📍 Hi. Welcome to Forever Wild, a podcast about family memory and the stories that shape who we become. I'm Megan McGovern, the oldest of four Sisters.
And I'm Nora Gibbs, the most ridiculous of four sisters. Together we're sharing our journey, growing up with an actor father, a mother who didn't think the rules applied to her, at least financially and a childhood full of chaos, adventure, and unforgettable moments.
Every episode we talk about stories from our childhood, and we talk about how siblings who come from the same families can see their past in very different ways, and how we carry that forward in our lives today. Thank you for joining us. This is forever wild. Um, I think you'd have some argument about whether or not you're the most ridiculous of the four of us.
Meagan:
So last time we ended our lovely story, I was in jail and, um, you were going to Australia, so against my will, against your will. So, okay, you wanna start with your story? My story? Whichever one you want. Well, I'm curious to see how your story goes. So I didn't know that you had that. This was why you didn't go to Australia, as I mentioned last week, so I knew, so where we ended it, I think last week was you had come back from California.
Nora: Yes. And you were driving up into Indian Lake area or Adirondacks, and you got pulled over and got arrested. So I had spent, I think I spent October, November, December, I think it was two or three months. In Los Angeles. I stayed with a friend of mine from high school, Chris, we were not dating and it was kind and I was actually dating back and forth.
His friend Josh, it was super uncomfortable 'cause I didn't really have a good place to stay. And it was, he didn't really kind of want this girl from high school there. And um, but I was trying to find myself, I was trying to find out where I want, what I wanted to do in life. I was 18, I had. No money, like not a dollar to my name.
I was gonna get a job out there and get an apartment and that I didn't wanna do that. And I really wanted to go to college. I wasn't sure how to do that. I knew I didn't want a life in LA and I didn't really like it there, so I was kind of lost. And then when I heard about the sale of the Century thing and the chance to go to Australia, I was, I was all over it.
And that was like, Australia wasn't my dream. But travel was my dream. My big thing was I wanted to go anywhere and I had never had the chance. And so I worked on getting my passport and went home. And when I got back there it was a hot mess. And I don't know if you remember what a hot mess you guys were in, but when I got back, you guys were living in a motel.
Do you remember that? In Indian where? I don't know. I remember that Katie was there and her boyfriend John was there. Oh, I do remember this. Yes. Yeah, we were living in a motel in Guns Falls. We were living in a motel, so I thought I was coming back to, you know, happy family reunion. I've been gone three months.
It's a couple days before Christmas. Everything's gonna be great. You guys are living in a motel living out of the ubiquitous black garbage bags. That are like the bane of my existence. Were all clothes are stuffed into garbage bags. We've got nothing left, no furniture. We don't own a damn thing.
Everything's been torn apart and mom is still waiting for the money from the business deal in New York, but the whole dream of me having a land in a cabin and all everything else is gone, right? This has all been reduced to the guy still owes her like $20,000 and that's all there is left. He's already, you know, basically screwed her out of the land.
I don't know if he screwed her out of it or not. She was awful. I'm gonna assume, no, I'm gonna assume this is her fault. I think he, I mean, I think he gave her 20, 30, 40, $50,000. I did look up something the other night. It is called right of first refusal. She had right of first refusal on the land, which, yeah, I was right.
Yeah. And I was just, just a word that's been floating around in our head for 30 years. It's a term that means that somehow or another, she knew the guy who owned the land and he gave her right of first refusal. She had the rights to do it. Whatever it was, she got a lot of cash out of it over six or eight months.
It kept us alive. She didn't get the land out of it. So I'm mad and I'm hurt and I'm upset and I find out you guys are living in a hotel and, and we're living in this hotel while we're waiting to go to Australia. We left the house in North River. And we were living there while we were figuring out how to get to Australia or how, while we were waiting for our flight to Australia, it wasn't, we were living in the hotel with no end game.
The end game was, we're in this hotel, we're leaving for Australia in a week. Okay, couple, so on the way back up to this motel from the airport, we got pulled over. Katie and I did, and I am sure they had our car flagged or they were looking for it. Right. So we got pulled over and I had checks up from my account and the guy said, I'm gonna arrest you.
And I was absolutely sure that this was wrong, that they were looking for mom. Absolutely sure there was no way they could do it because they didn't arrest me. White, 18 girl, girls that were cute and in college for nothing. And that I could talk my way out of it. Mom talked her way out of it. Why couldn't I cry and talk my way out of it?
And I tried and it did not work.
I was put in a cell and I had a notebook with me. And to be fair with all the privilege and everything else I had, I did. They did, I used it, they used it, whatever. And I was allowed to not be searched and I had all my clothes on and I didn't have to take my clothes off. And I was allowed to keep a notebook and a pen, and I called mom wherever and told her to come bail me out.
And I was in the cell a long time. I mean it was 12, 14, 16 hours something, especially after a flight from California. And yeah, a long time Katie had still had all my stuff in the car 'cause she had all my stuff. 'cause you know, she drove home and told mom what happened. But that was like my point where I said, this is it.
I'm done. I'm never going back. There's no way I could ever have anything to do with her again. I want more from my life than going to jail for her. And I feel bad for Morgan and Nora. Too bad. I can't do it. I, this is too much for me to rescue by myself. I'll rescue what I can, but I can't do this. And at this point, Katie had a boyfriend and Katie was very, Katie had a boyfriend by John, and Katie was very into John and they were, they were together, right?
Like I feel like at this point it was gonna be. Me and Morgan and mom, Katie and John, and then you were on your own. And it was essentially, I mean, Katie and John were essentially married for all. I mean, they were, that's how close they were. And um, they were all always together. Right. And there was no one without the other.
And for whatever reason, yeah, I didn't, I wasn't, I had never had a relationship really like that. I never really had a boyfriend at that point. And. I always had things I wanted to do and places I wanted to go, and I mean, for lack of better term, I don't know, maybe this sounds awful or arrogant, but I wanted to go do great things.
I was, I had been told my whole life I could go do great things and I couldn't see myself living whatever life this was. Yeah. And so. One of the things with the being out on jail is when I went to the judge and the judge said, you have to stay in the state and you can't leave. And I said, I don't know what you're talking about.
