CHAPTER TWELVE
“Woo-woo!”
The guys unloading boxes from a truck at the dock behind the May Company department store stopped in their tracks and looked up at the two teenaged girls speeding around the docks on a moped.
Dana, her blonde hair flying, and her dark-haired best friend Carrie Ann on the seat behind her, buzzed the guys on the docks at the local outdoor mall, catcalling over the sound of the moped’s whiney engine.
“Woo-woo!”
They zipped around town a bit before speeding home. But the young girls caught the eye of a patrol officer who stopped them and cited Dana for driving the moped without a license. He also didn’t like her flippant attitude. He sat Dana and her friend in his black-and-white, loaded the motorized bike into his trunk and carted them home.
“Watch out for her,” he told Dana’s mother. “If you’re not careful, she’s going to lead a life of crime.”
Beverly, Dana’s mother, let Dana have her moped back with a warning: “Next time, don’t get caught.”
At 13, Dana was more than a handful. She was developing into a beautiful girl, but she couldn’t take “no” for an answer. A simple request to do household chores would result in a screaming match because she wanted to go to the movies or do something with her friends. All Beverly wanted was to instill a little discipline and responsibility, but Dana would have none of it. Dana was temperamental and demonstrative.
Sometimes she acted more like a teenaged boy. One year Dana had gotten her mother a snake for Christmas. Afterward, Dana said that her first choice had been an iguana, but it had died under her bed, so she went back to the store and got a ribbon snake. On Christmas Eve, it got out of its box and Beverly finally found her Christmas present slithering around the bathtub. Beverly’s little lecture to Dana about gift-giving—it’s for the person you’re giving it to, not for yourself—fell on deaf ears. Dana had simply expected to get in trouble.
Once when they were getting ready for dinner, Dana asked if she could start the car and Beverly said no because Dana was still rather petite and the driveway was on an incline. Dana didn’t argue, but a few minutes later, there was a crash in the front yard. When Beverly ran out of the house to look, Dana had crashed the car trying to get it started.
Beverly was an ex–beauty queen and still tried to play the part. She liked being made-up and dressed. She had been a Rose Princess in the Tournament of Roses Parade in the 1930s, modeled at Bullock’s and was the model in the Hamilton watch ads. She had the drop-dead looks that attracted men in numbers. A would-be actress, her Hollywood career never quite took off, and she drifted from job to job and eventually had two sons by two different fathers.
Ten years later, she met Russell, Dana’s father, a women’s hairstylist, and she charmed him with her outgoing personality and bubbling sense of humor. People who knew her well said she’d never met a stranger because she immediately put people at ease as if they were old friends. Russell and Beverly married. Russell bought a house in Covina and worked at being a father to Dana as well as to Beverly’s sons, Rick, 10, and Craig, 8. Beverly and Russell tried many times to have another baby and Beverly suffered several miscarriages until she finally became pregnant. By the time Dana was born, their little family was ecstatic and Dana was the cherished new addition. Beverly, who worked at a beauty supply shop Russell owned, soon began using an assortment of medications. Russell thought the house resembled a drug store, with bottles of pills all over the house. He didn’t like it. He also didn’t like the fact that she charged his credit cards to the limit. He could not get her to stop spending money. Beverly was aggressive and liked being the queen bee of her own home as well as the small block where they lived, but she didn’t get along with one of their neighbors. One day he came home to find Beverly outside the house wrestling with the woman in the gutter. He left her soon after that. Dana was not quite 2 years old.
As Dana was growing up, Russell visited once or twice a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Early on, Dana exhibited daredevil and destructive antics to get attention, from dying her hair green to recklessness in sports. Dana thought her mother paid more attention to her older step-brothers because Rick had appeared in a sky-diving television commercial for Marlboro cigarettes and Craig, a musician, had played a big gig at Disneyland, caught the eye of a record producer and cut an album. Dana tried to play Craig’s guitar and would sing in the driveway of their home where she thought no one could hear, but resented that her mother never gave her the praise she gave her older half-brothers. She felt that her mother didn’t pay enough attention to her and that she was too young to compete for her mother’s affections. Feeling rejected, she retaliated by using pinking shears to cut a hole in one of her mother’s dresses. At 5 years old, she knew she’d get punished and didn’t try to hide what she had done. With her eldest half-brother, Craig, out of the house playing gigs with his band, Dana retaliated against Rick by crawling into his bed to take a nap, and wet his bed. He was furious at her, but she kept doing it because she thought it was funny. She finally stopped wetting his bed when she was 8 years old. Rick moved out of the house to live with his great aunt, Beverly’s mother’s sister, who agreed to take him in.
Beverly tried to discipline Dana, and at the same time pay more attention to her, by laying out clothes for her to wear and fixing food for her to eat. But Dana interpreted that as a form of control. Whenever Beverly disciplined her, Dana would rebel by stealing money from Beverly’s purse to buy candy, sometimes as much as $10 and $15. She liked Jolly Rancher and Pixy Sticks, and stashed it in her room. If Dana didn’t have any money, she would steal candy or other food and hide it in her room to eat later.
When Beverly thought she was tucked away in bed, Dana would read Grimm’s Fairy Tales, her favorite book, from cover to cover. Later, she fell in love with horror movies. She’d get up in the middle of the night to catch the 2-to-4 a.m. movies, preferring older movies that relied on suspense to slasher flicks. She liked good, scary stuff: monsters and sci-fi with genetically altered mutants. Her favorite was the werewolf, a powerful person you didn’t want to piss off, because it could change into a fearsome beast and rip your lungs out. She saw every werewolf movie she could.
Dana’s destructive behavior continued and, although she was bright, she didn’t do well in school. She always thought the teachers were looking down their noses at her or trying to put her down. When she was in sixth grade, Dana and a friend defaced the homeroom of a teacher she didn’t like. She got caught and spent weeks cleaning classrooms. Seventh grade brought more teachers that Dana didn’t like. She thought they didn’t like her either, so she ditched class. She became a banner carrier, one of the uniformed girls who walks in front of the marching band carrying the school’s name on a banner, but was dismissed because she couldn’t work with the rest of the team. She was suspended from school several times for forging notes to get out of class. With Rick, a young sky diver, Dana created a contraption to catapult neighborhood cats—outfitted with tiny parachutes—off the roof, so they would splash-land in their pool. They built their own makeshift high-dive platform from stacked orange crate boxes. One of the more dangerous stunts was to climb to the top of the rickety platform and kick off the top crate on the dive into the pool. Sometimes Dana got hurt, but she liked playing rough. Dana became an expert swimmer and excelled at softball. She got into a fight with another girl in sixth grade, claiming it was retaliation for a beating by the same girl. Dana admitted she’d cold-cocked her classmate, and said afterward, “It sure felt good. She beat the shit out of me and I got her, but I knew I would get in trouble.” Dana was suspended again. She said her mother took her to Baskin-Robbins, an ice cream parlor, to celebrate standing up to a bully.
Beverly was into Scientology and had a big poster in the kitchen listing the stages of development, with “apathy” at the bottom of the chart and “clear” at the top. She occasionally took Dana to meetings. Beverly was spending so much money for Scientology classes, which were required to progress in the organization, that she had to take in boarders to make some money. A man going through a divorce moved into a bedroom vacated by Craig, on tour with his band, and a couple of guys lived in a camper in their driveway.
