Despite the hardships, there were good times. Desperation had an air of excitement and surviving in the streets of Manhattan conferred unspoken badges of honor on Ilia and me. Life in Fun City, New York’s nickname before it became known as the Big Apple, was gritty and hard. Films like Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and Mean Streets could have been documentaries about life in my neighborhoods. My mother had come from an upper-middle class home in New England and didn’t find living in survival mode so enchanting, but my sister and I loved every minute of it. Uptown or downtown, there was always adrenaline in the streets—junkies, gang fights, or a naked woman walking down Lexington Avenue—the island was ours. Life was raw, never dull. Our apartment on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village was burglarized nine times. Our missing things were found in the junkie’s apartment upstairs but the detective investigating the crime wouldn’t make an arrest unless my mother agreed to sleep with him. She didn’t and we moved out soon after.
Things weren’t much different when we moved uptown to Spanish Harlem in 1967. It was the summer of the race riots. Bottles and metal garbage cans rained down from rooftops within days of moving in. Upon the discovery of a woman upstairs in the hallway who had been stabbed, my mother quickly ushered us into our apartment door. There were used syringes and burned spoons of heroin addicts outside of our apartment door on the way to school in the mornings. Fires routinely flared up across the street when junkies shot up in dark rooms of abandoned apartment buildings, the matches used to cook heroin igniting the filthy mattresses they slept on. We could feel the intense heat on our faces while leaning out the apartment window, lurid yellow flames lighting up the night as they licked the brick and mortar.
While waiting to be buzzed into our building one night, Ilia and I were held up at knifepoint by a teenager who threatened to cut our tongues out. The thief got all of twelve dollars by shoving his hand in Ilia’s pocket. It was a good trade. He got the cash and we kept our tongues, although Ilia, normally full of swagger and attitude—“Ya gotta get tough, Susie!”—cried like a baby when we got upstairs. I, on the other hand, was fascinated. I wasn’t scared. It was neat and fast, over in a few seconds. His hand movements were light and quick, and he knew exactly which pocket to grab. Despite the threat, I knew we weren’t going to get hurt. He wanted fast money for drugs and got it. It was part of the city’s pulse which we lived every day—a pulse I had mastered. Our neighborhood was all color, life, movement. Small repair shops, corner groceries, sirens, brawling—I drank it all in.
***
My mother, Nancy, was strong, talented, beautiful, and fiercely optimistic. She had movie-star good looks. A tussle of blonde hair, lipstick, a cigarette, black miniskirt and boots —that was my mother. Endlessly resourceful and creative, she made our dresses and clothes, knitted sweaters, hats, and mittens, and even made our stuffed toys and animals using scraps of material and patterns that she drew herself. She held us together, literally and figuratively, collecting soda bottles to get the five-cent return in order to pay for the subway to work every day. Each morning she grabbed that long train ride from the East Village to the World’s Fair in Queens to sling hot dogs and beer to the crowds in the sweltering New York City summer heat.
She continued waiting tables until she got her start in animation, hand-inking and painting animators’ drawings onto cels for TV commercials at Stars and Stripes Studios. She went on to work for Academy Award-winning Hubley Studios, helping create both short and full-length features for PBS. She also worked on such classics as Schoolhouse Rock, and while at Cel-Art Studios she did the inking and painting for classic television commercials for Hawaiian Punch, Hostess Cakes, and Cheerios. Much later, in the 1990s, she worked on MTV’s animated series, Beavis and Butthead as well as the 1996 full-length feature Beavis and Butthead Do America. In a very real sense, cartoons saved us. We always got a thrill watching my mother’s handiwork on the old black-and-white television, the one with the bent coat hanger for an antenna in our railroad apartment uptown.
***
My mother said few good things about my father. When I asked her why he would turn up in Bellevue, she had no specific answer. No diagnosis was ever made clear, but on those occasions he was administered medication that just put him to sleep. He was a loner who didn’t talk much. Like most very young kids, I accepted what I saw without much questioning.