I have a ticket to go to Australia in three days, or whatever it was. Yeah. And he said, you can't. And I said, I, I have to. I'm going to Australia. And he said, then I'm gonna have to put you back in jail. You can't have bail. I don't think I ever knew this, or maybe I knew it at the time and as one of the many things I blocked out.
Well, and because of that, I'm sorry, mom was what? That makes me really sad. Like I'm really sorry that that happened. I'm too, and I, it's not my place to apologize, right. For mom's thing, but like, it's honestly one of those things like shit, that's a big life changing. That's a, you know, left path, right path.
Which one are you gonna go? Kind of thing. And that's, well, it's, that's a big thing. And I'm really, that happened? Well, you think of all the, the what ifs. Like what if I had met a guy in Australia? What if I had loved it there and decided to go to college down there? I know. What if I had just because I probably would have stayed.
I was looking for a way out. I mean, that was maybe my plan, but you could have had a platypus all to yourself. Oh man, koala a wallaby. Um, but after all of that, I think mom was secretly thrilled. That Katie and I were gonna stay behind because Katie had a dog and she hadn't figured out what to do with her dog.
She didn't leave sugar. Sugar. I mean, oh, you love sugar. One of the things that we haven't talked about in all of this is that throughout all of this, we had two dogs. We had Toby and Sugar. So when we're talking, Toby was half frat Weiler, half Doberman, Doberman Venture. Yes. And they found him. Mom found him.
I remember when we found him, it was in a, a furniture store parking lot. The guy who we were buying furniture somewhere in California. In California. So this had been all over with us. So, and then sugar was a little. White pood thing that Katie just adored. Sugar had been with us forever. Sugar had been with us since before the first sale of the century.
So sugar was first. And sugar was deaf. Sugar was born. Deaf, yes. Dumb. And she was awful. Oh my gosh. She was awful, but, and she was a white poodle, so she always had that brown shit in the corner of her eyes. Katie, love dong. I, she loved that dog. Katie loved that dog. The way Sandra loves Rosie. There was, there was no separating them.
So all of this, so when we're talking about like leaving LA and Ben Stein and all of this, we're also talking about packing up a doberman and a poodle in the car and we talk about showing up at my Aunt Sonya's house for Christmas the year before this. That's what we we're, we, you know, this is, you know, with a doberman and a poodle and the houses in Connecticut and all the places that my mother rents and the house in Indian Lake on the lake.
Two dogs. I don't remember the dogs there, but they must've been there with us. They were there, so we're letting them in and out all the time. All of that. So there is no place for us to go with two dogs, and Katie can't figure out how to go to Australia with the two dogs. And so I think mom was thrilled that there was gonna be somebody to leave behind and, and also she had unfinished business with the guy in the land deal.
She went and rented a house in a place called Bolton Landing. She rented a summer beach. A summer house again, but it was, oh really? It was winter. So she got a good deal on it and she got us into this house for Christmas and we managed to have a Christmas tree. And this was, I think you guys were leaving in between, you left in between January, in between Christmas and January 1st.
So also it's important to note that she rented this house from the manager of the Adirondack Red Wings, which was the pro hockey team up there. That is important to note. That does come in later. It does come in to play, so you're welcome. We rented this house, which was a really kind of a cool house with, that was a great house with two dogs, and she essentially.
Was there for two or three days. Somehow we got a Christmas tree and decorated it, I think, because you couldn't have Christmas without a tree. And two days after Christmas, she gave Katie and me, which also meant giving Katie, John and me. I think it was $15,000 or said, here's where you get the $15,000.
You're gonna get it in three days from this guy in New York. And I want you guys to go up to the Adirondack. And pay off all of my bad checks everywhere so that I don't get arrested when I get back and pay the rent on this house for the next couple of months and send the rest to me in Australia if we can figure out how to wire it and live on the rest of it.
So she's leaving a 17-year-old, an 18-year-old, or six, I think Katie was 17 and I was 19 at this point, and she left us. With $12,000 cash in the middle of nowhere. But we also didn't have a, but when we had a terrible car, like a $1,500 garbage car. Yeah. So you guys left? Well, the police were looking, let me backtrack a little bit.
The police were looking for mom at this point, and the reason I know that is because she knew they were looking for her because in this house there was a really big master closet, and in the back of the master closet there was like. Space access or some kind of access to a hidden like space. There was a crawl space back there.
Yeah, a crawl space. And mom had us, I don't remember who was there, it was me, I think Morgan, maybe, I don't remember who was there. She had us practice hiding her in that space in case the cops came to get her. So that's one of the reasons that she wanted us to stay behind because when we got this money from the guy, and that's one of the reasons the guy was so done with her, 'cause she had racked up bad checks and.
All sorts of stuff all over the Adirondacks, and she was giving him a bad name, so he wanted to buy her out and be done. So he had nothing to do with her. So he was gonna give her the last 15, $20,000, whatever it was, and be done. And she told us to go and clear all the bad checks, which could have been, and it's such a pain in the ass to do this.
If you have never had to clear bad checks for somebody, you have to go to every store. Well, at least you did then. You have to go to every store where the bad check was written, go to the manager and say, I'm here to pay off a bad check and apologize and tell them your life story and tell 'em how sorry you are, and give them an ID and tell them you're not the person who's doing it, but you're paying it off for this person.
And they might have three bad checks and they might have 12 depending on how many was written. And so one check could be for 45, 1 could be for 165, and one could be for 30. And then on top of that, so you have to pay off the amount for each of those. Then you have to pay off the $35 bounced check fee for each of those.
And then you have to go to the next store, and the next store and the next store. And to get that, you have to go to the li, get a list from somebody. I don't know where you get a list of warrants or where they're from. I feel like there used to be a place called Telecheck, but I don't know if that was after this.
Yeah, there's a place that you go and it tells you, and some of the pla, some of the things will have gone to warrant and some of the things won't have gone to warrant and some of the places will let you pay them off. And take it away. And some of them will say, no, I wanna prosecute. And then you have to go to the county or the, and some of them will let you pay one bounce check fee.
Someone will make you pay 12 bounce check fees, right. If you have 12. So it, it could be, doing something like this could take days and days and you would still not know if it was clear. And then you'd have to go back to the county, to the sheriff and say, does this person have any warrants? And like, well, I don't wanna tell you.
