Thing of Beauty (52 page)

“She and I got in trouble at Eagleville. Before I even knew she had been a model, I always thought she was beautiful. I was playing tennis with her and she just looked real … I don’t know,
European
to me one day. And I turned to a friend of mine, who happened to be in my group, and I said, ‘Isn’t she beautiful, she looks like she’s chiseled from stone or something.’ And he looked at me and he brought it to my therapist, who immediately declared us in love and fucking. They even restricted us from each other at one point Everybody thinks everybody else is trying to fall in love, but it wasn’t really like that. I got accused of it, in group. But Gia, to me, was like a buddy, a sister or something. She was just real special. All these accusations just infuriated me and made me work against the place. I think it stifled my openness, you know? Gia was just as pissed. She thought it was ridiculous. I mean, for one, she was gay and that was like, well, that’s as far as it was going to go. One of the things that attracted me to her was that she was gay and I knew I didn’t have to put out or nothing.

“I mean, they tell you, ‘Don’t have any relationships,’ which means ‘Don’t get laid.’ And, you know, the AIDS scare was there and all of that. For the first time in my life, I was doing something right, doing what I was told to do. Hanging around with gay women seemed like a good solution. And I still got shit for it.”

Gia and Rob became friendly with one other Eagleville patient. Cheryl Paczkoski had grown up in Philadelphia’s
working-class Fairmount section and, in her late teens, got heavily involved with coke and methamphetamines—the so-called “poor man’s cocaine,” which was considered a regional specialty because so much was produced in labs in Bucks County. Gia, Rob and Cheryl thought of themselves as The Three Musketeers.

“People in Eagleville really gave Gia a hard time,” Cheryl recalled. “For one thing, they could never believe the amount of drugs she had consumed. They would say she couldn’t have shot that much. But Gia didn’t have any reason to he. Her life was too exciting to have to lie. A lot of people were against her. They felt she was so closed. And she would always get calls from friends and her mother after she was told not to. They used to drill her, scream and yell at her. They were hard on her. They always felt she didn’t open up, said she was lying. They were harder on her than anybody else. I guess that was to help her grow.

“They would accuse her of using. One time I remember they had her tested because her face looked all puffy. Here it was, she had been up the night before crying. Her roommate had told me she was crying.

“I remember, she did a skit about wanting to break up with this woman—you had to do these skits about stuff in your life. She wanted to break up with the woman in the skit. She wanted to end it, and when she felt that, she would go into the bathroom and get high. She went off to the side and set up everything and tied off and got high and then went back and she was all happy and high. At the end of the skit, patients could get up and give you feedback on it. You couldn’t talk back. You had to give them your attention.”

The skit was part of a web of exercises that included written biofeedbacks, frustrations being punched out on the plastic “anger mats,” drawings and the creation of a “lifeline” to pinpoint which events led to others. She was told to create a physical representation of the specific issues in her life, a self-portrait of constructive criticism. She drew a large mural depicting herself carrying a cross, her body floating somewhere between the earth and the sun. Although she was a good enough artist to do a fairly realistic, detailed rendering of human faces and forms, she chose
more abstract imagery—just an outline of a body, with features more symbolic than literal.

Her face had one weeping eye, a Bowie-esque lightning bolt, a question mark and stitches on her skull. In her chest was a broken heart, black lungs and a small black swastika. On her arms were needle marks. On her genital area were male and female stick figures. On the drawing she listed the themes that her therapy sought to address: “Confusion, Hate, Separation, Frust[r]ation, Growing Pains, Sexual Abuse, Mental Abuse, Helplessness, Love.”

There were also “tasks” that could be given by therapists to make certain points. Because Gia so actively downplayed her beauty and was so aggressively nonfeminine, she was once given a task of putting on makeup and doing her hair. It was an exercise that her counselors thought might drive home the point that even though Gia was an untraditional woman, she was still a woman—a concept she didn’t always seem to grasp.