Beverly didn’t set the best example for an adolescent Dana. Threatened by her daughter’s emerging beauty, she dressed in attention-getting outfits, dated aggressively and didn’t shield her daughter from her private life. Beverly often skinny-dipped in their pool and stayed out all night dancing with girlfriends. One night, Dana and her best friend found Dana’s mother and a local cop in the pool, with his boots, hoster, uniform and badge strewn around the house. Upset, Dana flipped on the harsh, bright pool and outside spotlights full blast and left them on. At 12 years old, Dana lost her virginity to one of the men living in the camper.
Craig’s success in the band was paying off. He became the primary breadwinner for the family. In between gigs, he came home to mow the lawn, do repairs and help around the house. He tried to tie up the funds to ensure that the money was spent on household expenses, not Scientology courses.
Despite meager finances, they always had food in the house and Beverly’s comedic, upbeat attitude lifted the household spirits. The divorced boarder, Michael Carpenter, was delighted by Dana’s spirit. She dyed his undershorts purple and put a “For Sale—This Week’s Special” sign on his car as a prank. He grew very attached to Dana and she regarded him as a surrogate father. Carpenter was delighted with Dana’s antics and thought she was “full of the devil.” Beverly lifted Carpenter’s spirits with her natural gift of comedy and inadvertently helped him get through a difficult divorce by showing him another side of life. She laughed away their unusual living arrangements and celebrated holidays like a patched-together family. Beverly tried to make Christmas and Halloween special by decorating the house and doing special things. On Christmas Eve, she would run a long thread of brightly colored yarn from their Christmas stockings to some gift in another part of the house or outside. One year, Dana got a redwood playhouse with windowboxes.
In seventh grade, Dana tried stealing earrings and perfume at the May Company department store, but she was caught immediately, and the store called her mother. Dana’s activity skyrocketed when she got the moped. She and Carrie Ann would ride for fun after school, zipping up and down alleys and backstreets, being careful not to get caught again. They loved high-energy and edgy rock music—David Bowie, Frank Zappa, the Rolling Stones and Spirit. Sometimes Dana, Carrie Ann and Beverly would spend hours in the kitchen cooking sauteed mushrooms and French toast, talking and eating. When no one else was around, Beverly would give them each a glass of Champale, an inexpensive brand of wine. Dana and Carrie Ann became fast friends. They would run up to the mountains and hike around with Dana’s dog. Carrie Ann’s parents were more restrictive and she envied Dana because she had so much freedom. Dana craved independence and wanted to live life on the wild side. She resented being told what to do. When her mother tried to keep her in line and give her chores to do after school, Dana would explode in anger and there would be a high-pitched screaming match. Punishment didn’t seem to work. If Dana was grounded, she would simply slip out of her bedroom window at night and return when she pleased.
Raising a teenaged girl with high spirits gave Beverly plenty of stress, but she had another problem—she’d found a lump in her breast. For some reason, Beverly interpreted the teachings of her new-found religion as reason to ignore the lump, but her health began to deteriorate and she quickly began to fade. Out of vanity, Beverly rejected getting a biopsy and, when her condition worsened, a mastectomy, but she eventually agreed to undergo chemotherapy. Her health was on a roller coaster. She would periodically improve and then deteriorate to the point of being bedridden. Then she would be up and around again. Craig hired a maid to take care of the household finances, buy groceries and clean the house.
The reality of having a terminally ill mother was beyond young Dana’s ability to cope. Michael Carpenter had to drive them to the emergency room one evening. As her pale, weak mother awaited treatment, Dana raced up and down the hallway of the hospital with the wheelchair. When her mother entered a treatment room, Carpenter gathered Dana in his arms and told her to prepare herself for her mother’s eventual death. Dana sobbed and they both cried together. To relieve the stress, he took Dana to dinner at a nice restaurant and Dana proceeded to order a cocktail. The waiter never flinched or asked her age, but Dana could pass for 18 at the time. Dana thought it was a big joke, but Michael was mortified. He knew that Dana liked putting him on the spot.
When Beverly was very ill, Dana would try to take care of her mother, getting her food and drinks and pills. Beverly suffered mood swings from the chemotheraphy and the abject horror of cancer. As a reasonably attractive and robust woman in her middle years, she shrank and shriveled into a shell of her former self as the cancer spread to her lungs and liver.
Beverly clung to life until Dana was 14. It was the summer between her freshman and sophomore high school years. Dana spent the evening in the hospital with her mother and asked Carrie Ann to go with her.
Carrie Ann thought Beverly was already dead. She was struggling to breathe. Dana sat by her bedside for a while to comfort her.
“Let go, Mom. It’s OK. I will be all right. Let go. Just let go.”
* * *
Dana didn’t last two years at her father’s house. Russell had married again, to a woman named Yvonne, but Dana didn’t like her new step-mother, nor did she like Yvonne’s daughter, Cathy, with whom she had to share a room. Russell and Yvonne had plenty of money and a beautiful, spacious home in Dana Point, an upper-class beach city. Dana spent a year in a depression. Losing her mother was a combination of extreme pain and relief, and she struggled with her feelings, alternately loving and hating Beverly. Dana thought her mother was an asshole for being promiscuous and not paying enough attention to her.
Because of the move to Dana Point, Dana had changed high schools and now attended Newport Harbor High School—when she felt like it. Her brother Rick saw his little sister having trouble and introduced her to his hobby of sky-diving. He took her up in an airplane for a spectator ride. Thousands of feet in the air, Dana looked down from the plane, her eyes wide, and he asked her what she thought. She said she wanted to jump. And when she did, she outjumped him. Dana was hooked. At 16, Dana had disarmingly light blue eyes, sun-kissed good looks and a figure that turned heads, but she preferred sky-diving to dating. Dana had some hair-raising experiences with sky-diving, but she considered the possibility of losing her life part of the adventure. Months after she took up the sport, she collided with another sky-diver and their gear became tangled in a free fall, thousands of feet in the air. As the seconds ticked away, they frantically tried to get their equipment to open up. Finally, about 400 feet from the ground, her reserve chute suddenly opened and she drifted slowly down to earth. Dana didn’t regret the collision. At that young age, she was so absorbed with the sport that she didn’t mind dying her way, on her own terms. She had skipped school that day and that experience intoxicated her with being in charge of her destiny.
At the same time, she and her new-found sky-diving friends were experimenting with drugs. When Yvonne discovered marijuana in the room that Dana and Cathy shared, Russell confronted both of them and told them that they were forbidden to bring drugs into the house. But by this time, Dana had her own life. She moved out of her father’s house and moved in with Rob Beaudry, her 23-year-old jumpmaster. She managed to graduate from Newport Harbor High School in 1976. In the yearbook, she answered a question about her favorite pastime with “Getting into trouble.” Her favorite place to be? “In free fall.”
The relationship with Rob centered around sports, primarily sky-diving. With the stamina, coordination and fiercely competitive drive of an athlete, Dana quickly mastered windsurfing, wave sailing, hang-gliding, water skiing and scuba diving. A year after moving out of the house, she invited her father to dinner for his birthday. Before dinner, she and Rob drove him to the airport, outfitted him with an emergency parachute and stuck him in the jumpmaster seat of the plane, and up they went. Dana and Rob clambered out under the wing of the plane and leaped off, did a few stunts and landed smack on the target in the drop zone. Dana felt happy to see the look of pride and admiration on her father’s face—she was able to share her adventurous lifestyle with him and get his approval. She was particularly happy that her “evil stepmother,” Yvonne, was left at home.
