Cory's Origin, Part 2: Human Trafficking and Baby Names

When we last left our hero, she had just been adopted in Ecuador, where she and her mother were now trapped. Her mother was holding her, and a man with a knife was demanding money.

The Cory of the present was telling me this as she, my husband and I boarded the Brown Line train to the Loop, in Chicago. Cory was visiting us on her way to Grad school. The three of us settled on the train, organized her luggage, and then resumed the recording.

I told her, "When you left off, your mother was being robbed."

And the guys comes up to her and says, "Give me all your money, or I'm going to kill your baby." She didn't have any money, so she handed the diaper bag to him, and he got really pissed off. And he went to stab me, and my mom put her arm in the way and like took the stab instead. And she still has like a small white scar from it on her left forearm. Yeah.

She also was almost kidnapped by a cab driver at one point. She told him to take her to wherever she was staying, and he went the other way, and she was like, "Stop! Stop!" And he didn't, and she had just spent, you know, the last few months watching "Annie" in Spanish over and over again. And you know the part where Annie is on top of the building, and Punjab comes down in a helicopter? And she's like, "Punjab! Help me! Help me!" Well, all my mom could think of to say was, "Punjab! Ayudame! Ayudame!" So she's yelling that, and people are like, "Who's Punjab?" Nobody helped her. She eventually was able to get out of there, and get away.

She also... she and her lawyer and Pepe tried smuggling her into Columbia to get a fake passport, or whatever, for me, and they ended up driving through really sketchy mountain area. And it was totally illegal, and they had to drive at night without the lights on cause they were trying to traffic illegally. So my mom was freaking out, and she also flipped out because they stopped at one point... I don't remember why they stopped, but she turns around, and she sees the guy driving the cab take a huge swig out of a liquor bottle, and then get back in the car, so she was like, "Oh, fuck!"

They get to Columbia, this doesn't work out. They're coming back to Ecuador, and they get stopped at the border by these guys with huge machine guns, and my mom's freaking out. They're like, "What are we gonna do?! What are we gonna do?! We have a white woman in the car! We're dead! We're fucked" And Pepe, our little guardian savior hero, Pepe, thinks fast, and he throws my mom down kind of like on his lap and covers her, covers her with a blanket, so they can't see the white skin, and... there was some sort of like horrible disease outbreak at the time. The guards come up, with the machine guns. They're like, "Who's under the blanket?" And Pepe's like, "She's sick. She's sick. She's very sick. She's diseased. Diseased." And they're like... backed away and shooed them on through.

There was a lot of stuff that went down.

One time, my mom finally had everything worked out. My passport, or visa, or whatever, was all worked out, you know, they go through the first round of checks; they go through the second round of checks. They're about to get on the plane, and as they're boarding the plane, they stop me at the gate. They tell her, "You can go, but you can't take your baby. Your baby's papers don't check out." That's the point of her being there was to take the baby back.

So she goes back, and she's just miserable, balling. She just wants to get the fuck out of Ecuador. She wants to go home to Duluth. She misses my dad. She wants the baby to come with her. That's the point of this whole journey. And she's watching the news, and she saw on the news that night that they plane we had almost gotten on had crashed, and everyone on it had died. Ooo, scary.

There were a lot of crazy things like that. She finally, though, obviously got back to America, and I was, I don't know, about nine months. I was naturalized just after a year... after I was one years old, or just before I was one years old. So there's little pictures of me at the little embassy in Duluth or at town hall, or wherever it was, running around with my little American flag. I kept throwing it on the ground. I didn't know any better. I was super cute little Cory Maria and the flag she kept rejecting. But I'm a full up citizen. I can vote, I just can never be president, cause of those nine dirty months in Ecuador.

And one thing, my dad, I just had him… my dad should tell this story. My Dad just retold me how, you know, it'd been like a year after, you know, I'd been back in the... well, when I had come to America, and he gets a phone call from Pepe. He's like, "Hello, Senior Brian!" Cause my dad, the way he tells it, he did always call my dad "Senor Brian."

So, "Hello, Senor Brian! I'm in Canada. I want to come to America. Can you smuggle me in?" My dad is like, "Well, I owe this guy my child. I owe him basically my life. I'll do anything for him." So, in Minnesota, there's this beautiful place called the Boundary Waters, which is a million acres of preserved wilderness on the border of Minnesota and Canada. It's all lakes, rivers, you know, gorgeous woods land, and really through like ninety-five percent of it, you can only get there by canoe, cause you can't have motorized boats.

So, my Dad and his friends, who were awesome hippy rebels, planned on smuggling Pepe in through the Boundary Waters. Like throwing him in a canoe, hiding him, and just coming in. And they had this all planned out. My dad was really nervous, but he was going to do what he had to to help this guy, cause this guy was the reason my mom and I got back to the country. My dad said his one friend, who has passed away now, his friend was like, "Yeah! We're going to get him in!" and he was all about it, and they had this big plan set up.

And not long before they were about to go through with this plan, my Dad gets a phone call. He's like, "Hello, Senor Brian, it's Pepe."

It's like, "Hey! What's up man?"

"I'm in New York."

And my Dad's like, "Really? How'd you get in?"

"I rode in the back seat of a car."

So, my dad was kind of relieved, though. I want you to hear my dad telling this story. It's better. Yeah... pretty much, yeah. My dad has confirmed a lot of these things, so even with my mom's possible embellishments, I have my dad to fall off... fall back on. To be like, "Yep. That happened."

Erin: One thing I remember you telling, previously, was about the nuns, and them wanting to name you "Cory."

Oh, yeah. So, my parents... once they had picked me, the nuns were like, "What are you going to name your baby?"

My parents said, "Cory. We’re going to name her Cory."

The nuns said, "No, you can't do that. That's a communist name."

My parents were like, "What?"

They're like, "That's a communist name. You can't name your baby Cory."

So, they're like, "Alright, we'll name her Marie?" cause my mom's middle name was Marie.

And they're like, "No. That's... That's not good either." I don't remember why they didn't like that name.

So, my parents were like, "Ok, so what are we suppose to name our baby?"

They said, "You have to name her Maria Veronica Velacalarza."

Well, my parents are like, "What?"

And they said, "You have to name her Maria Veronica Velacalarza." I'll like... figure out how to spell that and send that to you.

They were like, "Ok... sure... We'll do that. Maria Veronica Velacalarza it is." So, they say bye to the nuns, the get in the car, and they're like, "Your name is Cory."

Then, fast forward, I'm about three years old. My parents get this phone call from an American adoption agency. And they're like, "Hey, you know that baby you wanted?"

And my parents say, "Yeah..."

And they say, "We've got that baby you wanted."

And my parents were like, "Ok," and that's how we got Toby from South Dakota. Less far. I actually remember going to get him from his foster parents when he was just a baby. And I said I really like him, cause the foster parents gave me chicken noodle soup and hot cocoa, and that made me accept him.

When I was little, my mom got really pissed because I, a hundred percent seriously, wanted to name Toby "Rock and Roll Dack," and my dad really liked it. And he really supported him being named "Rock and Roll Dack," and my mom got really mad and she said, "Brian, we are not naming him Rock and Roll Dack! Stop encouraging her!"

And my dad said, "No, that's an awesome rock and roll name!" cause my dad's a musician, so he loved it. I think "Toby’s" ok, but "Rock and Roll Dack" would have been pretty sweet. The end.

But with Cory, that's not the end. Her dad and step-mother later had two more children, and the stories only get better from their. I'm sure I'll soon have new stories of the zany adventures of the Dack family. Hopefully, several from Brian Dack, their amazing father, as well.