Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  And while singer-songwriter Liz Phair is thought of as one of those dirty girls with a rough mouth, one who can be plain and unpretty about sex, people should not fail to notice the exhaustion in her songs, the sounds of disappointment that link her directly to the girl fading away in Minot’s story, or to the girl standing by impassive and sullied in Dobie’s recollection. Phair’s detachment, which is thrilling enough to be mistaken for heat, is absolutely about all things tepid and empty. Sung against the monotony of the piano-practice tune “Chopsticks,” Phair’s lyrics are deflated, resigned: “He said he liked to do it backwards / I said that’s just fine with me / That way we can fuck and watch TV.” And on “Fuck and Run,” Phair struck a particular note with many women for singing about the frustrations of waking up in bed with someone you barely know, knowing full well that you aren’t going to get to know him any better. “I can feel it in my bones / I’m going to spend another year alone,” she says in the refrain, and on the final repetition she changes it to the slightly more ominous “I can feel it in my bones / I’m gonna spend my whole life alone / It’s fuck and run / Fuck and run / Ever since I was seventeen / Ever since I was twelve.” You see, the cross-purposes of sexuality begin at seventeen, at twelve.

  Whatever unique troubles adolescence poses, we all know that obsessive love and its murderous tendencies exist just as strongly in human adults as in any teenager, which is why Carolyn Warmus and Betty Broderick and Jean Harris did the deeds that forced them to do hard time. Very often, even with adults, the object of this crazed adoration is of so little consequence—so mild or so icky or so not worth it—that the woman, in extremes and in fragments, starts to look like loose particles in a centrifuge spinning wildly around a dead, still, unmoved center. Obsession is basically an emotional fallacy, a mistaken belief one is thinking about someone else when she is really thinking about herself. That’s why obsessive love is often greeted by such intolerance, such lack of sympathy: it is the most selfish emotion of all, disguised as self-negation. It is perverse.

  And messy: the desperate, demeaning letters full of begs and pleas, the repeated telephone hang-ups and the evidence that you are the perpetrator via caller ID or *69, the strange looks from security guards as you loiter in the lobby of the love object’s office building. All this acting out is just so humiliating, the kind of yucky embarrassment that seems so female, so pathetic—like shoplifting or binge eating or forced vomiting—that the world can’t even find a way to make it seem “cool,” because the symptoms are so terribly raw, such a florid, uncomfortable eruption of the loneliness and desperation that scare the hell out of us. This is awful stuff, the kind of brute emotional torture that no one is fit to handle, least of all teenagers. Romantic disaster is their natural habitat only because they still haven’t learned.

  But adults are supposed to know better, they are assumed to be able to control their impulses—that is, I suppose, what makes them fit to be called adults. And if an adult woman—i.e., Jean Harris—becomes sufficiently insane over a diet doctor in Scarsdale that she goes to his house with a loaded gun and succumbs to the inevitable, it does at the very least seem like she must answer for the consequences. But to be a seventeen-year-old and adequately infatuated with an older man to have committed an act of violence on his behalf—this by a girl with no police record—seems a crime that he must answer for. Whatever troubles Amy had before Joey—and they were considerable: besides the rape at age thirteen, Amy was also traumatized by a schoolyard fistfight she got into with one of the tenth grade’s tough mamas that left her with a broken nose and a dislocated jaw that required surgical reconstruction, and resulted in a $1.2 million lawsuit against the school district—none of them imply her complicity in her own undoing. Look, I am as sickened and annoyed as the next person when someone in trouble starts attributing all their bad behavior to falling off the teeter-totter at three or to a recovered memory of sexual abuse at four, but somehow I don’t cringe at the thought of seeing Amy Fisher as a girl “at risk.” Once she is twenty-five years old, I’ll feel that the statute of limitations on pointing a finger at her pubescent perils has expired, but Amy was still a teenager, still very much in the thick of some very difficult years, when she met Joey. Like the newly aligned bone structure of her face, Amy was just barely holding it together, as vulnerable as Austro-Hungary on the eve of World War I, a weak and unassertive territory with boundaries and ideologies up for grabs. If any of her activities were immoral, none were illegal. But somehow, sometime after she got involved with Joey, Amy became a call girl, apparently at his behest, at least in part to fulfill some Travis Bickle fantasy he had about turning Amy into a hooker so that he could then rescue her from the life.

