A Ticket to the Circus (39 page)

John Buffalo, who was about two and a half at the time, came running out of his room, straight up to him. Jack introduced himself and held out his hand, which John shook. “Hi, Jack. I’m John Buffalo, but they call me Buffy. Want to see my toys?” He took Jack’s hand and led him to his bedroom, where he started to show him all his G.I. Joes. Jack sat on the edge of the bed and talked to him for quite a while, looking at his figures. I kept an eye on them. Then I said dinner was ready, and we all sat down to eat, Norman, me, John, Matt, and Jack. He ate every scrap on his plate and had seconds. I think it was roast chicken and
mashed potatoes, and Jack said it was the best meal he had ever had in his life. The thought passed through my head that it might well have been, and that made me sad.

Norman and he did most of the talking, and I could see Norman intimidated him a bit. Still, he had his own intellect, and if he disagreed with Norman, he wouldn’t hesitate to say so. He had brought an advance copy of his book, and after he ate, he asked if he could give it to me. He wrote, “To Norris, who gave me my first home-cooked meal; introduced me to the great Buffy! love, Jack.” He was staying at a halfway house on the Bowery, and I called a taxi to take him there. He could learn the subway another night.

Norman went to see him the next day, to make sure he was settled and everything was okay. Jack had meetings with his editor, Erroll McDonald, and others at Random House, and the book was due to be published July 18, in about six weeks. He started calling us every day, and usually it was me who picked up the phone because Norman was at his studio, working. Sometimes Jack just wanted to chat, or ask for advice, such as, where did he go to buy toothpaste? Where did he get stamps? He asked if I would go shopping with him, as he had almost no clothes, so we went to Macy’s, and it was so overwhelming that he almost couldn’t function. Just buying a pair of jeans was monumental. “Is there somebody who issues them to you?” he said, eyes wide, looking at the stacks and racks of clothes.

“No. You just find your size in something you like and go try them on. Over there, in the dressing rooms.”

“You mean they let you take and try these on? With nobody watching?”

It was a concept he could hardly grasp. We picked out a couple of pairs of jeans and a few shirts and T-shirts. Then we went to a coffee shop for lunch. Again, he seemed at sea, looking at the menu.

“So what do you want, Jack? You can have anything you want. I’m treating today. There’s burgers, eggs, soup, pasta. You can get meat loaf or chicken. Order anything you want.”

“What are you having?”

“I think I’ll have a hamburger deluxe, with tomato and onion and french fries.”

“I’ll have what you’re having.” He always had what I was having
whenever we went out. Any choice was overload for his system. I was determined not to get involved with him, but Norman had little time or inclination to go shopping with Jack, or answer his questions—there were so many. If Jack was supposed to be a research assistant, the job never materialized. It was all Jack could do to navigate through his days. I don’t think he would have been capable of taking on job responsibilities as well, and I couldn’t imagine having him around the apartment all day.

One day the phone rang and it was Jack, in a total rage. Someone at the halfway house had stolen his shoes, his new black lace-up shoes like Norman’s. He was going to find the thief and kill him. I got scared. There was something in his voice that said he wouldn’t hesitate to do just that. I had already seen flashes of Jack’s temper. Once, we went to the Metropolitan Museum, and he was smoking a cigarette when we walked up to the door. The guard said, “Put that cigarette out.” It wasn’t an angry voice, but not particularly friendly, and I saw Jack tense, as if he were about to punch the guard. I said, “Hey, Jack, you know nobody gets to smoke in the museum. It’s not personal.” He put out the cigarette, but kept glaring back at the guard.

Another time, we stopped at a newspaper kiosk to buy cigarettes. The man was rushed and slapped the change down a little too hard on the counter. Again, Jack tensed, as if the man had personally threatened him. Again, I had to explain that in New York, people were just in a hurry, they weren’t out to offend anyone, it was nothing. But the hair trigger of his temper was always cocked; he was on the lookout for anyone who might disrespect him.

After a couple of weeks of this, it frankly got to be too much for me. I couldn’t go on babysitting Jack every day. I had the kids, I was painting and showing at the time, still taking my acting classes, and I had the house to run, not to mention Norman’s and my social life. I had a dear friend, I’ll call her Gretchen, who I enlisted to go with us on some of the outings. I wasn’t trying to set her up with Jack as a romance, Lord knows. I just needed someone else to be a friend to him, to help me as a buffer so I wasn’t always alone with him, and Gretchen was unmarried and had the time. The three of us went out to a few places. She did like him, and he liked her.

