Thing of Beauty (57 page)

“I started getting all these phone calls from the other grandmother,” recalled Kathleen. “It was a lot of partying and bad stuff going on. We were trying to get the organization that handles children and youth in New Jersey to take her out of there. The social worker handling it at that point wanted Henry and I to get her, and take her away from the mother and that situation. She couldn’t live with her father. He had no room, he wasn’t working at the time. It was a mess.”

In the midst of this mess, Joey observed the way Gia was interacting with Kathleen and Henry. “I couldn’t understand what was going on there,” recalled Joey. “Gia was saying she had to get out of there. They weren’t being as nice to her as they were letting on. I heard them arguing about what she was doing with her money, and stuff like that. They wanted her food stamps from her and really cruel, nonsense stuff. I finally had to leave. I couldn’t believe what was going on. I would take her out to breakfast sometimes and she would pull out a bunch of money and offer to pay. She’d say, ‘Just don’t tell them that I got any money cause they’ll take my money off me.’ I said, “They don’t want your
money.’
I just thought she wasn’t feeling well or something. Then I heard them arguing about it, ‘We know you’ve got money, what are you doing with your money,’ and stuff like that. I took her to the store one day. She wanted to get some juice, she liked Hawaiian Punch and she got a few cans of that, and some lox, and I heard them upstairs, and they were up there counting down what she got”

“She was treated like a dog in that house,” Nancy Adams said. “You know how you see movies about people in institutions, locked up with the key thrown away? That’s how it was. We couldn’t call there, she couldn’t call us. Kathleen had her locked up. Gia would call Rochelle and I at the
salon, collect. She said she was sick and lonely, and they were always fighting about money. She thought Kathleen and Henry were afraid they were going to get stuck with all the medical bills. I guess that was a legitimate concern, but Gia’s happiness and well-being just didn’t seem to be motivating factors here. You see people on television dying of AIDS and you see the family pulling together for one last minute of quality time and she didn’t have that. She didn’t have anything.”

“It was not like that at all,” Kathleen said. “We would have given her
anything
if we thought it would help. She had food stamps here. Sometimes she gave them to us, sometimes she wouldn’t, and she would get all hyper and bent out of shape.

“Gia has never been the easiest person in the world to live with. You would think another woman in the house would be a help, but she was never a help. If I cooked something one way, she wanted it another way. When she was dying, food was something that you knew she had to eat, and you tried to give her something that you knew she liked. But, because of the nature of the disease, she would smell food cooking and be hungry, the smell would cause her nose to run and her mouth acted up. And any time she tried to eat she was completely miserable. She could taste the cardboard from the box whereas the day before she couldn’t. If you washed the dishes in certain detergent she could pick up on it. One night I had a beautiful rib roast and string beans, but by the time she got to the table she was having an allergic reaction to it. Then she started ripping into me. I was very upset.

“I was still working at Spiegel and Gia was home by herself. Joey’s daughter came to visit us and, because I was working, Gia and her spent a lot of time together one weekend. Gia took her to play miniature golf, to McDonald’s. Gia could start out doing something and be okay, and then she would tire easily. One of the big fights we had was because I didn’t want her to drive my car anymore. I was just concerned that something would happen and she wouldn’t be up to the situation. She was probably in denial as to how far along she was, and she was upset that I was taking away some of her independence. But I was very concerned that something would happen to her.”

I
n contemplation of her fate, Gia wrote:

Life & Death

energy & Peace

if I stoped today

it was fun

Even the terriable pains that have burn me & scarred my soul it was worth it for having been allowed to walked where I’ve walked. Which was ta hell on earth Heaven on earth back again, into, under, far in between, through it, in it over and above it.

Gia didn’t want her life to pass improperly. “She was really concerned with dying, she wanted to do it right,” said Rob Fay. “She didn’t want to go to hell. We used to watch Oral Roberts and them guys on TV. We’d laugh at it, but the right questions were there. At least that was a place where they talked about that kinda stuff.