My father and his younger brother Larry were nine months apart. Their twenty-two-year-old mother promptly left them right after Larry was born. Her name was Violet, and my father had little to say about her except that “she was a dancer—burlesque.” No reason was given as to why she’d left, a familiar parallel to my father’s own vanishing acts.
Dad and Larry came to the city in the late nineteen fifties, both joined the Army as soon as they were old enough to enlist. In later years, my father told me that he and Larry just kicked around a bit before they enlisted with the service. According to my father, he and Larry hustled in Times Square. I pictured them as loners at night leaning against a building, one leg bent, boot heel against the façade as they made eye contact with strangers, lit by the blinking lights from seedy theater marquees. Was it true? Was my father a midnight cowboy like Joe Buck, hustling for some change and a place to stay? Whatever he did, it all played into what I saw in my earliest years: a man of mystery and eccentricity who suffered from some unknown emotional turmoil.
When I was four, my mother had had enough of my father’s instability and mysterious disappearances, so we moved out. Dad came uptown just once the following year to visit briefly. And then the urban high plains drifter dropped out of sight for another seven years.
***
Despite our mutual love affair with the mean streets of Manhattan, Ilia and I were very different from each another. Even with blonde hair and blue eyes, I resembled my father. I looked Jewish. Ilia had brown wavy hair, hazel eyes, fair skin, and my mother’s Irish features. Our differences, however, went far beyond superficial appearances. Ilia liked danger—the road. I liked art and books. Always defiant, by 1974, Ilia had become a genuine hell raiser. At nearly thirteen, she ran away with her eighteen-year-old Puerto Rican boyfriend, José, staying in Detroit with him for a year and a half, living among gypsies. My mother, who hired a private investigator to find her, was upset, to say the least, but she wanted Ilia to make the decision to return to New York on her own.
When she came home, it wasn’t long until Ilia hit the road again, sixteen years old and hitchhiking to California with a friend who had a pair of dice tattooed on her neck. Ilia began using other drugs, but not the soft stuff—not marijuana or even LSD. She scored some prescriptions for Methadone and Dilaudid and ended up occasionally using heroin.
When Ilia was eighteen, she showed me a shiny silver .22 caliber pistol while we stood in an alley on Bond Street. I had never seen, much less handled, a gun before. She suggested I get one for myself.
“What do I need a gun for?” I asked.
“For protection, Susie.”
I just laughed. “Protection from what? I don’t need any protection, Ilia.”
“All right then,” Ilia said, “but don’t tell Ma.”
***
John Fensten had emotional issues, to say the least. He was a spectral presence in my life. I had not seen my father in seven years when I spotted him at a bus stop in 1974, the hot air blowing across Queens Boulevard like a desert wind from a mirage.
That afternoon I intended to go to the movies to see Gone with the Wind. My mother and I were living in Sunnyside, then. My sister had just run away from home. I had no friends, and no other way to occupy my time. I had gone to the movies alone pretty often when we lived in Manhattan and no one had ever been bothered by my age there. So I was brought up short when the woman at the ticket office refused the dollar I slid under her glass.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twelve.”
&n
bsp; “Sorry, but kids are not allowed without parents,” she said, firmly.
“But I’m not a kid,” I told her. She wasn’t persuaded. It was as I was walking away that I saw him.
I recognized him instantly even though the last time I’d seen him, I was five years old. He had taken me to the Central Park Zoo that day, given me a sweater, and taken a few pictures of me. It was an awkward memory, but it was also a clear one, and he hadn’t aged a bit. My father was unmistakable, a striking man, with wide-set eyes and good looks that put him somewhere between Gregory Peck and Tony Perkins. He was as thin as ever, his lean frame hung inside his slightly wrinkled clothing.
So I walked right over to this man waiting for a bus, and he stared at me blankly.
