TheWholeStory // episode_22

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Looking for episode_21 ? It's a podcast-only version, and a special edition called 'Story and a Half.' In this episode, my husband Francesco and Ellis take over the mic to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary and share what a long, strange trip it's been.

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May 20th, 2021

I have a few things I want to talk about.?

Exacting perseverance and money.

On Perseverance.

When Ellis was little, like 2 or 3, he did many things repetitively. Most things actually. We watched the same few episodes of Backyardigans or Spongebob like it was dogma. The ‘Dump Truck book’ was an early favorite that we read so many times we wore the edges off a nearly indestructible board book and Ellis could recite the entire thing by heart, as could I. The retainer wall outside our house on our corner lot, just too close to Parker Avenue to feel right about it, became a race track, where many a matchbox car made their way from one end to the other. Again. And again. And again. ‘One more!’ was the mantra, the chorus, the plea of my tiny Napoleon. Maybe all kids are like this at that age. I think I knew enough other moms to know that this is at least partly true. That our kids wanted to repeat the same actions and activities over and over, a way of searing them into the collective mind. But this kid was something else. This was some next level shit.?

And so a few weeks ago, in the cold and pouring rain, I stood trackside as Ellis went out for every single session. I stood at the final hairpin that enters the straight. I watched him-- through the back chicane, hairpin. Long arc on the double left, final hairpin, punch it down the straight, go wide on entry into the three corner blitz that is the trickiest part of the track, and the one that presents the most opportunity in the race for mistakes, mashups, and moves. Over and over and over. Lap after lap. I’ve finally been standing here long enough to see some of the nuances. I can discern now when he’s experimenting, making slight changes in his line, his entry and exit to the turns. As I stood there, it kind of baffled me that anyone could have the persistence and exacting perseverance to repeat, lap after lap, each and every time making mental notes of how to improve, what the conditions are, where there’s time to make up. And there’s an encylopedic even CPU style recording system in which he’ll come off track recalling specific laps, corners, moves. And I’m just in awe of him for being so committed, so exacting. So willing to do it over and over and over again. To find more time, make the tiniest adjustments, all to improve his craft. It’s a beautiful thing.

Money.

As someone who left home at 16 and has financially supported myself for much of my entire life, battled debt, declared bankruptcy, and pretty much lived paycheck to paycheck with a maximum 90 day runway, I have long been fascinated by how people ‘with money’ did it. I used to walk around in Manhattan and think-- what do ALL of these people do for a living to be able to afford to live in these apartments? How does that all work? When we’re broke, we don’t talk about it, for fear that others (or ourselves) will attach it to our value/intelligence/worth as people, making a correlation about our ability to make/manage money with who we are. Similarly, when we’re rich we don’t talk about it, because we don’t want others to see us only as this, and likely, the rich might feel a bit embarrassed/guilty about having what they do when others don’t. Then there’s the ‘middle class’-- we know that most of our friends have jobs with mid-range salaries, sometimes we know if they own or rent their house, if their kids are in public or private school and what kind of vacations they take, so we make reasonable assumptions about how close or far we are in comparison to them financially, with a few mystical variables including-- do their parents have money and do they help them out (down payments, school tuition, etc). Are they riddled with credit card debt to stay afloat or over-leveraged everywhere just to appear status quo.

If you’re my friend, I’ve likely wondered these things about you. No. I’ve totally wondered these things about you. And I know you’ve wondered them about me. But not because I really care about what your financial situation is-- it’s because I’m desperately trying to figure out if I’m on the scale of ‘normal’ in financial terms amongst my peers, especially when I feel like I’m drowning in the American nightmare and just want to pull the rip cord and move to a cave in the forest.

So, given the events of the past year of our lives, and the very long trajectory trailing behind it, I’m tempted to lay the whole thing out, numbers and all. Because if I were looking in, looking on, I’d want to know. I mean, I stand at the race track nearly every weekend and wonder-- how the hell do any of these people do this? I mean, a few of them look impressively well dressed, very Euro, very slim, so I assume those are the people from the good gene pools and the generationally wealthy families. That’s a no brainer. But the rest of us standing around in department store duds in our mid-range cars-- how the heck are they pulling together the funds to make this racing shit happen? Then again, there’s always that one guy who you literally can’t tell apart from the cleaning staff or the wayward hitchhiking hobo, and I’ll guarantee you, he’s the guy with the most money on the track (no offense to wayward hitchhiking hobos).

So, here we are. I want to tell you about the time that we had to go to the Coinstar machine with our change and then decide whether to buy some groceries or pay the power bill. Or the time we were going to do a film shoot and didn’t have a credit card with enough room on it to get the rental car. Or when the repo man came to get my car in florida after we lost it all in the financial crash of 2008. I want to tell you about when we used to Airbnb our apartment and sleep at our studio on an air mattress for the weekend. I want to tell you about bankruptcy, and cashing out Ellis’s college account and selling Apple stock to pay tax bills and then I want to explain the long and crazy road to February 7th, when, gradually and then suddenly, our financial situation changed drastically. I want to tell you all of it. So you don’t have to speculate. So you can see our challenges of having and not having.

For the better part of the past 25 years we’ve been treading water at best. And now, after 4 years of hard work, sleepless nights and an obsessive amount of research, Frank has made it happen. He turned a little bit of cash into enough that, for the first time in my whole life, we’ve got leverage. We’re not talking bazilliionare or anything close, but enough that my parents would be impressed (and probably surprised) if I planned on telling them, which I don’t.?

I’m relieved, after 25 years, to have some breathing room for the very first time. I’m also immediately a bit embarrassed and guilty for having it. My very first thoughts are about how I can help other people– frank and I always said, if we were rich, we’d be broke. I’m afraid of fucking it all up. We’re only in our early 40’s. Life is long and I’ve got a race car driver on my hands.

if we were rich, we’d be broke.

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This newsletter is comprised of entries from the journal I've been keeping since the day we got on the road in the middle of a global pandemic to go racing.

Shamelessly authentic and always with a sense of humor, I hope this story gives you a look behind the sheen of social media-- the shiny posts about racing, travel, and of course, eating, and sheds light on what it's really like to be a family taking risks and living life on the road.

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