Toward the beginning of May I came home to find the kids and Frank waiting in the foyer for me, upset.
Frank said, “She’s in the hospital.”
“Why?” I cried.
“She has to have some kind of operation,” he said. “On her spine. You just missed her call. She wants you to call her right away.”
“Her spine! Where’s the phone number?”
“In your bedroom,” David said. “On your pillow.”
I dashed up the stairs two at a time, my heart pounding. I turned on the light in the bedroom and went to the pillow. There was no note on it. I searched the bed, the nightstand, the floor. I flung the bedspread aside. I could find no piece of paper with Nancy’s number on it.
“David!” I shouted. “I can’t find it! Where is it?!”
“On your pillow!” he called from downstairs.
“Where!” I screamed, my cool starting to vanish.
All three of them came up to the room.
“It’s on your pillow, Mom,” David said. “Honest, I wrote the number down and put it right there on your pillow.”
“Then find it!” I shrieked. Nancy needed me. Without that number, I couldn’t help her!
David got down on the floor and began to search under the bed, behind the bed. We all searched, crawling around frantically for that elusive scrap of paper.
“It’s gotta be here somewhere,” David said.
“What hospital!” I screamed, seized by panic. “What was the name of the hospital!”
“I don’t remember, Mom. Saint … Saint … something.”
“Do you realize how many saints there are!”
“Calm down, Deb,” Frank commanded. “She’ll call back.”
“How do you know that!”
“She always calls back.”
I scampered across the rug for the phone. “I’ll call every hospital in London until I get her!”
“No!” barked Frank, wrenching the phone from me. “You’ll just tie up the line.”
His words bounced off me. I could only think of Nancy in trouble somewhere, and my inability to do a thing about it.
“David, where is that paper?” I yelled. “Where is it? Find it!”
“I don’t know what happened to it, Mom,” he protested, his voice quavering.
“Find it!”
“I can’t!”
“I can’t find my baby and it’s your fault! My baby needs me! Find it, goddamnit! Find it!”
I picked up a bottle of lotion that was on the nightstand and hurled it blindly in David’s direction. I missed him. It smashed against the wall, lotion spraying everywhere.
David looked to Frank helplessly. Frank stood there looking at me, wide-eyed. So did Suzy. They’d never seen me like this. I’d never freaked before.
My head was spinning. I was out of control. I collapsed on the floor in a heap, screaming, “My baby! My baby! My baby!”
The phone rang. I dove for it, answered it. It was the overseas operator.
“A collect call from Nancy.”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Where are you? What’s wrong?”
“There’s something wrong with my spine,” she said. “I can’t sit. I can’t stand. It hurts so much. They have to operate on it tomorrow morning. Please come and be with me, Mommy.”
I realized at once what the problem was—Nancy had been born with a pilonidal opening at the base of her spine. It is not a serious condition, simply an incomplete closure. However, her first pediatrician had warned me that a pilonidal cyst will often develop there after puberty. Very, very painful, but a minor surgical procedure to remove.
I heaved a huge sigh of relief.
“Don’t worry, Nancy. It’s a cyst. It’s not anything serious. You’ll feel much better after he takes it out. It won’t hurt anymore.”
“Promise?”
“Uh-huh. I’ll call you right afterward.”
She gave me the doctor’s name so I could call him.
“I love you, Mommy.”
“I love you, sweetheart.”
I hung up, totally drained. I looked up. My family was watching me apprehensively. David swallowed and looked down. He was very upset. He was so reliable, and I loved him so much. He didn’t deserve the fury I’d unleashed on him.
I went over to him, put my arms around him.
“Please forgive me, David. I’m sorry. I’m really so sorry.”
We hugged, holding on to each other for several minutes, both of us feeling such incredible sadness.
Then he and Suzy went downstairs.
“You okay?” Frank asked, still concerned.
I nodded.