“Hi. I’m Susan. I’m your kid,” I said.
He was surprised. He even looked a little shaken. I’m sure the last thing he ever expected was to have his second child waltz up out of the blue the way I had. He did manage to ask me how I was and how my mother and sister were. I told him they were okay.
There was nothing else to say after that. His bus hadn’t arrived yet, but I said goodbye and continued on my way. The encounter was short. There were no hugs, tears, blubbering ‘I miss yous,’ nor searching for pens to scribble down addresses or phone numbers to stay in contact. No promises of getting together. It was awkward, and I’m not sure which of us had the greater share of that.
Later, though, I was glad that I took advantage of that chance to force my existence on him. I wouldn’t see him again until I was twenty-one.
At nineteen, I moved out of my mother’s house. I worked in a clothing shop on Astor Place in the East Village for about a year. One hot summer afternoon, I ran into my father outside a deli on Second Avenue while I was on a lunch break. After nearly a decade, he was still unmistakable. He was sitting on a moped on the sidewalk. I walked up and introduced myself, again. That was the beginning of a futile attempt to interact with him. After this I saw my father a lot more, usually on First or Second Avenue or at Veselka’s Diner, where he would be sitting alone at the counter, having his usual hamburger and a cup of coffee or buying lottery tickets. He never had a telephone, so I either knocked on his door on East 5th Street or left a note stuck to his mailbox. There were many days when I knocked or rang his bell and got no answer that I knew that he was home and had ignored me. He wanted to be left alone; I was fine with it. At times it was almost a relief to not have to see him.
***
I realized that I had to do something other than work in retail, so I decided to go to college. I took classes in film and art at Hunter College but I was miserable. The school seemed impenetrably cliquish and institutional. After one pointless semester, I took the advice of my art teacher, left Hunter, and enrolled at the Art Students League on 57th Street. I studied anatomy, painting, and drawing for two years at night while working full-time at a photography studio across the street. During this time, getting to know my father proved difficult. He was still a quiet man who kept to himself, and our conversations were brief and awkward. It seemed as if he was impatient with me, as if everything I said was wrong.
He worked as a bike messenger and took pictures—he was a dedicated photographer and a master printer—but that was the extent of his existence from what I could tell. His dingy studio apartment was the perfect dark room—brown walls, brown rug, brown table, brown coffee, and brown roaches. The place reeked of cats. He was a minimalist in every respect and seemed to have no aspiration but to be left alone, take photographs, and collect cameras.
My frustrating relationship with him, where even a simple conversation was awkward and painful, stood in contrast to his relationship to Ilia. She and my father understood each other in some way that still defies description. As a child, she was his preferred photographic subject. They were accessible to each other on some level that I couldn’t understand.
But that connection was wrought with decay.
For a while, Ilia was living at the Hell’s Angels clubhouse on East 3rd Street. At one point she was thrown out, so she stayed with my father in his small, dark studio a couple of blocks away. She told me that one day she was in the bathroom and my father came in with his genitals out. Alarmed and upset, she went back to the clubhouse and told a few Angels what had happened. They all headed to my father’s building on East 5th Street and pounded on the door threatening to beat him up. He didn’t open the door and they left. She told me about it and warned me that I should never be alone around him, ever. I was devastated. I wept for her and for me, because I had being trying to build a relationship with him.
When I asked him about it he said that he did it because she smelled like heroin and didn’t want her around getting high. His answer was confusing and strange. A lot of things he said didn’t make sense to me.
The times he was the easiest to be around were when he was talking about cameras and dark room technique, types of printing paper and exposure times. He liked to give me cameras, lenses, and all kinds of accoutrement. He made it something in common between us, even if it was only one thing. I set out across the city like my father—with a camera. The seedy allure of the Lower East Side and Times Square drew me often. It was the early 1980s, pre-Guiliani era New York City. I was twenty-one years old, fearless and wanting to capture the dirt and the grit before it was gone. Like my father, I wandered alone with my thirty-five millimeter.
