by Linda Wolfe
Robert had made it clear to her he didn’t want a dull job, or a poorly paying one. He wanted something in television or the fashion industry. Maybe he could be a model, he suggested. Phyllis agreed, asked a friend who was in the business to recommend him to photographers and agencies, and sent him to an expensive dentist to have his teeth prettified. And all the while that she worked at helping him get a job, she continued to try, just as she had when he was a little boy, to expand his social connections. The actress Mary Martin was a friend of Mrs. Hammerstein’s. One day Phyllis suggested to the actress that Robert and her grandson ought to meet and go out together. They’d like each other, she insisted, and pressed to arrange a date.
But all her efforts came to naught. Robert and Mary Martin’s grandson didn’t hit it off, and none of her contacts came up with a proper job. After a while she decided the best thing would be to enroll him at Hunter College in the upcoming semester.
Far-out hairstyles were in, that early winter of 1985. Leilia Van Baker shaved off a chunk of her butterscotch locks, then bleached the rest sheer white, and Jennifer streaked her brown hair with flashes of blond. On weekends the two of them went out on the town with a third girl, Kitty Schoen, who was a year older than they were. They went not just to Studio but to West Side bars like MacGowan’s and the West End Cafe, and the new downtown club, Area, where the elaborate decor was changed every few weeks and the bathroom stalls were often used for quick sex or quicker drug fixes. At Area, Kitty and Jennifer had the most startling experience of their young lives. Someone offered them heroin. It was a shock. They were used to people offering them coke and pot and Ecstasy. Those drugs were middle-class. But heroin!
Kitty and Jennifer didn’t smoke cigarettes, but occasionally they sampled some of the middle-class drugs that were offered to them. Still, for the most part they preferred to get high on liquor. And on attention. They got plenty of that. Wherever they went, they made sure to dress eye-catchingly.
Jennifer was the most eye-catching of the three of them. She wore tiny miniskirts or ripped jeans—bought them long before Kitty and Leilia did. And she dangled a big cross around her neck, just the way Madonna did. The cross didn’t go over too well with her Jewish family, but she wore it anyway.
But no matter how many compliments girls and boys alike paid Jennifer for her trendy outfits, she didn’t feel altogether attractive. Often she’d stand in front of a mirror and bemoan her face, her figure. “God, I’m getting so fat,” she’d say. She was five feet seven and weighed about 140 pounds. Staring at her stomach, she’d promise herself she’d go on a diet to get rid of the little bulge beneath her belly button. Thin was what those East Side boys she’d been meeting lately really liked. Thin was what all their girlfriends were.
Kitty felt Jennifer’s obsession with being thin had something to do with her being jealous of Leilia. Or of her stepmother. She told Jennifer to forget about being thin. “Plump is in your genes,” she said. “You’re Jewish. Me, too. We’ll never look like lanky Christian girls. Anyway, even if you were thin as a rail, those preppie guys would never really accept you. They fool around with girls like us, but they don’t fall in love with us.” Still, Jennifer started to diet, shunning meat and gobbling carrots, celery sticks, and lettuce leaves until she felt like a rabbit. You had to be skinny if you were going to really make it on the scene.
“Yo, Jennifer!” a girl named Sally Hopper, who hadn’t seen Jennifer since camp two summers before, called out to her excitedly when she ran into her in MacGowan’s shortly after the start of 1985. Jumping up to greet her old camp friend, Jennifer accidentally knocked over the drink of a boy she was sitting with, and the liquid went spilling into his lap. Sally’s first thought was My God, if I did that, I’d be so embarrassed. But Jennifer wasn’t embarrassed. She was cool. “I’m really sorry,” she said to the boy. “Do you want me to buy you another drink?” Sally admired her for that, and afterward she took to hanging out with Jennifer.
One night at the West End Cafe, Sally and Jennifer got drunk and pretended to be having a fight, pantomiming being cats about to scratch. They got so into the game, they didn’t realize how loud they were being until a bartender objected and one of their friends made them go ouside. But what the hell. It was so much fun they just carried the pretend fight out onto the street.