And they'd argue with you. And it was a whole thing. So that was like Katie and my task while she was gone was to go clear her name, at least in New York. So I don't, I'm gonna let you tell your story in a moment, but you left and Katie and John and I, and oh my God, it was Evan. Evan came up from Connecticut.
Connecticut, and he was my friend from Connecticut who I just adored and he was fantastic. And Nail was there at some point. Also, we have a good family friend from any like named Nail. I remember Nail being there for a little bit also. Oh, everybody was there. I mean, so this is the thing is we went and picked up the cash and New Year's Eve we bought bottles of booze, huge bottle of Oh sure.
And we bought Live Crab and we had a crab boil and. I did not do drugs at this point. I just didn't like drugs and I didn't like people who did drugs, but some of the people in the house did and there were serious drugs, and I was more drunk than I had ever been in my entire life. And New Year's Eve, we sang and drank and just, it was a long night and Eben was passed on the sofa.
I had one of the bedrooms and at five o'clock in the morning. The dogs went bananas and there was banging and yelling and banging and yelling and nobody could get up. And nobody could move. 'cause we were buried. I mean, we were passed out like crawling to the door and the cops came in looking for mom at 5:00 AM on New Year's morning.
And Eben, of course, was like, I want nothing to do with this. What the ha I'm, I, I do not want, lemme call my family lawyer. He's like, I do not want people looking for other people at five o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day. This was supposed to be a party and Right. Katie and John, Katie, for all of her faults and wonderful qualities and everything else, Katie hungover is not something you wanna deal with.
Oh my God. She was so mean. When she was in Harvard. She was screaming at the cops that my mother wasn't there and that they get the fuck out and you have no right to be here. And they're screaming at her and saying, we're gonna arrest you too. And then John's in the middle of the whole thing. It was a disaster.
And they're like, wait a minute. You're 18 and 16. You're not on the rent. What are you doing here? And I'm like, well, I'm allowed to be here. And they're like, she's in Australia. So did she abandon you? No. 'cause I'm over 18. Well, you're not on the lease if you're over 18. You're saying you're an adult. Back and forth.
So they did, they actually searched the crawlspace and they searched everywhere because they knew she was tricky and they finally believed she was gone. Uh, and then Katie and I started our life there because How long were you supposed to be in Australia? I think we were supposed to be there two weeks.
Okay. Two or three weeks. So that was the thing was mom was supposed to be back by like the end of January and. I think we're supposed to be back mid-January. 'cause I was in school there and I know that at this point I wasn't, I knew at this point I wasn't gonna go back to Indian Lake School. I had, I knew that, but in my mind I really wanted to go back to school there.
I loved Indian Lake. That was like my home. Right. And you know, I think the Adirondacks were where we felt at home. And I don't know why we felt at home there and not in Connecticut. And well. I mean, Connecticut's hard if you're not from there, but Indian Lake did feel like home. It felt like our people and um, like everybody was poor, right?
Everybody was poor. And everybody's kind of leaves you alone to be quirky. There are a lot of weird people there, and you don't have to be, I mean, in Connecticut, in la you have to be a certain way. You have to look a certain way. In Indian Lake, you can be like a bear hunter or you can be a professor.
Nobody really cares. You can be your thing. I mean, like I was on the volleyball team, I was on the soccer team. I had good friends there. You know, it was just, it was a really good fit for me and I felt like that was my home. So when we ended up having to go to Australia, I remember asking mom like, do I have to go?
Can I stay here? Can I stay with Taryn's family? Can I stay with anyone else? And you know her whole thing. You go where I go, amigo. Right. I remember her saying that, and I was like. I never wanted to stab my mom before, but I wanted to stab her in that moment. Like, oh, I'm not amigo. I don't wanna be, I don't wanna go where you go.
You know? So it was very frustrating to me. Um, well, yeah, both of us. So you guys go and I'm mad at you and I'm mad 'cause you don't wanna go and you're on the plane and I know. Sorry. So Katie, my bad. So Katie and John and I ended up staying behind and we had a whole different trajectory at this point than you guys did because of that.
So, um, I. Why don't you say what happened when you went to Australia? 'cause this is like a whole thing. So it was Chris between Christmas and and New Year, so it was. Winter and you know, three feet of snow, four feet of snow in the Adirondacks, and we went to Australia. We got on a plane and for whatever reason we flew outta Boston.
I'm not sure why or how that happened, but I remember somebody driving us to the airport. I don't know how we got there, but we flew outta Boston. We got to Melbourne and. We were put up in a hotel called the Travel Lodge. You know, travel Lodge was a big thing back then and it was in the middle of Melbourne.
It was fantastic. It was this huge hotel. We had one room with two queen beds and it was me and Morgan and mom. And it was the first time that the three of us had ever been like alone without all of us. And was this all paid for by, this is all paid for by Soul Century. Yes. So we had a account that we could just charge breakfast, lunch, and dinner to, like that was all included.
And we, and the hotel was paid for by sale of Century and I think we were supposed to be there in the hotel for like a week. I. But she somehow had them do it for two weeks. I don't know how that worked out, but so we were there for, and she was supposed to start filming a couple days after we got there because she was supposed to get, you know, they let you get acclimated 'cause of the time difference and all that.
But it was a really long flight. I mean, Australia, I. From New York is, you know, nine, 10 hours at that point. Probably longer than that. Yeah. It's a hike. Yeah, it was. It was a really long flight. And the flight, you know, the jet lagged. It was the first time we'd ever been jet lagged, so it's just like, what is wrong with my body killed us.
But, you know, Morgan and I woke up and we had a great time. You know, the first couple of days we're really fun. Like, we were like, okay, we're here. Let's embrace it. Got up, ran around the city like. We hopped. They have a, a cold train that went through the city, hopped on the train. We discovered passion fruit soda, which is still my favorite soda in the whole world that they have in Australia.
And we got ready for mom to start filming. We met all the other contestants. You know, there were a couple other American women there, a couple American men, I don't remember their names, but there were, um. They were nice, you know, everybody was nice. They did like a cast dinner and we did, we all went out to dinner together and it was, you know, we felt very welcome.
The people at Sale Central were fantastic. There were producers everywhere helping us, and all of the people were staying in the same hotel. So it was really kind of fun for a couple of days. And Morgan and I met a couple of girls right off the bat when we got there. Names Belinda and Mary and they were our age and they were so much fun and Mom kind of liked that we were running around doing her own thing.
