I felt very sad watching her pack her things, not because she was leaving but because it had come to this. She was going off to live in New York by herself. She was only seventeen. In many ways she seemed so much older. In other ways, so much younger. I held out hope that she would at last find her niche there.
■■■
“No. Look, why don’t we get out of here for a bit? Get some fresh air, something to eat?”
She nodded. “Sure. Okay.”
She put on a ratty old fur jacket I’d never seen before.
“Where’d you get that, sweetheart?”
“Place on Saint Marks … where I work. Old clothes.”
“You got a job?”
“Just sort through the stuff. Coupla hours a week. Coupla … coupla bucks.”
I took her to lunch at Feathers, a restaurant in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, just above Washington Square Park. She chain-smoked through the meal but ate her food ravenously. She showed me the clothing store where she was working— it was a seedy, damp place in a basement.
■■■
If it wasn’t money Nancy needed, it was Mommy. Just as I had sat with her on her bed in the middle of the night when she was little making the shark demons of her nightmares go away—now I was soothing her grownup demon, which was mounting paranoia.
“I went to CB’s last night, Mom. Nobody would talk to me. They hate me. What am I gonna do? Nobody likes me. What am I gonna do, Mom?
What am I gonna do?”
“I’m sure they’ll like you again, sweetheart. Try to be nice. Try hard.” We had this conversation so many times that they all blur together in my mind. She’d sob; I’d do what I could to comfort her. Nothing had changed, really, from when she was a little girl. And she knew that no matter what she said or did, I would always be there for her. She was still my baby.
Sometimes I hated her for not being able to cope with the world. God, how she made me hate her. But ultimately I still loved her. She had so much intelligence and compassion inside of her. When I got really angry at her, I’d try to remember the baby, the soft, sweet-smelling baby with the glossy black hair. I had to do what I could to keep that baby alive. I hadn’t given up on her yet. In a sense I was playing for time, waiting for someone, somehow, to step forward and save Nancy— ease her pain, allow her to lead a productive life.
■■■
Like she had when she was living at home, Nancy generally slept all day, partied and got high all night. The clubs where she took to hanging out most of the time, Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s, were where the punk bands were playing, drinking, getting high, and, ultimately, getting discovered. Blondie came out of that scene. So did the Ramones, the New York Dolls. Nancy knew who these people were early on, before anyone else did. She mentioned them frequently. She had always seemed to have her finger on the bands that would be popular in a year or two. Now was no different, except that she was there with them.
She wrote several articles of criticism about the punk groups for a local rock paper in Greenwich Village. She sent us the clippings. We were very impressed. She set forth what punk stood for with remarkable clarity. The articles were interesting, perceptive, and surprisingly well written. We complimented her profusely.
“Did you really like them?” she begged repeatedly.
“Yes,” we replied repeatedly.
She didn’t get paid for the articles. The magazines that did pay, she said, weren’t hiring at the moment. Unfortunately Nancy didn’t stick with it until something opened up. And then the local rock paper folded.
She was most enthusiastic about Blondie and its lovely lead singer, Deborah Harry. She told me they were very talented and that Debbie Harry would be a superstar someday. She was right. She mentioned Debbie quite often.
“She’s real good, Mom,” Nancy said once. “And pretty. She’s my friend. Debbie’s my friend.”
At the time of her death, Nancy was carrying a photo album portfolio filled with family snapshots, postcards of places she’d been in Europe, the stubs of airplane tickets. Most prominent was a black and white glossy photo of her sitting at a table at one of the punk clubs with Debbie Harry.
The two of them are smoking, drinking, and, seemingly, engaging in intimate conversation. She felt they had a special friendship.
Nancy referred to a number of the soon-to-be-famous figures of punk rock as friends. I must point out that my knowledge of Nancy’s relationship with them is confined to what she told me then. I have only her version. I never met Debbie Harry or the others she mentioned, like Joey Ramone.
Once, when I made my bi-monthly grocery stop, Richard Hell was at Nancy’s apartment with her. They were listening to a Bruce Springsteen album and drinking coffee. He seemed quiet and polite. She asked me to give them a lift to an address on Houston Street. I did. Richard Hell, I learned years later, was considered a punk rock visionary. He led pioneering punk bands like Television and the Voidoids, and is credited with coining the punk catch phrase “the Blank Generation.”
None of these people came forward after Nancy’s death to make themselves known and offer condolences. I thought it over at the time and came up with several possible reasons for their silence. Possibly, they hadn’t known or liked Nancy much and didn’t care what happened to her.
Possibly, they had liked her and were sensitive enough to not want to embarrass or hurt us further. Possibly, they themselves were embarrassed at having known the infamous Nancy Spungen, now that they were successes with somewhat more mainstream images.
