I gave her the five dollars. Then I took the train home.
The phone calls started. She called collect three, four, five times every single day for several weeks—stoned, troubled, barely coherent. Often, she called me at the office. I alerted my secretary that Nancy had some emotional problems and should be put through to me even if I was in a meeting. If I was traveling, I left a number where Nancy could reach me. I was forever anticipating her call, wondering when it would come. I began to equate the phone cord with an umbilical cord.
Many times, she called in the middle of the night. I begged her repeatedly not to call after eleven p.m.—the kids needed to sleep; Frank and I needed to sleep—but she kept at it. So I had to turn the phone off at night. I figured whatever was troubling her would still be there in the morning.
For some reason known only to Nancy, she would speak to no one in the family but me. If she called home and I wasn’t there, she would not engage in conversation with Frank or Suzy or David. She had rejected them. “Tell Mommy to call” was all she’d say.
When I did, it would generally be to hear a plea for money. I refused to send it to her. She’d just buy drugs with it. One of the most impossible things in the world, I’m now convinced, is to refuse your own child money. I did my best. I paid her rent and utilities directly and brought her groceries every two weeks. I suggested she get a job. Instead, she began phoning relatives and demanding money from them. She called my mother, Frank’s sister, my cousin in Brooklyn. When they refused to give her the money (per my instructions), she got abusive and threatened to have their houses destroyed. I ordered her to stop bothering the family. In response, she hocked the television set we’d given her, which infuriated me. The very next day she called to say someone had grabbed her in the vestibule of her building, held a gun to her, and taken her wallet with the money from the TV in it. When I asked her if she’d called the police, she began to scream and curse. Then she hung up on me.
If it wasn’t money Nancy needed, it was Mommy. Just as I had sat with her on her bed in the middle of the night when she was little—making the shark demons of her nightmares go away—now I was soothing her grown-up demon, which was mounting paranoia.
“I went to CB’s last night, Mom. Nobody would talk to me. They hate me. What am I gonna do? Nobody likes me. What am I gonna do, Mom? What am I gonna do?”
“I’m sure they’ll like you again, sweetheart. Try to be nice. Try hard.”
We had this conversation so many times that they all blur together in my mind. She’d sob; I’d do what I could to comfort her. Nothing had changed, really, from when she was a little girl. And she knew that no matter what she said or did, I would always be there for her. She was still my baby. Sometimes I hated her for not being able to cope with the world. God, how she made me hate her. But ultimately I still loved her. She had so much intelligence and compassion inside of her. When I got really angry at her, I’d try to remember the baby, the soft, sweet-smelling baby with the glossy black hair. I had to do what I could to keep that baby alive. I hadn’t given up on her yet. In a sense I was playing for time, waiting for someone, somehow, to step forward and save Nancy—ease her pain, allow her to lead a productive life.
The analogy between watching Nancy destroy herself and watching a terminal patient being destroyed by disease popped up again and again in my mind. I never gave up hope. Instead I waited for the discovery of some magic cure. The longer she stayed alive, I told myself, the better the chance that someone would come along to rescue her.
The calls tapered off when Nancy settled into a routine of sorts that winter. She made some friends. By January 1975 she’d found a place for herself. That place was the punk rock scene.
As I understand it, punk was an underground backlash against the slick, juiceless, studio-produced sound that had begun to dominate the charts in the mid-seventies. Punk professed to being a return to rock’s roots. It was raw, hungry, and angry. It lived for the moment. It was hard and fast. It was Nancy. At age ten she’d been listening to Hair and the Beatles. At age twelve she’d graduated to Hendrix and The Who. Now, at seventeen, she was ready for punk.
Like she had when she was living at home, Nancy generally slept all day, partied and got high all night. The clubs where she took to hanging out most of the time, Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s, were where the punk bands were playing, drinking, getting high, and, ultimately, getting discovered. Blondie came out of that scene. So did the Ramones, the New York Dolls. Nancy knew who these people were early on, before anyone else did. She mentioned them frequently. She had always seemed to have her finger on the bands that would be popular in a year or two. Now was no different, except that she was there with them.