And you know, we went to the movies with them and Guns N Roses had released a new album and we were blasted at everywhere we went on one of their little speakers. Okay, so, you know, it was time to get to the actual filming of the show and. We all kind of felt like there was an end in sight. Like either way we were gonna win or we were gonna lose.
It was all gonna be over soon and you know, we could go home. We'd been there for a couple of days at that point and you know, we had brought with us. So did mom think that she was going to win? I mean, what was the feeling there? Like this was gonna be another huge fortune? She, I think she knew how. Urgent this was, and like how stressful and how desperate she was for this.
So it was kind of a different feeling this time. Like it was, there was a lot more on the line with this one. Like if we wanted, well, I mean it was, we were poor the first time too. Well, but the first time we had been in a house and dad was in the same city with us. And so like at this point, at this point, mom and Morgan and I were literally like, we didn't have a home, like we were homeless.
Right. Well, yeah. And so where Katie and I back in, everyone was Yeah, like in our mind, I mean, I think in my mind anyway, you guys were like safe. You were in a house in New York and you know, in my mind the actuality is obviously always different. But, um, you know, we had brought with us this little box of Trigger girl pursuit cards.
'cause you know, like when we were little, we had always done that. That was kind of like our thing. Like we would quiz her and do all that. So, you know, we, we wanted to make sure she was ready for the show. And, you know, the day the show, the day of the filming came. And we all went to the studio together and mom was nervous, you know?
And you know, back to what we were just talking about, you know, during the years, earlier when she was filming, it was for fun and there was nothing to lose. And this time the prizes and the money were very, very real and she was really desperate. So there was a different feel to this time. It was a lot more urgent than.
The previous one had been, so the shows took about 12 hours to tape and it, you know, it was a long day and it was heartbreaking to watch, you know, mom began to show signs of wear. She wasn't the same woman that won their biggest jackpot earlier. You know, she was slipping mentally and you know, she had lost, she didn't even make it past the first show.
It was awful. Like, she just quickly went out, like in the, it was a round of shows, so she didn't, how many did she take? Just one show and that was it. She was out. Yeah, she did one show and she was out. I don't even think she answered, you know, four or five questions. Right. To my recollection, she didn't answer very many Right at all.
And there was no second chance that was it? No, it was like, you know, if you get, if you win the show, that person, the person who wins that show goes on to the next one. So it was like a bracket kind of thing. And she was out the first show. So she took it all in good cheer and was happy and y'all went home, right?
Absolutely. Actually, absolutely. Opposite of that, she, we went back to the travel lodge, you know, she was very upset. She was very sad, and she went to bed for a couple of days. She didn't get outta bed. So they had a goodbye dinner for everybody that had come and were on the show. And it was kind of fun, you know?
I mean, there were all of these awards and everybody was dressed up nice. And mom had gotten out of bed and showered and went to the award show because it was a nice dinner and a beautiful place. And then the next night there was like another little dinner just for people. It was more casual and it was kind of just a couple of the contestants and there were a couple of women there that.
We had met that my mom had gotten to be friends with and she had told this woman that her car didn't work. You know, she had not done the international thing. So, um, she not put a international. She had taken off the international hold or something, and that's what she had told the woman that it wasn't working internationally.
So she asked if she could borrow her card and she would of course send her a check as soon as we got back to America. And you guessed it, that did not happen. Okay. But you know, and I know mom never a credit card in her life, correct? I did know that. Okay. And it was a very un, it was the first time.
Because I really liked this woman. She was very sweet. I don't remember her name, but she had like a bob and it was like curly blonde hair and she was just such a sweet woman, you know? Um, I really adored her and I remember thinking, I don't like where this is headed. And it was, it was the first time I was uncomfortable because I really liked somebody, mom was about to scam and like that I knew of and I knew that, you know, I was gonna be part of it.
So she borrowed a credit card from a woman and said that when she got back, she would send her a check for whatever we had spent and we just needed it to get us home. We were leaving the next day, right? We were gonna come back to America the next day on this flight. Well, the next day came and mom said, you know what?
I think we're gonna stay another day or two and we're just gonna hang out here. We're in Australia. We might as well just kind of poke around a little bit. So we stayed. At the same hotel for a couple of days and two or three days later, and again, we're running around the city, we were going to the public pools all the time.
We would go to the beach. I'm in a summertime in Australia, right? Like. So it's the middle of the summer there. It's hot. We to the beach. The beaches were gorgeous. I saw my first pair of boobies on the beach, 'cause it was topless beach. And I was like, holy cow, where am I? And I was like, oh, you know, they put french fries on their burgers there.
It was Vegemite everywhere. Oh, I want a french fries on a burger. That sounds excellent. They put french fries and they put a fried egg on their burger. So good, so good. But they had like Vegemite at McDonald's and I'm like, what is this crap? But um, anyway, so after a couple of days, travel Lodge put two and two together.
That sale of the century was no longer paying the bill for our room, and they very politely asked us to leave by, okay. Boxing up all of our goods and putting them outside of our room. Actually, they put them at the front desk and when they saw us coming back from something, they said, I'm sorry, we've had to.
You know, re possess your room. You no longer have a room here. So with this woman's credit card, we went and got another cheap hotel for a night, and then the next day mom said, Hey, you know what, while we're over here, I think it'd be so fun to just drive down to Sydney for a couple of days and check out Sydney.
Because Sydney, so Melbourne to Sydney is like a 14, 15 hour drive. But you drive down. I was just gonna say that's not close. No, no, not at all. That's like driving LA to San Francisco or LA to like Seattle. It's, yeah, LA to Seattle kind. Seems like 14, 15 hours. It was a hike. Yeah. It's not something that you just like do.
Oh no, you just do it. It's fine. Not a big deal. Okay. Yeah. So you just, the car. Well, so we went and rented a car on this woman's credit card. Okay. And mom was the only one who could drive. I mean, Morgan was 15. Morgan didn't drive. Mom drove, right. Okay. And, well, Morgan could drive a little bit like she kind of knew how to drive, but she did wasn't Morgan was 15.
That's the whole point. It doesn't matter if she knew how. Well, okay, well this comes into play later, so I'm just, okay. That's called foreshadowing. Okay. So we, um, rented a car. And we drove, we left Melbourne and we drove from Melbourne to Sydney and it was, I think it was a three day trip or two day trip, and it was absolutely gorgeous.