■■■
Frank and I decided to take a vacation alone that winter-our first. It so happened that the only time both of us could get away from work was during Nancy’s eighteenth birthday. We thought it over. After all, Nancy had a way of regarding her birthday as a national holiday. We decided to go.
Our relationship needed this.
■■■
Recently Karen told me that she called Nancy one morning that March to tell her that her father had died. Nancy coldly told her, “I have to hang up
—I have a customer here.” And hang up she did.
So I suppose I must face the fact that my daughter probably did work as a prostitute. She was certainly capable of it. Sex meant nothing to her. It hurts me to think about it. But I can deal with it now. Nancy is at peace now. I couldn’t deal with it then.
Karen told me she was very hurt after talking to Nancy on the phone.
Nancy had rejected her. She wasn’t there for Karen when Karen needed her.
My daughter had stopped caring about people. Frankly, I think this upsets me more than the thought of Nancy selling her body.
Nancy was able to pay her rent and bills herself now that she was working. She was very proud of this. She was also able to afford the fast track to self-obliteration. With the two to three hundred dollars she was making a night, she became a hard-core heroin addict.
We went to a restaurant in the neighborhood. I sat next to Nancy, who immediately began to doze off right there at the table. Her eyes closed, her head lowered, and off she went into slumberland. I nudged her. She sat up, confused, then fell asleep again. So we talked around her. We talked about the food. We talked about the weather.
At one point she slumped onto the table. Her elbow went into the untouched spaghetti I’d ordered for her. The sauce got all over her sweater.
I roused her, suggested she take the sweater off so I could dab at the sauce before it stained. She did. She had a T-shirt on underneath.
That’s when I saw the track marks. They ate away like a cancer at the insides of her elbows and the backs of her hands. The sight made me so sick to my stomach that I almost vomited. Those were her baby arms and hands to me, pudgy, soft, innocent. Now they were covered with the needle scars of an addict. She was so out of it, she didn’t notice or care that I saw them.
■■■
I asked her if she wanted to come home for Hanukkah/Christmas, but she said she had to stay in New York and work. So the four of us decided to spend the day after Christmas in New York with her, a prospect that delighted her. She was especially excited about buying gifts for all of us.
She loved giving and getting gifts. As Christmas neared she called me anxiously for gift suggestions for Frank (she was now actually speaking to Frank occasionally) and for the kids. She was so happy about what she’d bought me that she wanted to tell me what it was right there on the phone. I had to talk her out of it. Then she wanted me to tell her what I’d gotten her.
She begged and teased and giggled like a little girl.
I bought her a lot of little gifts. She didn’t care how much you spent on her. It was the idea of getting the gifts – opening the boxes, discovering their contents – that she loved. I knew it would give her pleasure to tear open so many boxes. She was so rarely happy. This would make her happy for a few minutes. What more could I give her?
■■■
As far as I know, she had no regular place to live until midsummer, when she phoned to inform me that she and Sid were moving in with his mother.
“Sid?” I asked, not placing the name.
“From the Sex Pistols, Mom. Sid Vicious. He’s the biggest rock star in the world. And he’s all mine. Isn’t that great?”
“So you two are …?”
“We’ve been crashing at people’s flats for a couple of weeks but it’s no good.”
I heard a man’s voice in the background.
Then Nancy said, “Here, Mom. Sid wants to say something.”
There was a rustling and then a young man with a heavy English accent said, “Hello, Mum.”
“Hello, Sid,” I said.
“How are ya?” He had a flat, placid-sounding voice.
“Fine. How are you?”
“Fine. Your daughter looks so pretty. I bought her shoes.”
“That’s nice.”
“And fancy underwear.”
“That’s very nice, Sid,” I said. “Sid?”
“Yes, Mum?”
“Could I speak to Nancy again?”
“Yeah, sure. Okay. But could you send us money? For Nancy?”
“T’ll talk to her about that.”
“Oh, okay. Here’s Nancy. Nice talking to you, Mum.”
“Nice talking to you, Sid.”
“‘Bye, Mum.”
“Goodbye, Sid.”
Nancy got back on. “Isn’t he great?”
“He sounds very pleasant.”
“Oh, he is. He’s a very nice lad, Mum.” Nancy was starting to pick up an English accent.
“With that name,” I said, “you’d expect he’d be, I don’t know, kind of rough.”
“Oh, no. That’s just for the act. He’s nothing like what the papers say. That’s all made up. Would your daughter go out with someone like that?”
I decided then and there to find out what it was that the papers said about the Sex Pistols.
