by Linda Wolfe
Right after Christmas, sixteen-and-a-half-year-old Dave Silverstein met Jennifer in the West End Cafe. He was a little drunk that night. At the beginning of December, New York had raised the drinking age from nineteen to twenty-one, and Dave had thought he’d never be able to get a drink again. In fact, the day the law went into effect, he and his friends had gone nuts. They’d kept calling each other up and saying, “Can you believe it?” and, “What’s gonna happen to us now!” The whole thing was so tragic it reminded Dave of that time his father always talked about, the day President Kennedy got shot. By Christmas, though, Dave and his friends had discovered they could get drinks at the West End Cafe if they had ID saying they were twenty-one; that’s why he was drunk. He was making up for lost time.
The way he met Jennifer was, she smiled at him from across the bar and he smiled back. And then later, even though she looked older than him, she came up to him and said, “There’s something about you. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something really special.” Then she said, “Could you call me?” and gave him her number.
He was flying for days, it was so flattering. Especially considering she was seventeen and a half! So he called her. And she was very friendly. Casual, like they’d known each other a long time. She wanted to come to his house that very evening, but since he had a rehearsal for a school play, they made plans to go out on Friday. She wanted to go to this place America, but he didn’t have the money. But he had free passes for the Hard Rock Cafe, and he suggested they go there instead, and she said fine.
He picked her up in front of a girlfriend’s building on Park Avenue, and they took the subway downtown to her place in SoHo. She was the first girl he’d ever been out with that didn’t mind the subway. The rest of them were so Jappy they’d only go places by cab. But not Jennifer. She was so nice.
Her neighborhood startled him. He’d never been down to SoHo before. There were all these iron buildings, and they were covered with graffiti. He felt he was in that movie After Hours. And then it got more and more bizarre, just like in the movie. Her apartment was a loft. It was so big it looked like the gymnasium of his high school. And then she took a shower, and afterward got dressed right in front of him. She wasn’t all naked when she came over to where he was waiting for her, but she wasn’t all dressed, either. And she just acted casual and took about an hour getting into her clothes. She said she couldn’t find the right blouse to put on.
Nothing happened. Not then. They just hung out in her room, which was plastered with pictures of male models and Billy Idol, and talked about people they knew in common. He was surprised to learn that there was one, a friend of his cousin’s who looked like a real thug, whom she’d gone out with. She didn’t seem the type. Still, he didn’t let it throw him, and after a while they stopped talking and walked all the way uptown to the Hard Rock.
One funny thing happened there. They’d been told they’d have to wait a half hour for their table, so they’d put their names on the list and gone outside to pass the time. They were sitting on a stoop not far from the club when they were approached by three girls from Long Island or New Jersey—you could tell they were B and T by the way they talked—and one of the girls said, “Which way’s the Hard Rock Cafe?” He started to point to the place, but Jennifer interrupted him. “It’s right down that way,” she said. But she was pointing in the wrong direction. He said, “Jennifer, are you sure?” and she said, “Yes, I’m positive.” So these Bridge and Tunnel girls went the way she’d said to go. Well, sure enough, five minutes later they were back, and when they turned up, Jennifer sent them off in another wrong direction. It made him think Jennifer had an attitude. That she liked to make fun of people. But maybe she just liked to make fun of people from Long Island or New Jersey. Though that would be odd, because she’d told him she came from Long Island. Well, maybe she was trying to live it down. Anyway, it didn’t matter. She didn’t make fun of him.
The Hard Rock was great when they finally got inside, and afterward they went back to Jennifer’s place. Her parents weren’t coming home, she told him, and she asked him to sleep over. That was fine with him, though he had to call his parents and lie to them, tell them he was at a friend’s house. But later he didn’t feel so fine. They started fooling around and it didn’t work out. He just couldn’t bring himself to fool around all the way. She wanted him to. She didn’t play games like other girls. There was no bullshit about her. But he wasn’t used to girls being so direct. He was still a junior, and he hadn’t even begun to figure it all out yet, and here all of a sudden he was with a girl who just asked for what she wanted, and it just threw him for a loop.
