The Other Hollywood (36 page)

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I didn’t want to admit that I did it. I was embarrassed because I screwed up good cases that the bureau had made in MIPORN. The fact that I was arrested for shoplifting made it more difficult to prosecute them. As an agent, you can’t embarrass the bureau—that’s the cardinal rule. The cardinal sin is to embarrass the bureau. It shouldn’t be that way, but the bureau is the bureau.

LAS VEGAS/MONTANA/ARIZONA/MISSISSIPPI/MIAMI
1981

DAWN SCHILLER
:
It was my understanding that Sharon was going to meet up with us later. I had no idea that she said no or that she was not going into protective custody with us, either. John had told me she said, “Yeah.” So I thought, “Oh, we’re working toward getting better. There’s no drugs; we’re leaving the area that caused us all this shit.” And John was holding my hand again; he was being romantic.

Then we hit the hawk.

SHARON HOLMES
:
John was the youngest of four children. He grew up in rural farm country in Ohio. His father was an alcoholic, and whenever John talked about him it was about arguments and yelling, and his father falling across beds and vomiting all over the kids.

His parents separated when John was three or four. John had two older brothers and an older sister.

Mary, the mother, had not worked—she was a housewife—so John, his mother, sister, and two brothers moved into a project in Columbus, Ohio, and became a welfare family. They moved in with another woman who had two children—both boys—that was in the same predicament.

They lived there until John was about seven.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
The first place we stopped was Las Vegas. John went into the casino while I waited in the car because I wasn’t old enough to gamble yet, and we didn’t want to take any chances.

So John went in—I don’t remember if it was the Aladdin or the Stardust—and he came back really quick and was scared to death, and I’m like, “What’s the matter?”

He told me a very scary person had sat down next to him at the roulette table, and I was led to believe that it was one of the people who had a contract out on him.

SHARON HOLMES
:
Dawn said that John got in the car—he was white as a sheet and trembling—and they got the hell out of there.

I have no idea who this man was, but John always called him “H the P” after “Harry the Pick.”

John came home one day and said, “This is a poker buddy of mine—I want you to hear his voice.” I have never heard a more chilling voice on an answering machine in my life.

I mean, talk about the “Godfather”—it was that type of thing. An ice pick, that was his choice of weapon.

John said, “Harry came from the Chicago mob, and he’s out here supervising the legitimate laundering of money from various interests of theirs.”

I mean, the voice on the telephone was enough to scare the shit out of you.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
“H the P”? I’m not going to say that. I’m not saying it. What did Sharon say?

SHARON HOLMES
:
John had an early introduction to pornography at about the age of between four and a half and five. He was home with the chicken pox, and when his mom came home from working a night shift she noticed this little collection of boys and girls underneath their first-floor living room window.

When Mary finally got closer, she realized that John had a nudie magazine, and he was in the window, showing the centerfolds to the four-and five-year-olds. They were all laughing and hamming it up, until mama got into the house, grabbed the magazine, and paddled his fanny with it.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
We decided to go stay with John’s sister in Montana because it was safe there. It was in the woods, and it was with family. Maybe we could get a fresh start. So we went to Montana via Utah; we had money for motels then. John wasn’t thieving yet—he had become the person that I knew in the beginning.

It seemed like we were trying to heal a bunch of bad stuff that had happened between us, that was all supposedly because of dope.

SHARON HOLMES
:
John was eight or nine when his mom remarried Harold—who worked for the phone company as a lineman—and they moved from Columbus to a rural area in Ohio called Pataskala.

Harold had bought Mary her own house. I think it was probably about two years later that David—John’s half brother—was born. Harold must have been in his late thirties or early forties. He was about twenty years older than Mary and he was really good to the kids until David came along.

David was his, and these other four children weren’t. So it became, “I don’t have to be nice anymore.”

