exist at Disney World. My kids were overjoyed; we had all the photos taken of their sweaty happy faces. On the news that evening was Casey Anthony’s daughter- Caylee, three years old, reported missing, so close in age to my own daughter. Another portent of doom? 

On John’s grand chessboard, I was placed as one of his loyal foot soldiers, a minor character that merely required my devotion. Soon afterward, as the country bucked from the bull market, I was out of a job. A prime position to be moved on the chessboard. Alas, I could tell my wife: John would give me a job! Six figures! The catch? Florida. I quickly warmed to the idea- season tickets to Disney World, a pool! My wife was skeptical. A friend told her that bugs were so large they’d take off with our children. She was tired of the expense of living on the east coast, worn out from the financial pressures and long commutes, and longing to live nearer to our family in the Midwest, where life was not, she deemed, so cutthroat.

I found the house of my dreams- a saltwater pool and a cream-colored four-bedroom (a rental) but my wife was not so charmed. She cried as we pulled into our “suburb”, which was a rather decrepit stretch of highway that housed drug dealers and prostitutes at the “neighborhood” grocery store. At meet-the-teacher night for my daughter’s first grade class, she told me that most of the parents didn’t have teeth- an elitist mindset, which I accused her of, in which she agreed. She could do without city planning, I told her. I made it clear John’s business was to be my career and Florida our forever home. (I conceded that we’d move to a legitimate suburb, not the armpit of Highway 50.) 

I could say it started slowly, but my personality changed so quickly- an alarming pivot. First of all, since I was now an owner (a five percent stake, ha!) I needed to work all hours. My mother had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and when she flew in from California, my wife was incredulous that I worked through the weekend. But we had a deadline, and it was all hands on deck, as the cliche goes, and I was a part of “the family” (an irony that is not lost on me). To offset the grind, there were the parties hosted by John- family events that morphed into gentlemen poker nights. On those occasions, I insisted on taking two cars, seeing as how I didn’t want to miss out on the big boy games (when had I ever played poker?), while my wife suffered through crass laughter juxtaposed against bouncy houses with screaming children. For Halloween, John assigned us a theme: Pimps. He rented costumes for “management” and we all wore bell-bottoms, curly wigs, fake chains, and the worst offense: grills on our teeth. Is that how you spell it? Grillz? It was a family party. (My wife, for the record, was not dressed as a hooker.)

It was no surprise that my marriage started to fray, and looking back, I think John was enjoying it all. Dressing me up as a pimp, guilting me into long hours, pushing my boundaries. Funny thing, boundaries. Futile against a person who glorifies in taking a machete to them, hacking away at your dignity. 

He cut my salary in half. In half! This was better, you see, because now I was getting what’s called a draw. Reduce my salary but increase my ownership percentage to a full 10%, which would have far greater dividends. You don’t say! Except for the fact that I could no longer pay my bills, that my beautiful house with the pool in the bad part of town had to be abandoned. The worst memory: when raw sewage came up through the pump because I hadn’t paid my bill. A metaphor for my life- my kids were literally walking around in our shit. 

I wish I could say that it was at this moment, steeped in sewage, that I awoke to the misery of our lives, but I didn’t. I was beguiled, you see. I don’t know if John had tired of me, but it wasn’t until he’d brazenly stolen a software developer’s intellectual property and made me the fall guy. He simply started a separate company appointing me as the president. I blinked into the betrayal. Me? But I thought I was family. As you can imagine, I say that in a simpering tone, but at the time I was truly and wholly shocked. And while I was processing this, the universe realized I hadn't gotten the point, and slapped me even harder. On a Friday evening, the security system “broke” and burglars came in and raided the warehouse, stealing a million dollars worth of phones. The insurance took awhile to pay it out, as suspicions were raised, because funnily enough, the same thing happened two years prior. 

At that point, the FBI called me. And at that point, I called them back. 

Was that when I decided to quit? Probably. To my wife’s great relief, we decided it best to leave Florida (a good idea when you’re speaking to the FBI about your boss). Right away, it felt like the world realigned itself. Indeed we did move to the Midwest, and I was able to get another job at a small telecommunications company. We got pregnant again, and while people say it's best not to mend a marriage with a baby, this little girl brought so much healing and joy to our lives. For the most part, I could look back at this dark time as a mere two years of suffering. Not a bad deal. 