He didn’t feel proud of himself for the way it turned out. But she was nice about it and told him to call her again sometime.
He did. He took her out to the show Plenty, which they both hated, and afterward they went back to his house and fooled around there. But it was no different the second time, and they ended up just talking and looking at photographs. She asked to see a picture of him as a little kid, and that kind of touched him.
After that they made a date for another night. But his cat died, and he couldn’t get to a phone, and he kept thinking about his cousin’s friend and the things Jennifer had said she’d done with him, and with other guys, too, and he figured he wasn’t old enough for the hassle of teenage romance, so he just went out with his friends.
She called him the next day. She told him she was upset at his standing her up. But when he told her what he felt about himself, about how he was ashamed of himself for being afraid to have a girlfriend just yet, she couldn’t have been nicer. She didn’t carry on about being rejected. She didn’t say, “Please, please.” She acted real understanding, and she just said, “Well, okay. But let’s stay in touch. Call me every once in a while.” He never did, though.
Later that month Jennifer told a friend that a guy she’d thought was really cute had rejected her. “Boys are so strange,” she said, her voice sad. “When you haven’t had sex yet, all they want is to get you to do it. But if you’ve had it, they’re scared of you.”
Early in February of 1986, Robert and a friend stole traveler’s checks from a Brazilian visitor to the United States. They went out on the town with this bonanza, cashing the checks in bars and restaurants along crowded Columbus Avenue.
They got away with the theft, just as Robert had gotten away with his burglaries, and he began to feel clever. “I’m wasting my time at Hunter,” he told Joel Coles, one of his Hunter classmates. “I want to get back up to Boston.”
“Why? What’ll you do up there?” his classmate asked.
“Go to Harvard.”
“Harvard? How’re you gonna get in there?”
“It’s easy,” he said. “All I gotta do is take some classes in their extension program, like John Flanagan’s doing. Once I’m in the extension program, they’ll move me along, and next thing I’ll be going to Harvard.”
Coles wasn’t sure you could do that, but Robert was so cool he didn’t want to argue about it.
“You’ve gotta ask Robert Chambers,” Jennifer said to Kitty Schoen just before Valentine’s Day. Kitty was planning a combination birthday and Valentine’s Day party.
At first Kitty was reluctant about asking him. She knew that people said he sometimes stole when he went to parties. Suppose he ripped something off from her parents?
“I can’t ask him,” she told Jennifer. “I don’t even know him.”
“Leilia does,” Jennifer said. “Let’s get her to ask him.”
Kitty still wasn’t sure she wanted Robert, but Jennifer begged Leilia to invite him, and after a while Kitty decided that having him at the party might be fun. He was so good-looking and popular. She joined Jennifer in imploring Leilia to ask him.
Leilia did, and on the night of the party, she picked him up and personally escorted him to Kitty’s. Jennifer was ecstatic. She was there with another boy, but she talked to Robert awhile and told Kitty he was really nice.
It was a great party, to Kitty’s way of thinking. Everyone got really ripped on champagne. And there was music and dancing and people looked terrific. Not the boys. The boys didn’t give a damn about dressing. But the girls were really dressed.
Things got a little out of hand, though. A friend of Robert’s took one of those four-foot-high Think Big pencils and started writing on the wall with it. It didn’t have any lead, but it made marks just the same. And Kitty’s father came in and saw the marks and told the guy to leave. Which he did. And Robert left with him. And then afterward one of the girls discovered she was missing twenty dollars from her coat pocket, and everyone thought Robert had taken the money. Everyone except Kitty and Jennifer. They blamed his friend.
After a while Robert and his friend came back. But nobody said anything about the money. There wasn’t any point. The guys came back stoned. They were so bombed out you couldn’t really talk to them. They were so out of it that although Jennifer was really excited about Robert’s being there, he never even remembered afterward that he’d talked with her at the party. “Jennifer?” he said to Kitty when she mentioned that he’d met her at her house. “I didn’t notice her.”
