Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (5 page)

Joe was the Tarricones’ oldest child and only son, and his Italian parents were thrilled with their dark handsome baby son when he was born in 1925. Two sisters joined the Tarricone family in the following years, but Joey was always the star, the innovator, whose expansive personality drew people to him all his life.

Most Italian sons adore their mothers, and Joe was no exception. Wherever he might travel, he would always keep in touch with her. Her name was Clara, and Joe never failed to remember her with gifts on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. He called home to New York frequently. Among the things that Joe and his wife, Rose, argued about were the huge phone bills that came in. He explained that he wasn’t going to put a time limit on his conversations with his folks.

As Joe and his sisters were growing up, the Tarricone household was full of music, noise, hilarity, and the redolent smell of ravioli, spaghetti, pasta fagioli, sausages and peppers, and pizza; Joe learned to cook from Clara, and it was to become one of his favorite pastimes as an adult.

All the Tarricones were devout Catholics. Going to mass wasn’t a choice; it was taken for granted that they would attend on Sundays and holy days. Faith in God was another thing Joe learned in his childhood home and it stayed with him.

Joe met Rose in the early forties when they were both in their teens. They were soon dating exclusively and they made an extremely attractive couple. He was unabashedly handsome, with thick wavy dark hair, and dark-eyed Rose was very pretty. Her hairdo then was a faithful copy of the upswept, side-parted pompadour with the back tucked under into a pageboy that actresses Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth wore during the Second World War years. Photos of Joe and Rose in their youth remain in family archives: some photos obviously taken in photo booths, which offered four pictures for a dollar; others from school proms. There were shots of them together at Coney Island. Even sixty-five years later, their engagement photo is especially endearing.

Rose and Joe seem frozen in time, grinning as he hugs her and they look forward to their future together.

But they were opposites. Rose wasn’t Catholic, which could have been a huge obstacle for them, but they dealt with that. Rose was quiet and a little shy. When Joe took her home to meet his family for the first time, she was
shocked by the life force that ran through the elder Tarricones’ house. There were five Tarricones and they held nothing back. Rose was startled by the arguments that ended in hugs, and the clatter of unchecked emotions, shouting, and loud music.

“But, you know,” their daughter Gypsy recalls, “my mother told me later that she enjoyed going to her in-laws’ house because she found it ‘exciting.’ She said it was probably because they were ‘so
nuts
!’ Even though Mom was a little overwhelmed at first, she loved her sisters-in-law a lot. If she had had her choice, she and my dad would never have moved away from New York.

“My dad was outgoing and loud. They were so different, but they loved each other.”

Joe had all kinds of jobs, spaced between three active-duty assignments in the armed services. He served in World War II in the army. Later, he was in the air force, and he was called up from his reserve status after that. He was a natural salesman, a studied pitchman, and it was difficult to keep up with his various careers—sometimes door-to-door, occasionally from the back of a truck, sometimes behind a desk.

Joe Tarricone also had a wanderlust that surfaced often. Where Rose longed to live in one house in one place and to have her garden and her precious furniture around her, Joe often came home in an ebullient mood and called out, “Rose, pack up! We’re moving! We’re going to Florida!”

Or New Mexico, or Texas, or the Pacific Northwest.

During many of the early years of their marriage, Rose was pregnant or recovering from childbirth. Claire, the
oldest, was born in 1947. Then came Aldo in November 1950, Joey two years later, and Gypsy in 1957. Gina came along in 1960, Rosemary in 1963, and Dean, the baby, in 1966.

Coping with seven children and a peripatetic husband who always saw rainbows over the next horizon wasn’t easy for Rose.

“She left so much furniture behind,” Gypsy remembers. “Sometimes she would cry over it, but she went where my dad wanted to go for so many years.”

Joe Tarricone was thrilled with the birth of all of his children, and he was a loving and caring father, however bombastic his personality. He cherished each baby and took the time to walk the floor with them, tussle with them, hug them, and let them know that each was special.

He became the Pied Piper for kids on the blocks where he lived. He liked nothing better than to gather up his children and a lot of the neighbor kids every Sunday. He’d take them all to a movie, a ball game, or the zoo. He often took a bunch of them to Disneyland, enjoying it as much as the children did.