Sally loved goofing around. So did Jennifer. One weekend Jennifer went on a ski trip with a bunch of friends and goofed around in front of a fireplace, posing for outrageous photographs. Lying on the floor alongside one of the guys, she held the fireplace tongs to his genitals and smiled a silly gleeful smile.
Tables with red and white checked clothes. A fireplace with a roaring fire. An old-fashioned wooden bar and behind it a display of cunning little toys—dolls and cars and brass knickknacks. Dorrian’s Red Hand was one of the homiest, coziest bars Jennifer had ever been in.
It was Brock who had first suggested they go there. He and she had gotten back together again, and he’d been taking her out to little French restaurants and even to a couple of shows. He knew she liked to do sophisticated things. And Dorrian’s was, no doubt about it, sophisticated. Her girlfriends had been talking about it for weeks. They said you had to dress up to go there. Wear nice shirts, good leather boots, and your best ripped jeans, because there were girls there who came in fur coats. Minks. Maybe their mothers’, but maybe their own. They were loaded, those girls. They carried hundreds of dollars of cash in their wallets, and some of them even had their own credit cards. Jennifer had been curious to see the place.
Then, the first time she went, she didn’t like it all that much. At least not at first. She felt uncomfortable, because she didn’t know anybody, whereas everyone else seemed to know everyone else. They’d been friends since grade school, had met each other years ago in fancy East Side schools like Spence and St. David’s. Some of the people she met said they’d never even heard of Baldwin, and treated her as if she was a nobody, a “wannabe.” That’s what people there called girls who wanted to get into their set.
But in the end she had a good time. She met a few girls with whom she clicked, recognized a couple of guys she’d seen at other bars, and told Brock she’d like to go to Dorrian’s again.
They did go back. They went again and again. They went so often that Brock tired of Dorrian’s, and sometimes he’d say, “Let’s do something else. Let’s try a new bar.” But they always wound up at Dorrian’s.
3.
Valentines
On an April afternoon in 1985, Patricia Fillyaw, a personnel manager for a major communications company, went into the kitchen of her Roosevelt Island apartment and flung herself into an orgy of cooking. Her elder son, twenty-one-year-old David, was coming home today after a year and a half in prison.
Pat was a community-minded woman who had helped establish Roosevelt Island’s first day-care center. She was also a devoted mother. She’d helped David with his schoolwork when he was a little boy, she’d encouraged him to paint when he showed an early talent for art, and when he’d entered junior high and begun to have scholastic problems, she’d raided her family’s small savings and put him in a private prep school—McBurney, on the West Side. He was one of the few black children there.
Pat’s husband, Jerry, who worked for a cash register company, had approved the expenditure. He wasn’t David’s natural father. Pat had David out of wedlock when she was just a girl. But Jerry, with whom she had another son, had adopted David, looked after him like a real father, and tried, like Pat herself, to do for David whatever would ensure him a good future, whatever would keep him from drowning in the whirlpool that sucked up so many promising young black men.
Still, despite Pat and Jerry’s sacrifices, David hadn’t done well at McBurney. He’d kept having problems, McBurney had asked him to withdraw, and around that time, Pat had learned that he was using cocaine.
She’d been shocked, and consumed with guilt. What kind of a mother was she that she hadn’t realized earlier w
hat was wrong with her son? she’d asked herself. But the parents of other drug-abusing teenagers, whom she met in the support groups she began attending, had made her feel better. What did she know about coke? they said. What did most parents know? How could parents spot the effects when all they saw, if they saw anything at all, was that their kid had a runny nose? Anyway, the important thing was not to brood about the past but to rescue the future, do something to ensure that the kid got rehabilitated.
Pat had tried. She’d consulted a psychiatrist and put David in a good residential treatment center. But David had kept on using drugs. And when he was seventeen, he and some friends had broken into a house and David had been sent to Camp McCormick, a state-run correctional center for youths. Then, when he’d been released from Camp McCormick, he’d committed another burglary and ended up in jail. But now at last he’d served his time. And he was drug-free.
Awaiting his arrival, Pat sautéed a chicken and peeled a mound of vegetables. Then she began sifting flour for her dessert, the special pound cake David had adored when he was little.
The cake was in the oven when she heard him at the door. She ran to him with open arms.
