Smiling, Dick rose and walked to me, then patted my arm. He knew that I was referring to his use of marijuana on an almost daily basis. Even I smoked pot with my gal-pals. Most weekends, someone would come up with a lone joint and pass it around between the four or five of us. "Gregg has the problem, Jen, not us. You don't have to worry about me smoking in front of him. As far as he's concerned, neither one of us uses the stuff."
"The `do as I say but not as I do' syndrome?"
"No," he counseled. "The `some things can't be handled by kids but can be by adults' syndrome."
"I have to tell you, Dick. If Gregg comes here, I won't be using the stuff at all. I'm not asking you to quit because I do, but I will ask you not to smoke in the house or in front of him. Are you willing to do that? I know it's asking a lot."
Dick didn’t hesitate. "Sure, Pussycat. I'll do almost anything for you. You know that."
"I really appreciate your willingness to make that sacrifice. You're a gem."
As usual, I wanted to believe Dick, wanted to believe that he desired to be a kind, but firm, father figure. With that belief, we went to get Gregg.
Arriving in Lantana at Sam's condominium, Dick and I hurried inside. Gregg and I threw our arms around each other. Hugging him gave me a moment to compose myself after the shock of seeing his physical condition. His tall, lanky body had shrunk to that of a skeleton. Even his eyes, once clear and sparkling brown, were now surrounded by dark circles and lay sunken in his head. Above his brow, in frustration and unhappiness, Gregg had literally pulled out a quarter-size patch of hair by the roots. The anxiety and stress of living with his father and stepmother had been far worse than I had imagined. I wanted to take his father by the shoulders and shake him. How could he have allowed his own son to become this sad and woebegone shadow of his former self?
Instead, I said, "Hi, Sam."
Sam mumbled, "Good to see you, Jen." He shook hands with Dick, looking awkward and embarrassed. His wife Nancy waved a greeting, then disappeared into the bedroom and stayed there.
Dick looked at Gregg gravely as he shook his hand. "Let's load his things in the car, Jen." With a tinge of sadness in his voice, he added in a whisper. "And let's get some food into this kid."
Within twenty minutes, we had left Sam's condominium and driven to the nearest restaurant. On the way home, Gregg, with a full stomach, said, "Thanks Dick and Mom. I can't tell you how good it is to be with you and gone from Dad's place. You saved me from going nuts."
I touched his cheek. We all smiled at each other.
Back in Sarasota, I leased a two bedroom, two-bath house that had a spacious office off the foyer. We needed more room and I wanted Gregg to have a real family feeling and a comfortable bedroom of his own.
With two summer months remaining before Gregg entered his sophomore year of high school, I began the mission of restoring my son’s health. Week by week, with continual home-cooked meals and long walks along the Gulf of Mexico, he began to fill out. The dark circles under his eyes disappeared and the sparse spot on his head filled in with new hair growth.
Dick approached Gregg one afternoon. "How about if I take you shopping for a batch of new clothes?"
Gregg straightened in interest. "I can pick them out?"
"Absolutely." Dick smiled as he winked at me. "Just you and me. Okay Mom?"
My heart filled with gratitude. "By all means. Have fun you two."
I happily observed the understanding and friendship Dick offered my son. Dick displayed a gentle kindness toward Gregg that renewed my love for him. I could see that Gregg looked up to Dick. He seemed to be rallying beneath our combined attention.
Weeks passed. On another bright and sunny morning, Dick and Gregg dug into a huge stack of pancakes and crisp bacon. Between mouthfuls, Dick inquired whether I had heard from Curtis about my commission check.
"Nope. He’s still coming up with the same old stall tactics."
A hard look crossed Dick's face. "Okay. It's time to stop playing games with the guy. There's another way to get your money, a way that usually works."
I caught my breath with a sharp intake. "Like how?"
"Like you'll see."
The next morning, while Gregg slept in late, Dick and I went to the La Casa Beach Inn. Marching up the stairs to the business office, we confronted my former boss. From behind a large desk piled high with ledgers and papers, Curtis shot Dick a wary glance.
