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

by Spungen, Deborah

  “You have no fucking right to yell at my mom!” she screamed. “Leave my mom alone!”

  “Nancy, ssh,” he repeated, literally clamping his hand over her mouth.

  The judge abruptly stopped his tirade.

  “Not guilty,” he said. “Next case.”

  We were momentarily stunned. Then we got out of there as quickly as possible.

  “The facts just weren’t there,” our lawyer explained in the corridor. “They had nothing on her.”

  “I’ll kill that motherfucker with my bare hands,” steamed Nancy. “He had no right to treat you that way, Mom. I’m real sorry.”

  I think it was the first time—the only time—Nancy was made to realize that we had to take the brunt of the consequences for her actions.

  “I’m just real sorry,” she repeated. “I don’t believe that motherfucker. Don’t worry, he’ll die for this! I’ll get somebody to kill him.”

  At that moment we bumped into a man I knew through Western Union. He was an officer of the traffic court, and I had helped him set up a Mailgram billing system for parking tickets. When he saw how upset Nancy was, he invited us into his office, gave us coffee, and stayed with us until Nancy calmed down. He was very kind.

  Nancy never forgot his kindness. Three years later he was being tried for accepting bribes. He asked me to be a character witness, and I agreed to. I mentioned it to Nancy over the phone. She was in New York with Sid. She immediately wanted to rush to the defense of this man who had been so nice to her.

  “Hey, if he wants me to be a character witness, I’ll be happy to go.”

  I pictured her getting on the witness stand with her wild white hair, punk clothes, heroin track marks, and sickly, translucent skin. This was not exactly the sort of character witness he needed.

  “I’ll tell him, Nancy, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary.”

  “Whatever it takes. I wanna help.”

  “I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

  I’ve never forgotten Nancy’s readiness to help someone who had once helped her. I’ve never forgotten that phone conversation. It was our last. She was dead four days later.

  Chapter 14

  We didn’t need a therapist to tell us that Nancy was going to have to find something to do with herself.

  She got very upset when I suggested she go back to school somewhere.

  “I won’t!” she screamed. “You can’t make me!”

  “It’s only a suggestion, Nancy.”

  “I won’t go! I just won’t!” She ran into her room and slammed the door.

  That was the last time college was mentioned as a possibility.

  A job, then. We were determined she find work—so she would have not only money but some element of structure in her life. She was amenable to the idea. She wanted to have some money. She was qualified to be a salesclerk or a typist. Every morning she scanned the classifieds for jobs. Her geographical options were pretty limited—she was isolated in the suburbs and she wasn’t allowed to drive. Her best option was to find something in Philadelphia, which was accessible by commuter train. She made phone calls, but nothing panned out. It was January. The Christmas rush was over. Stores weren’t hiring.

  One morning when I was going to work I saw a HELP WANTED sign in the window of the dress shop that was downstairs in my building. Nancy rode into town with me the next morning, applied for the job, and got it. She began the next day as a salesgirl. The store was small and sold fashionable, youthful women’s clothes. Nancy was excited about the job. She liked the girl she worked with, whose name was Randi. Randi introduced her to another girl, Karen, who worked at the store’s other branch a few blocks away. The three of them had lunch together on Nancy’s second day.

  “Everything’s working out,” Nancy enthused when she got home that night.

  The manager of the store called early the next morning when Nancy was still in bed. I woke her up so she could take the call. Nancy spoke to the woman for a moment, hung up, and went back to sleep. I roused her a while later.

  “You’d better get moving, sweetheart. Time to go to work.”

  She said something into her pillow.

  “What’d you say?” I asked.

  She turned over, glared at the ceiling. “I don’t have a job. She fired me.”

  “Why?” I cried.

  “No reason at all.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. We’ll find you another job.”

  “What’s the point? I’ll just get fired again.”

  I wondered why she had lost the job, but it wasn’t my place to intervene and find out. I never did learn the reason.

  Nancy rolled over and went back to sleep. She was very discouraged about losing the job. It confirmed her negative self-image. In response, she closed this option off, just as she had school. She refused to look for another job.