DAWN SCHILLER
:
Was John’s sister happy to see him? Not really. She probably just wondered how long we were going to freeload off her. She had a small apartment, a job, hadn’t seen her brother in years, and hadn’t heard good things about him.

SHARON HOLMES
:
John was the youngest and probably the most insecure of the four of them. He was still wetting the bed when he was seven. In the projects, the three boys had slept together in the same bed. Then suddenly everybody had a room of their own, and they thought it was wonderful. John discovered the woods and the stream and the fishing and frogging, and he was really happy there—until David came along. Then his stepfather turned on all four of the kids. You know, “These are your kids, and I’ll tolerate them—but David is mine.”

DAWN SCHILLER
:
We stayed with John’s sister for about a week—just kind of laid around on the couch and fattened up, ate, and slept. Then we got a call from his mother in Ohio saying that the FBI had been there looking for us and that we were listed as armed and drug-crazed.

We didn’t have a weapon, and we hadn’t been on dope since we left, you know?

So I said, “Let’s go to Florida and try to make a new life. It’s like, you know, far enough away, and it used to be my old stomping ground. It’s a good place.”

John thought, “Why not?”

SHARON HOLMES
:
Because John was the youngest, he took the brunt of Harold’s anger. He was the one that was always getting beat up because he wasn’t smart enough to get out of the house when he saw Harold coming. The other boys were older, so they were in junior high school and high school when John was still in elementary school.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
After we left Montana, John got pulled over for speeding. I swear to God, I thought we were busted. We didn’t want to swallow, waiting for the cop to come back from checking the license. But it turned out it was okay—I guess we weren’t on the computer yet—and the cop
just gave us a warning. He didn’t even give us a ticket, just sent us on our way.

SHARON HOLMES
:
When David was born he became the center of Mom and Dad’s attention. Mom was good to all of their children, but an infant requires a lot more of her attention. And of course Harold, being older, thought the baby was great—you know, “This is mine, but I’m not going to change those diapers or feed him.”

As David got older and began to walk and talk, John—being the closest in age to him—got tattled on. The others were smart enough to stay away from home as much as they could. It wasn’t a tremendously happy household.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
We drove through Arizona and Wyoming. We stopped at Custer’s Last Stand, and we saw the Grand Canyon and Scottsdale or Flagstaff where there’s that Giant-Meteor-Crater-thing. We, like, got a magnet and picked up pieces of the meteorite. Then we went to the Petrified Forest and stole a bunch of petrified trees in our socks.

We were having fun—doing tourist stuff—but when we hit Oklahoma we started to get low on cash, so we slept in the car as much as we could. Then, right around Mississippi, John started creeping around and breaking into cars again.

He came back one night with a gun. So we did have a gun—I think it was a .38—and we got some cash that way. I’m not sure about any jewelry, but I remember camera equipment and pawning it in the next town or maybe the next state.

SHARON HOLMES
:
When Mary and the kids were on their own, mealtime had always been a big event—everybody talked about what their day had been like. But at Harold’s table you kept your mouth shut. Mom and Dad could talk, but nobody else could put in their two cents’ worth. Things escalated when John reached his teenage years, and Harold was backhanding him—off a chair or across the room.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
We finally got to Florida—Hollover Beach and Collins Avenue is where I grew up for awhile—and we stopped at a place called the Fountainhead Hotel. We had enough money to pay for a couple of nights, but then we started to run out. John is a great one to befriend people and shoot the shit with them, so we got to be friends with Big Rosie, the manager, and she hired me as a maid. Her boyfriend, the handy-man, put John to work on a couple of things, but they didn’t really need him. So Big Rosie’s boyfriend got John a job working construction on another hotel down the road.

SHARON HOLMES
:
When John was sixteen, his half brother, David, snitched on him. Daddy comes home and David says, “John did this!” Guess who got beat?

Harold threw John down the stairs and came after him.

