Thing of Beauty (54 page)

Gia clipped whatever articles she could find in the newspapers and magazines about AIDS. She was convinced that there was something wrong with her. She had never been tested for exposure to the AIDS virus. Eagleville did frequent in-service presentations for staff about precautions in taking urine and blood samples. Everyone in the rehab community knew that intravenous drug users were a high-risk group, both because of shared needles and sexual habits. Drug rehabbers had been one of the first medical groups to decide it was safer to assume that every patient
had
been exposed than find out test results too late.

Besides, new patients were not routinely given AIDS tests anyway. The tests still gave too many false positives, and Eagleville wouldn’t refuse treatment even if exposure to the HTLV-III virus could be proved. If patients had symptoms of AIDS-related disease, they were put in the hospital like anyone else with medical problems. If they were asymptomatic, it was considered almost better that they didn’t know. It was hard enough to convince a recovering person to give life a second chance when they actually had a second chance.

Gia began having her suspicions throughout the winter and spring that she might have AIDS, but she did not display any other symptoms. She wasn’t quite ready to go back to New York and try modeling again, so she worked several
different local jobs: first as a checkout clerk at the Acme, and later in the cafeteria of a nursing home.

At some point during the winter, Gia began using drugs again. She called her counselor from Eagleville, with whom she was still doing a weekly group session, and informed her that she wouldn’t be coming anymore. Before each group session, patients had to give a urine sample. Gia knew that hers would be “hot.” She was discharged and her Eagleville case closed out. Although it was not commonly done—or recommended, for various security reasons—the counselor gave Gia her home phone number so they could keep up an informal contact.

Although she was living with her mother in Richboro, Gia started occasionally sneaking out to visit Rochelle in Atlantic City. “When she first came back from Eagleville,” recalled Rochelle, “I stopped using drugs completely so there would be nothing in the house for her to get into. But I had to work from noon till ten at night some nights and I had to leave her alone. I came home for dinner one day and there’s a guy in my living room and there’s a pile of coke on the glass table. I walked in and Gia’s saying, ‘I didn’t do any, I didn’t do any.’ I said, ‘You, shut up, you, get your stuff and get out.’ I was threatening her. I told her, ‘If it happens again I’ll call your mother,’ and she freaked, she said, ‘No, no don’t call my mother.’ Two weeks later I came home, made dinner and she’s eating and I saw a bruise on her arm. I said, ‘What is
this?’
She said, ‘I tried it and now I know I don’t like it anymore. I hate it.’ And I sincerely thought that she meant it. But after that, she was obviously doing drugs again and she got worse and worse.

“This is how I figured out what she’s doing. I look in her books—with all her checks and withdrawals—and I see she has
receipts from the turnpike.
She had written checks to get through the tolls and then she spent every dime she had on dope in New York. The receipts showed that she was up and back in a matter of hours. Writing bad checks for the tolls—she had balls, I’ll tell you. Who the hell would even
think
of writing a check for the tolls on the turnpike?”

During the winter and spring, Gia would sometimes drive to the Shore during the day, use her extra key to get into
Rochelle’s apartment, take something to pawn, get high, and go back to Richboro without coming by the salon to let Rochelle or Nancy know she was in town. Rochelle thought she was losing her mind. Things were just disappearing from her place, a mysterious glass with melted ice cubes in it would be sitting on the table when she returned from work. But then Nancy spotted Gia walking into the apartment building with a glazed gaze and a druggy-looking guy during an afternoon she was supposed to be in Richboro.

“I went back to the salon and called my sister,” Nancy recalled. “I told her I had just seen Gia on the street down here and she looked like she was on drugs. Kathleen started freaking out on me. She said I was a fucking liar, and Gia was home and doing really good, and all I ever did was make up stories about Gia. I said, ‘I’m not trying to badmouth Gia, she’s in trouble again.’ She hung up on me.”

