A Writer's Life (49 page)

As Bobbitt led Johnston up the steps toward the apartment, he suggested that on the following morning they might head over to the Atlantic Food's loading docks to earn some pocket money unloading trucks; in the meantime, John suggested Robert take a nap on the sofa. But on entering the apartment, Robert saw that Lorena was lying down on it, saying nothing, her face to a wall. There were two cardboard cartons
near her on the floor filled with dishes, bottles of lotion, and other items that Robert assumed she was taking with her. John had said on the phone that she would probably be gone before Robert's arrival—but here she was, on the sofa that was to be his bed, and John saying nothing.

Later that night, after visiting a few bars and getting something to eat, Robert returned with John and was disappointed to see that Lorena's things were still in the apartment, and, through the open door of the bedroom, he could see that Lorena was asleep on the right side of the bed. John placed some of Robert's belongings in the closet, and then, after pulling out the sofa bed and providing sheets and pillows, John said good night and joined his wife in the bedroom, closing the door softly.

Robert slept with difficulty that night, and then was awakened abruptly at dawn by John Bobbitt's voice. He was saying repeatedly, “Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!” Robert shook his head, confused, as John went on to say, “Work, work, work, work, gotta go!” John Bobbitt, already dressed in a warm-up outfit with a T-shirt underneath, continued: “Atlantic Foods—come, come, come.”

It turned out to be a very profitable day, with the two men receiving from the various truckers nearly ninety dollars each. After a sunny afternoon around the pool, John took Robert that night to a nearby discotheque called Legends, where John had worked irregularly as a bouncer during the past week. The job was easy, he had explained along the way, consisting primarily of checking patrons' age cards. John liked sitting in Robert's Mustang, admired its low-slung design and souped-up motor sound. They had a few drinks at Legends, went out to eat, and were home by midnight. Robert noticed that Lorena's things were still on the floor, and Lorena was asleep in the bedroom.

The next afternoon, Tuesday, June 22, while John and Robert were out shopping after another morning of work at the depot, an eighteen-year-old Laotian woman drove into the parking space below the Bobbitts' balcony with a ten-speed bicycle tied to the roof. She knocked on the door of the Bobbitts' apartment, and when Lorena opened it, she said, “I'm looking for John.”

“He's not here,” Lorena said coldly, closing the door.

But as the woman returned to the lot, she spotted John stepping out of Robert's Mustang, and she called out enthusiastically, “John, look what I have for you!” John Bobbitt saw the bike and broke into a cheer. After John and Robert had untied it—it was a sleek racer's model—they took turns bouncing its springy frame along the path of the parking lot, praising the bike's workmanship and style. The young woman stood next to them, smiling. Her name was Dawn—she had been a passenger in her
cousin's car when it had bumped into John—and now, she explained, she was offering this bicycle for John's use until his own was ready for her to pick up at the repair shop. She also repeated what she had said days earlier along the highway—how sorry she and her cousin were about what had happened, and how relieved they were that he had been unhurt. She then invited John and Robert to attend a party that she was giving later in the week. John accepted immediately, and, hoisting the bicycle above his shoulders, he exclaimed to Robert, “A party, a party! We're invited to a party!”

Lorena watched from the balcony. Closing the door, she went back to her packing. She had earlier carried the cardboard boxes and her dresses into a lower-floor apartment of a woman she knew named Diane Hall. She said nothing as John and Robert came upstairs, with John placing the bicycle against the railing outside their door and Robert carrying some groceries he had bought for dinner that night, prior to their going out drinking. Although Lorena had slept with John each of the two evenings Robert had occupied the sofa bed, he was still perplexed by the arrangement. He had not included Lorena in his shopping plans. Robert liked to cook. Should he have invited her? he wondered. He thought not. They had barely spoken. And before he had begun preparing the food, she had left the apartment and driven off in her car. But Robert remained uneasy about being a guest in this apartment.

