Karen Palmer lives just west of the Beverly Center\u2019s shiny consumerism, but she might as well be in a different city: Up a steep flight of stairs and behind stucco walls is her modest two-bedroom apartment. Inside, low-key furnishings and her overflowing bookshelves share space with husband Vinnie Scarelli\u2019s fine cabinetry. But Palmer\u2019s unglitzy Los Angeles existence has less to do with possessions than identity.<\/p>\n
For 23 years, Palmer, Scarelli and her two daughters had fake identities, which she started thinking about the day her ex-husband Gil (not his real name) pointed a loaded gun at her pregnant belly. What happened next makes for an intense, and intensely observed, memoir that has taken Palmer nearly 50 years to untangle. \u201cShe\u2019s Under Here\u201d details forgery, a child\u2019s kidnapping, a mental breakdown, struggles to stay afloat \u2014 and joy.<\/p>\n
Karen Palmer \u2014 the name she chose and still uses \u2014 was born in L.A., but she doesn\u2019t know where or precisely to whom. As an adult she learned her biological mother\u2019s name. Nothing more. Adopted in infancy, Palmer was raised in Silver Lake, her upbringing impacted by her journalist father\u2019s alcoholism and her stay-at-home mother\u2019s religiosity. She got pregnant at 15 and her parents sent her to a nearby Catholic home for unwed mothers where she gave birth to a baby boy, whom she placed for adoption. Despite deep grief over these events, Palmer attended UCLA to study piano performance. But she left without earning her degree after meeting and marrying Gil.<\/p>\n
Palmer was still in high school when she started working as a part-time secretary at an office supply company. Gil, her charismatic, not-yet-divorced boss, was not just the manager but the ringleader of a group of friends who referred to him as \u201cMr. Fun.\u201d He relished the attention. Before long, Gil convinced her to drive to Las Vegas for a weekend getaway. She was entranced by a man who could win and lose big at blackjack without missing the chance to order another round of J&B on the rocks for himself and Harvey Wallbangers for her: \u201cYou\u2019ll like it, baby. It\u2019s sweet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fast-forward 14 years \u2014 past the couple\u2019s wedding (Palmer was 19), the births of two daughters, many instances of domestic violence and Palmer falling in love with Gil\u2019s friend Scarelli \u2014 Palmer asked for a divorce and received it. But Gil, already furious that Palmer and Scarelli were a couple, descended further into alcoholism. He took a trip with their 7-year-old soon after. Palmer met them at the airport upon their return and handed the baby to Gil while she embraced the older child. When Palmer looked up again, Gil and the younger child had disappeared into the terminal crowd.<\/p>\n
Palmer, speaking from her L.A. home, pauses for a long time when asked if she knew she had made a mistake. \u201cIt was such a harried moment,\u201d she finally says. \u201cAt first I thought, \u2018Oh here comes my family,\u2019 and then I could feel the hatred coming off him the nearer he came. It was confusion and fear. The more afraid I was of him, the more groveling I became.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the course of marrying and building a life and the hair-raising things we went through, Vinnie and I essentially endured a kind of war together,\u201d says Karen Palmer.<\/p>\n
(Vincent Scarelli)<\/p>\n
Palmer\u2019s baby girl was gone for nine long days during which she enlisted help from the authorities, only to realize the law upheld a father\u2019s right to see his children. When Gil finally returned the baby, making sure Palmer saw that he had a gun, Palmer said to Scarelli: \u201cWe have to run.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many factors complicated the family\u2019s decision to run, including the children, Palmer\u2019s aging mother and their financial instability. Although Palmer and Scarelli wound up in other states for years, their story demonstrates how many identities are lost, found and disguised in L.A. Loading a car with the minimum (\u201cone pot, one pan, two car seats\u201d), Palmer and her family drove to Boulder, Colo. They bartered his house-painting skills for a temporary apartment and set about obtaining documents that would allow them to work and register their daughters for school. Palmer applied her graphic design skills to forging birth certificates with new names. Yes, she says, they committed fraud, but not identity theft. With those documents and a family friend\u2019s California address, they essentially invented new versions of themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the course of marrying and building a life and the hair-raising things we went through, Vinnie and I essentially endured a kind of war together,\u201d says Palmer. \u201cOur lives were in danger and we needed to protect young children.\u201d She and their daughters joke about \u201cSaint Vinnie,\u201d but she adds, \u201cI feel completely able to give and receive love in spite of trauma, and I think that\u2019s because one person sacrificed everything in his life for me and has never for one second expressed regret.\u201d<\/p>\n
A year or so after she learned of Gil\u2019s 2008 death, Palmer felt safe enough to head to a Social Security office and \u201cstraighten everything out.\u201d She writes about how she came to see that Gil\u2019s oft-repeated adage \u201cyou are who you say you are\u201d should actually be \u201cyou are what you do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The coroner\u2019s investigator, who had retraced Gil\u2019s life before his demise, helped. \u201cHe said, \u2018You did the right thing\u2019 in protecting your children, explaining that when a substance abuser falls off the deep end, the endgame is sad and ugly. Having a stranger tell me that held weight.\u201d Palmer says since her family\u2019s flight, not enough has changed to protect women from domestic violence. \u201cWomen still are not believed. One of the troubles that I had with writing this is that I wasn\u2019t beaten. I was always worried that what happened to me wasn\u2019t \u2018bad enough.\u2019 But writing this memoir shows me that yes, it was bad enough. Particularly because it involved a man with a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n
Twenty years after leaving L.A., Karen Palmer returned in 2005 and has lived in the city with Scarelli ever since. Now that the couple has straightened out their identity issues, their bond is stronger than ever \u2014 and so are their relationships with Palmer\u2019s two adult daughters. \u201cL.A. is where people reinvent themselves, but I had been gone so long that the city itself changed. It\u2019s like when a street looks different, but you can\u2019t remember what was there before. The city has subtly shifted. It\u2019s not the same and yet it is the same,\u201d she says. As she sits at her piano, sunshine filtered through laurel trees, Karen Palmer is now at home \u2014 in her city and with herself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the Shelf She’s Under Here By Karen PalmerAlgonquin: 256 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":231158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[62382,91055,1582,276,4471,3603,124597,124595,246,124599,124594,6276,2961,2252,124598,224,5337,5204,124596,1628],"class_list":{"0":"post-231157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-baby-boy","9":"tag-birth","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-child","13":"tag-daughter","14":"tag-different-city","15":"tag-ex-husband-gil","16":"tag-family","17":"tag-journalist-father","18":"tag-karen-palmer","19":"tag-l-a","20":"tag-la","21":"tag-life","22":"tag-loaded-gun","23":"tag-los-angeles","24":"tag-losangeles","25":"tag-name","26":"tag-scarelli","27":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115213579133427044","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}