It was the most beautiful thing, like you drive through and you're driving through like the Snowy River National Forest and like, I'm like, Hey, I think someone's parrots loose. And it's like, no, that's just a parrot. Like this is where they're from. Yeah. You know, and it was unbelievable. And we went through this beach and it was called I can't, 13 Mile Beach or something.
It was so pretty that I like swore I would someday bring my kids back there. It was the most incredible beach in the world. Spoiler alert. I did get to bring my kids back there and it was just as cool as I expected. So That's crazy. Yeah, that was kind of fun. So we did that drive. We got to Sydney and Oh my God, what do we do in Sydney?
Oh, so we get into Sydney. And the whole way we're driving through all this stuff. Of course I think it's beautiful. And they're pointing out this beautiful thing and every time they would say something isn't this beautiful? I'd say, yuck. No, I wanna go home. That was like my quote, Ugh, it's ugly. I wanna go home.
And that was my whole thing. I, it was a beautiful place. I really wanted to go home at this point. It was like two and a half, three weeks. You were what? You were 13 or 14? I was 13. I was 14. Yeah. You were younger than Scout. Yeah. Scout says, yuck, I wanna go home. I was in. Italy with her on her 13th birthday, and I wanted to go scuba diving on erect, uh, to go see beautiful antiques under the ocean.
And she sat around complaining because she hated the entire place and wanted to go home and didn't like the food and everything was terrible. Solidarity scout, solidarity. I'm on the beach in Italy. On my birthday. On her birthday. Like, can we just enjoy the Italian beach? Nope. I hate everything. I want to go home.
The food sucks. This is terrible. Okay. Yeah, so good. It was, you know, I was miserable. I did not like it. I wanted to go home. It was. You know, I knew that school had already started again and I was missing things and I, you know, yeah. I had FOMO before it was fomo. I didn't, you know. Yeah. So we get to Sydney and we're there for a day and we're walking around Sydney.
We went to the aquarium, which was actually like, unbelievable. That was the first time I was like, okay, this is actually really cool. We saw Opera House, you know, we did the whole thing. Um, and we're sitting there in the hotel room and mom said. And I was really just in a shitty mood and mom said, I think I have a plan that we can stay here for a lot longer if we want to.
And she'd been working some plan, like every hotel we had stopped in along this route. She'd been on the phone with people. You know, we used to wake up in the middle of the, you know, like 7:00 AM and she'd be on the phone with someone whispering. Do you remember that? She was always doing that. She was always on the phone with somebody talking about a plan or writing in her notebook.
Yeah. Notes about something that you didn't know where it came from. It was like this weird shorthand she had that she wrote notes in. Yes, she did write shorthand. So you had no idea whether, I had no idea what it was. So she said, you know, I have this plan and we can stay here for a while longer, and I'd really like to, and I threw a fucking fit that you would not believe.
I, I, I believe it. I threw things. I kicked the wall. I screamed. I absolutely said, this is not happening. I'm going home with her without you. I will call Megan. I'll call Katie. They will come get me. Like, I, I'm like 13 years old, like, Megan's gonna come get me from Australia. Like, I mean, I, I would, I would've, you couldn't leave the country.
I didn't know that at all. That's true. I would've eventually come to get you. I didn't know that. So I threw a fit and you know, Morgan was kind of like, Hey, we're in Australia, we should stay. This is cool. And you know, I think Morgan's whole thing, and I know we've talked about this before, is she was bigger than Indian Lake.
Like she wanted to do big things. She wanted to be a California girl. She wanted to do something big with her life. And I just wanted, you know, a quiet life. Like I wanted stability. I wanted to be in school versus running around Australia. What a nerd was I right. Wouldn't well mean, I was kind of like, I was kind of like Morgan in a lot of ways.
I was too big for Indian Lake. I, I wanted to go to Australia. I wanted to go do the big things. But at 13, you know, a lot of kids just wanna be home and doing their own thing. They, and it doesn't even matter whether you loved Australia or wanted to travel. You were 13. You had a right to wanna be, you know, doing your own thing.
Yeah. Oh, well one thing we did do before we ended up leaving, um, in this whole little time period that I thought was so cool was just south of. Melbourne. Um, we, I guess we did this on the way from Melbourne to Sydney. Um, there's a little island called Philip Island, and that's where the ferry penguins are.
I was just gonna say, yeah, that's where the penguins are. Yeah. So we went and we saw the ferry penguins. Um, how did you get out there? Like you just paid the money and took a ferry or something, or did a No, it's a, it's like a, you took a bridge from Melbourne to. Yeah, you just drive over a bridge, but like you're driving over the bridge and there are like sheep on the hills and it's like rolling countryside and it's like the most beautiful country in the world.
And I only remember this so well because again, I was lucky enough to take my kids back a few years, like 15 years ago or 12 years ago. And we went back and we did the ferry penguins too, with my friend Kelly. My friend Kelly that I met in Singapore, had a house on Philip Island, coincidentally. And it was like, okay, that's pretty neat.
It was so cool. So she invited us. Sorry, I'm getting way sidetracked. But she invited us for Christmas one year when we lived in Singapore. So we did the whole Melbourne to Sydney Drive again, but with money at this time, which was so nice. But anyway, so we were in Sydney with me and Morgan and mom, and we convinced her finally to go home and, but we had this rental car that we had to, that was rented in Melbourne for like city use in Melbourne only.
And we were in Sydney. So Morgan and I, Morgan drove and she took the car. We drove it from the hotel like six blocks away, and we parked it outside of like it was, let's say it was Hertz or whatever. We parked it around the corner from the Hertz rental car company, and this was like after hours. So we parked the car around the corner and we wrote them a note inside and we wrote them a note and said, hi, you can find your car around the corner at this location.
Here are the car keys. And we slipped it through the after hours box so that they could have their car back. That's because you were leaving or because. Okay. We were leaving to go back to America. Okay. So I could to head back home. And we ended up, we moved, we drove back. We flew back, and we flew back to Albany.
Okay. So for some reason, I remember, I thought I remembered a lot more criminal activity in grift and bad stuff. It was all on one person's credit card. It might have been two credit cards, but my understanding is it was one lady's credit card. And you just, she didn't steal from anybody at this point. She didn't grab anybody's wallet or do anything else.
