by Susan Orlean
They drove up Eighty-second Avenue, past the Lovelier You Beauty Salon and the Beavers Inn and the Moneyman and the Junk-a-Rama, and then turned east, past Lincoln Willamette Funeral Directors, which had a digital sign flashing the time, the temperature, and then the message COMPARE! COMPLETE CHAPEL SERVICE WITH CASKET $1,997. A few blocks west of Eighty-second Avenue, on the edge of Multnomah County, is the neighborhood known as Lents. This is one of the places Tonya lived when she was growing up, and it’s also not far from where Gary Gilmore lived for a time. Lents was settled first by farmers and then, in the 1930s and ’40s, by shipyard and sheet-metal workers; today it consists of narrow, pitted roads that peter out into gravel alleys, with houses so tiny that some look as if they had been built for dolls or chickens, or were really meant to be one-car garages. In the neighborhood nearer the mall, where Tonya lives now, the houses are scant, speckling open acreage that used to be farms and woodlots. In Lents, everything is shoved together; nearly every house is on a parcel the size of a napkin, hemmed with a high chain-link fence, and in the yard there is usually a motor home and a dog kennel, and a toolshed, and maybe a car chassis that someone has lost interest in fixing. Every block or so, squeezed between the houses, there is a church: New Testament Church of God and Christ, “Preaching a Living Christ to a Lost and Dying World”; the Church of Christ; the Bethel German Assembly of God.
The Welfelts’ house is east of Eighty-second Avenue, in the Mount Scott neighborhood, which is on the steep side of Mount Scott, a small extinct volcano. On this side of Eighty-second Avenue, the houses thin out and are newer and nicer, with bright aluminum siding, and carports, and picture windows, and decorative screen doors. The convoy stopped at Nancy’s driveway, and the club members lugged in the boxes of flyers and buttons and bumper stickers, and then pulled chairs up to the dining table. Along with Elaine, a former charm-school teacher, who has frosted hair and narrow, square shoulders and a striking imperial posture, and Nancy Welfelt, who has a cheery face and fading blondish hair, there were four other middle-aged women, and the husband of one of them: a jittery guy with wire-rimmed glasses. He never sat down at the dining table and never even took off his coat, and then suddenly left during the meeting to go visit his parents’ graves at the cemetery across the street. Someone complimented Nancy on the view from her living-room window, and she said, “You want to see something? See out there? You can see Shawn’s house. Shawn, the bodyguard. He lives behind me, with his parents.” Everyone crowded to the window and looked in the direction Nancy was pointing, across the side of the hill and over the tops of some houses wrapped in fog.
One of the other women said, “Have you ever seen Tonya’s mother’s trailer? It’s just up the road here, and it is meticulous. It is lovely. It is tidy. You would never even know it’s a trailer.”
“Trailer trash is what they call people out here,” another woman said to me. She sat down and started tapping on the table with her fingernails. They were long and burgundy-colored, and each one had a different small image painted on it—a shooting star, a sun, a lightning bolt. She said, “There are plenty of people who think we’re scum because we live out here on the east side. Well, I live in a very non-scum neighborhood. It’s actually a so-called good neighborhood, but it’s always going to be thought of as trash, because it’s east side.” She tapped. Her fingernails clicked: lightning bolt, star, sun.
“I wouldn’t say trash,” Elaine said. “I would say . . . I would say . . .” She paused. “Well, my heart just went out to Tonya when I first saw her skate. I just see that little gal out there, the abused child spanked by her mother with a hairbrush, and when they would do the up-close-and-personals for the Olympic skaters, they showed Tonya in her jeans at her little house fixing her car, and I could just feel her sink. When I started the club, the people I heard from were women with abusive husbands, and Vietnam vets who had come home and felt displaced, and they’d see that little gal and feel really good about themselves. So it’s funny that people would think of her as trash.”
“Scum,” the nail woman snapped. “That’s what they call us. It’s a class difference—that’s what all this mess is about Tonya. She’s just a regular Clackamas County girl. In my opinion, she’s a modern gal, what we would call a tomboy. She can hunt, she can fix a car. She calls herself the Charles Barkley of figure skating, and she’s right. She’s a stud.”