She wrote several articles of criticism about the punk groups for a local rock paper in Greenwich Village. She sent us the clippings. We were very impressed. She set forth what punk stood for with remarkable clarity. The articles were interesting, perceptive, and surprisingly well written. We complimented her profusely.
“Did you really like them?” she begged repeatedly.
“Yes,” we replied repeatedly.
She didn’t get paid for the articles. The magazines that did pay, she said, weren’t hiring at the moment. Unfortunately Nancy didn’t stick with it until something opened up. And then the local rock paper folded.
She was most enthusiastic about Blondie and its lovely lead singer, Deborah Harry. She told me they were very talented and that Debbie Harry would be a superstar someday. She was right. She mentioned Debbie quite often.
“She’s real good, Mom,” Nancy said once. “And pretty. She’s my friend. Debbie’s my friend.”
At the time of her death, Nancy was carrying a photo album portfolio filled with family snapshots, postcards of places she’d been in Europe, the stubs of airplane tickets. Most prominent was a black and white glossy photo of her sitting at a table at one of the punk clubs with Debbie Harry. The two of them are smoking, drinking, and, seemingly, engaging in intimate conversation. She felt they had a special friendship.
Nancy referred to a number of the soon-to-be-famous figures of punk rock as friends. I must point out that my knowledge of Nancy’s relationship with them is confined to what she told me then. I have only her version. I never met Debbie Harry or the others she mentioned, like Joey Ramone. Once, when I made my bi-monthly grocery stop, Richard Hell was at Nancy’s apartment with her. They were listening to a Bruce Springsteen album and drinking coffee. He seemed quiet and polite. She asked me to give them a lift to an address on Houston Street. I did. Richard Hell, I learned years later, was considered a punk rock visionary. He led pioneering punk bands like Television and the Voidoids, and is credited with coining the punk catch phrase “the Blank Generation.”
None of these people came forward after Nancy’s death to make themselves known and offer condolences. I thought it over at the time and came up with several possible reasons for their silence. Possibly, they hadn’t known or liked Nancy much and didn’t care what happened to her. Possibly, they had liked her and were sensitive enough to not want to embarrass or hurt us further. Possibly, they themselves were embarrassed at having known the infamous Nancy Spungen, now that they were successes with somewhat more mainstream images.
There were other friends. Lance Loud looked out for her. There was a tall, striking model named Sable whom she often went to the clubs with, as well as Phyllis, whom she described as “can you believe it—a nice Jewish girl with a straight job and a nice Jewish family?” Each joined Nancy and me for lunch on separate occasions. There were Felipe and Babette, a French couple who lived in Chelsea.
Recently I met a girl named June who had a brief encounter with Nancy that winter. June had come up to New York on the train from Philadelphia to meet her boyfriend, a musician, at a party. She told me she got there before her boyfriend and, intimidated by the scene, stood against a wall feeling bewildered and ignored. Then a young woman, Nancy, appeared at her side.
“H
ey, I’m Nancy and you need a drink and an ashtray.”
And with that, Nancy stuck by June’s side until her boyfriend arrived an hour later. She got her the drink and the ashtray, and when she found out June had come from Philadelphia, Nancy introduced her to everyone else at the party as “my friend from Philly.” June told me everyone there seemed to know Nancy and made a point of speaking to her on their way in and out. She told me she thought Nancy was so sophisticated and self-assured, and couldn’t believe she was not yet eighteen. June added that she thought Nancy was a very considerate, very special person.
Frank and I decided to take a vacation alone that winter—our first. It so happened that the only time both of us could get away from work was during Nancy’s eighteenth birthday. We thought it over. After all, Nancy had a way of regarding her birthday as a national holiday. We decided to go. Our relationship needed this.
