Thing of Beauty (51 page)

Then Nancy Adams threw her own wrench into the works. She decided that she would move to Atlantic City and replace Gia as Rochelle’s roommate. Gia assumed this
meant that Nancy would also be replacing her as Rochelle’s lover. Nancy denied it, but Gia became insanely jealous anyway. She convinced Kathleen, who didn’t need much convincing, that Nancy was conspiring to destroy her life. “When Gia got into Eagleville, whatever she did, Nancy jumped in and picked up,” Kathleen recalled. “It was sick.”

Nancy was unable to make Gia or Kathleen listen to her version of what had happened. Nancy had been so pleased with the way Rochelle had done her nails during the Gia vigil that she had come back to the shore a week later for another manicure. This one took place at Salon Samuel, where Nancy ran into owner Sam Posner—who she knew from working at the Shore doing makeup several years earlier. Sam offered Nancy a job at the salon. Sharing a place with Rochelle was a convenient afterthought because, in fact, Nancy had started dating Sam. But Kathleen had strong opinions about him as well. “The
stories
I’ve heard about him,” she said. “I know what he is. He’s a lowlife of the earth who takes out girls and does things he’s not supposed to do—takes pictures of them and shows them around. Nancy uses him and he uses her. It’s sick. Yet I can’t get my family to wake up and see that this is the world Nancy lives in.”

It was almost as if Gia’s therapists had four patients in one. “Gia had a very pressured kind of relationship with these three women who seemed to be the most important people in her life—her mother, her aunt, and her lover,” recalled the former Eagleville therapist. “These were three very aggressive women trying to get Gia to do what they wanted. It was a lot of women fighting about her, all these people arguing over who’s going to get Gia’s affection. The mom was real afraid of the aunt’s involvement with Gia. Gia’s perception was that the mom was jealous of their relationship. They were apparently pretty tight.

“It didn’t seem like they were fighting over Gia because she was a star or anything. I think it was because she was so much like a baby. She wasn’t like an adult, she was like a child. She would deal with things in her life and take care of herself as best she could, but emotionally she was a little girl and I think that elicited from a lot of people this ‘I want to take care of her’ thing. It’s inappropriate, given that this
woman was an adult, she was addicted and she was killing herself—and all these people
knew
this.”

The pain that Gia felt about Kathleen would eventually be mirrored by the Eagleville staff. “The mother called up a lot and wanted to know what was going on,” one therapist recalled. “I didn’t find it odd at all. I heard people complain about the mother, like she was really wild. I’ve worked with a lot of borderline people and a lot of women who are dysfunctional. To me, this mother and daughter were not that odd. The mother didn’t stick out in my mind as a bizarre person. This is a woman who loved her daughter, who didn’t quite know how to deal with what was going on. It’s true of any family with an addicted member. Now, she’s certainly a
very
pushy woman, and some people had a hard time with her. And Gia was completely the opposite—I could imagine Gia sitting there quietly and her mother pushing her around. The mother would question me—’Who are you? What do you want?’ But if it was my daughter addicted and living on the street, I’d want to know, too.

“A lot of parents get like that. They panic. I wasn’t angry or upset with the mother. I just thought she was panicking. When a parent has a child in treatment, they go through their own stuff—was it my fault, what did I do, was I a bad mother? Her mom couldn’t deal with her
own
life. She had her own issues to deal with—her husband, her first husband, the sons, Gia, and whatever her own personality was.

“I mean, any woman who leaves her husband and her kids is going through
something.
I don’t know how long that takes to deal with. The mother left, from what Gia reported to me, because of abuse from her dad. I doubt very much if her mother had been through therapy or anything like that, so it was probably hard for her in her own life. When her mother left, Gia never resolved any of those issues.

“Interestingly enough, we had in the chart about abuse between her and her father, from her reporting about being abused by her dad. She never talked about it. The way she talked about her relationship with her dad was that she stayed very masculine to get approval from him, and that was part of trying to keep a relationship with him after she matured. It wasn’t anything that he wanted her to do, that
came from her. She thought it was her way of being one of the family, which she saw as being all male figures. She said that her mother really wasn’t that involved with her when she was growing up.