"Dick, Jen, Good to see you. What can I do for you?"
Dick took three purposeful strides, leaned over and planted his beefy paws on Curtis's desk. In a voice cold as ice, he said calmly, "You can pick up your pen and write a check to Jen for $3,785."
"Well, aah, Dick, I can't right now. I'll have to send it to her."
Dick's head jutted out. The two men were almost nose to nose. "Now look, you sniveling, puny, fucking excuse for a man," he growled. "Unless you want me to use your shirt for a mop...with you in it, start writing. Now."
Curtis shrugged his shoulders and turned up the palms of his hands.
Dick slowly came around the desk, reached down, grabbed the front of his white shirt, twisting it into a ball, and partially lifted the man off his chair. "One last time, pal. I came for Jen's money and she's going to have it. Now!"
Curtis scrambled for his checkbook. Dick released his grip. Squaring himself in the chair, Curtis tried to appear unflappable, but didn't quite succeed. His face turned beet red as he hurriedly scratched out a check and handed it to Dick without looking at him. Dick casually walked across the room and handed it to me.
Outside, he exploded in laughter. "What a great day. I really like days like this."
CHAPTER FIVE
Gregg and the 'Straight' Program
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
-- Henry David Thoreau
Dick clearly intended to become a success. The problem was that he couldn't zero in on anything that seemed to work. He sold new cars for a few weeks. He sold used cars for a few weeks. Next came a sales job for a man named Jake who had a building texture coating business. Two months into the new sales job, Dick announced that he thought he should go into business for himself. "Hell, why should I work for someone else when I can do it myself. I've already picked out a name: Space Age Coating Company. How about you handling the phone and the books?"
"I plan on going back into real estate, Dick."
"Can't you do that after we get this thing launched? Let's work as a team, okay?"
"Alright. I'll help."
"Great. And on the plus side, Jake's one and only salesman, a fellow named Glenn, has agreed to work for me, so we'll be off to a good start."
Dick jumped right in. Soon we had job orders on commercial buildings and private residences. A couple of weeks into the new business, the telephone rang late one night. Dick picked up the receiver, then slammed it down a few seconds later.
"Who was that?" I asked, getting ready for bed.
"Damn," Dick cursed. "That was Jake. He told me he's gonna get even with me for stealing from him. I don't know what he's so upset about. All I took was a sample kit, a lousy list of prospects, and Glenn, his mediocre salesman. I'll bet Jake did the same thing when he started."
After that, midnight phone calls from Jake brought more threats. Dick would shriek a foul response, roll over and fall back to sleep, while I lay awake for hours, worrying.
In six weeks, we had the company progressing nicely. The telephone rang often. One morning, Dick happened to answer the telephone in the kitchen. Minutes later, he poked his head into the office where I sat at the desk organizing the workload. "Well, it looks like Jake kept his word about getting even. Glenn had his car ripped off. He said he parked it in the driveway last night and this morning it was gone. I'm going to pick him up and we'll look for it. See ya later, Pussycat."
Dick left the house, whistling cheerfully. Perplexed, I couldn't help but shake my head in wonder at hi
s strange response and demeanor concerning this emergency. Wanting to think the best of him, however, I told myself that he was only taking a positive approach to the problem in anticipation of helping his salesman do the same.
Hours later, Dick phoned with news. "We found Glenn's car in a vacant field outside of town. Jake did a number on it. He pried open the trunk and took the sample kits. He also got your attaché case and that real estate walk-along measurer you loaned me. Sorry about that. All the windows were smashed. And then Jake must have doused the car with gasoline and threw a match at it. The car’s burned to a crisp."
I was shocked. "I'm so sorry to hear that. Will Glenn's insurance cover the loss?"
"Couldn't say. I drove him back home and he quit the job. He blames me for what happened to him and his car. Can you imagine that? Oh well, I'll be better off without him. Don't you fret, Pussycat, I'll sell the jobs myself and find some schmuck to handle the hard labor of applying the texture coating."
