Chuvalo

by George Chuvalo

  “Your son George left his wallet here at the station a few months ago, Mrs. Chuvalo. Would you like to come down and pick it up?” After Lynne said she would come during lunchtime, the sergeant said, “No, no … come after four.” My wife thought that was a little odd, but said she would be there.

  When Lynne showed up and asked for the sergeant by name, he greeted her with: “Mrs. Chuvalo, do you have $300?”

  “No, why?”

  “For outstanding traffic tickets,” said the cop. “You are now under arrest.”

  It was pretty obvious why my wife had been instructed not to come to the station until after four o’clock: in those days all the banks were closed by that time, and ATMs weren’t around yet. If being placed under arrest wasn’t humiliating enough, Lynne was told she would have to submit to a full body search. She started screaming and hollering, thinking about how Stevie and Georgie Lee had been in that same station, and now she was there too, being horribly mistreated. She was locked in a cell, but before anything worse could happen, a younger cop saw what was going on and intervened.

  The whole episode was my fault. I was the one who got the tickets, but the car was registered in Lynne’s name. After she used her one phone call to tell me what happened, I contacted my lawyer, who had enough cash on him to get her released a few hours later.

  Georgie Lee came out of jail for the last time on October 27, 1993. It was three weeks shy of his 31st birthday, and he’d already spent almost a third of his life behind bars. Since Jesse’s death, Georgie Lee had often talked about overdosing so that he could be with his brother in heaven, and he’d once even slashed his wrists, but on that day, when he came home from Warkworth Institution, a medium-security facility near Campbellford, Ontario, he looked and sounded better than he had in years. While he’d never been overly devoted to exercise on the outside, my son worked out constantly in the joint. He was solid and muscular, thanks to lifting weights and hitting the heavy bag, and his demeanor gave Lynne and me renewed hope that he’d finally cleaned up his act. I remember his mother prepared some delicious homemade soup on the day Georgie Lee came home. He was happy and smiling as she hugged and hovered over him.

  That’s my last recollection of my son alive, eating that soup.

  Three nights later, Georgie Lee was in a Parkdale flophouse with another guy and a girl who, like him, had both been in and out of jail multiple times. Georgie Lee overdosed, but when the paramedics showed up, he said, “Fuck off!” He’d rented the room for just one night, and the front desk called at 11:30 the following morning to tell him to get out. By 11:45, he was dead. They found him seated in a chair, wearing only a pair of undershorts, with a syringe sticking out of his left arm. (My son died on Halloween, October 31, 1993, the same day as actor River Phoenix, who collapsed from drug-induced heart failure outside a West Hollywood nightclub.)

  When I got the call to go to the morgue, I was in a daze. And when I got down there and they pulled Georgie Lee out of a filing cabinet for corpses and then put him on the slab, it caught me off guard. I was angry, upset and crying, all at the same time. When they pulled him out like that, it was as if he was some sort of meaningless commodity, like he had no value. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

  When I got back to the house, Lynne was beside herself with grief. In a barely audible voice, she said, “Phone my mother.” I dialed the number, and when my mother-in-law answered, I told her, “Lynne wants to speak to you.” My wife broke the news that Georgie Lee had passed away, then all of sudden she stopped talking and hung up.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Lynne answered like she was in a trance. “My mother said she won’t come to see me now … she’ll see me at the funeral.”

  At that moment I thought to myself, “What mother in the world would do that? What mother in the world wouldn’t walk a hundred miles over broken glass to comfort her daughter over the loss of a second son?’’

  My wife had had issues with her mother for years—something that was probably at least partially responsible for Lynne becoming a heavy drinker by the time she was in her early 20s.

  I remember one day when our sons were just little guys, everything was perfectly normal and we were all just enjoying being together. Then all of a sudden Lynne smashed her back up against the wall in the hallway, crying uncontrollably. When I asked what was wrong, she replied, “My mother doesn’t love me.” Then she started pouring out her heart: “Look where my mother lives, about a mile away. She hardly ever comes to see us, yet she’ll take a 90-minute bus ride to go see Patsy [Lynne’s sister] and then stay with her for the weekend.”