We arranged for one of the secretaries in my office to stay with Suzy and David. I think they were a bit offended—they felt they were old enough and responsible enough to stay alone for a week. They were. We just thought an adult should be there in case Nancy got upset about us being away for her birthday and decided to come home.
I told Nancy we would be going to Aspen on a one-week charter and would be gone for her birthday. She said that would be fine. She wished us a pleasant trip. We sent her a birthday card and a toaster oven as a gift, and I arranged for a Mailgram to be delivered to her on her birthday, which was a Saturday.
We had an idyllic two days and nights in Aspen, skiing and cuddling in front of the fire. On the third day I came down with the flu and spent the rest of the trip in bed with a high fever. I felt like God was punishing me for trying to get away and have a good time.
Our charter flight came back very early the morning after Nancy’s birthday. Suzy and David were still asleep. They left a note: Nancy had called continually all day Saturday and was furious to find us absent on her birthday. I crawled into bed, still weak from the flu, and was just about asleep when the phone rang. It was Nancy.
“How dare you go away on my birthday!” she screamed.
“Now, Nancy, I told you we were going to be—”
“You forgot my fucking birthday! I don’t believe you!”
“Nancy, we sent you a card and a Mailgram and a toaster oven. We didn’t forget. And we told you we would be away.”
Silence from her end.
“You don’t love me,” she said quietly.
“Of course we do.”
“Do you really?” she demanded.
“Yes.”
“Good. Then I’ll get on a train and be there right away. We’ll celebrate today. Okay?”
I honestly didn’t want her to come home that day. I was still sick and not sure I could handle her first return visit since moving to New York. But how can you tell your own child not to come home to celebrate her birthday with her family?
“Okay, Mom?”
“Okay, sweetheart.”
Suzy baked her a birthday cake. I found a roast in the freezer and stuck it in the oven. I went to get her at the train station. She got off the train with her old nasty scowl—That Look—and another look that was entirely new. Nancy was now a blonde.
“Whaddya think?” she demanded.
“It looks very nice, sweetheart,” I replied. What else could I say? I thought it looked cheap and awful. I thought it made her look like someone other than my Nancy.
“Yeah. Debbie and I did it at her apartment. She’s a blonde, too.”
She wore a purple sweater and new, skin-tight black jeans, which she stripped off the second she got in the house and dumped in the washing machine.
“Need to be shrunk,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
So she sat through her birthday dinner in her sweater, her underwear, and her ridiculous blonde hair, and any time any of us glanced at her, she erupted.
“What the fuck are you staring at, you!” she demanded of David at one point.
“Nothing,” he said quickly, shooting a look at Suzy. They exchanged a smirk—both of them thought Nancy looked really silly as a blonde.
“Now you’re passing fucking signals,” Nancy charged. “Back and forth. I saw you, you two little shits!”
“Aren’t!” Suzy protested.
“Are!” Nancy returned.
We ate the rest of the meal in silence, our faces in our plates. When we were finished, Nancy blew out the candles on her cake and ate a large piece. We had no more gifts for her. This annoyed her.
As soon as her jeans were dry, she put them on and said she wanted to leave. Frank drove her to the station. In all, she was home about three hours.
“Boy, was she mean and nasty,” said Frank when he got back.
“Boy, is she the same,” said Suzy.
“Boy, am I glad she doesn’t live here anymore,” said David.
Chapter 16
“I got a job, Mom!” Nancy told me excitedly over the phone one afternoon.
“Wonderful!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, I don’t have to worry about money anymore. And you don’t have to take care of me. I’ll be good for two or three hundred a night! Do you believe it?”
I didn’t. “That’s a lot of money, sweetheart. What kind of job is this?”
“Dancin’,” she replied. “Kinda sleazy places, but that’s cool. An agency sets me up with gigs.”
She was a go-go dancer. She danced topless in Times Square hustle joints.
“I have to drink with some of the customers afterwards. You know the old routine, right?”
“Uh, no.”
