“Care to deny it, Mrs. Spungen?” one of them said.
Why was this happening to me?
“N-no comment,” I stammered, starting to close the door.
“People will assume it’s fact if you don’t deny it,” he warned.
“They’ll believe she was a witch,” agreed another.
But I was on to this trick now.
“No comment,” I repeated.
I closed the door. Before it shut, the reporter managed to throw the sheet of paper inside the hallway. It lay there on the floor next to my feet, headline shouting at me. I left it there.
Frank left for the office. Suzy went back to the city.
The British reporters returned.
“You took our property!” charged one of them. “We want it back!”
“W-what property?” I asked.
“Our paper! Our piece of paper! You took it! Give it back!”
“Or we’ll call the police,” said another.
David appeared behind me. “What is it, Mom?”
“I … I …” I couldn’t answer him. I was quivering all over. I couldn’t take this, I just couldn’t take it.
“What do you guys want?” David demanded.
“Our clipping,” one of them replied. “She has it.”
“I … I … don’t have it,” I whimpered.
“Then we’re getting the police,” one of them said. “We’re calling the police and telling ’em you stole our property.”
“Leave us alone,” David said angrily.
“Of course,” one suggested, “you could just give us a statement about—”
“Get off our property!” David ordered.
“Look, sonny—”
David hurled the door open, charged out onto the porch, red-faced. He was taller and huskier than any of them. Their eyes widened.
“You get the hell off our property,” he screamed, “or so help me I’ll beat the living crap out of you!”
They took off. Then David came back inside, slammed the door shut, and phoned the police. They said that if we could find the clipping they’d come over to pick it up, then deliver it to the reporters, who’d just phoned from their motel.
“Do you know where it is, Mom?” David asked.
I was still standing in the foyer, frozen.
“Mom?”
“Huh?”
“The clipping. Where is it?”
“I … left it. Here, on the floor.”
“I don’t see it, Mom.”
I just stared at him.
“Mom?” he said. “I don’t see it.”
“Then I don’t know where it is,” I said.
David checked the wastebasket to no avail, then called Frank. Frank hadn’t seen it. Then David tried Suzy. She had. On her way out she’d taken it outside and thrown it in a garage trash can. David found it, called the police, and handed it to them when they arrived. They took it away.
“Those guys won’t come back,” one of the officers promised. “We’ll make sure of it.”
But I was sure the reporters were still out there. They were hiding somewhere. Behind the bushes, maybe. I heard a car door slam a few minutes later. My heart began to pound, my chest to ache beyond belief.
As I stood there in the foyer, watching David calmly and efficiently fold up the chairs in the living room, I fell off the high wire. I managed to grab it with my hands and hold on for dear life, but I had to do something fast. I had to talk to somebody, somebody who would listen, somebody who would understand. I could not go on like this for one more second. If I didn’t talk to somebody right now I would lose my grip and fall all the way down. I would break into a million little pieces. Nobody would be able to put me back together again.
I made a dash for the kitchen phone and dialed a therapist I knew.
“I have to talk to you!” I cried. “I have to talk to you!”
“Come,” she said. “Come at once.”
I blurted something out to David, got in my car, and sped away. It was a forty-five-minute drive to her office. I opened the window and let the cold air blow on my face. I inhaled it deeply. I turned the radio on full blast.
I looked at the people in the other cars. I couldn’t believe they were just going on about their lives—their soft, trivial lives—as if nothing had happened. The world had changed. Nancy was dead! How could no one care?
The therapist, Paula, embraced me warmly when I got there.
“I feel so badly for you,” she said soothingly. “The papers are doing such an awful number on you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, they are.”
I felt calmer already, just being with someone who understood, someone who was on my side.
“Sit down,” she said. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
I told her. I poured it all out in a nonstop forty-five-minute tirade—my anxiety, pain, isolation, nightmares, paranoia. I really don’t remember much of what I said. All I remember was that I kept telling her how afraid I was.
“I thought it would be over,” I said. “It’s not over. It keeps coming at me. And there’s going to be a trial. It’ll last for months. We might have to actually go. I can’t take it. I’m a private person. I need my privacy.”
She nodded sympathetically.
“You also need your family’s support at a time like this,” she said, “and you feel like you’re not getting enough of it.”
“Everyone’s been fine,” I said. “It’s just that nobody seems to notice how much trouble I’m having, or to care.”
“Usually, in times of stress, members of a family are there for each other,” she said. “You each count on the other. But in a case like this, when you most need to rely on one another, you aren’t there for the other. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because each of you is in the same kind of pain. Each of you feels grief and pain. Your whole family is going through a crisis. One of you isn’t there anymore. One of you has been murdered.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, eager for her insights.
“Because of all of the notoriety surrounding Nancy’s death, you aren’t being allowed to weather the crisis. You aren’t being allowed to grieve as you should. The normal grief cycle is being disturbed. This is confusing you and causing you problems. It’s probably setting all of you off, in your individual ways.”