  I’d never considered that. But when I called my mother-in-law to express my concern, she said, “Oh, I love both my daughters the same. Lynne is just imagining that.”

  “Maybe that’s so,” I told her, “but actions speak louder than words. You’re never here and you never want to spend time with her. How is she supposed to know that you love her?”

  I remember replaying that conversation in my head after Georgie Lee’s funeral, when Lynne’s mother didn’t come back to our house. When I called her to ask why she didn’t come to our house, she simply said, “I went to Patsy’s to comfort her.” Unbelievable.

  It was so hard to be with Lynne after Georgie Lee died because every time we started to talk, we’d start to cry. We were on automatic. As a result of our being so upset in each other’s company, we literally couldn’t look at each other. At night, I slept in our bedroom while she slept across the hall in Jesse’s room … in the same room and the same bed where he’d shot himself eight years earlier.

  In the wee hours of the morning on November 4, four days after Georgie Lee died, Lynne came into our bedroom to forage through her hope chest. We didn’t say anything to each other. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was looking for Fiorinal that our sons had stolen in a previous drugstore heist. Ironically, she’d saved the pills in the hope chest for the day she had no hope.

  Before I left at 7:30 for an early appointment, I peeped inside Jesse’s room to see her lying on the bed in a burnt-orange tracksuit, with her backside facing me. “I’ll see you later, doll,” I said.

  When I arrived back home at 1:47 p.m. (I remember looking at the clock as soon as I walked through the door of the house), she was on her back clutching the Holy Bible and the cremated remains of Jesse. A suicide note, written on the back of a grocery list, was on the table. She had written, “I looked for love and couldn’t find any.”

  That was it—or so I thought. It wasn’t until very recently—October 17, 2012, to be exact—that I suddenly remembered that Lynne had been lying on her back when I returned home that afternoon, which means she was probably still alive when I left in the morning.

  “Steven, Mom’s dead!” I yelled.

  My son bolted from the kitchen through the long hallway we had in that house, smashing through the front door like a fullback busting through the line. Screaming his pain into the wind, he started kicking over garbage cans. I’ll never forget that tormented scream, born from the realization of having to live with the pain and guilt of losing not only two brothers, but now his mother. It only plunged him deeper into the abyss. At Lynne’s funeral three days later, Steven was stoned on heroin.

  It’s taken years for me to come to grips with my wife’s suicide, and while I can’t condone it, I can understand it. I think a woman feels pain differently than a man, and I think a mother feels pain differently than a father. A woman has a nine-month head start on loving a child, so the relationship between a mother and child is fundamentally different than between a father and child. Feeling the pain that only a mother can feel, Lynne simply couldn’t bear it any longer. First Jesse, now Georgie Lee. It was too much.

  To be honest, at that moment I felt totally abandoned. Despite all our problems, despite the turmoil and the separations, I loved Lynne and I know that she loved me. When she died, I lost my best friend.

  The deaths of Georgie Lee a
nd Lynne four days apart put me in the lowest point of my life. I was walking around like I was in a coma. Stevie told me later that I was in bed for a month and a half, but I don’t remember. Friends apparently came around to visit, and I must have gotten out of bed once in a while to eat and go to the bathroom, but for the most part that period is a total blank.

  What I do remember is seeing Joanne O’Hara at Lynne’s funeral. My wife had been a comfort to Joanne after she lost her 10-week-old daughter to sudden infant death syndrome, and Lynne had introduced us at work some 15 years earlier. Shortly before Christmas, when I was back on my feet again, I happened to run into Joanne on the street and she asked if it would be all right if she and her kids—11-year-old Jesse and four-year-old Ruby—dropped by the house for coffee on the day after Christmas. It turned out to be a very nice visit, after which I asked if she would mind driving me to the homes of a couple of buddies, since I didn’t have a license at the time.

