by Linda Wolfe
The neighbors, learning about the burglary, suspected Robert of having committed it. But Phyllis, who wore hand-me-downs for several weeks afterward, told them she believed she’d been robbed by the superintendent or else by some cat burglar who had scaled the back walls. She lobbied to get the super fired and she bought a mercury vapor light for the back of the building. “It’s as powerful as a streetlamp,” she told the neighbors. “It’ll keep any future burglars away.”
“It’s finished. It’s really over,” Phyllis said to Barbara Dermont over tea sandwiches at the elegant Carlyle Hotel a few months after her apartment was burglarized. She was speaking about her marriage. Bob Chambers was moving out. A moment later tears welled up in her eyes.
Barbara was astonished. She’d never seen Phyllis cry before, had always imagined her as a tower of strength and a fortress of guarded emotion. She felt embarrassed and tried to comfort Phyllis, but Phyllis was inconsolable. “I didn’t want much. All I ever wanted was for Bob to take me for a walk on a Sunday afternoon and hold my hand,” she cried. “Or just take me out for a cup of coffee.”
He can’t, Barbara thought, because you always take control over everything when you’re with him. But she didn’t say this to Phyllis. Phyllis doesn’t see herself as controlling, Barbara mused. She doesn’t see herself clearly at all. She lives in a kind of fantasy world. Suddenly Barbara felt tears in her own eyes.
Toward the end of that winter’s ski season, Brock Pernice made his way to Robert’s house on East 90th Street. Brock wasn’t at York any longer. He’d transferred to another school. But he’d known Robert at York, and when they’d run into each other recently, Robert had mentioned that he had some terrific skis to sell. Brock had been interested.
At Robert’s, Brock went down to the basement with him. There he saw numerous pairs of skis.
“They’re old family skis,” Robert said, although in fact he and some friends had stolen them from a ski chalet in upstate New York.
“How much do you want for these?” Brock asked, selecting a pair.
“Two hundred dollars.”
“I’ve only got a hundred.”
“That’ll be okay,” Robert said.
Brock took the skis.
Several days later, he saw Robert again. It was at his school cafeteria. He was sitting there when suddenly he looked up and noticed Robert standing over him. He wasn’t alone. He had two black guys with him. Strangers. “We came for the money you owe,” Robert said.
Owe? Brock felt confused. “I thought you said a hundred dollars would be okay.”
“No.” Robert shook his head. “It’s two hundred.”
Brock realized he must have made a mistake about the price and said he’d pay up. “But not now,” he explained. “I don’t have the money on me.”
“You got a bank account, don’t you?” one of the strangers suddenly interjected.
Brock nodded unhappily.
“So let’s go to the bank.”
Brock hesitated. But the stranger who had spoken was broader and more muscular than he. So was the other one. So was Robert for that matter. Getting up from the table, Brock left school and headed for his bank.
Robert and the other two young men went with him. And the whole time he was drawing out his money, they stood ominously at his shoulders.
In the summer of that year—it was 1983—Jennifer went for the second time to the Adirondacks camp. Canoeing, sailing, and struggling up winding wilderness trails, she was, like adolescent campers everywhere, hungry all the time. One weekend Steve and Arlene visited her and, taking her grocery shopping, allowed her to buy thirty-five dollars’ worth of snacks. The largesse, the attention made her so joyous that she described the shopping expedition in a letter to one of her old Port Washington girlfriends. She also mentioned in the same letter that she was going out with a boy at camp. “His name is Jeremiah,” she wrote. “He is fifteen. Blond hair, blue eyes! Gorgeous!”
“If only I could be like her,” a young Colombian woman named Julia Zapata said about Phyllis Chambers to several of her friends that August. Julia’s English was poor, her clothes were shabby, and she was perpetually anxious, but she had landed a job as cook for an extremely rich but elderly and ailing couple, Samuel and Irene Coyne, who lived on Park Avenue. Phyllis Chambers was managing the household, supervising Julia and a staff of several nurses, but her principal job was to serve as companion to old Mrs. Coyne, who had had a debilitating stoke. Phyllis attended her with devotion, talking to her, bathing her, and even painting her lips and cheeks and wiggling her into a girdle and dressy clothes so she could go out to lunch to the Carlyle.
