The Professor and the Prostitute (19 page)

I didn't believe it. I simply couldn't rid myself of the impression that there was something odd about the incident. It just didn't seem feasible to me that an ordinary citizen, pursued by a terrifying crowd, would have fled when police tried to help him. I began to feel certain that if I looked beneath the surface, I would discover that in some way Coury had been complicit in his own death.

Perhaps I wanted to discover this because, as psychiatrists who study the new field of “victimology” are always quick to point out, all of us like to believe that there are no
innocent
victims. If a victim can be found to have provoked or somehow contributed to his own destruction, then the rest of us can—theoretically, at least—learn to eschew the kind of behavior that did in the unfortunate fellow, and thus we can feel, somehow, safe. Safer, anyway. Of course, I
know
there are innocent victims. There are children playing on streetcorners who get shot by cruising snipers. Women are raped and beaten by strangers, men robbed and mutilated by macho marauders they have never before laid eyes on. Nevertheless, I couldn't quite swallow that Coury's ordeal had occurred simply because he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's
such
a wrong place—Times Square, at least at that time—the middle of the night. Why had Coury been there? And what sort of man had he been?

I began by getting in touch with his mother, Mary Coury, an articulate, maternal-sounding woman who had been devastated by the loss of her son but who nevertheless agreed to talk with me. She said it was because she wanted the world to know the kind of family Gerry had come from. It was a family that hailed from Torrington, Connecticut, a quiet town in the northwestern corner of the state. There, Mary Coury, and her husband, Nimar, a Lebanese American, had settled down more than forty years earlier. And there they'd raised seven children, six boys and a girl. Gerard had been the youngest. He was twenty-six years old when he died.

Mary Coury was proud of her family. “All our kids went to college,” was the first thing she pointed out to me. “My husband is a factory worker, and I never went further than high school, but we sent all our kids to college.”

It was easy to understand her pride. The Courys had often been hard pressed to make ends meet. But Nimar Coury had augmented his factory wages by servicing candy vending machines, and Mary had been an astute household manager. Somehow, the couple had begun to live out the American dream: to arrange for their children to have a better life than they had had. “All our children have done well,” Mary Coury said. “And their children will do even better.”

The eldest son, David, attended West Point and served in the U.S. Army until his retirement a few years before. Marcia, the only daughter, graduated from the University of Hartford and eventually entered the computer division of a large insurance company. (“She was one of the first people the company ever trained for computer work,” Mrs. Coury told me proudly.) The next child, John, went to Boston College, then on to American University for an M.A., and took a job with the Agency for International Development in Panama. Another son, Bill, went to Niagara College and then into business on the island of Barbados. Nimar Jr. had two years at Allegheny College, in Pennsylvania, on a scholarship. And Charles, the next son, had attended the University of Connecticut and was working at a school for troubled adolescents in nearby Litchfield.

“Gerry may have been the brightest of the bunch,” said his mother. “He had a ninety-one average in high school and was a member of the National Honor Society.”

I was to hear a similar account of Gerry Coury by talking with his high school principal, Marvin Maskovsky, a sincere, friendly man. He told me that Gerry hadn't been
just
bright. In his halcyon days, he had been one of those rare, well-rounded boys, the kind who excel at both sports and studies. He was a center on the Torrington High football team for four years and manager of the baseball and basketball teams for two. Scholastically, he'd ranked forty-fifth in his class of 390. He'd been voted “hardest worker” and “most influential” by his classmates; he'd been president of the Key Club, a junior branch of the Kiwanis Club; and he'd been a school leader, the kind of boy, said Maskovsky, “to whom a teacher could go to discuss a class problem, and who could be counted upon to give sound advice and cooperation.”

Maskovsky had a detailed example of what a cooperative young man Gerry had been. He remembered that the first year he was principal, he'd gotten “this idea that it might give our graduation ceremony a certain loftiness and importance if the kids gave some kind of ovation to the faculty. But it was a question in my mind, because you're never sure how kids are going to feel about that sort of thing. So I called Gerry Coury into my office. I asked him what he thought of the idea. And Gerry went away and thought about it and talked it over with the other seniors, and he came back and said, ‘Yes, it's a great idea,' and the students did it, and it was very moving. That was the kind of boy Gerry was. He was my emissary to the other kids.”

