And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (41 page)

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.”

“But you've never been there. How do you know you'll like it?”

“All the bands are there. It's cool there.”

She didn't renew the lease. Instead she rented the apartment on a month-to-month basis and talked continually about moving to London. She began to save up for it.

I asked her if she wanted to come home for Hanukkah/Christmas, but she said she had to stay in New York and work. So the four of us decided to spend the day after Christmas in New York with her, a prospect that delighted her. She was especially excited about buying gifts for all of us. She loved giving and getting gifts. As Christmas neared she called me anxiously for gift suggestions for Frank (she was now actually speaking to Frank occasionally) and for the kids. She was so happy about what she'd bought me that she wanted to tell me what it was right there on the phone. I had to talk her out of it. Then she wanted me to tell her what I'd gotten her. She begged and teased and giggled like a little girl.

I bought her a lot of little gifts. She didn't care how much you spent on her. It was the
idea
of getting the gifts—opening the boxes, discovering their contents—that she loved. I knew it would give her pleasure to tear open so many boxes. She was so rarely happy. This would make her happy for a few minutes. What more could I give her?

It was a raw, gray day as we drove to New York, and we had to keep both the car heater and our coats on. We mapped out our day. Suzy and David wanted to go to a museum after we opened the presents. Frank and I agreed that I'd take Nancy to a movie if she didn't want to go to a museum. Then the five of us would have an early dinner before she had to leave for work.

“Think she's really going to do this London thing?” Frank wondered aloud.

“It sounds pretty farfetched to me,” I said. “I can see her going over for a vacation. You know, two weeks. But not staying there for good. She may not even like it there.”

“If she wanted to stay,” Suzy asked, “would you let her?”

“Nancy does what Nancy wants,” I answered with a shrug.

“How come
we
can't?” Suzy asked.

Frank and I exchanged a quick look, weighed a reply. The kids waited for it. It got very quiet in the car.

“Nancy doesn't live by the same set of rules the rest of us do,” Frank said. “Not me, not Mom, not any of your friends' parents. She won't lead a life like other people. She just won't. She's determined to be different, and there isn't much that Mom and I can do about it anymore.”

“How come?” David asked.

“Because she's disturbed,” I replied. “Nancy has serious troubles. You know that. You both know that. Her way isn't the right way. Believe me, it isn't. Maybe our way isn't, either. But we think it is. That requires a certain amount of faith on your part. You have to trust us. But you're not kids anymore. You can look at Nancy. You can see she's not happy.”

“Are
you
happy?” Suzy asked.

“Good question,” Frank admitted.

“Are you?” she repeated.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes, we are. Yes.”

We got to Nancy's apartment at about noon and she greeted each of us with bear hugs. She was in great spirits and the place was spotless.

She absolutely would not open her gifts until we had each received our gifts from her.

I went first. I couldn't believe what I saw when I opened the little box. It was an Elsa Peretti necklace—a small silver vase that hung from a sterling silver chain. I had long admired Elsa Peretti's jewelry, but I'd never imagined I'd get to own a piece. It must have cost Nancy $150.

“It's real, Mom.” Nancy beamed. “The vase, I mean. It holds water. You can wear a fresh flower around your neck every day.”

I was flabbergasted, it was so beautiful.

Underneath it, folded into the cotton, was a note. I opened it.

I looked up at her beaming face. She was so proud. For a moment the source of the necklace—the kind of work she'd done to make the money—crossed my mind. But I let the thought go. I hugged and kissed her and thanked her.

“Do you
really
like it?” she begged.

“Oh, Nancy. I
love
it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She asked twenty times. I answered twenty times. The answers never seemed to compute.

Frank went next. His box was from Bloomingdale's. Inside was a gorgeous dress shirt to wear with his new suit.

“That's great, Nancy,” he said enthusiastically. “Just great.”

“Does it fit? Does it fit?” she begged.

Unfortunately it was not the right size. Frank hesitated. Obviously, it crossed his mind not to tell her.

“I'll take it back,” she said, guessing it was the wrong size. “I'll take it back. Maybe they're open now.”