Exit Glenn.
Within days, Dick found Ken. "The guy’s got some good sources for pot," he said, rubbing his hands together. "He also has an airless paint sprayer and a sandblaster."
Dick brought Ken home to introduce him. Coming into the house in dirty tattered clothes, the little weasel-looking scrub of a fellow peered at me with lowered head and steel gray, lifeless eyes. He gave me the creeps. It soon became apparent that Ken worked part time and sold marijuana full time.
In a matter of weeks after hiring him, Dick made a casual announcement. "Ken has to leave town. Seems there's an outstanding arrest warrant on him. I don't know what that's all about. He needs to raise some traveling money. His Greco airless paint machine is something we can use. Will you loan him $500 on it?"
I felt pushed into the fray. "I don't know, Dick. What would we do with it, and what is the machine actually worth if we wanted to sell it one day after we buy it?"
"Jen, I guarantee the machine's worth at least $1,500. It could come in handy for the business and when we're not using it, I could lease it out to paint subcontractors."
"I honestly don't want to buy the machine. This texture coating business is still in its infancy. It's too early to make equipment investments."
"Jen, it's a money-making machine. It would be a good investment for you and I need it."
"Alright, Dick. If you say it's worth it, I'll check into it."
I called attorney Reed Reynolds, who I had met years ago through his wife at real estate functions. "My advice is not to loan five hundred dollars on the machine, but to buy it, for say...$300,” he told me. “Allow the seller thirty days to reclaim the equipment. That way it's a clean transaction. If the seller wants to buy it back, that's fine. If not, you're not stuck trying to collect a bad debt. And you'll have a bill of sale if you want to sell it."
I repeated the attorney’s advice to Dick. "That's not what Ken wants," he said.
"Frankly, what Ken wants or doesn't want has no bearing on the matter. This is a business transaction and I don't want to buy the machine to begin with, so three hundred dollars is the one and only offer. If Ken can do better elsewhere, that's fine."
"Okay, Jen. I'll let him know. It's your money."
Ken jumped at the offer.
I drew a simple contract. Ken and his wife met me at the bank and we concluded the transaction. Then, with money in hand and the law hot on his trail, the couple climbed into their already packed and dirty clunk of a car and beat it out of town.
The following week, Dick stopped making sales calls and Space Age Coating also went 'belly up'. "I'm sorry, Pussycat. I guess that wasn't the business for me. At least we broke even on it and you can always sell the machine."
"Broke even? Just barely. And I have no idea who would buy the paint machine." I closed the books on the company, while the Greco paint machine sat chained to a pole in the garage, like a prisoner.
In short order, word filtered back to us that the weasel-looking Ken had not eluded the law for long. The police arrested him the day he left Sarasota and threw him in the slammer. Convicted on the charge of grand larceny, he was sentenced to a Tampa prison. Eventually, I sold the paint machine for $200 to a road building firm in Tampa. In an eerie coincidence, both Ken and the Greco paint machine ended up doing hard time in Tampa.
Exit Ken.
The good news, however, was that Dick and my son Gregg were spending time together and appeared to be relating well to one another. So, I consoled myself with a gentle reminder that much of life seemed to be an ongoing series of trade-offs.
Soon Dick landed a sales job for one of the largest home building corporations in the country: U.S. Home Corporation. While the grueling one-hundred-mile round trip to Clearwater didn't faze him, a corporate edict did: Dick had to get rid of his beard. Emerging from the bathroom, he avoided my eyes. His chin, half the normal size, ended an inch or so below his lower lip, giving him an unsightly Andy Gump appearance. His behavior became meek, his self-confidence seeming to disappear along with his beard. Just like Samson in the Bible, Dick had lost his power with the shearing of his hair.
Soon, an underlying fear became reality. When Dick and Gregg returned from an outing, it was obvious that they were both high on marijuana. I couldn't believe it. I chided Dick behind closed doors. "How could you get my son high on pot? You made a promise that you wouldn't even keep it in the house, much less give it to Gregg."