The grand finale of these exercises was called the “self-disclosure,” a presentation that often lasted a half hour, put on in the small auditorium for the entire Candidates Program. Dawn Phillips, one of the few openly gay women in the program, was outraged by the reaction after Gia’s self-disclosure.

“I remember her talking, you had to speak into a microphone and she did it,” Dawn recalled. “She was more confident than I would have been. She didn’t stutter the whole time. At the end of these exercises, patients could get up and give you feedback on it. And you couldn’t talk back—you had to give them your attention.
Every single person
mentioned her being gay, that being gay was her basic problem. They didn’t think she was as okay with it as she claimed to be. Or, well, they tried to make her not okay with it—that’s how I felt. And I think it was because of her looks—the fact that she was a model and the way she looked, that she didn’t look like the stereotype of a lesbian.

“I was getting so outraged I was about to get up and yell. I wanted to attack everyone in there, but I was too frightened to do that. Finally, Gia had to leave to go to work. That night, she came into the kitchen and I was sitting there. I just started talking to her and told her how I felt. I thought
what they had done to her in there stunk, she didn’t deserve it, and I didn’t see her gayness as being the issue. She was elated that somebody was saying this to her, could understand her. It was like a shock to her.”

After the first three months of the Candidates Program, patients had to get jobs off-grounds, although they still lived at the hospital. They could also get passes to socialize, but they had to make out a pass plan of who they would see and what they would do. Therapists could veto plans to socialize with suspected enablers, and patients were routinely discharged from Eagleville for not following their pass plans.

Gia was never caught, but she was beginning to sneak visits with Rochelle. “She’d get a pass to come out, she’d go to the mall and I’d pick her up,” recalled Rochelle. “She wasn’t using when she was in there. She was straight, she was being good.

“She had been sneaking phone calls to me all along. She would write me letters from Eagleville saying she didn’t want to see me anymore, and then she would call me and say, ‘Don’t take those letters seriously, they made me write them.’ Gia was upset that Nancy was living with me. When Gia would call me, sometimes I would tell her to listen to that song ‘Don’t You Forget About Me.’ [The song, by Simple Minds, had been popularized in the recent hit, teen-angst movie
The Breakfast Club.]
I was worried that after her treatment she would not come back to me. I thought she would disregard me because she was being programmed to forget people, places and things in her past. I just kept saying, ‘Listen to this song.’”

In September, Gia completed the inpatient part of her program at Eagleville, a milestone which only thirty percent of the Candidates actually reached before being discharged prematurely or simply dropping out. In the third phase of the program, patients took apartments off-grounds—often with recent Eagleville patients—and got full-time jobs in the community. They returned to Eagleville at least once a week for counseling, although many continued to come to the hospital every night for twelve-step meetings. Others went to the various meetings held in the Norristown area. Economically depressed since the ebb of its manufacturing sector in
the seventies but still the Montgomery County seat, Norristown had developed a significant population of recovering people. There was, at any given time, a small group trying desperately to stay clean, another group that had been clean long enough to be counseling others, and a much larger third group of former Eagleville people who had returned to their addictions and found themselves geographically trapped in this hard-luck urbanized suburb.

Although her mother begged her to move home, Gia followed her therapists’ advice and moved in with recovering people in Norristown. She shared a fairly depressing apartment—on an unpaved alley just off Norristown’s main street—with two other recovering women from Eagleville, one of whom had lost an arm to an abscess.

Now that she was out in the real world, there were things that had to be taken care of. Gia pulled out the blank-page book that she had received during her first weeks at Wilhelmina—the one in which she once had pasted the Polaroids from her first major sittings—and turned it upside down. Starting from what was the back, she drew a little cat and then made a list: to call the dentist, to go by the welfare office and to check on her insurance. Then she started combing the want ads for jobs. On the other side of the book were the scribbled phone numbers of the contacts she made during her first trip to Europe, addresses for Paris hotels and “The Prince,” notes to herself—“while in Paris if Christian Dior is shooting … while in Rome call Riccardo Gay.” But, as she was growing accustomed to saying, “that was before.” So she wrote: “counter & warehouse, $5.25/hr … Philly Steaks, apply in person … office cleaners, $4/hr … cook deli & dessert, $4.50/hr.”