He went downstairs with the kids. I cleaned up the mess I’d made with the lotion, then slid into bed and fell asleep. I awoke at five a.m. and called Nancy’s physician in London. It had indeed been a pilonidal cyst, and he’d removed it without complications. I spoke to her later in the day. She was groggy from the painkillers, but fine. I sent her flowers. Three days later they sent her home.
Trouble was, she had no home. She was crashing in someone or another’s dirty flat from week to week, stoned and without a source of income apart from what I was sending her. We had wired her the $1,000 balance from her certificate, and it ran out in June. Then the money started coming out of the household budget.
As far as I know, she had no regular place to live until midsummer, when she phoned to inform me that she and Sid were moving in with his mother.
“Sid?” I asked, not placing the name.
“From the Sex Pistols, Mom. Sid Vicious. He’s the biggest rock star in the world. And he’s all mine. Isn’t that great?”
“So you two are … ?”
“We’ve been crashing at people’s flats for a couple of weeks but it’s no good.”
I heard a man’s voice in the background.
Then Nancy said, “Here, Mom. Sid wants to say something.”
There was a rustling and then a young man with a heavy English accent said, “Hello, Mum.”
“Hello, Sid,” I said.
“How are ya?” He had a flat, placid-sounding voice.
“Fine. How are you?”
“Fine. Your daughter looks so pretty. I bought her shoes.”
“That’s nice.”
“And fancy underwear.”
“That’s very nice, Sid,” I said. “Sid?”
“Yes, Mum?”
“Could I speak to Nancy again?”
“Yeah, sure. Okay. But could you send us money? For Nancy?”
“I’ll talk to her about that.”
“Oh, okay. Here’s Nancy. Nice talking to you, Mum.”
“Nice talking to you, Sid.”
“ ’Bye, Mum.”
“Good-bye, Sid.”
Nancy got back on. “Isn’t he great?”
“He sounds very pleasant.”
“Oh, he is. He’s a very nice lad, Mum.”
Nancy was starting to pick up an English accent.
“With that name,” I said, “you’d expect he’d be, I don’t know, kind of rough.”
“Oh, no. That’s just for the act. He’s nothing like what the papers say. That’s all made up. Would your daughter go out with someone like that?”
I decided then and there to find out what it was that the papers said about the Sex Pistols.
“Is he on heroin?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah, but I’m going on meth again. Sid wants me to. See how good he is? Can you send me some money? So we can get settled? Sid’s broke, too.”
“If he’s such a big success why doesn’t he have any money?”
“I think they’re holding out on him.”
I told her I’d think about it. I ended up sending her fifty dollars.
I started reading whatever I could find about the Sex Pistols, punk music, and its devotees. It was quite a lesson in commercial exploitation.
&n
bsp; The group and its image had been created by Malcolm McLaren, a shrewd young London University art school graduate who portrayed himself as an avant-garde artist and the group as his art form—a new, living art form for the post-industrial age.
In the early 1970s McLaren opened a shop on Chelsea’s King’s Road that specialized in 1950s clothing and records. The store was a hit with working-class teenagers, who liked the tough, greasy Elvis look and sound. It became a popular hangout.
Over the next couple of years economic hard times hit England. Job opportunities dried up, especially for the working-class teens who formed McLaren’s clientele. They became increasingly sullen and angry. They were hostile toward the queen. They saw no future for themselves. Immediate thrills—anything shocking and exciting—became all that they were interested in.
McLaren, meanwhile, had his eye on something potentially more profitable than ’50s clothing. And definitely more avant-garde. He turned his store into a sex shop, stocking it with kinky leather and rubber clothing and bizarre, sadomasochistic sexual apparatus—everything from handcuffs to chains to metal-studded leather collars. He now called his store simply Sex.
