Thing of Beauty (49 page)

“I met Rochelle and Gia the same night,” recalled Ted Catrana. “The salon people came over and we were partying. It wasn’t real loud or anything, because our little son stayed asleep, but it got into a little mess. The first night was just one of them things, I’m a little embarrassed to tell. Gia went into the bedroom to lay down. We had been drinking. Gia wasn’t, she was all methadoned out. My wife noticed she went into the bedroom. Rochelle came in and checked up a couple times, then she left with the rest of them. Gia stayed with us.

“Gia was in the bed, in her underwear and a T-shirt. She was just being sexy. My wife seemed very turned on. They made a move and started kissing. If you want to know the truth, I was gonna leave. I had heard all about Gia, about her and other girls, it was very common. When I was getting ready to go, she said, ‘Don’t leave.’

“I never wanted to take advantage. She was whacked, and I didn’t want it to be a thing of me taking advantage of a whacked girl. But a man is a man and you can only go so far, and she initiated it. Gia seemed very fresh the next morning. My wife was very edgy, but Gia had a way of just smoothing everything over. Gia got into the shower. I asked my wife if she was all right, I started to feel guilty. I asked her how it was for her: she said it was different. At first I worried whether it was going to hurt us as a couple. When Gia was in bed, she was like a little baby, like a warm kid. She was sexual in her own way; she was very warm and sensitive. Once you met her, you were touched forever.”

Gia stayed with the Catranas on and off over the next few months, periodically returning to Rochelle. “One night me and Gia went out and got home really late,” he recalled. “And Rochelle was there with my wife and it didn’t look like friendly talk. Gia and Rochelle started to go at it, fist-fight. Rochelle got into the car and drove off. Gia took off after her, all upset. They went to the apartment. I sort of felt bad that it was my fault, so I went over to try and break
it up. I never saw two women fight like that, it was crazier than you’d think. Finally the cops came, everybody calmed down. Then they pretty much were back together, being lovey-dovey, so I got out of there.

“To me, Rochelle was Gia’s downfall. Rochelle is Bonnie—she’s worse than Bonnie, she’s Bonnie and Nancy Vicious put together. Rochelle would stab you in the back in a
minute.
Her mentality is pretty much the mentality of Atlantic City: Kick ’em when they’re down and discard them. It’s a rough, crazy town.

“But Rochelle was just bad for Gia. One day she’d be helping her out and the next day I’d see them and they were strung out. Rochelle was always good at her job, good at doing nails. She’s vicious and all, but she had some qualities. I’m just saying, for Gia, she was Satan. Gia’s mother, of course, was a big problem for her, but she wasn’t even in the picture. Gia said, ‘She doesn’t talk to me.’ I don’t think the mother helped her the least bit.

“Gia and Rochelle told me they did some smokers in Philly. They joked about it, ‘Remember that guy we did.’ Maybe they were just saying it to excite me, but when you have habits like that, anything is possible. One night I was at their apartment and Rochelle said she was going to put on a videotape of them, and Gia said, ‘No, no, no.’ They spoke of it openly, that they were turning tricks. Or maybe, yeah, it was that they performed for them, just to get them off. That was one of the things that was stressed: ‘No, we wouldn’t sleep with them.’”

Ted was not exactly a Boy Scout himself. “I’m not saying I was an angel,” he said. “I did
a lot
of cocaine at that time and over the next couple years. I did a lot of coke with Rochelle. I’d say Rochelle and I shot up cocaine at least fifty times. We’d sit in her kitchen and do cocaine for hours at a time. I later went away for rehab in North Jersey for cocaine. But Rochelle …

“Eventually what happened with this little love triangle with my wife and I and Gia was that Gia started to turn more toward my wife than me. I always told her she didn’t have to do anything for me, but I didn’t want her to continue just with my wife. I knew I would get too jealous myself. I had feelings for Gia too, and I didn’t want her to sleep with
me to be with my wife. I didn’t want her to use me. A couple of times I came home from work and they were together. My wife worried that she was in love with Gia, and felt a little deeper than she should have. And every time that happened, something would happen with Rochelle, and Gia would go somewhere.