Soon after Pat Fillyaw welcomed David home, Robert applied for work at the Fulton Street Cafe, a restaurant in New York’s newest tourist area, the South Street Seaport. Roberta Dillon, a young manager, interviewed him and was impressed with his good looks and courtesy. He’ll make a perfect host, she thought, and offered him a summer job.
Parties. Girls getting so stoned they’d strip to their panties and dance with each other. Guys getting so wasted they didn’t even pay attention to the girls. George Hannaford, a shy young preppie who lived in a vast apartment on Park Avenue, started giving parties that summer whenever his parents went to their vacation house. Coke was the big thing with the boys. The girls preferred Ecstasy, which cost about forty dollars a hit but lasted six hours and made them feel in love with the world. When they felt that way, they’d screw whoever wanted them, even two or three guys in a row. But there wasn’t that much sex. Sex wasn’t what it was all about.
George worried about his parties sometimes. There’d be thirty, forty, even fifty kids camped out on the Aubusson carpet and the Billy Baldwin print sofas. Suppose his parents got wind of the bashes? But he kept on giving them. They made him feel popular.
The only bad thing was the mornings. He always got this let-down feeling, because he’d wake up and see that he didn’t know half the people who’d slept over. That would make him start worrying again. Suppose something got stolen? What would his parents say?
Robert Chambers came to a lot of the parties. George didn’t worry about him. Robert’s okay, was the way he looked at it. He’s one of us.
A few weeks after she hired Robert, Roberta Dillon noticed that he was not, in fact, an ideal host. He was chronically late to work, and when he finally arrived, he moved so lethargically around the dining room that his efficiency was close to zero. He was deep into drugs, some of the waiters and waitresses told her. And what’s more, he was stealing their tips. Dillon wasn’t sure she believed the stories about Robert. He was so clean-cut and well-mannered. She kept him on.
“I’m going into business,” David Fillyaw told his mother excitedly one evening in August. “Me and two friends. We’re going to get discos to sponsor fashion shows.”
“Where are you going to get the money?” Pat Fillyaw asked. “It costs a lot of money to start a business.”
“Not this one. Not East Side Productions,” David said. “All we have to do is get some stores to contribute clothes to us and a disco to agree to show the clothes, and we’ll start turning a profit right away.”
Pat wasn’t keen about the plan. For one thing, she didn’t believe it would work. For another, she’d been hoping that in the fall David would go to college. He’d been poring over school catalogues ever since he’d returned home, and watching him do so had filled her with joy. But he was so enthusiastic about his business idea that after a while Pat decided that maybe business was right for David. Besides, East Side Productions seemed viable. The sportswear chain Benetton had shown an interest in the idea, David said, and the Cat Club, a downtown disco, had given him and his friends the go-ahead.
Still, Pat wanted to see the disco. And one night she persuaded David to take her and Jerry to it.
As soon as they entered, Pat’s stomach sank. The disco looked more like a warehouse than a nightclub. It had black walls and beer-sticky carpets. The mirror on the back wall was smeared with dirt. There was something about the atmosphere that told her it was wrong for David to be hanging out there.
She told David this. “Go to school,” she said. “Get a career.” But he got angry. “East Side Productions is my career,” he said.
Robert ran into David that summer. He’d met him years ago, back when David used to hang out with friends who went to York Prep. Now he found out David had just gotten out of prison for stealing. He knew a thing or two about stealing, too, Robert told David. He’d burglarized his own building twice, he boasted, as well as an apartment on the West Side. Not only that, but all summer long he’d been managing to pay for his coke by copying names and numbers off credit cards he handled at the restaurant he was working in. What he did was, he used the information on the cards to get Western Union to wire him money. He didn’t have to show the card, he said. All he had to do was have the cardholder’s name and number.
David and Robert hit it off.
Jennifer was summering in Southampton again, where she was working in a boutique. Some of her friends were staying at their parents’ vacation homes, others—the ones whose parents didn’t have houses in the Hamptons—were crashing wherever they could. Kitty Schoen even crashed one night at the Meadow Club in Southampton, spending the hours in secret in the women’s locker room. But Jennifer had a place of her own. She was sharing a house with Leilia and several other young people.
