The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes

by Dawn Schiller

  “Thor!” I gasp, knowing he can’t come with us. My little hero’s chocolate head rises up from my lap. A wag of his tail asks silently if I’m all right. My faithful companion. Not my Thor!

  “Well, I know he’s your pet, Dawn, and I’m sorry, but you can’t take dogs to foreign countries. Nothing we can do about that.”

  The tearing of my heart is killing me, but I know Dad is right. I have to let go. I know leaving the country is the only chance I have to start fresh and make sure John, and anyone connected with him, will never track me down. I look down at Thor’s little face, with those pleading eyes, and rub his ears and neck. As I squeeze him tight, he shivers. He can sense when something scary is about to happen. John taught him that. Memories flood my mind of how brave and loyal he has been to me in the most terrible times. My friend, my angel to the very end. He deserves better. He deserves to not be scared all the time too. I beat myself up inside for not being able to take him with me.

  Big Rosie… Her face appears clearly in my mind’s view. Her parents… I wrap Thor’s soft, familiar frame in a vision of a warm bed near a fire and see him happy and content.

  “I know somebody.” I weep. “They’ll be good to him. Won’t they, boy?” I look into his graying reddish eyes. And for a moment, he stops his shivering and sweetly blinks. He knows! I think.

  “I’ll ask a lady, a friend—Big Rosie—if her parents would like to adopt him. She loves him, and they’ll take good care of him.” I kiss his head and cry some more, rocking him in my arms, knowing this will be one of our last days together. It will have to be.

  And it is.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  War and Peace

  Sitting in the booth of Clancy’s Clam Broiler in Glendale, I am filled with nostalgia mixed with nervous anticipation as I keep a watchful eye on the lobster tank near the entrance. Fidgeting with my napkin and place setting, I wait for Sharon to meet me for lunch. It is April of 1988, almost seven years since we last spoke—that day in the Safeway parking lot. When we said good-bye. When I thought somehow she would meet up with John and me.

  The stained-glass door swings open, and a small, neat frame steps inside. I recognize her right away. In her impeccably tailored navy blue gabardine suit and matching navy shoes, she instantly scans the dining room. She turns in my direction, and we lock eyes. I draw a deep breath and stand to greet her.

  “Sharon? Hi. It’s me…Dawn.” I tentatively hold my arms out for a hug.

  Swiftly she inspects me up and down, gives a short nod as if to acknowledge that I am really Dawn, and steps toward my outstretched arms. “Hi!” she gushes clumsily, and then reaches in for a steel-like embrace.

  We stand awkwardly for several moments, holding one another, absorbing the reality of being in each other’s presence again. Sharon’s strong nurse’s fingers hold my shoulders in a viselike grip, and I feel her take in a deep breath—a sigh maybe, or a silent cry. “I knew you’d return,” she says, gaining her composure and stepping back to look me over again.

  “Your hair!” I comment, fumbling for something to say. Sharon’s hair no longer hangs down her back; it is cut short—very short—and is nearly solid white.

  “Like it?” She smiles. “I love it. Cut it off as soon as the divorce was final. In celebration! Freedom!” She runs her fingers through it, fluffing the white strands in different directions. “Wash and wear too!”

  “Yeah. It looks good. I’m just not used to seeing you like this is all.” I am instantly conscious of the extremely long mane of golden brown hair that flows down my back past my hips. “Hey! In Asia, this is still the style,” I dismiss jokingly, flipping at the tendrils behind me.

  “That’s fine. It’s not for everybody. This is something I had to do. You know?”

  I nod somberly. I know. “Let’s sit down.” I motion in the direction of my table, realizing we are still blocking the door. “Here. I have a booth.”

  We settle in uneasily. My heart races in my chest; my palms sweat. I resume folding my already well-creased napkin and rummage through my brain for the next “right” thing to say. I have no idea if she will stay friendly or get distant and cold, and I realize I am still afraid of what she thinks of me.

  So…I think. I knew she and John got divorced because of the articles I read in the Los Angeles Times, but how? When? I can only guess, and I guess the worst. My stomach does a summersault. But she’s sitting here. We’re sitting here. And we’re okay! And John…well, John is gone now.