It was all just one credit card and one poor woman that Yes, you knew, but it wasn't Okay. Yeah, because later on, and I mean later on, we were, Nora and I were just talking before this episode about how bad it got, and Mom did a lot worse than just one person's credit card. Like she was stealing jewelry and stuff.
This, this was the first time I. Using someone else besides yours. Sorry. Using someone else's identity and having like a credit card and using it for whatever the hell she wanted. This is the first time I think she did that to some degree. I think this is gonna sound really weird and making it all about me, but I really think that once I left, she didn't care because I kind of kept her.
From doing bad stuff, I wouldn't have let her do it. I would've told Aunt Nora, I would've told the father I would've done something about it. And not that you and Morgan wouldn't have. No, we didn't. But I mean, we just, but at that point, like, you know, you're kind of with your mom and she's doing this thing and you know it's not right, but you're like, it'll all work out.
Right. But I think she, after that this point, everything went. This is the point where everything went sideways. There was the nothing. This is where everything went to shit. And nothing was left when this was done. Yeah. This was it. This was the absolute Your life was, I mean, and you're talking about turning points where what if I had gone to Australia with you and what if, I mean, I, I might've, if Mom had said, let's stay here, I might've said, hell yeah, I'm gonna go to college here, but let's do this.
Well, and I think, I think anybody listening. You know, and is thinking there's no way that all of this stuff happened without somebody trying to intervene or someone in their family trying to jump in and say, we have to help these kids. There's too many weird things happening. We did have family members who wanted us.
They wanted us, they wanted us to come live with them. They wanted us to stay with them. They wanted to help us. Not all four of us. Nobody wants four kids. Okay, well, I'll say that. Me, I mean, I'll, I'll say this. One of the big everybody in the family wanted to help, right? Nobody wanted four feral girls.
Right? And I don't think there's anybody who would've taken on all four of us. Nobody has the resources for that. Especially, I mean, all of our family that could have taken this in had kids of their own. Right. And a husband. Yep. And they had two kids of their own. And there is, one of my aunts didn't have kids at the time and she had had, at this point she had two babies.
Yeah. She had two babies. Yeah. And nobody and the other ones had older kids or they were our age. Nobody can take in four feral children. And the big, big thing with taking in the four of us. Is that you're dealing with my mother? Yeah. You knew mother. She's always gonna be there in the background. My mother is a force of nature, so in order to get the four of us, you would have to sue, go through custody, fight her tooth and nail, have her trying to abduct us in the middle of the night and have all of us convinced that she, we wanted to be with her.
And we would sneak out in the middle of the night and go away and we would be screaming and yelling and saying, there was no way you were gonna take us it. There was no. Real way for any of them to intervene. And at this point you were also, you were 18, you were 19. Right. But up until this point, like why didn't anybody step in right up until this point?
Um, they helped by giving her money to keep us from being homeless. And there was never a grand plan to buy her a house or pay her rent for a year or figure out a long-term plan because my mother always said she had it. Covered that first. She won sale of a century. Everything was covered, or she was gonna get the money from the house in Los Angeles and everything was covered, or she was getting the money from this Adirondack deal and everything was covered.
It was gonna be fine. And so there was nobody ever stepped in to make a plan until, yeah, until it was too late until I was 18. Yeah, Katie's 17. You guys are young. And it was just a disaster. All right, so you come back from. Australia, we came back from Australia and we call you and you and Katie at this point are living in a little apartment in Hudson Falls, New York.
Okay, so here's the thing. You guys were gone. It seems like you guys would've gone a lot longer than that. I don't like, I honestly, and I know this is gonna sound so weird to people, I have no idea how long we were gone for. I don't know. It could have been a month, it could have been three months. I don't know the answer to that.
I think you were gone until at least March because this is what I know and what I did on my end was we had moved into that house right before Christmas and we took the money and we went and paid off all of the credit cards and all of the bills and or whatever, checks all the bills. Everything else kept her outta jail.
I went to court. I paid off my. Bounced checks and kept myself out of jail. The judge gave me a stern lecture and I didn't know whether to thank him or roll my eyes at him or spit, and I decided that because I had been out of college the year before, the semester before that, I couldn't do that anymore, and I enrolled at the community college, the Adirondack Community College because I didn't know what my plan was, but I knew I wanted to do that in the meantime.
I don't remember how or why, but we didn't have the money for rent for February and March because we had spent all of that money on cocaine partying and paying off bad checks. And I think we also bought a car, like a $4,000 car. We had to go down to New York City to buy 'cause mom told us to. But I do know mom expected there to be, you know, $10,000 left over from that 15,000 and there it wasn't there.
And I mean there's only so much money you can spend on, on alcohol and booze in a month. It wasn't, I remember her being very upset with you guys 'cause she did expect you guys to have money when we got back. Right. But we literally did what she said. We paid off all the checks and paid off all the debt and.
Bought stuff for the house and just stupid stuff like the, the battery on the car was always dead and we had to get the car jumped all the time and a hundred dollars here and a hundred dollars there and some groceries and it just went and the guy from, and I think it was only like a month to month lease for the winter.
It wasn't like a long-term thing. It was like you can have the house for January and by February you need to be out. All I know is that we were outta money. Katie and I didn't know what to do, and the guy from the Red Wings called us and said, we want my house back. I, I'm only gone for a month or two. I need to come back and, you know, and so by March 1st I did something I had never done before and I called a family member for help.
And I called my uncle Bernie and I said, I want to get my own place. And he's like, about fucking time. Sure, what do you need? And I love him. I found an apartment for $300 a month rent, and I needed. A $300 deposit and $300 for the first month. And that seemed like the most money I had ever imagined owing somebody.
And it was an insane amount of money to borrow from somebody, but I didn't care. And he said, here's $600. Off you go. And I, it's funny you don't think about it. I don't even remember in those days how you would've done that. Would he have mailed me a check? Would, would I have gone to Western Union? Things were just harder then.
I do remember going to Western Union occasionally, so I feel like that was the thing back then. Yeah. But Uncle Bernie wouldn't have gone to Western Union, probably would've just gone to his bank and wired it. Yeah, that's true. Um, I don't know. So Katie and I got a tiny little apartment and it was actually, it was three bedrooms, but it was a little, I mean, the whole thing was probably four, 500 square feet and it was on the.