His old clientele of disaffected teens liked his new merchandise even better than the old. They began to wear his black leather clothing and metal-studded cuffs on the streets of Chelsea. It was shocking and mean-looking stuff. It turned heads. Malcolm McLaren had given birth to a fashion craze, a big enough one to attract the attention of members of the New York Dolls—friends of Nancy’s who had gone over to London to perform during the year she lived in New York. They visited his shop. He heard them play and they hit it off. McLaren followed the Dolls back to New York to manage them.
There he heard the raw underground rock that Nancy was so excited about. (He also, I later read, came in contact with Nancy for the first time.) When the New York Dolls broke up a few months later, McLaren returned to his London sex shop with the idea of forming a band incorporating the nasty leather look he’d popularized along with the tough, hard rock he’d heard in New York. After all, the bored, restless teens who hung around his shop were hungry for a new sound, something angry, nihilistic, shocking. In other words, a sound to go with the clothes.
And so a craze was born.
McLaren came up with a name for the group, the Sex Pistols, and hired four of the teenagers hanging around his shop to be its members. Johnny Lyman was given the job of lead singer.
“He looked good in my clothes,” McLaren reportedly explained.
“But I can’t sing on key,” Lyman reportedly protested.
“That’s what I want,” McLaren reportedly replied. He gave Lyman a new name to go with his outfit: Johnny Rotten.
The Sex Pistols began performing in London clubs in the spring of 1976. They were an immediate sensation. Not, apparently, for their music, which critics described as “nonmusic.” (“The Sex Pistols weren’t into music,” McLaren was later quoted as saying.) No, what attracted attention was their manners, which were described as outrageous. Instead of singing lyrics, the Sex Pistols shouted vulgarities at the audience, snarled at them, spat at them, called them and the queen dirty names. Supposedly, they took bad taste beyond any level seen before in public. They vomited on stage. They stuck themselves in the face with safety pins. They practiced “pogo dancing,” which consisted of hopping up and down in place, arms spastically flailing. They advocated “squelching,” which was making love without any show of emotion.
My stomach churned as I read and heard about all this. Maybe it was only an act, as Nancy had warned me, but it was a disgusting one nonetheless.
With McLaren encouraging them to “let it all hang out,” the Sex Pistols whipped themselves and their audience into such a state of frenzy that their early performances ended amid fistfights and property damage. “Their public persona wasn’t a gimmick,” McLaren later said. “It expressed their real attitude toward life. They were into chaos.”
For McLaren, it was a kind of living theater of the absurd, a statement about the decline of English civilization. And a gold mine. A more than able promoter, McLaren got the outrageousness of the Sex Pistols enough exposure for the record companies to take notice of them. Britain’s EMI Records signed them up.
(To measure McLaren’s promoting skills, consider that by the time they broke up less than two years after he created them, the Sex Pistols had signed two million dollars in recording contracts even though they could not, in reality, play. In all, they would record two albums and perform less than fifty times in public.)
Sid, whose real name was John Simon Ritchie, was not part of the original foursome. He was a childhood friend of John Lyman and an ardent early fan of the Sex Pistols. He was exactly the sort of person McLaren had designed the group to appeal to. He was, McLaren said, “a living example of the bored, frustrated kids in London looking for a scene.”
When the group’s original bass player dropped out, McLaren gave John Simon Ritchie the name Sid Vicious and handed him the job. The fact that Sid did not know how to play the bass was apparently not an issue. His appearance was the important thing. At 6 feet 2 inches and 135 pounds, he was tall and gaunt. He wore his black hair standing straight up on his head in a spiky fashion. One eye drooped. He already wore McLaren’s clothes.
One of the magazine stories I read had a black and white photograph of him. He didn’t look particularly threatening or evil in his photograph. He looked like a typical skinny English rock musician.
Black and white photographs can be very deceptive, I was soon to realize.
The Sex Pistols’ first album, Anarchy in the U.K., was released in England in November 1976. The group first came to the attention of the mainstream British public a few days after its release because of an appearance on a national television talk show. Its host, Bill Grundy, asked them to say something outrageous to the viewing public. They obliged by letting loose with a string of snarled obscenities, resulting in front page news the next day, as well as the suspension of Grundy.
