And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (37 page)

“Cold enough?” she asked.

“Perfect.”

“I mean, 'cause, I have more ice if you—”

“No, it's fine.”

“Great.”

We sat down on the sofa and watched her kitten smack a rolled-up sweatsock around the room.

“I'm looking for a job,” she said. “I typed up a résumé and I'm gonna hit the music magazines next week to see if I can get something. I'll do anything they want, you know, file or type or answer the phone or whatever. It'll happen.”

“I'm sure it will, sweetheart.”

“I met a couple of my neighbors. One of them's a hooker. Oh, and you know who lives upstairs? You won't believe it. Lance Loud! Remember, from the Loud family, the one that was on the TV series?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I went to Max's. Max's Kansas City. And CBGB's. I mean, there's really a lot going on here. You wouldn't
believe
it. I met some people in bands. Good bands. Not plastic.”

“Anyone I would know?”

“Not yet, but you will. Yeah, there's really a lot happening.”

I left about an hour later, feeling positive about Nancy's move. Maybe it would turn out to be good for her. She'd certainly gotten off to a good start.

At home it seemed like life had gotten back to normal. Suzy, who was sixteen, was concentrating on art as a major subject. She didn't have a boyfriend, but she had a lot of friends and baby-sat on Saturday nights. David, who was fourteen, played basketball nearly every day and did very well in his classes. He brought his friends home now. Since I seldom got home before six o'clock—especially on the days I was called upon to be in Upper Saddle River—Suzy and David were responsible for preparing dinner. I could count on them. Both of them were blossoming into reliable young adults, not to mention excellent cooks.

With Nancy out of the house and the atmosphere much calmer,
Frank and I became close and strong. We could relax at night, talk, make love, sleep in each other's arms, knowing that no strangers were under our roof. We could leave the distributor cap on the car, money and keys on the table. It went unsaid, but life was better at home without Nancy.

It was so pleasant that I wanted to be there more. When Western Union asked me to spend a greater part of the week in New Jersey (it was a promotion), I asked instead for a transfer that would allow me to spend more time with my family. It meant giving up a professional opportunity, but it was worth it to me.

The first inkling we had that Nancy was having trouble in New York came on Christmas Day, one month after her arrival, two weeks after my visit. The four of us were at my cousin's house for dinner, and Nancy called me there.

“Mom … I … I …”

“What is it, Nancy?”

“Like … uh …”

She sounded just like she had when she'd started phoning from Colorado—zonked, morose, her voice slurred.

“… uh … I ain't feelin' so good.”

“Are you sick?”

Long pause.

“Huh?”

“Are you sick?” I repeated.

“Oh … I don't know, I don't have … have no
money
. I can't like, I don't have no
money
. Can't pay my rent. Nothin' to … nothin' to eat, Mom. Nothin' … no food. I can't get me no job. I ain't got no … job. Nobody interested. Nobody wants me. Ya gotta send me money, Mom.
Money
.”

I knew from her voice that she had found drugs—which kind I don't know. Certainly, it was something hard. Frank and I had agreed not to send her money if she was on drugs. We would not finance her self-destruction.

“Mom?”

“I'll send the rent money to your landlord.”

“No, send it to
me
, Mom. Send it to
me
.”

“No, Nancy.”

“Why?”

“That's the way it is.”

“I want it. Send it … send it to
me
. Don't you trust me? Don't you, like,
trust
me, Mom?”

“I'll send it to your landlord.”

“How'm I gonna eat?”

“I'll be up to see you tomorrow.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“Yes, I do.”

I went alone. Frank stayed with Suzy and David, who were on school vacation. I stopped at a market near her apartment and bought two big bags of groceries.

She looked awful. She was pale and had dark circles under her eyes. She had a bad cough and was unkempt and dirty. This was unusual for Nancy. No matter how outrageous her appearance, she was usually clean. The apartment was a mess—dirty dishes and clothes everywhere. It smelled of overripe kitty litter. I was worried. She seemed really out of it.