Rob helped Dana through nursing school at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. She had hated the way the nurses at the hospital treated her when her mother was dying and wanted to become a nurse so that she could demonstrate kindness to patients and their relatives. It took her five years to get her associate of arts degree in nursing.
She and Rob stayed together for several years and became engaged, but Dana decided she didn’t want to rush into marriage when she was still so young. She had become pregnant twice and he convinced her to end the pregnancies, even though Dana wanted children. She loved him, but she knew that she would always resent him for that.
In 1981, just after she’d received her nursing degree, a group of sky-divers decided to take the ultimate challenge: sky-dive into the Grand Canyon, a spectacular—and illegal—thrill. They plotted and planned and took practice jumps for months before flying to Colorado for the secret jump. Because conditions were dangerous and volatile, many of the divers missed the drop zone, including Dana and two others, who were arrested and hauled off to court. Their gear was confiscated and they had to pay a fine, but Dana looked back on that as one of the greatest moments in her life.
For the next five years, she was in a volatile, on-again, off-again relationship with Chris Dodson, an excellent windsurfer. Sports kept them together. They would go to Hawaii three times a year just to go sailing and play golf and traveled to Oregon for sailing competitions. Though they were great at sports, they were crummy at having a relationship. Both hot-headed and competitive, neither one would back down during a fight. Inevitably, Dana moved out and, while she was dating a paramedic, met Evan Campbell, a Scotsman, who also was involved with someone else. Smitten with Dana, he took her to Hawaii for three weeks of hang-gliding, sky-diving and golfing. He returned to his girlfriend, but he and Dana remained friends and stayed in touch.
In 1986, Russell married Jeri. Shortly after, Dana moved into their house with them in Canyon Lake for several months to figure out her next move. She had been working as a nurse at the nearby Corona Community Hospital since 1981, a few weeks after getting her state nursing license. Over the years, she had held down positions in obstetrics and the emergency room, and had assisted in the operating room, which she preferred.
It didn’t take long for Tom Gray to find out that Dana was in the area. An ultra-light aircraft pilot, Tom was lucky to have a hobby that generated income. Local businesses and car dealers would pay him to pull advertising banners in the air above weekend festivals and over freeways during rush hour. When he heard through mutual friends that Dana was living in the area, he would look for her car whenever he was up in the air. It took him a while, but he spotted it, parked at a house in Canyon Lake. He found out that she was living with her father and wasn’t dating anyone, but he didn’t know how to approach her.
Starting as a drummer in grade school, Tom had been in rock bands during his entire adolescence and into adulthood; he had his share of groupies, but they didn’t appeal to him as serious girlfriend material. His band, Longshot, played at Disneyland, Magic Mountain, Gazzari’s, the Starwood and other kingmaker venues that were popular during the hard-rock glory days of Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The band hadn’t had a big gig for a while—they were doing midnight shows at local bars—but they were OK with that. No one in the band had ever wanted a record deal—they were just in it to have fun.
Tom’s passions for music and flying came together by way of informal weekend picnics in the local foothills off Ortega Highway, the windy, hilly road that links the Inland Empire to Orange County. The word-of-mouth get-togethers had no corporate sponsors and no admission fees and consisted of people drinking beer, firing up the barbecue and riding dirt bikes. At night, they’d build a big bonfire and everyone would dance and party with Longshot. One weekend, some sport flyers who flew battery-operated remote-control toy airplanes decided to get their group together to check out the ultra-light scene. News of the mega-gathering grew and by the time the weekend rolled around, Tom heard that both ultra-light pilots and sport flyers were driving in from around the state. Someone pulled together a banner saying “Welcome to the Fly-In” and Tom agreed to pull the banner over the festival as people were arriving in the afternoon.
Although it was still springtime, the temperatures had climbed to the 90s. Tom was up in the air and he was looking for Dana. He’d heard she was coming with friends and possibly a date. As he scanned the crowd, he saw another pilot take to the air in his ultralight, so Tom flew higher to give him lots of airspace. The daredevil pilot started to wow the crowd by buzzing them at low altitude at high speed, then shooting upward and doing other tricks. On his next fly-by, he soared upward to execute a risky maneuver and took a turn, but his wings folded up like a big butterfly. He went into a death spiral and the crowd roared its approval, thinking it was a wonderful trick. It wasn’t. He hit the ground at high velocity and was killed on impact.
Dana’s nursing instinct kicked into gear and she ran over to help, but she was a long way from the site of the accident. By the time she got there, she was suffering from a slight case of heat stroke. In the meantime, Tom was still up in the air with the “Welcome to the Fly-In” banner behind him, thinking, “Oh, this is just great.” He began his descent right after the crash. He thought the accident must have been fatal, but didn’t know for certain until after he landed. Tom didn’t get to talk to Dana that day, but Dana later joked that his banner should have read, “Welcome to the Die-In.”
A few weeks later, Tom spotted Dana at the grocery store. She took his breath away. He thought his heart had stopped. Blonde and athletic with a cute little sunburnt nose, as sassy and wise-cracking as he remembered from junior high. They exchanged numbers and Dana told him she was working at the hospital in Corona. Tom started driving out there to leave little notes on her car. She dismissed them, but Tom didn’t give up.
Tom was on the quiet side and had never before been aggressive about having a girlfriend. Sometimes he went for months without dating, and that was fine with him. He found that women usually approached him most of the time anyway, but he shrugged off contacts from women who only knew him onstage. He wanted to get married someday, but not to anyone he’d met in a bar.
One night, he decided to surprise Dana by showing up in the emergency room of the hospital where she worked. Tom drew a few looks with long, wiry blonde hair to his hips, black leather jacket, shredded Levi’s and snakeskin boots. Dana took one look at him and hurried him off to a waiting room. Tom thought it was funny that she needed to hide him from her professional colleagues, but he didn’t care. He wanted to ask her to go to his high school reunion and she agreed. He picked her up in a limo.
They had a great time. She wore a Hawaiian print dress with a mid-summer tan—but it wasn’t just her good looks that attracted Tom. He loved her adventurous spirit and prowess in sports. He loved the fact that she was a great windsurfer and was into riding bikes and sky-diving. They started dating just as Dana was preparing to leave the country. She had been planning to hit Hawaii in early January, travel through New Zealand, then zip through Australia to catch the last week of the America’s Cup yacht race, and possibly relocate. She had been scouting nursing jobs there. Tom helped her sell everything she had for her trip as she made plans to live there. He didn’t think she was coming back, but he didn’t discourage her from going—he didn’t want to feel like he was stifling her. As it turned out, one of Tom’s brothers lived in Australia and he offered to put her up for a few weeks. Tom drove her to the airport and she called him periodically with reports about the dismal job hunt. Employers didn’t want to hire a foreigner, and even if she found a job, she would start at the lowest level of the pay scale. Dana had a good work history and didn’t like that. But she had fun playing sports there.
