The Verdict

As much as I would love for this to be my review of the marvelous Sidney Lumet film, The Verdict (1982), starring Paul Newman in top form as down-on-his-luck public attorney (and sometime ambulance chaser) Frank Galvin, it is not. That laudatory review will have to wait for another day. Instead, what I want to present to you, dear reader, is a possibly fate-sealing verdict from the source of my financial support for the past decade. It may yet be the end of me. And, looking back over the calamitous decade that commenced when I left my sister in Anchorage, Alaska and flew to the Philippines, how could I not see this coming? 

(In the months leading up to his death in 1966, Lenny Bruce would introduce to his comedy act, much to the displeasure of his audience, the humorless details of the legal actions being taken against him. I hope I'm not beginning to sound like poor Lenny.)

The letter from the VA Debt Management Center arrived, via email from a family member (I'm using an address in the States as my "home of record"). Mailed on November 19,(*) the Monday before Thanksgiving, it wasn't delivered until November 26, and I have until December 19 to reply or they will go ahead with what they are threatening to do. The letter states:

The Department of Veterans Affairs recently sent you a letter explaining that your entitlement to Compensation and Pension benefits had changed. As a result, you were paid $XXXX.XX more than you were entitled to receive. Since you are currently receiving VA benefits, we pkan to withhold $(the full amount of my monthly benefits) until the amount you were overpaid is recouped. The withholding is scheduled to begin on February 2019.

So at least my Christmas table won't be bare. But what sort of cheer can come from the prospect of the end of the world come February? But the VA shone a light at the end of the tunnel. In a paragraph that opens with the words What are your options?, it reads:

PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Pay the debt.

or PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Set up a payment plan.
... if the recoupment plan above causes undue financial hardship, you can request an extended monthly recoupment plan with a financial status report.

or PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Request a waiver or dispute the debt
If you cannot repay the debt as proposed on the front of this letter, we will work with you to set up a reasonable repayment plan.

Then the letter closes with the obligatory - and somewhat hypocritical - words, "Thank you for your service to our country." (I can hear my father interjecting "Blow it out your ass!")

So I went to an internet café, printed out the forms (VA form 5655 Financial Status Report), and filled them out. 

While going over my financial statement, detailing my expenses against my income, I had to be brutally honest. The amount of my expenses matched that of my income. I have been criticized in the past (by my dear sister) for not saving what little money I have left after I kept the wolf from my door. My excuse is always the same. When you live without everything but what you need to survive, you watch the commercials on TV that scream at you for not buying some crap you don't need but which they insist is the only thing that will make your happiness complete, and you're an American and born & bred in a culture of instant gratification, and the result is you live in perpetual frustration. So when you discover there's an extra ten bucks in your pocket after the bills are paid, the very last thing you think of doing is putting the money away for a rainy day. Because it's always raining here. Maybe the next flood is coming and we don't know it?

My request for a waiver had to be made in writing. So I enclosed a letter with my financial report, once again telling the story that I've had to tell dozens of times. I last told the story on November 18 (see Thankless).

So, I'm in great danger of not only being stranded in a foreign country, which is how I've been living for eleven years, but of being stranded here without any financial support. And it gets worse. The VA may not believe me. For years I have tried to convince my friends of the seriousness and desperation of my predicament. I gave them some glimpses of what livibg in the Sticks is like - the typhoons, earthquakes, and floods, the incessant power failures, the inescapable heat, the bugs. But I failed. All of my skills as a writer that I brought to bear on the task of convincing them that I desperately want to get out of here have miserably failed. They don't believe me. They regard my being here as purely voluntary, and they don't believe that I really want to leave. I managed to convince only one of them that I needed help in acquiring a replacement passport, and he helped me over the relatively minor hurdle of getting to the embassy in Manila, paying the fee, and returning. That was in 2016. But once I had the passport, he told me that I then had the liberty to stay or leave. But, of course, I did not. I still have to find the wherewithal to pay for the ten years' worth of visas that I never got, as well as a plane ticket home to somewhere in the States I could expect someone to take me in. But I guess he didn't believe that, either. 

Suppose the VA does the same - suppose they don't believe that I'm stranded here. If none of my friends believed me, why should the VA?

The upcoming Christmas has the potential of being the most precious holiday for at least the past decade - and all the more precious for potentially being the last. I will try and reflect some of its emotion in my upcoming posts.


* It was dated November 18, a Sunday, which was almost certainly a clerical error. Government employees (like Catholic prostitutes) never work on Sundays.