■■■
The Sex Pistols began performing in London clubs in the spring of 1976. They were an immediate sensation. Not, apparently, for their music, which critics described as “nonmusic.” (“The Sex Pistols weren’t into music,” McLaren was later quoted as saying.) No, what attracted attention was their manners, which were described as outrageous. Instead of singing lyrics, the Sex Pistols shouted vulgarities at the audience, snarled at them, spat at them, called them and the queen dirty names. Supposedly, they took bad taste beyond any level seen before in public. They vomited on stage.
They stuck themselves in the face with safety pins. They practiced “pogo dancing,” which consisted of hopping up and down in place, arms spastically flailing. They advocated “squelching,” which was making love without any show of emotion.
My stomach churned as I read and heard about all this. Maybe it was only an act, as Nancy had warned me, but it was a disgusting one nonetheless.
With McLaren encouraging them to “let it all hang out,” the Sex Pistols whipped themselves and their audience into such a state of frenzy that their early performances ended amid fistfights and property damage. “Their public persona wasn’t a gimmick,” McLaren later said. “It expressed their real attitude toward life. They were into chaos.”
■■■
“I got beat up, Mom,” she moaned. “My nose is broke somethin’
‘orrible. It’s all over my face. It hurts.”
“Who did it?” I asked.
“The Teddys. They don’t like us.”
“Who are the Teddys?”
“Assholes who hate punks. They attacked us on the street. They gave me two black eyes, too. Sid got knifed. But we’re okay. And I’ll be ready for ’em next time. Sid bought me a truncheon.”
■■■
Two weeks later she phoned to say she and Sid had moved to a different hotel. When I asked why, she replied that the manager of the hotel had asked them to leave.
“Sid got mad,” she explained, “and dangled me out the window. I was screaming at him to let me back in and I guess it pissed off the other people in the hotel.”
“Are you okay?” I asked. What else could I say?
“Oh, yeah. It was nothing. He was just upset.”
I did not yet know Sid or understand Nancy’s relationship with him. But this incident clearly indicated to me that it had an ugly, violent streak. It made me wonder if perhaps Sid was the actual source of the beating Nancy had blamed on the Teddy boys. I didn’t ask her. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to know. Besides, she kept assuring me his name and on-stage manner were an act, that he was in reality a “sweet lad.” Indeed, the few times I’d spoken to him on the phone he’d seemed pleasant.
They got in another reportedly violent quarrel in a different London hotel room at the end of November. Again, Nancy’s screams brought the manager. This time the British press was also alerted. The papers reported that the manager went up to Nancy and Sid’s room to find a bloodstained bed, a near-naked Sid bleeding from cuts on his arms, and broken glass all over the carpet. There was a bottle of pills on the nightstand. A police inquiry was launched.
■■■
I was sorry she couldn’t come. And relieved at the same time. As it happened, she was not alone for her birthday. The much ballyhooed U.S. tour of the Sex Pistols was an unqualified disaster. It was aborted midway through, and Johnny Rotten left the group.
The tour got off to a roaring start. The band members got surly and walked out on an interview on the Today show. Then they headed for a concert swing through the Deep South, where it was believed they would get the maximum mileage out of their shock value and hopefully arouse the kind of rage they were able to with England’s punk teens. At first they did.
In Atlanta the audience threw plastic cups and popcorn at them. In Dallas, Johnny Rotten called the audience “redneck cowboy faggots” and Sid had his lip bloodied.
■■■
And she spoke to Nancy in London. She asked Nancy if she was a groupie.
“I am not or never have been a groupie,” Nancy replied in the article.
“If a groupie came up to Sid, he’d kick her in the face.” She asked Nancy about her domestic life.
“I sleep all day and go out to the shops, you know, for bread and milk. I don’t cook. This place isn’t a pigsty or anything, but I’m not into cleaning.” She asked Nancy about her future plans, now that the band had brokenup.
“I never think about the future,” Nancy replied.
■■■
David spoke to Nancy a few days later. She called to find out if the story had come out. David told her it had, and that we’d been suffering as a result. She apologized, then asked him for a copy of the article for her portfolio. Then she said Sid had something important to say, and put him on. What Sid had to tell David was that while he’d been touring America with the Sex Pistols, he’d had sex with a transvestite. All of the gory details followed.
■■■
Soon after our unpleasant brush with the press and notoriety, I received one of the two letters I got from Nancy while she was abroad. Actually, what she sent me was a Mother’s Day card. It was only March, but the British celebrate Mother’s Day earlier in the year than we do. It was a standard Mother’s Day card with a couple of standard rhyming verses about how sweet and thoughtful a mom I really, truly was. Underneath and across the back, she scrawled:
Dear Mommy,
Happy Mother’s Day from both of us. I guess this card pretty much sums up the way I am and I feel. If you don’t know it, Sid thinks the world of you, too. Believe me, that’s rare. He rarely takes a liking to anyone. And he wants to meet you very much.