Another one of the women said, “I’ll tell you, you know who I cannot stand is that Kristi Yamaguchi.” Everyone groaned. She rolled her eyes, and went on, “She is just so prissy. Tonya is so tough. She is a stud! She really is!”
The nail woman said, “You know, there are a lot of us who look at Tonya and think to ourselves, There’s a gal who pulled herself up, who had some tough times with her folks, and whatever, and she still did great by her dreams. I know what it’s like to have dreams and to perform. When I was a kid, I was a performer. I was on that radio show Stars of Tomorrow, and I got tons of trophies for my singing.”
Nancy said, “You were a singer? You sang?”
“All the time—oh, yeah, all the time,” she said. “I had just tons of trophies. I don’t have them anymore. My dad threw them all out.”
Elaine said, “Why did he do that?”
“Well,” the woman said, shrugging and tapping, “we just don’t get along.”
TANYA UTBERG, the Clackamas County Fair and rodeo queen, said to me recently, “I think Clackamas County is a very warmy place,” which makes it sound soothing and regular, but often it seems to be a more haphazard and disjointed place than that. The day I talked to the Rodeo Queen, I drove out to the neighborhood where Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly used to live, and where Tonya still lives. Her house is in a part of Clackamas County called Beavercreek. Beavercreek isn’t shown on any street map—it’s just an area, not far from a small city called Happy Valley, which is where Tonya’s mother is currently living. Tonya’s road in Beavercreek is a skinny rib that runs along a foothill, past a spread of newish one-story houses. Tonya’s house, an A-frame chalet, is at the end of a long driveway and is not visible from the road. At the end of her driveway were a white farm gate, a big homemade heart-shaped sign left by some fans, and several No Trespassing notices. A few miles farther along the road, not far from the Savage Mini-Mall, I stopped at a new housing development, and the real estate broker gave me a tour of one of the houses. When it is finished, the development will be called Sunset Springs Estates. The broker didn’t know what had been on the property before it was subdivided, but a few scraggly fruit trees out back provided a hint. In bright weather, the Sunset Springs houses will have a distant view of the wolf-fang shape of Mount Hood and a close view of a new development called McBride Estates, and of a woeful old farm undoubtedly in line to have the earth turned up under it so someone can sow some more houses. The broker said, “Sunset Springs Estates are going to be real lovely places when they’re done.” Then he gazed out the window and said, “It is sort of funny around here. Everything is such a big mix-match. You have one kind of thing right next to another kind of thing, like lots of money beside poor. That’s what I call a real mix-match. Things don’t always fit together as well as they should.”
TUESDAY AND THURSDAY are cheapskate nights at the skating rink—for four dollars, you can rent skates and skate for two hours. A big banner advertising Cheapskate Nights hangs above the ice, next to one, paid for by the fan club, that says home of TONYA HARDING—U.S. FIGURE SKATING CHAMPION. Saturday evening isn’t for cheapskates, but it’s the busiest night. On the Saturday after the fan club meeting, the ice was packed. You can watch the rink from the mall’s upper level, standing between a kiosk with a public-service poster that says SUPPORT THE U.S. OLYMPIC TEAM: GO SHOPPING and a small business called All About Names, which is set up on a rolling cart. For a couple of dollars, you can get printed on a number of different items, such as beer steins and key chains, or on a piece of fancy paper, a little legend about almost any name. I asked the woman
working at the cart to do the name Tonya on pink paper with a drawing of a fairy castle, and she said, “Tonya? Ton-ya? Tonya? I’ve never heard of that before. What a nice, interesting name.” That morning’s Oregonian had had a story about Nancy Kerrigan on the front page for the seventeenth day in a row. The woman at the cart punched some buttons on a computer, and after a moment the paper came out. It said that “Tonya” was Latin for “priceless,” and that a Tonya was “a liberated spirit” who “has never settled down to any one thing . . . is attractive, lively, and tasteful . . . sets high expectations and fulfills them.” Down below, kids were whizzing around showing off, or inching along the edge of the ice, clinging to one another in wobbly packs. A lot of the girls looked like Tonya, with long multilevel blond hair and a puff of bangs, eyes rimmed in black liner, and stocky bodies in inexpensive-looking clothes. In the center of the ice, a few skinny girls in Lycra skating dresses were practicing spins. Until recently, Tonya sometimes practiced during open-skate hour, picking her way through the crowd. Now she skates only very late at night, but for a long time she usually practiced in the mornings, when the ice was empty but the bleachers were filled with people eating tacos and gyros and Dilly Deli sandwiches and looking on.