After Robert and John had finished eating, they headed over to Legends. John thought he might be needed later as a bouncer, but the owner predicted a slow evening. The owner bought them a drink—Robert wanted a beer; John asked for his favorite B-52 (a shot glass layered with Kahlúa, Bailey's Irish Cream, and Grand Marnier). Then, after John had spoken with some patrons he knew, he and Robert drove off to visit other bars in the area—O'Toole's in Centreville, and then Champion's and P. J. Skidoo's in Fairfax County.

During the course of the evening, the two men each had three or four more beers and John had a second B-52. Shortly before 1:30 a.m., John and Robert left P. J. Skidoo's, neither claiming to feel the effects of the alcohol but both admitting to being tired. They had risen at six o'clock that morning to unload the trucks. Before returning to the apartment, they stopped at an all-night Denny's on Sudley Road to have something to eat along with a pot of coffee. It was a little after 3 a.m. when they entered the apartment. Robert slipped out of his sneakers, removed his clothing, and tossed his peak-capped Buffalo Bills hat into the corner. John entered the bedroom, where Lorena was asleep. What he would recall days later—when he was physically able to speak with the police
about his wife's allegations that he had raped her—was that he had settled himself to the right of his wife in the bed, and he vaguely recalled embracing her, and even attempting to remove her panties with his feet. But he insisted that he recalled no struggle on her part—knowing from past experience she was surely capable of scratching and kicking. In other interviews with the police, he conceded the possibility that they had had intercourse; but, again, he insisted that his sexual urges that night had been underwhelming because of his fatigue. He had been conscious at one point of his wife's left hand fondling his penis—trying to get it hard, he assumed. Then, suddenly, a piercing pain bolted him upward, and he caught a glimpse of Lorena, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, racing from the bedroom. She fled past the slumped figure of Robert Johnston on the sofa bed; Robert remained asleep (although he would later claim that she had at some point gone into his wallet and removed a hundred-dollar bill, and that she had stolen his Nintendo Game Boy handheld computer).

Barefoot, Lorena ran down the steps and across the parking lot toward her car. It was somewhere close to 4:30 a.m. She managed to open the door despite carrying the knife in her right hand and, not noticing it at that moment, most of her husband's penis in her left. She had heard him groan as she cut him, and she had sliced him off with one swipe, as adroitly as if clipping a cuticle at her salon.

Driving a quarter of a mile to the intersection of Maplewood Drive and Old Centreville Road, she stopped, and it was then that she became aware of the penis in her fingers. A 7-Eleven store with some lights glowing stood across the road to her left. To her right she saw a grassy field. She hurled the penis with her left hand in that direction, over the roof of the car. It sailed about fifteen feet and settled in grass and weeds that rose about ten inches.

Then she turned her steering wheel to the right and sped along Old Centreville Road five miles into Centreville itself, following the route she regularly took to the salon in the shopping center. Parking in front of the salon and getting out, she tossed the knife in a wooden-framed trash can at the curb. Entering the shop, she reached for the telephone, calling Janna Biscutti. But the answering machine responded. Running out again to her car, she drove nearly ten miles to Janna's home, in Fairfax, where her cries and pounding on the door awakened Janna's husband upstairs and brought him rushing to her side. She collapsed in front of him on the living room floor, flailing her arms, sobbing, making no sense. Janna hastened down in her bedclothes and tried to comfort her, but it took fully ten minutes before she understood what Lorena had done to John. Janna dialed the police. It was 5:20 a.m.

The dispatcher at the police station—who had already received word from the hospital about the arrival of the bleeding John Bobbitt—heard Janna say, “I've got the wife here … don't know if she did what she said she did, but she said she cut a piece of his anatomy off.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm her boss.…”

“Keep her there, and keep her calm.…”

“She's
not
calm.”

“Well, try to do the best.”

“I'm trying as best as I can.”

“Yeah, do the best you can. Don't let her shower.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, don't let her change her clothes.…”

“Okay,” Janna said, adding, “He's been bringing women to the apartment.”

“Okay, just keep her, keep her as calm as you can, and don't let her shower, wash her hands, or anything.”

Later, Janna received a call from the county police, this time instructing her to bring Lorena Bobbitt into the station house in Manassas.