  “How long have you been in town? You mentioned something about Asia.” Sharon breaks the ice.

  A waitress appears, interrupting us, and we each order an iced tea to be polite.

  I have no appetite and take the moment to pull in a deep breath and gather my thoughts. “Southeast Asia. Thailand mostly…with my father.” The words seem to come out on their own. I don’t want to give much detail. “He opened a hotel on an island in the south—Phuket Island—back in early 1982. But that was after, well, John was arrested in Miami.”

  I lower my head. “So he’s dead? AIDS?” I let the reality of the words linger in the air. The Los Angeles Times splashed the news on the front page less than two weeks after they reported his admittance into the VA hospital with the disease. “Just doesn’t seem real…”

  “Yup. Died fittingly on the thirteenth, if you ask me,” Sharon replies, her words cutting swiftly.

  I lift my head to check her face, to detect any sign of concern or grief, but there isn’t any. “Yeah. Strange how thirteen was his lucky number too…” The hair on my arms rises in gooseflesh. Then, shaking it off, I let out a short laugh at the irony and think very hard about how to stay delicate with what I want to say next.

  “He beat me, Sharon.” I decide to come right to the point. Breaking the terrible wall of silence between us about the abuse is something I’ve been waiting years to do. “He sold me on the streets…sold me to…you know…to people…Eddie Nash…for drugs. Then he beat me afterward. He was ruthless and cruel…beat my face…gave me more black eyes than I can count…broke my ribs.”

  My throat constricts and, although I feel my soul erupting, I can barely choke out the words. “I came back to LA to work, but mostly to find him. To tell him I made it…in spite of him. And show him…to his face…how much better I became. Better than he ever said I would be! Better than he ever treated me…especially in the end.”

  I stop myself, realizing I am sinking too deep into my emotions, and try again to shake off the pain. I feel the crushing anguish of John and the memories of the risks I took believing I was nothing, not worth living…lost, self-destructive, drinking myself into oblivion…alone in Southeast Asia…so alone.

  The list of John’s offenses goes on and I know I’m not through it all, but finally I am ready to face him, the angry beast who left me with such terrible scars. After these many years, I’ve come back to confront him…but it seems, it wasn’t meant to be.

  As Sharon listens to my story, her eyes grow large, then soften. She nods. “Yes, I kinda figured as much.” Her head lowers, and she stares hard into her lap. “I went to see him in jail…after he was extradited.” Her expression hardens, and she looks up, staring somewhere beyond me. “Another bit of poetic justice,” she continues smugly. “John was jailed between the Hillside Stranglers, the Trash Bag Murderer, and the Skid Row Slasher. Right where he belonged, if you ask me.”

  I gape at her, disbelieving. How bizarre, I think, flashing back on my bike ride past the Hillside Strangler victim’s house, not knowing that Angelo Buono, one of the stranglers, was living on the street. “Did he ask you about me?”

  She snaps to. “I asked him where you were. What happened to you? All he told me was not to talk to you, that you had taken off with some people you met in the hotel in Miami and turned state’s evidence.”

  “Turned state’s evidence! It was more like a sting operation, a setup, in a North Miami park, where I had no choice but to turn him in. The cops even sent my
brother down from Oregon—awarded him a plaque of honor for bringing me to them. They told me my family was in danger, Sharon…that the best thing to do, for him and for me, was to tell them where he was. And those people saved my life! He was so crazed he would have eventually killed me, Sharon. If they hadn’t helped me get away, I’d be dead right now. He made a mistake—one he’d been so careful not to make. He never hit me in front of anyone before, and he messed up when he beat me in front of those people. People who cared about me and weren’t afraid of him!” My anger burns again as I recall the day of my liberation from John. I force the familiar pent-up rage back down. A fiery ball of fury, as great as the scorching sun, is the burden I’ve carried with me since I last saw him.

  Sharon shifts her fork and spoon nervously around the table. A thin line of perspiration on her upper lip glistens from the light’s reflection as she swallows a hard gulp of air. “I know he went looking for you when he got out.” She finally opens up. Her brow is damp with sweat. “And I thought, well, since I hadn’t heard from him after I stopped going to see him in jail and I hadn’t heard from you…that…maybe he found you again.”