Maskovsky sounded truly sad. He went on to tell me that ever since Gerry's death, he'd been thinking about him and leafing through the pages of his yearbook, the 1973
Torringtonian
. There was Gerry, in portrait after portrait, group shot after group shot, always neatly dressed, vibrant, clear-eyed. “He was a star,” the principal said.

I thought briefly, after talking with Maskovsky, that perhaps I'd been wrong about Coury. Perhaps, after all, he
had
been a straight-arrow sort of fellow. But a call to the New York Police Department sent me back to my original theory. They too had a photograph of Coury, they said. A picture taken by a police photographer just after his death. In their picture, Gerry was dirty, unkempt, deteriorated. “Like a derelict,” one police officer told me, his voice hushed. “And it isn't as if he looks like he'd just gotten that way overnight, or because of what happened to him right before. He had several days' growth of beard, and his body was filthy. He looked as if he'd been this way a long time.” And another policeman, one of the several who'd noticed Coury
before
he died, described him as “smelly.”

More intrigued than ever, I decided to make a trip to Torrington to try to unravel the story.

On a fiercely hot day in July 1981, I drove the hundred miles from New York to Torrington. Happily, the town (population 31,000), is nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, so it was about ten degrees cooler than New York. Indeed, it seemed, as I drove through its center, like a green and pristine paradise: tree-lined streets, a lushly planted village green called Coe Memorial Park, old Victorian houses, tall-steepled churches. The New England town of everybody's fantasy. But within minutes of my arrival I was forced to consider that nowadays, even pretty, rural towns have big-city problems. Driving down a broad, uncongested avenue, I suddenly heard a brazening of sirens, and when I pulled to the side, I learned from a shaken bystander that a bank had just been robbed, the robbers had made a stunning getaway, and the police were in pursuit. Before the day was out, I was to experience even more vividly how alike small towns and big cities are today.

I went first to look at the street where Coury had grown up. It was right in town, but it was nothing like the streets I'd passed through earlier. The Coury home was on a partly industrial block in a neglected, decaying neighborhood. Porches sagged, windows were broken, and houses were in sore need of paint. This was another Torrington, a place of doldrums and despair.

The Torrington doldrums cannot be overlooked in the story of Gerry Coury. At the turn of the century, when river power was still important, Torrington was a thriving industrial city, producing brass, copper, and metalware. The town absorbed waves of immigrants—chiefly Italians, Irish, and, like the Courys, Lebanese—who thrived in the New England setting. But in recent decades, Torrington had fallen upon bleak times. Old industries had shut down, and new ones had been slow to replace them. In 1981, the average weekly wage, $238, was among the lowest of any Connecticut city. Unemployment that year was so high that Torrington was one of only fifteen Connecticut cities promised special consideration on federal government contracts. Because of the low wages and high unemployment, the ambitious young had tended to leave Torrington, which left the town with a disproportionate number of old people.

For the young who did not leave, there wasn't much to do. On Main Street, the formerly elegant, much-frequented movie house had closed. So, too, had quite a few of the clothing stores and coffee shops. And in Gerry Coury's neighborhood, the closest thing to a lively gathering place was a shabby, drearily lighted all-night diner.

No one was at the Coury house that morning, so I started driving around the area to try to interview some of the people who'd known Gerry. There was Father Joseph Amar, pastor of St. Maron's Church, around the corner from the Courys'. Father Amar said that Gerry had been very active in church affairs when he was an adolescent but that in recent years he hadn't seen much of him because Coury had “apparently fallen on hard times.” There was Eddie Barber, manager of the Moosehead Tavern, a bar that Gerry used to frequent. Barber said that Gerry “had his strange ways. Sometimes he'd walk in with his head hanging down and just not talk to anybody.” There was a friend of Gerry's who didn't want to be identified, who told me that Gerry had changed since high school, saying, “He got kind of strange, withdrew into himself. He became a loner, and he got kind of down on everything, saying the guys with big money ran the whole show.”

