Getting It Through My Thick Skull (14 page)

I was done, I was tired, I wasn’t moving, and I didn’t care who said what to me. Keeping up appearances was over. All the strength, anger, and resolve that had kept me going for the past three years disappeared, leaving only an empty shell. Forget getting the kids ready for school, driving them places, greeting them when they arrived home in the afternoons, games, schedules, homework, meetings. “You deal with it,” I told my husband. “You figure it out because I am done. Oh, and find somewhere else to sleep. This room is taken.” The kids came into my room to visit me after school the next day, and when they started telling me what they needed that day, that night, and for school, I just looked at Joe and said, “Figure it out because I am done. Mommy doesn’t feel well.” I rolled over and dived under the covers again.

This was a really alarming development for Joe. I dropped the ball in a big way— I let it all go. After a few days of me refusing to get up, Joe frantically called my closest girlfriends. “You’ve got to come over and talk to her. I’ve never seen her like this.” When they showed up to check on me, and gently and reasonably pointed out, “You can’t just lay here like this forever,” I replied, “I don’t give a shit! The house can burn down for all I care. I’m staying right here.” I wasn’t going to kill myself, but it sure would have been nice to go to sleep and not wake up.

The will to live is actually much stronger than I had ever realized. Eventually, of course, I wanted to clean up. I got hungry. I had to get out of bed, shower, go downstairs, fix something to eat, and resume living—if for no other reason than Cass really was dying. Joe’s help was desperately needed at the shop, and the family needed me at their home. Cass was aware of Joey’s latest “situation,” but he was so heavily medicated that I’m not sure how much he really understood, which was a blessing. My parents, on the other hand, were very much alive and well. And they were pissed!

My father, the most mild-mannered, polite, pleasant banker type you could ever hope to meet, insisted on a family meeting at the senior Buttafuocos’ home. Cass was too weak to even make it downstairs on the appointed night, but my parents and Joe’s sisters, stepmother, brother Bobby, and Joe and I all sat in the living room as my quiet, reserved father tore into Joe. “What are you doing to my daughter and the children? Just what do you think you’re doing to this family? Your actions affect all of us!”

Joe continued to protest that he was set up, he hadn’t done anything wrong, and on and on, but my father, for one, wasn’t listening. Disillusionment had set in for my parents, and they saw the writing on the wall. Joe was remorseful and just sat there, taking my father’s tongue-lashing.

I was stuck. I was up and out of bed, but my spirit was gone. Depression robbed me of the energy it would have taken to pack up and leave Joe. The timing was also dreadful. I loved my father-in-law dearly. I wanted to help however I could, to be at his side during his final days and help my family in their time of need. There were bigger problems going on than Joey’s sideshow; this was literally life and death. I was forced to put my own troubles aside. All my time was taken up with the death vigil. It wasn’t just the family repercussions we had to deal with—it was a legal quagmire. Joe had been on probation at the time of his hooker scandal, and I knew the repercussions would be severe. I was the only one worried about it. Joe was his typical, breezy self about the matter. “What—are you kidding? They’re not going to put me in jail over this!”

“They certainly are!” Here we went again. Sociopaths are simply not frightened by the things others are. That grandiose sense of self does not allow for fear. Rules and regulations are for the rest of the world, not them. Mind you, Joe had already served time. Most people would do whatever it took to stay the hell out of the penal system for the rest of their lives. With typical insouciance, Joe wasn’t worried. That was my job. And sure enough, in June he was officially sentenced to jail for three months, to be served starting in September.

Cass died in August, and very soon afterward Joe went back to jail. It was a blessing that his father didn’t live to see that, and a mercy that he was only fuzzily aware of the entire drama playing out during the last few months of his life. Joe was gone, and I made up my mind. For real, I was leaving. I did not visit Joe one time during those seventy-five days. Nor did I miss him—not one little bit.

I refused all his phone calls, though I allowed the kids to take them. Paul was now fifteen, and he refused to even discuss his father’s current difficulty with me. Jessica was much more upset—by what she saw as the unfairness of it all. Joey had, of course, given the children his version of what had happened and had sworn it was a big misunderstanding, not his fault. She, for one, believed every word. She was 100 percent on his side. I did what I could: hugged them, told them how much I loved them, encouraged them to lean on their family and friends.

It was actually a very peaceful two and a half months in one sense. I was financially secure and knew exactly where my husband was and what he was doing. I had plenty of time to reflect on Joey’s behavior, without his endless justifications and wheedling and joking. I came to the conclusion that there weren’t going to be any more surprises in my life. I steeled myself to break the news to the kids.

I took Paul and Jessica out to dinner one night and said, “Kids, I have to talk to you about something important. When Dad gets out of jail, I am going to ask him for a separation. I am having a very hard time with all this, and I can’t live like this anymore.”

Twelve-year-old Jessica burst into tears. “You can’t do that! Daddy needs us! How can you do this to him? He’s in jail!” Paul didn’t have a visible reaction one way or another, but Jessica was beside herself. She was Daddy’s girl, for sure, and was really suffering because he was away.

“Mom, if you break up with Daddy, I’m going to go live with
him
!” she said. I tried to reach over and comfort her, but she wouldn’t let me touch her. She was furious with me. I started to backpedal.

