She seemed pretty normal. At least she still had her sense of humor. I guess I thought murdering her old man might’ve taken that away. But maybe it had brought it back.
We sat down at the table and ate some fudge. Susan talked a blue streak. She was totally up on world events—the Camp David Accords, the new pope, the Red Sox getting creamed by the Yankees. I wasn’t sure if her talkativeness was due to the meds she was on or her being starved for scintillating conversation.
“Can you believe I’m in here?” she asked at one point, with a wry shake of her head.
All around us, catatonic and delusional people shuffled about. One woman stuck her face in mine, speaking gibberish. Susan spoke to the woman like a doctor. She told the lady she needed to adjust her dose of something and gently shooed her away.
Susan wanted to know all about my life and Virginia’s life. Virginia told her about Dustin and the appliance store. I told her about the low-budget Brian De Palma movie I’d cowritten that had been shot on the Sarah Lawrence campus that summer.
“It’s like a student film,” I said, trying to play it down so the gulf between us wouldn’t seem so wide.
“Who’s in it? Anyone famous?”
“Kirk Douglas,” I mumbled.
“I once danced with Paul Newman at a political rally,” she boasted, trying to one-up me a little.
I didn’t mention I’d had a Paul Newman sighting of my own.
“You should write a movie about me,” she insisted. “But you better hurry up ’cause lots of other writers, real big shots, are interested in my story.”
“Your life would make quite a story,” I said.
Of course that was part of the reason I was there. But I hadn’t quite figured that out yet.
“Did you see that New Yorker piece on me?” she asked.
I looked surprised.
“The New Yorker? Wow—”
“Yeah, I always wanted to be in that magazine. I just thought it might be for one of my poems, but I guess I’ll take what I can get.”
She leaned a little closer to me.
“I didn’t mean to kill him, you know.”
I tensed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Virginia do the same.
“I—I figured you probably didn’t,” I stammered.
“Me too,” said Virginia, in barely a whisper.
With no hesitation, no self-consciousness, Susan launched into talking about the night she killed her father.
“It was self-defense,” she said. “It was me or him. He was gonna kill me. You know he threatened to all the time.”
I nodded. Virginia nodded. We hung on her every word.
“I went to his house that night to get my stuff. I left a bunch of things behind when I had to get my butt out of there in a hurry. I mean, jeez Louise, I woke up one night and he was pointing a gun at me! I wasn’t going to stick around after that! I said, ‘I’m out of here.’ But, like I said, I still had some stuff there. Some paintings I’d made that I really liked. Some poems I wrote. Clothes I wanted to take to California. Did you know I was planning on moving there?’
“I think I read that.”
“You can’t imagine how many times I’ve said to myself, ‘Susan, you idiot, you should’ve left that stupid stuff behind.’ If I had, I wouldn’t be in this stupid place.”
“But . . . why did you bring a gun with you when you went over there?” I asked haltingly.
“Are you kidding? I was scared outta my wits. I was afraid he was going to kill me. So I took my cousin Mark’s gun. I just borrowed it, really, from his house. I was going to put it back. I thought he wouldn’t even notice. Wrong again, Susan. Anyhoo, I went there really late that night. I thought I could get in and get out without waking him up. I was hoping, anyway. But, just my luck, he woke up when I was climbing through the window. I looked up and there he was. Standing there in his undershorts, pointing his rifle right at me. You know what he said? ‘Now I’ve got you just where I want you, you little bitch.’ Those were his last words. I don’t even know how I got the gun out of my purse so fast. I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. I only fired once. Just to stop him.”
“But what about the second shot?” Virginia blurted out.
“I’m getting to that part. He fell back on the floor and was just lying there, not moving or anything. I didn’t see any blood. I thought maybe I didn’t even hit him. I thought maybe he was playing dead. You know, playing possum. I thought he was going to jump up and get me, like in a scary movie or something, you know? But then when I got closer, I could see he wasn’t breathing too good. I could tell he wasn’t gonna make it.”
She was silent for a moment.
“So I put him out of his misery. I took the rifle and shot him again. Shot him in the head.”
It was chilling to hear her say it. Chilling to think about it.
I had thought about killing Jimmy many times, but Susan had actually pulled the trigger.
She had taken Hank’s last breath. Obliterated whatever his last thought might have been. To kill her? Forgive her? Beg for his own forgiveness?
She had destroyed his personality. His sensibility. His awareness—or, more accurately, his lack of awareness.
“Why didn’t you just shoot him again with the pistol?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know why.”
“But why did you make it look like a suicide?”
“I don’t know. It all happened so fast, like in a dream.”
It was the same way Hank had described his murders. Maybe that’s what murder felt like sometimes. Dreamy.
I suspected some of Susan’s dreaminess could be attributed to her being hopped-up and asked her about that.
“Were you drinking that night? Or taking drugs or . . . ?”
“Oh, I don’t want to talk about that,” she said, dismissing my questions with a wave of her hand. “Anyway, I never thought the cops would really buy the whole thing was a suicide. But they’re a bunch of idiots, those Manchester cops.”