“She knew that somebody would want to do something with her life story. She said, ‘I don’t want it on no Monday Night Movie,
The Adventures of Carangi.’
She didn’t want any bullshit in it She didn’t want her mother to tell her story. If Kathy hears that and she’s hurt, well, I’m sorry, but
that’s what Gia wanted. She didn’t want the bullshit. She wanted to make a couple of videos addressing children, especially young girls. To them, a cover girl is like a goddess, y’know.

“What she wanted was for the kids to see what it can do. She wanted to tell the kids, y’know, that you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to get high, you don’t have to run from things because it doesn’t get you anywhere. We talked about a video and she would say, ‘Look at where it got me.’ She didn’t care about Jagger and all of them guys. That part of the story meant nothing to her. She just wanted to help keep anyone else from goin’ through what she was goin’ through. It’s one thing if you get hit by a bus and you’re dead, y’know. But to have to sit there every morning and say, ‘I better live today because I might die today,’ was—well, I can’t imagine it.

“She wanted to talk to those kids about drugs. It isn’t the drug itself. I can’t stress this enough—Gia’s life didn’t go downhill because she discovered heroin. She’d have gone there eventually, it didn’t matter what drug she used. Coulda been peanut butter sandwiches. Heroin was just escapism at its best. Somebody’s a junkie nodding out, you hit ’em with a bat he doesn’t know it. You are
away
when you’re high. That’s what she wanted to do, to get away, to run. And she couldn’t run anymore.

“She didn’t want to say, ‘Don’t ever do drugs.’ She used to fuck with Nancy Reagan and the ‘Just Say No’ thing. Yeah, eight-year-old kid in the ghetto making three grand a week sellin’ dope—’Just Say No!’ It doesn’t
work
that way. And she knew that. She wanted to get down to the issues of why people are gettin’ high and why drugs are killin’ people. I don’t believe anybody gets high for recreation. You get high to escape your day. ‘Shit, I had a rough day in the office, give me a couple of martinis, let me light a joint.’ It’s escape, no matter how you put it. CEO of some, big, GM or something, or some guy who digs ditches. One goes home and has a beer and the other goes home and has his butler bring him Dom or somethin’ like that. It’s the same thing. It’s not being able to face life on life’s terms, as it comes. That’s what she wanted kids to know: you can
handle
anything
that comes your way. You don’t have to go gettin’ high, you don’t have to run from anything.

“And I never went and got a video camera. We just put it off and put it off.”

In September, Joey’s wife had her baby, which set off another round of family angst The issue of where his daughter from his first marriage would live continued to worry everyone. And then, the issue of whether Gia should be allowed to visit the new baby—come near the baby,
touch
the baby—became another battleground.

“I didn’t know that much about AIDS,” recalled Joey Carangi, “and then I started hearing how deadly it was and stuff like that and I started listening up on this stuff. I wasn’t worried about myself, but then Gia was supposed to come visit with my mom, and my wife was due to go in the hospital any day to have a baby and I was worried about her coming. I didn’t think it was a good idea. Not that I would tell her not to come, but I didn’t think my mother should bring her.”

Gia came anyway, and none of the imagined problems materialized. At the end of the family get-together, Gia was dropped off at the Atlantic City station to catch a bus back to Philadelphia so Kathleen could stay a few extra days with the new baby. Instead of taking a bus, she walked over to the salon to see Rochelle and Nancy. “The girl looked like walking death,” Nancy recalled. “To leave somebody that sick in a bus terminal? I just didn’t get it.”

“Her mother, who cared about her
so much,
didn’t know where she was,” Rochelle recalled. “We went out to dinner and she paid for it. Where she got the money I don’t know. She told me she was sorry for this and that, and that she loved me. She said she was contemplating moving back to Atlantic City. She was supposed to call me the next week, to make plans to get together for Halloween. Gia
loved
Halloween.