  She was only interested in two things from this point on—music and drugs. The harder the better.

  She’d sleep all day, get up at about the time Suzy and David were coming home from school. After a cigarette and a cup of coffee she’d go up to her room and put a record on—she was big on Lou Reed now—and make plans on the telephone.

  If it was a weeknight she’d usually stay home in her room listening to music, reading, and smoking. Sometimes she went over to see Don and Carol, an unmarried couple in their twenties whom she’d gotten friendly with. She often stayed out all night. She was no longer friendly with Linda and the neighborhood kids.

  If it was a weekend, she’d take the train into Philadelphia and meet up with the two girls she had gotten to know at the dress shop, Randi and Karen. The store closed at six. The three of them would go to Randi’s apartment (Randi and Karen were older than Nancy, in their early twenties) and fix up their appearances.

  Nancy’s overall look was beginning to change from flower child to street tough. The workshirts gave way to tight black T-shirts. The patched and faded denim flares yielded to very tight new straight-legged jeans. She wore platform heels, the higher the better. At 5 feet 1 inch, she thought she was too short. She also began to wear a lot of eye makeup and plucked her eyebrows. Her lovely, full chestnut-brown hair was cut to shoulder-length shag and streaked blonde.

  The three of them would go to the rock club, which in those days was a place called the Hive. It was their hangout. They would drink Black Russians—Nancy easily looked as old as the other girls and had no trouble getting served—and meet guys. When the Hive closed at two a.m., they’d move on to an after-hours club called High Society. It had a dance floor. They’d stay there until about five or six, and Nancy would come home on a morning train. She’d see the guys she met at these places one or two times—never longer. Always, there were drugs. The neighborhood kids, I later learned, were mostly smokers—marijuana and hashish—and LSD users. With her new friends, Quaaludes were the big drug. Karen didn’t like to smoke, she recently told me. But what was enough for the other kids wasn’t enough for Nancy. She had to get higher. According to Karen, Nancy began to shoot speed when it was available. Karen tried to talk her out of it—she was afraid Nancy would kill herself. That argument, of course, held no water with Nancy. She wanted to kill herself.

  “She was always reaching for something that wasn’t there,” Karen told me recently. “She needed for some guy to come along and set her straight, some nice guy. She’d do whatever a guy told her to.”

  Years later Suzy told me that one afternoon when she came home from school Nancy called her into the bathroom. She was shooting up. She ordered Suzy to tie her off with the hose. Suzy, always the dutiful sister, did. Then she watched in horror as Nancy repeatedly punched at herself with the needle until she found a vein.

  Years later David told me he answered the phone one Saturday morning. It was Randi. She advised him to check Nancy’s room to make sure she was still alive.

  “She took ten Ludes last night,” Randi said. “She took enough to kill a horse.”

  David checked.
Nancy was fast asleep. He tried rousing her, and, after a moment, was able to get her awake—mumbling and cursing, one eye open. She was alive.

  We didn’t know this sort of thing was going on at the time. Suzy and David didn’t tell us. They were afraid of incurring Nancy’s wrath. They were also trying to protect us, I think. We did figure Nancy was getting stoned. We did know her neighborhood friends were troublemakers. But we had no idea how seriously drug-involved she was, or that Suzy and David were being forced to witness her exploits. Had we known at the time what was going on, I suspect we would have sent Suzy and David away from Nancy to boarding school. It would have meant depriving them of a family life, but it would have been our only choice. We couldn’t do a thing with Nancy.

  Where was she getting money for drugs? She stole some more of my jewelry. I was forced to begin to keep it locked up. Then she intercepted a $300 refund check from the University of Colorado, forged our signatures on it, and cashed it. When we discovered this and angrily confronted her, she made up three or four different stories. She said she’d get the money back from someone she’d given it to. We never saw the money.