* * *
Tom picked her up from the airport and, having nowhere to live, she temporarily moved in with him. About a week after she got back, he surprised himself by proposing to her, and she surprised herself by accepting. Tom was overjoyed. His mother was a nurse and his father worked in construction. They got married young and were still married and had a fantastic relationship. Tom wanted the same dynamic team with Dana. In August 1987, the couple bought a house in Canyon Lake for $108,000 and moved in right after the deal closed. They had an elaborate wedding in October 1987 with 200 guests and five stunt sky-divers. Tom’s parents fell in love with Dana too after she and Tom had invited them over for dinner and served them wine brought back from Australia. She and Tom delayed their honeymoon for six months because they were both working so hard, and Dana wanted to take some time to plan it. They decided on Maui.
Shortly after they were married, they bought bikes, but Tom, more of a musician than an athlete, had trouble keeping up with Dana, mentally and physically. She had the hard-driving temperament of a competitive athlete and that clashed with Tom’s easygoing attitude when it came to sports and exercise. They drove down to Ensenada, Mexico, for a 50-kilometer bike ride and Tom suffered mightily keeping up with Dana. She didn’t stop or slow down and always rode just a little ahead of him. He jokingly complained later that she just about killed him on that ride. Both of them were certified scuba divers, and Tom surfed occasionally, but Dana was a much stronger swimmer than Tom. There didn’t seem to be any sport in which she didn’t excel. On a ski trip to Utah with Tom’s brother, she skied circles around them both, even though the brothers had been skiing longer.
Tom considered that part of Dana’s charm—she was a hardcore athlete. After a bike ride, she would cook dinner for him, and make jokes over a glass of wine at dinner. He was head-over-heels in love. He was so much in love, he didn’t even care about music any longer. She had been bugging him about playing in the band and he agreed to give up the band scene for married life. He was tired of playing the same songs every night year after year with only two weekends off. Now, the band was just for fun. They performed at weddings and messed around at parties. Tom taught Dana how to play some instruments and she had a natural gift for singing. Their partnership was electric. Together, Tom thought, we can do anything. Dana, the little blonde spitfire he had fantasized about since he was in junior high, was everything he ever wanted.
* * *
“Dana!”
Tom’s head was bobbing up and down in the waves. He was getting tired.
“Dana!”
Tom was trying to get her attention. But it looked like she was already looking straight at him.
“Dana!”
Tom was hanging onto the windsurfboard, but it was hard because the wind was whipping the waves. The Maui sea was rough and the wind was blowing hard. Tom was tired after taking windsurfing lessons all day. That was part of their pact: Tom wanted Dana to learn some of the things he liked, like music and flying ultra-lights and remote-control model airplanes. For Tom, it meant learning how to golf and water ski and windsurf. He’d had windsurfing lessons earlier that day and he was tired. He didn’t have any floatation—no lifejacket, no wetsuit. He was very tired.
“DANA!”
Tom could swear she was looking straight at him. That was weird. They were on their honeymoon. He wanted to come back in, soak his aching muscles in a hot bath and take his sunkissed, newlywed wife to dinner on their honeymoon. Bobbing around in wind-whipped surf wasn’t what he’d planned. After the lesson, Dana had taken him to a remote part of the island where the waves were bigger and rougher to practice in more challenging waters, but it had been too much for him. He was about a half-mile from shore when he tried taking a turn, and the windsurfboard tipped over, and he couldn’t get it back up. He’d struggled with it for the better part of an hour and he was exhausted. He wasn’t a strong swimmer. Now it was all he could do to hold onto the board. He knew that Dana could hop on her board and get out there to help him in a heartbeat.
“DANA!”
He was getting tired of yelling. She was just sitting there on the beach, looking at him. Finally, he saw her get up and get her board. She didn’t look concerned at all. Well, maybe she couldn’t hear him over the wind and the pounding surf. The waves were getting high.
He watched gratefully as Dana hopped on her board, jumped in the surf and came out to get him within a minute. Finally! he thought. He thought he was gonna drown out there. But when she got closer, she leaned over, grabbed the haul rope of his board, tied it to her board and took off. Tom held on, thinking she was going to pull him out of the surf, but she hadn’t said a word. She just tied up his board and sailed back to the beach. Tom, already exhausted, could not hold on, with the wind gusting her sails powerfully. He yelled at her to come back, but if she heard him, his cries were ignored. When she got to the shore, she sat down again on the sand with both boards and continued to watch him.
Tom was as bewildered as he was panicked. He couldn’t understand what she was doing and why she didn’t help him. She knew he was a poor swimmer. She’d been looking at him when he fell off the board. Tom knew that Dana knew what was going on. If he had thought he was going to drown with the board to hang onto, he knew he was doomed without it. He could feel the cross-currents tug at him and knew that trying to swim was futile, but he had no other choice. Already exhausted, he tried to get back to shore, but the current kept driving him back. He continued fighting, his tired arms slapping at the choppy waters, knowing that he couldn’t last much longer. An occasional wave slapped him in the face and he swallowed a lot of water, which was making him feel sick. He tried resting by floating on his back, but the water was too choppy. Fear set in as he struggled. He tried not to panic. Tom wondered if he was going to die. He was so exhausted, his muscles were aching and he didn’t think he was going to make it to shore. He could see Dana; he knew she could see him. She was just staring into space, not moving, not saying a word.
Finally, Tom saw that he was making some progress. He spotted a buoy and thought it was his only chance. He channeled all of his energy into reaching it. He finally got to it and was so taxed, he lay over it. After he rested for a while and got some energy back, he started yelling at Dana. She was still just sitting there watching him. Tom finally worked his way to shore by pulling himself along the buoy line and literally crawled up onto the beach. He was drained and his muscles were so tight, he just lay there a while. Finally, he walked unsteadily over to where she was sitting.
“Couldn’t you see me? Why did you leave me out there? What the hell were you doing? Why didn’t you help me?”
Tom, standing over Dana, was so angry, he shook his fist at her. Dana flinched slightly, but didn’t answer him. She never said a word. She just sat there with a distant, blank stare. Tom was angry enough to hit her, but he was too tired and he wasn’t the kind of guy to hit women anyway. He didn’t know what to do, so he just lay back down on the beach to rest and stayed there for about an hour without talking. Finally, he said, “Let’s get out of here,” and they left.
At dinner that night, Tom never brought it up and they never talked about it. They both acted like it had never happened. Tom wondered if she’d been hit before, given the way she’d winced when he raised his fist. He wondered if she’d been in some kind of a blackout, but neither of them had been drinking that day. Tom couldn’t explain her behavior, but he began to watch his back around Dana.
Married life with Dana soon became a contest of wills. After spending thousands of dollars on their wedding and thousands more on the Hawaiian honeymoon, Tom wanted to cut back a little on their spending. Dana didn’t. Each of them was making around $45,000 a year, Dana as a nurse and Tom as a heavy equipment operator driving a backhoe for a construction company. Even though the economy was booming, they soon found themselves in debt. Fortunately, the couple’s choice in real estate had been a wise one. Their $108,000 Canyon Lake home spiked in value to $170,000. Tom and Dana decided to exploit their good fortune and get a one-time, $40,000 equity loan to get themselves out of debt. But the money didn’t last long. In May 1988, eight months after their marriage, they were still drowning in debt and took out a $27,000 second mortgage.
