The Babysitter

by Liza Rodman

  Then one hot August day, my prayers were answered.

  “Pack a bag,” Mom announced. “I have two days off, so we’re goin’ to P’town.” She was as happy as I’d seen her all summer. So was I. I wondered if Auntie was still mad at me, and even though I had a nervous stomach worrying what she’d say when she saw me, I didn’t dare ask Mom about it and ruin her good mood.

  Louisa and I already had our bathing suits on, so all I had to pack were jacks, marbles, my Fred Flintstone puppet, and my pajamas; all Louisa packed was some Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. We jumped into the back seat of Mom’s used Ford convertible and tapped our knees together, waiting for her to get ready.

  Provincetown at last! I thought.

  Mom started the car, wrapped a soft, yellow silk scarf around her hair, put the top down, and finally pulled out onto Route 6 headed north. She turned up the radio and sang all the way.

  The music and her happy mood allowed me to relax into the back seat. There was no doubt my mother had a date that night. Date nights were the only times we saw her that happy.

  As we pulled into the RC driveway, Mom took her best pink lipstick out of her pocketbook and applied it perfectly before she even stopped the car.

  “Okay,” she said to me as she turned off the engine. “Take your bag up to Auntie’s. And for God’s sake, don’t do or say anything stupid.”

  I got out of the car, and the first person I saw was Tony, sitting in the RC’s truck with Geoff riding shotgun. I waved to both of them, and Tony got out and came over. As he approached, he put a piece of Juicy Fruit gum in his mouth and handed me the rest of the pack.

  “Wow, you’re not Little Liza anymore! You’re almost all grown up!” he said, leaning up against the side of the car to light a cigarette. He winked at Mom, and she smiled. He looked back at me. “Where ya been this summer, kiddo? Can’t believe it’s been a year since I’ve seen you!”

  I smiled and nodded, unable to talk through the wad of gum I was struggling to chew, and without thinking, I pulled my hair over my Dumbo ears, even though Tony never said anything mean about them sticking out. Instead, he always said something nice about my wild, curly hair or new bathing suit or how tan my legs were getting. Tony was one of the few grown-ups who never yelled at me, never called me difficult or fresh or a nightmare or a whole hell of a lotta trouble. Instead, he’d push his glasses up his nose and say, “You sure are gonna be a pretty chick when you grow up.”

  I had to look away because my cheeks always turned bright red when anyone said anything nice about me, especially when it was Tony.

  “Geoff and I were just heading out to the dump. Wanna come along?” he said, looking at Mom for her approval.

  “Please, please, please can we go?” I said.

  She looked down at me and then up at Tony. Just then, Auntie strode through the office door and joined us in the parking lot. She was all dressed up in a striped dress, and she was wearing fake eyelashes and a lot more makeup than I’d never seen her wear in the middle of the day. Her thick, tanned feet looked like they were trying to squeeze out of her high-heel sandals.

  “I missed you, girlfriend,” she said, giving Mom a quick hug.

  “Me too,” Mom said.

  Auntie looked at me and gave me a little smile. I didn’t know how, but everything seemed to be all right.

  “Looks like you ladies are ready to hit the town,” Tony said.

  “Finally!” Mom said. “I couldn’t wait to get back to P’town. Harwich is Deadsville!”

  Mom and Auntie laughed. Tony didn’t.

  “Mummy, can we go with Tony?” I said, hoping she hadn’t forgotten his invitation.

  Mom and Joan looked at each other.

  “Hey, Tony, can you take all four?” Auntie said. “I’ll throw a little something extra in your paycheck if you’ve got room in the truck.”

  “Sure thing. Louisa and Gail can sit on Geoff and Liza’s laps, right, guys?”

  “Sure!” I said. “There’s plenty of room.” Although I wasn’t at all sure there was. I just knew I wanted to go wherever he wanted to take us.

  “Okay then,” Tony said. “It’s settled. Liza, why don’t you go find Gail, and we’ll be off.”

  I ran toward Auntie and Uncle Hank’s apartment to get Gail before anyone could change their mind.