John Bobbitt had been cut at approximately 4:30 a.m., and he had never seen the knife. As he jumped from the pain and saw Lorena running out, he felt the flowing of liquid between his legs and was not sure whether it was urine or blood. Staring at the wound, he could not believe it. Nothing was there but an emptiness—he could even feel an “emptiness,” he explained after his release from the hospital. “You know, it's … sharp, uh, sharp, being amputated … then, then the pain's gone and you go mental, like a mental shock, like … like you're scared, you're, you know, like, uh, you know, you don't know what … what's going to happen. What's going to happen. What's, you know, what do I do next, you know. And I had to react quickly, you know, instantaneous.”

While applying pressure into his groin with his right hand, trying to lessen the flow, he reached with his left hand for a gray pair of warm-up pants he had left on the floor and managed to slip them on. He stumbled into the living room, and began kicking at Robert Johnston. “Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!”

Johnston lifted his head up, frowning, and said, “Okay,” assuming that John Bobbitt was getting him up for work at the Atlantic Food Services depot. Johnston headed into the bathroom, and he was brushing his teeth when he felt Bobbitt pulling his T-shirt from behind, saying, “Gotta go, gotta go!”

“All right
, okay!” Johnston said, and then, turning around, he saw
blood coming from beneath the warm-up pants, falling on Bobbitt's unlaced black sneakers, and then Johnston saw the trail of blood that had traced Bobbitt's movements from the bedroom.

“God, man,
what's wrong
?” Johnston said, spitting the toothpaste into the sink.

“Been cut, cut,” Bobbitt said. “Gotta get to the hospital.”

“Let's
go!”
Johnston shouted, slipping on his sneakers and then helping Bobbitt by the arm and escorting him down the steps. Bobbitt, who was bare-chested, kept his right hand between his legs, and with his left, he opened the door to the Mustang and slipped in while Robert Johnston started the engine.

“Where we going?” asked Johnston, who was still unfamiliar with the area.

“Left,” Bobbitt said, pointing.

Johnston motored out of the parking lot, spun the car around, and, when Bobbitt pointed to Highway 28, turned again and was soon speeding through a multilaned and virtually empty street, passing gas stations and fast-food shops with their colorfully lighted signs blazing and flickering in the mist of the not-yet-dawning light of Wednesday morning.

“What
happened?”
Robert Johnston asked, speeding ahead, his hands tightly gripping the steering wheel.

“She did it,” Bobbitt said. “She cut me.” But he did not say where, being too embarrassed—and still not entirely believing what had happened to him. “How could she have
pulled
it off?” he remembered asking.

“Left
, I mean, right,
right!”
Bobbitt yelled as Johnston turned incorrectly off Sudley Road. Then, moments later, with the Prince William County hospital in sight, Johnston took another left and headed directly toward the emergency entrance and slammed his car to a stop next to two parked ambulances. Bobbitt ran ahead of Johnston, climbed the steps, and entered the emergency room from a back door not intended for the public. Then Johnston, trailing a few steps behind, began to yell to all the technicians and nurses he saw: “Hey, this guy's wife tried to kill him. Hurry, he needs help!”

“Where is he?” one of the technicians asked, and when Johnston looked around, he could not find him.

Bobbitt had run into the trauma room and then stopped, astonished, as he saw a male patient he recognized—the Laotian motorist who had hit his bicycle on the highway days before. The man's name was Vienkhone Khoundamdeth, or “Khone,” as his cousin Dawn had introduced him at the accident site.

“Hey, Khone,” Bobbitt said, “what're you doing here?”

“Had a motorcycle wreck,” Khone said, stretching up to look at the bleeding Bobbitt, whose trail of blood extended behind him for several feet.

“How you doing?” asked Bobbitt, not feeling any pain. (A doctor later explained that Bobbitt was in shock.)

“I'm going to be okay,” Khone said. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Oh,” Bobbitt said casually, bending forward a bit, with his hands pressing into his groin.

“Hey, you there!”
shouted the ER doctor, Steven Sharpe, entering the room and glaring at Bobbitt. Dr. Sharpe, a stocky man of forty-three, with thick, curly hair and green eyes, was squinting through his small circular glasses at the blood along the floor, “Come here! Let me see your wrists.”