Sunday, December 14, 2014

A MODERN ROMANCE INTRODUCTION

A Modern Romance

by

Ms. C.J. aka "Pinky D."
and 
Candy Man aka "Sugar Bear" Bill



Copyrighted 2014 by C.J. Miller 


This is a true story...only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.


They say that sometimes, "Truth is Stranger Than Fiction."  This is actually a true story and I cannot wait to tell it to millions of people because people need to hear stories about the power of the Living God and how wonderful he can be if you just recognize him and give yourself to him completely. This is also a story about how two grown people, who were old enough to know better, fell in love after having a three month "long-distance" relationship via the Internet.  I say they should have known better, because as circumstances would have it, they were both drawn into their desire to be loved by someone whom they thought that they knew --- but, found out that people, like their looks--- can be very deceiving. 

They were not strangers to one another. So, all those stories about meeting someone over the Internet who essentially is a stranger to you and falling in love with them too quickly, only to have the relationship turn into a living nightmare, didn't actually apply to them. On the contrary, despite the fact that they grew up together in the same town and went to the same schools together, they truly did not "know" one another. That was the imminent danger that they faced, while struggling to develop what any truly loving person would want to have in their lives...a true love forever.  

Well...as the saying goes: "Nothing good lasts forever..." so I guess the relationship was doomed from the start if it started out to be good, at all...but ended up being a disaster of Biblical proportions. This is a story about how to NOT have a good relationship with someone...whether you truly care about them or not.  This is a story about what happens to good people who have good intentions that are definitely NOT...good enough.  And, this is a story about how some truly crazy people can lure you into their messed up world and end up not only trying to drive you crazy with them...but, also trying to destroy you in the process.

Take heed and be careful...



In 2013, Ms. C.J. wasn’t doing so well.  She had recently been fired from a very stressful job in Las Vegas, NV and had to move back to Atlanta, GA. where she had been living for over 25 years, to try to get her life back in order. It was July, and it was sweltering hot in Atlanta, but she was hopeful of finding a good job and a new place to live in a familiar town. She had been homeless in Vegas for over two months and had just driven through a devastating tornado in Oklahoma. How much worse could life get for her? 

She had actually been fortunate enough to be sharing a very large mansion and working as an Office Assistant/House Sitter for a well-known author and radio celebrity, in an upscale, affluent neighborhood in Atlanta, when she had started her relationship with Sugar Bear Bill via Facebook messages on the Internet. But, things were about to change for her very quickly.  Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lot of money, she had very few friends in Atlanta and was living on the Unemployment Benefits she was receiving from her last job. She was lonely and tired of struggling so hard.  She just wanted a good man who would understand her situation and (yeah)…take care of her. 

 She had just left her newest love interest, an ex-Marine and former "Meth-head" in Las Vegas, despite the fact that they had been planning to be together again. They would speak to each other on the phone every week, but she was not looking forward to dealing with another stressed out veteran with drug and alcohol problems, nor was she looking forward to spending the coming holidays alone. Her money was beginning to run out fast, especially after the government shut down that took place in October of 2013, that cut off her benefits before she could find another full time job and left her even further behind than ever before
Life was looking very bleak, indeed for Ms. C.J., and she was losing hope of ever finding someone with whom she could share her life, not to mention the ever present fact that she was having problems finding another job and it was getting very cold in Atlanta. She had made the decision, in the summer of 2013, that she would never deal with another stranger and she never wanted to be homeless, ever again. Her last fiancé of five years with whom she had been living in Atlanta, was an ex-Army veteran suffering with severe PTSD and he had tried to kill her in June of 2012. 
 
She had left him in the middle of the night with only the clothes on her back and some important papers in her purse. That was the reason why she had gone to Vegas in the first place; having escaped his wrath to avoid ever dealing with him again and fearing for her life in the long run. She had also vowed to never deal with another veteran, since apparently the ones she had been with all seemed to have severe psychological problems that left a bad taste in her mouth and a cleaned out bank account, every time.  

Thus, the reason for putting all of her possessions into a  storage unit.  But, this time she had left Nevada with whatever she could carry in her car.  She was in danger of losing everything that she owned, and the prospect of losing her mind in the process was very real indeed. Her car payments were late, her car insurance had been canceled, and she was about to lose her only means of transportation and the key to getting a good job…the brand new car that she had purchased just nine months earlier. The mansion in which she was living was located on a very dark, private road with little or no street lights and the days were getting shorter with the coming of Fall. The street would be plunged into complete darkness after 5 pm in a few weeks and she was getting scared.

In September of 2013 her health was failing and she needed to see a doctor, but she could only go to the county clinic with a current Georgia ID. The Monday after she had gone to the DMV to get her ID renewed, the police were waiting outside of her driveway and pulled her over immediately.  She hadn’t committed any traffic violations but that didn’t matter…they impounded her car anyway. So, she was forced to walk almost three miles to get to any sort of public transportation; up and down steep hills, around blind corners on a street with no sidewalks and muddy shoulders; taking her life into her hands with each trip to get food or other personal necessities. 