  * * *

  We drove out of the RC, the five of us crammed onto the front seat, and drove slowly through town with the radio on, past the Lobster Pot and John’s Footlong. The summer traffic thinned as we neared the west end. Louisa had somehow squeezed on the seat between me and Geoff, who held Gail half on his lap and half on the armrest of the passenger door. I was close enough to Tony to smell his cologne. He told me once it was very fancy stuff his wife always gave him—English Leather. I looked over at him just as he looked at me.

  “You’re never gonna ever wear makeup or lipstick, are you?” he said. “Because you’re already such a cute chick without it. I always tell Avis: makeup and lipstick only make a good girl look like a bad girl.”

  I thought about Mom’s thick pink lipstick and heavy blue eye shadow and Auntie’s fake eyelashes and heavy rouge, and I wondered if he thought they were bad girls.

  I moved the wad of Juicy Fruit to the side of my mouth. “Nope,” I said. “I’m never going to wear it.”

  “Promise?” Tony said, looking at me so long I got nervous, because he wasn’t watching the road.

  “Yes, I promise, Tony.”

  On the radio, Tommy James and the Shondells were singing their hit “Hanky Panky,” and Tony sang along. We all joined in for the chorus, and I threw in a shimmy with my shoulders like I’d seen the girls do on American Bandstand.

  My baby does the hanky panky…

  Tony laughed. “How do you know all the words?” He looked at me like I was the smartest girl in the class. I felt my cheeks go red again.

  “I know the words to all the songs,” I said, and I did. My mother’s favorites that summer were “The Girl from Ipanema,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and “Wild Thing,” which she would turn up as high as the volume would go and sing along with the chorus while the palm of her hand hit the steering wheel with the beat.

  I looked over at Tony again, who caught my glance and winked at me as the song came to an end, and he started flipping through the stations to find another he liked. It was always hard to find a good song on the radio in Provincetown. Only a few stations came in clearly, and only one or two of them played music, so you were always turning the dial all the way one way and back again through the static until something good came through.

  Later that evening, exhausted from the sun and swimming and full of ice cream and hot dogs, Louisa, Geoff, Gail, and I climbed the stairs to Auntie’s apartment and fell into the bunk beds, a tangle of sticky hands and sandy arms and legs.

  It felt so good to be home.

  20 TONY

  By the end of the summer, Tony had had quite enough of hauling garbage, repairing broken lamps and windows, and unclogging toilets at the Royal Coachman. He begged Avis for yet another reconciliation, and her response was less than open-armed; she warned him, “If you leave us one more time, Tony, I’m through.”1 He promised he had learned his lesson and wouldn’t leave them again; he would find reliable work and settle down. Somewhat appeased, Avis agreed, so Tony left his grim cottage at the RC and once more returned to live with her and the children. In mid-September they rented a tiny cottage on Shank Painter Road from David Raboy, an assistant professor at Rhode Island College who summered on the Cape and then rented the cottage out during the winter months.

  As had been the case in their earlier apartments, Tony and Avis’s “pad” became a gathering place for young people to hang out, drink, and do drugs. Many of the kids were Avis’s girlfriends from childhood. Those girls had watched Avis become a bride and then a mother before she turned fifteen. Now at eighteen, the girls envied what they perceived as Avis’s life of freedom as an adult with a handsome hu
sband and her own apartment. Although one of them thought Tony odd and that “everything that came out of his mouth was just strange,” the young woman never said it out loud to anyone at the time. She even thought there was something slightly sinister about him. But, he was a grown-up, and his strangeness was made “cool” by his being older. It didn’t hurt that he also sold or gave most of them drugs. So, strange or not, they clamored to be with him.

  In October, with the departure of the last of the summer population, Tony lost the few handyman jobs he had around town. To make matters worse, Avis had a pregnancy scare from one of their rare copulations and it rattled them both. They couldn’t afford the three children they had; a fourth would have been disastrous. Besides, she often felt as if she already had a fourth child in Tony, who teetered on a knife’s edge, swinging wildly between manic energy and lethargy so profound he could barely get out of bed. When, during a particularly bad argument, he hauled off and whacked the back of her head, he was as stunned as she was.

