Getting It Through My Thick Skull (15 page)
Joe didn’t have a job or any work lined up. We lived on the proceeds from the sale of our house—which sold after four months on the market—and waited to see what would develop. We rented a nice home in the San Fernando Valley, which we chose based on the reputation of the school system. Fortunately for me, Sherri, our new agent, recommended an accommodating general practitioner. When you have a bullet in the side of your head, doctors don’t tend to say no. Whatever I wanted in terms of prescriptions was filled on the spot, no questions asked. “What do you need? How much of it?” were the only questions they ever asked at his office. My pill intake, already quite high, escalated.
Joey bounced around L.A., making plenty of friends wherever he went. Californians—many of whom were transplants themselves—were very mellow, nice, and accepting of our history. If anything, I think people were just surprised to see that we were a decent couple, not the freaks they’d read about in the tabloids. Joe found work as a bouncer at the Rainbow Room on Sunset Strip, a perfect job for the short term.
Jessica entered eighth grade, and Paul entered eleventh. Jessica, particularly, appeared to adjust fairly well and quickly, making new friends and playing sports. God bless my daughter . . . she has the good part of Joe’s personality in her. She makes the best of situations, gets involved in activities, and has a very resilient spirit. Paul, meanwhile, is much more reserved and holds things in.
Paul was essentially a great kid, but at this point he became unusually quiet and withdrawn and spent a lot of time in his room or driving aimlessly around our new neighborhood. He was just trudging through the days, resigned to his new circumstances, but not finding anything to like about our new home. He had been putting up with this crap for four long years by now. As a twelve-year-old boy, when it’s all over the papers that your father had sex with a sixteen-year-old girl—how mortifying! At that age, you don’t even want to think about your parents having sex, much less with someone very near your age. Then this was followed by his father being arrested for soliciting a hooker. He wanted to escape all this, and soon found some friends at school to help him. His choice was to ignore schoolwork, hang out with his new buddies, and smoke weed or drink his concerns away.
I met some other parents at school events and games, but I remained distant. I was grieving the loss of my best friends and social network back home. Nobody could ever replace them; I wasn’t even going to let anybody try. I shunned people. I’d left behind such a wonderful community in Massapequa. I knew I could never find better friends. I didn’t want to get close to anybody ever again—it would just get taken away. I was cordial, but that was as far as it went. I preferred to stay to myself. Or with Joe—he was the only person I had.
I was utterly bereft. Our first few weeks in L.A., I would drop the kids at their schools, and then drive all the way out to the ocean. I’d sit there in my car and cry until it was time to pull myself together and pick the kids up. I knew I had to get it together for them, given that they’d been forced to give up everything they’d ever known. Joe could see I was not doing well. I found no joy in anything; I just did what I had to do to get through each day while constantly mourning the loss of my old life. Of course, in the hero role he was good at, he found a stable and encouraged me to go horseback riding. It perked me up briefly. Riding lessons at least gave me something to look forward to every week.
By Thanksgiving, I was getting urgent phone calls from Paul’s new high school, reporting that he hadn’t shown up for classes. Minor punishments like grounding didn’t have any effect on his behavior. My sweet, funny, sensitive boy who had never caused me a moment’s worry was now coming home obviously stoned or drunk, not even trying to hide it. I could easily see that he was spinning out of control. This new lifestyle wasn’t working. As parents in a whole new state three thousand miles from home, Joe and I were just floundering. I knew my son was anesthetizing his grief because I was too. The only difference between us was that I was forty years old, and he was sixteen.
I could hardly blame him for wanting to escape however he could, but I was the mother, and I couldn’t allow him to give up his life, despite my desire to do so. I had to make him care about his own life, even though I didn’t care much about mine at the time. It was clear that he was headed down the path to failing or dropping out of high school and becoming a full-time drug addict. I couldn’t even blame him. I understood what he was doing much better than he ever knew because all I wanted to do was withdraw and take my pills in peace. Paul was just a kid, though. For him and his fledgling life, I was going to put up a fight.
“Joe, we are going to lose him if we don’t do something,” I said. I wasn’t exaggerating. I was frantic with worry. Joe agreed that whatever we needed to do, he would back me up.
I reached out to the mother of one of Paul’s new friends and really poured out my worries to her. “He’s not going to class, he’s failing, and I know he’s drinking and smoking pot all day, at the very least.” She told me about a private school in Malibu with only eight or nine kids in each class. Lots of individualized instruction and plenty of attention were paid to each student. They offered structure and guidance, which, sadly, were both lacking in Paul’s life. Joe simply wasn’t capable of offering either—he was a loving father but more of a pal, the one the kids turned to for a good time and money. I probably didn’t do enough given my own struggles with the move, but I did mobilize enough to find what I thought would be a good solution for our son.
This private school cost a fortune, but I didn’t care. Paul started over in the middle of the school year, and I didn’t care about that either. I didn’t want him in his current school for another second. The new administration did what it promised, and Paul slowly but surely turned around. Oh, he still wasn’t happy about the move, but he started making decent grades and going to class every day. He made a couple of close friends that he still has to this day—nice boys, who have grown into great young men. The Malibu school had a number of famous sons and daughters in attendance, so having the last name Buttafuoco wasn’t nearly the big deal it had been in the Valley.
That
crisis, at least, seemed averted.
A year into our new life, money was getting tight. Joe had become very close to the owner of the Rainbow Room—he and his wife were wonderful to us—but it wasn’t a career. Paul drove himself to his private school every day, and I wasn’t sure I wanted Jessica in that same high school system that Paul had been so briefly and disastrously enrolled in.