  We were not totally naive. We suspected even then that she was financing her drug usage by doing some low-level dealing. Three of the guys in the neighborhood were definitely dealers. She was often dropping by their places for a few minutes. Worse, they were often dropping by ours. They’d go up to her room with her, stay thirty seconds, then come downstairs, smirking. Never would they make eye contact with us on their way out. Who knew what they’d brought into our house. The thought terrified me.

  We would not have our home serving as an illegal drug marketplace. Frank and I considered calling the police anonymously and having the boys busted. Nancy, too. We went so far as to ask our attorney what would happen to her. He said that since she came from a comfortable suburban family and still—despite her numerous brushes with the law—had a spotless record, she would probably be put on probation and sent home to her parents. We just plain couldn’t win.

  The only way the legal process could help us, our attorney advised, would be to declare Nancy a ward of the court. But to make Nancy a ward of the court, we would have to relinquish our rights as parents. Frank and I wouldn’t do it. It would be like leaving your baby on somebody’s doorstep in a blanket, a five-dollar bill pinned to her diaper.

  She was our child, so she stayed in our home—where she remained a disruptive, divisive influence. Worse than ever before, actually. How could we raise Suzy and David responsibly when there were two sets of rules, one for them and one for Nancy? They had to be up at a certain time and off for school. Not Nancy. They had to be home by a certain time. Not Nancy. Sometimes she never came home at all. If we got angry at her for staying out, she’d tell us to “get fucked.” Or worse, she’d bring some boy home with her at two a.m. on a weeknight, lock her door, and “entertain” him right there in her room while the rest of us tried to sleep. The talking and loud music would wake the four of us up. Frank and I were outraged by this. It was our house. She was violating our family unit. Frank would have to get up and throw the boy out.

  After one such nocturnal visit, I went downstairs in the morning to find a young man with long hair sprawled on the living room sofa, asleep. I didn’t know who he was. I tried to wake him up, was unable to. I called Frank down. Frank was unable to rouse him. He really appeared to be quite comatose. Before we called an ambulance we woke up Nancy. She told us not to worry.

  “He’s just tired.” She yawned. “He was too tired to drive home, I guess. He’s cool—just let him sleep.”

  So we went about our morning routine with this strange person passed out on our couch. David said he was still there when he got home from school. When Nancy came down at about four o’clock, she woke him up and he left. Later I found out from David that he had been on Quaaludes.

  Even now, I wonder how we could possibly have put up with this. But thinking back, what could we have done? We had tried everything. There was no solution, no hope. All we could do was cope. Most of the time, we felt so defeated that we had no capacity for anger. Anger accomplished nothing but to make us feel worse, anyway. Certainly it had no effect on Nancy. Nothing did. More than once I asked myself Why me? What did I do to deserve this? More than once I fantasized that someone would kill her, put her and us out of our misery. I really did. I’m not ashamed to admit it.

  We went through the motions of living. We were prisoners in our own home. We literally could not leave. Then one night both Frank and I had to be out of town on business, Nancy responded by inviting half a dozen couples to sleep over. They took over the house—used our bed, David’s bed, Suzy’s bed. David told me there was humping and moaning and naked people running up and down the stairs all night long, not to mention two very large dogs. He and Suzy were forced to spend the night on the sofa while this went on around them.

  This was going on while Suzy, at fifteen, was starting to date boys and formulate her opinions about sex. I knew that Nancy and Suzy’s generation was more promiscuous than mine, that having sex on the first date—not kissing—was now considered by some to be the way a girl showed she liked a boy. So I tried to emphasize to Suzy the difference between sex and love—a distinction Nancy was never able to comprehend. Nancy was right there to contradict whatever I tried to impress on Suzy. She egged Suzy into losing her virginity.

  “You should go out with more guys,” she told Suzy one afternoon. “Don’t any of ’em dig you or what?”

  “Joe likes me,” Suzy said defensively.

  “So you oughta fuck him. You’re too old to be a virgin.”

  “Nancy,” I said sharply. “That’s Suzy’s business, not yours.”

  “I don’t like him,” Suzy said, ignoring me, as Nancy was.