I had no idea what was going to happen to Jack in the long run. I
just wanted him to get from one day to the next without any major troubles. Soon after the shoe-stealing business, his suit went missing as well. Again Jack called, in hysterics, but soon after, he called back and told me the director of the halfway house had only taken it for safekeeping. Still, he was angry the director would do that without asking him, and I worried he was going to try to hurt the man. There was the feeling of lava boiling down inside Jack, and I was certain that one of these days something was going to cause it to erupt.

When he had been in New York a couple of weeks, we had our first dinner party with Jack. We invited Pat Lawford, Dotson Rader, and Norman’s old friend and mentor, Jean Malaquais, and his daughter, Dominique, who was about fifteen at the time. Jack had read some of Dotson’s books, and agreed with his radical left position about the Vietnam War and the government. Dotson later said he thought Jack might be gay because of the direct way he stared, unblinking, into his eyes, which is sometimes construed to be sexual interest—or it might have been the prison code for intimidation, or a way of keeping himself from being intimidated, as Jack was certainly intimidated at that dinner. Dotson said Jack seemed like the repairman who came to fix the fridge and then was asked to stay to dinner. He clearly didn’t belong. Norman, uncharacteristically, seemed to be holding back, letting Jean Malaquais take control of the conversation. Pat hung out in the kitchen with me while I cooked, but at the table, she joined in the discussion, at first a little hesitantly.

Jack considered himself a Marxist, like Jean, and the two of them got along well. But then Jean started criticizing America, our foreign policy, the “imperialist culture,” on and on. He had nothing but bad things to say. Jack ratcheted it up a notch, calling America a fascist hellhole run by pigs, and so on. Pat, who of course was President Kennedy’s sister, was now furious. I had told her who was coming for dinner, but I don’t think she fully realized who Jack was, or that a convicted felon can’t vote. She turned on Jack and said, “When did you last vote?”

“I don’t vote,” Jack replied.

“Don’t vote? But you criticize! If you don’t like the way this country is run, the minimum duty you have is to vote.”

“It’s pointless to vote because voting is a fucking fraud, and the whole thing is a dirty scam run by the rich capitalist pigs.”

Then Jean chimed in with his views. “It doesn’t matter which bourgeois president America has,” Jean added, shrugging his shoulders in a French manner. “They are all the same. All for the almighty dollar, no care at all for the people.” Pat’s fuse was good and lit. Norman picked up the bowl of potatoes and tried to pass them to change the subject.

“Want more potatoes, Pat?” I’d never seen him this nervous.

“If you hate America so much, why don’t you
leave
?” Pat asked Jack.

“I want to,” he answered.

“Good. Where do you want to go?”

“Cuba.” Given JFK’s history with Cuba, that was almost enough to give Pat a stroke.

“
Cuba!
Splendid. I’ll buy you a ticket.
One way!
” She got up and announced she was leaving. Dotson stood up with her. Norman was alarmed and tried to calm her down. For some reason Dominique, Jean’s daughter, chimed in at that point, trying, I think, to put balm on the situation by explaining her father’s views, but it only put more gas on the fire.

Pat turned to her and said, “You’re only a kid and you already have your mind nailed shut.” She and Dotson left.

Dotson later told me privately that he had looked into the eyes of two killers in his life, and they’d both had eyes like Jack’s. Pat had said in the car going back, “Why would Norman have that person in his house? Poor Norris! Did you see his eyes? He has a killer’s eyes. Don’t ever let me be in the same room as that man again.” Later, when Jack killed Richard Adan, she said, “That could have been Norris or one of the little boys. Norman needs to have his head examined.”

As I had feared, the socialization of Jack was deteriorating. He wasn’t ready for the dining rooms of New York society, that much was for sure. Whether he was ready for socializing at all was in doubt. That night was the first real inkling we had of what we were up against. We had a big problem on our hands.

