The Secrets on Chicory Lane: A Novel(29)

Afterward, we fell asleep and didn’t wake until morning. I caught hell from my parents when I finally did the walk of shame back across the street.





12


I’m getting close to Livingston, and I suddenly feel tired. It’s still early afternoon—I think I could use a cup of coffee—so I pull off at the next exit, where, lucky me, there’s a Starbucks. I go inside and find the place full of women, some with kids. Prison families. Have to be. The wives need a little pick-me-up before a visit to Polunsky. Are any of them there to see death row inmates? The odds are low; the entire facility is huge and houses nearly three thousand inmates, out of which only two or three hundred are on death row. Many of the women most likely have husbands or fathers in the general population.

That’s a world I can’t imagine.

Armed with caffeine, I return to my rental car and continue the journey. My thoughts go back to that morning after I’d first slept with Eddie. Both of my parents were upset, but it was my mother who really gave me hell. I think my dad went along with her because she was so upset. “How could you have done that with him?” she bellowed, as if Eddie was a convicted felon. Well, at least he wasn’t a felon then.

I told her I was an adult, and we got into a fight. Looking back, I realize I was only twenty-two, and I certainly didn’t know everything like we all think we do at that age. And I had just disrespected my parents by coming home for the Christmas holidays and spending the night with the boy across the street. Had I used my best judgment in sleeping with Eddie? Who knows; probably not. However, at the time, I was truly dazzled by him. He hadn’t even been trying to seduce me, really—it just happened. And we both wanted it. We were young and stupid. Not as young as when we fooled around in his bomb shelter in the sixties, but still, we were in our very early twenties, a time of life when one’s sensory receptors are wide open, ready to experience new feelings and emotions. We were rookies at being adults.

Maybe I was rebelling a little against my mother, too. While I understood perfectly why she was depressed and irritable all the time, I believed she could do something about it. Now I know that’s not necessarily true. If only she hadn’t become hooked on tranquilizers, she might have overcome her grief over losing Michael. Instead she misused the prescriptions, and the doctors were happy to keep writing them. The words mental illness were not ones that we often used back then. And I’m sorry to say I resented it at the time. Living with her was very difficult and unpleasant. I always felt she held Michael’s abduction against me because I left the front door unlocked. She never once said, “I forgive you.” When I was in therapy in the eighties, my doctor said I probably should have asked her for forgiveness, but I never did. I’ll have to live with that one, too.

At any rate, what happened, happened.

For the rest of Christmas break, I made it worse—Eddie and I embroiled ourselves in a torrid affair. We had only two weeks left in January to be together, after which I would have to go back to Evanston. So we made it count. Boy, did we.

Mother was mortified, and Dad was at a loss. Even Eddie’s mother questioned her son about it. We weren’t subtle at all. I’d go across the street, and we’d practically live in the bomb shelter almost every one of those fourteen days. Sometimes I’d spend the night. I tried to be with my parents at mealtimes and for a little while in the evenings before they went to bed. Then it was over to Eddie’s for hedonistic indulgence. We drank wine together, we smoked pot together, we made love together. The stereo blasted Eddie’s eclectic taste in music the whole while. I remember there was a lot of Pink Floyd and harder stuff like Black Sabbath. The two weeks were a binge of sex, drugs, and rock and roll—no question about it. And I wasn’t ashamed, either.

Probably because I was in love, or I thought I was.

Whatever magic Eddie possessed, he put a spell on me that December and January of 1976–77. I truly was in another world, lost in a whirlpool of sensual delights. In many ways, it was my first experience of real passion. Much of it is a blur now. When the time finally came for me to return to Illinois, I was heartbroken. I went over to say goodbye—I’d spent the previous night in my old bedroom—and we made love one more time before I left for the airport. We promised to call and write, and I assured him I would return to visit sooner than usual. He vowed to come to Chicago.

I won’t ever forget the heartache I felt for the first few weeks of the spring semester. It was pretty bad. Eddie and I talked a lot on the phone. I lived alone in an apartment, so there were no problems dealing with put-out roommates. He rarely wrote to me though, maybe only two times, his words written in the same printed block letters he always used. I asked him over the phone why he didn’t write me more often, and he replied that he was more expressive with his art, so if I preferred he could draw something for me and send it.

Somewhere tucked away in an envelope in one of the filing cabinets in my office are seven original sketches—one in color—by Eddie Newcott. That includes the early one from the sixties depicting a prince fighting a dragon, in which Eddie wanted to be my “night.” I’ve been told I could sell them for a lot of money. There are sickos out there who would pay for them—collectors of Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy memorabilia and the like. Eddie, with the media’s “Evil Eddie” persona attached to him, had already attracted the yellow journalists and ephemera seekers. He had received two proposals of marriage since being sentenced to die. No doubt I could sell those drawings and do very well. But I won’t. Not yet, anyway.