“The next time I saw her, I said, ‘Gia, what happened to the cassette player?’” Rochelle recalled. “And she wouldn’t lie to you. She wore her hair on her face and she’d sorta look up through her bangs at ya. And I said, ‘Did you sell the cassette player?’ And she said yeah. And I said, ‘How am I supposed to listen to my music?’ And she said, ‘Well, you still got the turntable.’ You just couldn’t stay mad at her, because she was like a bad little child. This went on until she had gotten really bad and sold jewelry of mine. It wasn’t the value of the jewelry so much as it was that my grandmother had given it to me. At that point I threw her out and told her to go back to her mother, which was, of course, the worst thing you could say to her.”

Gia did what she was told and went back to Richboro. She was, by then, convinced she had AIDS. She tried to tell her mother that she was ill, but Kathleen didn’t believe her. “On Memorial Day, she came to me and said, ‘Mommy, I really have something wrong with me,’” Kathleen recalled. “You could tell she was disturbed. And it still bothers me that I just went ahead about my business. I was working at Spiegel then, and I just went to work. But that’s what you would have done—she didn’t seem any different. So I went to work, she and Henry had dinner together and she headed to the Shore.”

Gia went first to her brother Michael’s place, to get all her things together. Then she pawned everything she could get her hands on. She also sold her car, for a bargain $1,700. Her mother had always held the title to the Fiat because it was registered at her Richboro home for tax purposes. Through all the years of Gia’s addiction, Kathleen had always refused to transfer the title, but she had recently relented and signed the car over. With the money—well over $2,000—Gia bought all the heroin she could afford and checked into one of the cheap hotels she and Rochelle would go to when they were living with Joe Carangi and needed a few days by themselves. Gia did her best to overdose on heroin, but was unsuccessful. When she regained consciousness, she went out to a restaurant, but found that she couldn’t bear to eat any of the food she ordered. She fed the food to a dog she saw outside the hotel, stayed in the room for a couple days, and finally sneaked into Rochelle’s apartment.

Rochelle hadn’t heard from Gia for about a week. “I came home from work and went in the apartment,” she recalled. “I had my friend Steven staying with me and I laid down and I heard breathing. I told him, “There’s somebody in this room.’ He’s a cute little gay guy: he put his hand on his hip and said, ‘There’s nobody in here.’ Then I heard a cough. I looked, and Gia was under the bed. She crawled out and I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She said, ‘I’m sleeping and didn’t have anywhere to go. I’m sick, I don’t feel good, I don’t have anywhere to go.’

“I cleaned her up with a washcloth. At that time she said, ‘Chelle, I think I have AIDS.’ She didn’t look good, but AIDS wasn’t really around yet. And Gia
always
had dark circles under her eyes. And her weight always shifted, too. When she was on methadone it was up, on heroin she ate a lot of sweets. She just looked like she had been on a drug binge. And I thought she was telling me she had AIDS as one of her things to make me feel sorry for her.

“So I got her cleaned up, and I kept saying, ‘You can’t stay here,’ you know, and then finally I said she could spend the night. I still didn’t know if she was lying about the AIDS or not. We went to bed. In the morning, she said she was going to get something for breakfast. I asked if she needed
money, she said, ‘No, stay there.’ What I didn’t know was that she had already taken all my tip money from my jeans and she went off to buy drugs. So I sat in the living room and waited for her. I was
so pissed.

“She came back about two in the afternoon, when she thought it was safe and I was at work. She still had her key, she thought she was just going to hang out at the house. And she walked in and I was fighting her to get into her pockets to find the dope. We were just pushing and shoving and all that. We threw each other around. And she was trying to run out the door and I grabbed the shirt off of her, so she wouldn’t run out. I pulled it off her, and she ran out the door like that. I called the police on her. I wanted her brought home.

“The next thing I heard she was in the hospital in Philadelphia and she had pneumonia.”

They were not thrilled to have Gia Carangi as a patient at Warminster General Hospital, nestled back off the redundantly named Street Road in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs. Even at inner-city hospitals, where staff was accustomed to hard-luck cases using emergency room doctors as primary care physicians, the junkies were considered the scum of the earth. At a suburban hospital, the concept of treating a beaten-up IV drug user who looked like Street Road’s first street person, and a
woman
yet, was a little difficult to grasp. Especially since the girl was registering as a welfare recipient, but was accompanied by a mother who appeared to be at least middle class—and who was acting nearly as touchy as the staff was feeling about this odd case.

