My Bio - Part 18

One night in 1991, bored out of my mind, I stumbled upon a fascinating service where I could leave voicemails. I started having fun, leaving edited messages from one machine on others, sharing outgoing messages, and generally getting creative with the system. It was part of a large magazine business.

On another evening, I was reorganizing my collection of tapes—conversations, pranks, and edits. Suddenly, I got a bad feeling. Something was telling me to call Andy and have him make backup copies through the speakerphone. I thought that maybe I should hide the tapes with Kim or disguise them by recording over store-bought ones. I knew that taping over the tabs of unwanted tapes could turn them into blanks, but I didn’t have enough of those to spare. Foolishly, I ignored my gut feeling, convincing myself I was being paranoid. After all, Andy had some copies.

The next morning at 10:30, I was startled awake by a knock on the door. I assumed it was Kim or Peter.

I was wrong. It was Chief B of the local police department, and with him were a detective named Carol and a couple of male officers. They had a search warrant.

“Don’t worry,” Carol reassured me as we sat in the kitchen while Chief B complimented my looks. “It’s not like on TV. They won’t ransack the place.”

That did little to comfort me.

I felt like a child again, watching helplessly as they went through my belongings, just like when my mom would clean out my room, tossing whatever she deemed unworthy, no matter how much I treasured it. I had the same problem with the staff in Brattleboro and Valleyhead.

The officers went straight for my tapes, taking every blank they could find. They even took my journal, which was on the kitchen table, though I got it back the next day.

In the South Deerfield/Greenfield/Northampton area, prank calls were treated like serious crimes, unlike in Springfield, where they were just seen as harmless petty pranks. Still, this was Massachusetts, and it was only a misdemeanor. Jail wasn’t a risk. Instead, I got a year of probation, which included a monthly $10 fee and mandatory counseling.

I connected with a woman named Cassandra from the only agency that made home visits, crucial since I didn’t drive or have access to public transportation. Cassandra was wonderful, and we were mutually attracted to each other, though she remained strictly professional. At 46, she was 20 years older than me at the time.

By late 1991, I was more miserable than when I first moved to South Deerfield nearly a year earlier. Tammy told me that she and Mom were considering moving me to Connecticut, closer to her, which stirred mixed emotions. While Tammy and I were getting along better, our lifestyles and interests were still worlds apart.

Back in the late ’80s, Mom and Tammy had suggested the Norwich Housing Authority, where I could live near Tammy with subsidized rent since I was low income, but I’d refused because I didn’t want to leave Andy. I wouldn’t realize until later, when I finally moved there in early 1992, that it wasn’t the right time back then. Everything has its time, I suppose.

Once I knew I was moving, I ran up a $1,400 phone bill under a fictitious name, and things went from bad to worse.

Much, much worse.

Before the move to Norwich, I had the same bad feeling I’d had when the idea was first proposed years earlier. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but every instinct told me something was wrong—something bad was going to happen.

But what choice did I have? I felt trapped, with no way out. I could stay in South Deerfield, feeling isolated, miserable, and alone, or I could take a chance in Norwich. At least in Norwich, I’d have my nieces nearby, even if Tammy and I didn’t share much in common.

So, I packed my things, and in early February 1992, Bill came to pick up Shadow and me.

Norwich was smaller than Springfield but bigger than the small town of Salem, where Tammy lived. Tammy’s house, a three-bedroom in a beautiful wooded area about 20 minutes from the coast, was a bit cramped for five people, but it was lovely.

The projects where I was moving to were located at the end of a long road on top of a hill. Bill and I met Tammy at the start of the road. We got out of our cars to chat briefly. While they talked, acting as if I wasn’t there, I glanced at the street sign. Beneath the street name, it said “Dead End.” I stared at those words—Dead End. Was it trying to tell me something? Maybe, because the next four months would be a complete nightmare.

“I don’t know how I know this,” I told Tammy, “but we’re making a mistake. Something’s wrong—like really wrong.”

“What’s wrong is that you’re being selfish, spoiled, and negative,” she snapped. “Where else would you go anyway? Back to South Deerfield? Back to Springfield?”

Why did people always confuse realism with honesty with negativity and rudeness?

“Give me enough money to get to Arizona, and I swear I’ll pay you back, no matter how long it takes,” I begged.

But Tammy and Bill ignored me, got back in their cars, and took me down that dead-end road.

I knew deep down that Arizona was the answer to my problems. Most of them anyway. Somehow, I just knew I was meant to be there. Life wouldn’t be perfect there—no place on earth is—but New England had nothing for me. If I’d known at the time what lay ahead, I could have told myself, “Just hang on for 102 days and you’ll be free.”

But I didn’t know, and the feelings of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness only grew stronger as I hit rock bottom.