Joe cooked huge spaghetti feeds on Sundays and invited all the neighbors. Joe, Rose, and their youngsters probably lived longer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, than any other place. They became friends with the Bob Silva family who lived across the street. The Silvas had children just about the same age as the Tarricone offspring and it was a happy time for all of them.

“My dad figured out a way to make enough pizza for most of our neighborhood,” Gypsy recalls. “He got these
boards and covered them with clean linoleum so that he and the men on our street could roll out pizza dough in four-foot-by-four-foot sheets.

“He also made something he called ‘Coo-Coo Fritz’; it was dough filled with mozzarella, Parmesan, and all different kinds of cheese. And then he would deep-fry it.”

Joe Tarricone could energize any group and a lot of people loved him. Rose remained quieter and more thoughtful. As her children grew older, she wanted to get a job. Joe pictured a marriage much like his parents’ union: he wanted to be the breadwinner and have Rose stay home. But Rose had had a taste of forced independence during the months when her husband was away in the service and she was alone with their children.

“She got a job in Old Town in Albuquerque,” Gypsy says. “It was in a specialty candy store and she was really good at rolling chocolates—so good that she was offered a management job there. But the woman who had that job was older, and an alcoholic. Mom said she just couldn’t accept if it meant that woman lost her job.”

Joe made good money most of the time. He worked mostly in sales, selling everything from the Famous Schools job training courses to gas to meat. While he and the family lived in Seattle, he owned the Shamrock gas station under the viaduct in south Seattle. He had a huge billboard with his picture on it, and it said, HI! MY NAME IS JOE! That became a familiar sight to drivers.

When he sold memberships to Famous Schools, he outsold most of his peers. One year, he was given a valuable painting as first prize in a sales competition. Joe could sell
anything, and his customers were always glad when he came by.

“When we were in Washington State,” Gypsy recalls, “we lived in Lower Preston, a very small town east of Seattle, and our house had a Coleman stove. Sundays were still special days for us. Mom got us all up and dressed, and Dad dragged us to church at Our Lady of Sorrows in Snoqualmie. Mom started the spaghetti sauce the night before, and she stayed home getting Sunday dinner ready. We all went out for hot chocolate after church, and then we went to K-Mart. My dad loved chasing the Blue Light Specials there.

“When we got home, we ate spaghetti and meatballs. I came to dread Sundays because I was the one who had to wash all those greasy dishes!”

There was no question that Joe Tarricone forged deep bonds with all seven of his children. He and Rose had been married three decades, and they were living back in New Mexico when Joe came home and once again shouted, “Pack up, Rose! We’re moving to Texas!”

For the first time, Rose said, “No, Joe—I’m not leaving my house. I’m tired of moving for thirty years. No more.”

He didn’t believe her, and his response was flip: “Then I’ll divorce you.”

“Fine.”

“My dad was blowing smoke,” Gypsy says. “But my mother meant it. She didn’t want to move again.”

Joe hadn’t really expected to be divorced, thinking at first that Rose would change her mind about moving to Texas. And, of course, she didn’t.

Their affection for each other didn’t diminish, but Joe was still the eagle, flying free, looking for a fortune in the next town or the next state.

And Rose loved her garden and especially enjoyed knowing that she would be there when the perennials she planted returned each spring. She gloried in the permanence of being in her own house with her treasured furniture, curtains, and knickknacks around her.

Gina was sixteen, Rosemary was thirteen, and Dean was ten when their parents broke up. Claire, Aldo, Joey, and Gypsy were out and on their own. Joe promised to support his youngest children and he kept that promise; he would never miss sending a check to Rose for their school clothes and monthly expenses.

Not until the fall of 1978.

School was starting in Albuquerque, and Rose looked for the extra check Joe always sent to buy Gina, Rosemary, and Dean new clothes for school and money for books and supplies. Day after day she checked her mailbox, but the check never came. Nor did the monthly child support that had arrived in the first week of every month. There was no check in October, or ever again.