But I was not to be spared. One summer morning in 1986, when I was twenty-three years old, I walked over the Williamsburg Bridge to the East Village. It was early and warm, the streets mostly desolate except for one lone figure, my father, who sat on his moped. I walked up to say hello and he asked me what I was doing. Telling him I was just out for a walk, he eyed me over and said that all the boys must be after me. A smile streaked across his face as he raised both hands making a double grabbing gesture at my chest level. I stood there frozen trying not to show any facial expression. Part of me tried to brush it off as another example of his disordered behavior, but I was sickened. Feeling degraded and aching with nausea, I told him I had to leave and walked away. His actions had crushed me, causing me to feel like trash, like an object used for sex and not a human being or even his own daughter.
There was another time, when I was thirty years old, during a visit with him. We had lunch at Velselka’s Diner on East 9th Street and then walked around the neighborhood. As usual, it was awkward. He had one of his cameras with him and asked to take a picture of me, which had never happened before. Stopping outside one of the small storefronts on East 6th Street, he asked me to turn around, facing the store, instead of facing forward toward him. He directed me to hold on to the gates with my hands up and to spread my legs apart like I was about to be frisked. He clicked off a few shots. It happened so fast. Why didn’t he want a picture of my face? I knew something was wrong. And now he had pictures of me this way. I was too afraid to ask him or say anything. Remaining mute seemed safer than opening up a pandora’s box of pain and disappointment. AfterI got home, it slowly began to sink in even deeper.
After years of trying to break through his barriers of silence or short, staccato sentences, I realized we would never really connect with each other in the way that I needed and yearned for. We drifted even farther apart, although I would occasionally see him in Manhattan as he glided by on his bike.
Right before Christmas in 2000, I received a letter from my father’s next door neighbor informing me that my father was ill with lung cancer. He was in a VA hospital in Manhattan, about to be transferred to the Fort Hamilton VA in Brooklyn. The doctor said that my father wouldn’t last five days, so he was sent to a nursing home in Cobble Hill instead, where he lingered for five months.
I visited him every weekend, cashing his Social Security checks and paying his rent and electric bills. I brought coffee and sandwiches as we sat in silence most of the time in the midst of the noisy ward. As the days turned into wee
ks and months, my father occasionally looked at me and made a brief conversation.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
“No, not right now.”
“I can’t believe you don’t have someone,” he said.
Small words of kindness. A few syllables. And yet they touched me. Now, at the end of his life, he was giving me a compliment.
Another time he said that I had a gold light around me when I was very young. I wished he could have told me at the time. It’s what children want—and need—to hear.
I’d had a short ghost story about a noisy poltergeist published by Warner Books in 1992 in an anthology of true tales of the supernatural.
“You’re going to be the next Eugene O’Neill,” he remarked.
I wasn’t familiar with O Neill’s work or with his tragic and difficult life, but I had heard of the writer’s name. It was a generous thing to say because he rarely said anything, much less offered compliments.
When the weather grew warmer, I would push him outside in his wheelchair. I could tell that he was starting to slip away. One day, in the midst of the silence, he said, “Your patience is beautiful.”
Those simple words again. I had never received a compliment like that. I was escaping an abusive boyfriend, and these gentle silent sittings in the spring air with my dying father were a welcome relief from the fear that raged in my personal life.
He died in May of 2001. I was sad, although the grief didn’t approach the searing pain I experienced after my sister’s death. It was almost as if my father was simply gone again. My mother, who couldn’t understand why I had invested time in pursuing my father in the East Village or attending to him in his final days, commented that his death was “a nothing end to a nothing life.” But I was his daughter so, to me, it seemed as if my mother had essentially said that I, too, was a nobody—as the daughter of nothing.
Ted Bundy's Murderous Mysteries Page 31