Around here, kids go to the movies, or they drive up and down Eighty-second Avenue, or they hang out at the mall. If they work at it, they can get into trouble. A juvenile court counselor named Steve Houseworth told me that in the last two years, kids in the county, like kids in counties all over the country, have become increasingly hedonistic, defiant, and angry, and that juvenile arrests have boomed. “Our big problem is with antisocial preplanned deviant behavior,” he said. “We’ve got an explosion of anger, intimidation, and aggression issues. I think we’ll see more of it, too, because the county is growing real hard and real fast.” The county, he went on, is trying out a privately run anger-management program called Temper Talk, which offers counseling to juveniles charged with Assault 3 or Assault 4—causing harm to a person without intent or with intent, respectively.
The program director for Temper Talk, Derek Bliss, told me, “Kids here are looking for power and they want control. They’re angry about dominance. They want to show the image and reputation of dominance.” I asked him whether he recognized the likes of Shawn and Jeff and of Shane Stant, the twenty-two-year-old man who had been paid to attack Nancy Kerrigan. “Definitely,” he said. “These are the kind of guys who lose their temper but don’t know how to use their temper. Shane, the one who confessed to actually doing the assault—he’s a very big boy. He’s not behind physically for his age-group, but he’s clearly behind empathetically. I’d bet there was a humongous amount of inconsiderate behavior in their lives before this assault.”
On Saturday night, I talked with two young guys, D. J. Dollar Bill and D. J. Fast Eddie, who were standing on a platform beside the skate rental booth, playing tapes over the loudspeakers and calling out for the kids to reverse directions, and then to speed up, and then to get ready to line up for games. Dollar Bill said he was a delivery driver for an auto supply company. Fast Eddie said he worked in the produce section of a grocery store. Fast Eddie also said he could not comment on Tonya. “What I’m about is right here,” he said, motioning to the ice, “and here is fun.” He put on a Snoop Doggy Dogg song and then said, “We’re going to play some great games later. We just finished a big one. It’s the favorite around here. We break up into teams and compete in four events—the ringtoss, ice basketball, ice golf, and a finale, which is a snowball race with a snowball on your head. We call it ‘The Olympic Ménage à Trois.’ ”
CELEBRATION NEW SONG FOUR-SQUARE CHURCH, a Pentecostal congregation, meets every Sunday in a room at the Holiday Inn in Gresham, a town just north of the Clackamas County line. The pastor of the church, Eugene Saunders, hadn’t been seen in three weeks—that is, since shortly after the night that he was doing homework with Shawn Eckardt, the heavyset baby-faced bodyguard and self-described foreign espionage operative, who was a classmate of Gene’s in a legal-assistant training program at Pioneer Pacific College. That night, Shawn had bragged to Gene that he was involved in setting up an attack on a figure skater, and played a garbled tape of a planning session for him. It was that conversation—which Gene repeated first to a Pioneer Pacific teacher, a private investigator (who repeated it to the Portland Oregonian), and then to the authorities—that broke the case open. The publicity that followed was so overwhelming and relentless that Gene decided to go underground.