  We had coffee the next few mornings, and before long I realized that Joanne was making me feel alive again. Still, I felt uneasy because Lynne had been dead just eight weeks. I thought to myself, “You’re not supposed to be feeling like this.” I was debating the situation with myself like I was two different people. But there was no denying I liked being with Joanne. She knew the pain of losing a child, and as an RN she was used to helping calm down people who might otherwise go off the deep end. At the time, she seemed like the only person in the world that could do that for me.

  Joanne and I eloped on January 27, 1994, in Wilson, New York. We didn’t tell anybody. There was absolutely nothing going on between us before Lynne died, but in the weeks that followed, Joanne’s kindness, empathy and love saved my life. It was as simple as that. If people take issue, I can’t help it—but I understand. I couldn’t help marrying her; Joanne was my pillar of strength, the anchor I needed when nothing else in my life was making sense.

  I was 56 when I got married for the second time. Who the hell falls in love at 56? That’s the age when you’re just supposed to be looking for a companion, but until you’ve been in my shoes, you can’t really understand. After all that I’d lost, I needed something strong and positive to hold on to. Joanne was like my Celestine Prophecy, which is a beautiful book by James Redfield about spiritual awakening and the people you meet for a reason.

  Exactly one year later to the day, we got married for the second time in a Catholic ceremony in Toronto. To be honest, I felt guilty that our elopement happened so quickly after Lynne’s death, but I never for a second doubted that it was the right decision. I knew that most people—especially Mitchell and Vanessa—wouldn’t understand (they still don’t), but if it wasn’t for Joanne, I would not have survived. And you know what? I know in my heart that Lynne would have been okay with it, too. She would have understood.

  To be honest, my decision to marry Joanne came down to a choice between perhaps killing myself sometime later in the ‘90s, or being the way I am now: living and being as happy and as normal as I could hope to be. Nobody can accuse her of being a gold digger, either, because just before we were married, I lost my house and we had to move in with her mother. I was totally broke when the Croatian Credit Union foreclosed on my mortgage after I’d missed a couple payments and they hadn’t given me enough time to find a new lender. It only added insult to injury when my furniture ended up being piled on the front lawn for everyone to see. Financially, I was down and nearly out, but that was the least of my worries. Joanne’s love and support brought me back to the land of the living.

  Meanwhile, with Stevie back behind bars at OCI for yet another drugstore robbery, I once again held out hope that this might be the time he’d get himself straight. Part of me still believed that was possible—but only by him being locked up and getting treatment. We’d been down this road before when I’d gotten Georgie Lee into rehab, but it only lasted a couple of weeks; he couldn’t stick it out. Still, Steven did pretty well at Ontario Correctional Institute. He looked healthy and happy, and for a time it seemed like he had a real shot at beating his addiction. He was doing so well, in fact, that in the fall of 1995 a camera crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate shot footage of me visiting him in jail as part of a documentary about the decimation of my family.

  Today, nearly 20 years later, I still use that video to open the presentation I’ve made more than 1,500 times at schools, juvenile detention centers and other facilities all across Canada, parts of the U.S. and Europe on behalf of my Fight Against Drugs foundation.

  The Fifth Estate segment first aired on December 5, and two days later I returned to OCI, where Stevie and I talked about touring the country together to tell our story after his release the following August. He wanted to talk about education, about self-esteem, about imagery. He wanted people to know that if he could have seen himself so out of control in the future, he would never have turned to drugs.

  How out of control? Stevie once robbed three drugstores in 45 minutes. And when he wasn’t breaking into pharmacies, he sought out alternatives. One night in Guelph, after he ran away from Mitchell’s house, we found him lurking outside the animal hospital with a big rock in his hand. He said he wanted to bust in to steal the tranquilizer drugs they used on wild dogs, cats and raccoons.

  When my son told me that, I could feel hot tears streaming down my cheeks.

  When the kids see Steven up on the screen during my presentation, he doesn’t fit their preconceived notion of an addict. He doesn’t come across as a kid who’d crap his drawers at the very sight of heroin or a kid who’d been stabbed by another prisoner while doing hard time behind bars for robbing drugstores. He’s handsome and articulate, and he speaks from the heart. “My father’s never given up hope,” he says. “When he says to me, ‘You know, kid, I need you to be well, I need you to be okay so that I’m okay,’ he’s saying it with conviction, and he’s always in tears when he says things like that. It hits home to me now, and I say to myself, ‘Man, I’ve got to get better. I’ve got to be well for him and the rest of my family.’”