“And each of us is used to leaning on the other,” I mused aloud. “But can’t, because the other’s in the same boat.”
“Right. You’re all hurting. You’re feeling your own pain real bad right now. But I’m sure you’re not alone in that. You just feel alone.”
“What do I do?”
“We have a program called crisis intervention counseling. We try to help you to restore the normal cycle, let it happen so you can get on with the rest of your life. I want to see you twice a week. I’d suggest individual therapy for the other members of your family, too, but that’s up to them. Then, after you’ve each handled your grief, I’d recommend family network therapy, so you can rebuild as a unit.
“I’m going to get you a prescription for a very light dosage of Valium. It’s to help you sleep. It’s just enough to break the cycle of wakefulness you’re in.”
“What about my chest? It hurts so much.”
“I don’t want you to take anything strong—no tranquilizers or painkillers. It’ll be best for you in the long run if you feel the pain now. It’s a rough time, but you have to get through it without the aid of drugs. You can do it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you mind if I tell you what I’d do if I were you?”
“No, go right ahead.”
“Get away for the weekend. The four of you. Go to the mountains. Someplace where nobody will bother you. Clear your heads. Get some perspective and some rest. Then try to get back into it on Monday.”
That sounded like an excellent idea. I suggested it to Frank that night. He agreed. Then I told him who the suggestion h
ad come from.
“I just really needed to talk to somebody,” I said. “I’m upset, and we, well, we talked.”
Frank was very supportive. “Do you think she can help you?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m going to see her for a few weeks. She sort of suggested we all might need some help getting through this.”
He nodded noncommittally. He still harbored a distaste for therapy, one that had in no way been tempered by our track record with Nancy. He was not interested in seeing a therapist. He felt pain, but he also felt he could handle it. And much of his grief had already poured out of him in an uncomplicated torrent of tears. With me, it had stayed inside and was seeping into all of the cracks and crevices. The same thing was quietly happening to Suzy and David.
Frank made reservations for all of us at one of the big resort hotels in the Catskills, where the meals and recreation are all laid out for you. No effort is required on your part. David endorsed the trip heartily. Suzy did not. She refused to come with us. She had withdrawn to her apartment and her paints. “I needed to be away from you,” she recently told me. “I needed to not talk to you.”
I was perplexed by her apparent desire to keep her distance from us, but I respected it. However, I didn’t like the idea of her being alone the entire weekend. She agreed to spend the weekend with a cousin.
The three of us were blessedly anonymous in the Catskills. We hiked in the crisp, clean fall air, ice-skated, swam, and put away one giant meal after another. I even slept pretty well. The Valium helped.
The tension did not vanish, though. On Saturday afternoon I got a massage at the health club.
“You ought to relax more, dearie,” the masseuse clucked. “Your neck and shoulder muscles are like granite.”
I tried to relax. We all did. But something always seemed to prevent it. At dinner on Saturday night a photographer approached our table and said, “How’d you like to have your picture taken?”
“No pictures!” I screamed.
“Beat it!” commanded Frank.
We all hid behind our menus like fugitives.
“Wait, folks!” protested the startled photographer. “You’re not obligated to buy ’em!”
He was an innocent hotel photographer. We’d mistaken him for a member of the press. We declined his offer more calmly, then burst into relieved laughter as he went off to the next table, totally confused.
After dinner Frank and I went to see a movie. David spent the evening with some teenagers he’d met at the hotel. He did not tell them his last name. They all ended up in one of their rooms watching Saturday Night Live. While watching it, David had the misfortune of encountering a cruel sketch about Sid Vicious and Nauseating Nancy. As his friends howled with laughter, David broke down and began to sob. They didn’t know why. He told them, then fled from their room and appeared at our door, tears still streaming down his face.
“They were in total shock,” he said. “I had to get out of there. Had to.”
I put my arms around him.
“I’m okay now,” he assured me, quickly putting his family protector mask back on. “It’s just that it’s not fair. That’s what it is. It’s like no matter how hard you try to get away from it, you can’t. Are you guys okay?”
“This thing really is going from bad to worse,” muttered Frank “I just don’t see how far people will go.”
“I’m going to write them a nasty letter,” I vowed.
(And I did. An NBC vice-president sent me a letter of apology. I also fired off a letter to Johnny Carson a few days later after he continually made crude jokes about Nancy in his monologues. He did not respond to the letter.)
I dreaded our return home. I felt the same intense uneasiness as soon as we turned onto our street. My eyes darted from one parked car to the next, checked the shadows behind bushes, the fluttering curtains in neighbors’ windows.
I waited until Frank had gone in the house before I would go in. I was subtle about it—he never noticed how terrified I was that there might be cameramen in there.
There was quite a lot of mail, much of it condolence notes. One letter was addressed to me personally in large, shaky handwriting with little circles over the i’s instead of dots. There was no return address. I feared it was an obscene letter. I took a deep breath and opened it.
It was from Sid.
