by Linda Wolfe
“Gerry may have been the brightest of the bunch,” said his mother. “He had a ninety-one average in high school and was a member of the National Honor Society.”
I was to hear a similar account of Gerry Coury by talking with his high school principal, Marvin Maskovsky, a sincere, friendly man. He told me that Gerry hadn’t been just bright. In his halcyon days, he had been one of those rare, well-rounded boys, the kind who excel at both sports and studies. He was a center on the Torrington High football team for four years and manager of the baseball and basketball teams for two. Scholastically, he’d ranked forty-fifth in his class of 390. He’d been voted “hardest worker” and “most influential” by his classmates; he’d been president of the Key Club, a junior branch of the Kiwanis Club; and he’d been a school leader, the kind of boy, said Maskovsky, “to whom a teacher could go to discuss a class problem, and who could be counted upon to give sound advice and cooperation.”
Maskovsky had a detailed example of what a cooperative young man Gerry had been. He remembered that the first year he was principal, he’d gotten “this idea that it might give our graduation ceremony a certain loftiness and importance if the kids gave some kind of ovation to the faculty. But it was a question in my mind, because you’re never sure how kids are going to feel about that sort of thing. So I called Gerry Coury into my office. I asked him what he thought of the idea. And Gerry went away and thought about it and talked it over with the other seniors, and he came back and said, ‘Yes, it’s a great idea,’ and the students did it, and it was very moving. That was the kind of boy Gerry was. He was my emissary to the other kids.”
Maskovsky sounded truly sad. He went on to tell me that ever since Gerry’s death, he’d been thinking about him and leafing through the pages of his yearbook, the 1973 Torringtonian. There was Gerry, in portrait after portrait, group shot after group shot, always neatly dressed, vibrant, clear-eyed. “He was a star,” the principal said.
I thought briefly, after talking with Maskovsky, that perhaps I’d been wrong about Coury. Perhaps, after all, he had been a straight-arrow sort of fellow. But a call to the New York Police Department sent me back to my original theory. They too had a photograph of Coury, they said. A picture taken by a police photographer just after his death. In their picture, Gerry was dirty, unkempt, deteriorated. “Like a derelict,” one police officer told me, his voice hushed. “And it isn’t as if he looks like he’d just gotten that way overnight, or because of what happened to him right before. He had several days’ growth of beard, and his body was filthy. He looked as if he’d been this way a long time.” And another policeman, one of the several who’d noticed Coury before he died, described him as “smelly.”
More intrigued than ever, I decided to make a trip to Torrington to try to unravel the story.
On a fiercely hot day in July 1981, I drove the hundred miles from New York to Torrington. Happily, the town (population 31,000), is nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, so it was about ten degrees cooler than New York. Indeed, it seemed, as I drove through its center, like a green and pristine paradise: tree-lined streets, a lushly planted village green called Coe Memorial Park, old Victorian houses, tall-steepled churches. The New England town of everybody’s fantasy. But within minutes of my arrival I was forced to consider that nowadays, even pretty, rural towns have big-city problems. Driving down a broad, uncongested avenue, I suddenly heard a brazening of sirens, and when I pulled to the side, I learned from a shaken bystander that a bank had just been robbed, the robbers had made a stunning getaway, and the police were in pursuit. Before the day was out, I was to experience even more vividly how alike small towns and big cities are today.
I went first to look at the street where Coury had grown up. It was right in town, but it was nothing like the streets I’d passed through earlier. The Coury home was on a partly industrial block in a neglected, decaying neighborhood. Porches sagged, windows were broken, and houses were in sore need of paint. This was another Torrington, a place of doldrums and despair.
The Torrington doldrums cannot be overlooked in the story of Gerry Coury. At the turn of the century, when river power was still important, Torrington was a thriving industrial city, producing brass, copper, and metalware. The town absorbed waves of immigrants—chiefly Italians, Irish, and, like the Courys, Lebanese—who thrived in the New England setting. But in recent decades, Torrington had fallen upon bleak times. Old industries had shut down, and new ones had been slow to replace them. In 1981, the average weekly wage, $238, was among the lowest of any Connecticut city. Unemployment that year was so high that Torrington was one of only fifteen Connecticut cities promised special consideration on federal government contracts. Because of the low wages and high unemployment, the ambitious young had tended to leave Torrington, which left the town with a disproportionate number of old people.