Summer came, and we moved to Provincetown, which brought some relief from the daily calls and frequent visits from Jack. Gretchen continued to see Jack from time to time, and I think she was falling for him a bit. He could be charming in a little-boy way. He had read a vast amount and was knowledgeable about many subjects. Jack was self-educated,
you could tell, because he sometimes pronounced a word strangely, as if he had read it but had never heard it spoken aloud. I usually corrected him, and he was grateful.

Norman felt that we couldn’t totally abandon Jack, so he invited him to spend a few days with us on the Cape. We were renting a big house that summer, and Jack had his own room on the water. He loved being in the middle of our family, and would sit on the deck for hours, just looking out to sea, soaking up the solitude and light. One night, the girls—Betsy, Kate, and Danielle—went to the movies, and Jack asked if he could tag along with them. It never occurred to any of us that we should be afraid of him. While he sometimes bragged about his misdeeds, like the time he killed someone in prison who had disrespected him, stuck a knife in his chest while he was watching a movie in a theater, it always seemed like a little boy bragging. I never quite believed it, but that was probably just me in denial that he could really be as bad as he was telling me. (Once, while we were sitting at an outdoor café called Café Blasé, Jack gave me a lesson on how to kill someone with a single knife blow. He said it should be a sharp knife, and you put the tip between the person’s second and third shirt buttons and push hard, one quick thrust. That sends the knife right into the heart, and it’s over immediately. I think he really thought it might be useful information for me one day.)

He stayed with us a few more days, and then went back to New York on the bus, but life in the city was worse for him after the cool tranquility of the sea. New York was hot and gritty, and everyone in the city was testy, a bad combination for someone as paranoid as Jack.

I got a call from him not long after he left, and he was really agitated. He told me several things people had said to him or done to him, much like the museum guard incident, and he kept saying, “I’m going to blow. I’m going to blow.” I thought that meant he was going to leave town. He’d talked often enough about skipping out and going to Cuba, which would have been a terrible thing to do, as he would have been arrested and sent back to jail.

“Try to stay cool, Jack,” I said. “It’s just the weather. People in New York get hot and cranky. They don’t mean anything. You can’t take off now. Your book is coming out soon, and when that happens, you are going to be a big star. It will be a bestseller and make a lot of
money. Everyone knows it will. Just hang in there. Please don’t do anything stupid. The last place you want to go is Cuba anyhow. I don’t think they would welcome you there with open arms.” We talked of the time when he’d get out of the halfway house, get an apartment, maybe a place in the country with a dog (he wanted a Doberman), and start a regular life. I think Norman, too, was counting on the positive reception of the book to change things. Boy, were we naïve.

   
A FEW DAYS
after that conversation, at about ten o’clock on a Saturday night, I got a call from Gretchen, who was crying and sounded awful. She and Jack had made plans to go out that night, and he’d stood her up. Never called or anything. She was really upset. I said, “It sounds like you’ve gotten a crush on him, sweetie. You haven’t slept with him, have you?” She had not, although she’d made up her mind that she was going to do it that night if he made the move. But he never came. Never called. The following day was a Sunday, the day that
The New York Times
was reviewing Jack’s book. The review turned out to be a rave, but that elation was forgotten when our phone started ringing with the news that Jack had killed Richard Adan, a waiter at a restaurant on the Lower East Side called the Bini Bon, and had disappeared.

The phone rang constantly all day. The FBI put a stakeout around our residences in Brooklyn and in Ptown, in case Jack tried to come there. The kids were all upset, rightfully so, especially the girls. I had never felt like he would hurt any of our family, but then maybe that was just my naïveté. The authorities tapped our phones, in Ptown and in New York, in case Jack called us, but he never did. They tapped Gretchen’s phone, too, and there they lucked out. Jack began to call Gretchen.

A detective named Bill Majeskie was in charge of the case. He was a sweet-faced boy in his early thirties, not at all the type of tough detective you would cast on a TV show. He came to the house in Provincetown and talked to us, and just when I was thinking he was too young and innocent to be involved in something like this, he crossed his legs and I saw a gun strapped to his ankle. I was in the real world. Majeskie talked to Gretchen, taped Jack’s calls, and made a big map on
his wall of Jack’s whereabouts. The pushpins and marker line went all the way to Central America, and then back to Louisiana, where they finally captured him about six months later.