  My son also talks about how he felt that he and Georgie Lee and Jesse all had a sense of worthlessness, and how he attributed that to a lack of education. A lot of that was my fault. Mitchell was an outstanding student and Vanessa was real good in school, too. Stevie did okay, but when he wanted to quit high school, I let him … because I thought he’d go right back. You know when he went back? When he was in jail. On the outside, he couldn’t get it together. His marriage was through, he wasn’t welcome back at his house, so it just got easier and easier for his addiction to win out. But behind bars, when he could concentrate on learning, Stevie did very well. He completed high school inside Collins Bay Penitentiary, and he was working on getting a BA in Russian Literature from Queen’s University. It’s hard to imagine my little drug addict son being so enthralled with such somber stuff from the likes of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, but he loved those guys.

  I still have a hard time watching that video in its entirety. I usually just stick around for the first 30 seconds to make sure it’s running properly, then I come back in the last minute or two when I see my son in jail. At that moment, I think about my young audience, and how they view the image up on the screen. My son looks like he could be in anyone’s family. As they say in Spanish, he’s mui simpático—very empathetic.

  On August 17, 1996—exactly nine months and 15 days after the video was taped—I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, working the corner for WBO super flyweight champion Johnny Tapia. He was making a title defense against Argentina’s Hugo Soto, and the fight was going to be telecast on ABC’s Wide World of Sports at 5 p.m. Eastern time.

  Stevie was looking forward to watching it. Since being released on August 6, he’d been staying at Vanessa’s apartment in downtown Toronto. At 1:30 on the day of the fight, Vanessa said she was going to visit some friends in Guelph, 45 minutes away, and that she would be staying overnight. Before she left, she gave her brot
her $100 and a pack of cigarettes. She took out three, leaving 17.

  When Vanessa returned home with a couple of friends at 2:30 the following afternoon, she found a key in the lock of the apartment door. When she saw that, she kind of panicked. She turned the key and the door opened a few inches, but the inside chain was on. When she saw that, my daughter knew what was on the other side. She fled the building.

  Two of Vanessa’s friends went downstairs and got the superintendent. He came up to the 17th floor and after taking stock of the situation he called the police. Two officers showed up and cut the inside chain. They found Steven, clad in a pair of undershorts, sitting slumped over a desk. The dark indentation on the side of his neck from hitting the edge of the desk made it look almost like his throat was cut. There was a syringe sticking out of his left arm and an unlit cigarette between the first two fingers of his right hand. After he shot the heroin into his vein, before he could light his cigarette, he was dead.

  I’m told it took about seven seconds.

  After I got off the plane at Pearson International Airport at 4:30 that afternoon, I went through customs with my luggage and headed toward the sliding exit door. On the other side, I saw my driver, Marvin Elkind, alongside Joanne and her son Jesse, who was almost 14. Normally when I come home from a trip my wife is happy to see me, but this time I saw a look of dismay on her face.

  “Joanne, what’s the matter?” I said.

  “We have to talk,” she said quietly.

  After I repeated the question and she gave the same response, I made it easy for her. I said, “Steven’s dead, isn’t he.” It wasn’t a question.

  When she nodded her head, I started sobbing uncontrollably.

  When you’ve already lost two sons to heroin, the prospect of losing a third is never that farfetched. During the course of Johnny Tapia’s 12-round fight, I remember constantly thinking about Steven. How was he coping? Was he dead or alive? I seemed to ask myself that question 1,000 times over the course of the fight—three minutes a round, 36 minutes, 11 minutes between rounds. Thirty-six plus 11. During those 47 minutes, when I was getting paid to counsel, instruct and motivate Johnny Tapia, little did I know that before the broadcast had even started at five o’clock, my son had already passed away.