“She was saying that she had ARC. She said you could live for ten to twenty years with it. I didn’t think she was gonna die. In 1986, people didn’t know too much about it”

But while it may have seemed important to Rochelle, a chance for another new beginning, Gia’s visit to her was
only a minor aspect of the trip to Atlantic City. Her agenda in challenging the family wisdom on the matter was clear. Her goals very specific. “In the scenario with the Atlantic City trip,” recalled one of her counselors, “Gia thought that her
mother
was telling the mother of the newborn not to let her come visit because she had AIDS. When Gia got down there, she found out that it was her brother and his wife, and not the mother. She cared
very deeply
that it wasn’t her mother. In fact, she was ecstatic.

“Gia was, by this time, so desperate for signs of her mother’s love. It is so sad to think here are two people and all they wanted each other to know was that they loved each other, and they couldn’t do that in a way that was normal and straightforward. It’s amazing that people can spend their whole lives trying to get another person to say they love you.”

On October 18, 1986, Gia went to Hahnemann University Hospital—a teaching hospital in Center City which treated many of the city’s first AIDS cases—to see her oncologist, Dr. Wilbur Oaks. The doctor had no plans to admit her. She was in for tests and an office visit, as she had been several times over the summer. Gia’s most immediate problem was persistent vaginal bleeding—a permanent period—which left her, among other things, severely dehydrated. She was put on birth control pills to try to stop the bleeding. When that wouldn’t work, a hysterectomy was considered. Since Gia was focusing more and more on childlessness as her biggest regret, the hysterectomy would have been an especially symbolic blow. On the 18th, Gia went in for an ultrasound, but was so dehydrated that technicians couldn’t get her bladder full enough to see it, no matter how much water they forced her to drink. Oaks decided she would have to be admitted.

“She was indigent, on medical assistance,” recalled Dr. Oaks. “The AIDS patients are costly and the end result is so grim, but we don’t turn anyone away. She was one of the very first we had, certainly the first woman. I had seen her over the summer a few times, and by the time she was admitted her personality was strange. She was pretty much sociopathic at that point. She looked like she’d been through
a hell of a lot. And it’s hard to know what you should do when they look like they’re in distress. One thing we had to do was discuss the ‘code status’ with patients and family.”

The code status—whether Gia would be put on life support if her health failed, if she “coded”—was, initially, an easy decision to make. Gia and Kathleen had had many conversations over the summer about final arrangements. Much to the rest of the family’s shock, a funeral plot had already been discussed—near her aunt Barbara Adams, but in the open sun because Gia always liked to lay and have the sun fall on her face. And Gia had already expressed her desire
not
to end up on life support. It was agreed that, if the situation arose, there would be no unusual heroics employed.

But code status seemed to be the only thing the family could agree upon. During Gia’s hospital stay, Kathleen took complete control of her daughter’s life, pitting herself against family and friends. She decided who and what could be told about Gia’s condition. Although Gia had been quite open about her diagnosis of ARC several months before, Kathleen was now insisting that she had been hospitalized for “female problems” that had mostly been caused by her long-term drug use. When old friends called, Kathleen could not bring herself to admit to them that Gia was terminally ill. Besides the personal stigma attached to such an admission, she was afraid that the local press might get hold of the story. She was under the impression, probably mistaken, that reporters had been snooping around Hahnemann trying to get information on her famous daughter.

Kathleen also decided who could visit Gia in the hospital. Immediate family were allowed in. Joe Carangi would drive up to Philadelphia from Atlantic City to see his daughter almost every day after work, often accompanied by one or both of Gia’s brothers. Kathleen immediately barred Rochelle, claiming that Gia had specifically stated that she didn’t want to see her old girlfriend and had even written a note saying that she now hated her. Nancy didn’t come because she was sure she wouldn’t be allowed in either. She got reports from Gia’s old high school friend Vicky, who knew how to get in and out of private hospital rooms unnoticed
from years of doing deliveries for her family flower business.

“The whole thing at the hospital was horrible, just horrible,” recalled Joey Carangi. “Kathleen wouldn’t let any of Gia’s friends in. She had everybody flagged from going upstairs to visit. I saw a few of her friends sneak up when Kathleen wasn’t there. But as far as Kathleen was concerned, she didn’t want nobody up there to see her, nobody, and she was playing like she was the doctor, taking care. Grieving mother.
Right. “