by Liza Rodman
Tony was already thinking of heading out to San Francisco, where he’d heard that in a neighborhood called Haight-Ashbury drugs were as cheap and plentiful as dime-store candy. He offered to take the girls along because they said one of their band members had a big house there and lots of money and drugs. Tony liked the sound of that.
On their way out the door, Bonnie and Diane stole Avis’s only pair of good shoes. Unaware, Avis exchanged addresses with the girls so that they could write, and then stood on the porch holding one-year-old Michael on her hip and watched as the car pulled out of the driveway. When the car turned toward Route 6A, she saw Diane’s thin, pale arm waving from the window. She never saw either girl again.
When Tony had offered the ride, he’d imagined a wild road trip; he had plenty of drugs, and the girls seemed amenable to just about anything he had in mind. But after a few hundred miles, the girls had become tiresome, singing loudly and off-key to the Mamas and the Papas hit single “Monday, Monday” whenever it came on the radio, or, even worse, “California, Here I Come!” Diane had a high, reedy voice, and when she sang, she squeaked the lyrics. It felt like his head was in a vise whenever they opened their mouths, and he yelled at them to “shut the hell up” until he was hoarse. And now his damned car was overheating in the middle of the godforsaken desert; the last town they went through had been at least an hour earlier, and it had only a couple of buildings with FOR SALE signs in dark windows. Since then, he’d seen nothing but cacti, prairie dogs, and turkey vultures circling lazily above the roadkill that littered the highway. He wished he’d brought his taxidermy kit: he’d never had the chance to stuff a vulture, let alone a prairie dog.
Mercifully, Tony spied a car approaching them across the hot sage and bitter brush, the sun glinting off the windshield as it bumped along the rutted road toward them on Route 66. It was the first car he’d seen in more than an hour. When the car was finally within about a hundred yards, he saw that it was the Arizona Highway Patrol and quickly pushed the coffee can out of sight under the front seat.
When the officer approached the car, he saw three hot and sweaty faces looking up at him.
“We’re on our way to San Francisco!” Bonnie volunteered.
“Thought we’d see the Painted Desert on our way,” Tony added.
“Painted Desert?” the cop said. “You missed that by about a hundred miles”—he pointed behind them—“that way.” He looked inside the car. “Where’s your water jug? Gotta have a water jug if you’re going to drive these parts.”
“Oh, I didn’t know,” Tony said. Then added lamely, “I’m from Boston.”
The cop chuckled, pushing his hat back off his slick brow.
“Yep, I saw your plates. Don’t see many folks from Massachusetts way out here. You better be careful in these parts. When people wander off into the desert, we usually only find a pile of bones, and not even that if the coyotes get there first.” He pronounced it KYE-oats. Tony had never heard it said that way.
Tony peered into the desert; there was nothing but hot dust as far as the eye could see. Compared to crowded Boston and even Cape Cod, the desert felt like the moon—endless and anonymous and wild. It was indeed a place to get lost, or a place to lose something and, possibly, as the cop said, lose it forever. Once the car had cooled down, and with a water jug supplied by the officer, Tony and the girls continued down the hot highway.
What happened next remained a mystery for more than fifty years. Tony was back in Provincetown less than a week after he had left. He told Avis that instead of driving Bonnie and Diane all the way to California as he had said he would, he had left them in Pennsylvania after the cops told him he couldn’t cross state lines with a minor (Diane was sixteen). But then his story changed. Later, he told police he had driven them all the way to California and left them at their friend’s mansion in Hayward, a small but wealthy farming community on the southern end of San Francisco Bay.
Neither story was ever confirmed by investigators or his own defense team. But regardless of where Tony “left” them, the two “groupies” who ran away from home seemed to evaporate into thin air.
* * *
The disappearance of Bonnie Williams and Diane Federoff caused barely a ripple of concern, even in their immediate families. Because both were “wild child” children of the sixties, Bonnie’s mother and Diane’s grandparents, with whom she had been sent to live, assumed the girls would return home when they were ready; worrying about their running away from home was one thing, but doing anything about it was futile.3 They weren’t the only girls who had vanished. The mid-1960s was a time of runaways, and the parents of itinerant teenagers came to expect sudden and unexplained absences. As the sexual revolution hit its stride and drug use among America’s youth became rampant and routine, police took less and less interest in yet another kid running away from home. Across America, four thousand women and girls were reported missing, and police departments’ phones were constantly ringing. Few of the reports were ever investigated, and some of the women never returned home. It wouldn’t be until the infamous cases of Patricia Hearst, J. Paul Getty III and his severed ear sent with a ransom demand, and a millionaire’s daughter buried alive with a tube to breathe through that missing women and children became news and police across the country finally took notice.
In short, the 1960s was a good time for anyone looking to find an aimless young woman in need of a friendly face.
Running away was a normal, even safe coming-of-age phenomenon for boys in America. But the growing number of runaway girls was alarming because, unlike the boys, the girls often turned up dead. The demographics of runaways also changed; whereas children from poorer neighborhoods, often orphans, ran away to find a better life and a regular meal, by the late sixties, it had become a middle-class problem. Churches began setting up runaway shelters to deal with the issue, and in the early 1970s, a nationwide hotline was established to better track the missing youth. But all of that came too late for Bonnie and Diane.