On Sunday, I went to church, and Reverend Saunders reappeared. In the newspaper box outside the Holiday Inn, the headlines were still all about Tonya. Inside, nineteen people were gathered in a meeting room, among them a weary-looking older couple with a strange, thin, shrill-voiced boy; a young woman with two restless redhaired children; a man with stringy blond hair that hung to his shoulder blades, sitting with a pretty woman who wore her hair in cornrows, and was the only black person I saw the whole time I was in Clackamas County; a ruddy-faced man with pinkish eyelids and full lips, wearing a worn-out chambray work shirt and holding in his lap a Bible and a Bible study guide; a man, maybe around seventy, with greased-back black hair and thick glasses, wearing a plastic windbreaker and a short striped necktie. In the front of the small room, a big, bearded man holding a zebra-striped electric guitar began strumming and singing in a tender voice. Everyone rose, scraping back tan metal folding chairs. Someone turned on an overhead projector, and a handwritten lyric sheet flashed in a crooked rectangle across the wall and ceiling, and then the congregation sang. The room was new and drab; the floor felt hollow. Outside, it was pouring. The motel was so new that there was no lawn yet, or even mulch—only mud and construction equipment, and fresh sidewalks, which looked silvery in the rain. After one of the songs, the man with the greased-back hair stepped forward and began a rhythmic declaration from the back of his throat. He was speaking in tongues, and he went on for several minutes, shouting and sweating and slapping his thighs. Finally, he paused, wiped his brow, and then translated what he had to say—that Jesus was coming, that Jesus was watching, that anyone who followed Jesus and resisted Satan would never go astray.
When he finished, Gene Saunders came to the front of the room. He is a handsome, fleshy young man with small, crowded features; he was wearing a dress shirt and suspenders, and holding an open can of Mountain Dew. He said, “I know you’ve been wondering a lot of things—some of you have known where I’ve been, but mostly you’ve known that I just needed to take a break from the publicity. We got calls from around the world. We got calls from Japan about this. I want to tell you folks a few things. First of all, you know that I am not Shawn’s pastor. I think some of you read something saying that he was with us—that I was his pastor—and you were thinking, Hey, we don’t know this guy. Well, we were classmates in school. I’m not his pastor.” He chuckled. “I suppose he could use one now.” People nodded, and bumped one another with their elbows. “Also, I want you to know I never changed my story. I always said I couldn’t understand the tape. It was a garbled tape. It started getting into press reports that I could understand the tape, and then at the grand jury hearing I testified that I couldn’t, and everyone is asking me why I changed my story. I didn’t. It was misrepresented that way.”
Someone called out, “That was Satan working! That’s how the enemy works—confusing us with things we didn’t say!” Gene nodded, and sipped from the can. He strolled around the front of the room. “It’s been tough for me, because I’ve had to neglect you and the church business during all of this, and I’ve had to make choices. I shouldn’t say this in front of our treasurer, but I was offered fifty thousand dollars to tell my story to a television show, and I turned it down.” From the back of the room, someone said, “Reverend, we could sure have used that money!” and everyone laughed. Gene said, “Well, I turned everything down. We’ll just have to keep fund-raising for ourselves. But, you know, that was real temptation.”
“Why di
d they do it, Reverend?”
He looked down, kicking lightly at the carpeting. “Bitterness, I think. Bitterness that things weren’t going their way.”
The ruddy-faced man flipped his study guide open to Luke 14. “All the answers are right here,” he whispered to me. He ran a fingernail across the page, to where it said, “Wanting a new car or hoping to be successful in your career is not wrong in itself—it is wrong only when you want these things just to impress others.” He closed the book and then closed his eyes.
Gene finished speaking and shook everyone’s hand, and said he would be back every Sunday unless things got too distracting again.
THE THREE SISTERS
IN BULGARIA, SOME TENNIS BALLS ARE LIKE dumplings. Manuela, Katerina, and Magdalena Maleeva, Bulgarian sisters who are three of the best tennis players in the world and definitely the three best tennis players in Bulgaria, know all about putting topspin on a dumpling. They also know how to park themselves at the baseline and bang back every dumpling that comes over the net. The flabby, bounceless tennis balls in Bulgaria come from Poland, where they are manufactured to international standards and then, apparently, overcooked. This might discourage some players, but the Maleevas are not easily discouraged. In fact, they may be the least discourageable people in Bulgaria. No world-class tennis players have ever before emerged from that country. One year, the three Maleeva sisters made up the entire Bulgarian Federation Cup tennis team. Youlia Berberian, their mother and also their coach, was the team captain. There are no Maleev brothers, so there’s never been much of a men’s team.