“They think they’re buyin’ me champagne. Champagne! It’s ginger ale.” She laughed. “Fuckin’ ginger ale.”
I guess her new profession fit all of the criteria Nancy had for a job. It was lucrative and, while not illegal, it was socially unacceptable. It took her into a hard, unsavory, and dangerous world. And it allowed her to sleep all day and be up all night.
It was, to us, repellent. Knowing about it made us feel dirty, ashamed. When people asked us what Nancy was doing for work in New York, we didn’t tell them. Only my friends Janet and Susan knew. Suzy and David kept it from their friends. They, too, were ashamed.
Of course, we were perfectly aware that these clubs were also operating bases for prostitutes. The one thing, dancing, led to the other thing, hooking. We shut our eyes to this possibility. It was too horrible to conceive. We wanted to believe that Nancy was only dancing, and so we believed it. That was bad enough.
Recently Karen told me that she called Nancy one morning that March to tell her that her father had died. Nancy coldly told her, “I have to hang up—I have a customer here.” And hang up she did.
So I suppose I must face the fact that my daughter probably did work as a prostitute. She was certainly capable of it. Sex meant nothing to her. It hurts me to think about it. But I can deal with it now. Nancy is at peace now. I couldn’t deal with it then.
Karen told me she was very hurt after talking to Nancy on the phone. Nancy had rejected her. She wasn’t there for Karen when Karen needed her. My daughter had stopped caring about people. Frankly, I think this upsets me more than the thought of Nancy selling her body.
Nancy was able to pay her rent and bills herself now that she was working. She was very proud of this. She was also able to afford the fast track to self-obliteration. With the two to three hundred dollars she was making a night, she became a hard-core heroin addict.
I found out in the early spring when Frank and I took the kids to New York to see Nancy’s apartment and take her to dinner. They hadn’t been up there since the move.
She looked tired and down. She wore old jeans and a baggy, oversize turtleneck sweater that came to the very tips of her fingers.
She hadn’t cleaned her apartment. It wasn’t a pigsty, but the ashtrays and litter box were overflowing. She showed Suzy and David around rather mechanically. They played with her cat for a minute. It went for David�
�s throat as if it wanted to kill him. We didn’t stay long.
We went to a restaurant in the neighborhood. I sat next to Nancy, who immediately began to doze off right there at the table. Her eyes closed, her head lowered, and off she went into slumberland. I nudged her. She sat up, confused, then fell asleep again. So we talked around her. We talked about the food. We talked about the weather.
At one point she slumped onto the table. Her elbow went into the untouched spaghetti I’d ordered for her. The sauce got all over her sweater. I roused her, suggested she take the sweater off so I could dab at the sauce before it stained. She did. She had a T-shirt on underneath.
That’s when I saw the track marks. They ate away like a cancer at the insides of her elbows and the backs of her hands. The sight made me so sick to my stomach that I almost vomited. Those were her baby arms and hands to me, pudgy, soft, innocent. Now they were covered with the needle scars of an addict. She was so out of it, she didn’t notice or care that I saw them.
Frank saw them, too.
“There’s nothing we can do to help her,” he said to me later that night, choosing his words slowly and painfully.
“Nothing?” I begged.
“Not until she wants to be helped.”
He took me in his arms. I held back my tears.
I had a nightmare that night, the nightmare I was to have so many times over the next three years. I dreamed we were back on Welsh Road. Nancy was five. She was running up to me in the living room, excitedly waving her hands in front of her face.
“Look what I have, Mommy!” she exclaimed. “Look what I have!”
What she had were track marks all over her little girl’s hands and arms, the track marks I’d seen in the restaurant.
Then she began to cry.
“Help me, Mommy!” she sobbed. “Help me!”
I tried to reach out to her, but my arms wouldn’t move no matter how hard I strained.
I awoke from the nightmare with a start.
Seeing Nancy’s track marks haunted me in daylight, too. A few days later Frank and I went to his friend’s house, where a briss was being held for the baby that he and his wife had just had.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 27