Mrs. Coyne’s son and daughter-in-law didn’t altogether approve of Phyllis. They felt she was extravagant and domineering, rather as if she were the lady of the house, not an employee. But Julia adored her. Sure, Phyllis acted like a lady, not a servant, was the way Julia looked at it. But what was wrong with that. Nothing said that because you scrubbed floors or washed pots or emptied bedpans, you couldn’t be a lady. Julia wanted to be one, too. So did all her friends who worked as servants to the rich.
Julia was thrilled when Phyllis began to tutor her in the essentials of ladydom—gave her advice about clothing and hairstyles and lectured her about improving her personality. “You must learn to celebrate yourself,” Phyllis told Julia. “You must say to yourself, ‘This is Julia, and I’m beautiful.’” Phyllis had learned to say things like this about her own self in a self-help group called The Pursuit of Excellence. She attended numerous self-help groups—among them Freedom Institute and Scientology.
Julia was also thrilled when Phyllis invited her to accompany her and Mrs. Coyne to the Carlyle.
Phyllis had been working for the Coynes for a long time when Julia met her at their home in the summer of 1983. But in the fall Phyllis was fired. Years later a member of the Coyne family would tell a public official that she’d gotten into trouble because, try as the family did to point out to her that her elderly charge no longer could appreciate gourmet dining, she had refused to listen to them and persisted in going to costly restaurants with her.
Losing her position with the Coynes was a blow to Phyllis. But she soon received a nursing assignment that made up for the disappointment. She was hired to care for New York’s beloved prelate Terence Cardinal Cooke, who was suffering from leukemia. She looked after the cardinal until his death in mid-October with a devotion and attentiveness that did not go unnoticed among his friends in the Church’s hierarchy.
“I miss you terribly. I’ll die if I don’t see you,” Jennifer said over the phone to Marjorie Harvey, one of her old Port Washington friends, late in October 1983. “Promise me, swear to me you’ll come and visit me in the city.”
At Halloween, Marjorie accepted Jennifer’s invitation. So did several other Port Washington girls whom Jennifer had been imploring to come. The group took the half-hour train ride into the city, went downtown to Jennifer’s loft in SoHo, and donned their costumes. One girl dressed as a rabbit, another as a bum, several as black cats. Then they went to Washington Square Park, bought a couple of bottles of Riunite red, and sat drinking on a stoop near the park.
They had a wonderful time until the black tights and twisting tails of the girls impersonating cats caught the eye of a group of rowdy young men. “Here pussy, here pussy,” the men sniggered. Alarmed, the Port Washington girls scattered and began to run away. But Jennifer turned on their tormentors with an obscene comeback.
“Don’t do that,” Marjorie said, grabbing Jennifer’s arm. “One of these days you’re going to get yourself killed saying things like that.”
Jennifer shrugged. “This is New York. You have to know how to handle yourself here.”
Marjorie bristled. Jennifer’s telling me I’m unsophisticated, she fretted. Her irritation lingered, and later she decided that all evening Jennifer had kept implying that her old friends were too provincial and tame for her.
They may have been. By the night
of the Halloween visit Jennifer was not just going to the occasional disco but to lively and at times turbulent parties. At one, she and two city girlfriends consumed a bottle of vodka. Afterward they got sick and hurried into the bathroom. There Jennifer made them all laugh by lying down in the bathtub with her feet and arms sticking out.
She drank a lot. One night she came home from Studio so drunk her father grounded her.