  “No. Ha! He didn’t find me. It turns out, right after those people helped me to a safe house, my father, who out of the blue was maybe thirty miles away, read about John’s arrest in Miami and came and got me.”

  Sharon’s gaze drifts past me again, and her eyes cast shadows as if her memory plays a scene from the past. “I’ll never forgive him,” she says gravely after a long pause. Then, staring me straight in the eye, she continues, “He crossed the ultimate line with me.” Shadows dance wildly in her stare. “I’m a nurse. I’ve devoted my life to healing. I am a nurturer. I can do nothing else and feel there is no other way than to have the greatest respect for human life.” Her eyes lock fiercely with mine. “He came to me that night of the murders—to the house.” Her lips curl in disgust. “He was covered in blood, gray matter—brains and bone…” She clears her throat loudly. “At first, I thought it was his…that he had been in an accident. He was crying…like he was hurt. He asked me to draw him a bath…I should have known…the bathtub…his favorite confessional!”

  I don’t blink, clinging onto her every word. I picture myself in the bathroom in Sharon’s place, watching him, waiting for him to speak first, as she did the many times I saw her interact with him in the past. A nurturer. I visualize her letter to me after my attempted suicide.

  “You must promise me you will never repeat this!” she insists, leaning in to me. Her tongue thrusts out as if to wipe a bad taste from her mouth as her expression falls. Replaying the repulsive scene in her head, she presses on. “He said they were scum. That they deserved it; that they were lowlifes and didn’t deserve to live!” Her face goes pale, and she pauses again.

  “What did you say to him, Sharon?” I breathe.

  “I asked him, ‘who?’ Who was he talking about and what did he mean, ‘didn’t deserve to live'? That’s when he told me Eddie had sent his thugs to the house on Wonderland. He said Eddie had his black book and that he threatened to kill everyone in it, including you…me…his mother, Mary! He said that it was either them…or him and everyone he loved. He said they were dirt…to screw them!”

  She swallows hard and lowers her head. “I told him, ‘But they were your friends, John. How could you?’ I told him to get out! Get out and never come back! How dare he expose me to such filth?”

  Shifting uncomfortably in the booth, I ask no more questions. As I mull over her revelation to me, it fits like a missing piece of a puzzle I’ve almost given up on completing. Sharon is shaking, visibly unnerved at the recollection of the horror of that morning. I sense that this is the first and only time she has ever told anyone—ever gotten it off her chest—and that somehow, in doing so, she can find some peace from the memory of such betrayal. But I also sense she has more to reveal.

  “Do you think that maybe he really was trying to protect us, Sharon?”

  “Maybe,” she answers. “And himself, of course.”

  I nod. “Well, that explains why he showed up at the motel cleaned up then.” I purposely avoid mentioning the Valium he took to sleep that night.

  “Uh-huh. He took his bloody clothes rolled up in a paper sack when he left at dawn, and later, he told me he dropped them in different Dumpsters along Glendale and Hollywood on his way to pick up the car that got left near his answering service.”

  My mind pictures him slinking in the early morning hours through the streets of Hollywood, frantically trying to cover his tracks. I stop…and let the image fade to black. Too much, I think, allowing my brain to rest unfocused for a short time. “He told me you said yes,” I blurt before I can understand why. “Yes, that you would go into the Witness Protection Program with us. That you were just going to close up the house and meet us…later…when it was safe. He kept on telling me that…the whole time we were running…all the way to Florida!”

  Sharon’s eyes grow large with disbelief. “I told him no! I told him again, how dare he ask me to leave my family…for him! I said I would stay undercover in downtown LA while he turned over evidence to the police, but after that…well, he was on his own!”

  My gut twists, knots in a ball. So…that was a lie too, I think, stunned for a moment. Wow…ha…amazing. That’s one I still believed.

  “I believed him, Sharon,” I tell her flatly.

  Sharon shakes her head slowly. I can see in her face that she’s picturing me waiting for her all that time. “I…I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

  “Yeah. Ha. I can understand that!” I feel like a fool.