But that’s not the ending. For as a proper mob boss, I was a snitch, the worst sort of betrayal. Not to be outdone, John made a call of his own to the FBI. He accused my dad, a reputable pediatrician, of running a secret drug ring with me, his son. Writing scripts for oxy’s, I believe. Absurd! It went nowhere, of course, but I’m sure John knew that. He only wanted to unsettle me. He bided his time for another year or so- enough for my family to get comfortable, to assimilate back into suburbia. I could still regard John as a wily man, a cunning man, gregarious, certainly, but not a sociopath. What even was a sociopath? 

One day my wife got a knock at the door and opened it to a man who cheerfully told her she’d been served. She was taken aback. Served? With what? He backed away, conciliatory (not in a smug way- more of a ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ sort of way). Paperwork was included. I owed John $75,000, as I had previously agreed to the terms of the “draw”. It was a fraudulent contract, and he hadn’t even attempted to mimic my signature- boxy and clunky, nothing similar to my own. I ignored it. I added “buffoon” to my estimation of him, bringing him down a notch. This would go the way of the drug claims, I was sure. But to be served means to be sued, and I had to get a lawyer. A lawyer cost me dearly because, as lawyers do, as they go back and forth, money that could have gone to my family. Eventually there was silence on his end and I thought the matter had been dropped. Another year went by. The next time it wasn’t the cheerful server. I got an official summons that a judgment had been issued. John had successfully won a suit against me in court.

So here’s the thing: for John to win in court, I would have to know about it, right? Right? Ah, but there was a loophole. Indeed, he had won in court. Spitefully, incredulously, but legally so. Frantically, I called my wife. She had to go into hiding- yes, into hiding. Not for the safety of our family (my mind would not go there), but to save the family van: the slightly battered silver Ford Windstar that happened to be paid off and could be seized at any moment. Also, my wife’s beloved piano- not a showpiece, but a source of income, as she taught lessons from home. What else? Jewelry, old golf clubs, shabby furniture. Anything we owned was there for the taking by a sanctioned deputy from the court. 

Outrage poisoned my soul. How was it possible, in this day and age, an ad in the paper? A newspaper, an ancient relic. Outdated, yes, but still a loophole, my lawyer explained to me. Emergency papers would have to be filed, and not by him, but by a lawyer in Florida, where the judgment had been served. I sputtered with rage. John had no problem finding my address to serve me papers, but now he claimed he had no means of contacting me, as I’d gone dark, apparently, inhibiting his due process, and a judge had signed off on it. In such good faith, John had put an ad in the Orlando newspaper, kindly informing me of his case against me. A public notice, again, in Orlando, where I had not been living for years. 

At the time, I wanted to shake strangers on the street, to vent my sheer rage, for my friends were tired of hearing about it. How how how? Ludicrous, insanity, right? Validate me, help me make sense of it all. I could see the glassiness in their eyes. A vengeful screed, I’m sure they thought, certainly made up or exaggerated. How could such a thing be true?  

Now, years later, I consider my family lucky. Now I understand more of John’s dark psychology. His own brother claimed that he molested him when he was a child. At the time, I discounted it- it was far too unsettling for me to grasp- but now I’m not so sure. There were whisperings of affairs. The worst I heard was a woman who committed suicide, a suicide note referencing his treatment of her, although I don’t know the details. At any rate, all too sordid for the likes of my vanilla disposition, which, at the time, I found too salacious. But now? 

I learn about them, sociopaths. I educate myself. What is evil but the degraded attempt of control? Cult leaders come in all forms: businesses, religions, self-help groups, families. They exult in suffering; they delight in depravity.  

Did John’s luck ever run out? In a way. From a legal perspective, he has many lawsuits against him, and most importantly, the investors who sunk 30 million into his company. While he has evaded prison time, his home has been repossessed, his wife has left him, and he lives alone. I’m sure he loves the drama; thrives on it, in fact, as he is incapable of remorse. Do I feel pity for him? Not at all. I hope he suffers. I don’t, however,dwell on vengeful fantasies (at least not as often). 

But here’s what he doesn’t have: a comfortable, if pedestrian, life. A small home, a piano, a minivan. And even now, with the broody teenagers, a family.

A real family.