by Mary Leo
We gave up being friends with Elaine. I figured she must be some kind of Communist spy. After all, Pete Best deserted the Beatles and John went out and found Ringo to play the drums. I was confident that we would find someone to marry George.
That summer, the three of us did the same thing every day. We went to eight o’clock Mass, mailed our love letters to The Beatles, walked to the 100th Street bridge, flirted with the sailors on the passing ships, hoped there would be one from England or Germany, and made up our Beatles stories.
Our stories were all-consuming and ever changing. We rarely wrote them down because we modified them daily. They were so much a part of us that sometimes it became hard to separate fact from desire. We lived another life in another world. We escaped our age, our families and our neighborhood. Through our stories, daily life in South Chicago became tolerable. We were merely stuck there until we were old enough to marry a Beatle.
It was Sharon who decided to walk to the bridge early that day. By early, I mean usually we wouldn’t go to the bridge until late in the afternoon. Then the river was crowded with ships that would sometimes dock at the local shipyard to unload cargo and exchange seamen whenever necessary. It was those seamen, those sailors of the world, whom we admired.
We thought the bridge was our link to England because of all the foreign ships that passed through it, and because we had determined, through photos, that our bridge and its surroundings looked exactly like Liverpool—our destination as soon as we graduated from high school.
We kept all the things that we wanted to bring with us at Sharon’s house in an old World War II trunk that belonged to her father. We scented it with lavender and lined the inside with Christmas paper and ribbons. It was sort of a hope-chest type thing where we kept our dreams.
I opened my package of Sno-Balls, threw the wrapper on the ground while Lisa transported us to the Bahamas. “John is sitting out on the veranda—that’s what you call a porch when you’re rich—writing poetry and drinking ice tea. It’s a warm day with an inspiring breeze. John listens to its whistling as he writes. The veranda is a massive expanse of decorative tile and blooming flowers. It overlooks the ocean and part of the quaint village below. A servant, hidden by the bountiful foliage, waits to attend to John’s every need. Paul and Sharon show up and interrupt his intense artistic moment. I come in from a swim in the cool, blue water when John pulls me over to give me a kiss. One of those long passionate kisses like Omar Sharif gave Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago.”
Normally, I would have cut in and complained about Ringo and me not being in the Bahamas with them, but on that day I just didn’t care. There had been a wild storm in the middle of the night, one of those intense post-tornado-warning types that always sent me looking for cover, so I was sluggish that day and not in the mood for fantasy. Also, I worried about staying overnight in Sharon’s backyard tent. Part of me didn’t want to because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and the other part of me just didn’t want to ask my mother. She hated my sleeping anywhere other than my own bed, especially ever since we moved away from Commercial and 96th, where Sharon and Lisa lived. We only moved about eight blocks away, but to my mother it was just too far for me to go every day. She wanted me to get new friends. Neighborhood friends. I told her that was impossible and distance was not the determining factor when it came to choosing a friend.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t admit my mother’s wishes to Sharon and Lisa. They’d hate my mom for it and besides, they had been planning the sleepover for weeks. The next day was my fourteenth birthday and the sleepover in the tent was their present to me.
I lagged behind while we walked, thinking about going home and taking a nap and what it would be like to nap on a veranda in the Bahamas with Ringo, when a man brushed by me a little too closely. I stopped and stared after him. He carried two bags, one a tan suitcase and the other a red plaid duffle bag. He was tall, taller than most of the guys who lived in our neighborhood, and smelled like Sharon’s dad, Old Spice. I immediately thought he must be a sailor…English perhaps.
“Hey,” he said, stopping and turning around to gaze at me. “I’m lookin’ for a place called Pauline’s. You know where that is?”
Because of a slight breeze my Sno-Ball wrapper made its way up his left side. He had a tattoo on his upper arm that read, BORN TO RAISE HELL.
He didn’t notice my wrapper, but I noticed his tattoo, the mark of a true sailor.