  When he wasn’t looking for work or walking the dunes, Tony busied himself with finishing a partially framed room in the basement of their Shank Painter apartment for his “art projects.” The room was partitioned off from the rest of the basement, and when he finished putting up plywood walls, he put two padlocks on the door. He spent untold hours in his private “studio” but never had any artwork to show for it.

  He also spent a lot of his time pursuing Christine Gallant, who had moved to Hyannis with her sister after the summer job at Adams Pharmacy ended. She came to Provincetown often to visit Raul Matta, but she would also see a fair amount of Tony, who listened patiently as she bemoaned that Matta was still very much married. Like so many other young women in Tony’s circle, Christine had a sad and sordid history with men and with drugs, an escalating habit Tony was only too happy to supply. She often called the Shank Painter apartment looking for Tony and would instead talk to Avis, who, for her part, didn’t mind that another woman was calling her husband. “[Tony and I] were just living together by then,” Avis later said. “I didn’t care what he was doing.”2

  As November loomed, Tony finally found a job in New York City. He was hired on a trial basis as a clerk at Emery freight company near John F. Kennedy International Airport; if after forty-five days it worked out, he would be brought on full-time. Avis wasn’t wild about the prospect of leaving Provincetown and moving to New York, but the money was good, and if he got the full-time job, the plan was for her and the kids to follow as soon as Tony got situated. “Despite it all,” Avis said, “I think we both really wanted to make it work.”3

  When Tony left for New York, Sarah Cook, Avis’s aunt, who was actually only a couple of years older than Avis and more like a sister, moved in to help her with the children. Along with most of Avis’s relatives, Sarah didn’t like or trust Tony and watched him come and go through the late fall of 1967 with a growing sense of unease. She observed that he was strung out all the time and his drug use was making him even odder and more volatile. Sarah didn’t hold back.

  “He’s insane, and he’s going to kill you,” she warned Avis. “You have to leave him. One day he’s going to flip out and kill somebody, and I don’t want it to be you.”4

  21 TONY

  It was a surprise to almost nobody, least of all Avis and her family, when Tony lost the job in New York. After his forty-five-day trial period ended, he was fired. By the time he returned home to Provincetown, he had fashioned a story that his and several other employees’ jobs had become “redundant,” and he was no longer needed. Back in Provincetown, it was the same old Tony saga: no job, no money, but plenty of drugs. Again, Sarah warned Avis, “Don’t take him back. Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry.” But Avis did take him back, and soon they were fighting around the clock.

  “We were having a lot of hassles over money because we owed so much money to so many people,” Avis later said.

  Finally, they decided to officially separate. Avis hoped it would jolt him into getting a real job and supporting his family. Tony did what he always did; he looked for an escape. He couldn’t find work now that the tourist season was officially over, and he had already burned just about every bridge with the few people who hired help during the winter. As the bitter winds of another cold, gray January began to blow, Tony knew he had to get out of town. Then, a buddy, Ronnie Enos, told Tony he was headed out west to visit his mother in Arizona, and the two decided to hit the road. A week later they drove out of town, leaving Avis standing in the driveway, once again abandoned and with a baby on her hip.

  As she watched the car disappear, Avis decided she’d finally had enough. With Sarah’s urging, Avis filed for divorce, citing Tony’s cruel and abusive behavior.

  “In those days you had to have a reason,” she said.

  She was nineteen years old, had three children under the age of six to feed and clothe, and she didn’t know whether she’d be able to pay the next month’s rent. Tony left for San Francisco with $450 in his wallet, nearly $3,500 in today’s value. He left Avis $80.

  Before Tony and Ronnie left town, they stopped at Dr. Hiebert’s for a supply of amphetamines so they could drive to California without stopping. As they left Provincetown, they passed a road sign at the terminus of Route 6 that read, BISHOP, CALIFORNIA, 3,205 MILES.

  Ronnie rolled down the window and raised his fist: “ ‘California, here we come!’ ” he sang into the cold January air.

  “I hate that song,” Tony said. “Roll up the window, it’s fucking freezing out there.”

