And eventually, this little movement became part of a big huge deal, as Debbie Gibson was replaced by Tori Amos and the Breeders and Hole and Veruca Salt and Liz Phair. And even the boy bands weren’t presumed woman haters anymore, especially when the leader of the biggest boy band of all, Kurt Cobain, married Courtney Love—and not a more traditional rocker wife like Angie Everhart or Naomi Campbell—and even carried the couple’s baby around in a Snugli, and was known to wear the occasional dress. (Kurt even admitted he got the name for Nirvana’s biggest hit after Tobi Vail, his then girlfriend and Bikini Kill drummer, spray-painted a bathroom wall at Evergreen State College with the words “Kurt Cobain smells like Teen Spirit.”) Clearly, Axl Rose was not the only kind of rock star out there anymore. Sassy, which for a while was the cool alternative to Seventeen, had a column called “Cute Band Alert,” and now those slouchy gorgeous boys like Evan Dando from the Lemonheads and Steve Malkmus from Pavement became sex symbols of substance. And instead of The Facts of Life there was My So-Called Life, which got canceled but even still, and Clueless was sweet without being stupid, and The Craft was sweet even if it was about teenage witches, and Welcome to the Dollhouse was definitely not sweet but it had a strong enough impact to get beyond the art house and into the occasional multiplex. And in short order, Jennifer Capriati and Tonya Harding went nuts or went psycho and Lorena Bobbitt wasn’t convicted and Sharon Stone and Shannen Doherty became role models. And Alanis Morissette made it seem like a good idea to root for the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction after all, and a world that had been so resistant to all that Amy Fisher was, now that she was in jail, was starting to look like one she could have lived in.
Meanwhile, in the Albion State Correctional Center, Amy has received more than twenty disciplinary citations, and has even been found guilty of sexually harassing a guard. Which, I’m sure the Riot Girls would agree, means she must be doing something right.
On 10 December 1996, after serving four years in prison for first-degree assault with a .25 caliber handgun, Amy Fisher was denied parole by the state board in Albany, New York, on the grounds that “there is a reasonable probability that [Ms. Fisher] would not live and remain at liberty without violating the law, and her release at this time is incompatible with the welfare and safety of the community.” The board also criticized Amy’s decision to leave the crime scene without calling for help for Mary Jo, opting instead to return home to wash off the blood. “Your pattern of intention and the severity of your criminal act coupled with your lack of insight into your criminality do make your discretionary release not appropriate at this time,” the parole report said, addressing Amy.
Nowhere in these written conclusions, however, was Amy Fisher ever referred to as a “wild animal.”
According to the Justice Department, the United States prison population consisted of 1,182,000 inmates by the end of 1996, more than double what it was in 1985. This increase was attributed to the conviction and incarceration of more black drug offenders and more white violent criminals. While the length of sentences has not increased, the likelihood of paroling prisoners has decreased—though I doubt this reflects a sudden new trend among assailants to flee a crime scene without calling an ambulance first. The habit of running to scrub the blood from your hands is, I believe, time-honored.
Federal prisons now operate at a 25 percent rate of overcrowding; state prisons, like the one Amy Fisher is in, have a population excess of only 16–24 percent. Our penal system is one of the only government-sponsored growth industries left; states like Missouri that lack the capacity to hold all its convicts have been known to contract them out to private, for-profit jailers in states like Texas, where patrolmen fired by local sheriffs and police departments for excessively violent behavior and the like can find employment and have been known—as was captured on videotape proudly recorded for training purposes—to beat their charges with stun guns and fire hoses, have them slither across the floor naked while guard dogs bite them and spray them with pepper when it’s all over.
Amy Fisher will next become eligible for parole in June 1999.
The Buttafuocos now live in California.
Here’s the real Amy Fisher story, the way it should have been:
This is about a girl who is shaggy and small, hair in her eyes—you just kind of know, you can imagine, that her mother is always pushing it behind her ears or trying to get her to put it up. And that’s probably Amy in a nutshell: solidly defiant, but up until Joey, it was probably pretty innocuous, hair on her face, clouds in her eyes.