10 LIZA
I heard about Tony Costa weeks before I met him. I was seven that summer of 1966, when Mom got the job at the Royal Coachman and the three of us shared a single room on the first floor near the office. Louisa and I did our best to stay out of her hair, and whenever I could, I’d tag along behind Cecelia as she made her rounds through the rooms. If she wasn’t humming some church hymn, she was talking about “my Tony.”
“When my Tony gets back from his trip, I’ll have him come over and meet you.” “My Tony is a good man.” “I raised my Tony by myself after his father died in the war.” She didn’t say what war, but I figured it was a long time ago and far away.
Cecelia talked about her Tony in a sort of low mumble, like a lobster boat idling at the pier, while she folded towels from the dryer or tucked hospital corners on the beds. I was happy to be out of my mother’s reach, and happy to help Cecelia where I could—handing her little squares of soap for the dishes on the bathroom counters or gathering up the dirty linens from where guests had thrown them on the floor. She always thanked me with a smile or pat on the arm or even a hug. It was the hugs that I waited for most. She’d take me in her arms and hold me there as if she had nowhere else to go and nothing to do, as if she loved me. I’d seen Mom give Louisa a hug or two like that, but I’d never gotten one.
One day, as Cecelia and I were moving between rooms, a man drove up to the motel in a beat-up Oldsmobile. One of the many things Grampa Georgie had drilled into me was how to recognize the make of a car, and every time I got it right, I felt something close to pride and wished he were there to notice. I was standing by the linen cart with an armful of towels and stared as the man got out of the car and then smiled in my direction. He was tall and suntanned, with thick dark hair and straight white teeth. I was confused. I didn’t know why a stranger would smile at me, but then he said, “Hi, Mother,” and I realized Cecelia was right beside me. She stopped emptying towels from a large laundry bag and looked toward him.
A look of worry momentarily flooded her face. Then, she gave her head a little shake and rushed past me, her arms open.
“Tony!” she said, throwing her arms around the man and kissing him on the cheek.
I hadn’t seen many mothers throw their arms around their kids and kiss them, so I watched, my mouth open at the spectacle. But then I saw the man grimace and sort of shrink as he pushed Cecelia away. He reached up to wipe his cheek where her lipstick had left a red smear.
“I told you I don’t like lipstick,” he said.
“I like to look good for work,” Cecelia said quietly.
She no longer seemed happy to see him. I wondered what had happened.
“You’re back so soon. I thought you might find a job out there for a few months.”
“I told you when I called from the road that things didn’t work out and I decided to come back.”
“But everything went okay, yes? No problems?” Cecelia said.
“Everything went fine, but I didn’t end up taking the girls all the way to California,” Tony said. “I left them in Pennsylvania instead, that’s all.” And before Cecelia could ask why, he volunteered, “They got bored with the ride, so I dropped them outside Philly. Where they wanted. It’s where they wanted,” he said again. “So here I am.”
She seemed to think about that for a minute, then gave a little sniff.
“Well, Vinnie has been taking very good care of me with you away,” she said, giving the bosom of her yellow sweater a little flick-flick-flick with her fingers, as if brushing off lint.
Tony laughed, but the laugh wasn’t very nice.
“Yeah, I’m sure he did,” Tony said.
Finally, Tony looked over Cecelia’s shoulder and saw me standing there.
“And who’s this?” he said. He smiled for the first time since getting out of the car, and I realized this Tony had a nice face.
Cecelia turned and also smiled. “Ah! This is Liza. My boss’s girl and my little helper,” she said, beckoning me over. “Liza, come say hello to my Tony.”
I dropped my armload of towels onto the housekeeping cart and walked over, feeling my face burning with the attention both she and Tony focused on me. Not knowing what else to do, I put out my hand. With a little chuckle, Tony squatted down and took off his sunglasses. His eyes were brown like mine, and when he smiled, they smiled too. I watched my entire hand disappear into his large, tanned fingers.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Liza. I hope to see you around, okay?”
All I was capable of was a nod into the front of my shirt.
“Okay, okay, enough of this,” Cecelia said. “Liza and I have work to do.”
Tony let go of my hand and stood up. When he did, I finally glanced up at him. He was looking toward the main door of the motel.
“Did you ask if there’s any work around here for me?” he said. “I gotta find a job.”
“Yes, I talked to Mrs. Becker about you. She runs the place most days. She’s expecting you.” Cecelia pointed toward the office.
Without another word, he strode off.
“It’s good to have you back, Tony,” Cecelia called after him. He didn’t turn around.
As she and I walked back toward the linen closet, she shook her head gently.
“Ah, my Tony,” she said.
