At this point in Nancy’s life she couldn’t be saved. Methadone kept her alive a little longer. It was the next best thing to a cure and we applauded it.
We took her out to dinner. Her choice for a restaurant was Grotta Azzurra in Little Italy. We’d taken all three kids there for dinner years before and had a nice meal. This night Nancy enjoyed herself, enjoyed the food. But after about an hour a little timer seemed to go off in her head. She got restless. It required great effort for her to play the part of good daughter, and she’d run out of energy.
“I wanna go,” she said, putting her fork down.
“Don’t you want to finish your dessert?” I asked.
“I wanna go.”
Actually we were anxious to get back home. This was the first time we’d left Suzy and David for a weekend without a baby sitter.
So we left. We dropped her off at a friend’s apartment in the Village and headed on out. When we stopped for gas on the New Jersey Turnpike, I called home. Suzy answered. She sounded upset, frightened.
“What’s wrong, Suzy?”
“Nothing, Mom.”
“Why do you sound that way?”
“We had a party and—”
“You were told not to have a party!”
“—and we smashed your car.”
It was the last straw. I couldn’t stand to hear anymore. I hung up on her. I got in the car and told Frank, then totally withdrew. We drove all the way home without speaking. I didn’t have the strength to deal with this. Or the desire. I decided to resign. As a mother. As a human being.
When we got home, the car was sitting in front of the house. It was so badly smashed that I could not look at it. Suzy and David were waiting for us in the foyer, cowering. I didn’t greet them.
“Frank,” I said. “You handle it. I quit.”
They all looked at me, shocked. I had always been strong enough to deal with whatever came along. Not this time. I’d had it. My limit had finally been reached. I went upstairs and closed myself in the bedroom. I thought about grabbing a suitcase and filling it and running away. Then my mind went blank. I just lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, limp, drained. Eventually I slept. Frank crawled into bed next to me sometime during the night. We didn’t speak.
I felt okay in the morning. I asked Frank for the details. He gave them to me. The kids had thrown a beer bash by the pool. Sometime during the evening they’d loaned the car to a friend who asked for it (which they were forbidden to do) and he had proceeded to wreck it along with two other cars.
We did, of course, lose our car insurance again. This time we were forced to take out a high-risk policy at triple the rate.
Left on their own for the first time, Suzy and David had done just the sort of thing Nancy would have done. They were getting to be the age she had been that awful last year she’d spent at home. They were testing us, testing to see if they could get away with the kind of behavior Nancy had. They couldn’t. We would not tolerate this sort of recklessness and irresponsibility from them. History was not going to repeat itself. We came down on them very hard. They were grounded until they left for camp in July. Unlike Nancy—thank god—they took their punishment, cowed by our anger, apologetic.
We’d gotten Nancy away from them, but her specter remained.
Chapter 17
Nancy stayed on the methadone program for about four weeks.
I didn’t hear from her very often. One time, the strip club she was dancing at was raided for a liquor license violation, and she was busted. She was stuck in a cell for a couple of hours until the club owner bailed her out. She ended up having to pay a $150 fine. She didn’t have the money so I paid the fine for her. I couldn’t stand the idea of her going to jail.
Then she met a guitarist named Jerry at Max’s. She liked him a lot. She wanted me to meet him. I don’t know if he returned her ardor. I somehow doubt it, since he broke it off to move to London and play in a band there. Nancy was pretty down about his leaving, but seemed to be coping until she discovered that her friend Phyllis was flying to London for two weeks—mainly to see Jerry.
She called me, sobbing hysterically.
“Do you believe her? That rotten.… She was my friend! She’s fucking my guy! My … guy! He’s mine!”
“I’m sorry, Nancy.”
“Do you believe somebody would do that!”
“It happens. People do that.”
“To you?” she demanded.
“Well, no. But you have to accept it.”
“I don’t have to accept a fucking thing.”
She slammed down the phone.
And went back on the smack. I could tell from her slurred voice on the phone a few days later.
“You’re shooting again, aren’t you?” I said.
“Uh …”
“Aren’t you?”
“Well … yeah. Like, uh … well, yeah. I am.”
“Oh, Nancy, why? Why did you start again? You were doing so well.”
“Jus’ figured I’d do it one time, Mom. One little ol’ time, ya know?”
“Nancy, that’s so stupid! Totally stupid! You’re an addict! You can’t just go back to it once!”
“I … yeah. Well, you know what they say: Never trust a junkie. Not even your own daughter.”
She hung up, chuckling sadly to herself.
Nancy stayed on heroin through June and July. By then Suzy and David had left for camp. Every evening Frank and I sat at opposite ends of the pool, both of us in our own oasis. Silence.
One afternoon she called the house while I was on my way home from work. She told Frank to have me call her at once. She wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t answer his questions. She sounded terrified, he said.
I called. There was no answer.
“How long ago did she call?” I asked Frank.
“Five minutes, tops.”
I called again to make sure I had the right number. I let it ring a couple of dozen times. I was about to hang up when she picked it up. I heard heavy breathing, then a muffled moan.