When Amy met Joey she thought he was cool. If she had followed the college-bound course she was meant to—85 percent of the graduates of John F. Kennedy High School attend four-year institutions (and I don’t mean jail)—then in ten years, she’d have thought he was gross, a terrifically recherché relic of days gone by, she’d have looked at him the way Stephanie in Saturday Night Fever looks at Tony Manero—with a twinge, with a sigh, and finally with a sense of relief that she got out, that 2001 on the weekend is not what she lives for, that the back seat of a car is a place for passengers and not for sex, that she became a grown-up.
This ought to have been a story of the road not taken, of the crush Amy had on the guy who fixed her cars, the white 1989 Dodge Daytona which was later replaced—in one of those moments when life offers symbolic justice that is almost literary—with a black 1991 Chrysler LeBaron once it was totaled, in one of those many accident situations that seemed as much a part of Amy’s dazy dopey adolescent days as, say, the four major food groups or a toothbrush are to other people. This could have been a distracted driver in disarray, the kind who would still have to bring her car in on college vacations for a tune-up here, a dent there, who would always make Joey Buttafuoco smile when she turned up in December or May, the unspoken frisson always there, never spoken, never certain.
This is the story of a girl and her car because that is what it would be had Amy taken the road she did not take. Because really I don’t think she wanted Joey or Paul or Rob or any of the boys she turns to like they’re salvation, like they are mighty as Michelangelo’s David. I think she wanted out. I think she wanted to drive as far and as fast as a Bruce Springsteen song, to run like hell from herself and her life, to let’s get lost. I think she wanted speed, absolutely elsewhere, to escape the depression that she describes as hanging with her from the time she was a little girl: “Dread is what I feel upon awakening,” she recalls early in My Story. “Sadness has me inside of it. It’s like a big tub of water I’ll never get out of. It’s not fair to wake up, six years old, and feel like that.” This is the story of a girl who wants so badly to be free that she finally ends up in jail, doing five-to-fifteen, dreaming not of boys, not of lovers, but of Ferraris.
This is the story of a girl who pretty much just wants what boys are guaranteed as their birthright—to go out there and hunt and make claims and take lovers and take chances and take in and take off and take out and say gimme gimme gimme and never once be told that a lady must wait and all that stuff.
See, if Amy had really listened to her own desires, had really tried to know what she knows, all her energy would have been focused with the precision of an electron microscope on that great big open vista, that forward trajectory, the place anywhere on earth that even an American-made car will take you to, and the place beyond that, the place where Emily Dickinson, who never left Amherst, could be transported to in the comfort of her own mind, the place she described with the line “There is no Frigate like a Book.”
You can drive forever and never find that cool calm, but the chances are certainly a lot better than if you’re fucking a thirty-seven-year-old married man with herpes and a funny name, in a little apartment above the garage, the kind of place where men keep their etchings, the kind of claustrophobic setup that is so enclosed that you don’t even notice that you’re always having sex during the gray of afternoon—the adulterous hour—never in the black of night or the sunny bright of first
thing in the morning, never when people who are not in illicit liaisons manage to do it.
Look, a girl can get in trouble anywhere. But a car, even on Dead Man’s Curve, even on a very dangerous road, will take you a lot further than a man. And when the time is right, if it comes to that, you can drive that car into a garage, turn on the engine, feel the air fill with carbon monoxide, feel the onset of asphyxia, feel your breathing slow, feel your body stop feeling, feel the only real freedom you will ever know.
PART THREE
There She Goes Again
I want to be the girl with the most cake
I love him so much it just turns to hate
I fake it so real I am beyond fake
Someday you will ache like I ache
COURTNEY LOVE
“Doll Parts”
The calm before the storm: most of us understand this reference to the peaceful, dark gray of the sky in the moments preceding thunder crack and lightning bolt and a cloudburst of torrents of rain as meteorology’s metaphor for the way that when things seem the most stable and contained, it is often just a decoy for disaster, a respite nature grants as a cruel joke before a big huge mess, before the hangman shows up, before the bomb drops, before really bad things start to happen.