“On the women’s unit, we did a lot of work on mothers. I think Gia’s tears were about not having what she wanted from her mother, feeling abandoned by her mother. What we tried to talk about in group was, given that time in our society when her mother left, and she was being abused by the dad, women didn’t really have very many options, there weren’t very many services provided. What I tried to do with people is get them to understand the other person’s position. But she was still ‘Why did this happen
to me?’
I think Gia was caught in loving her mother and having a lot of hate for her mother for leaving her as a child. She was able to cognitively understand that her father would not have allowed her mother to take her and her brothers. I believe Gia did know that. But she was still stuck with that feeling, ‘Why did you leave me there?’ and more of the emotional stuff of being the only girl.”

Sessions with family or friends were not a routine part of treatment at Eagleville, and there continued to be times when Gia’s therapists forbade outside contact with anyone. But Gia always bent those rules. She sneaked a call to Rochelle and Nancy urging them to come visit on Easter Sunday, and then pretended she didn’t know why they were at the front desk, confused that their names weren’t on the visitors’ list. (Nancy made things worse by offering to bribe one of the staff members to be taken to Gia’s building.) For a period, Gia was even barred from contact with her mother. But later on, Kathleen began attending some therapy sessions with Gia on the hospital grounds.

“Everybody who dealt with us thought we were very tied together,” Kathleen said. “One therapist used the way I let her serve me coffee one day as an example of the way we were tied together, constantly switching mother and daughter roles. I arrived early for an appointment and they asked if I wanted coffee. I said no. Then Gia comes in with this coffee and she hands it to me—and it’s light. I drink my coffee black. But I sat there like an obedient child and drank it that way.”

The therapy did not remain so benign for very long. Kathleen felt herself being analyzed and attacked, a process she never recalled agreeing to. “The therapy is really intense over there, they know how to get at you,” Kathleen recalled. “You say it looks like it’s going to rain out, it becomes a big issue. You don’t even want to open your mouth because you know you’re going to hang yourself.

“The intense sessions started to bring up all these things inside of me.
Everything,
all the reasons why I thought I needed help in my own life: things that had happened, the religion, my mother, my sisters. One night I started seeing all these little file cards popping up with all these sentences on them, things that I thought I had dealt with and buried and gotten rid of years ago and here they were. And somewhere inside of me, this voice says, ‘Yo, Kathleen, if you don’t cut this shit out, you’re gonna be like Norman at the end of
Psycho
watching a fly on the wall, you’re not gonna know who’s who.’ So I put a stop to it. My mother said, ‘You don’t have to do this.’ I said, ‘Thank you, Mother. Finally, after all these years of my married adult life you tell me something I can do.’

“By the time I went back over there, I became enraged. I went back there and said, ‘I’m not the druggie, I’m not going to be ripped apart like this anymore.’ I had sense enough to realize: you’ve buried this, don’t let somebody rake it up and grind you through it again.

“I guess Gia really did expect too much from me. I always felt she was never going to be happy until she had me totally, one hundred percent for herself. She always created situations where I had to devote it all to her. But there were times when she took care of me and I took care of her. It switched back and forth. There were times when each of us tried to break away—there is a separation you should make from parents to become an adult—and the other always blocked them. She would tell me what to do, she gave me a reason to pull myself together. She would have a way of making me get mad and pull my act together if I felt I wasn’t getting the credit I deserved … she just kept me stirred.

“But the therapy was hard for me. She’d say, ‘Mom, we really had a good session today,’ and I’d say, ‘Gia, what did you get out of this?’

“Our relationship has been compared to
Fatal Attraction,
too. But I had a different way of looking at it—it’s probably the whole thing really. I just
wanted
her. When the boys were born, one of the first trips they had to the doctor for their regular checkups, he said to me, ‘Kiss them good-bye now, eventually you’ll lose them to another woman or to the service.’ When Gia was born, she was to be the last child, the girl. She was the one I could put it all into because she was a girl, I wouldn’t [be accused of making] a sissy out of her, or whatever. Maybe I held on to her too tightly so I was able to let go of the boys a little bit.