For the young who did not leave, there wasn’t much to do. On Main Street, the formerly elegant, much-frequented movie house had closed. So, too, had quite a few of the clothing stores and coffee shops. And in Gerry Coury’s neighborhood, the closest thing to a lively gathering place was a shabby, drearily lighted all-night diner.
No one was at the Coury house that morning, so I started driving around the area to try to interview some of the people who’d known Gerry. There was Father Joseph Amar, pastor of St. Maron’s Church, around the corner from the Courys’. Father Amar said that Gerry had been very active in church affairs when he was an adolescent but that in recent years he hadn’t seen much of him because Coury had “apparently fallen on hard times.” There was Eddie Barber, manager of the Moosehead Tavern, a bar that Gerry used to frequent. Barber said that Gerry “had his strange ways. Sometimes he’d walk in with his head hanging down and just not talk to anybody.” There was a friend of Gerry’s who didn’t want to be identified, who told me that Gerry had changed since high school, saying, “He got kind of strange, withdrew into himself. He became a loner, and he got kind of down on everything, saying the guys with big money ran the whole show.”
These observations were corroborated by Owen Quinn, a schoolmate of Gerry’s who had become the director of Torrington’s social services. In his professional capacity, he’d seen quite a bit of Gerry in recent years. He said Gerry was “cynical” and saw the world as a “dog-eat-dog place.” “Like when Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner had to withdraw from the Olympics,” Quinn tried to explain. “You know, most people were sad and disappointed. But Gerry said, ‘I’m glad. I’m glad they can’t compete. This country is always making heroes over nothing.’ Gerry used to be a very outgoing, optimistic sort of guy. But he got very distant and sort of depressed in the last two or three years.”
I began to realize that the Gerry Coury whom his mother and his principal had spoken about was not the only Gerry Coury. That perhaps theirs was a Gerry Coury who had ceased to exist long before a man with the same name and features met his death in the New York subway station. Gerry Coury had changed.
It didn’t take me very long to find out why. A visit to the local newspaper office produced an important item of information that had been left out of all publications except those in Torrington and nearby towns. Coury, the town police had told the newspaper, had been part of the local “drug culture.” The New York newspapers and the national magazine that had painted Gerry Coury as a “straight-arrow” youth hadn’t reported this. They’d either neglected to call the Connecticut press and police or—perhaps because it made a better, a more chilling, story to portray Coury as an innocent, a mere passer-by on that Main Street of the nation’s drug business, Forty-second Street—they’d obtained but chosen to ignore the information.
The center of the drug culture in Torrington was the lovely village green I’d seen when I first entered the town, Coe Memorial Park. I also found out that, just as in New York, the culture was composed chiefly of young men who led aimless, rootless lives. Gerry had apparently been part of this alienated group for some time. But in the weeks before
his death his life became particularly rootless. He not only had no job and no girlfriend, but he had no home. For a time, he’d shared a house with friends, but in the middle of June they’d kicked him out. After that, he spent his days in the park. At night, he bedded down in a parked car.
It was difficult to pin down exactly when the honor student’s descent started, but it must have been sometime in his early college years. After his graduation from Torrington High, Gerry had gone off to Fairfield University in Fairfield County, Connecticut. There, things began to go wrong. A dean told me Gerry showed signs, while at Fairfield, of being very “disturbed.” He’d become involved—“overinvolved,” said the dean—with the remnants of the campus counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. He kept demanding “relevant” courses and kept tangling with the administration. At the end of his third year, Gerry dropped out of Fairfield, and the university advised his family that he needed psychological counseling.