Through Eagleville networking, she finally got a job, at just above minimum wage, as a sales clerk at Designs—a store that sold Levi Strauss products in the new wing of the King of Prussia Mall. She also had tried to start dating men, although she wasn’t supposed to get involved, on orders from her counselors. Sascha Brodelin—a Rasputinesque, Russian-born fashion photographer she had been friendly with since her early days in New York, but whose career had never taken off like hers—was coming down to take her on dates. But privately, she was still holding on to a crush
she had developed on her role model at Eagleville. “Here you are, not supposed to be attracted to anybody,” recalled Dawn Phillips, “and here’s Gia, real blatant about the whole thing. This counselor was getting roses and poems via this anonymous person. I think it started while Gia was still inpatient, the poems at least.”

The counselor tried to downplay Gia’s gestures without alienating her. “Gia mistook caring as sexual,” recalled the counselor. “That was pretty much how she looked at relationships. She needed people and in the process would push people away, by needing them so much that she put an expectation on them that they couldn’t meet.”

The people Gia knew from Eagleville were aware of her past and her recent recovery. In a small therapeutic community, gossip and even tidbits from confidential group sessions traveled fast. The people she worked with at Designs were the first on whom she could try out the “new Gia,” the result of seven months of sobriety and intense therapy.

“I have to say, she acted like everything you ever hear about someone affected by drugs,” recalled Stephan Sammartino, who was also a salesman at Designs and, because it was on his way, would often drive Gia to work. “She talked very slow, like she had to think about what she was saying. She talked like an elderly person or like she was wasted, but she wasn’t. She was very funny, but like an older person would be. She’d talk loud, get carried away telling stories until all the customers were listening in. She would just tell us this off-the-wall stuff, totally out of the blue.

“She was a little self-conscious about having been at Eagleville, but she always joked around about all the things she wasn’t allowed to do. Supposedly, she wasn’t permitted to have a relationship with anyone. She would always jokingly complain about not being allowed to go on a date. Then it was, ‘Oh, I went on a date and we kissed and that’s all I was allowed to do.’ This went on and on. So one day we were standing around—supposedly watching the dressing rooms—and we started telling stories.

“Gia said, ‘I went on a date last night and something happened.’ So we all gather around, and she starts out talking real low. ‘So, we went here,’ she led us to believe that this was a guy—she always referred to her boyfriend—’and
we didn’t want to do anything, I didn’t want to have sex with him. So, we went out for ice cream, I got rum raisin, and brought it back to the house …’ And she said she put it between her legs or whatever, and he ate it. She put in more details, and her voice was getting louder. And then the best part was, she said, ‘But those
raisins
were something else!’ Just the way she said it, it was so great. We would always joke about rum raisin after that.”

Gia talked a lot about her mother and emphasized how important the split-up of her family had been. It was as if the fourteen-year-old trauma were still a fresh, open wound, or perhaps a bone that had broken long ago and had never been set properly—requiring a painful rebreaking and resetting to be made right. She said she still wanted to get her family back together. “If her mother was coming to visit,” Sammartino recalled, “she’d tell me, ‘My mom’s coming, but the guy she’s with, it’s not my dad. He’s nice, but he’s not my dad.’ The first time her mom came, I remember, she came striding in and, well, you get customers in the store, the minute they walk in it’s like ‘Here we go,’ your eye goes right to them We were just about to start on her and Gia said, “That’s my mom, don’t say anything.’

“Her mother was very, like, sturdy, husky, like a real strong nun. You wouldn’t want to play with her. And she’d come in and walk right to the back of the store to the manager.’ ‘I’m Gia’s mother, Mrs. So-and-so, and can she go to lunch right now, we’re going to go.’ She wouldn’t go to Gia and ask if she could go on break. She went right to the back. The mother wasn’t rude, and she seemed affectionate with Gia. She’d give her a big kiss and hold her hand as they walked through the mall. Gia would go like a little kid with her head down.”