The road back to the house was a 45 degree incline...straight up.... for about four city blocks. She would cry out in pain and pray that God would help her get up that hill every time she went out. Ironically, her landlady’s car had literally exploded into flames in the same week that C.J.'s car was repossessed, and she too was inconvenienced with having no transportation. But, the landlady was running an illegal gambling operation out of her home, and had a well-to-do boyfriend to help her get another car within 2 weeks. But, Ms. C.J. didn't have those options.

C. J. was forced to move to less lavish accommodations in a Middle Class neighborhood in Decatur, GA. where transportation was, at least, a little more convenient but, that was when things began to change radically. Her so-called friends from her new church claimed that they would try to help her, but they were unable or unwilling to do what needed to be done to get her life back on track. They accused her of being lazy and not trying hard enough. They had never been in a situation like hers and they didn’t understand what she was going through looking for work as an older woman in a bad economy. They had cars and didn't have to walk for miles just to get somewhere in town.

Besides that, they were foreigners…Caucasian looking people from Iran... who had never been subjected to the discrimination and prejudices that a 58 year old African-American woman was facing in the job market of the Post-Recession, U.S. Economy of 2013. They were now millionaires and business people who lived in luxury, but refused to share any of their good fortune with her and did the bare minimum in the way of financial assistance to help. They claimed to have come to this country with nothing and had to struggle to get ahead, and yet their stories did not add up.  Especially since they were business owners and diplomats back in Iran and somebody had to have given them and their families plane tickets to get to America, in the first place.. 

The move to Decatur, proved to be disastrous, to say the least. She was living with greedy and troubled people who used her for whatever they could get out of her. Although she shared the common bonds of being African-American with them, she did not feel comfortable around the poverty that awaited her every time she rode the buses somewhere. She tried desperately to find work; putting in scores of online applications, and ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it. The crushing blow came during the holiday season when she was asked to cook a lavish Thanksgiving dinner for her landlady and her sons, who then tried to make her pay for the entire meal by turning the heat off in the house, during an unseasonable cold snap for Atlanta.  

The constant changes of temperature in the house caused her to get a nasty sinus infection and she seemed to have been developing a problem with her hip that was affecting her walking. She managed to get to a local doctor who began treatments with painkillers and muscle relaxers. Little did she know that the pains that she was experiencing in her legs and hip were the beginnings of a very serious ailment. 

The bright part of this whole scenario, however, was that she had recently reconnected with an old friend of hers from back home, Candy Man Bill.  They had been corresponding on the Internet, and were rekindling their friendship after a 40 year separation. They had known one another since Kindergarten and had graduated high school in the same year. They had had the same friends and lived in the same neighborhoods. But, they had lost contact with one another after graduation when they had gone to different colleges. 

Ironically, he had attended the college that she had wanted to go to, and she had attended the college that he had wanted to go to. She had never really noticed him or hung out with him in high school, although he had been a member of a popular local band, was a very talented musician, and had even been in a few of her classes. He had never been one of her “boyfriends,” so it wasn’t like they were actually rekindling an old flame. She really didn't know him at all. 

He had moved to Los Angeles, CA in the early 1980’s, had developed his own vending business (thus the name Candy Man), had purchased a very nice home (that he was renting out), was working as a substitute teacher for a local school district (but not making much money), and was taking care of his elderly mother, after having cheated death a few years earlier from having a mild stroke and a serious heart attack. They had both worked in the Financial Services field had a lot of interests in common, and Ms. C. J. knew (or, so she thought) that this was going to be the final love of her life. 

They had so much in common that they were both smitten from the start, and had professed their growing love for one another; even if it was only the kind of love that old friends with thirteen years of common memories of living in the same town could express to one another in a conversation over the phone or in a text message. She thought that she could help him take care of his mother and his health problems together.  It seemed like it would be the ideal situation for her until they got married legally, since she was also a professional registered elder/child care provider with Care.com., had taken care of her own mother during her later years, and also had training as a disabled person's caretaker.

Candy Man had called her on New Year’s Eve, and they had spent over an hour talking on the phone; reminiscing about the old days back in their home town. They knew that they were technically compatible, but they also realized that they didn’t really know one another very well.  He called her every day (sometimes twice or three times a day) and they talked (sometimes for hours) about what was going on in their lives.  They began planning a life together, but neither of them could have dreamed what Fate had in store for them. Their love was about to be put to the ultimate test. 

This was when disaster struck in Ms. C. J.’s life.  Atlanta was going through a horrible cold snap. The temperatures dropped to the single digits or below, but C.J. had to still try to find a job.  She bundled up as best she could and managed to acquire a part-time job working for an upscale men's clothing store as a tailor, but was unceremoniously fired in less than one week after spending over $55 in bus and taxi fare to get to their training site over 30 miles away from her home. They claimed that she could not perform to their impossible standards of altering ten suits in eight hours (it was actually age, color and sex discrimination) but at least, she had made enough money to get her through another couple of weeks. 

She had planned to move out of the home where she was living in the middle class neighborhood to take a job as a live-in Nanny/Tutor for an 11 year old hyperactive, special needs child closer to home in Atlanta. But, the city had recently been through a very bad snow storm and had been shut down for days. Atlanta does not have the ability to deal with serious snow storms, and this one was as debilitating as it could have been to the city, to say the least. 