Sadly, either the family did not or Coury would not accept this advice. The young man simply came back to Torrington and, with few opportunities for either employment or entertainment, began to deteriorate. He did find work occasionally—once as a waiter at the Kilravock Inn in Litchfield, a famous old hotel that caught fire the summer Gerry worked there. (“It burned down the week he left,” Mrs. Coury was to tell me. “We always kidded him that he must have burned the place down.”) He pumped gas for a while and worked as a security guard. But eventually he always failed. He lost his security guard job because, said his mother, “he fell asleep one night, or came to work late. Something like that.”
When he wasn’t working, Coury would just drift. He traveled to New Jersey. To New York. To Florida. Even to California. How he got the money for his trips, no one seemed to know. But now Gerry was drifting both across America and downward.
There is in psychiatry a fundamental concept called the downwarddrift hypothesis. Psychiatrists use it to explain why, when most individuals in America’s still-expanding economy and still-fluid class structure invariably seem to progress, both economically and socially, beyond the levels of their parents, certain people not only do not exceed their parents but drop to progressively lower and lower strata of society. Such individuals, goes the theory, spiral downward in class because they suffer from psychiatric disorders—schizophrenia, alcoholism, drug abuse. From all I had learned in Torrington, it was clear that Gerry Coury exemplified the downward-drift hypothesis. He’d failed to live up to his siblings’ achievements and to his parents’ aspirations because he had had the psychiatric disorder of drug abuse.
To gain some insight into the sort of life Gerry had ultimately led, I went over to Coe Memorial Park and hung around for a while. I wasn’t frightened, even though quite a few of the benches near me were filled with scruffy, unkempt youths who seemed stoned. Perhaps it was because, as a city-dweller, I still couldn’t rid myself of the notion that anything that looked as idyllic as this verdant park simply couldn’t be dangerous, no matter its denizens. Or perhaps it was because I’d been told that ever since the Coury story had broken, the Torrington police were keeping a close eye on the park.
Whatever the reason, I sat in the park and quietly observed my neighbors. They were, for the most part, barefoot and wearing nothing but jeans—just the way Gerry had been dressed, wandering about midtown Manhattan. After a while, I began to strike up a conversation with some of the young men. Had they known Gerry Coury? I wanted to know.
It turned out that quite a few of them had, and soon we were talking. Yes, Gerry had hung out here a lot, they told me. Yes, for the most part they’d liked him. “He was real mellow,” one young man said. But another, a gaunt, sad-eyed man, interrupted, “Except when he got funny.”
“What do you mean, funny?” I asked.
“Paranoid. When he got high, he’d get paranoid. He’d shout and scream.”
Then the man began to nod and smile to himself. He shut his pained-looking eyes and began to look happier, and faraway. It was as if I suddenly wasn’t there, as if no one was there, and he was alone with his daydreams. I tried to bring him back to reality by asking him some more questions. But I think he truly didn’t hear me. He began laughing and cackling.
That night as I drove home I began to understand what had happened to Coury in New York City—and why the tale had seemed so mysterious. Coury hadn’t lost his shoes and shirt in a mugging. He’d just been wandering around the city in the same garb he and his Torrington cronies were accustomed to wearing. He hadn’t waited in Grand Central for his parents to send someone to “rescue” him, perhaps because he knew that after years of his erratic behavior they wouldn’t do so, or perhaps simply because he was just too stoned to remember to wait. And as to the Forty-second Street crowd’s having stripped him of his trousers and subsequently taunted him, it seemed just as likely that he himself, deep in some dazed, drug-induced daydream of his own, had begun to take off his own pants, thereby arousing the crowd’s jeering.
No drug traces were found in Coury’s body. But there are some drugs, notably LSD, that are difficult to detect. From Coury’s behavior earlier in the day—the confused laughing and talking to himself that police who’d seen him in Midtown and at Grand Central had reported—it seemed plausible indeed that he’d taken, or perhaps unknowingly been given, some sort of a hallucinogen such as LSD. A bad trip on a hallucinogen would have made him frightened of everyone—not just of the crowd, but of the police who tried to help him. A bad trip would have enmeshed him thoroughly in a monstrous private nightmare.