11 TONY
Soon after Tony returned from his mysterious trip with Bonnie and Diane, he and Avis were fighting more than they were talking, and Tony moved out. It was the first, but it wouldn’t be the last time he did. As she watched his car drive away from the apartment, she noticed a car with Indiana plates drive up. Twelve years after disappearing from her life, her father suddenly returned. She later wrote that having him walk back into her life was her “every-single-birthday-candle wish come true.”1
For five days, Clinton “Johnny” Johnson reconnected with his daughter and got acquainted with his grandsons. A photo of their reunion showed a smiling Johnny, Avis, and her two boys and was made all the more poignant, as it would be their last. Johnny died two weeks later in a car accident back home in Indiana. He drove his car off the road, through his front yard and into a cornfield, where he was thrown free, but then the car rolled back on him, crushing him. He was forty-seven years old. The man Avis had mourned losing her entire life was now gone forever.
* * *
Even though Tony was working at the Royal Coachman, he still couldn’t afford an apartment, so after he left Avis, he spent most nights sleeping out on the dunes or crashing on friends’ couches. But when Johnny Johnson was killed in late July, Avis was grief-stricken and lonely, and she asked Tony to move back in with her and the boys.
It was hardly a joyful reconciliation; along with their ongoing money squabbles, their sex life remained stagnant. In fact, he recoiled from her embrace. It was as if “he was scared to touch me,” she said later. Tony himself admitted that he feared what might happen if he did. And according to Avis, he rarely touched her again, and when he did it was often by force. On one of those occasions, he told her, “You’re my wife and I want to fuck you,” threw her to the bed and took her violently. She didn’t think of it as rape because “I was his wife,”2 and in 1966 women couldn’t charge their husbands with sexual assault.I
By this time, Tony was regularly taking the sedative Solacen along with a variety of amphetamines by alternating handfuls. He was also experimenting with an ever-increasing array of street drugs—pot, hash, and even heroin and LSD. He told Avis he felt as if he were sitting outside himself, observing “Tony” from a distance.
Once, when she asked him, “Do you remember the time—?” he shut her off. She realized he never wanted to answer questions about what he did or where he’d been.3
“No, I don’t want to talk about that: that wasn’t me; that was someone else.”4 He looked upon himself as totally removed, separate from that Tony; it fascinated him more than it repulsed or scared him, and he set out to learn as much as he could about his favorite subject: Tony Costa. He read books on astrology, witchcraft, Buddhism, and the various psychotropic drugs he now took like aspirin. He also shared his self-observations and his growing feelings of darkness with friends.
Over a few beers one night at Fo’csle, he told a buddy that he thought of doing “really bad things, really horrible, terrible things.”
The friend shrugged it off. “Yeah, Tony. We all feel like that sometimes.”
Tony erupted in anger, something he rarely revealed to anyone but Avis. “You don’t understand,” he said, slamming his beer on the table as he rose to leave. “Nobody understands!”
I. Spousal rape wouldn’t become a crime in all fifty states until 1993. Even so, it remains very difficult to prove a lack of sexual consent within a marriage.
12 LIZA
Mom had the kind of looks that stopped people in the street. Even when she was a baby, strangers told Nana that they’d “never seen such a pretty child!” I don’t think Nana, a plain, stern woman, ever forgave her for it. As Mom grew up, those beautiful baby looks matured into a sexuality so animal it was almost feral. She even smelled different from other moms—earthy, like warm topsoil.
Grampa Georgie called her a real piece of work. She had curly, shoulder-length blond hair that she “tipped” even blonder and later wore in a stiff beehive. She had freckles sprinkled across a button nose, a pretty smile, and bright blue eyes that blazed, especially when she was angry, which by the time I came along seemed like most of the time. She loved to laugh, but usually at the expense of others, and pulling a good prank on someone made her day. On top of everything else, her body resembled that of Marilyn Monroe’s—curvy with big boobs. She warned me I’d probably end up with big boobs too, and that if I wasn’t careful I could also end up with a fat ass like hers. The dreaded Noonan ass, she called it. She said she’d inherited hers from Grampa Georgie’s mother and her mother before her. It was the only thing about her appearance Mom hated. Everything else worked just fine for her. In spite of her d
readed fat ass (and as I would later learn, maybe because of it) men seemed to line up at her door, waiting their turn to ask her out. Even I could see there was something wild and raw about her that men wanted, but it frightened me.
* * *
That spring, after we had returned to West Bridgewater, Mom had found a new boyfriend, Tom, her boss, who was the principal of Stoughton High School, where she taught. Tom asked her to go on a date the minute he heard she’d gotten a divorce. Even though she loved the attention from the good-looking, well-educated principal, she had said no; he was married, and she didn’t date married men. But Tom kept trying. Finally, he came to Mom with tears in his eyes and horrible news: his wife was dying of cancer. Doctors didn’t think she’d last another month, six weeks tops. Soon after that, Mom gave in, and Tom became her secret boyfriend. He was not, however, a secret around our house. After he’d show up, she’d put us to bed, sometimes at three in the afternoon, pulling the curtains and telling us it was nighttime and to stop complaining and go to sleep. A few times, when I tried to get out of the room to go to the bathroom in the night, I’d find the door was locked, and I’d lie awake worried that if I fell back asleep, I’d pee the bed. A few times I did, and in the morning I had to rush to get the sheets in the machine before she found out.