WHEN I WAS in my mid-twenties there was a TV show, “The Last Degree,” about the pressurized life at an unnamed Ivy League law school. The show starred Steven Hansen, who has since faded from the scene, a blond, whose hair curled at its ends, and who, with the exception of his turned-up and my straight nose, bore an amazing resemblance to me. Even I saw it in our similar body language. More than a few times, his fans asked or stared at me until they determined, unluckily, they were mistaken. Once, when Sarah and I checked into a hotel for a conference in Orlando, the hotel clerks thought for sure I was Hansen. Soon there was a ruckus in the lobby and busboys and clerks were sticking papers in my hand wanting autographs. It became a damned family joke because only my brusque New York accent finally convinced them that I was really a doctor.
That slim brush with fame told me how much I cherished my anonymity. Even in the self-contained world of medicine, where the stars are research doctors, I was content to do my job in the anonymity of the ER.
Not so Sarah. She wanted recognition as a famous artist, and knew she would gain it as soon as she came to New York. While she was still a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Jeremy Riegle, at the height of his fame, gave a guest lecture to Sarah’s class. Sarah was one of the star students in both talent and beauty; Riegle made sure he met her. Soon Sarah found herself in his bed. She foolishly thought she had seduced him. They had a three-night stand. He gave her his notorious rap: “Come to New York, I’ll help you. And you will renew my inspiration.” Her ego and naïveté at all-time highs, she fell for his snow job. She called him two months later before she came in for her Easter break. He invited her to come to see him, an invitation that she misinterpreted. She flew into town and went directly to his loft, where, hocus-pocus, he fucked her one more time. And then he fucked her over. When she awoke in the morning, she found a note. “Please, take your time. Have breakfast. I had to drive out to the Hamptons to be with a friend. Let yourself out and leave the number where you’re staying and we’ll get together again before you leave.”
Sarah found out that he had seduced hundreds of women. If they suited him and they agreed, he brought them into his stable of assistants and occasional bed partners. Stunned and in denial that someone could treat her like just another “street fuck,” Sarah chose not to call him and make her own way.
Years later, when her career started to do well, the art world being so small, they met again. He did not remember that he had taken a painting of hers for his “collection,” did not remember her name, and barely recognized her face. As she gained minimal recognition between SoHo and Chelsea, he helped her out. He included her in a show he curated, and wrote an essay for a catalog for her first solo show. I thought this was some form of redemption for Sarah’s mistake. That he truly believed in her work.
This limited art success had not garnered her real fame, no worldwide recognition.
But now, unknown to us, as I continued operating and the gurney rolled my son to the hospital morgue, we were suddenly gaining worldwide “fame” without having any control over our names or our fates. From the Net to local and cable TV, I was becoming known as “Dr. Neil Downs, who worked heroically through the tragic murder of his son, Barry Castor Downs. In the waiting room, his wife Sarah Brockton Roberts, a well-regarded New York artist, stood courageously with the other parents of the fallen.”
While Sarah and I crumbled, side by side on the soft leather couch in my office, TVs throughout the hospital and the world showed film of the carnage. Through the locked door came a most unwanted message, “Neil, it’s Shana.” Shana Armstrong was the assistant operations officer of the hospital.
“Bad time, Shane.”
“I know. But there is a mob of press and we have to get you out of here unless you want to hold a press conference.”
Hell no, was she nuts? I didn’t want to talk to the press. Not to anyone. Including Shana.
Thus began a new nightmare. One that happened to others. Never to me. One that happened to those who lusted after fame and recognition after murdering their children, lying to save a killer’s ass, having their wangs cut off, or sucking a president’s cock.
Sarah and I drank some bottled water and cleansed our faces with alcohol swipes that I had in my office. Ray Esperenza, the besieged hospital PR director, who also acted as a liaison between the administration and staff, and was also someone I considered a friend, along with two security guards, successfully hustled us into an ambulance through a corridor exit. When the ambulance pulled down our block a mob of reporters and satellite trucks surrounded the front door to our apartment building. And a new insanity began. The ambulance driver took us to the safety of my friend Matt Silverman’s house in Rye.