“But, basically, Rochelle was just flooded with girls and guys and Gia was looking for that one-on-one. She wasn’t getting it from Rochelle, and it was driving her crazy. She wanted an exclusive relationship. And, believe me, she would do
anything
to get it. I remember going to their apartment one night and they were just going at it. Clothes were ripped off. Rochelle was sitting in a corner and Gia had her by the throat and was going down on her, like, trying to force sex on her. Gia’s shirt was off, Rochelle’s pants were off, and she was screaming. When I opened the door to the apartment, she was screaming, ‘Get me outta here!’ Gia gave me the look of death. She was in a rage. Of course, the next day, they could get back together.”

It was an endless cycle, Gia and Rochelle, but each time around left Gia a little more depleted, a little more desperate.

“I remember one night,” Rochelle said, “I was staying with tins guy, the one whose window Gia had jumped through. He was out, I was just home watching TV in my robe. All of a sudden, Gia comes climbing through his window in a Ralph Lauren tuxedo and black cowboy boots, fully made up with her hair long. She said, ‘C’mon, I want to take you out to dinner.’ I looked at her in this tuxedo and I just said, ‘Gia, you’re out of your mind, it’s done, it’s
over. ‘
She said c’mon, c’mon. She talked me into it.”

Kathleen was almost completely out of the picture, feeling there was little she could do but wait for a call from the police about the last of her daughter’s nine lives. She was beyond crisis mode. The emergency had been going on for nearly four years. There had been too many last straws. And with Gia in Atlantic City, someone closer by would be called to put out the emotional brush fires. It was her ex-husband’s turn. He had jurisdiction.

Gia’s father wasn’t sure exactly what to do. He gave his
daughter a place to sleep. He gave her a job, which she sometimes even
did.
He gave her extra money when she hit him up for it, which was often, even though he had a pretty good idea where it was going. And he gave her a place to cry.

“I can’t tell you how many times he helped her out,” recalled Dan Carangi. “Gia
broke
my brother. Sometimes I’d walk upstairs and she would be on his lap and with her head on his shoulders for hours. She was close with her Dad, much closer to her father than her mother.”

It was true that Joe Carangi had great affection for his daughter. He was, as he always had been, willing to do anything for her. But they were the an
ythings
of a man who believed that he had always spoiled his daughter—with no clue that she felt, at some essential level, that he had never really given her the time of day. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her or indulge her or hold her when she came to him. He just didn’t
get it.
He didn’t understand girls, and most of what he knew about junkies came from his observations of the ones who wandered into his new luncheonette, Joe’s Place, for breakfast after getting their methadone at Atlantic City’s main clinic—which was located just around the corner. The ones who were up on their luck and had a little money paid easily. The real goners emptied their pockets onto the table or the long Formica counter, picking out linty coins and perhaps a crumpled bill or two from among the pawn tickets and keys. But they all had that stunned-stoned look in their eyes, the narcotic glow on their otherwise disheveled faces. His contribution was to feed them—sometimes for free if someone was particularly pathetic and he was feeling particularly sympathetic If you came to his place, Joe Carangi would give certain kinds of sustenance. But you had to pick from what was on his limited luncheonette menu.

There was no longer the slightest doubt that methadone wasn’t going to solve Gia’s problems. She was in her fourth program in as many years, and she was showing no signs of improvement. “I saw her down there one time,” recalled Kathleen, “and it was like she was epileptic or something. She had the shakes. Gia had always stood very straight, and held her shoulders beautifully. The longer she was on that program in Atlantic City, the worse her shoulders got.”

Pressure from her family and Rochelle finally convinced Gia that she needed inpatient care. “Gia had agreed to go into rehab after I threatened to leave her, to
really
leave her,” Rochelle recalled. “I called Kathleen and asked her to come get her. She was like, ‘Well, I have a Corvette Club meeting tonight. Of all nights, does she have to pick tonight? I would come tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Kathleen, you have to come
now!’
I
begged
the woman. She did not come until two or three days later. Gia’s mother cared more about her Corvette Club meeting than Gia. The only time she would come for Gia was when Gia was at the top.