We found a cute little house in the San Fernando Valley in a good neighborhood where Jessica could enter the local high school. The summer after eighth grade, I signed her up for a local acting workshop, and she made a couple of fast friends there. On the first day of high school, she knew only two people who would also be attending her new school that fall. Once again, she rose to the occasion, making a whole new group of friends and getting involved in all kinds of school activities with barely a pause.
Joe wanted to return to what he knew and was best at—auto body work—but he ran into a brick wall every time. No one wanted to hire him because of his notoriety, especially as an auto body guy. But eventually he met a man who took a liking to him, and they began working together. Joe excelled at bringing in customers and handing out cards all over town, as well as doing the actual body work and handling claims. Paul joined him at the business as soon as he was out of high school. His father brought him in, just as Cass had done with Joey twenty years before.
And Joe became very successful. He had the personality, the drive, and the work ethic to make that business profitable. He was doing quite well. I, meanwhile, was wallowing in self-pity, flying home every chance I got. I was still lost, but I didn’t even want to be found. I didn’t want to become involved with any of the other mothers or pursue horseback riding. The only time I was ever happy was on a plane ride to New York, where I stayed with my sister and saw my family. The first time I flew home for a visit, several months after our move, I absolutely couldn’t wait to see all my friends in person again.
We met for a celebratory reunion lunch, and it was wonderful to see their faces, but hearing about their lives only made me feel left out and cheated. They were driving carpools, going to the beach club, getting involved with the high school PTA—in short, living the life I was supposed to be living! It hurt me so much to see what I had been forced to leave behind that I could no longer bear to stay in contact with them. I continued to return “home” frequently, but only visited with family from that point forward. I clung to them; they were all I had.
Sociopaths generally adjust quite easily to new environments. Whether it was jail on Long Island or the Rainbow Room in Hollywood, Joe was perfectly at ease. To sociopaths, moving means nothing more than a fresh pool of people to size up and a brand-new set of circumstances to manipulate to their advantage. While I bitterly mourned my losses and struggled to find meaning in this strange new place—and help my equally lost son—I had to marvel at my husband’s lack of feelings or concern for the loss of our entire lives. He wasn’t looking back, and he certainly wasn’t crying over spilled milk. I didn’t know that there is no such thing as regret to a sociopath.
T
wo full years into our “new life” in California, I was still very far from adjusting. I felt I had no purpose other than helping my two teenagers however I could. Jessica was very involved in high school activities, and it was probably all for the best that she needed me to drive her around all the time. At the very least, it gave me a reason to get up and have something to do. She was on the swim team, and we used to leave the house at five in the morning, when it was still pitch-black outside in the dead of winter, to get over to the college pool where her team practiced and held meets.
I would glance over at my full-of-life daughter, raring to go even at that ungodly hour, and think,
She’s trying so hard, doing so well, how can I not?
I managed to get her everywhere she needed to be, but in the downtime I was a whole other story. As soon as I dropped her off, I’d return to a rented house that I had no desire to try to fix up. We had owned our own home since I was twenty-two years old, and I had always taken great pride in fixing up our houses: decorating, stenciling the walls, 122 landscaping—you name it, I was a regular Martha Stewart. But who cared? This wasn’t our house, so why bother? This would never be home to me.
Now that Paul and Jessie were teenagers with their own groups of friends and complicated social lives, I had plenty of free time when I wasn’t chauffeuring. In the mornings, after I dropped Jessie off, I fell into the habit of coming home and crawling right back into bed, popping some pills, and zoning out in a pleasant haze. Half-awake, half-asleep, I’d watch TV all day until I knew everybody would be coming home for dinner. At that point, I managed to pull myself out of bed, make myself presentable, and appear reasonably together and alert for a game, event, or just making dinner and checking homework that night. It was a sad, lonely, but most of all boring time. I was forty-three years old, and it felt like my life was over. Depression and inertia hung over me like a fog. I functioned when necessary and did what I had to do, but that was all. I was anesthetized 24-7.
On one of my periodic trips home to New York—still the only activity in my life that excited me in any way—I was in the city and stopped by to say hello to Dominic Barbara, the man who’d long ago replaced Marvyn Kornberg and was still our attorney. We had become good friends. Dominic had seen me at my absolute lowest point—when Joe was arrested in Hollywood—and he’d cleaned up that mess the best he could. He was a very perceptive man, and he studied me carefully.
“You still taking all those pain pills, Mary Jo?” he asked.
“Yes, I am. I want to get off them, but I can’t. A few hours without my medicine, and I’m sweating and shaking and falling apart. I don’t want the kids to see me writhing around in pain in bed, going through withdrawal. I need to be around for them.” I was long past getting high. I was taking thirty pills a day to stay “normal.”
“I think you should go to a rehab center,” he said matter-of-factly. “No, no, I don’t want to do that! A few days in a hospital, maybe, so they can wean me off these pills is what I need. I don’t need rehab!”
“There’s something else going on here besides your injury and the pain . . . you have some issues you need to deal with.”
“Dominic, we don’t even have health insurance. We live in a rented house, and we have to think about Jessica and college. I can’t afford rehab, even if I needed it, which I don’t.” That was the end of that discussion as far as I was concerned.
“I will pay, Mary Jo, if you are willing to go into treatment. You’re out in California now, near the Betty Ford Center, and they’re really the best. It will be my gift to you.”