This simple and commonplace expression, the kind busy people use to describe a rare period of downtime, the kind of saying that seems so obvious, that reminds us to trust the silences no more than we trust the noise, that makes note of the way the signals we receive are often counterintuitive, that tells us not to get too comfortable with our assumptions—this stupid expression about the weather whose meaning and implications I never gave any thought to at all—suddenly struck me as rich and resonant when I realized it is completely wasted on friends and relatives of suicides.
It seems like every suicide was healthy, happy, sane and sanguine—a few problems, nothing serious—at least as far as the mourners are concerned.
Consider the case of Margaux Hemingway, a former model and failed actress, who, at the age of forty-one, on 28 June 1996, died in her studio apartment in Santa Monica, her body bloated beyond recognition, her hands folded over her nightgown as she lay tidily on her bed, her position that of a corpse in a coffin. The news of Hemingway’s passing was mentioned on television bulletins or in wire-service stories in the newspaper almost as an afterthought, more a confirmation than an announcement. It was as if to say that if you wondered what had happened to that Idaho-fresh pretty girl with big bones and baby blues and bushy brows and that whole seventies outdoorsy glamour thing, the one who appeared in a movie called Lipstick and seemed to be recovering from the humiliation ever since—if you wondered what happened to her and occasionally thought that she might be dead, then it turns out that you were right.
None of these early reports mentioned the cause of death, which was not to be determined by the Los Angeles County coroner—chastened to caution by the public relations fiasco of the O.J. trial—for seven more weeks. But even without the benefit of the autopsy report, it seemed obvious that this was a suicide: relying on only the meager details about Hemingway obtained through media osmosis, through a fame that had become as indelible and unnoticeable as invisible ink, I knew that nothing about Margaux’s situation—nothing about being a woman in your forties living alone in one room without a view—sounded especially happy.
I remembered Margaux Hemingway as a thing of beauty, the model graced with a million-dollar contract—unheard of in 1975—to be the face of a fragrance called Babe, created by a company called Fabergé, in what seemed like an effort at forging a female counterpart to Joe Namath’s success as spokesman for an aftershave called Brut. I could envision the famous photograph taken of Margaux at Studio 54, appearing—either by design or by default—as the quintessential Quaalude casualty, a picture-perfect depiction of disco decadence with the spaghetti strap of her camisole insouciantly and sloppily slipped over her shoulder, her left nipple bared, her spaciness outspaced only by the blank stare of her kid sister Mariel in the background. (It is this picture of these two granddaughters of a Nobel Prize-winning author—along with the alleged careers of Sofia Coppola, Julian Lennon, Ashley Hamilton, Zoe Cassavetes, Charlie Sheen, the Phillips sisters Mackenzie, Chynna and Bijou, and the Wilson girls Carnie and Wendy—that makes me wonder why famous people continue to breed.) I could recall images of Margaux on the cover of Time and Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar as the model of modern American beauty, the inside pages of her fashion spreads and face shots that frame her as the first supermodel: I’d seen them all in the dentist’s waiting room during my prepubescent cavity-prone years, and they came back to me after her death as recovered memories that were not false so much as vague. But the images were vivid enough to remind me that for Margaux to have been in that glossy, glittery place—sheltered by the sweet, slippery safety that success at a young age secures for you when you are too busy to want it, and snatches away from you when you are finally desperate enough to need it—and now have her life, at forty-one, enclosed into one small room, was a sure sign of suicide.