“Nancy!” I cried out.
There was a long pause.
“Huh?”
“Are … you … okay?”
“Tired … just tired, Mom.”
“Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
She hung up. A few days later she called me to thank me for saving her life. She’d OD’ed. My call had roused her enough to call Lance Loud for help. He’d taken her to the hospital.
“You saved me, Mom. You saved your Nancy’s life.”
I didn’t know if I had done her a favor or not. She seemed to think so. But I believe that she knew, deep down inside, what I myself was becoming certain of: Only in death would she find peace.
After that incident she swore off smack, though. Not that she let on that there was any connection.
“It’s just no good, Mom,” she told me on the phone. “Gotta get off. Nobody likes the way I look. Gotta get off so I can keep workin’.”
She spoke about kicking her heroin addiction as if it were like taking off ten extra pounds.
“And it’s really expensive. I’m gettin’ off.”
“I want you to know we’re with you. Anything we can do …”
“I’m glad.”
“Same program?”
“Uh-uh. State of New York ran out of money. Big surprise, right? But I found another one. Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. Goin’ up there tomorrow mornin’.”
“Good luck, sweetheart.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
My job no longer took me to New York regularly. I made arrangements to take a personal day off so I could go up and see her. I thought it was important to give her positive reinforcement.
She was very enthusiastic about my coming. Truly, the change in her when she was on methadone was remarkable.
“Come in really early, Mom. We’ll spend the whole day together, you and me.”
“Will you be awake?”
“Call me
from Penn Station. I’ll be up!”
Unfortunately the day I chose to come to New York fell in the middle of a horrendous August heat wave. It was already ninety degrees and muggy when I got on the train at eight in the morning. It was close to a hundred by the time I got to New York. I wore a loose-fitting T-shirt and jeans. As I sat there on the train, I fantasized that Nancy had just graduated from Penn and gotten a job in New York. She and I were going to shop for the new business suits she’d need. We’d try Bloomingdale’s. And Saks, of course. And Bendel’s …
The train plunged into the blackness of the tunnel and then we were in Penn Station. I called Nancy from a pay phone. She was up and raring to go. I bought some fresh hot bagels and a bunch of daisies at the station, then took a cab to her apartment. She was showered and dressed. She wore a tight T-shirt, black jeans, and platform sandals. She hugged me and squealed with delight over the flowers. She carefully arranged them in a pitcher, then made a pot of coffee. We had breakfast.
“You’ve got to see Fiorucci’s,” she jabbered excitedly. “That’s where these jeans came from. And then we’ll go to Bloomingdale’s, okay?”
It was just like my fantasy. A real mother-daughter day.
“Great,” I exclaimed.
“But first I get my booking for tonight.”
“Okay.”
“And get some kind of blood test at a city health center in Harlem. To do with my methadone thing. Ya know, to make sure I’m clean.”
“Okay.”
“And then get my methadone.”
“Okay.”
“But we’ll have plenty of time to shop. If we get moving, lady!”
“Okay, okay!” I laughed. “Let’s go.”
The go-go club booking agency was in a sleazy office building in the West Forties. The hallway outside smelled; inside it was very hot and dingy. There was a large room with a number of men at desks working the phones. Hardened young women were coming in and going out. There was a big blackboard on one wall with about fifty women’s names listed.
It was all so foreign to me, so bizarre, so sick, so inconceivable. Never had I imagined I’d ever find myself in a place like this—especially with my eldest daughter. The daughter had brought me here.
“See, Mom, there’s my name!” Nancy exclaimed, pointing to her name on the board. She wrote down her assignment, then said, “Hey, you gotta meet my boss!”
“That’s really not—”
“C’mon.”
She dragged me into a small office where a fat middle-aged man was on the phone. He was sweating profusely. His shirt stuck to him. One shirttail was out. Nancy waved to him. His response was annoyance. He gestured for her to go away and not bother him.
“Let’s go,” I whispered.
“No way,” she replied.
He got off the phone. “What is it?” he demanded impatiently.
“I want you to meet my mother,” Nancy said proudly.
His head snapped back when he heard the word mother. He smoothed back his hair, tucked in his shirt. Then he politely introduced himself and shook my hand. His was greasy.
“A real pleasure. A real pleasure indeed.” He beamed. “What brings you to New York?”
“She came to see me,” Nancy answered.
“Right. Well, enjoy your stay, Mrs. Spungen. Come again.”
I wondered what kind of person he thought I was. I didn’t ask. We left. When we got back down onto the burning pavement, I asked myself, How many mothers in America are doing this today?
It was now about eleven o’clock. Time to go to Harlem for Nancy’s blood tests. We took the subway. It was a long, crowded, chokingly hot ride. When we got off, we had to walk several blocks crosstown, past burned-out tenements and abandoned cars. The sidewalk was littered with broken glass. Some men slept in doorways. Others loitered on street corners and in doorways. They appraised us as we walked past. Nancy’s jeans were very tight. She wore no bra and, well, what breasts there are in the family, Nancy got. They whistled and hissed after us, made kissing noises and very detailed, very obscene comments about what they’d like to do with us.
