KooKooLand (47 page)

B
efore returning to New York, I decided to pay a quick visit to Susan's brother, Terry. I wanted to express my sympathy and to see how he was holding up. Terry was now in his early thirties and living with his wife and kids in a rural town an hour north of Manchester. His glory days as a boxer were long over and he was working as an insurance salesman. According to Jimmy, he was still gung ho about that TV preacher.

Once again, Virginia offered to go with me.

“It's like the old days. Hanging out together,” she said.

On the way up we listened to the Stones and talked about our boyfriends.

Finally, we arrived at the remote cabin in the woods where Terry was living.

He seemed glad to see us. He invited us into his living room and served us coffee and sugar cookies. I noticed that several copies of the
New Yorker
containing the story of the Piasecny family were displayed on the coffee table.

I started to tell Terry about my trip to see Susan, but he cut me right off.

“She's nothing to me.
Nothing
,” he snapped.

I flinched. His words seemed so unfair. He'd turned against Susan for murdering their father in a way he'd never turned against Hank for killing their mother.

“But, she's been through so much, and—”

“I don't want to talk about her,” he said, more sharply.

I clammed up. But he kept on ranting about Susan.

“She's always been no good. Always been violent. Women like her are drawn to violence like moths to a flame. They even love being beaten up. Look at her, both of her husbands beat her and she liked it.”

His words hit me like a left hook.

“I can't imagine anyone likes being beaten,” I managed to choke out.

“Then you don't know Susan. And you're not too swift.”

Get me outta here, I thought. Get me the hell outta here or I'm really gonna punch him.

From the topic of violence-loving women, Terry jumped right into talking about violence-hating women.

He said most women, the ones who didn't love violence like Susan, had an “overexaggerated” reaction to it. As an example, he brought up his young daughter, who was playing nearby. He cruelly mimicked how she would cringe when he threatened to belt her one.

Virginia and I glanced at each other, horrified.

I wanted to grab that little girl and make a run for it.

Instead, I just said we had to be going.

Before we left, Terry insisted on reading us something from the Bible.

John 8:32: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

I thought that was pretty ironic. Even though Terry's family secrets had been cracked open like a bottle of Jimmy's harsh whiskey and splashed all over the newspapers and in the
New Yorker
fucking magazine, Terry seemed anything but free.

Susan wasn't free either. Obviously. She was locked up.

It was dark by the time Virginia and I hightailed it out of there.

Virginia nearly plowed into a tree in her haste to get away.

On the drive back to Manchester, I made up my mind. I was going to write about Susan and Terry. About Jimmy and Hank. About Shirley and Doris.

I wasn't a violence lover. I was a violence hater.

I wasn't thinking that telling the truth would set me free.

I just hoped—somehow, someday—it might help that little girl.

S
hortly after I saw Susan—a mere seven months after she had been committed for life—she petitioned the court to set her free. Dr. Standow, the psychiatrist whose assessment of Susan had been instrumental in her being found not guilty by reason of insanity, had examined her again. He found her to no longer be a danger to society or to herself and, stunningly, recommended that she be released.

On February 6, 1979, there was a court hearing to decide Susan's fate before the same judge who had committed her.

Several witnesses, including Susan, testified.

The state attorney general strongly objected to Susan's release. Dr. Standow, the state argued, had previously characterized Susan's mental illness as “long-standing.” It was hard to imagine the illness had resolved itself in a few short months.

Some of the hospital staff had their own objections. The director of Susan's unit described her as disruptive and manipulative. He said if she didn't get her way she got angry. He said she bribed other patients to do things for her.

By his description, Susan sounded a lot like Hank.

Susan, in her own defense, painted a starkly different picture. She described the environment at the hospital as inhumane. She insisted she wasn't even getting privileges, like physical recreation, to which she was entitled.

Another staff member admitted this was true. He said Susan didn't have the same privileges as the male patients because the hospital didn't have a separate forensic unit for women. The hospital didn't have enough staff to monitor her if she went outside.

Because she was a rarity—a criminally insane woman—Susan was out of luck.

The next day, the judge denied Susan's petition.

Susan was disappointed, but she knew there'd be other chances. By law, she had to be reevaluated every two years.

Nevertheless, she did start to get a little depressed. I could tell when she
wrote to me that her mood was pretty lousy. She said there was no one on her ward she could relate to, no one she could talk to intelligently about art and music and poetry.

She thought having an animal might cheer her up. She put in a request to get a cat on the ward. A couple of the other units had therapeutic animals. But her request was denied. “The environment wouldn't be good for the cat,” she said she was told.

“Can you believe that logic?” she wrote. “It's OK for humans, though.”

Most of all, she was starved for contact with the outside world. She tried to keep up her connection to it by watching the news and reading
Time
magazine.

She sent me a letter a few months after the mass suicide of Jim Jones's followers in Guyana.

“How can so many minds get so perverted at the same time?” she wondered.

It was a good question, one that I thought could be asked about our own hometown.

But I didn't push myself too hard to answer it. Not then, anyway.

It was a mental maze I was afraid of getting lost in.

I didn't want to get depressed myself.

I didn't want to pervert my own mind.

So, I tried to put it aside.

I got on with my life.

I got a cat of my own.

I got a new boyfriend, a cute young actor. Moog Boy and I had drifted apart but were still friends. Nobody stays with the first guy they sleep with, do they?

I got a great new job that Brian De Palma recommended me for. I started working on a boxing movie for Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. I flew with them to a tropical island to be their gal Friday for five weeks as they shaped the movie's screenplay. All day long I happily typed words like
cocksucker
and
motherfucker.
At night, Marty and I drank piña coladas and listened to Van Morrison while Bobby kept to his boxing regimen and went to bed early.