Even though John only weighed 110 pounds, he was six feet tall, so when he got up off the floor he decked Harold. And John told Harold straight out—as his mom was coming through the door—“You touch me again, and I’ll kill you.” John went into the army soon after that.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
We changed our names. I was still Dawn, but John was now “John Curtis.” And he was really nice at first. John was a really good artist, and he would sit and draw pictures of me or my dog. And he would buy me a strand of garnets—which is my birthstone. It was really nice.

But then his paranoia and possessiveness started coming back. He started saying, “We’re never going to get out of here unless we get more money!”

I guess he noticed that there were girls on the beach working as hookers, and I was oblivious to that. Don’t ask me why—there was just a coping blindness that I had. Then he started telling me I needed to go out there.

I said, “No, please, I don’t want to!”

John got really pushy, and I started to get scared. He would withhold his affection and act hurt, you know? He would manipulate me in that way—I’m not doing it, so I’m hurting him.

He’d say, “I’ll keep an eye on you at all times—it will be real easy.”

There was a couple of X-rated motels across the street. I was just freaked out because I didn’t want anybody at the hotel to know that I did that. I was totally embarrassed, you know?

So here I am carrying tons of shame and humiliation—and John dresses me up in a bikini top and some shorts and tells me to go out.

I just did it, you know, because we were at that eggshell stage again—where I didn’t want to do anything to make him hit me. Of course, he was going to hit me whether I did it or not.

SHARON HOLMES
:
After the fight with Harold, John escaped out the back door—with his mom running after him—and spent two days roaming the woods. Harold always went to his mother’s on Sundays, while Mary and the kids all went to church. So John waited until Harold had left, and then he went to his mother and said, “I’m going into the army. I need you to sign me in. I’m not going to stay in this house, or I will kill him.”

Mary felt that was the lesser of two evils and signed him into the army. Two weeks later John was in boot camp, and from there he was sent right
to Germany. He was in the Signal Corps. Most of the time he was in Nuremberg—almost the full three years.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
I would just walk on the beach and get approached by men—it was no problem. I think it was fifty bucks for sex, and anything below that was, like, twenty bucks. The clients were nice—they weren’t scary—they weren’t going to kill me. I could handle them, and sometimes it was just more pleasant to be with them than it was to be with John.

SHARON HOLMES
:
When John came back from the service he spent about ten days in Ohio, and that was enough. Harold was civil to him because when John came back, he was bigger, and it was like, “We can’t harass this young man now because maybe he will kill us.”

That was all John needed, to see his mom and say, “I’m going to California.” And he did. He’d been in California for probably a year when we met.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
My turning tricks probably lasted a good two weeks. When I would come back, that’s when the bad times would start—because John was extremely possessive and jealous. He’d say, “Was that all the money? Why did you take extra long? I was watching you—I saw you with two men!” Which was total bullshit, but I would freeze up in panic, knowing where this line of questioning was going—to me getting hit.

He would drag me into the bathroom and fill up the tub with hot water and scrub me down, all the while telling me I was a filthy whore.
I
was the whore.
I
was the slut.
I
was the dirty whore that just wanted it and asked for it. While I’m being scrubbed in the bathtub, you know?

He had a deep, deep, deep illness. Very twisted. A very twisted man.

SHARON HOLMES
:
John had the drive for fame. But he also had an extremely low sense of self-esteem. That never changed. He loved the adulation because it didn’t matter what he was famous for—it built up his ego, what little there was of it. He really felt he had nothing else to give besides his unique attribute, which is kind of a sad reflection.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
When I finally refused to go out on the beach—and John didn’t have enough patience to manipulate me in any other way—he hit me.

That was the first time he hit me since we’d left Los Angeles. The door of our room was ajar, and I grabbed the opportunity and ran. I ran down the stairs into the back by the pool, in front of the snack bar, “Joe’s,” which was run by an Italian guy who always had the best sausages and spaghetti sauces. We ate breakfast with the people from the snack bar every day.