Rose and Joe were divorced by then, but she counted on him. That just wasn’t like Joe. He had always been a good provider. Rose had gone to a legal aid office when she and Joe split up, and they helped her get the divorce. She also got her GED certificate, a high school degree, after all that time. Rose was only fifty and she still had three children at home. Although Joe’s contributions helped out, she knew she would have to get a job,
something she was actually looking forward to. After he vanished, she had no choice but to provide financially for the children.

Rose applied for a job with See’s Candies and soon became a manager. She had no animosity toward Joe; it was just that their goals in life had grown so far apart. He kept his promise to come home at least twice a year to see their children and they had talked comfortably when he did.

A few years after her divorce, Rose Tarricone began seeing an aeronautical engineer and they eventually married. He saw how hard she had worked over the years, and he also worried about her chronic migraine headaches. Her new husband wanted her to relax, and she finally agreed to retire from her candy factory job.

No longer a married man, Joe Tarricone had been ripe for a midlife crisis when he received his divorce papers. In his midfifties, he was still a good-looking man, although his dark, wavy hairline had crept backward several inches. He embraced the style of men’s fashions in the late seventies. Up until then he’d mostly worn work clothes or armed service uniforms. Now he chose brightly colored leisure suits, polyester bell-bottom trousers, wide neckties, or muslin shirts with embroidery. Heavy gold chains were de rigueur for hairy-chested men like Joe, and he soon bought a few.

He had married so young, he was suddenly single after thirty years, and it somehow felt wrong for a man who had always been part of a Catholic family. There was an emptiness
that Joe wasn’t prepared for, even though he was regularly in touch with his seven children and ex-wife. He wasn’t broken-hearted, but he was lonely, and he was ready to date.

He was attracted to women a generation—or more—younger than he was. That wasn’t unusual; many men in the grip of a midlife crisis seek to recover their youth by dating women young enough to be their daughters. Joe Tarricone was certainly one of them.

He was living in Seattle at the time of his divorce, working for Gerard’s Meats. After dating many young women once or twice, Joe ended his frenzied dating and settled down to seeing just two women. They were both pretty and easy to get along with, and he wasn’t sure which of them was right for him. He was honest with them and made no promises.

One was named Kim. She was the one Joe chose to accompany him to Gypsy’s wedding in July 1977. He had flown the younger kids in from New Mexico, and he picked them up in California and drove them to the wedding in Lake Tahoe. His children liked Kim, and they all had a good time during the festivities. Naturally, Joe cooked for the reception and put together huge antipasto platters with cheeses, meats, peppers, olives, and tomatoes.

The other woman was Renee Curtiss. Joe first met Renee when he worked at Gerard’s, and he had been very attracted to her, even though she was in her early twenties, thirty years his junior. She was the secretary at Gerard’s Meats, efficient, very pretty, and fun to be around. The one
thing that bothered Joe about Renee was that she wasn’t taking care of her own daughter, Diana
,
*
and was even rumored to have another child who lived someplace else—a son, Brent.
*

The Carlsons had been mistaken about the relationships in Geri Hesse’s family.

Diana, an eight-year-old in 1977, wasn’t Geri’s daughter, after all; she was Renee’s daughter. Geri was her grandmother, but she might have told people that Diana was hers—in order to protect Renee’s reputation. Renee would have been very young when she gave birth to two babies, probably in her midteens.

Joe hadn’t found her to be a very attentive mother to either of her children. He disapproved of that. He had no idea who had fathered Diana and Brent; Renee didn’t talk about it.

Joe had always put his own children first—and he vacillated over which of his young girlfriends to choose.

“On the drive back from my wedding,” Gypsy remembers, “my brother Dean said Dad asked the kids which of his girlfriends they liked best, Kim or Renee? They told him they couldn’t make that decision for him, although I guess all of us secretly wished he would choose someone closer to his own age.”

In the end, Joe chose Renee. Unfortunately, in choosing Renee, Joe also got her mother, Geri. They came as a matched pair.

In 1977, he decided to move to Alaska. The pipeline construction was under way, and he could see tremendous potential there if he started his own door-to-door meat business. He’d learned the ins and outs of selling meat in big lots while he worked at Gerard’s in Seattle and was confident about striking out on his own.