Dear Debbie,
Thank you for phoning me the other night. It was so comforting to hear your voice. You are the only person who really understands how much Nancy and I love each other. Every day without Nancy gets worse and worse. I just hope that when I die I go the same place as her. Otherwise I will never find peace.
Frank said in the paper that Nancy was born in pain and lived in pain all her life. When I first met her, and for about six months after that, I spent practically the whole time in tears. Her pain was just too much to bear. Because, you see, I felt Nancy’s pain as though it were my own, worse even. But she said that I must be strong for her or otherwise she would have to leave me. So I became strong for her, and she began to stop having asthma attacks and seemed to be going through a lot less pain. [Nancy had had asthma since she was a child.]
I realized that she had never known love and was desperately searching for someone to love her. It was the only thing she really needed. I gave her the love that she needed so badly and it comforts me to know that I made her very happy during the time we were together, where she had only known unhappiness before.
Oh Debbie, I love her with such passion. Every day is agony without her. I know now that it is possible to die from a broken heart. Because when you love someone as much as we love each other, they become fundamental to your existence. So I will die soon, even if I don’t kill myself. I guess you could say that I’m pining for her. I could live without food or water longer than I’m going to survive without Nancy.
Thank you so much for understanding us, Debbie. It means so much to me, and I know it meant a lot to Nancy. She really loves you, and so do I. How did she know when she was going to die? I always prayed that she was wrong, but deep inside I knew she was right.
Nancy was a very special person, too beautiful for this world. I feel so privileged to have loved her, and been loved by her. Oh Debbie, it was such a beautiful love. I can’t go on without it. When we first met, we knew we were made for each other, and fell in love with each other immediately. We were totally inseparable and were never apart. We had certain telepathic abilities, too. I remember about nine months after we met, I left Nancy for a while. After a couple of weeks of being apart, I had a strange feeling that Nancy was dying. I went straight to the place she was staying and when I saw her, I knew it was true. I took her home with me and nursed her back to health, but I knew that if I hadn’t bothered she would have died.
Nancy was just a poor baby, desperate for love. It made me so happy to give her love, and believe me, no man ever loved a woman with such burning passion as I love Nancy. I never even looked at others. No one was as beautiful as my Nancy. Enclosed is a poem I wrote for her. It kind of sums up how much I love her.
If possible, I would love to see you before I die. You are the only one who understood.
Love, Sid XXX
P.S. Thank you, Debbie, for understanding that I have to die. Everyone else just thinks that I’m being weak. All I can say is that they never loved anyone as passionately as I love Nancy. I always felt unworthy to be loved by someone so beautiful as her. Everything we did was beautiful. At the climax of our lovemaking, I just used to break down and cry. It was so beautiful it was almost unbearable. It makes me mad when people say “you must have really loved her.” So they think that I don’t still love her? At least when I die, we will be together again. I feel like a lost child, so alone.
The nights are the worst. I used to hold Nancy close to me all night so that she wouldn’t have nightmares and I just can’t sleep without my beautiful baby in my arms. So warm and gentle and vulnerable. No one should expect me to live without her. She wa
s a part of me. My heart.
Debbie, please come and see me. You are the only person who knows what I’m going through. If you don’t want to, could you please phone me again, and write.
I love you.
I was staggered by Sid’s letter. The depth of his emotion, his sensitivity and intelligence were far greater than I could have imagined. Here he was, her accused murderer, and he was reaching out to me, professing his love for me. His anguish was my anguish. He was feeling my loss, my pain—so much so that he was evidently contemplating suicide. He felt that I would understand that. Why had he said that?
I fought my sympathetic reaction to his letter. I could not respond to it, could not be drawn into his life. He had told the police he had murdered my daughter. Maybe he had loved her. Maybe she had loved him. I couldn’t become involved with him. I was in too much pain. I couldn’t share his pain. I hadn’t enough strength.
I began to stuff the letter back in its envelope when I came upon a separate sheet of paper. I unfolded it. It was the poem he’d written about Nancy.
Nancy
You were my little baby girl
And I shared all your fears.
Such joy to hold you in my arms
And kiss away your tears.
But now you’re gone there’s only pain.
And nothing I can do.
And I don’t want to live this life
If I can’t live for you.
To my beautiful baby girl.
Our love will never die.
I felt my throat tighten. My eyes burned, and I began to weep on the inside. I was so confused. Here, in a few verses, were the last twenty years of my life. I could have written that poem. The feelings, the pain, were mine. But I hadn’t written it. Sid Vicious had written it, the punk monster, the man who had told the police he was “a dog, a dirty dog.” The man I feared. The man I should have hated, but somehow couldn’t.
How was I supposed to react? What was I supposed to do?
The Valium did not help me sleep that night.
Frank put in a full day at the office on Monday. Suzy and David returned to classes. I made my first appearance at work. On Sunday night Suzy and David had mentioned that they were nervous about how people would react to them. I was, too.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 41
