And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (49 page)

It did, however, look clean and healed.

“We'll have an awfully long wait at the hospital,” I said.

Not to mention another scene.

“How about your doctor, Mum?”

“It's Saturday. He's off. Tell you what, I can take them out. There's really nothing to it.”

“Okay.”

I went upstairs to fetch a pair of small toenail scissors. I washed them in alcohol, took them downstairs with the bottle of alcohol, some cotton, and antibiotic ointment. Nancy was waiting for me in the kitchen.

“Stand next to the window,” I said. “The light is better.”

She obeyed.

“Okay, now don't move,” I said.

“I won't.”

She stood perfectly still for me as I cut the little catgut knots one by one and pulled the stitches out. I worked smoothly and calmly, as if I took out stitches every day. In actuality, I had never done it before. When I was done, I cleaned the ear and put ointment on it.

“It looks fine,” I said.

“Thanks, Mum. Could you make me an appointment with a plastic surgeon? These scars all over my arms. I'd like to get 'em off.”

“We'll see,” I said.

I sensed another presence in the room. I turned to find Sid looming in the doorway.

“Mum,” he said, “I need a doctor for me eye. It won't stay open, you know. Could you make me an appointment, too?”

I looked at her, then at him. I felt myself getting sucked into their universe. Now there were two of these helpless souls for me to take care of. My burden was doubled. I took a deep breath, let it out.

“I'll try, Sid,” I said.

“Thank you. That'd be very nice of you. I don't like my eye, you know. I got it in a fight. People always want to fight with me. Teachers. Policemen, Teddys. Everybody. I don't want to, but they do.”

“He's really a very sweet lad, Mum,” Nancy said.

They returned to the sofa and began to nod off again.

When it got to be about six, I asked Nancy what she and Sid felt like for dinner.

“Can we go to the Village Inn, Mum? I want to take Sid there.”

The Village Inn was an old family favorite, a neighborhood Italian restaurant we'd taken the children to many times through the years. Evidently Nancy had fond memories of the place. However, to go into the Village Inn dining room meant walking through the bar, a popular blue-collar conservative hangout. It would be impossible to take Nancy and Sid through there and emerge unscathed.

Frank and I exchanged a worried look.

“I don't know, Nancy,” I improvised. “It's gotten to be so crowded.”

“I don't mind,” she said.

“We'll have to wait a long time,” I said.

“I don't mind,” she said.

“Sid will miss
Sha Na Na
at seven,” Frank pointed out.

“Sha Na Na?”
said Sid, perking up. “I don't want to miss
Sha Na Na
. They're my favorite.”

“We could order takeout and eat it here,” Frank suggested. I blew him a kiss when Nancy agreed.

David took the orders—both Nancy and Sid wanted spaghetti and meatballs—phoned them in, and went to pick them up with Frank.

Nancy and Sid helped themselves to vodka and tonic and began to kiss and grope at each other on the den sofa. I didn't like watching Sid touch her. It wasn't that I hated him, because I didn't. Actually, I felt kind of sorry for him. He seemed like a victim of Malcolm McLaren's promotion machinery. For a brief time he'd been a star. Now he didn't know who or what he was. He seemed like a genuinely confused kid. No, the reason I didn't like watching him touch her was because the two of them were totally oblivious to my presence in the room. I felt I was witnessing an intimacy I wasn't supposed to see, really didn't
want
to see. It made me want to avert my eyes. It gave me the creeps.

They lived in their own little world, Nancy and Sid did.

I went into the kitchen to set the table in there for the four of us. Nancy and Sid would eat in the den before the TV. Suzy followed me in there. She was angry.

“How can you stand this!” she demanded. “How can you watch them? How can you watch her dying like that? Why don't you
do
something?”

I wanted to say “Suzy, if I let myself react at all, my head will simply blow right off.” But I didn't want her to know I was so upset. And I was too upset to explain myself. I shut her out. I shouldn't have, but I did.

“They'll be gone tomorrow,” I said. “Let's just get through the weekend, okay?”

She glared at me. “I don't see how you can put up with it. Your own daughter.” Then she stormed out.

Frank and David came back with the food. Suzy came downstairs grudgingly and we four ate silently in the kitchen while Nancy and Sid ate in the den, watching
Sha Na Na
, of course.

“Debbie?” Sid called.

“Yes, Sid?”

“Best fuckin' food I ever ate. Best fuckin' ever!”

“We think it's good, too, Sid!” I called back.

He ate, at most, a third of it. He had little appetite for food, it seemed. After dinner the four of us watched the two of them nodding off on the sofa, ever alert to the falling cigarette ashes.

Suzy was still angry. She glared at her sister with a combination of curiosity and disgust. Nancy caught her.

“If you look at me like that one more time I'll cut your fucking face up,” she snapped viciously, her eyes cold.

Suzy froze. There was total silence. I couldn't stand the tension
in the room, so I went into the kitchen. Suzy followed me in there, wide-eyed.

“Do you think she will?” Suzy whispered, terrified.

“I don't know,” I replied. “I really don't know.”

Suzy went up to her room. She was so scared she went back to her apartment early in the morning, before Nancy and Sid came back from the hotel. Suzy never had the chance to see or speak to her sister again. That little scene they'd played out in the den was their final communication.

Frank took them to the hotel that night. I picked them up on Sunday at about one o'clock. Just like David had the day before, I found them naked in bed. They got up pulled on their now filthy clothes, gulped their methadone, and were set to go.

“Don't you want to pack?” I asked, wary that they'd changed their plans and were going to stay longer.