Three squares a day, I could have anything I wanted. Anything off the menu. Or anything the hotel had flown in from Paris especially for us. Foie gras, sweetbreads, filet mignon with béarnaise. Like a little heathen, I pointed to what I wanted until I learned how to pronounce it.

One night Marty and I went out to dinner. I ate boneless quail with grapes off a gold plate the size of a flying saucer while a white-turbaned waiter kept filling my glass with Cristal. I listened to Marty analyze Jimmy's favorite boxing
movie,
Body and Soul
. I knew the movie inside out and could hold my own. We talked about films for hours.
City Lights
.
The Thief of Bagdad
.
White Heat
.

My head was spinning from the champagne and the whole shebang.

“Made it, Ma. Top of the world!” I felt like shouting like Jimmy Cagney in
White Heat
.

I just hoped I didn't get shot down in the end like him.

When we returned to New York, Marty and Bobby kept me on as their researcher. I spent my days talking to washed-up boxers and gruff old guys like Papou. I was right in my sweet spot. I was working on a story about an angry-but-soulful lug who beat his wife to a bloody pulp.

Shortly before the start of shooting, Jake LaMotta, the boxer the movie was about, got arrested for smacking his fifth wife. Suddenly, some of the people I was calling for research questioned why we were making a film about such a monster. I assured them the movie wouldn't glorify LaMotta, but, still, some people hung up on me. I had my own concerns about how the wife-beating incident might impact the movie. Primarily, it didn't gel with the movie LaMotta's redemption at the end. But then, who really wanted to see a movie about the real guy? Who wanted to be left with the message once a brute, always a brute? Who wanted a story with no hope? Where was the nuance in that?

Even if it was sort of true.

When the movie came out, it was so brilliant nobody remembered or cared what the real Jake LaMotta had done. I didn't care either. I made a quick trip to Manchester to take Jimmy to see it.

When the lights came up, Jimmy sat dazed and drained in his seat like he'd just gone twelve rounds.

He'd seen his life flashing in front of his eyes at twenty-four frames per second.

He'd had a psychic smackdown.

“I had a ringside seat to that slugfest,” he blurted out—meaning the slugfest of boxing and wife beating and self-loathing—“and that movie didn't pull any goddamn punches.”

Raging Bull
rocked Jimmy's world almost as much as
Blood Feast
had rocked mine.

Maybe a part of me was looking for a little payback.

But I was also hoping to hold a mirror up to Jimmy. To get him to see the error of his ways. To lead him to his own possible redemption.

I didn't know if it had worked. For his sake, and even more for Shirley's, I hoped that it had.

T
wo and half years after Susan was arrested for killing her father, she was released. With two shrinks saying she was no longer a danger to herself or anyone else, the state had to let her go. New Hampshire's quirky insanity law had freed Susan just like it had let Hank walk.

I found out about Susan's release when I called home one Sunday night. I'd been in the dark about her for a while. We hadn't had a falling out. She'd just stopped responding to my letters. I think it had become too hard for her to see the different paths our lives had taken.

“That conniving little scam artist conned those headshrinkers,” snarled Jimmy. “Well, she better cross to the other side of the street if she sees me coming.”

“Oh,
Jim
, you don't mean that,” squeaked Shirley.

I sure hoped Shirley was right.

But I also hoped Susan stayed the hell out of Manchester.

I wanted her to live. I wanted her to succeed. I wanted her life to have a second act. I still believed that was possible.

When Susan left the hospital in the summer of 1980, she had a lot going for her. She was only thirty-eight. She was bright, attractive, and college-educated. She had meds, religion, and therapy to keep her going. She had an apartment—in Concord,
not
in Manchester.

I wish I could say she turned her life around. I wish I could say that once the man who had menaced her childhood and murdered her mother—the villain of the story—was out of the picture, Susan's life had a happy ending. I wish I could say, against all odds, she finished medical school and made it to California. That she met a nice Jewish doctor and I danced at their wedding. That she had a little girl with beautiful cheekbones and named her after Doris.

But stuff like that only happens in movies.

Within a week, Susan was arrested.

Not once. Not twice. Three times.

First some cops caught her smoking a joint in a parked car. Then she was arrested twice for trying to obtain controlled drugs with forged prescriptions.

That was two felonies, one misdemeanor, and counting.

“I told you that kid was a bad seed,” crowed Jimmy, when he gleefully delivered the news.

I was overcome with sadness.

I got off the phone quickly. I didn't want Jimmy to hear me blubbering.

After that, I vowed to try to forget about Susan. I didn't need another criminal in my life.

And I had a brand-new job to keep me occupied.

My dream job.

Woody Allen had hired me as his assistant.

Jimmy—no surprise—took credit for it.

“Hey, I'm the one who took you to your first Woody Allen film. I deserve a cut of your big, fat paycheck,” he said when I called to tell him, hoping he'd at least say “nice going, kiddo.”

“I—I'm only making three hundred bucks a week,” I stammered.

“That's good money for a dummkopf girl.”

“Daddy's very proud of you,” piped up Shirley. “We both are.”

“Maybe I'll come down there one a these days,” Jimmy said. “Even though Woody's a Jew and I'm a greaseball, I think we'd really hit it off.”

I panicked.

He's not going to come, dummkopf, I told myself. He's just trying to get a rise out of you.

But I was wrong.

I came home from work one day and Jimmy was standing on the front steps of my building.

“Who do ya think you are, Annie Hall?” he cracked, giving me the once-over.

I was wearing an Annie Hall–ish getup. Floppy hat. Necktie. Men's shoes.

“Wow, what I surprise,” I managed to choke out.

He had on a getup of his own. Bright turquoise shirt. Black polyester pants. Shades. He was dressed for a night out, Jimmy style.