The man had an accent. It wasn’t English, German maybe, which was the next best thing considering the Beatles had spent much of their time performing in various nightclubs in Hamburg. He had dark blond hair on a big narrow head that leaned to one side, pitted cheeks, and he was dressed entirely in black, which was weird for such a hot, humid day. He was looking for Pauline’s, a boarding house that only catered to sailors. That confirmed it for me; he was definitely a German sailor.
By this time, Sharon and Lisa had returned from the Bahamas, had also stopped, and were focused in on this mysterious man.
Lisa answered his question with her best English accent, pointing the way, “Just down the block a bit, mate. And when you get to the Jovial Club on the corner there, take a right. It’s the brown building at the end of the block on the left, mate. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” he said, grinning a polite response—his smile, crooked. There was something about him, maybe it was the way he walked by me a little too close, or his smile, or his dull eyes, but right from the start I didn’t much like him. He gave me a creepy feeling.
I pushed my feelings aside because, after all, he was a sailor.
He turned and continued down the street. My Sno-Ball wrapper dislodged from his arm and blew into the gutter. We all stared after him like he was the first man we had ever seen. As he walked away, Sharon and I squealed with excitement.
“I bet he just got off a ship from Germany. Did you hear that accent?” I asked.
Lisa, the Skeptic, said, “It sounded a little Southern to me.”
“It did not,” Sharon guaranteed her. “It was German and I should know. I’ve heard that accent a million times from my father’s best friend and he’s German.”
From that moment on, we believed that the friendly stranger who had just entered our world was, in fact, a German sailor. We watched him walk down the block towards Pauline’s, the two-story building right next door to Sharon’s house, and our stories took on a new twist. The stranger was now part of our fantasy, part of our world. Lisa even put him out on the veranda in the Bahamas and gave him a German name.
“Just as John and I finish our passionate kiss, Carly and Ringo walk in and who do they have with them but…umm…Wolf Dietrich, an old friend of the lads from the early days when they used to play at the Kaiserkeller Club in Hamburg—”
My name is Patricia Matusek.
Dad drove me to the townhouse that night, waiting until I got in, waving his goodbye. For years afterward, he relived that four-mile drive, going over every turn, every light, wishing that he had said more, had convinced me to stay home one more night, blaming himself. It wasn’t his fault. How was he to know that Richard Speck would take my life that very night.
I loved kids. I wanted a whole houseful. They would be in their teens and twenties by now, except for the baby. She’d be the result of a romantic weekend at Lake Geneva. Bob and I would have raised them right, too. Good kids, with high morals, compassion for their fellow man and a thirst for knowledge. Of course, my oldest daughter would have won a gold medal in free-style and my son would be on his way to medical school. My middle daughter, just like her mom, would have loved children and prepared herself to be a grade school teacher. No one could have talked her out of that. And the baby? My sweet baby girl. She’d be her grandpa Joe’s favorite and my little angel.
Me? I’d still be working for Children’s Memorial. I’d have paid my dues on night shifts and gone back to school for my BSN while I worked my way up to head nurse. I’d have been there to st
op Mr. Dombrowski from taking his accident-prone three-year-old daughter back home and then killing her in another of his drunken rages. I never would have believed his story about the stairs. I knew what that kind of rage looked like from living over my dad’s tavern all my life and seeing it in other men.
I would have told Mrs. Young that there were alternative treatment programs for epilepsy and her ten-year-old son wouldn’t have gone through years of torture on unproven medications.
I’d have sat up all night with Joey and Ben and baby Tammy comforting them before their morning surgeries; been there when little Philip was having an adverse reaction to his medication and prevented the second fatal injection. I could have prayed with frightened Sarah, thrown a ball with seven-year-old Mark, read Green Eggs and Ham one more time to Mary, gotten extra Jell-O for four-year-old Pete, brought in a dinosaur book for Justin, tickled Sammy, sang Happy Birthday to Seth and given out as many hugs to as many children as my arms could hold.