  Fueled by two coffee cans full of amphetamines, Tony and Ronnie drove nearly straight through, traveling on I-80 the entire way, from its beginning in New Jersey to its terminus in San Francisco. Their only stop was in Chapel, Nebraska, nineteen hundred miles from Provincetown, where they napped, showered, and within hours got back on the road. When they made it to San Francisco, they headed straight to Haight-Ashbury, where two sisters from Provincetown had an apartment on Oak Street. They also met up with another Provincetown local, Matt Russe, who had gone AWOL from the army. Russe had a well-earned reputation as a bully; he once sided with his pit bull after it bit a child. By the time he turned fourteen, he and his equally delinquent older brother already had rap sheets that included petty larceny, breaking and entering, and assault with a deadly weapon.

  “The Russe boys had their territory long before there was such a thing as gangs,” Avis said.1

  After four days in San Francisco, Tony and Ronnie found their own apartment and Tony spent all but his last five dollars on rent. It was a squalid dive on Haight Street, furnished with little more than stained mattresses on the floor; dirty, chipped dishes in the sink, and a soiled, torn sheet on the front window. Nevertheless, he wrote Avis that “a new life” had begun for him now that he had found his “kind of people at last.” And indeed, Tony once again gathered a coterie of Provincetown transplants—Ronnie, Matt, and a handful of others.

  With the San Francisco newspapers on strike, there were no want ads to comb through, so Tony and the Provincetown gang used the strike as an excuse to remain unemployed. Most days he and his flock hung around hustling for spare change and doing whatever drugs they could round up, including heroin, which was plentiful and often free on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park.

  They’d been in the apartment less than a week when Tony, Matt, and Ronnie tried to crash a party upstairs in their building, but the host threw them out, telling them, “Get lost, neighbor. You weren’t invited.” They returned downstairs, and soon there was a knock at the door. Tony opened the door to a short young woman with brown eyes and long, brown hair smiling up at him. She reminded Tony of Avis. Her name was Barbara Spalding, and she had come downstairs from the party to apologize for the host.

  “Greg is very rude. He shouldn’t talk like that to strangers from out of town,” she said. “I knew by your accents that you weren’t from California.”

  Tony invited her in, and no sooner had she crossed the thresh
old than Matt Russe dropped his pants and mooned the woman. She screamed and ran from the apartment. Tony went after her and caught up to her on the stairs.

  “Listen, Barbara,” Tony explained, “Matt is always clowning around. He doesn’t mean any harm. It’s just his foolishness.”

  They stood together on the stairs, and after they chatted awhile, Tony offered, “How about a date? You can tell me about Haight-Ashbury, and I’ll tell you what Provincetown is really like.”

  She told him she had a little boy and would have to bring him along, and they agreed to meet at the Golden Gate Park the next day.

  It was only a matter of days before Tony moved into Barbara’s even dingier room in a communal apartment on McAllister Street with her and her two-year-old son, Bobby. She had divorced Bobby’s father five months before and was living off the welfare payments for her son. And now, so was Tony.

  “I loved that kid,” Tony later said.2

  And maybe he did. But he didn’t seem to care that the two-year-old boy was witness to his and Barbara’s drug use. One of their highs of choice was a “match head,” in which methamphetamines are mixed with red phosphorous. They also did whatever speed, LSD, hash, and heroin they could find. One night they mixed a possibly tainted dose of methamphetamines with alcohol and then shot it up. Barbara immediately went into convulsions.

  “Get me to a hospital,” she begged. “I’m dying.”

  Tony took her to the nearby San Francisco General Hospital, where they rushed her to the ER. He outweighed Barbara by as much as seventy pounds, and so fared better, but he too was given Librium to come down from the drugs and soon recovered. In the middle of their near-fatal overdoses, the hospital filled with other casualties: it was February 19, the night of the Haight-Ashbury riots. While Tony waited seven hours for Barbara to stabilize, he did what he had once done with Peter when Avis overdosed on chloral hydrate: he walked the halls with Bobby on his shoulders and sat while the boy napped in his lap. All around the hospital and the city beyond, the sirens screamed.