By the time Nancy arrived in London four months later, the Sex Pistols were the biggest sensation in England. Their album was atop the charts, their exploits the toast of the thrill-hungry British tabloids. The press reported that several members of the band had vomited at the KLM ticket desk at Heathrow airport while en route to Holland. More headlines came as a result of a press conference held in front of Buckingham Palace to announce that the Sex Pistols were signing with A & M Records for their second album. Johnny Rotten, the press reported, spat vodka all over the director of A & M Records, as well as members of the press corps. Within a week A & M cancelled the contract. More headlines.
As big as the Sex Pistols were at that time in England, their popularity was confined there. The group was not well known here, and then only for their outrageous reputation. No U.S. record distributor had picked up Anarchy in the U.K. The U.S. record industry and press seemed to regard the Sex Pistols as a sick sort of Bristol social phenomenon, a fad that figured to be short-lived.
But it was only natural that Nancy would like the Sex Pistols, want to be involved with them. They were angry and violent. They were the newest thing on the musical horizon, the next step past the underground New York punk scene. They were celebrities. Later, when she herself would become a punk celebrity, journalists would characterize her as a girl who took to punk because it was a repudiation of middle-class life. Not so. They didn’t understand Nancy. She loved being middle-class. She was making no social statement, issuing no challenge. It was simply the music that attracted Nancy to punk. Always, it was the music. It was her flame. All she wanted was to get close to it. As close as possible.
I didn’t know yet how ugly and frightening that flame was. I hadn’t heard the music. I hadn’t seen the Sex Pistols or their followers in action. I didn’t until later that summer, when a network television magazine show did a feature on them. The four of us gathered around the TV set in the den to watch it.
The report opened with s
ome Chelsea street scenes, focusing on the punk teens there. They were some of the most bizarre-looking human beings I’d ever seen. They wore narrow wraparound sunglasses and weird spiky haircuts—one young man wore his hair in a mohawk, dyed green. The young woman with him had cascading purple hair, purple makeup, and a tattoo on her upper arm. They were skinny and pale and wore Hell’s Angels-type black leather clothing and black motorcycle boots. One young man wore a set of handcuffs in his belt. Another carried a truncheon. They looked like futuristic Nazi stormtroopers. They were repellent.
Ten years earlier some people had called hippies with beards and long hair “freaks.” Those were not freaks. Those were sincere, peaceful people who were trying to make a statement. These were freaks.
Over these street scenes was played the music of the Sex Pistols. Only it wasn’t music. It was an unpleasant, atonal cacophony of sound. It was antimusic. It was noise.
“Great stuff, huh, Mom?” David said.
I was too stunned to reply.
“Why would anybody want to look like that?” Frank asked as a young man with a black leather collar and no shirt clenched his fist at the sidewalk camera.
“I guess it’s some kind of statement,” said David.
“Of what?” Frank pressed.
“They’re saying that everything stinks, is all I can figure,” David said.
“They look dumb,” Frank said. “Really dumb.”
Then the report took us to a Sex Pistols concert. First the camera focused on Johnny Rotten as he snarled and spat at his packed house of followers. All of them were, seemingly, menacing punks. All of them were, seemingly, eating his act up and dishing it right back at him with their own snarling anger. Here was the opposite of Woodstock. If that had been a love-in, this was a hate-in. Rotten, to me, came off sort of like Mick Jagger in a bad mood. An untalented Mick Jagger.
Then the camera moved in on Sid.
I couldn’t believe it. The newspaper photos hadn’t prepared me. He was extremely tall, pale, and cadaverous. With his drooping eye and malevolent expression, he had to be the creepiest-looking young man on the face of the earth. He looked like Frankenstein’s monster. My daughter was living with Frankenstein’s monster.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 31