“Are you taking care of yourself?” I asked as I tidied up the kitchen and put the groceries away.

“Been sick,” she replied weakly. “I been sick. Don't … still don't feel so good.”

“Are you on something?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Really?”

“Uh-uh.”

“If you need to go to a doctor—”

“I don't.”

“If you do, let me know.”

“Did you bring money?”

“I bought you groceries,” I said.

“Oh, right. Yeah … thanks. How 'bout money? Any money?”

“No. Look, why don't we get out of here for a bit? Get some fresh air, something to eat?”

She nodded. “Sure. Okay.”

She put on a ratty old fur jacket I'd never seen before.

“Where'd you get that, sweetheart?”

“Place on Saint Marks … where I work. Old clothes.”

“You got a job?”

“Just sort through the stuff. Coupla hours a week. Coupla … coupla bucks.”

I took her to lunch at Feathers, a restaurant in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, just above Washington Square Park. She chain-smoked through the meal but ate her food ravenously. She showed me the clothing store where she was working—it was a seedy, damp place
in a basement. Then we went back to her apartment. She kissed me good-bye woodenly and asked me again for money. I said I had none to give her. I didn't really—I'd only brought an extra five dollars.

“
Please
, Mom. You gotta give me some
money. Please
.”

I gave her the five dollars. Then I took the train home.

The phone calls started. She called collect three, four, five times every single day for several weeks—stoned, troubled, barely coherent. Often, she called me at the office. I alerted my secretary that Nancy had some emotional problems and should be put through to me even if I was in a meeting. If I was traveling, I left a number where Nancy could reach me. I was forever anticipating her call, wondering when it would come. I began to equate the phone cord with an umbilical cord.

Many times, she called in the middle of the night. I begged her repeatedly not to call after eleven p.m.—the kids needed to sleep;
Frank
and
I
needed to sleep—but she kept at it. So I had to turn the phone off at night. I figured whatever was troubling her would still be there in the morning.

For some reason known only to Nancy, she would speak to no one in the family but me. If she called home and I wasn't there, she would not engage in conversation with Frank or Suzy or David. She had rejected them. “Tell Mommy to call” was all she'd say.

When I did, it would generally be to hear a plea for money. I refused to send it to her. She'd just buy drugs with it. One of the most impossible things in the world, I'm now convinced, is to refuse your own child money. I did my best. I paid her rent and utilities directly and brought her groceries every two weeks. I suggested she get a job. Instead, she began phoning relatives and demanding money from them. She called my mother, Frank's sister, my cousin in Brooklyn. When they refused to give her the money (per my instructions), she got abusive and threatened to have their houses destroyed. I ordered her to stop bothering the family. In response, she hocked the television set we'd given her, which infuriated me. The very next day she called to say someone had grabbed her in the vestibule of her building, held a gun to her, and taken her wallet with the money from the TV in it. When I asked her if she'd called the police, she began to scream and curse. Then she hung up on me.

If it wasn't money Nancy needed, it was Mommy. Just as I had sat with her on her bed in the middle of the night when she was
little—making the shark demons of her nightmares go away—now I was soothing her grown-up demon, which was mounting paranoia.

“I went to CB's last night, Mom. Nobody would talk to me. They hate me. What am I gonna do? Nobody likes me. What am I gonna do, Mom? What am I gonna do?”

“I'm sure they'll like you again, sweetheart. Try to be nice. Try hard.”

We had this conversation so many times that they all blur together in my mind. She'd sob; I'd do what I could to comfort her. Nothing had changed, really, from when she was a little girl. And she knew that no matter what she said or did, I would always be there for her. She was still my baby. Sometimes I hated her for not being able to cope with the world. God, how she made me hate her. But ultimately I still loved her. She had so much intelligence and compassion inside of her. When I got really angry at her, I'd try to remember the baby, the soft, sweet-smelling baby with the glossy black hair. I had to do what I could to keep that baby alive. I hadn't given up on her yet. In a sense I was playing for time, waiting for someone, somehow, to step forward and save Nancy—ease her pain, allow her to lead a productive life.