I miss you very badly and I hope we’ll see each other soon. You know, just between us, that you’re the only one in the family that I really care about. Now, I have two best friends that I love-you and Sid. I hope you’re happy your daughter finally found a guy and settled down! It’s our anniversary on March 11th. One year already since we met. I can’t believe it. But we both love each other very much and take care of each other and we have a very beautiful relationship that you would be proud of.
The reason my writing is so shaky is because my Sidney is playing bass right next to me and the bed is bouncing like hell. Well, enough about us. Have the happiest Mother’s Day of anybody. The reason my writing is so shaky is because my Sidney is playing bass right next to me and the bed is bouncing like hell. Well, enough about us. Have the happiest Mother’s Day of anybody. We’ll be thinking of you. We both love you, Mommy!
Love, XOXOXOXO
Nancy
Underneath, in his own childlike scrawl, Sid wrote:
Luv from Sid XXXXXXX
And underneath that, Nancy added:
P.S. We both love you again and hope we’ll be together soon!
I read the letter over several times in amazement. This was clearly not the letter of a girl who was repudiating her upbringing. Far from it; this was a girl who hoped her mother was happy that her daughter “had finally found a guy and settled down.” Had I not known the circumstances, I’d have been justified in jumping to the conclusion that her “Sidney” was a nice Jewish dentist.
Something else about the letter amazed me—its tone. It was unfamiliar.
After I’d read the letter over again, I realized what it was.
Nancy was genuinely happy—possibly the only time she had been in her entire life.
She stayed that way for a short time. A very short time. The life that she and Sid had together was constructed around drugs and his fleeting fame and wealth. They could stay happy only for as long as they were able to hold on to their health and his money.
She phoned me from Paris that spring, her voice filled with childlike enthusiasm.
“I’m traveling, Mum,” she exclaimed. “Just like I always wanted to. It was so bloody moldy in London and it’s so beautiful here.”
“It sounds wonderful, sweetheart,” I said.
It did sound wonderful. I’d always dreamed of being able to go to Paris in the spring.
“Oh, it is! My Sid bought me real French underwear. Black.” She giggled. “And shoes. Charles Jourdan. And we eat every night in this great little restaurant and have wine and they’re so bloody nice to us. They don’t make any kind of big deal over us or anything. They’re just nice.”
■■■
The doctor phoned me a few hours later to say that Nancy was suffering from a severe infection of the fallopian tubes.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to hospitalize her, Mrs. Spungen,” he said. “But she’ll be fine, I think, in a few days. And there’s a very nice young man here who’s very worried about her.”
Nancy stayed in the hospital until she was well enough to want out. Sid took her home to their little house in Maida Vale and vowed to be her nursemaid. He also promised to call me every day at the same time to report on her progress. He kept both promises.
“She’s already doing better, Debbie,” he said on her first day back. “I fed her yogurt with a spoon and gave her her medicine. I’m taking care of her. I gave her lemonade. Here, she wants to talk to you. Here’s Nancy.
Here’s our little girl.”
Nancy got on the phone.
“Hi, Mum,” she said weakly. “He’s so sweet, isn’t he? Isn’t my Sid sweet?”
“Is everything all right, Nancy?”
“I’ll be okay. My Sidney’s here. I miss you, though. Can’t you come over? Can’t you be here to take care of me, too?”
“I … I don’t know. I’ll have to let you know.”
I wanted to see her. I hadn’t seen her for fifteen months, and she was ill.
But I was afraid. She’d told me about the beatings she and Sid had suffered.
“Would I be safe?” I asked.
“Nobody will touch you, Mum,” she assured me. “I’ll watch out for you.”
I wasn’t so sure. Hers was an alien life. There was danger in it. I was against going-until I got a letter from her a few days later. This was her second and last letter from abroad. Actually it was a list. She catalogued the twenty-one places she wanted to take me in London, everywhere from Trafalgar Square to Harrods (“the English Bloomingdale’s”) to Knightsbridge (“fancy shopping area”) to Oxford Street (“more shopping”).
At the bottom of the list she concluded, “Don’t forget to bring this list with you. Can’t wait to see you. Everything is fine here.”
■■■
Nancy was coming home.
The prospect stirred bad memories. Not memories of the public Nancy, the punk Nancy, but memories of our private Nancy, the one we’d grown up with. That experience was far more frightening than anything I’d ever read about the punks.
■■■
hexafu 