Upper floor of a house where an 85-year-old man and his wife lived downstairs, I remember. And they rented, they rented out the uh, uh, the downstairs and their names were Mr. And Mrs. Flood. And so this is 1990, I think they were born in 1905 and 1908, something like that. And they had lived in that house ever since he was born in 1905.
And so they had lived in that house for, you know, 85 years and. She loved us. And the biggest tragedy though, and this was really hard, I don't even like talking about it, but it was hard, is that they wouldn't take dogs. And we still had Toby and Sugar and Katie said, I can't go without my dog. And we said, okay.
And we took sugar to meet them and they said, oh, sugar, sugar, sugar. Oh, sugar. She's such a sweet little thing. But they couldn't have Toby, they couldn't have a Wiley Doberman in their house. Yeah. Katie and I had to take Toby to the pound and we begged them to find him a good home, but we were literally stuck with nothing but the clothes on our back, no place to live.
And Uncle Bernie had given me the month money for an apartment and I was not going to let that go because of a dog. But we had carried this dog, you know, for all over the country at this point, and I was. Devastated for it, but it wasn't even my dog. I didn't even like the dog. I don't even, I mean, it was like, and, and this was one of the, this was one of the, the points where I was like, I've gotta make sacrifices.
I've sat in a jail for this woman. I cannot lose my life over a dog. I, I've gotta, and I'll say Toby at this point was older and had a lot of like, hip problems and Toby was not gonna be along much longer. So like. Well, no, I was hoping you were saying when, say Toby was a great dog and I'm sure somebody adopted him and loved him 'cause he was so sweet.
So I don't know either way. Well, Toby was my dog, so I'm looking at the bright side like he was. Yes, it, within a year or two, it would've been a very different situation for him. He would've been very expensive. It would've been a lot of pain. I don't ever feel bad that like, I'm Of course, like when I found out, I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Toby's gone. You know, like it was heartbreaking. Right. But Right. You know, with some retrospect and, you know. Yeah. Like there was just no way I, there was, and it was one of the hardest things I've, I've had to do was like, you know, but also somebody else put me in this situation. I know. I, I didn't ask, I was mad at mom.
I was not mad at you. Oh, yeah. So Katie and I moved into this place and we had no furniture. I don't remember what you did for Craigslist. Garage sales there. You probably looked for a, I I remember sitting on a couch and I remember you guys saying it was so funny. This is actually one of my favorite, like fun memories.
And you probably don't remember this, but you guys at like, I wanna say five 30 at night. You said, come here, come here. And we would go down and sit at the bottom of the stairs. And the old people do the stairs, would listen to jeopardy really loud and we could hear it through the stairs or through the wall.
'cause the wall was so thin. Do you remember the Yep. And we would sit on the, I don't that, no. We would sit on the stairwell and listen to their jeopardy when you guys didn't, when your TV wasn't working. These people were so fantastic. I don't, yeah. We never had a tv. I had nothing. Yeah. And I got a job at Pizza Hut and I waited tables at Pizza Hut and I ended up living in this place for three years and going to school here for three years.
And I loved these people and I. The little old lady was very, very old school, 1930s, 1940s. She had not ever come outta this. She wore a wig every morning and purchased it on top of her head, and she insisted that since I was going to school, she would make me a, a sand, a, a lunch, a packed lunch to go. Uh, that's a very upstate New York thing that you take a packed lunch everywhere and that it's always chicken sandwiches and it's just dry chicken between TVs of bread.
But she put butter on the bread and every morning she would get up and she would make me a chicken sandwich because she thought, thought that was maybe part of my rent or something, or it was the right thing to do, or just the nice thing to do. I don't know. I love that. That's such a great story. It is. I just, I really loved her and she was kind enough to let me take the dog in and they loved sugar and they loved Katie and I, you know, from that point on, I, I waited tables at pizza and I went to college and I was very.
Lost and kind of alone, but also happy because it was my own place in my own life. But when you guys got back, the first thing mom did was say, okay, we're gonna move in with you. You've got three bedrooms. And I was horrified. And I had started going to a, a counselor. A counselor at the community college.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Wow. And she said. You can't let your mother move in with you. And I said, what? What do you mean my mother has to move in with me? I can't leave her homeless. And she said, no, you have to say no. And my mom was furious. I had stolen all of her money and taken all of her money and used it irresponsibly and thrown it all away.
And probably I did use a lot of it irresponsibly. I really don't remember what happened to it, but I know I didn't blow the whole thing. Right. I know I did what she told me to do. And there's probably a couple thousand dollars that was, you know, missing, but. Um, in, in general. I knew I hadn't done that, but she was furious screaming at anybody who would listen that I screwed her over and not Katie, of course, just me.
And she ended up doing something that I had never seen her do before. And this was like how we knew it was the beginning of the end. She decided that. I don't know why there were still cops looking for her, but there were, I think the bad judge were, Nope, that's after this apartment. She was wandering for something else.
We moved into an apartment in Glens Falls. We moved into an apartment. Okay. So she did move into an apartment first. Okay. So you guys got an apartment. Yes. So you guys got an apartment and she was mad that she had to get an Apartment, furious apartment. It was a three bedroom apartment and it was above dentist and it was in falls.
She did that to be me, arc, Katie and me, and furious that we were both saying paying separate rent and that I was making her maintain her own place when I had an apartment where she could live for free. And if I was making money at Pizza Hut and I could make my own rent, why would I make her get her own place and didn't love her and didn't?
I love you guys and what was wrong with me? This is apartment. I started going to school, this department I went to Glens Falls High School. Um, or middle school. I went to Glens Falls Middle School 'cause I was in eighth grade in this department and it was so fun. I had the best time of my life in Glens Falls.
I met my friends that I'm still friends, I'm friends with on Facebook too day. I'm still friends with people. Happy. Yeah. I mean, I was, I was happy there. I thought it was a, a good place to live. It was better than the Adirondacks 'cause it wasn't, I.
Yeah. Right, right. So it had all the beauty of the place there, but you weren't stuck in a little town. I'll say this is the apartment road closed that I started drinking. I had my first cigarette. I smoked pot for the first time, and I kissed my first boy for the first time. Shane Mul. Okay. Hey, wow. Oh, I went crazy in that house.