  Because Joey denies anything more than just barely knowing Amy, there is only circumstantial evidence to corroborate her claim that he hooked her into hooking. In fact there isn’t any way to prove much of Amy’s story, but somehow we seem to believe the crux of it, if not every detail: the New York Post, which in the spirit of tabloid journalism often trashed Amy, asked readers who was to blame for Mary Jo’s shooting, and found Joey the winner (in the sense that there was a winner in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”) with 1,416 votes, while Amy received just 324; had this poll been done later, when Joey was convicted of statutory rape after Amy’s convincing testimony, the margins might have been wider.

  A large part of the reason we believe Amy’s story—besides the fact that the big lug she calls her lover is nothing to boast about—is that we see the wreckage, we see Joey’s fingerprints all over this mess. If you went into London after the Blitz and saw burnt-out buildings, crumbling edifices, detonated shells, dead bodies and other assorted memorabilia of an air attack, you would not assume that this was just some perverse British gesture at postmodernism, an attempt to give the city that certain bombed-out look at the behest of some new architectural movement that is managing somehow to thrive in the midst of this huge war; you wouldn’t assume anything other than that London had been bombed. Similarly, we don’t need to work too hard to trace a trail between a girl who was troubled but not criminal to a sudden onset of antisocial symptoms—as well as a case of herpes—that arrived in her life at the same time as Joey did.

  In this country we believe that children need special protection before the law, and when kids misbehave, even if there is no older person aiding and abetting, the law understands that they are not supposed to be as morally developed as adults—which is why our system of justice invented juvenile court. And while teenage boys are given to insane infatuations—see Scott Spencer’s Endless Love for details—in most cases, they don’t have an older woman goading them on the way Amy Fisher had Joey Buttafuoco. There’s no need to explain this—teenagers in general are gross and obnoxious, rarely managing to fare the ch-ch-ch-changes without aggravated acne or bad posture or strange ideas of what to do with their hair—but more often than not the ones who manage to be cute are girls. Because of advances in health care and nutrition, the average girl now experiences menses at twelve, three years sooner than she could have expected her first period half a century ago. Benzoyl peroxide and Retin-A have further contributed to making adolescence less vile. The faddish, girlish clothes that they still tend to wear—well, if you like ’em young, you like ’em like that. But yummy though they may be, these girls are poison, mostly to themselves. They act like little grown-ups and that makes it easy to forget that they don’t know shit. As writer Tad Friend puts it: “The reason sex with minors is immoral is that while they may look and move like nascent Sharon Stones, they don’t have any idea what it all means.” Or worse, they know exactly what it means, they have an instinct for seductive poses and caricaturish flirtation—or they learn them from old Madonna videos and memorized Melrose Place episodes—but they don’t understand where their chain of command begins and ends. If the implications of sexiness are clear, the implications of sex itself may not be.

  And yet, the multiple portrayals of Amy a
s a public menace—depictions created both on national television and in the local courtroom—indicate that we have stopped regarding youth as innocent. It is old news that the viciousness of many recent juvenile crimes has resulted in an increased number of minors who are tried as adults. But in Amy’s case, because of the seeming sexual bravado of a teenage call girl with a married lover—which was interpreted by the district attorney’s office, as well as by the judge who set Amy’s $2 million bail, as a sign of strength, not weakness—Amy was treated as an adult by the legal system not because of the wretchedness of her crime but because of the perceived uncontainable nature of her promiscuity. Amy Fisher might as well have been radioactive, the heat of this hot little number made these men—lawyers, judges, police, private investigators, so many men—so damn nervous. In fact, the judge actually called her a “wild animal” and “a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse.” It was as if they all feared that Amy, if not carefully regulated, might disintegrate into sawdust, and her dirty particles might infiltrate every nook and cranny with sex and fever and frenzy and lust.