With my hands and feet tied, Richard Speck carried me to the bathroom. I asked him to please untie my ankles and he asked if I was the girl in the yellow dress—I had worn my yellow dress the day before. I could smell whiskey on his breath and Old Spice on his body. I hated being that close to him because for the first time, I was afraid he might hurt me.
Chapter Four
September 8, 1987
While I was drunk last night and against my sober judgment, I promised Mike that I’d at least give Stateville Correctional Facility one more day—as if anybody ever gets corrected inside a prison.
And if I had paid attention to where we were going in the first place, I would have told him right up front that there was no way I was stepping one foot inside a prison where Speck lived…but for some reason, last night, right after Mike said good-night to me outside our motel rooms, I blurted out that I wanted to see for myself how the miserable son of a bitch lived. Get a tour of solitary. Ask questions. Let some guard tell me how, even though the bastard didn’t burn in the chair because Illinois overturned the death penalty, Speck’s prison life is worse than death. Each day is torture and he’s just waiting and hoping to die. At least that’s what I wanted to hear at two in the morning. Now that the sun’s up, I’m not so sure.
“Where’d you get those?” Mike asks as I pull out a pack of Marlboros from my purse.
“Bud’s Place. Why? Do you want one?” I ask all smiles, knowing perfectly well Mike hates my smoking and would never even try a cigarette.
It’s nine a.m. and once again, we’re walking toward the prison entrance. Weird thing about Stateville, it’s not like the prisons you see in movies. Whoever designed this place had a sense of humor. You drive up a long, tree-lined double driveway like it’s some rich guy’s estate—trimmed lawns, verdant trees, bushes. As if good landscaping has some relevance to what goes on inside. The whole glorious effect comes crashing in as you get closer and realize that the ornate building we’re driving up to is surrounded by a gray cement wall. Of course, there are the required gun towers in each corner and the wall itself must be at least thirty-feet high. The red brick, schoolhouse-type building and the burgeoning landscape makes you think of some sick-ass joke somebody is trying to play on the neighborhood: We’ll keep the grass green and the trees pruned and nobody will ever know.
Mike says, “You said you quit for good.”
I take a long drag and tell him, “I lied,” then slowly let the smoke out of my lungs. “God, that’s good.”
He stares at me for a moment. I know he’s going to give me a lecture. I can hear his little brain churning.
I take another drag.
“I know what you’re going through, trying to quit. I know about addiction. With me, it’s milk. I’ve been trying to cut down for years, but I can’t seem to kick the habit. Don’t know why. It’s just something I can’t stop doing. Sometimes I’ll drink an entire quart in one sitting.”
I stare back at him. No expression. Trying to gain composure. I want to laugh out loud, but I know the guy is serious. He actually believes that his drinking a glass of milk is somehow equal to a nicotine rush.
Mike grew up in Minnesota in one of those small Beaver Cleaver towns. He missed the radical part of the sixties and lived out the seventies on some other planet. He never did drugs and only drinks an occasional wine because “it’s good for you.” Mike studied acting at the Goodman Theater in Chicago because it gave him friends. He was geeky looking and in theater geeky is an asset. In between stage plays, Mike took up driving me back and forth to rehab after my stint with Father Oak. I got over my disability, but Mike can’t seem to shake his…me. The poor bastard says he loves me but I don’t want his kind of love. Too honest. Too real. Too much potential hurt involved. His hurt, not mine. I stopped feeling a long time ago.
Besides, I should have known better. He goes against rule number one: Never date, or sleep with a non-drinker.
I made that mistake in the beginning when I was emotional, drugged-up and happy to see the little sleeve-wiper. He’s been trying to get back to the date-state ever since we broke up a few months ago. But I won’t let that happen again. Not in this lifetime. He goes against rule number two: Never date a guy who wants to change you.