I didn’t, when I heard those first news reports, know the gory details, the twenty-eight-day detox at Betty Ford, the subsequent stay at a private clinic in Twin Falls, Idaho, or the fact that her death was a day shy of the thirty-fifth anniversary of her grandfather Ernest’s suicide via Abercrombie & Fitch shotgun. I didn’t know about the failed marriages, the declared bankruptcy in 1991 with debts of $815,900 and assets totaling $6,795. I didn’t know about the posing in Playboy, the infomercials, the Psychic Friends’ Network endorsements, the public claim that her grandfather molested her and the resultant estrangement from her family. I didn’t know that she had changed the spelling of her name, née Margot, to the more exotic x-variation, chosen for the wine her parents drank the night she was conceived, and I did not yet know that she had been named for Margot Macomber, a character of Papa Hemingway’s invention blessed with a face “so perfect that you expected her to be stupid.” I didn’t know that she dropped out of high school, that the only real job she’d ever held involved doing publicity for Evel Knievel, or that her first husband picked her up in the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel on her first day in New York when she was just nineteen. I didn’t know that she had to lose forty pounds to be a model, that she did a half-hour television show for the BBC in which all she did was talk to Lynn Redgrave about her struggle with bulimia, that she was traumatized by a skiing accident that caused her to gain seventy-five pounds from immobility. I didn’t know all the New Age nonsense, that she consulted with a Cheyenne medicine man, that she learned the art of shamanism from the Northwest Coast Indians, that she studied the philosophy of the Hawaiian kahunas, that she hoped a chiropractor might cure her epilepsy, or that she ended up in jail in India for reasons that are unclear while on a trip to visit holy sites. I did not know that at her funeral, held at something called the Agape Church of Religious Science, an ex-boyfriend said, “I feel her, you feel her, she’s in the wind.” I did not know that she’d moved into the apartment that she chose to die in less than a month before, that the boxes were still unpacked. I did not know all the other pieces that make this seem like a life worth interrupting.
I did not yet know that Margaux felt like nothing, and she was nothing. Nothing but a great beauty, and one who had, by most accounts, through the ravages of alcohol and time, completely lost her looks. But never mind that, because at one time she had been a great beauty, and even then that was not worth much. Beauty is not, after all, worth anything more than beauty: it did not mean she could act, dance or sing, and in spite of her literary heritage, it did not mean she could write, think critically or even think at all. “She thought they were going to have a creative marriage, like Jean-Paul Goude and Grace Jones,” a friend said of Margaux’s second attempt at matrimony—to a man from Venezuela who lived in France—which pretty much proves my point: only an idiot would see Goude and Jones as a paradigm of creativity or anything else.
But we
valorize beauty so highly, we believe in it, we revere it, we have given supermodels more space in the public pantheon than we afford to just about anyone else who does just about anything else for a living. What was once a rough trade of underpaid girls in overpriced schmattes has gleaned a professional sheen enticing enough that Elite Model Management—in a reversal of the usual flow of talent—now has a division for actresses who want to model (it represents, among others, Drew Barrymore, Ashley Judd, Ivanka Trump and Nastassia Kinski). Beauty is so powerful to us that we forget that it is only what it is, it is its own closed system, open it up and it contains nothing, it signifies nothing and it implies nothing other than the premium of pleasure that beauty itself provides: it does not bestow goodness or braininess or anything more, and yet the omnipotence of beauty by itself is enough to make it perhaps the most desirable asset in God’s creation. Other heritable attributes, like intelligence or talent, can be a passport for a simple soul into an exceptional life, into premature fame or fortune for which, by definition, no one can ever be adequately prepared. But smarts and chops are more than skin deep, they are an inner resource, they demand motion and motivation, while modeling asks for stillness and static. Of all the assets that can take a girl away from her hometown, beauty is the most dangerous, the desire it inspires seems to entitle people to abuse it, the luckiness we attribute to the beautiful people makes us feel just fine about anything we might do to them—they must be immune to heartbreak, they must be impervious to pain. (So entrenched is the collective sense that those gifted with good looks lead carefree lives of no consequence that even as I defend the feelings of a supermodel, I have trouble believing that what I am saying is true.) “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” Kelly LeBrock coos in Pantene commercials, which I’m sure makes many people want to ask, Why the fuck not?! If beauty can excite love, then it can also incite hate. (In LeBrock’s case, it ought to elicit our pity: until recently, she was married to Steven Seagal.) “Only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone / And not your yellow hair,” W. B. Yeats wrote in “For Anne Gregory,” a poem that omits its implied inverse, that neither God nor any man could love her without her buttercup-bright tresses. (The corn-silk mane as an ideal of beauty has become such a resonant metonymy for all that is oppressive in our culture that when Whoopi Goldberg did her one-woman show on Broadway many years ago, her today-I’m-gonna-be-a-white-girl routine entailed little more than draping a towel over her head and asking the audience to admire her “beautiful blonde locks.”)
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