“Fuck you!” Nancy yelled back at a bunch who sat on a stoop, drinking beer and smoking marijuana.
“Nancy!” I whispered fiercely, walking faster. “Let them be!”
“You’re not afraid, are you, Mom?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Hey, don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.” She took my hand and held it until we got to the health center.
It was an absolutely horrible place—hot, filthy, and mobbed. There were alcoholics, addicts, bums, people with hacking coughs.
The man in line ahead of us at the reception desk told the nurse, “I has this here, like, discharge from my penis, ya dig?”
My skin began to crawl.
We were told to wait. There were no empty seats in the waiting area, which was just as well. I was afraid if I sat down I’d catch something. It was so hot in there it was hard to breathe. A man came over to us. I was frightened. He only wanted a light. I gave him some matches. When he tried to give them back to me, I told him to keep them.
Nancy and I stood there for two hours. I felt like everyone in the place was staring at us. We did kind of stand out, being the only two white people there.
“Sorry about this, Mom.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, I really am.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
We stood there until Nancy couldn’t stand waiting anymore. She spat out “Fuck this shit” and plowed her way down the corridor and around the corner toward the examining room.
“Miss!” the receptionist called after her.
Nancy evidently grabbed the first man in a white coat she found and let loose. I could hear her quite plainly.
“You sonofabitch! You stupid motherfucker! We’ve been waiting for three fucking hours. My mother is with me! We’re not gonna wait another fucking minute! Three fucking hours for a lousy fucking ten-minute blood test! Now! Take me now!”
He took her right into the examining room. She came back out ten minutes later, grabbed my hand, and yanked me toward the front door.
“Let’s get out of this fucking hellhole!”
I breathed a sigh of relief as we emerged onto the street. Even the street was better than being in the health center. We walked back crosstown, past the same men—they remembered us—and caught a bus down to Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital, which was on Fifth at 106th Street. Once again I asked myself, How many mothers in America are doing this today?
We were only in the hospital a few minutes. We took the elevator up to the methadone clinic. Nancy handed over an ID card that had been stamped at the Harlem health center. The nurse gave her back the card, then gave Nancy her paper cup of methadone.
She downed the orange liquid, handed back the cup, and said to me, “Let’s get some lunch.”
By now it was already past three o’clock. Nancy had to be at work at six, and change her clothes first. So our day was pretty well shot. We had lunch at Joe Allen’s in the theater district. We took a cab. I had had enough mass transit for one day.
The restaurant was so heavily air conditioned, it felt like a meat locker. I loved it. We both gulped down two gigantic iced teas. It was the best iced tea I’d ever tasted. We ordered hamburgers and dove into them when they came.
“I’m really sorry things turned out this way, Mom. I wanted us to go to Bloomingdale’s and Fiorucci’s. They have these pants that’d look good on you.”
“It’s okay. We had a day together, that’s the main thing.”
“Yeah, but we wasted it, waiting in that hellhole.”
“We’ll shop some other time.”
She grinned. “Okay.”
The cab dropped me at Penn Station. I gave Nancy enough money so she could take the cab home and pay the driver.
“Good-bye, Mom. I’m sorry everything got loused up.”
“Don’t worry. It was
fun. I had a nice time. Not quite what I expected. But nice.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
We embraced. Then I got out and the cab took off down Seventh Avenue. Nancy waved to me through the rear window. I waved back.
There were no seats left on the train, and the air conditioning was broken. I stood the whole way home, crammed between two commuters, sweat streaming down my back and my legs.
“How’d it go?” Frank called when I came in the front door.
I didn’t answer. I was too busy peeling off my wet clothes in the foyer.
He appeared from the kitchen. “What are you doing?”
I went past him, found my bathing suit in the laundry room, jumped into it, and dove to the bottom of the pool. I stayed down there as long as I could. When I came up, Frank was waiting by the side of the pool with an iced tea. I drank it. Then I went upstairs and washed the day off of me in the shower. Or tried. Only then was I able to tell Frank about it. In the telling, I found humor in my adventures. By the time I was done describing my day, we were both roaring with laughter there by the side of the pool.
You had to laugh, if you wanted to survive.
Nancy stayed on the methadone through the fall. The lease on her apartment came up for renewal at the end of November. She had now been in New York a year. When we talked about renewing it, she balked. She had a different idea.
“I don’t know, Mom. I don’t know if I wanna lock myself into New York.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t.”
“Is there somewhere else you want to go?”
“A lot of bands are going over to London. A lot of my friends are just sort of clearin’ out, going there. Debbie’s goin’ there. The whole music thing from here is there now. I’ve never been there. Everybody’s been there.”
“I haven’t been there.”
“Randi has. Phyllis. I wanna go, too.”
“I don’t understand what this has to do with your lease, Nancy. You still have to have a place to live.”
“Well, I don’t know. I was thinking I’d like to work in the music business there. You know, live there.”
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 29