Certainly, observers who’d seen Coury in the last few minutes of his life had seen a man lost in a nightmare. “He was just bugged out,” a thirteen-year-old Forty-second Street hanger-on said. “He never spoke,” said the transit officer who’d tried to protect him from the jeering crowd behind him. “He never said a word! We tried to hold him, but he pulled away and ducked into the subway.”
I felt sure, as I reached the city, that Coury had not so much been frightened to death by the crowd as that he’d been frightened to death by a drug overdose. For witness the precise details of that death: he touched the third rail twice; after touching it the first time, he flipped backward, took six deep breaths, reached over, and touched it again. Most likely, he’d been so thoroughly, so inutterably panicked that he could imagine no help, no relief from his terror, save the relief of death.
Why had the story in the papers and the national magazine seemed so bewildering? Well, the reporters hadn’t used any information about Coury that came from the Torrington police or press. They’d relied on his mother. And she, as mothers will, had offered a glowing picture of her son. It was easy, now that he was dead. So, denying his problems to the world at large, possibly even denying them to herself, she’d gone ahead and painted him, not as the man he had become, but as the boy, the high school star, he’d once been.
That was the end of the puzzle, but for me it was the beginning of a period of anger. I was indignant at all the people who were blaming New York for what had happened to Coury.
There were many such people. One of them, a Torrington friend of Coury’s, wrote a letter to the New York Times in which he raged against the “mob of underdogs” who’d run after Gerry, “those nameless punks who live on trash and broken homes.” The letterwriter spoke of being disillusioned, of having once cared and worried about the “disadvantaged,” but of having become convinced, as a result of what happened to Gerry, that the disadvantaged should be “kept away, at almost any cost,” from the rest of society. “I want government, which is charged with our general welfare, to step in, with Federal Troops if necessary, and protect my life as I walk the streets of America’s cities,” he wrote. Big cities was what he meant. “I have three brothers who live in big cities, and I don’t want to lose any of them.”
I felt that what had happened to Coury wasn’t a New York tragedy or even a big-city tragedy. It was an American tragedy. All over the country, hundreds of thousands of youths were s
uffering from the disorder that had afflicted Gerry Coury. There is an epidemic of downward drifters in America, I kept thinking, and Forty-second Street is only one gathering place for these restless souls. There are also—I couldn’t put it out of my mind—Coe Memorial Parks in innumerable American towns.
A TRAGEDY ON EIGHTY-NINTH STREET
New York, New York
1980
ON A SEPTEMBER SATURDAY when summer vacation was drawing to a close and the school term just about to begin, a thirty-four-year-old New Yorker named Irene Schwartz drove her two children out to the Great Adventure amusement park, in New Jersey. On Sunday, she took them to Central Park. On Monday and Tuesday, she made preparations for their return to their classrooms, scheduling a dentist’s appointment for seven-year-old Joshua and a nursery teacher’s home visit for five-year-old Judy. Then, sometime on Tuesday, she left her co-op on East Eighty-ninth Street in Manhattan, drove out to Farmingdale, Long Island, and purchased a shotgun. That night, or early Wednesday morning, she went into the bedrooms where Joshua and Judy lay sleeping, shot them in the head, carried their lifeless bodies into her own bedroom, lay down between them on her big bed, and shot herself.
Why? The mind recoils, the imagination stumbles, particularly since Irene Schwartz had been a well-educated, well-off, and, above all, motherly woman.
Her friends and neighbors were numb with disbelief. One said to me, “One of the most awful things about what happened is that it makes you feel that if a woman like that could kill her kids, then none of us is safe. It could happen to anyone. You see, she seemed to have all the pieces of her life in place. There just weren’t any warning signs.” Another said, “I used to watch her as she went about her chores and think to myself, God, I wish I could be more like her. Now I feel not just sad but scared.” And a third said, “She was so loving. If she did something like this, could I? Could I flip right out one day when I’m stuck home with the kids and they’re screaming and my husband’s away and school hasn’t started yet? Could I just up and shoot them?”