Despite her flirtations with self-help groups, Phyllis counted most on God to see her through her troubles with Robert. She was very pious—“perhaps even overly pious,” a priest who counseled her would one day tell an interviewer. Her beliefs were stern and narrow. One night toward the end of 1983, John Dermont, who was also a Catholic, became aware of this. He and Phyllis were at dinner together, and he had just waxed philosophical and said, “I believe in God. But sometimes I wonder. I mean, where was God during the Holocaust?”
Phyllis said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, you know,” Dermont replied. “All those people died.”
“Those were Jews,” Phyllis said.
Dermont didn’t see the relevance of her answer. “I’m not talking about what religion people had,” he said, “but about God’s concern for humanity.”
Phyllis had no problems with the topic. “Oh yes, John,”, she said. “But those people had turned their backs upon Christ.”
Jennifer, nearly sixteen, fell in love with the rock star Billy Idol in the spring of 1984. Billy had blue eyes. A pouty mouth. A tattoo. She adored his music, the way he scowled, the way he swaggered. BILLY, she wrote in big block letters in her friend Joan Huey’s journal, and drew hearts with his name and hers entwined.
She and Joan talked about boys all the time, and daily they went on what they called “guy-searching” walks, strolling eagerly among the crowds of young people on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. They also planned a trip to Florida, a trip which, Jennifer scribbled in Joan’s journal, would net them “Tan guys! Epcot Center! Disco! Everything! Sex, sex, sex!”
“I know we would have the best time with blonds,” Joan scribbled back. Blonds with “bluish-green eyes.”
But Billy Idol was their ruling passion, and at last they managed to find out where he lived. For weeks afterward, the two teenagers spent hours in front of his Village apartment. And soon they began writing each other letters in which they fantasized romance with the surly singer. “Can you believe we got Billy’s real name-n-address?” Jennifer wrote. “I happen to love him… . Billy Idol rules!”
“I happen to love him also,” Joan wrote back. “A lot.” Then she spiced up her correspondence. “You and I will get Billy Idol and we will have massive sex with him, okay?” she suggested. Then, later, “All right. We’re gonna go back there and Billy will be by himself and we’re gonna have a threesome right away.”
One day Jennifer told Marjorie Harvey, her old Port Washington friend, that while shopping in Tower Records she’d actually met Billy, and what’s more, he’d kissed her. “That’s not all,” she said. “The best part was that after he kissed me, the manager told him he shouldn’t have done it, not with all these diseases going around, and Billy just sneered and gave the manager this look like, Hell, it was worth it!”
It may have been true. But it may just as well have been a fantasy. Marjorie believed it. But she didn’t know that Jennifer was busily inventing a new life for herself that spring, a star-studded, stud-starred life in which she was no commonplace schoolgirl but a creature irresistible to handsome tanned guys and even to celebrities.
She was also writing poetry. Her poems, awkward rhymed verses, were generally about love, especially love gone sour or awry. One, written about the boy she had found “gorgeous” at camp, went:
I loved to look into his eyes,
To hear his voice,
Or even just to see him smile.
Another, written to a boy she felt had mistreated her, mourned:
That playing games
Is for little boys.
Girls were never meant
To be treated as toys.
When she wasn’t composing verses, she scrawled giddy letters and notes to her girlfriends. “I love you so much!! We are the closest two buddies can ever get,” she wrote to one. “I know we’ll remain friends forever!!” “I love ya,” she wrote to another, “for good times and bad. I’ll be on your side forever more ’cause that’s what friends are for.”
She was increasingly preoccupied by love—or, rather, being loved. As her sixteenth birthday approached, her longings crystallized around the notion of losing her virginity. It was a burden carrying around her virginity, fighting off boys who wanted to relieve her of it, hearing girls she knew who’d given up theirs when they were fourteen and fifteen start to exchange secrets about their experiences, then clam up when she said she hadn’t had sex yet. But more important to her than social acceptance was the idea that she would at last, once she had sex, truly experience love.
The guy she had in mind, she told a school friend, wasn’t Brock. “Brock’s always fighting with me,” she said. “He doesn’t really love me. And for the first time to be good, the partners really have to be in love.”