“They did everything they could to avoid admitting her to that hospital,” Kathleen recalled. “I had to beg them.”

Kathleen explained that her daughter’s symptoms included weakness, extreme shortness of breath and fever—and a history of long-term IV drug use. But she told the doctors she believed it was primarily depression that Gia was suffering from. She was having crying spells that wouldn’t stop. The doctors ran a series of tests, the results of which suggested that depression was the
least
of Gia’s problems. She had bilateral pneumonia, bone marrow depression with anemia from drug-related toxicity and extremely
low blood cell counts. The doctors thought they had better rule out AIDS.

The hospital staff was extremely paranoid about the AIDS virus. It was June of 1986. AIDS news was in the papers every day, Perry Ellis had just died very publicly from the disease on May 30, and the Second International Conference on AIDS had just concluded in Paris. But in the trenches, hospital workers were still getting sketchy information on the disease and weren’t sure whether to trust what they were getting. In inner-city hospitals, where the first AIDS cases had been concentrated, there was already a routine to the panic, a sense of fear and experience. Warminster General Hospital had treated, at most, a half dozen AIDS patients. Each one caused a certain sector of the staff to don rubber gloves for the simplest of procedures—like taking a temperature—and full body suits for anything more complicated.

When AIDS was suspected, Gia was immediately rushed into an isolation ward. A doctor trying to explain fear as caution might insist that she was isolated to keep her from picking up any additional infections from other patients in her immune-depleted condition. But according to her charts, she was released from isolation only after it was determined that she probably had AIDS-related complex “and not communicable AIDS disease.” Even in June of 1986, it was clear to the medical profession that AIDS was not the type of communicable disease that required patients to be isolated in order to prevent an epidemic. But nurses and doctors on duty at hospitals don’t always believe what the medical journals insist they should.

“I’m not sure if they didn’t trust what the literature was saying or just had never worked with somebody with AIDS,” recalled Patrick Kenney, who was psychiatric nurse at Warminster at the time and, as the staff’s only openly gay member, had taken on the added responsibility of being the hospital’s AIDS expert. “Some of the medical staff wanted nothing to do with Gia. They were petrified of her. There was a staff problem with the moral issues of how she got AIDS. The majority of staff responded well to the teaching I was doing, but a few were irrational. They were going in in space suits just to check on her—gloves and gowns to take her temperature. But it wasn’t just her. There was a
physician who had AIDS here. They wore gowns to take his temperature, too. I tried to explain to them why this was
not okay,
what is the message you’re sending? But then, most patients tend to be accepting of whatever the staff says.”

Kathleen was not accepting of what the staff said—echoing outrage that Gia was too weak to voice—and was quickly branded “difficult” by many responsible for Gia’s day-to-day care. After observing what they considered to be the unusual relationship between mother and daughter, they began referring to Kathleen as “that bitch.”

After eight days in the medical unit—her AIDS having been determined to be the noncommunicable kind, her pneumonia successfully treated with erythromycin—Gia was transferred to the psychiatric unit. She was diagnosed as having a schizoaffective disorder with some psychotic features and significant depression. She had talked about thoughts of buying a gun and committing suicide. She was having hallucinations and feeling paranoid.

When her crying began to abate and she was speaking coherently, she pieced together what had just happened to her. After her fistfight with Rochelle, Gia had run topless out into the street. A construction worker had given her his windbreaker to cover up, and she proceeded to wander aimlessly into one of the neighborhoods where she bought drugs. It started to rain, and she lay down on a mattress next to a Dumpster and fell asleep. Then something violent happened to her. She told one friend she was raped by a man who found her there. She told a nurse in the psych unit that she was turning a trick and the guy had beaten her up. She told her mother that all the bruises were from her fight with Rochelle.

“I still do not believe that Gia was raped then,” said Kathleen. “Gia eventually told me
everything,
or gave me enough information to put everything together. Nothing she ever said leads me to believe she was raped. She told me one time in a fit of anger, ‘Well, I’ve been raped twice, but don’t even think twice about it because I dealt with it in group.’ And I don’t know whether to believe that or not.