And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (44 page)

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 some 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.

“Too bad,” Frank said, “she couldn't find somebody more outrageous.”

“It's all an act,” Suzy said as Johnny stomped around on stage. “It's fake. It's show biz.”

Indeed it was an act. A Sex Pistols concert was a performance, and the band members performers. But they seemed to be caught up in this angry, hateful act just as much as the crowd was. There was something dangerous about all of the hostility being let loose in that concert hall, something that was almost out of control. It scared me.

Then the camera panned across the foot of the stage, at the punks who were crowding close to the Sex Pistols, clapping, cheering, yelling obscenities back at them. There, clapping her hands high over her head, was Nancy Spungen.

“That's my sister!” cried Suzy.

At least it almost looked like her. If you could picture Nancy with a wild mane of hair bleached white, and giant smudges of black makeup around her eyes. And black leather clothes.

She was one of those freaks. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it was my baby, that I was the mother of that girl.

I wasn't. That wasn't my Nancy. My Nancy had slipped away. My Nancy was gone.

That face on the TV was a doomed face. The face of the terminally ill. Her days were numbered. Her wish was coming true. I knew it for sure as soon as I saw her that night.

She'd gotten too close to the flame.

My immediate response was to cross the bridge before I came to it. From that evening on I began to daydream about the details of Nancy's death. I didn't wish her dead. I just knew she soon would be. I was preparing myself. I knew that no matter what she had
done, how much I had hated her and wanted to smack her sometimes, it would hurt. A lot.

She would be back from London. It would be a golden, sunny autumn day, her favorite day, her favorite kind of day. The New York Police Department would call me to say that Nancy had overdosed and was in critical condition. I would phone Frank, Suzy, and David with the news. The four of us would rush to the New York hospital. There, we would find her in her bed, conscious. She would say good-bye to each of us, then die peacefully in my arms.

Then it would be time to make arrangements. First I would have to have her body moved to Philadelphia. I would arrange that. I would call the funeral director and give him all of the instructions. Next I would phone my dear friends Janet and Susan, and my mother. Janet would go to our house immediately and be waiting there for us when we got back. So would my mother. Susan would be out. Or could be. I had to be prepared for that. I would leave a message with her son, that's what I would do. I would ask him to tell Susan that “something's happened” and to come over. When we got home, I would make arrangements for the visitors who would come by. I would order assorted deli platters from Murray's Delicatessen. I would sit down with Frank so we could decide what should be said at the funeral. A rabbi. We'd have to talk to a rabbi.

My daydreaming occupied my mind whenever I was alone—driving to work, shopping for groceries, or trying to fall asleep at night. Sometimes I felt guilty about having these daydreams. I wondered if it was wrong. I didn't know.

I was very, very strong in my daydreams. I acted in a calm, detached, businesslike manner. I just did what I had to do. I fantasized Nancy's death so many times that when a business contact asked me at one point how many children I had, I automatically answered, “Two.” It just fell out of my mouth. It was as if she were already dead. I was ready for it, I thought. I was prepared, so prepared that when the inevitable happened, it wouldn't hurt.

How foolish I was.

Nancy phoned toward the end of the summer. I told her we'd seen her on TV.

“Didn't I look great, Mom? My hair?”

“It was exciting to see you,” I replied.

“Did you hear the band?”

“Yes.”

“Aren't they great?”

“Uh … to tell you the truth, it's not really my kind of thing.”

“That's cool. Aren't you proud of me, Mom? I've made it. I've really made it!”

She genuinely believed she had achieved something. I understood her pride, but I didn't share it. Having an affair with Sid Vicious was not my concept of doing something worthwhile with your life. But she was proud. Her rock fantasy was coming true.

She called the following week to tell me that she and Sid had gotten married.

“Aren't you happy for us?” she cried, excited.

Shocked was a better word.

“When?” I asked. “Where?”

“Now you can send us a gift,” she said.

“When were you married?” I repeated.

“We'd prefer money to things. Tell everyone in the family, okay? No gifts. Cash.”

The amount of emphasis she placed on money made me doubt her story.

“Nancy, can you prove you and Sid are married? I mean, if he's such a big celebrity, how come it wasn't publicized?”

“We didn't want the press to know. It'd be bad for his image.”

“Can you
prove
you're married?”

“Don't you believe me?” she snapped angrily. “Don't you believe your own daughter? I'm
happy. You
should be happy, too. Instead you're calling me a bloody liar.”

“I'm not—”

“I'll send you the bloody wedding pictures,
okay?
Now send us our wedding gift.”

She hung up.

I told Frank the news. We discussed it. We were confused. We didn't know whether to believe her or not.

She called again two days later.

“Did you send the money, Mom?”

“No.”

“What's wrong, don't you believe me? You don't think I'd lie about something like this, do you?”

“I don't know, Nancy. You told me never, ever to trust a junkie when they ask for money.”

“But Mom, this is different. We're
married
. Your Nancy is
married.”

We sent her a hundred dollars. My mother sent her fifty.

We had been conned. The wedding pictures never came, and Nancy never referred to her “marriage” again. (After her death our lawyer was in London and checked the records. As far as he could determine, there had been no marriage.)

We were angry at ourselves for having been taken in. The incident also heightened our mixed feelings about Nancy. It was getting to be so hard to love her. It seemed sometimes like all we got in return for our love was untruth and crap. I'd never do something like that to her. How could she do it to me? And why?

But I kept remembering something my housekeeper had once told me: “Your child is your child, no matter what she does or is. She is still your child.” It was true. No matter what Nancy did, I still loved her.

Soon after this I had a nightmare. I was walking in a cemetery. Suddenly I came upon several men who were working on a new tombstone beside a freshly dug grave. They were chiseling a person's name on the stone. A first name and middle name were already there:
NANCY LAURA
. S
O
was a date of birth:
FEBRUARY 27, 1958
. Nancy's date of birth. One of the men put his chisel to the stone to begin the first letter of her last name.

“Stop!”
I cried in my dream. “I don't know what her last name is! I don't know if it's Spungen or Vicious! And Vicious isn't his real name!”

I awoke from the nightmare in confusion. Frank was sleeping peacefully by my side.

I had not, I realized, looked at the date of death on the tombstone.

Nancy and Sid stayed with his mother for less than two months. She and Nancy apparently didn't get along. So Nancy and Sid
moved into a hotel. Nancy phoned me from her new place of residence. From her calls, I learned that she was becoming exposed to the violence that surrounded the Sex Pistols.

“I got beat up, Mom,” she moaned. “My nose is broke somethin' 'orrible. It's all over my face. It hurts.”

“Who did it?” I asked.