Soon afterward she and the boy she had chosen had sex. It was her sixteenth birthday present to herself—a present even more exciting than the one Arlene gave her, which was a trip to the Bahamas. She was exultant about giving up her virginity. “I’m so happy,” she bubbled over the phone to one of her old Port Washington buddies. “I’ve done it, and it was great. I’m so glad I planned it, didn’t just get drunk at a party and end up in bed with some guy, like happens to a lot of girls.”
But for all her planning, her first sexual experience brought her misery as well as happiness. Only a few days after the event, she arrived at a party and saw the boy with whom she’d made love greeting another girl with a hug. She sobbed with jealousy and stormed and screamed at him.
She never fully forgave him. Not long afterward she went back to seeing Brock again. And to seeing other boys, too.
“Robert does not do his work nor does he deal realistically with his situation. There is a possibility, therefore, that he will not graduate with his class,” York headmaster Stewart informed Phyllis Chambers toward the end of that school semester—Robert’s senior term. It was but one of many discouraging notes he had sent to Phyllis. He hated having to write it, because Mrs. Chambers was such a concerned parent. Always volunteering to serve on school committees, always helping out on parent-teacher days. But although he liked her, there was a limit to what he could do for her. Ultimately Robert would have to pass his courses to be entitled to a diploma. And no one could assume he’d pass. As he always said to his kids, never assume! Assume makes an ass out of you and me.
Of course, part of the problem was the way parents these days didn’t control their kids. They let them hang out all night doing God knows what, and the kids came to class more asleep than awake. As he always told the parents: If you lose control of your kids, you’re running a hotel, not a home.
Still, it was his job to try to get Robert through high school, and he made up his mind to get really tough with him. He’d keep him after school, give him detention. Maybe then he’d recognize the seriousness of his situation.
Day after day that spring of 1984 Robert stayed late after school while much of the rest of the senior class, cans of beer or paper cups of mixed drinks in their hands, made their way to the park and lazed in the sun, smoking pot, playing Frisbee, and listening to music. Only weeks before, he’d been one of them. And now he was a prisoner. Despising Stewart’s efforts at disciplining him, he, too, wrote a poem:
This detention is not working.
I no longer care.
I’m going insane, slow but sure.
My condition is terminal.
There is no cure except … let me out!
But Stewart wouldn’t let him out. And his parents, he complained to his friends, wouldn’t get off his back. It was shape
up or nothing. They’d even told him that unless he got into some good college, they wouldn’t give him financial support. The problem with parents, he charged, was that they were always pushing, pushing, pushing you.
One day, inspired, he wrote another poem, this one entitled “Our Parents.” In it he painted a romanticized portrait of a generic mother and father, a portrait in which self-pity and mockery were hidden behind lines of card-shop sentimentality:
Strength and security, laughter and fun,
He’s a prince to his daughter, a pal to his son.
A storyteller to girls and boys,
She’s seldom dismayed by the family noise.
He’s an “everyday Santa” who brings home surprises,
The man to consult when a problem arises.
The truest of friends in times of need,
She’s eager to help her child succeed.
He’s a living instructor who struggles to teach,
All the goals his child someday can reach.
They know deep in their hearts that day after day,
It was all worth the bother
Just to hear their children say,
“I love you, Mother and Father!”
Then, at last, graduation time arrived. Robert, dressed in a cap and gown, went to the ceremony, which was held in the auditorium of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He strode up to the podium to receive his diploma case and shook Stewart’s hand as he reached for it.
But the diploma case was empty. He hadn’t, despite the detention, completed all his course work and wouldn’t be getting the actual diploma unless he made up the work at summer school.
That night Robert celebrated with his classmates at a graduation party. It was held in a loft, where a reggae band entertained the graduates. Robert got drunk. But that didn’t bother his admirers, the flocks of tittering, dewy-eyed girls who hugged, kissed, and cuddled him as if he were a pasha with a harem.