Tom and Dana liked the good life—going to nice Italian restaurants, ordering appetizers and several glasses of wine, and buying things for the house. After their storybook wedding, Tom was mortified at being in debt, but took it in stride as part of a package deal: marriage and the “I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go” philosophy. He put the near-death experience on his honeymoon in the back of his mind and concentrated on enjoying life. With Tom retired from playing bar gigs, she suggested they build an in-home studio. Dana began to act jealous around his friends—even his male friends—as if she resented the fact that he had fun without her. She would make comments about them and felt uncomfortable when they were around. Tom didn’t see anything wrong with his gorgeous newlywed wife wanting to be around him and only him. After all, Dana had long ago put her sky-diving days behind her. The couple worked on turning their house into a home, painting one room lavender with white trim, installing oak blinds instead of curtains and turning the garage into a studio. They spent upwards of $26,000 on music equipment—amplifiers, guitars, recording equipment, keyboards, drum sets, microphones, monitors. With the home equipment, Tom laid down tracks to one of Dana’s favorite songs, “These Boots Were Made for Walking,” and Dana sang and pranced around in high-heeled boots as Tom recorded the whole song on video.
Dana, always a good cook, took a classes at a local college, and was soon creating Italian dishes better than those some restaurants served. She excelled at veal picatta, spaghetti, and filet mignon with bernaise sauce, Tom’s favorite. Not everything turned out. A chicken dish with lemon turned out so lemony, she dubbed it, “Lemon Pledge chicken.” When she got home from work, she would shoo Tom out of the kitchen and sip three or four glasses of wine while she fixed dinner. She’d have more wine with her meal. Gradually, Dana’s athletic physique rounded out. Drinking became a pastime and weekends dissolved in a haze of bourbon, 7Up and tequila shooters.
Dana took a job as the night nurse at a 12-bed hospital on Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California from Thursday through Sunday. The hospital provided a small cottage for her to live in during the week and she would scuba dive in the pristine waters off Catalina in the afternoons before work.
Change was rippling through Dana’s family, as well. Craig had given up his life as an itinerant musician and become a born-again Christian minister in the mid-1970s. He’d moved to Virginia and was studying to become a pastor. Craig, who had never been as close to Dana as Rick had been, had a major falling-out with her. When their mother died, her meager estate was split equally in thirds, but Dana complained that she should have more because she had spent more time with Beverly when she was ill. Rick bowed out by giving up his third for Dana and Craig to split. Then Dana was angry at Craig for taking a larger share because he had fixed up the house to sell. Dana had become furious that Beverly’s car was not given to her. Relations between them had been rocky ever since. Now the problem was with the great aunt with whom Rick was living.
Dana made annual visits to see her great aunt, sometimes with her brothers. She was upset that her aunt had not included Dana in her will, reasoning that Dana’s father would leave her a handsome estate, which she did not have to share with her brothers because they were no relation to Russell. Rick, who was living on his aunt’s property, tried to convince her to create a living trust under which Dana, Craig and Rick could equally share, but she didn’t understand that concept. All Tom knew was that any mention of Craig or her aunt reduced Dana to hysterical tears.
Though he was in his later 30s, Rick was experiencing severe arthritis in his knees, spine and hips. He was attempting to get his master’s degree and moved to Alhambra, a suburb in Los Angeles County about 55 miles from Riverside County. To help his little sister and her new husband get a leg up on putting their home together, Rick gave Dana and Tom a number of things to keep for him while he was in school—a complete dining room set, a dresser, chairs, two TV sets, a complete stereo set, and a truckload of music and film equipment, including several of his acoustic guitars, a bass guitar, his cache of record albums, a lawnmower and a set of family silverware monogrammed with “W,” for Ward, Rick’s father. He also wanted Dana to hold for safekeeping the family Bible, and slides, 8mm film and pictures of their family and his sky-diving adventures. Dana thanked him for loaning them the “all the goodies” with a cute card, a cartoon of a grossly heavyset couple about which she commented, “Hey bro—I hope Tom and I never look like this! I think the trick is to eat less and fuck more as you get older. What do you think?” She wrote another note thanking him for his love and support and apologizing for being “a big turd” and “wigging out,” and signed the note, “Your sister, fartblossom Gray and Tom-the-black-hippie Gray.”
About two months after they were married, Tom and Dana had a big New Year’s Eve bash for their friends and family. Afterwards, Rick got a perplexing letter from Dana accusing him of trying to manipulate her marriage. Rick wrote a five-page letter back saying that if she didn’t appreciate his brotherly advice, then they no longer had to share their personal life with one another. Rick thought Dana was hyper-sensitive and would interpret anything he said or wrote as criticism. “I guarantee, this will be the last time you ever send me a snippy little, ‘shove it up your ass and let me live my own life’ letter and get a civil response back. Sometimes I don’t know who the hell you think you are. You seem to think you can just dash off a quick line to someone in regards to a major issue in the relationship and the recipient is just supposed to roll over and take your shit lying down. I used to make exceptions for your behavior because you were young, but I’m through with that now. You’re old enough to get that you’re not the center of the universe like you’ve been coming across lately.” Rick cut down on correspondence with Dana and continued through school as his health worsened. He developed a thyroid condition and his arthritis was threatening his mobility. Eventually, he was declared legally disabled and received checks from the state every month.
Tom and Dana found creative hobbies to do together. Tom had obtained a mail-order ministry from the Universal Life Church and had performed marriages for friends before he and Dana were married. When Russell and Jeri decided to renew their vows, they asked Tom to perform the ceremony. Dana went wild with the preparations. When the ceremony was held in Russ and Jeri’s backyard, it was such a success that they launched a side business, Graymatter Matrimony, performing weddings, complete with a band in which Dana sometimes sang. Tom had taught her to play electric guitar, which she learned rapidly. Dana designed the business cards, featuring an anatomical sketch of a brain with a wedding veil on it. Dana had also learned to do screen-printing and purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. She soon had several business accounts for T-shirts, hats and posters.
Dana and Rick tried to patch up their sibling squabbles and create some kind of family for themselves. Despite their “insane family situation,” Dana wrote, “the object is not to use that as a justification, but figure out how to deal with it and quit putting so much attention on it and go on making our lives as happy as possible …
“You’re the only one in our family that I feel I have a chance to have the family relationship with, so now that I feel secure in my personal life, I feel I can safely put some energy into our relationship … maybe now we can be more trusting with the feelings and viewpoints that we have and will share down the line.”
* * *
A couple of years into Tom and Dana’s marriage, the economy took a downturn, hitting the construction industry in the pocketbook. Tom was reduced to working part-time and picking up jobs where he could. As their income dipped dramatically, Dana tried to pick up the slack by working double shifts, but she continued to spend. Tom came home from work one day and found a new lawnmower in the garage. They already had a lawnmower, but Dana had wanted a new one. She charged the credit cards up to the limit and they had a hard time making the payments. Tom implored Dana to cut back on the cards and she told him that she would, but then she’d just get another credit card and do the same thing. Despite the reduction in their income, Dana still wanted to eat out at her favorite restaurants and keep up her standard of living: a weekly manicure, monthly pedicure, eyebrow, lip and bikini waxes and keeping her hair cut, permed and colored. Tom knew these little luxuries, combined with the other more frivolous expenditures, were important to Dana, but were also driving them deeper in debt.