“Oh, right,” remembered Nancy, heaving their few possessions carelessly into an overnight bag. “All set, Mum.”

I checked them out of their room and brought them to the house. Frank had picked up lox and bagels for Sunday brunch, per Nancy's request.

Nancy piled cream cheese and lox onto her bagel and began devouring it with gusto. Sid just nibbled on a dry bagel.

“Have some lox, Sid,” Frank offered.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No … I can't eat
that
.”

In midafternoon, Nancy decided it was time for them to catch a train back to New York. We drove them to the station. Frank and I got in the front seat, David in the back seat with Nancy and Sid. Nancy said nothing in regard to Suzy's absence, though she did clutch her sister's offering of chocolate chip cookies.

“Thank you so much for having me,” Sid said as we pulled out of the driveway.

“Our pleasure, Sid,” Frank said.

“I didn't know people lived like this,” said Sid. “In a fuckin' palace.”

We drove in silence for a while. Then out of nowhere, Nancy quietly said, “I'm going to die very soon. Before my twenty-first birthday. I won't live to be twenty-one. I'm never gonna be old. I don't wanna ever be ugly and old. I'm an old lady now anyhow. I'm eighty. There's nothing left. I've already lived a whole lifetime. I'm going out. In a blaze of glory.”

Then she was quiet.

Her words just lay there like a bombshell. No one wanted to touch them. She hadn't issued a threat, simply made a flat statement. We all believed her. Even Sid.

We got stared at by everyone again at the platform. When the train pulled in Nancy hugged me.

“My beautiful mum,” she said softly. “My beautiful mum.”

She released me. “Didn't I tell you she was beautiful, Sid? Wasn't I right?”

Sid nodded.

We hugged again and kissed. Then she kissed Frank and David. Sid kissed me again on the cheek, and again I shuddered. Then he shook hands with Frank and David.

“Very nice to meet all of you,” he said.

“Don't forget to call when our stuff comes,” she said.

They got on the train. We watched from the platform as it pulled away. She waved from the window. We waved back.

She'd issued a warning to us in the car, but I had no inkling that this was the last time I'd see her alive. I felt only relief that she and Sid were gone.

“I honestly can't understand her,” David said as we drove home. “She's dying. She knows it. Why won't she stop herself?”

“She doesn't want to,” Frank said sadly. “She wants to die. She has for a long, long time. It's been her goal.”

“But why?” asked David.

“She hates being alive,” I said. “She hates her pain. She hates herself. She wants to destroy herself.”

“Isn't there anything you guys can do?” asked David.

“Yes,” I said.

“What?”

“Watch her die.”

Nancy lived out her rock fantasy in New York, sharing the bed and the career of a star. But she and Sid were running out of time.

He collapsed in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel their first week there. Nancy phoned me from the hospital in hysterics.

“Save him, Mum!” she cried. “Save him! The doctor says his brain might be damaged! What do I do? Help me! Oh, please!”

As always I calmed her down. And as always it left me a wreck.

“The doctor will take care of him, Nancy. He'll be fine. You'll see. Call me tomorrow, okay?”

She did. Sid was okay.

Nancy did manage to find them a methadone center, but the lines were long and every day Sid was taunted and provoked by the other addicts. He got mad. He got in fights.

“They keep hasslin' my Sid,” Nancy reported. “He's got this hot button, Mum, and they just won't leave it alone.”

She went to work on Sid's career.

She tried to line up recording contracts for him, but found little interest from the record companies. Sid had no actual career. All he had was a claim to fame. But neither she nor Sid realized that.

“It's not workin' out the way we thought,” she told me over the
phone. “Nothing's happening. Sid's real depressed.”

They went back on heroin.

Two weeks after we'd put them on the train, she was calling for money—stoned, incoherent, paranoid.

“Won't let us work,” she mumbled. “Don't like us. M'Sid. Me. Don't like us. Won't let us work. No money.”

“Where's Sid's money?” I asked.

“Supposed to get some. England, Mum. It's in England. Don't have it, though. Don't have any. No money. Problems. Just problems.”

I refused to send them money. She hung up, more dazed than angry.

The following week she did somehow manage to get Sid some club work. She lined up three nights for him at Max's Kansas City in mid-September, and also booked him into the Hive, her old Philadelphia hangout, for the last weekend of October.

“If you see Karen,” she told me, “tell her I hope she comes. Wanna see her. Wanna see Karen.”

Sid's first couple of performances at Max's were sellouts, thanks to his notoriety. But he did not cut it in his U.S. solo debut. There were catcalls and boos. People walked out.

He and Nancy sank deeper into drugs and despair. I spoke to her about once a week and each time she sounded lower. She and Sid went out of their room at the Chelsea less and less. One night one of them nodded off in bed with a lit cigarette and set the mattress on fire. Reportedly, a hotel employee rushed up to their room with a fire extinguisher to find them wandering around, oblivious to the smoldering mattress. The manager moved them to another room, room 100.

Their packages began to arrive at our house from London toward the end of September—each package addressed to a different family member. For some reason Nancy thought this would speed up delivery. I got a roll of newspapers—Sid's clippings. David got a box filled with metal-studded leather collars and cuffs. Inside the box there was also a note from U.S. Customs: “Three knives were removed from this package by U.S. Customs agents. Please contact if you wish to appeal.” We didn't wish to. Frank got Sid's gold record, the glass covering shattered. The sofa didn't come. It never did.

I phoned Nancy to tell her their stuff had come.

“What stuff?” she asked, stoned and confused.

“Sid's clippings and his leather, uh,
things
. And his gold record.”