“Is that why you had Hank’s body exhumed? To show up the police? That’s what some people think—”
“No! Those people are stupid too! I did it for my babcia.”
Virginia and I looked confused.
“My grandmother,” she explained, translating the Polish word. “I did it for her, not for the police. I didn’t want her to think her son was damned forever. Anyway, I thought I could get away before the cops even suspected me. I thought I’d be out in California playing golf and they’d be chasing their tails. Wrong again, Susan.”
She never admitted that guilt might have played a part in her getting caught.
She did admit feeling remorse.
“Every single day I regret what I did,” she said.
I wasn’t sure if she meant killing Hank or digging him up.
When I asked her to clarify, she assured me she was talking about the murder.
But I wasn’t totally convinced.
I decided to leave it at that.
When we finally said good-bye, we promised to write. We promised not to lose touch again.
In the car Virginia said, “I don’t know what to think. Did she kill him in self-defense or in cold blood?”
I thought about it and shook my head.
“Both, I think.”
For the rest of the way home, Virginia and I were silent.
One thought kept running over and over in my head.
That could have been me.
Terry’s Take on Things
Before returning to New York, I decided to pay a quick visit to Susan’s brother, Terry. I wanted to express my sympathy and to see how he was holding up. Terry was now in his early thirties and living with his wife and kids in a rural town an hour north of Manchester. His glory days as a boxer were long over and he was working as an insurance salesman. According to Jimmy, he was still gung ho about that TV preacher.
Once again, Virginia offered to go with me.
“It�
�s like the old days. Hanging out together,” she said.
On the way up we listened to the Stones and talked about our boyfriends.
Finally, we arrived at the remote cabin in the woods where Terry was living.
He seemed glad to see us. He invited us into his living room and served us coffee and sugar cookies. I noticed that several copies of the New Yorker containing the story of the Piasecny family were displayed on the coffee table.
I started to tell Terry about my trip to see Susan, but he cut me right off.
“She’s nothing to me. Nothing,” he snapped.
I flinched. His words seemed so unfair. He’d turned against Susan for murdering their father in a way he’d never turned against Hank for killing their mother.
“But, she’s been through so much, and—”
“I don’t want to talk about her,” he said, more sharply.
I clammed up. But he kept on ranting about Susan.
“She’s always been no good. Always been violent. Women like her are drawn to violence like moths to a flame. They even love being beaten up. Look at her, both of her husbands beat her and she liked it.”
His words hit me like a left hook.
“I can’t imagine anyone likes being beaten,” I managed to choke out.
“Then you don’t know Susan. And you’re not too swift.”
Get me outta here, I thought. Get me the hell outta here or I’m really gonna punch him.
From the topic of violence-loving women, Terry jumped right into talking about violence-hating women.
He said most women, the ones who didn’t love violence like Susan, had an “overexaggerated” reaction to it. As an example, he brought up his young daughter, who was playing nearby. He cruelly mimicked how she would cringe when he threatened to belt her one.
Virginia and I glanced at each other, horrified.
I wanted to grab that little girl and make a run for it.
Instead, I just said we had to be going.
Before we left, Terry insisted on reading us something from the Bible.
John 8:32: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
I thought that was pretty ironic. Even though Terry’s family secrets had been cracked open like a bottle of Jimmy’s harsh whiskey and splashed all over the newspapers and in the New Yorker fucking magazine, Terry seemed anything but free.
Susan wasn’t free either. Obviously. She was locked up.
It was dark by the time Virginia and I hightailed it out of there.
Virginia nearly plowed into a tree in her haste to get away.
On the drive back to Manchester, I made up my mind. I was going to write about Susan and Terry. About Jimmy and Hank. About Shirley and Doris.
I wasn’t a violence lover. I was a violence hater.
I wasn’t thinking that telling the truth would set me free.
I just hoped—somehow, someday—it might help that little girl.
Down but Not Out
Shortly after I saw Susan—a mere seven months after she had been committed for life—she petitioned the court to set her free. Dr. Standow, the psychiatrist whose assessment of Susan had been instrumental in her being found not guilty by reason of insanity, had examined her again. He found her to no longer be a danger to society or to herself and, stunningly, recommended that she be released.
On February 6, 1979, there was a court hearing to decide Susan’s fate before the same judge who had committed her.
Several witnesses, including Susan, testified.
The state attorney general strongly objected to Susan’s release. Dr. Standow, the state argued, had previously characterized Susan’s mental illness as “long-standing.” It was hard to imagine the illness had resolved itself in a few short months.
Some of the hospital staff had their own objections. The director of Susan’s unit described her as disruptive and manipulative. He said if she didn’t get her way she got angry. He said she bribed other patients to do things for her.
By his description, Susan sounded a lot like Hank.
Susan, in her own defense, painted a starkly different picture. She described the environment at the hospital as inhumane. She insisted she wasn’t even getting privileges, like physical recreation, to which she was entitled.