“All right, I wanted to bring this up tonight. It’s something to think about,” I said, and then we went home. Jessica absolutely refused to speak to me for the rest of the night and disappeared into her room with the slam of a door. I sat up late that night and realized that I was stuck. I was tired, I was hurt, and I didn’t want to be in this marriage anymore. But my daughter was so hysterical, and Paul was so stoic. I couldn’t do this to them.

When Joe returned home in December, he was chastened and sorry. Again, of course. “You can’t leave me now. I need you more than ever! Dad is dead, and Bobby says I can’t come back to the shop!”

Bobby had apparently gone to see Joe in jail and told him he was not welcome back at work because Joey was bad for business. More bad news—but the holidays were upon us, and we had to get through them somehow. Family tradition dictated that we celebrate Christmas at the Buttafuoco home, but we all needed a change of venue. It would have been too sad a reminder that Cass was gone to gather at Joey’s childhood home just months after his death. I offered to host the family at our house that year. The situation was awkward, to say the least, but I filled the house with friends as well as family so we wouldn’t have to interact too much. All of us were cordial. I was mortified inside, but put on a happy face. I gave gifts to Bobby’s children gifts, of course, and chatted a bit with their parents.

According to Joe, Bobby’s wife Ursula was behind this decision to oust him from the shop. She had put her foot down and told Bobby to make a choice: either his brother or his wife and kids. Joe was enraged; he blamed her completely for this breach. The family business was his birthright, and some outsider was taking it away! Joe, as usual, was quite convincing. And as he ranted endlessly about his treacherous sister-in-law, his anger began to spark mine. How
could
they do this to us— take away our livelihood just when we needed it most?

Bobby had laid it on the line: Complete Auto Body and Repair was sinking. No one wanted to bring their cars in for service there. The place had become a joke. All that was in the public’s mind was, “Didn’t some guy have sex with a teenage girl there?” Cass’s legacy was going down the tubes, and there was only one reason. Bobby and his wife had young children to support. Bobby, like Joe, had worked there his whole life. Joe was no longer an owner; it was solely Bobby’s business after Cass died. The decision was final: Joe was not allowed to work there anymore. After that Christmas, despite my understanding of the realities of what was happening with the business, I no longer spoke to Bobby or Ursula, whom I’d loved for many years.

Joey’s frequent outbursts only added fuel to my fire. Whether or not it was in my mind, or it really happened, I felt people pulling away from us. There was a general sense of those around us backing away.
You know, Joey, I made an ass out of myself for years defending you. Then you’re out in L.A. soliciting a hooker?
I was in a total state of depressed resignation. On top of that, I felt plenty of shame, fear, and embarrassment. The kids didn’t want me to leave their father, and where was I going to go, anyway? I swallowed some more pills and soldiered on.

I lived for ten years in my dream house. Six of them happy. But it wasn’t my dream house anymore. Friends and neighbors had distanced themselves—the second media onslaught had been a little too much for many of them. The family was fractured over Joe’s firing from his own family business. Clearly, there was nothing left for my family on Long Island. We put the house on the market and hoped for the best. We weren’t sure if its notoriety would make the house an easy sell or an impossible one.

Where do you go to live when you’re infamous and hope just to blend in with the crowd? “I can work in L.A.!” Joe said. “We can start a whole new life there! It’ll be great!” He had created this whole mess, but here was the solution. I had no desire to live in California. I lived exactly where I wanted to live. But even on days when I told myself it wasn’t too late that I could still get out of this marriage, I knew I could never bring myself to let Joe go out to California alone and worry about the kids going back and forth to visit him if we separated. I was going where they were going; I had to stick it out.
They’ve been through so much,
was the constant refrain in my mind. It was all I could think of. They needed both their mother and their father.

And I needed my pills. Once we finally decided to make the move,
Where am I going to get my supply?
was one of my biggest concerns. I needed those Xanax and Percocet just to get through the day. By the time we left Long Island, I was taking twenty-seven pills every twenty-four hours.

Packing up that house broke my heart. On a hot summer day, the biggest moving van I’d ever seen in my life hauled away every single one of our possessions, along with three cars we had to transport across the country. The four of us stayed at my parents’ house for three days to give the furniture truck time to arrive before we flew west. It was a sad, quiet time. My parents had visibly aged during the past few years. The whole matter had crushed them both. Less than a year later, they also packed up and moved north to rural Maine. My situation destroyed my father: first of all, the shock of almost losing his daughter, but then the whole out-of-control circus and public humiliation that followed. Massapequa was such a small community; everywhere he went there were comments about the case, remarks, pointed fingers. He’d be in the diner trying to have a cup of coffee and hear people making salacious remarks about Joe and Amy. It was suffocating; there was no getting away from it.

Despite all I’d been through in the past seven years, I had never even been tempted to pick up a cigarette, a habit I’d shed when the kids were small. The day before we moved to California, I drove to the convenience store, bought a couple of packs, and started puffing away. What the hell did smoking, or my health, matter? I no longer cared about anything anymore.

Our feeling was that we were living in la-la land, just another couple of loonies new on the scene. When everybody’s pointing at you all the time, it’s nice to live in a place where there are lots of others to point at, too. There weren’t many famous people living on Long Island—and those who did lived on gated estates in Brookville or South Hampton and had servants shop for them. They weren’t strolling through the local Pathmark grocery store twice a week, like I had.