We continue to walk up to the prison in silence.
I figure he must be working on his milk-habit-guilt this morning or I’d be hearing all the crap about what lung cancer looks like and how they had to cut out half of some relative’s jawbone before he or she died a pitiful death at forty-five.
“What’s all that?” Mike asks about a large group of mostly women sitting on folding chairs under a white canopy.
“I guess you’ve never been to a prison before.”
“Never had the need.”
“Oh, that’s right, you come from Minnesota. There are no prisons in Minnesota.”
“We’ve got our share of gangsters and outlaws.”
“Gangsters and outlaws? You’ve been watching far too many James Cagney movies. Well, Jimmy, those are the dolls, the dames who got left behind. It must be visiting day.”
“Look how they’re dressed,” he says, gawking now as we walk past the group. “And the perfume.” He waves his hand back and forth in front of his face trying to get rid of the smell. There must be close to a hundred women, mostly black and Latino, a few children and maybe ten or fifteen men waiting patiently under the white canopy. Night-club-wear on most of the women: bright colors, sequins, rhinestones, cleavage and silver three-inch heels.
“Gotta keep reminding your man what he’s missing. It’s all part of the game. I remember waiting outside the jail for my dad and watching the women line up, waiting to get in. Of course, they weren’t quite as colorful back then, but it’s the same gig.”
When we get to the guardhouse, Mike is told that we have to enter through the Visitors Center, a tan, brick one-story building at the end of the fence. I take in the last drag of my cigarette and drop it on the ground. Because I haven’t smoked in so long I get a reassuring buzz. Moaning with delight while I step on the butt, I tell Mike, “Heaven in just two little inches.”
He mumbles some nasty comment. I don’t ask him to repeat it because I’m not in the mood for some insane milk argument. I’ve got my own argument going on. Like, why in hell am I doing this?
It must be time to let everyone in because the women get up from their chairs and start to line up behind me. I enter on the girls’ side and Mike on the boys’.
Inside the building the walls are lined with pressed wood paneling, like they’re trying to make the room cozy or something. I tell one of the female guards what I’m here for and another guard proceeds to check me with a metal-detector wand while yet another guard digs through my purse. An alarm goes off and shatters my brain but the butch-prison-guard who’s wanding me doesn’t flinch. The black mamma in the gold lamé gown waiting next to me gets impatient and puts her hand on her hip and rolls her eyes. The guard, without saying a word, starts frisking me and gropes a
t my breasts like some sex-starved teenage boy in heat.
“It’s my bra,” I tell her. “I wear an underwire.”
No reaction.
The magic wand travels down my body to my feet and back up between my legs. The alarm stops. The gold lamé lets out a sigh and adjusts her own bra. “Don’t you know better than to come in here wearing one of them things? They got themselves a real phobia about metal. Go get yourself a party dress like I got. Your man’s gonna love you in one of these and there ain’t no metal pushin’ you up. It’s just all natural lusciousness.” She slides her hands around her half exposed breasts and down the sides of her hourglass body, her perfume growing more intense as she moves.
“I bet he would,” I answer smiling with her, amazed at the amount of pride she seems to take in the way she looks at ten in the morning—like a backup singer in a Vegas lounge act. The line of incoming women behind her wraps around the Center and, except for a few older, more motherly types, they’re all dressed for the same show.
I must be an enigma to these dolls. I’m in black slacks and a white shirt. My short, unstyled brown hair is combed back off my face and I’m wearing almost no makeup, which means I have no eyes. Without eye makeup, I look about as feminine as a white dinner plate. The only thing girly about me are my bright red earrings—a calculated rebellion.
Two of the guards escort us into a tiny room and hand us special Movie Crew badges to wear while we’re inside the prison. A male guard named Captain Bob—dark hair, overweight, late forties, with a mole just under his left eye—leads us down a long hallway. The guards wear a two-toned green uniform, grass green slacks and a light green shirt; traditional guard.