That next morning, before I had finished my coffee, Ray called me on the phone and implored me to give a statement, which we issued. “Sarah and I ask that you let us mourn in peace. We thank all of those who have already sent cards, flowers, telegrams, and emails. We appreciate more than words can convey these outpourings of love and support. We ask that instead of flowers, that you send all donations to your favorite charity in Castor’s name.
“Once again, we send our deepest thanks for your expressions of love and support.”
That didn’t end it. Ray, who knew me well—we played racquetball together and had taken Castor and his kids to Knicks and Yankees games—did his best to deflect all attention from us. In the next few days we discovered who our friends were and just how much information you could find out about anyone. The papers, the magazines, the television, and the scandal creeps went berserk. We found these “facts” published in the papers or on the Net: my college records, photos of Sarah and Castor, Castor and myself from times I could barely remember—all given or sold by people we had trusted and some from those we didn’t remember. There were interviews with Castor’s schoolmates and teachers. His IQ and school records. Evaluations of my performance from college onwards. I heard I was a great doctor or a hack who couldn’t even open his own practice. My run-ins with the higher-ups about the uninsured and a paper I’d written in college about the benefits of a nonprofit, single-payer health system, excerpts from letters of protest for the way hospitals hounded stricken patients for payment were cited. They mentioned my father as inventor of the Gypswitch. They traced Sarah’s pedigree as a descendent of Revolutionary War hero Mawbridge Brockton. Her gallery let the magazines use photos of her work. People did a special little spread with photos the gallery had in their files. USA Today ran bios of all the murdered children, and then copies of the speeches at the masses or ceremonies.
We received calls through intermediaries at Matt’s house from all the major networks. A college acquaintance who worked on “Nightline” called Matt and begged him for an interview. The New York Times ran front-page pictures and then a supposedly investigative story on ER rooms in New York, focusing on mine, and how we handled the crisis.
All of this came out in one fashion or another: We were members of the ACLU and Common Cause. I’d served two three-month stints with Doctors Without Borders. We had signed petitions and Sarah had donated paintings to organizations hoping to ban all guns. They wanted us as spokespeople, but only said so through a television spokesperson, and never contacted us directly.
Celebrity-news programs like “Xtra” and “Inside Edition” ran stories on the killing and did profiles of us all with a peculiar slant. We never watched them, but we heard. Friends taped them for us in case, in some less frenzied future, we wanted to relive our celebrity status.
We were told that one radio blowhard gave this commentary. “It is so sad and tragic what happened to Dr. and Mrs. Downs, but if it is true that Mrs. Downs had an abortion, I wonder if they regret that now.” Sarah had no abortion that I knew about.
One aspiring mayoral candidate used film of the shooting in an ad saying this would never happen in his city.
The Policemen’s Benevolent Association recorded two videos using the shooting. One for the younger set used Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” on the sound track. For the older set, they used Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend.” Both were used without permission as a come-on. Twenty-five bucks for the video and a sticker for your car.
This charade of gossip and salacious fascination with the killers, the dead, and their families, passing for news, continued unabated, and still goes on.
The loneliness of so many who wrote us at the hospital, the gallery, or just “New York City,” frightened and saddened me. We both received offers of dates, marriage proposals, yes, marriage proposals, sexual orgies, love mail, and, of course, hate mail.
Then came unending sources of information and explanations for the behavior of the four “misunderstood and disturbed teens.” Mitch Tabaldi and Rusty Kickham attended Stuyvesant for two years, making the long trek from Howard Beach, Queens. Neither had done well either academically or socially. Kickham, who was to star on the soccer team, never went to practice and quit the team after his first year. Tabaldi had been disciplined for bringing a gun onto school grounds, which resulted in his being “asked” to leave Stuyvesant after his junior year. Kickham, his only real friend in the school, left with him. Not long after, Bobby Skirpan, Tabaldi, and Kickham, who’d been friends since kindergarten formulated their murderous scheme. Linda Graper was Kickham’s girlfriend. All the words and analysis spewing out of the TV and the Internet could never truly explain why four middle-class kids turned into cold-blooded killers.