  “One might describe this defendant as a seventeen-year-old girl who lives at home with her parents and goes to high school. That would be about as accurate, Your Honor, as describing John Gotti as a businessman from New York City,” deputy district attorney Fred Klein said at the arraignment, in an attempt to convince the judge to deny bail. “This defendant is totally uncontrollable, manipulative, violent and extremely dangerous.” In an odd instance of the legal system defending the honor of the illegal system—as always, politics makes strange bedfellows—Klein pointed out that Amy had “cheated” her escort service out of profits by turning some of their referrals into private customers. Bail was set, but at a prohibitively high sum.

  At a later appeal by Fisher’s attorney for bail reduction, Klein argued that Amy was a bad risk outside of jail because she could so easily “slide into that sleazy world [of prostitution], and she’ll be able to support herself very well, and no one would ever find her.” Klein said this as if he’d failed to notice that television cameras had become permanent fixtures outside the courthouse, outside the county jail and outside the Fisher home—Amy could not possibly hide in plain sight. But more disturbingly, Klein treated and talked of Amy as if she were a force of nature, as if her ability to turn tricks was a source of power—and not a simple function of her ability to lie supine, spread-eagle. As Sheila Weller, co-author of My Story, points out in a section of her third-person analysis: “The notion that teenage prostitution can as easily bespeak a girl’s enormous emotional problems and self-brutalization as the wiliness and resourcefulness Klein alluded to, was unaddressed.” (In fact, I think Weller fails to make herself clear here: I mean, when on earth has prostitution ever bespoken anyone’s “wiliness and resourcefulness”? When has it ever been anything other than a last resort or a form of mental illness? And I defy anyone to find me one prostitute without “enormous emotional problems”—because I think it’s hard enough to find one person without enormous emotional problems.) Amy’s bail held steady at $2 million, and could only be paid with the combined resources of a production company purchasing the rights to Ms. Fisher’s story and a kindhearted bail bondsman in New Jersey. In the eyes of the law, Amy Fisher was the Pandora’s Box of Nassau County, the Typhoid Mary, the Red Scare, the Black Death, the untamable wild bikini, the female body as agent of demise, the vagina dentata contained in a five-foot frame. And in my eyes, Fred Klein had well earned the Senator Joe McCarthy Award for preposterous hysteria at no cause.

  Meanwhile, as Amy rotted in jail, every man she’d ever met seemed to be selling her out. Peter DeRosa, a john she’d serviced in his home in Levittown—the place synonymous with subdivision hell—had videotaped their encounters with a hidden camera, a move that proved to be fortuitous when the prostitute turned out to be front-page news. He sold the tape to A Current Affair for $8,000, turning a profit, which meant that rather than paying for sex, DeRosa ended up getting paid for it (a privilege that, from the looks of him, I don’t think he will be enjoying ever again). Carnal acts aside, this videotape contained a moment of Amy saying, “I’m wild. I don’t care. I like sex.” This syllogism was frequently sound-bitten into some sort of slut manifesto. After that, other men came forward, selling stories of sexual favors in return for procuring a murder weapon. With cameras staking out Long Island to a parodic effect that can only be likened to the Albert Brooks movie Real Life, men whom Amy barely knew were claiming that she slept with them, while the men she had actually slept with were denying it.