One of the boys in their group house, a preppie with a penchant for outrageous pets, had brought his boa constrictor with him. Jennifer hated the loathsome creature at first. It looked slimy and thick, and it ate live mice. She watched the owner feed it, and she shrieked with disgust.
“It’s a snake,” the boa constrictor’s master grumbled. “What do you expect it to eat? Pizza?”
Jennifer laughed despite herself. And eventually she came to enjoy the snake’s acrobatic gyrations and voracious appetite. She also began to enjoy its owner, who was strikingly good-looking. And soon they became lovers.
Their affair was glorious at first. He told his friends Jennifer had a really hot body. She told her friends that he was the first guy who had truly awakened her sexually. Not that she had orgasms. But that wasn’t the point. The snake’s owner paid more attention to her body than any guy she’d been with previously, she explained, and that in itself made her feel wonderful.
In the middle of the summer she started keeping a diary. And at the height of the summer her friends noticed a change in her. She stopped worrying about her figure, wore bikinis all the time, and seemed infinitely more sure of herself than she’d ever been before.
But her self-assurance didn’t last long. When the cool weather set in, her bronzed and virile boyfriend broke up with her. She felt betrayed, and returned disheartened to the city.
Money and coke. Coke and money. By the fall of 1985, Robert was obsessed with both. He was enrolled at Hunter College, but he rarely went to his classes. He’d started freebasing, and when he wasn’t high he was thinking about how to afford getting high.
He had lots of ideas. They came to him easily when he put his mind to thinking about the rich people among whom he had moved throughout his life, and soon he began trying out some of his ideas. One day he went home with a girl he knew and, when she wasn’t looking, fixed her front door so that it would remain unlocked while he and she went into her bedroom to neck. While she was moaning in his arms, a friend whose help he had enlisted entered the apartment through the
unlocked door and removed whatever valuables he could grab in the foyer. Another day, Robert gained entry to the well-guarded Park Avenue building where another of his girlfriends lived by having the doorman buzz the girl’s apartment; her maid, recognizing his name, said it was all right for him to come in. Once in the lobby, he took the elevator to the top floor, got out, climbed a service staircase to the penthouse, and burglarized an apartment. This time David Fillyaw came along, and they stole thousands of dollars’ worth of silver, jewelry, and electronic equipment. They fenced their catch in midtown and shared the proceeds.
Afterward, Robert felt pleased with himself. And one day he bragged about the exploit to a new girlfriend.
She was impressed. He’s suave, she thought. Just like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief.
Back at school and starting her senior year, Jennifer became more experimental. She used drugs on occasion—coke, Ecstasy, and LSD. And she had sex with a number of lovers. None of them gave her the kind of ecstatic experiences she’d had with her summer boyfriend. Nor did they assuage the pain she still felt about that breakup, the hurt that clung to her heart like moss to a stone. But when she slept with guys, she told her friends, they’d always tell her afterward how wonderful and beautiful she was, and for a little while, for the time they were staring into her eyes and saying the words, she’d believe it was true and at least momentarily feel good about herself.
She was having a hard time that fall. Her schoolwork oppressed her. Her scores on college admissions tests were very low. And she was fighting a lot with her father and stepmother. The quarrels were over the usual adolescent issues—late hours, unmade beds, unwashed laundry—but they made Jennifer furious, and she’d storm out of the apartment and go to friends’ homes to sleep.
Her father and stepmother were impossible, she’d complain to these friends, sometimes falling into such a rage that she’d pound clenched fists against furniture and walls. Her father was erratic, she’d fume, loving and indulgent sometimes, strict and punitive at others. Her stepmother was a witch who had enchanted him and stolen away his love. They went off on fascinating trips together without inviting her along. Worse, if she objected to being left behind, they assumed she didn’t want to be alone in the loft and asked friends of theirs to stay with her, as if what she needed was a babysitter. Then, when they didn’t leave her alone, when they were all three together in the loft, they made her feel like an intruder. They’d yell at her if she left even a few dishes in the sink, say she had no respect for their space. And if she so much as went near their collection of musical instruments, picked up one of their little flutes or African shakers, they’d shout at her to stop. “I get into trouble if I so much as move anything!” she’d sob.