They fought over money and Tom’s inability to get work. Tom knew Dana was fatigued from working extra shifts for both of them, so he backed down. He wasn’t fond of arguing anyway, and Dana had a talent for delivering particularly stinging rebukes that her brother Rick called “castrating zingers,” so he tried to avoid fights. Tom had faith in their relationship and he knew that despite the temporary rough times, everything would ultimately work out. He found contentment in being married and having a good relationship, but he noticed that Dana needed to buy things to be happy. He got the impression that she rarely felt good about herself, even when he told her that she looked good. “Yeah, what do you want?” she would snap back.
The longer Tom was out of work, and the more the bills piled up, the worse their fights became. Dana resorted to the door-slamming screaming matches she’d engaged in during her adolescence, a part of her that Tom had never seen. She would rage at him, blaming him for the crisis of the moment, then screech out of the house in her Cadillac or go for a long bike ride. Tom accepted that behavior in part because he felt responsible for not bringing in his share of income and felt bad about constantly being the one to put his foot down about the credit cards. Dana had staked her claim to handle their finances at the start of the marriage and Tom had no problem with that until he discovered that she was driving them into debt. He had no idea how to handle her volatile temper. Shrinking back in the face of her anger seemed to fuel her eruptions. Tom was relieved when she stormed out of the house to take a drive or do something physical. It seemed like a better way for her to channel her anger.
As their income dropped, Dana stepped up the pressure on her aunt, nearing 90, to the point of waltzing through her home and staking claims to valuables, even saying, “When you die, I want this cup, this Chinese cup,” on one visit. Craig was incensed at Dana’s callousness and ruthless pursuit of money, and didn’t hesitate to confront her about her behavior, causing Dana to fly into tantrums. Any phone call from Craig would cause a fight with Dana as well as with Tom, who got so frustrated, he tossed a photograph of Craig in the trash.
Craig had seen the change in Dana from the time she started sky-diving, which was around the time that he became a born-again Christian. After she started running with that crowd, she no longer shared the same values with him, and in his mind, she ceased being his baby sister. He was frustrated that any confrontation about her behavior resulted in a screaming match in which she would claim to be the victim. He came to believe that Dana was out for whatever Dana could get. He disliked having contact with her, but felt obligated to send birthday and Christmas cards. He was also inclined to write or phone when Auntie complained of visits from Dana.
Despite the family turmoil, Dana’s biological clock was ticking and she decided it was time to have a baby. In March 1989, she went off birth control pills, and went on the “no party program” for several months to clean the alcohol out of her system. Her goal was to become pregnant by summertime. In a note to Rick, she was upbeat and irreverent about impending motherhood. “Does that scare you? Me as a mother?” She and Tom picked out Melody May if the baby was a girl and Marshall if it was a boy. She signed the note, “Love you, dorkface, my fartblossom.”
By summertime, they were working on the house, making planters out of halved whiskey barrels, and planting lime and lemon trees, herbs and strawberries, as well as a vegetable garden with eggplant, tomatoes and cucumbers. Dana was finding solace in Tom’s parents, who were a good example of a long-term married couple. Tom was building remote-controlled planes for Dana and teaching her how to fly them, but “Tom builds ’em, I smash ’em,” she joked in a note to Rick. Dana liked the two-cycle engines and the grease and decided to organize a contest among model plane enthusiasts called “Graymatter Splatter” with prizes and T-shirts. She took two months off work to organize their fall contest, which she said would “slip by like goose shit on a muggy day.”
Dana’s relationship with her brothers waxed and waned. She bought a ten-gallon fish tank with an eight-inch rubber eel that she named “Cedric Eel,” a send-up of Rick’s formal name, Cedric Erle. When Rick visited, Dana was delighted to see him. She wrote a quick note to Rick about completely disconnecting from Craig and was happy that he was sticking with the grind through grad school. She addressed her note: Dearest Sir Cedric Erle of Alhambrashire,” and signed it, “Love ya and all of that, Lady Fartblossom & Lord Tom.”
That summer, when Rick came out to see Tom and Dana, Dana confided in him that she had lost her virginity to one of their boarders when she was 12 years old, When Rick suggested that she get some counseling, Dana said she was deeply insulted, didn’t need a shrink, and would never consult one because she already knew what made her tick. Besides, she told Tom about it and when he responded with “love, understanding and support,” Dana said that that was more than a shrink could do. She wrote Rick a note that included a poem called “Age of Reason,” about moving forward. “Why can’t we love each other, is kindness an ancient skill buried by our blindness?”
By December, Dana had received another painful letter from Craig decrying her continued badgering of their aunt. Dana had gone to the nursing home and persuaded her to sign a will splitting the estate three ways. Craig said that their great aunt, who was so senile she believed she was living in the 1920s, condemned Dana for her greediness. Dana denied forcing her to do anything and said she would abide by whatever Auntie decided. But at that point, the will had been changed. Craig’s wife, Jini, thought Dana had a frozen heart, and wanted very little to do with her.
Dana felt Craig was truly responsible for creating the vulture-like atmosphere around their aunt and never really asked for anything—other than the china cabinet. “I only asked her for that china cabinet as a child and did it innocently … I’m not worried about who gets what … I will be grateful for whatever (if anything) that is left.”
During the holidays, Dana thoroughly enjoyed fixing up the house with lights and decorations, but she didn’t often make it over to Russell and Jeri’s house for family get-togethers. Everyone knew that Dana and Jeri’s ex-mother-in-law, Norma, didn’t get along, and they figured that was the reason. She and Tom usually spent holidays with Tom’s family.
Despite their best efforts, Dana had not yet conceived by springtime and it was putting a strain on the couple’s relationship. She was 33 and desperate for a baby. She continued to spend lavishly, though Tom pleaded with her to keep their finances under control. Their fights were getting bigger and more serious. Tom believed that Dana was just taking her frustrations out on him. He felt that she treated her dog better than she treated him, and she told him that he was right. Tom thought that Dana was never happy with what she had and seemed always to be searching for something else. She would bounce from project to project, the way she’d bounced between continents before they were married, but nothing seemed to make her happy.
On the Saturday before Easter, Dana took her brother, Rick, and Tom’s brother, Gerald, for a day of boating and water skiing on Canyon Lake. Rick told Dana that she was being bossy and thought she seemed upset that no one was jumping at her commands. She retaliated by pouring a beer on Tom’s head as he piloted the boat. He responded by pouring a beer on her head. The whole afternoon, Dana hounded Tom about whether he still loved her, asking him over and over again. After they got home, she became upset and stormed out of the house, but came back in and demanded that Rick take Gerald to a Mexican restaurant around the corner and wait for them while she talked to Tom. When Tom said he couldn’t understand why Dana was acting so irresponsibly, she unleashed her fury on him. Rick phoned both of them the next day and called Dana a “goddamned, fucking, ball-busting bitch” for acting like a child and having such a ridiculous temper tantrum. “You have little consideration for anyone else’s feelings or comfort,” he said in a note, adding that he disliked “the tension that surrounds you, Dana, when you don’t feel that you’re being obeyed…” Rick didn’t speak to Dana for six months. It wasn’t the first time that she had cleared the house. Dana would snap for apparently little reason and explode at Tom, make a scene, clear their friends out of the house, and then leave herself. Whatever friends Tom had left stopped coming over. Tom allowed Dana to hit him in the shoulder—and she could pack a punch for a woman. Tom was said he felt “beat up” and isolated.