"What's the big deal, Jen," Dick grumbled. "The kid's used the stuff before. We're just getting to know each other."
A contemptuous glare shown in Dick's eyes as my maternal instincts surged to the surface. "We had an agreement," I said. "We bailed Gregg out of his dad's house to help him straighten out his life. You know very well he can't do that if he smokes pot."
"Alright, Jen," he said in a voice weighed with indifference. "I'll do it your way. No more smoking with the kid."
After that experience I recognized a certain despair growing deep inside of me, a lack of response to the kind of person I had been for most of my adult life. I felt divided from myself. Where once I had been secure and unafraid, I now found myself fighting insecurities. I began withdrawing into myself. Gregg began doing the same. He spent more and more time alone in his room, listening to music, unresponsive to conversation and almost zombie-like. Gregg and I were drawing apart, yet we didn't move closer to Dick, just the opposite. We both felt isolated and alone. The distance between each to the other grew.
Had I been able to grasp what was happening, I would have realized that both my son and I were becoming psychologically controlled. A diminishing self-assurance, isolation from friends and family, and a growing dependence upon the abuser. We had taken the first steps in the downhill slide to becoming abuse victims.
I considered myself a reasonable and logical person. Yet, I couldn't understand why the more I gave in to Dick, the more dependent I became on him. I didn't realize until much later that my son and I had entered the realm of the ‘Stockholm syndrome’, whereby the captive, eventually, will begin to identify with the tormentor. I felt like a robot. If he stopped smiling, my smile vanished. If he displayed happiness, so did I. My soul had been taken over and I found myself more and more in a state of moral genuflecting.
Where at one time I enjoyed being alone, I now felt insecure when Dick left the house. While shopping, I'd worry about what he thought. Did he think I spent my time with another man as he so often accused? I felt guilty for no reason and then angry with myself for feeling that way.
As Christmas drew near, I suspected Gregg of dipping into Dick's ever-present bottles of Jack Daniels. Opening the front door with a load of presents in my arms, I found Gregg laying motionless on the hallway rug. Frightened, I dropped the packages and ran to him. As I knelt over him, the smell of stale liquor hit my nostrils. Gregg lay passed out cold. I put my hands on his shoulders and called his name. He moaned and finally sat up. I helped him up and guided him to the living room couch. "Stay where
you are, Gregg. Let's get some food inside you."
He sat down and held his head in his hands. "Okay, Mom." He drank a large glass of milk and slowly ate the scrambled egg sandwich I placed on the cocktail table in front of him.
I waited until he finished before speaking to him. "Why, Gregg?"
"Oh, Mom," he slurred, "the girl I really liked at school told me to `get lost.' I thought she liked me too. When I got home I just started pouring straight shots. Oh God, what time is Dick coming home? He's going to have a fit."
"Don't worry about that now," I said. "Go to bed and get some sleep. If he asks about you, I'll tell him you didn't get much sleep last night and you went to bed early. Between you and me, you don't intend doing that again. Is that right?"
"Yeah, Mom, I'm sorry."
I needed to stay with Dick in order to provide stability for Gregg, I told myself....
It all seemed so confusing in my mind, I couldn't think clearly or make any logical plans.
Dick generated a mass of swirling, stressful emotions that left Gregg and me on the verge of hysteria on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. I fell exhausted into bed most nights. All I could do, then, was regain enough strength overnight to get up and face another day of turmoil that acted as tonic for Dick. He had asked me to marry him many times. I avoided the issue. I couldn't put into words why he both fascinated and frightened me. Had Gregg's problems not accelerated I might have come to grips with my life and with Dick. However, Gregg's grades had fallen again and his behavior was becoming more antisocial with each passing day.
Gregg's high school principal called me in for a conference. The minute I sat opposite his desk, he spoke sternly. "Your son is showing all the symptoms of being on drugs. His friends are known drug users. Gregg has severe problems. If we find him with a joint or even suspect that he's high, we'll have to suspend him."
Tyranny of a Lover...Diary of the Wife of an Undercover informant Page 5