The forensic unit at Bellevue is like no other floor in the giant hospital. Prisoners enter it through an electronic gate that deposits them in a tiny claustrophobic closetlike area. There they wait till a second electronic gate swings open with a ferocious clang. Then they are on the unit, a warren of small wards and private rooms. These wards and rooms are as big as those on other floors, and no more drab in color, but their outside windows are barred, and along the corridor side each has a viewing area made of shatterproof glass to permit surveillance by hospital personnel and corrections officers.
David Fillyaw kept returning there. He preferred the conditions to those at Rikers Island, hospital personnel believed, and they held firm to the view that his frequent talk of suicide was just an effort to frighten corrections department authorities into hospitalizing rather than jailing him. They saw in him the classic outlines of the sociopath, a man whose stated emotions were a sham and who was forever making excuses for himself. When he talked to them about Sarah, he persisted in saying that if it hadn’t been for cocaine and what he called “Long Island iced tea”—a concoction of various white liquors he had mixed with a shot of a red liqueur—he never would have hurt her. And when he talked of his penchant for drugs and drink, he blamed his habits not on himself but on the fact that he’d never known his real father and that his stepfather hadn’t loved or understood him.
Pat Fillyaw was unaware of the degree to which David held her girlhood transgression and her choice of a stepfather for him responsible for the wreckage he’d made of his life. Nor did she view her son as a sociopath. When she visited David, which she did every day, she saw only a sad, disheartened boy, a child to whom she had given life and who now no longer wanted that gift. His despair seemed authentic enough to her, matching as it did her own now that he was in such trouble.
On March 19, David once again obtained a bathrobe belt and, knotting it around his neck, attempted to hang himself. He was found before he had succeeded in altogether choking away his own breath. This time he had made a real suicide attempt, a corrections officer promptly informed the district attorney’s office. It was serious.
When Pat learned what had happened, she was distraught. She blamed the hospital. How the hell had David gotten the belt? she kept wanting to know. And why, when he’d said he was fed up with life, had the staff not protected her boy from himself?
Sleek Vuarnet sunglasses. Velvet-soft sweatshirts. On March 21, as he was wandering along Columbus Avenue, these things caught Robert’s eye—perhaps because his old friend John Flanagan had invited him to visit him over Easter at his vacation home in Palm Beach, and looking good was on his mind.
Many days when he window-shopped, he felt envious of his wealthy friends, and a feeling of self-pity overtook him. He would ask himself why it was that he, who was as worthy, as deserving, as those other young men, didn’t have all the clothes, the accessories, the accouterments they had. On this particular night he set out to rectify matters. He had the means. He had stolen a credit card from a girlfriend while they were at a party together. The card was her mother’s. He would take care of his needs with it, he decided. Entering store after store on the busy avenue, he shopped to his heart’s content. He bought the sweatshirts he’d admired. He bought the fancy sunglasses. And he even got himself a shiny state-of-the-art stereo.
The next night he used the card again, treating friends to dinner in an East Side restaurant. Then later, while he was walking alone on 42nd Street, it occurred to him that he needed new sneakers. Reeboks, Nike, Adidas—footgear made the man. He went into a shoe shop, tried on some sneakers, made his selection, and handed his credit card to the salesclerk.
He was standing there waiting for the clerk to finish checking on the card and give him his parcel, when suddenly the clerk put down the phone and began striding toward him with an angry expression on his face. He panicked. And a second later he tore out of the store.
The clerk came after him. But he hid himself amid the crowds on 42nd Street. Once he was sure he was safe, he made his way uptown to Dorrian’s and bought himself a couple of drinks.
The next day, Palm Sunday, he flew to Palm Beach. When he arrived, the air was moist, the breezes scented. He took a taxi to John Flanagan’s home. But when he reached the house, he couldn’t get in. No one was at home, and all the doors and windows were locked and shuttered. He waited around for a while, but no one came. And at last, late at night, he made his way back to the airport.
