9. Yippie - ex-wife

1984

August  9th Vacuum packed tofu and burgers 

October  5th “what is it with you and new machinery?’ 

6th  first night overnight at factory

in  ephemeris wrote at top of October ‘got  rid of Lesia’ Uranus trine Venus 

31st  told of court order

November  12th purchased tickets to US

December  20th Honolulu 

24th  NY

29th  Baltimore 

31st  London – passing one-night stand; the London chick and me

Sometime in 1984, we bought a large mixer for our secondary products. We could make hundreds of cheesecakes at a time and mix huge amounts of tofu and rice and flour and spices and herbs for our burgers. I think it was a fifty-gallon mixer and it made life so much easier. We were getting more customers and at some point in early 1984 we got our first interstate distributor in either Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane. 1984 was such a crazy year, even more than the years before that I forget which state we began to send products to. What changed our packaging and ability to ship was the introduction of vacuum packing our products.

I had tried using a vacuum packing machine on burgers and tofu to see how long they would last with the thought that if it extended the shelf life and made packaging easier I would buy it. The problem with tofu is that it has a very short shelf life and it is a fiddly thing to deal with. Tofu has to be kept under water unless it is in a tetra pack, which is an extremely expensive process to do. We saw in the States that most tofu companies put tofu in water in a container the size of the block of tofu and then a heat seat film was put over it. The way we delivered tofu was by placing tofu in plastic bags then placing the tofu in the bags in buckets of water and taking them to the tofu shops and putting them in trays of water. The shops would have to change the water in the tray each day or the tofu would start going off within a couple of days. The whole process was slow and messy. When I found that I could put a block of tofu in a special plastic pouch then have a machine suck the air out without having the tofu surrounded by water and then to have it last for a month without going off I was quite excited. Our burgers went from lasting one week to lasting two months. I could not get the cheesecakes to work in the vacuum system as the entire filling would just get squashed like baby poo all over the pouch, well the chocolate ones anyway, and it was not a good look. The vacuum packer cost $4000 and it took a lot of convincing Lesia that it was the right thing to do but once we had it we were able to expand our market out of South Australia. We started making spring rolls with tofu filling and we could put four in a pouch and using some sort of food grade gas (so we were told) to keep all the air from getting sucked out we could vacuum pack them and they began to sell so well that they topped our burgers and tofulafels in sale, coming in second only to the cheesecakes.

The tofu business looked like it was going to be successful but Lesia and I were not going to make it as a couple. We broke up in April or June of 1984 and I stayed in the tofu factory for a few days before returning and trying to do whatever it was to keep us together. She made some threats about going legal and that kept me at home except for making tofu for several more months. It is strange how only a few words can make everything end though. Sometime in October, our mixer broke down and Lesia said, “what is it with you and new machines?” and that was it. I remember those exact words so well but I do not remember much else of that year prior to that.

I stomped off, as only a male can do, to the tofu factory and stayed for a few days and worked on the factory, scraping paint off the woodwork and other such unimportant and non-impressive tasks and when I did return ‘home’, she told me I no longer lived there, so I stomped off once again, as only a male can do, back to the tofu factory and slept in my office for the weekend, in between making tofu and other related soy stuffs. On Monday morning the good wife/mother dropped the children off at the factory and said she had to go to work. I did not hear from her until later in the week.

The children and I lived in front of the tofu factory and that is when I really started to fall, and the children fell with me and we did not stop falling until August 16th 2003 when there was no further to fall. Leigh fell 15 stories that day.

It was mid-October and here I was in a foreign country kicked out of my home of three years which at this point had been the longest I had lived anywhere since I was seventeen back in Clifton Park. I had a tofu business but it was only partially mine and two children aged forty-five months and fifteen months. I had no family nor friends and just enough income to pay the mortgage on the tofu factory for the upcoming month. I was quite upset. I went to complain to Lesia’s parents about my life but of course that was quite a dumb thing to do they just told me to go back to the States.

So the children and I lived at the tofu factory for a couple of weeks and on weekends I would take the children to Lesia and on Monday morning she would send them by taxi to me, and I had to pay the taxi fare. The first time that happened I did not have enough money as I did not know she was doing such a thing and luckily the people renting the front part of the tofu factory had enough money on them for me to pay for the taxi. The children played outside or in my office whilst I made tofu. It was a nightmare. Then I got a court order from Lesia, which basically consisted of several pages of insults about me. Somewhere during her tirade she mentioned she was going to file for a divorcee in a year, as that is how long it took at that time in South Australia. I was still unsure what the issues were except that we did not like one another.

We were sent to a court counselor but that did not go very well. We both tried to get the bloke to side with us. I would tell what a horrible human being Lesia was and then she would get stuck into me until the court counselor told us to leave because we were wasting his time. The children continued to live with me. The court order seemed like a lot of scare tactics and control maneuvers by Lesia. It was not clear what she wanted except to find someone, preferably someone influential, like a judge, to tell me that I should get my act together and stop being such a flake. She told me that if I went for any claims on her house that I would lose the children completely and I had already given up my country to be with these kids and I was not going to miss out raising them so I agreed not to make any claims on her house. She had bought the house a year before meeting me and my work at the tofu factory went towards paying off the mortgage for almost four years already but I was not to ask for anything so I didn’t. I was basically happy to be free of her. Now all my energy would go toward helping my children escape South Australia with me.

We were supposed to make deals through lawyers that we had hired. I had gotten my man out of the yellow pages. It was not long before I began to wish I never had started with him. On the day we went to court he had a big acne pimple on his face, I think he was about 24 and just out of school. My lawyer’s advice was to let her have the children and I was to work hard and save a lot of money then come back in a couple of years and “we“ would get the children. He said it would probably cost about ten thousand dollars and that was the end of my relationship with him. I know that ownership was linked with possession and if I gave up my children, I would never have the hope of having them live with me in the future. I was probably his first case, and it was obvious that he did not know his ass from a hole in the ground.
The first court order of what would end up being more than sixty court orders in the time I was parenting in South Australia (is that a Guinness Book of Records, record?) was heard in court on October 31st 1984, two weeks after the children were left with me at the tofu factory. In that Order there were many of what I would consider quite insane statements about me but what pissed me off the most was that it said I was to surrender my United States passport to the court. I could not believe what I read.  I was a free citizen in Australia on my accord and I had done nothing illegal and here this person is trying to make a prisoner of me by having the court take my passport.

Less than two months later in December, I decided to take a trip to New York; I needed to look at my life and to determine what it was that I wanted to do. I had gone to the court hearing Lesia tell the court to take my passport and of course the judge said that there were no grounds to take my passport but it did show me at what level Lesia was going to go to prevent me from being free and for the next sixteen years I would fight for my freedom. Whether it was all done wrong and the children should have stayed with Lesia and I be left to view the children at her discretion meaning I would be a dog on a rope knelling to her every whim to even see the children or whether I made the right decisions is impossible to know. Whatever we did we did badly, and we did it all wrong. I had known men who were totally controlled by their ex-wives, and they would be allowed to see the children once or twice a month and to do that it would be done only if the demanding other person got their way. I had given up my country to make a home in a place I did not want to be, and I was not going to live in Adelaide and see my children whenever it would suit Lesia.

10. Leigh’s first ride was in a Rolls

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.