We used to go to parties and fields. Ugh. What was the word? No, we were there for like three or four months. I don't think that lasted very long though, because so, so where this all wraps up Yeah. Is that by the end of that semester of, of college for me, and by the end of everything else, summertime mom was one.
It was summertime. There were more warrants up for her. Summertime. Yeah. And four wins. Ser mom said herself into a mental hospital, four wins. And I remember thinking. That maybe this was going to be good for her, maybe this was actually gonna help and that maybe she was mentally ill and that maybe this would fix everything.
Um, and then it became clear that she was doing that to avoid being arrested. That they weren't gonna go arrest her from a mental hospital and you, she made Morgan come stay with us. And I was mad about being saddled with a 15-year-old sister. I remember that, and I know that that's not fair to Morgan.
Morgan had no place to go. But I also remember thinking, I can barely feed myself. I don't want to give my extra bedroom to Morgan. I don't have room for this. I can't do this and I'm being sucked back into this and I don't remember you. I ended up going to stay with, got moved, our aunt and uncle in Houston and time that I had ever.
Spent any time with them.
I was not told they must have known until halfway through my stay there,
I feel like. So where did I remember thinking mom had gone to visit Uncle Bernie and Aunt Sonia? I think that's what I was told is she went to visit her siblings. So we moved out of that apartment. I went to go stay with them in Houston for the summer. Had a great summer. Um, yeah. I bet. Well, they were always fantastic.
I'm joined, we joined a summer camp. I joined a day camp at the YMCA in Houston, and we went all over Houston. Every day we went swimming, we would go roller skating, we'd go ice skating. We went to movies. We had the best time ever. We had so much fun that summer and they, you know, uncle Bob would drop me off in the morning.
I would go play with my friends all day, go back, we'd have a nice dinner. It was like the most fun summer. Sydnee was the little tiny baby. I was babysitting her. She was like 10 months old. One, maybe a year old. Ben was like three or four. Sounds like the worst. Oh my God was so fun. I had the best summer and I would like sneak cigarettes and ugh, the, I remember smoking in Uncle Bob's bathroom and he found and he was like, Hey.
Don't ever smoke a cigarette in my house again and ain't where I found my cigarettes. And she cut them in half and like dumped water in them in the trash can. 'cause I went to go get them outta the trash can. I thought she had just threw 'em away. She had like crushed them and poured water all over them.
Oh, I was so mad.
Oh God. How dare somebody parent you? Um. So then, anyway, to wrap up this, this whole saga, this, I'll say this was kind, anyone's still listening to this, knew that this in the next two or three years is a lot of this. It's a lot of, what the fuck are you talking about? How did you end up doing this? Where did you go?
Do you remember what happened from here to here? It's a lot of, I mean, in the next couple of years from this point on, I probably moved another eight to 10 times.
And mom got progressively right, worse and bold from, okay, I've got a scheme that's a little sketchy, but it might make a lot of money to fuck it, steal her purse, take her jewelry, let's just throw the stuff. And it went from borrowing someone's credit card to stealing people's wallets out of their purses very quickly after this.
So it was, um, right. You know, it was a lot. But I think that right. I think that her going to the mental hospital that summer was the best thing that could have happened to me because it showed me what I wanted my life to live like look like. I knew that you could have a family and you could have dinner at five o'clock and you could have kids and do the whole thing, and I.
And that was what I mean, going to see them. My aunt and Uncle Houston did the same for me. They gave baths every night and they made sure their kids brushed their teeth and the kids got dressed every morning in clean clothes and they had pajamas. And the pajamas were in a certain place and there was no throwing everything on the pile next to the floor.
There was next to the bed. It was just, there was laundry done and it was done well, and there was, the refrigerator was cleaned out and. They ate dinner at home and they didn't say, oh, and I remember when I, to somewhere they were going, a bookstore, and I was babysitting my cousin and she asked me if I wanted a book.
And I said, oh, I'm really into Stephen King right now. 'cause I just discovered like reading for fun. I said, can you get me the new Stephen King book? And she came back with Jane Austen and I was like, I don't want Jane Austen, I want Stephen King. I want murder. I want mayhem. I want trash. And she's like, no, Jane Austen's really good for your brain.
And I'm like, bro, I don't want something good for my brain. I want, you know. So,
well, I, I remember one of my absolute favorite memories is when we would go there, first of all, they put the kids to bed, read the books, reunited at a certain time, and they would lie down with them and they would always say, and Bob would always say, 'cause he was, you know, pretty young and hip at this point.
He'd say, well, after I put the kids to bed, we'll go out. And I was like, 'cause he wanted to go do cool stuff. And he was probably, you know, 38 at this point, maybe, or, and. So I would, um mm-hmm. He'd put the kids to bed. He'd always fall asleep. We'll put 'em into bed and he'd get back up and I'd be like going out.
He's like, oh my God. Oh, the bookstore, I guess. But we would go to the bookstore, the book stop, and he would buy me whatever I wanted. I could buy a hundred dollars worth of books if I wanted to. I could buy as many books as I wanted. And it was never, and it was fun, right? I mean, they were starting this company that I now work for and it was, um, that I've now worked for, for 28 years.
Um, so I remember, you know, the company had just been open for like five years at that point, and it was just, it was a really big deal. So
it was a really big deal and it was just nice to see normal families and I always used to think, how did. My aunt grew up, all of our aunts normal, they all grew up and had these wonderful lives, and mom was just chaos after chaos. Okay.
All right. So after this it just spirals I think so too. Further and further and you know, again, is a good point to, it's, it's very chaotic the next couple years and a lot of people listening to this are gonna think, there's no way this is true. And I'm just here to tell you, it absolutely all happened. It absolutely changed a lot of people's lives and, um, you know, it shaped who we are and who we became.
Yeah, I mean, and that's the whole point of this is how do you go through this and then learn how to do normal? How do you do bads for your kids? Well, I'll tell you, every time my kids have a cavity, they blame it on my bad parenting. So maybe I didn't know, maybe I never learned. It's really funny. All right.
Alright, well, so after all that, thank you for listening to Forever Wild. If you are flabbergasted by this episode, like I'm, or if you've enjoyed this episode, you know, let us know. We would love to hear from you. So send us your questions, 📍 thoughts, um, ideas for what to talk about next and what you'd like to hear more about.
Until next time, stay wild. Bye bye.
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