These observations were corroborated by Owen Quinn, a schoolmate of Gerry's who had become the director of Torrington's social services. In his professional capacity, he'd seen quite a bit of Gerry in recent years. He said Gerry was “cynical” and saw the world as a “dog-eat-dog place.” “Like when Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner had to withdraw from the Olympics,” Quinn tried to explain. “You know, most people were sad and disappointed. But Gerry said, ‘I'm glad. I'm glad they can't compete. This country is always making heroes over nothing.' Gerry used to be a very outgoing, optimistic sort of guy. But he got very distant and sort of depressed in the last two or three years.”

I began to realize that the Gerry Coury whom his mother and his principal had spoken about was not the only Gerry Coury. That perhaps theirs was a Gerry Coury who had ceased to exist long before a man with the same name and features met his death in the New York subway station. Gerry Coury had changed.

It didn't take me very long to find out why. A visit to the local newspaper office produced an important item of information that had been left out of all publications except those in Torrington and nearby towns. Coury, the town police had told the newspaper, had been part of the local “drug culture.” The New York newspapers and the national magazine that had painted Gerry Coury as a “straight-arrow” youth hadn't reported this. They'd either neglected to call the Connecticut press and police or—perhaps because it made a better, a more chilling, story to portray Coury as an innocent, a mere passer-by on that Main Street of the nation's drug business, Forty-second Street—they'd obtained but chosen to ignore the information.

The center of the drug culture in Torrington was the lovely village green I'd seen when I first entered the town, Coe Memorial Park. I also found out that, just as in New York, the culture was composed chiefly of young men who led aimless, rootless lives. Gerry had apparently been part of this alienated group for some time. But in the weeks before his death his life became particularly rootless. He not only had no job and no girlfriend, but he had no home. For a time, he'd shared a house with friends, but in the middle of June they'd kicked him out. After that, he spent his days in the park. At night, he bedded down in a parked car.

It was difficult to pin down exactly when the honor student's descent started, but it must have been sometime in his early college years. After his graduation from Torrington High, Gerry had gone off to Fairfield University in Fairfield County, Connecticut. There, things began to go wrong. A dean told me Gerry showed signs, while at Fairfield, of being very “disturbed.” He'd become involved—“overinvolved,” said the dean—with the remnants of the campus counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. He kept demanding “relevant” courses and kept tangling with the administration. At the end of his third year, Gerry dropped out of Fairfield, and the university advised his family that he needed psychological counseling.

Sadly, either the family did not or Coury would not accept this advice. The young man simply came back to Torrington and, with few opportunities for either employment or entertainment, began to deteriorate. He did find work occasionally—once as a waiter at the Kilravock Inn in Litchfield, a famous old hotel that caught fire the summer Gerry worked there. (“It burned down the week he left,” Mrs. Coury was to tell me. “We always kidded him that he must have burned the place down.”) He pumped gas for a while and worked as a security guard. But eventually he always failed. He lost his security guard job because, said his mother, “he fell asleep one night, or came to work late. Something like that.”

When he wasn't working, Coury would just drift. He traveled to New Jersey. To New York. To Florida. Even to California. How he got the money for his trips, no one seemed to know. But now Gerry was drifting both across America and downward.

There is in psychiatry a fundamental concept called the downwarddrift hypothesis. Psychiatrists use it to explain why, when most individuals in America's still-expanding economy and still-fluid class structure invariably seem to progress, both economically and socially, beyond the levels of their parents, certain people not only do not exceed their parents but drop to progressively lower and lower strata of society. Such individuals, goes the theory, spiral downward in class because they suffer from psychiatric disorders—schizophrenia, alcoholism, drug abuse. From all I had learned in Torrington, it was clear that Gerry Coury exemplified the downward-drift hypothesis. He'd failed to live up to his siblings' achievements and to his parents' aspirations because he had had the psychiatric disorder of drug abuse.