They weren’t quite looking at me, I realized, as I strode through the main office. But they were extremely aware of me.
I sat down at my desk. The calendar page was still open to October twelfth, on which I’d written “Call White Deer Run re: admission Nancy, Sid.” I turned the page and began to clear off my desk. There were a number of condolence notes and phone messages. As I began to answer them, co-workers gradually came in one at time to offer a few words of sympathy. Several of them inadvertently called me Nancy instead of Debbie. Then they got flustered and I ended up comforting them.
I had trouble getting back into my work. I couldn’t seem to concentrate on it. Sid’s presence was too strong. I kept thinking about his letter and poem. I kept worrying about his trial. I kept trying to figure out what had gone on that night in room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel.
I constantly caught myself staring out the window, wrapped up in these thoughts. I tried to shake myself free of them. “Please go away,” I begged. “Just for five minutes. Let me think of something else.” But I was unable to.
I ran out of steam at about three o’clock. This puzzled me. I usually have tremendous stamina. I decided to go home early. My work had waited for me for a week. It could wait one more day.
When I turned onto our street, I slowed the car down to a crawl so I could look inside each parked car. I checked the neighbors’ bushes and windows. I stopped in front of our house, hesitated, kept going. I circled around the block. Maybe the reporters were hiding there.
I found a car with a New York license plate parked on the next block. My eyes searched the windshield and bumpers for some sort of press sticker. None. Seemed innocent enough, but how to know for sure? I returned to our street, got to our house again, idled outside. Someone honked behind me. I jumped, looked in the rearview mirror. It was a neighbor trying to get by—I was blocking the road. I pulled over so the car could pass. I looked our house over for any signs of forced entry. It appeared secure.
But I couldn’t get myself to go inside. Not until somebody else was home. I drove to Murray’s Delicatessen and had a cup of coffee at the counter. Then I called home. No one was there yet. I had another cup of coffee. I called again. David was back from school. Relieved, I drove home.
I told my therapist, Paula, about this fear the next day. She advised me that in order to overcome it I’d first have to get in touch with its cause.
I already knew it, I told her—the press genuinely made me feel as if I were walking around the house stark naked with the window shades up. I said I didn’t see how I’d be able to get back on track until I was sure the reporters were gone—for good.
And they were far from gone. The second week after Nancy’s death the story merely entered its second phase: PROMOTERS OF VICIOUS TURN SLAYING INTO HYPE read the Philadelphia Inquirer headline that week. The story quoted McLaren as saying Sid was set to finish a film about the Sex Pistols, record a brand-new album, and begin to make some TV talk show appearances. A Sid Vicious concert tour was in the works, reported the Philadelphia Daily News, commencing with that October 27–28 appearance at Artemis in Philadelphia that Nancy had booked for him. David Carroll, owner of Artemis, joined McLaren in denying that he was exploiting Nancy’s murder. Rather, Carroll described himself as a personal friend of Nancy’s. “Now that she’s gone,” Carroll reportedly said, “I have to ask, what would she have wanted him [Sid] to do? She would have wanted him to play rock ‘n’ roll.”
The press showed up on our doorstep, hoping we’d vent our outrage over Sid’s being allowed to perform in Nancy’s hometown just two weeks after her death. We were outraged, but we kept quiet. Fortunately others spoke for us this time.
An editorial in the Philadelphia Bulletin angrily denounced the tasteless profiteering. “The very idea of new promotions of Sid Vicious based on his current notoriety leaves us aghast,” wrote the Bulletin’s editors. “Still, we suppose it isn’t all that surprising that the folks who brought us punk rock would now look for an even more disgusting way to line their pockets.”
Our friends rallied in our support, offering to go down and picket Artemis for us. We appreciated this and might have taken them up on it had it been necessary. As it turned out, it wasn’t.
On October 23, eleven days after Nancy’s death, Sid tried to kill himself in his room at New York’s Seville by slashing his wrists with a broken light bulb. He also tried to jump out the window. Anne Beverley, said the newspapers, quoted her son as screaming “I want to die! I want to join Nancy! I didn’t keep my part of the bargain!” Sid was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, and the reporters were back on our front porch. Had there been a Nancy-Sid suicide pact? they wanted to know. Or were these false dramatics on Sid’s part to lay the foundation for an insanity plea. Again, we kept quiet.
Based on the contents of his letter to me, I felt Sid’s suicide attempt was a genuine one. This belief was confirmed two days later when Sid phoned me from Bellevue, again going through an operator with an urgent message. I returned his call for the same reason I had the first time—fear of what he might do to us if I didn’t.
“I can’t live, Debbie,” he said weakly. “I tried to kill myself.”
“I know.”
“I tried, but they wouldn’t let me. Now I sit around here and do nothing. They’re afraid I’ll try again. And I will. Can you come visit me, Debbie?”
“I can’t, Sid.”
“I so want to see you.”
“I can’t,” I repeated.
“Please call me then. Please.”
“I have to hang up now.”
“I love you, Debbie.”
“Good-bye, Sid.”