She met the people that she was supposed to be working for at a local McDonald's, and had to walk almost two miles, up a long icy hill to get there because the people were afraid that they would get stuck inside of the neighborhood where she was living because the house was at the bottom of a deep gully at the bottom of another steep hill. Anyone familiar with Atlanta's topography knows that the terrain there can be extremely treacherous; especially when it is icy. 

The first of February was coming fast and she had already given her landlady notice that she would be moving out. Her Emergency Unemployment Benefits had run out, and Ms. C. J. had found herself  broke with no money, again. She needed this job badly. The people who had promised to hire her seemed to be a nice professional, religious couple and the child seemed to be manageable.  But, the saying: “You cannot judge a book by its cover,” could never have been truer in this instance.  

The couple turned out to be evil, vindictive, super over-protective, "bourgeois to the nth degree", unrealistic, psychopaths who claimed to be related to our President. Their house was drafty and cold and the kid was a pathological hyperactive liar.  After a seemingly minor misunderstanding about how to care for their child, some serious lies being told by the kid, and asking whether or not she could have a drink of water or eat lunch at their house after being there for over ten hours a day, Ms. C. J. was verbally abused, and threatened with attempted kidnapping for letting the kid go outside to play and jail time for neglect and abuse.  None of the lies were true and C.J. had been the 3rd caretaker in a month to be with the kid. 

Mind you, they were supposed to have been "church people" and true Christians. The father was an ex-crack head deacon of the church they attended, was the director of the outreach program for homeless people, and the mother (who was really the kid's adopted parent who couldn't have children of her own) was a department supervisor who worked for the CDC. But, she treated C.J. like she was one of the street people they dealt with on a daily basis, instead of the educated professional that she was.  After telling the people that she didn't want to work for them any more, she was then physically beat up by the DeKalb County Police, and ultimately ended up lying in jail on the bench warrant that had been issued after her car was impounded four months earlier.

The people for whom she had been working had tried to wrongfully evict her, from the apartment where she had been living as a part of the Nanny/Tutor deal,  and then sued her for the rent they claimed that she owed them.  And, were it not for the bench warrant against her, she would have been “home free” (so to speak) to find another place to live. But, because she didn’t have the money to pay the tickets on her car or the money to get to the court the day of her hearing --- on a bitterly cold Winter’s night in early February 2014, she found herself  homeless and “ass out” again

To make matters worse, the city of Atlanta had just gone through a SECOND more serious snow storm in two weeks. The city was again, shut down for over five days, and Ms. C. J. had to sit for 20 hours a day, in a desolate, freezing cold, horrendously boring jail cell with a woman who hated the sound of her snoring; something she knew very well that C.J. couldn’t control, but the woman swore up and down that C.J. was doing it on purpose and would wake her up by yelling her name over and over in the middle of the night. The food looked and tasted like dog food and basically, all she could stomach were the peanut butter sandwiches, since she was a practicing vegetarian. 

Ms. C.J. had to endure this torture through meditation and prayer, until she could face the Traffic Court judge ten days after her arrest. All she could think about was getting out and being with her Candy Man Bill. After twelve days of eating horrible jail food, and living with loud and unsavory characters in the bleakest of conditions one could ever imagine, she was finally processed out of jail and released into the streets of Decatur. Her brand new “KINDLE” computer had been stolen by a crack head who lived in the house where she was living. They also stole her medications. So then, she had no home, no money, no car, nowhere to go...and she was IN PAIN!

Candy Man had been devastated from being over 3000 miles away with no way to contact her or to find out what had happened to her while she was incarcerated. He managed to send her $130 in cash when she was released, so she could at least get something to eat, a charger for her phone and some bus fare to get around town. Luckily she ended up being able to stay with her niece, in a beautiful townhouse about 25 miles outside of Atlanta for a short time. But, she still needed to figure out what she was going to do with the rest of her life. Her niece's HOA had regulations against unauthorized visitors moving in with her.  C.J. had to find someplace else to go, quickly.

She had tried to get help from Social Services and local homeless shelters but the shelters were full of seriously mentally and physically ill, angry, dispossessed, uneducated, dirty and hopeless people from the streets of Atlanta and they turned her away night after night because she didn't "look" homeless and didn't have a bunch of screaming babies on her hip. It broke her heart to see the numbers of Black men and woman who had been thrown away by the Society with nowhere to go and no one to care for them. She didn’t belong there and everything she had tried to do to get up on her feet had come to naught.  She was back to “square one,” again. All she got was a few free lunches and a pair of jeans to wear from the shelter's clothing closet. .

But then, finally --- her “knight in shining armor” came through…and between her family buying her a plane ticket and his mother agreeing to take her into their home (at least that is what he told her) in California, they decided that she should finally move to Los Angeles!  She had to swallow her fear of flying and living with earthquakes to go be with the man of her dreams. Little did she know that what waited for her in California was nothing like she could have ever imagined, and she definitely did not think that it could be worse than what she had just gone through.

This is the story of what happened to Ms. C.J. after she began living her new life with a Candy Man named Bill.  

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