In the morning, at 7 A.M., he telephoned his mother, hoping that perhaps Flanagan had called and left a message for him saying why he’d been delayed and when he’d be arriving. His mother barely listened to his account of looking for Flanagan. “Come home at once,” she told him.
There was something in her voice that warned him he’d better not argue with her. And, not knowing why she sounded so peremptory, he boarded the first New York-bound flight he could get.
As soon as he was home, he understood her insistence. The mother of the girl from whom he’d stolen the credit card had called while he was away and accused him of having taken it.
“There must be some mistake,” Phyllis had said.
“I doubt it,” the woman had answered. “I’m going to press charges.”
Phyllis had been imploring, conciliatory. “Please wait,” she’d said. “I’m sure that as soon as Robert gets back he’ll be able to explain everything.”
He wasn’t home for more than a few hours before the irate woman came to his apartment. His father came too. Phyllis had asked him to be present so that they could handle the matter together.
“Why did you steal my credit card?” the woman asked. They were sitting in his living room, amid the antiques and paneling.
“I was forced to,” Robert said. He had made up his mind that admitting the theft was the wisest policy. But he didn’t intend to be blamed for the entire thing.
“Who forced you? What do you mean forced?” the woman said.
“My friends. They made me take it. It was their idea. And as soon as I did it, I wanted to give it back. To your daughter.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“I was too ashamed. If I gave it back, she’d have known I’d taken it.”
The woman shook her head. Her daughter had told her that Robert was a druggie and that he lied all the time. He was lying now, she felt sure. And trying to pull the wool over her eyes. “If that’s the case,” she demanded, “why didn’t you just cut the card up? Destroy it?”
Robert had no response to that question. He stared at her.
“You don’t have to answer that,” his father said.
His father is trying to rescue him, the woman thought. He shouldn’t. If he really wants to rescue his son, he should face up to the truth about him and do something about it. �
�I don’t believe you wanted to give the card back,” she said. “If you had, you wouldn’t have used it.”
“I didn’t use it,” Robert shot out. “Only my friends did.”
The woman whose card had been stolen remained unconvinced. But, a mother herself, she felt sorry for Phyllis and Bob. She struck a bargain with them. “If you acknowledge his cocaine addiction and send him to a rehabilitation center,” she offered, “I’ll let the matter drop.”
Phyllis and Bob were grateful, and the next day they shipped Robert off to the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota, where years before Bob had once briefly shaken his drinking problem.
Around the time Robert went to Hazelden, Jennifer spent a few days at the Ritz in Boston with a new girlfriend, Alexandra LaGatta. She loved the stately old hotel from the moment she entered the ornate lobby, and she was elated by the spacious bedroom she and Alex would be sharing. But best of all, she discovered as the porter was carrying in the luggage, the room had its own little bar. “Look!” she called out to Alexandra. “We’ve got a bar!”
Alexandra said, “Sssh!” She was afraid that the porter might notice they were under the drinking age and report them to the management. But a moment later she felt foolish. Jennifer was scoffing at her timidity. “We can do what we want,” she said. “It’s our room. Our bar.”
The two of them were in a great mood that afternoon. They went shopping in a mall, bought themselves new clothes, wore their purchases right out of the store, and, giggling, ordered huge bags of jellybeans at a candy shop and consumed the entire quantity while riding an escalator backwards. At night they went to a party that John Flanagan was throwing, flirted with some boys, and stayed late.
It was raining when they left the party, and the streets were deserted. “Let’s take a cab,” Alexandra said.
“Back to the hotel? What for?” Jennifer said. “It isn’t that far.”
Alexandra didn’t want to walk. She felt frightened of the dark and empty streets. But she chided herself for not being as daring and courageous as Jennifer was and, not wanting to seem fainthearted, faced into the rain and made her way to the Ritz on foot alongside her friend.