A few days after that I got a second letter from Sid, this one even more anguished than the first. Sid’s second letter also gave me some insight into what might have happened that night at the Chelsea.
Dear Debbie,
I’m dying. Slowly, and in great pain. My baby is gone, without her I have no will to live. I love her so desperately. I know I can never make it without her. Nancy became my whole life. She was the only thing that mattered to me.
I’m glad I could make her happy. I gave her everything she ever wanted, just for the asking. When we only had enough money for one of us to get straight, I always gave it to Nancy. It was less painful to be sick myself than it was to see her sick.
When you love someone that much you cannot lose them and still be able to go on. I know that if I lived to be a thousand years old I would never find anyone like Nancy. No one can ever take her place. I love Nancy and Nancy only. I will always love her. Even after I am dead.
I have only eaten a few mouthfuls of food since she died. I may die of starvation in this place. I just hope it comes soon, so that I can be with Nancy again.
We always knew that we would go to the same place when we died. We so much wanted to die together in each other’s arms. I cry every time I think about that. I promised my baby that I would kill myself if anything ever happened to her, and she promised me the same. This is my final commitment to the one I love.
I worshipped Nancy. It was far more than just love. To me she was a goddess. She used to make me kiss her feet before we made love. No one ever loved the way we did, and to spend even a day away from her, let alone a whole lifetime, is too painful to even think about. Oh Debbie, I never knew what pain was until this happened. Nancy was my whole life. I lived for her. Now I must die for her.
It gave me such pleasure to give her anything she wanted. She was just like a child. She used to call me “daddy” when she was upset, and I used to rock her to sleep. When I was upset, I used to call her “momma” and she used to nurse me at her breast and call me her “baby boy.”
I tried to kill myself but they got me to hospital before I died. Nancy knows that I will soon be with her. Please pray that we will be together. I can never find peace until we are together again.
Oh Debbie, she was the most beautiful person I ever knew.
I would have done anything for her.
Nancy once asked if I would pour petrol over myself and set it on fire if she told me to. I said I would, and I meant it. If you would happily die for someone, then how can you live without them. I can’t go on without her. She always said she would die before she was twenty-one, and I never doubted it.
Goodbye, Debbie. I love you.
Sid XXX
There was a friend’s address on the back of the envelope, in case I felt like writing Sid a reply. Again, I was so terribly confused. On the one hand, I truly felt sorry for Sid. He was a victim of his celebrity. He had loved Nancy and was now in pain. On the other hand, I had no doubt he had killed her. I wanted him punished. I wanted not to feel anything for him but anger and hate.
I kept rereading two sentences from the last paragraph of his letter:
Nancy once asked if I would pour petrol over myself and set it on fire if she told me to. I said I would, and I meant it.
From that, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine what went on that night at the Chelsea. It wasn’t hard to visualize Nancy handing Sid the knife she’d bought and ordering him to prove his love for her by using it on her. By shutting my eyes, I could almost hear her say the words: “I don’t believe you love me. If you really loved me, you’d help me die.” Then I could hear his protestations. And then her screams.
No one will ever know for sure what happened that night. Based on Sid’s letters, my knowledge of Nancy, and the police’s disclosure that she was the one who bought the knife, it is my belief that she engineered her death. She wanted to die, had for years. She was ready to die. So she made Sid the instrument. She egged him into stabbing her by convincing him it was the only possible way he could prove his love for her. Certainly, she was capable of manipulating him. Certainly, he was capable of being manipulated. Sid was the patsy, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not.
In a figurative sense, I feel Nancy committed suicide, the death she’d long wanted but had been unable to bring about on her own. In a literal sense—in a legal sense—I don’t believe you can regard this as suicide. Nancy did not plunge a seven-inch hunting knife into her own stomach. Another hand did, and the law said that hand had to be held accountable for its actions, no matter the degree of outside persuasion or inebriation.
But that was and is my belief. I realized at the time that others might not agree, that here was cause for genuine debate and food for vivid courtroom drama. I realized again how much I was dreading Sid’s trial.
I didn’t write back to Sid or phone him again. I never heard from him again. I kept his letters to me a secret from everyone except Frank. I felt that if I disclosed them to the police, somehow they’d end up in the newspapers, end up being sensationalized. I didn’t want that. They were private, personal letters. He made no threats in them. He bared his soul. The letters weren’t meant to be shared.
I disclose them now because I feel they shed light on what happened that night and might help others to understand what Nancy and Sid really meant to each other outside the limelight. I disclose them now because both Nancy and Sid are gone. They can no longer speak for themselves.
Chapter 25
David’s protective armor began to peel away the week after Sid’s suicide attempt.
He went out with friends on a Friday night. He came home after only an hour, troubled.
“I just didn’t want to stay out,” he said. “I don’t see how anyone can have a good time.”
The very same thing happened the next night, only he came home even more upset.
“I tried to talk about what was bothering me,” he said. “I tried to talk to Bobby. He’s my best friend, right? I spilled my guts out to him. Know what? He got really uptight. He changed the subject. He’s, I mean, he’s my best friend.”