“I knew all along that if it hadn’t been for me, Gia would be living on the street. And I also knew what was going to happen if she went into rehab. I knew they’d say I was her ‘enabler’ and that they would have to turn her against me. That’s how rehab works; they try to break the pattern of drug use by getting you away from the life that led you to it. I knew I was taking a chance that I would lose her. But I was twenty-five years old by then, I had grown up a lot. And I knew there wasn’t any choice.”

G
ia’s lawyer John Duffy was stunned when he heard his client had checked into Eagleville. A recovering alcoholic himself, Duffy was pleased that she was finally seeking inpatient treatment. He just couldn’t imagine someone like Gia in a place like Eagleville. “It’s a bare-knuckle joint,” he said. “It’s the last bead on the rosary. I do a lot of intervention work, and I never send
anyone
to Eagleville. I don’t want a patient in a place where they’re going to learn
more
about violating the law. I wanted to help her get into a better program. But Gia called me and said she wanted to stay there.”

Eagleville Hospital was not the Betty Ford Center. The inpatient rehab center in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs had been created to insure against the very thing that Betty Ford and other exclusive treatment centers stood for: class and economic distinctions determining quality of care. Located in a rural area just outside of Norristown, Eagleville had been created by local Jewish philanthropists at the turn of the century to treat indigent tuberculosis patients of all religions. In 1967, Eagleville shifted direction and became one of the country’s first therapeutic communities for the treatment of alcoholism. Drug rehab was later added, and Eagleville became known as one of the few facilities in the country to embrace the radical notion of “combined treatment” for the broader problems of addiction rather than the traditional substance-specific approach.

Through these changes, Eagleville maintained its commitment to indigent patients and court-urged, voluntary commitments. It was designed to be the top of the bottom: the last best chance for the worst cases to save their lives. And that altruistic mission was even surviving the financial difficulties that had come with the Reagan years—treatment money was increasingly being redirected into Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” ad campaign. The funding drought had forced cutbacks, a financial reorganization and a reorientation as primarily a hospital rather than a therapeutic community. Eagleville had been forced to advertise on television for a few patients who might actually have health coverage.

But the hospital was still racially integrated, maintained a separate women’s unit, and refused to shy away from the most hopeless cases—which was the way heroin addicts were viewed by a public health system increasingly concentrating its efforts on more fashionable, more insurable addictions like cocaine and alcohol. Most of Eagleville’s 126 short-term detox and rehab patients, and its 70 long-term patients in the ambitious Candidates Program, were on public assistance. Many had come to Eagleville after living on the streets, more than a few bad criminal records. The facility’s dedicated staff knew the value of serious care for the most serious patients. Some of them had begun their careers in counseling, social work and even medicine after saving themselves at Eagleville.

Gia had about $2,500 remaining of the hundreds of thousands of dollars she had made modeling—as well as a stack of debts and outstanding warrants. She gave Rochelle the money to hold onto, and had herself declared indigent so that welfare would pay for her treatment. In December of 1984, she entered the detoxification program at Eagleville, which lasted days or weeks—however long it took clients to rid their bodies of whatever they had taken, to get over the worst of their physical withdrawal symptoms and to recover from any emergency physical damage from suicide attempts or accidents. After detox, patients who wanted to stay drug-and-alcohol-free were admitted into Eagleville’s month-long inpatient program of classes, group therapy and individual
counseling. The average patient was at Eagleville for forty-five days.

But Gia didn’t make it that long. Two weeks into her stay, her aunt Barbara was killed in a pre-Christmas auto accident on the Atlantic City Expressway. Barbara had been Gia’s baby-sitter as a child and, even though she hadn’t spent as much time with her as a teenager as with her aunt Nancy, Barbara had a very special place in Gia’s heart. Barbara was another of the mothers Gia never had, but she had also served a pivotal role in the Adams family. She had always been a sort of buffer between Kathleen and Nancy, spanning the generation gap between the two and enabling them to have some semblance of sisterly interaction. Only if Barbara was there as charming peacemaker could Kathleen, Nancy and Gia spend an afternoon together shopping. Barbara was free-spirited and had a way of bringing people together. The week before her death, she had taken one of the casino buses to Atlantic City rather than driving. As the bus tooled down the expressway, Barbara had suddenly found herself leading all the passengers in a round of Christmas carols. That was just the kind of thing that could happen whenever she was around.