The analogy between watching Nancy destroy herself and watching a terminal patient being destroyed by disease popped up again and again in my mind. I never gave up hope. Instead I waited for the discovery of some magic cure. The longer she stayed alive, I told myself, the better the chance that someone
would
come along to rescue her.

The calls tapered off when Nancy settled into a routine of sorts that winter. She made some friends. By January 1975 she'd found a place for herself. That place was the punk rock scene.

As I understand it, punk was an underground backlash against the slick, juiceless, studio-produced sound that had begun to dominate the charts in the mid-seventies. Punk professed to being a return to rock's roots. It was raw, hungry, and angry. It lived for the moment. It was hard and fast. It was Nancy. At age ten she'd been listening to
Hair
and the Beatles. At age twelve she'd graduated to Hendrix and The Who. Now, at seventeen, she was ready for punk.

Like she had when she was living at home, Nancy generally slept all day, partied and got high all night. The clubs where she took to hanging out most of the time, Max's Kansas City and CBGB's, were where the punk bands were playing, drinking, getting high, and,
ultimately, getting discovered. Blondie came out of that scene. So did the Ramones, the New York Dolls. Nancy knew who these people were early on, before anyone else did. She mentioned them frequently. She had always seemed to have her finger on the bands that would be popular in a year or two. Now was no different, except that she was there with them.

She wrote several articles of criticism about the punk groups for a local rock paper in Greenwich Village. She sent us the clippings. We were very impressed. She set forth what punk stood for with remarkable clarity. The articles were interesting, perceptive, and surprisingly well written. We complimented her profusely.

“Did you
really
like them?” she begged repeatedly.

“Yes,” we replied repeatedly.

She didn't get paid for the articles. The magazines that did pay, she said, weren't hiring at the moment. Unfortunately Nancy didn't stick with it until something opened up. And then the local rock paper folded.

She was most enthusiastic about Blondie and its lovely lead singer, Deborah Harry. She told me they were very talented and that Debbie Harry would be a superstar someday. She was right. She mentioned Debbie quite often.

“She's real good, Mom,” Nancy said once. “And pretty. She's my friend. Debbie's my friend.”

At the time of her death, Nancy was carrying a photo album portfolio filled with family snapshots, postcards of places she'd been in Europe, the stubs of airplane tickets. Most prominent was a black and white glossy photo of her sitting at a table at one of the punk clubs with Debbie Harry. The two of them are smoking, drinking, and, seemingly, engaging in intimate conversation. She felt they had a special friendship.

Nancy referred to a number of the soon-to-be-famous figures of punk rock as friends. I must point out that my knowledge of Nancy's relationship with them is confined to what she told me then. I have only her version. I never met Debbie Harry or the others she mentioned, like Joey Ramone. Once, when I made my bi-monthly grocery stop, Richard Hell was at Nancy's apartment with her. They were listening to a Bruce Springsteen album and drinking coffee. He seemed quiet and polite. She asked me to give them a lift to an address on Houston Street. I did. Richard Hell, I learned years later, was considered a punk rock visionary. He led pioneering punk bands like Television and the Voidoids, and is credited
with coining the punk catch phrase “the Blank Generation.”

None of these people came forward after Nancy's death to make themselves known and offer condolences. I thought it over at the time and came up with several possible reasons for their silence. Possibly, they hadn't known or liked Nancy much and didn't care what happened to her. Possibly, they had liked her and were sensitive enough to not want to embarrass or hurt us further. Possibly, they themselves were embarrassed at having known the infamous Nancy Spungen, now that they were successes with somewhat more mainstream images.

There were other friends. Lance Loud looked out for her. There was a tall, striking model named Sable whom she often went to the clubs with, as well as Phyllis, whom she described as “can you
believe
it—a nice Jewish girl with a straight job and a nice Jewish family?” Each joined Nancy and me for lunch on separate occasions. There were Felipe and Babette, a French couple who lived in Chelsea.