David went up to his room and sat in there by himself. It was unusual for him to be unable to communicate with his friends. It was unusual for him to want to be alone. He was becoming depressed and isolated. Frank and I were concerned.
Then at dinner a few nights later he suddenly froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. The fork began to shake. His hand was shaking. He stared at it as if it belonged to someone else. Then he began to tremble all over.
“What’s wrong?” asked Frank.
David burst into tears, hurled his fork down, and ran up to his room. We followed him up there.
“What is it, David?” I begged. “Tell us. Talk to us.”
“I just … I just don’t know what to do,” he sobbed. “I can’t go to school. I start to go, and then I just can’t. I can’t sit there in class with everybody else. They all know.”
“So what are you doing?” asked Frank. “Where are you all day?”
“In the library. I hide out in the library. At first I figured I’d start working on this big term paper I have to do, you know? But I couldn’t do that, either.”
“How come?” I asked.
“Because it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t matter. It’s just so stupid. All of it is. I’m supposed to take the SAT’s in a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to do that, either. All I do is read. That’s all I do. Read about death. There’s this tribe in Africa, you know? When somebody you love dies, they build a grieving hut for you way off in the woods and put you in it for a year. Then they come get you and bring you back. You’re healed.”
“Sounds pretty good,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind that at all.”
He began to cry again. “I can’t figure out what to do.”
He went into therapy. However, he came home from his first few sessions even more upset than before. He refused to see his therapist anymore. He requested mine, Paula. She took him on. With Paula’s help, David made some progress. He was at least able to get in touch with what was upsetting him.
“I was really angry at Nancy for so much of what she did to us,” he said recently. “I wouldn’t let myself grieve for her. I fought it. I didn’t think it was right to grieve for her. That really messed me up, because I also loved her. She was my sister.”
This was a start. He began to work out his conflicting emotions. However, he continued to cut his classes and feel alienated from his friends. We made an appointment at his school and the three of us sat down with the admissions officer and David’s counselor. As it happened, the admissions officer was very understanding of the trouble David was having with his schoolwork—his own sister had died when he was sixteen.
“All I ask,” he said to David, “is that you try. Come. If you can’t stay, then tell us and go on home. If you’re having a bad day, if you can’t take a test, just come on in and tell us. As for the SAT, you tried taking it as a junior and did very well. I’d just use that score and forget about taking it again. Life is tough enough for you right now.”
The admissions officer’s support was crucial at this time. And it went on for the next few months. With it, David began to mend. Without it, there’s no telling how long it would have taken David to get back on track.
I shared one of David’s problems. I was beginning to feel the same way about my job as he did about his schoolwork. It didn’t seem to matter. It wasn’t important—to me or to anyone else. I was having trouble getting out of bed and on my way in the morning. I seldom got into the office before ten thirty. Or stayed past three. I tired easily. My energy—my drive to succeed—seemed to have vanished.
About a week after I got Sid’s second letter, my job took me to New York for the day. This was my first trip there since the day after Nancy’s death, and it was an awful experience. I was ill at ease from the second I got off the train in Penn Station. It was even worse out on the street. Each time I heard a siren, I saw Nancy in the back of an ambulance. She was being rushed to the hospital, her life bleeding out of her. Toward the middle of the afternoon I was seized by chest-aching panic at the thought of being caught in New York City after dark. I felt I was going to hyperventilate at a sales meeting and had to flee to the ladies’ room. When the meeting was over, I
high-tailed it to Penn Station and got the hell out of New York. It was no longer an exciting city, with jazz and ballet and theater. It was Sid and Nancy’s New York.
I had to go to Washington the following week for a two-day conference. It was my first solo overnight trip, also the first time I had to meet new people and be charming. I tried. I walked around the banquet room with a frozen smile on my face and a little nametag stuck on my chest. I felt like I was really wearing a banner headline on my forehead: MURDERED GIRL’S MOM.
Sure enough, I hadn’t been there an hour before a middle-aged businessman recognized my last name.
“Spungen,” he said, staring at my nametag. “Spungen. Spungen. I know that name.”
I said nothing.
“Hey, I got it,” he exclaimed. “Did you know that girl? The one that was murdered?”
No more frozen smile.
“Yes,” I replied.
“How?”
“She was my daughter.”
He laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. That wasn’t your daughter.”
“You’re right,” I snapped. “That was my dog.”
His eyes widened. He walked away. So much for my attempt to be charming. I went up to my room. I needed to call home. I needed to hear Frank’s voice.
Nancy’s death had made us closer than ever before. I later discovered that few marriages are the same after a child is murdered. The divorce rate among the parents of a murdered child is very high: nearly four out of five couples split up. They look at each other and see only their pain. In a sense, Frank and I had already gone through that years before, when Nancy was growing up. Now we were in the minority, the one out of five couples who grab on to each other as a result of their child’s murder and don’t let go.
I told him what had happened downstairs.
“It just won’t seem to go away,” I said.
“Try to roll with it,” he suggested. “Don’t take things to heart. A lot has happened, but one thing hasn’t changed—there’s always going to be plenty of assholes in the world.”
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 42
