by Lee Taylor
That’s the problem. Some days I just want to say screw it, but I know Mike would honestly be hurt. See, I’m a sucker for sincerity. A guy with a genuine concern, a genuine kindness. Trouble is, these days, when I see it coming I usually run. Men like him are dangerous. They get under my skin and I have to try to stick around and do the right thing, even when I’d rather toss in the towel. Most women can’t tell the difference between the ‘real thing’ and the ‘thing of the moment’. I can.
That’s the trouble. Mike’s the real deal.
He’s just so damn positive that it’s hard to be around him without catching his pestilence, which I sometimes get a bad case of. It’s such a bummer. It can take me weeks of heavy drinking to get back into my comfortable state of terminal disenchantment, which I seem to be wallowing in at the moment. Then we end up arguing over my drinking. Truth is, I’m only trying to return to reality.
My reality. His doesn’t matter.
Let it go, Carly. Tell him.
“What if I told you a little bit about that summer when I stopped writing to you and your sister?”
“What do you mean by stopped writing? I thought the letters stopped because it was part of our punishment.”
I shake my head, and take a swig of my bourbon. “I never wrote any.”
Somebody opens the front door. The light bounces off the mirror in front of us. For a moment I can feel the sunshine on my face. Don’t like it. Then it’s dark again.
“What? You never told me this.” He sits back on his stool. Gets a smile on his face like he’s glad I’m about to tell him a secret.
“Never wanted to, until today.”
“What’s different about today?”
“Speck’s parole hearing. Brought back some memories.”
“What kind of memories?”
“Some good. Some not so good. I was a different person back then. Positive, self-assured, even funny at times.”
“I remember your letters. Still have a couple.”
For the first time in twenty years I want to talk about that time. Want to let go of some of my past. That maybe if I throw it over to Mike, he might catch it and understand what goes on inside my head.
“I was the kind of kid who thought she could change her world with Mass and a prayer.”
“Hard to imagine you in a church.”
“Every morning for two solid years.”
“You?”
“And my two best friends, the girls you met at the concert, Sharon Lombardo and Lisa Toporis. We were praying to marry the Beatles. We were obsessed.”
“Like my sister.”
“Worse.”
I stare into Mike’s eyes hoping to find empathy. I see only curiosity. How can I get any commiseration from a man who is still in his twenties? He was barely out of the thumb-sucking stage when the nurses were killed. How can he understand my misery? My angst? What does he know about murder?
Mike and I move to a booth made for four. The table is covered with that heavy resin crap that everybody got into sometime in the seventies. The seats are covered with brown vinyl. Matter-of-fact, when I look around, the whole tavern seems to be drenched in brown, from the rough hewn walls to the pool table in the middle of the floor. Sunlight hasn’t entered this room since the last nail was pounded into the roof. It couldn’t be a better set for what I was about to tell Mike, who by the way, is perfect for the part of the innocent friend.
Three
It was a Monday when I first met Richard Speck. Monday, July 11, 1966. Sometime around noon or one because Sharon had just bought fifty cents’ worth of hard salami from Fata’s grocery store for lunch. She loved to buy one thick piece and gnaw on it while she walked, like it was a candy bar or a Tootsie Pop. Lisa and I each bought a bottle of Coke and a package of Sno-Balls. We preferred straight sugar over real food anytime.
Sharon, at thirteen, was a classy bird with sleek blond hair and violet eyes. Clothes draped over her slim little body like water slipping over a rose. She had flawless skin and a beauty mark just above the right side of her upper lip. All the boys wanted to date her but she wasn’t interested.
No one wanted to date Lisa. She was an overweight twelve-year-old with naturally curly hair. All three of us had long hair, but for some reason on Lisa it just didn’t work. No matter how much she ironed it, her hair still looked like a brown bush. Back then, straight, long hair was in and curly was definitely out. Everything about Lisa was out. But despite her appearance and all the jokes that were made about her, she remained the most self-confident of the three of us. Lisa read a lot, something Sharon and I never did. Romance novels and poetry. Maybe that’s where she found her strength.
I was pretty shy back then, the wallflower type. Despite my devotion to the Beatles, I longed for a boyfriend. It wasn’t that I was ugly or goofy or anything, I just never talked to boys. They scared me. I hid when they came around. I did have one thing that I liked about myself, though. My hair. It came down past my waist—pure chestnut brown, just like a Breck commercial. Even in the sunlight there were no split ends. VO-5 was my friend. Other than that, I was a typical, skinny, flat-chested soon-to-be fourteen-year-old. Very ordinary and very much in love with Ringo Starr.
Sharon believed that if we went to Mass every morning and said the rosary every night one of us would marry a Beatle. Sister Martha thought we were praying for the sins of the world. The new priest, Father Walsh, who was too cute to be a priest, used us in his Sunday sermon once as examples of model teens “sacrificing our mornings for the praise of Our Lord.”
Ha!
What we were actually doing and had been doing since February 6, 1964 (the day Ed Sullivan brought the Beatles to America) was praying to God, the angels and the saints for one of us, that would have been me, or all of us, which was highly unlikely, to marry Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and John Lennon. We all knew that John and Ringo were already married and that damn Jane Asher kept hanging onto Paul, but we were confident in our faith. After all, it said so right there in the New Testament, “Ask and you shall receive.” We decided that sometimes it might take longer to receive but that was the power of faith like ours. We believed absolutely that one day it would all come true or why be Catholic? I mean, if you can’t get what you want, then what’s the point of all the praying? At least that’s what Sharon said.
We had another girl in our group, Elaine Benaki, who wanted to marry George, but she quit after two months. I think she still wanted to marry George but she just wasn’t willing to pray for it as much as we were. Elaine said we were irrational, unrealistic, delusional—I had to look up delusional in the dictionary—and even dangerous. How un-Catholic of her. She obviously did not understand how our religion worked.
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 stop 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 firs
t time, I was afraid he might hurt me.
Four
September 8, 198 7
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.