  “What difference does it make?” Nancy demanded. “Everybody balls everybody.”

  “That’s not true!” I cried. “Everybody does not do that. There is such a thing as romance, Suzy. I don’t want you—”

  “Mom,” Nancy interrupted.

  “Yes?”

  “Fuck off. I’m trying to set my baby sister straight.”

  I was furious—especially when Suzy didn’t come home Friday night.

  She told me she was sleeping over at her friend Laura’s house. When Frank, David, and I were in the middle of dinner, I remembered that Laura’s parents had forbidden her to have sleepovers. I called Laura. She was home. Suzy was not there. She said she didn’t know where Suzy was, but Laura must have contacted her, because Suzy was afraid to come home the next morning. She hid at another friend’s house. David interceded and found her. She came home that afternoon, sobbing.

  “I don’t like what you did,” I told her. “More than anything, I don’t like to see you lie.”

  She apologized. I grounded her for two weeks.

  Frank and I fretted over Nancy’s influence on Suzy and David. It ate away at us that they still looked up to her, respected her, wanted to be like her. After all, she was getting more erratic and irrational with each passing day.

  One time she didn’t come home for two days. She finally called from a train station in Philadelphia. She said she’d been beaten and robbed. When I picked her up, she was bruised and pale. Her wallet and watch were missing. She was totally vague about what had happened.

  “He beat me,” she said softly, as if she were under a spell.

  “Who did, Nancy?”

  “He did.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know … I don’t know.”

  “I’ll call the police,” I said.

  “No! No! You can’t!” she suddenly screamed. “You can’t call! No, please!”

  I didn’t call. I took her home and put her to bed. She stayed there for a day and a half.

  Another time I dropped her off at a mall to buy some records. It was early on a weeknight. The mall closed at nine. We didn’t hear from her until midnight. She told us she’d been abducted by a man at gu
npoint and driven around. Again, she sounded very vague, as if under a spell.

  “Did he rape you?” Frank demanded, barely able to contain his agitation.

  It was maddening. We didn’t know if the crime was real or a product of Nancy’s imagination.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Did … he … rape … you?” Frank repeated.

  “No. He just wanted to kill me … to kill me. He drove and he drove and he … then he just drove back to where I am now.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Uh … the mall.”

  I said we’d be there as soon as we called the police. Again, she got hysterical. I brought her home and put her to bed. We never did figure out what happened either time.

  Then, one weeknight, Nancy brought home a boy named Stephen at around three in the morning. He was about twenty, a guitar player with long hair. Her stereo woke us up. Frank banged on the door and told him to get out.

  There was no response.

  “You hear me in there?” Frank screamed, pounding on the door with his fist.

  Still no response. He tried the knob. The door was locked. He stormed back into our room, picked up the phone.

  “I’m calling the goddamned police!” he fumed. “And get that lousy sonofabitch out of my house.”

  “Wait!” I cautioned. “Maybe they’ll get up, now that they’ve heard you. Wait a minute.”

  He slammed the phone down. “I know what I’ll do! I’ll take the door off! That’s what I’ll do!”

  By now, Suzy and David were standing in their doorways in their pajamas, yawning, annoyed.

  “What’s going on?” asked David.

  He got no answer from Frank, who took Nancy’s door off to reveal Nancy and Stephen lying on the bed, fully clothed, so zonked on drugs and Southern Comfort that they were barely stirring.

  “Out!” Frank screamed. “Get out!”

  “Okay, man. Okay,” Stephen mumbled. “Don’t get crazy. No need to get crazy.”

  “I’ll get crazy if I want to! This is my house and you’re in it! O-u-t!”

  Frank came back in our room, cursing. We could hear the two of them talking. Suzy and David closed their doors and went back to bed. Then Nancy showed Stephen to the front door. We heard it open. We didn’t hear it close. A moment later she came back upstairs. Stephen started up his car, drove away. He had a loud sports car. We could hear it circle around the block, pull back up in front of our house, and stop. He turned off the engine, got out, and came back in the house through the open front door.