Their playtimes were also getting rough-and-tumble. Dana liked rough-housing and would sprint at Tom and tackle him, knocking him down. One time, she punched him hard in the face while they were wrestling around. Tom was hurt, but he didn’t get mad because Dana said it was an accident.
In August 1990, Dana got a new job as an operating room nurse at the Inland Valley Regional Medical Center in Wildomar, making $46,000 a year. The construction industry was still in a slump, and Tom was earning less than $16,000 a year. Still facing down credit card bills, they borrowed $2,200 from a relative and asked Russell and Jeri for help in refinancing their Canyon Lake home. They declined because Tom and Dana owed more on the house than it was worth.
In November, Rick wrote a three-page letter to Dana warning her that he did not want to resume their relationship until she conducted herself responsibly, referring to the Easter incident earlier in the year. He expressed appreciation for Tom, who he thought was “busting his ass to love and serve you. His only frailty so far is probably his tendency to remain soft-spoken and being afraid to tell you what his true feelings are at any time because he is afraid of hurting your feelings.”
Rick’s physical condition had deteriorated considerably and he was in a great deal of physical pain, as well as mental anguish and stress over trying to create some semblance of a family. “I have seriously considered that if I become much more physically disabled or have to suffer much more physical or mental pain that I’m just going to go up on some high peak somewhere with a majestic view of what’s left of this poor planet, lay my serape down, and let my life cease.”
Dana responded by sending him a humorous Christmas card with a note saying that his letter wasn’t pleasant or fair. “Do you think we could ever cut out the bullshit and just get along? Ya know, family, love, etc?”
In another three-page letter, Rick wrote that he was bowing out of his relationship with her because it was “upsetting and painful to contribute to you what little I have and then be told that I am not working in your best interest.”
He also wrote about Dana’s requests for money from their aunt. “I have asked you repeatedly to let me handle it, but you just don’t get it that she doesn’t see things the way they are. Now that she’s so old and senile, trying to make sense out of anything with her is an incredibly frustrating experience. She is in no financial position to help any of us. What she has is hers to do with as she wishes regardless of what anybody thinks.”
He recommended that Dana look at a video series on family interaction by author and psychologist John Bradshaw, and said that she needn’t respond to his letter. He asked her only to leave him out of her life and to stop being an irritant. He was tired of the fights, the conflicts, the upsets. “I bear no animosity toward you or Tom … I no longer want to confront our relationship nor do I want to attempt to have anything remotely resembling a family.”
A year later, in November 1991, Dana sent Rick an irreverent, funny birthday card with a note, “Wishing you a happy b-day despite your total disgust with us and all of your family.”
Rick wrote Tom a six-page letter one month later, bitter about Dana’s “poor little Dana, nobody loves me” routine, her profound disregard for other people’s feelings and her thirst for things, not people. Rick said the emotional and physical pain and exhaustion that came with his increasingly debilitating arthritis, and the unsuccessful history of trying to create something of a family with Dana, led him to the conclusion that was forcing him to have no more contact with her. He asked Tom to return his photo albums, his guitars and the silverware with the monogrammed “W.” Rich again referred to the Easter debacle, criticizing Dana for refusing to apologize for or acknowledge her behavior in being oblivious to anything but herself … “She doesn’t give a shit about anything but having everyone else fall into line with her dreams and wishes even if they don’t begin to approximate reality. So, it’s reality be damned, Dana’s dreams however impractical or neurotic, will prevail.”
Dana wrote back immediately, saying that she will never “live up to your expectations and [I] have finally stopped trying.” Dana insisted that she “truly cared” for her aunt because she loved her and wanted to share “precious moments” with her, and “all I hope is that when she goes, she goes happy and in her own home … Whatever her will says I really don’t know. I can only hope whatever decision is made, it comes from her heart.”
She asked Rick to “let go of all the hate and disgust you have for me and quit insisting I apologize to you for my entire life. If I really seem like a ball buster [sic] bitch then most likely I am. I am also your sister, your only sister so can we ever be civil?… Let’s just drop all the past shit and go on, OK?
Dana promised to stop sending Rick her hard-bitten remarks if he promised to “quit persecuting my existence and turn off the spotlight shinned [sic] on all my mistakes … I love you anyway, fuckhead!”
* * *
Tom didn’t care whether he lived or died. Dana had alienated him from his friends, put them thousands of dollars in debt, and was getting more violent. She was constantly hurting him, verbally, physically and emotionally. She even threatened to run him down with his own truck. Tom was afraid and told her that he was afraid. The fear and the psychological torment rendered Tom emotionally paralyzed, which drove Dana into a frenzy. She hounded Tom for affection, to make him say he loved her. He tried to reassure her often, but it was never enough. He began to realize that whatever he did would never be enough for Dana. He realized he had been clinging to what their relationship used to be and what it could be instead of what it was. Like any relationship, there were good times and bad times, but it was difficult for him to step back and recognize that he was being abused. He’d never minded Dana “wearing the pants” in the family, but he decided that he should start living life more for himself instead of for her. He began taking time for himself to fly planes more often and thought about getting back into music. He began practicing his drums and started getting another band together.
Dana was angry at his new-found focus, particularly because the focus was not on her. She was still trying to get pregnant and in late January 1991, she realized she had succeeded. She was overjoyed. She happily gained weight and their relationship took on a rosy glow. Both Dana and Tom believed having a baby could save their marriage. The relationship settled into a period of normalcy until Dana had a miscarriage in March. She became deeply depressed and started drinking more.
Still desperate to have a baby, Dana began to take fertility drugs. The drugs, consisting of female hormones, contributed to Dana’s extreme mood swings and she resumed her rampages. Tom was torn between wanting to assist his wife through a difficult period that, with all due fairness, was partially the result of the hormone imbalance brought upon by fertility drugs. But he also realized he needed time for himself. When Dana was pregnant, he realized he had been walking on tenterhooks waiting for Dana to combust. Tom put a band together and started having practice sessions.
He began to stand up to Dana, and let her know when she was out of line. Dana would call her outbursts “speaking up for herself” and “speaking her mind.” Tom had another name for them: “insta-bitch.” He would also say that “the bitch notch was going up to ten,” which was his way of telling Dana that she could have handled something better. Tom tried that as a way of stopping tempers from escalating. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. Since he was working with a band again, he had an outlet and somewhere constructive to put his energy and attention.
Dana threw herself into her different ventures—the wedding business, silk-screening and her hospital work. She had a need to organize everything and be in control. She had an excellent work history and was diligent with her patients, all of whom seemed satisfied with her care. But her domineering attitude made her co-workers’ lives miserable. She would become friends with a co-worker and then, six months later, something would happen and they were no longer friends. She didn’t get along with most of her co-workers because she was highly critical of their work. Dana had no tolerance for what she saw as people’s stupidity; she had a low boiling point, and was known for “getting into people’s faces and giving them the business” because they irritated her, just to “shock them into reality.” Dana had no problem being called a bitch. She prided herself on earning the title.