“And she might have been all right, but then, I don’t know, maybe if I hadn’t left her father, it could’ve worked out all right. I only know what went on in my mind. When I left, she held on to being that eleven-year-old girl emotionally. That’s what came out at Eagleville, and she agreed with that. She was this eleven-year-old girl finally finding herself as a twenty-five-year-old. That’s another reason why she didn’t know if she truly wanted to be a lesbian. After she was done with all that soul searching and therapy she went through, added to the fact that she had been on drugs all that time, she didn’t know.”

On Memorial Day weekend, a lanky, tough-talking auto mechanic named Rob Fay stole a car from his job and went on a drive from which he didn’t plan to return. He was twenty-five years old, addicted to free-base cocaine and alcohol, and his father, from whom he was estranged, had died three weeks earlier. “I said, ‘Where’s that big emotional outpouring like they have on TV?’” Rob Fay recalled. “1 didn’t have it, so I continued to party my brains out. I brought the car back, but there were cops all around so I ditched the car. I attempted suicide—put a belt around my neck, but I put it on too tight and passed out before I could hang myself. I woke up. I was, like, ‘How low can you be?’ Totally hopeless, totally alone, with nothing, and I decided, well, let me give it one more try—I went to turn myself in to the police.

“I went to the police station, told them who I was and they said no, they didn’t have any warrants for me. Here I am, I just triedlo kill myself, turned myself in and
even the
cops won’t take me.
It’s raining, it’s eleven at night I slept outside under a bridge and went back. The cops
still
couldn’t find any paperwork. When I was hitchhiking the night before, a guy had picked me up who worked at Eagleville and told me about it So I went to Eagleville figuring, ‘If they don’t take me, I can kill myself and it’ll be justified.’”

Rob Fay was quickly detoxed at Eagleville and entered the thirty-day inpatient program. He met Gia, who had already been there for over four months, on the hospital’s bucolic grounds. “She was different from the other people I met there,” he recalled, “she didn’t take any shit off nobody. If they were wrong, she had no problem standing up for what she believed in.

“We had a love of Bowie in common. She had a lot of pictures of him and Angela—some pictures her friends took on that movie set I mean, we both were freaked out over him. I always liked him because he was different and he had the balls to be different David Bowie had this song, ‘All the Young Dudes.’ We used to talk about this song because we were both the same age and I had tried to commit suicide when I was twenty-five and he talks about ‘kicking it in the head when you’re twenty-five.’ I didn’t think I’d five past twenty-five. And she was convinced that there was no way you could maintain this type of lifestyle and be twenty-six.

“She told me right away that she was gay. She was fighting that she said, ‘I am, but’ … she had a rough time with a lot of men in her life. There were times in New York when people just took advantage of her. I guess you wouldn’t really call it rape because she wasn’t screaming, but there were a lot of times when that happened when she didn’t want it to happen. But being as high as she was, you can’t argue, you don’t even know what planet you’re on. Something like that happens, it’s just ‘Oh, well, it’s part of the scene.’ She had been raped a few times. Date rape, or whatever you want to call it She had a lot of anger about that.

“A lot of things made her angry, she was an angry person. She stuffed a lot of things down. Nobody took her seriously for a long time, because she was Gia—
Gia,
like a china doll or something to a lot of people. Even at Eagleville, Gia was this fragile little thing. I said bullshit on this—that’s the thing
they
created
for her, this little world where Gia was mommy’s girl.”

When Rob met Gia, Kathleen wasn’t allowed to visit-mother and daughter only saw each other during therapy. During one session, Kathleen brought Gia a kite. It was bright yellow—Gia’s favorite color—and shaped like a butterfly. The therapist told Gia afterwards that she should give some thought to the life cycle of the butterfly.

“I remember one time we were flying kites,” recalled Rob Fay, “and her kite was a yellow butterfly. I said, ‘I really like your kite.’ And she said, ‘Oh yeah?’ and just took the string and let it go. I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘I was just thinking about my mom. This is what I have to do with her. I gotta let her go.’