  Sharon appears anxious, her mind seemingly triggered by something even more disturbing. Her eyes dart wildly about the restaurant. From the main door to the lobster tank, from the waitress station to the bathroom exit. Perspiration glistens on her forehead, and her hair is damp as if she has stepped out of a steamy bath. She wipes her palms dry on her navy pants. “All right, Dawn. I’m going to tell you something now that I have not repeated to anyone since July of 1981 when it happened. After I tell you, I never want to talk about it again. You can take it how you want, but I don’t ever want you to breathe another word. Am I clear?”

  “Okay. I understand.” My hands are curled into fists of tension; my body is tight, immobile. I prepare myself to hear what Sharon has to say next, as if I’m about to be pounced on by a lion.

  “Okay. Good. Well…here it goes.” She clears her throat and continues. “That night when you and John left and we said good-bye in the Safeway parking lot…well…I went home to finish packing up the house. Not to meet up with you and John, but to close everything up. I knew it wasn’t safe there anymore…because of John and Eddie and, well, how John lied to the police. I was going to Oxnard to stay with my parents. Anyway, I was in the bathroom, finishing my bath and packing. The dogs were in there with me. They had been boarded for three days and didn’t want to leave my side…you know.” Sharon’s mouth is parched; I can hear her tongue stick to the roof of her mouth. She takes a long drink of her iced tea. “Well…I was just stepping out of the bathroom, into the doorway of the kitchen…you know…when he grabbed me.”

  “Grabbed you? Oh my God. Who?”

  “One of Eddie’s thugs…who knows…a bad man? He was wearing a black ski mask, so I couldn’t tell. He grabbed me around my waist and pinned my arms to my side so I couldn’t move. He put a knife to my throat and told me to keep quiet.”

  “Sharon. What did you do?” My voice is a raspy whisper.

  “You remember the antique meat hook you and John cleaned up and mounted in the kitchen by the stove?”

  “Yes. The one we got from the swap meet.”

  “Right. Well. We struggled for a while. It was hot, and I was slippery from the bath and managed to pull one of my arms free. I was reaching around for something, anything I could grab to use as a weapon, when my hand found the meat hook.”

  “No…”

  “Yes. I took hold of
that handle and, as hard as I could, brought it all the way down in front of me for momentum, then swung it straight back with every ounce of strength I had…”

  “What happened?”

  Sharon sits upright confidently. “Severed his spinal cord right at C6-C7. It was instant. Sucker wasn’t going to take me out without a fight.” She looks impenetrable, like a fortress made of iron daring anyone to challenge her strength.

  “Sharon, you’re kidding! Then what did he do?”

  “Dead. Instantly. He collapsed where we stood. I slipped right out of his arms.”

  “Sharon!” I’m incredulous, immobile except for my eyes that won’t stop blinking in disbelief. “What…How…? What did you do with the body? I mean…how…?”

  “It was a mess. Bled like a stuck pig…everywhere. What do you think I did? I made a phone call.”

  “To who?”

  “Big Tom. He…well, his guys…came and picked the poor sucker up within an hour.”

  “What did they do with the body? Did they know who it was?”

  “I didn’t ask. I was told not to worry, to assume it never happened. I thanked them and said that was fine. I never wanted to talk about it again. I just wanted him out of my house. Became another John Doe, I guess…and that’s that.”

  For a fleeting moment, I can’t believe what Sharon has just revealed. I remember the traumatic fear of a sniper’s bullet when John and I were on the run—the sinister feeling I got when John ran into that hit man at the Stardust in Vegas. Somehow, back then, I thought Sharon was safe. John must have diverted my fear more than I knew. Then I think about all those years of suffering and beatings I endured at John’s hand, how many times I was sure he was trying to kill me—and I realize how, as a consequence of his actions, Sharon was almost killed too.

  My childish impression of Sharon, always impervious to John’s bad behavior, dissipates and I see her true vulnerability behind her detached armor. She is, as I am, a survivor. “I’m glad you’re all right, Sharon. That probably freaked out the people who sent this guy after you. You sure gave them something to think about. What else happened? I mean, anyone else come looking for you?”