The vilest of all was a Web site/CD-Rom game. I didn’t check my email for weeks after the murder, and then, when I did, I found information on a game called “Genius Kill,” in which the player decided which “Jewface genius” or “nigger” he hates most and then kills him or her as they leave Stuyvesant. Then the player got points for killing more kids than Skirpan, Tabaldi, Kickham, and Graper. I knew all about this game because someone calling himself “Xtian Death” sent it to me on my email. They had shot Castor fifty more times and, as he wrote to me, “Jew dock, you never saved him. Not once.”
My belief, my faith in some repository dignity of humanity plummeted.
We spent the next three days bunkered with Matt and his wife and two kids as the TV trucks with their satellite dishes practically barricaded his house. Matt, slippery and conniving as he was, proved an invaluable friend. He arranged for the burial service and dealt with the rabbi of Castor’s temple.
He explained to the principal that Sarah and I could not attend the mass memorial at Stuyvesant, where not only students and teachers who knew the murdered and now martyred, but also mayors and senators and governors and limelight seekers eulogized the children they never knew.
After three days, on Monday morning, the time came to bury my son. I barely noticed the sunny, seventy-five-degree winds of spring in New York. I wish I could say we had a beautiful ceremony with heartfelt eulogies for a hundred friends and family. But no, we chose to skip the service and go straight to the cemetery in Queens. I hoped the press and public would leave us alone to mourn in peace. But no. Outside the cemetery was a braying pack of journalists. Once inside the cemetery we carried my son’s casket in silence from the hearse and placed it into the ground beside his Mommoms. When the rabbi hymned his prayer, and, after some mumbled “Amen,” the only sound I heard was that of uninhibited sobbing as I threw the first and last shovels of the dust whence he came onto his final home. In that moment of internal solitude and grief for us and peace for Castor, there should have been silence, but above us whirred the blades of a helicopter with someone snapping pictures of the suddenly ubiquitous face of Sarah Brockton Roberts as she wept hysterically.
In that moment—when I felt almost like jumping into the grave beside my son, and I knew Sarah did too, so out of our minds were we that we clung to each other fearing that if we let go we’d disintegrate into the pain—the thought that saved me was a realization that I must flee America.
That evening, Sarah numbed herself with tranquilizers, which did not stem the flow of tears, and then finally we were alone in the extra bedroom of Matt’s home. I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. My son was dead and my heart broken beyond repair; this was the time to ask the question that would seal our fate.
We had not made love since before his death. And I needed to make love to Sarah that night, to feel myself inside her, to feel as if I lived somewhere real, that I could survive in some less horrific future if we could make love and life again. But that was the Sarah who had been my faithful wife, my love, my soul mate. Inside her, I had never felt alone.
“Sarah … Where …”
“Do we have to do this now?” She had been waiting for that question. She pushed herself off the bed and tugged at the strings of her nightgown. Her neck began to twitch. Fast. Her faced twisted.
“I have to, yes.” I stayed seated on the bed.
Because the papers found out she did not arrive until four hours after the initial call went out for her, we gave the story that she was at various openings and galleries, one step ahead of the search party. They’d never uncovered the truth about her whereabouts. Thankfully.
“Neil …” Her body drooped into sadness and she started crying. Different tears from those she had wept for Castor, tears of guilt and remorse instead of the purity of loss. “I was with Jeremy.”
“With him?”
“Neil, it’s so complicated and I don’t even know how to explain what … We have lost so much more than one child. More than Castor.”
Yes, I thought, we have. She came to me and needed me to hug her, and I did. But as we held each other, my arms had no strength. “Harder, hold me,” she whispered. “Harder” in Sarah’s world indicated forgiveness. I tried. I wanted to. I couldn’t. Yes, we had lost more than just Castor, I thought, we had lost each other. My last inner reserves of love, of belief in anything seemed to evaporate against my conscious will, not just from the ineffable place where we find love and heart and our souls, but even from my physical being. She felt my arms go weak and she fell away from me and she stared at me and I closed my eyes—and she knew.
That night we did not sleep together. We never stayed one night alone in the same room again.
In the moment when we needed most to be one, we were two—far apart, and alone in our own suffering. In that moment, from her and for her, despite the weight of my guilt that somehow I was at fault, I was gone.