Another staff member admitted this was true. He said Susan didn’t have the same privileges as the male patients because the hospital didn’t have a separate forensic unit for women. The hospital didn’t have enough staff to monitor her if she went outside.
Because she was a rarity—a criminally insane woman—Susan was out of luck.
The next day, the judge denied Susan’s petition.
Susan was disappointed, but she knew there’d be other chances. By law, she had to be reevaluated every two years.
Nevertheless, she did start to get a little depressed. I could tell when she wrote to me that her mood was pretty lousy. She said there was no one on her ward she could relate to, no one she could talk to intelligently about art and music and poetry.
She thought having an animal might cheer her up. She put in a request to get a cat on the ward. A couple of the other units had therapeutic animals. But her request was denied. “The environment wouldn’t be good for the cat,” she said she was told.
“Can you believe that logic?” she wrote. “It’s OK for humans, though.”
Most of all, she was starved for contact with the outside world. She tried to keep up her connection to it by watching the news and reading Time magazine.
She sent me a letter a few months after the mass suicide of Jim Jones’s followers in Guyana.
“How can so many minds get so perverted at the same time?” she wondered.
It was a good question, one that I thought could be asked about our own hometown.
But I didn’t push myself too hard to answer it. Not then, anyway.
It was a mental maze I was afraid of getting lost in.
I didn’t want to get depressed myself.
I didn’t want to pervert my own mind.
So, I tried to put it aside.
I got on with my life.
I got a cat of my own.
I got a new boyfriend, a cute young actor. Moog Boy and I had drifted apart but were still friends. Nobody stays with the first guy they sleep with, do they?
I got a great new job that Brian De Palma recommended me for. I started working on a boxing movie for Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. I flew with them to a tropical island to be their gal Friday for five weeks as they shaped the movie’s screenplay. All day long I happily typed words like cocksucker and motherfucker. At night, Marty and I drank piña coladas and listened to Van Morrison while Bobby kept to his boxing regimen and went to bed early.
Three squares a day, I could have anything I wanted. Anything off the menu. Or anything the hotel had flown in from Paris especially for us. Foie gras, sweetbreads, filet mignon with béarnaise. Like a little heathen, I pointed to what I wanted until I learned how to pronounce it.
One night Marty and I went out to dinner. I ate boneless quail with grapes off a gold plate the size of a flying saucer while a white-turbaned waiter kept filling my glass with Cristal. I listened to Marty analyze Jimmy’s favorite boxing movie, Body and Soul. I knew the movie inside out and could hold my own. We talked about films for hours. City Lights. The Thief of Bagdad. White Heat.
My head was spinning from the champagne and the whole shebang.
“Made it, Ma. Top of the world!” I felt like shouting like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat.
I just hoped I didn’t get shot down in the end like him.
When we returned to New York, Marty and Bobby kept me on as their researcher. I spent my days talking to washed-up boxers and gruff old guys like Papou. I was right in my sweet spot. I was working on a story about an angry-but-soulful lug who beat his wife to a bloody pulp.
Shortly before the start of shooting, Jake LaMotta, the boxer the movie was about, got arrested for sm
acking his fifth wife. Suddenly, some of the people I was calling for research questioned why we were making a film about such a monster. I assured them the movie wouldn’t glorify LaMotta, but, still, some people hung up on me. I had my own concerns about how the wife-beating incident might impact the movie. Primarily, it didn’t gel with the movie LaMotta’s redemption at the end. But then, who really wanted to see a movie about the real guy? Who wanted to be left with the message once a brute, always a brute? Who wanted a story with no hope? Where was the nuance in that?
Even if it was sort of true.
When the movie came out, it was so brilliant nobody remembered or cared what the real Jake LaMotta had done. I didn’t care either. I made a quick trip to Manchester to take Jimmy to see it.
When the lights came up, Jimmy sat dazed and drained in his seat like he’d just gone twelve rounds.
He’d seen his life flashing in front of his eyes at twenty-four frames per second.
He’d had a psychic smackdown.
“I had a ringside seat to that slugfest,” he blurted out—meaning the slugfest of boxing and wife beating and self-loathing—“and that movie didn’t pull any goddamn punches.”
Raging Bull rocked Jimmy’s world almost as much as Blood Feast had rocked mine.
Maybe a part of me was looking for a little payback.
But I was also hoping to hold a mirror up to Jimmy. To get him to see the error of his ways. To lead him to his own possible redemption.
I didn’t know if it had worked. For his sake, and even more for Shirley’s, I hoped that it had.
Loaded
Two and half years after Susan was arrested for killing her father, she was released. With two shrinks saying she was no longer a danger to herself or anyone else, the state had to let her go. New Hampshire’s quirky insanity law had freed Susan just like it had let Hank walk.
I found out about Susan’s release when I called home one Sunday night. I’d been in the dark about her for a while. We hadn’t had a falling out. She’d just stopped responding to my letters. I think it had become too hard for her to see the different paths our lives had taken.
KooKooLand Page 36