  Following Joey’s lead, Paul Makely, Amy’s boyfriend and the proprietor of the Future Physique gym (more French where it doesn’t belong), had always gainsaid any suggestions that he’d had an affair with Amy. Paul had a child with his common-law wife and a domestic life he was determined to maintain. But unlike Joey (who’d sicced Amy onto him in the first place), Paul seemed more available to Amy—he was even going to be her date for the senior prom—and she thought of him as a salubrious influence, even called him “my lawyer-approved boyfriend.” Then one day while Amy was out on bail, Paul allowed Hard Copy to plant cameras in his gym and intrude on a rendezvous that the couple had planned after her plea-bargain hearing. An undisclosed sum, estimated to be as high as $50,000, was to be tendered to Paul for his trouble and treachery. The result was footage of Amy flippantly (and after the broadcast, famously) asking Paul to marry her so that they could have conjugal visits while she was in prison, and saying things like “If I had to go through all this pain and suffering, I am getting a Ferrari.” Paul, of course, was supposed to be the good guy, the antidote, the anti-Joey. (It seems that whenever people deal with the world in binary oppositions, choosing one thing only because it negates another, they are inevitably startled by the discovery that the quest for something completely different has only given them more of the same. That’s why Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother while doing everything to avoid that fate.) On the night the Hard Copy segment aired—after falling on the floor, crying and screaming, “Not Paul! Not Paul!”—Amy took an overdose of Xanax and lorazepam, and was committed to Huntington Hospital for a month of psychiatric treatment.

  It is strange to me that this Hard Copy episode served only to demonize Amy further. The obvious pain and trouble of this girl was turning a profit for others, but no one publicly expressed any urge to protect her, no one seemed to notice that she was a teenager kidding around with her boyfriend when she said whatever things she said: no one gave her a break. It was all face value, all Ferrari = materialism = frivolousness = failure to recognize the seriousness of her crimes: BAD BAD GIRL. Marvyn Kornberg, the lawyer for Joey Buttafuoco, responded to the Makely tapes with the dismissive, “It’s just Amy doing what she does best: lying and prostituting herself”—even though, in fact, she hadn’t sold herself so much as she had been sold.

  And that’s how girls get into trouble. Does anyone have a v-chip that they can use to correct that? Because the intrusions of violence, of fear, of all that is bad in the world, are usually out of our control—and all the inhibitors to the negative influences of the media and the arts that people want to build as some glossy gesture at protecting their children’s innocence are just false, the silly symbolic acts of people stuck in a closed system, like those warning labels attached to a mattress saying that you can’t cut off the warning labels. No gated community, no television rating system, no parental advisory stickers on albums would have helped Amy Fisher at all—bad people and bad parenting are what made Amy bad; not rock music or the Internet. The real test of our character and concern for children is not in the shibboleths we invent to safeguard the ones who are already perfectly safe, but rather in what we do when the system fails and goes wrong. Amy Fisher is a real girl in real trouble, in real need of all those things we supposedly do to protect the innocent—she is the reason there are statutory rape laws and juvenile delinquency procedures that we seem to have forgotten about. And
in a pinch, that protection wasn’t there. The television exploitation of this minor—are there not some FCC guidelines about what is permissible in such situations?—prompted prosecutor Fred Klein to say that she was even more “revolting” than he’d previously thought, but it made no one angry at the privacy invasions brought on by Paul Makely, a man she trusted, or Hard Copy, a nightly tabloid that no one should have trusted. It seemed that if we could be amused and entertained by Amy Fisher, all anyone really cared about was that she’s not my daughter.

  Meantime, much as Amy is made to look like a girl who needs more than just a good spanking, for the longest time there was a baffling reluctance to prosecute Joey for statutory rape—not to mention contributing to the delinquency of a minor—even though everybody knows that he really did sleep with Amy. At first police and prosecutors decided not to press charges because Amy was not a credible witness; later they said that they wanted to spare the Buttafuoco family any further grief. He was finally tried and convicted in 1993. But it’s hard to see this hemming and hawing as anything but some form of judicial disapproval of Amy, of a girl who definitely wanted it, and who should have been saved from what she wanted, as Barbara Kruger implores on one of her art posters. Certainly in the aftermath, Joey deserved to be punished. It’s not as if we have failed in the past to take a hard line on statutory rape: Roman Polanski—a Holocaust survivor who gave us Repulsion, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Tess, and lost a wife and an unborn child to a kind of insanity that seemed peculiarly American until the Tokyo subway bombing cult emerged—was exiled for sleeping with a thirteen-year-old in 1977. How has an auto mechanic been so judicially privileged?