Dana was still working extra hours but the financial problems continued to build. They missed house payments and were sometimes broke. Somehow, Dana always found a credit card. She managed to keep up her monthly pedicures and weekly manicures, and always looked neat, clean and professional. She also started hanging around with the band and watching their practices, particularly their guitar player, Jim Wilkins. He often brought Jason, a tow-headed toddler, along with him. Dana would take Jason and play with him while they practiced and that lifted her spirits.
Soon, Jim and Jason became a part of Tom and Dana’s social life. They flew planes, picnicked, partied, drank and made music together. One night just before the holidays, the band was booked for a party. Tom and Dana had been fighting again and Dana that night decided to go home with Jim. She arrived back at her Canyon Lake home at 6 a.m. the next morning and told Tom that she was going to leave him for Jim.
Dana and Tom reconciled and she came home, but they had a restless holiday season. Soon after, Dana found that she was pregnant again. Tom wondered whether he or Jim was the father, but it didn’t matter—in March 1992, Dana suffered another miscarriage. This time, she didn’t seem as depressed as she had been after the first one, and within weeks, Dana made plans to go to Sweden to visit some friends. She was there three weeks. When she got back, Tom picked her up at the airport and told her that he was leaving her. Dana was so devastated, she started seeing a psychiatrist, who prescribed Paxil, an anti-depressant.
That summer, she went back and forth between Jim and Tom. It seemed as though she was using Jim as a tool to get Tom back, because as soon as she went to live with Jim, she would desperately try to get back with Tom. But Tom didn’t want to discuss reconciliation unless she had finished her business with Jim. Dana would insist that she was having nothing to do with him, but Tom would fly over Jim’s house in his ultra-light and find her car parked there every night and every morning.
Tom and Dana vacillated for months. Their financial situation went from precarious to dire, and they missed mortgage payments. Dana was still bringing home most of the income and she resented having to deplete her paycheck for the mortgage, leaving little to spend on herself. They continued to miss mortgage and loan payments on the second trust deed.
At the start of 1993, around the time she decided to move in with Jim for good, Dana’s abuse of alcohol increased. She kept the prescription for Paxil and sought out another psychiatrist who prescribed different medication. In April, she started stealing painkillers from work and tried to hide the drug use by reporting that glass vials containing medication had broken. Controlled substances at a hospital are strictly inventoried and accounted for when they are administered to a patient or wasted, which usually has to be witnessed by another employee and documented. Dana tried to hide the thefts of medication by reporting that she had dropped and destroyed glass vials or had administered it to a patient via verbal order from a doctor, though that medication had not been prescribed. Every time Dana stole painkillers or other medication, her nursing supervisor was making a note of it. Dana had barely avoided getting fired months earlier because she was unable to get along with other nurses in the obstetrics department, but she had been transferred to post-op recovery and seemed much happier. She had been talking about leaving nursing to go into silk-screening full-time.
The summer of 1993 was a difficult one for Dana. Her drug and alcohol use intensified and in June she filed for divorce from Tom. In August, Tom moved out of the Canyon Lake home and back to his parents’ house in Covina, and Dana moved the rest of her things to Jim’s house in Lake Elsinore. To stave off foreclosure proceedings on the Canyon Lake house, Dana and Tom filed for bankruptcy in September. They owed $177,400 on a house that, at that time, was worth $125,000. They also listed their parents as creditors for their loans of $2,200 and $3,000. Dana was netting $2,500 a month and Tom was clearing about $600 a month. They claimed their musical instruments as assets worth $3,500, but Dana didn’t claim her silk-screening equipment.
In September and October, Dana was stealing drugs from the hospital regularly, sometimes twice or three times a week. She took a four-day trip to New Orleans in October for a silk-screening convention at the Hilton in the French Quarter using Jim’s credit cards. Dana said she attended the conference during the day and partied up and down Bourbon Street at night. Jim was now paying for most of her bills, and helping her settle some debts and pay back her parents.
On November 18, Dana was called into a meeting with the hospital supervisors and confronted with details of four separate incidents in which wasted medication was improperly documented or medication not prescribed was recorded as being administered to a patient. The missing medications were Demerol, Sublimaze and Astramorph, all opiate-derivative painkillers that are administered intravenously. Dana stated that she could not remember certain incidents and in other instances, explained that the doctors had asked for the additional medication. The doctors recalled differently. At the end of the meeting, the supervisors decided to suspend Dana for three days.
Dana was called into another meeting on November 24 and given another opportunity to respond to the same allegations as well as a string of 34 additional incidents. Some of the amounts she claimed to have administered were so high that if she had given the patient that much, it might have been fatal. Dana referred to nurses or doctors who witnessed her wasting medication or who had verbally ordered a change in medication. Each of those nurses and doctors said they hadn’t spoken with her. When asked if she had anything else to say, Dana said she was upset that everyone knew about her suspension. Dana’s supervisor reminded her that she herself had announced her suspension at a staff meeting. At the end of the meeting, she was fired.
Dana sank into a deeper depression, but brushed off the loss of her job to friends and family as “incomplete documentation.” She never acknowledged pilfering drugs, but said she was the victim of backstabbing and made a scapegoat because she had the “biggest mouth.” To quell her feelings, Jim took Dana away for Thanksgiving, to the family cabin in Mammoth Mountain, an upscale ski resort in Northern California. Although there was some snow on the ground, they spent their days fishing and biking around the lakes. Dana cooked a turkey and the fish they caught for an intimate Thanksgiving dinner.
In December, Dana plunged into decorating the house for the holidays and put her energy into her silk-screening business, exercise and trying to find another job. She made Christmas stockings for Jim and Jason. On her birthday, December 6, they all went to Disneyland, where Jason went wild. She applied for unemployment. Because she was not working, she tried to establish a schedule for herself. She picked out a $1,000 Trek mountain bike and put it on layaway. She would take Jason to daycare and go for a bike ride or do some other kind of exercise in the mornings, scan the classifieds, make phone calls and go on job interviews. Dana told her manicurist that she was putting a woman’s touch on Jim and Jason’s bachelor pad. She scrubbed the place from top to bottom, lined all the cupboards, bought new curtains, got Jason a computer and a new monitor for his games, went through Jason’s closet and got rid of old clothes, bought him new ones, replaced the headboard on his bed, bought curtains and bed and kitchen linens. She pulled Jason out of daycare and put him in a private preschool. Dana spent a lot of time with the boy and took him to the beach a couple of times, on the warmer winter days, to teach him how to swim. They would take their bikes and run by the lake with the dogs. She seemed determined to give him what his biological mother, whom Jim characterized as a drug user, could not. She talked about Jason incessantly and her friends and family began to wonder whether it was Jason, not Jim, that she had fallen in love with. Even Jim seemed a little jealous that Dana had so much time with Jason and was bonding with him. Jeri warned Dana not to get too close to Jason, just in case the relationship with Jim didn’t work out.
Jeri and Russell saw Dana infrequently—they didn’t have a close relationship with her. They weren’t invited to her parties, and she didn’t introduce them to her friends, but she would drop in on occasion, or all three would come by for a visit.
On Thanksgiving and Christmas, like each year before, Dana was invited but did not go to Russ and Jeri’s house. For Christmas, Jim paid the balance on the mountain bike so she would have it for Christmas. On New Year’s Day 1994, she and Jim took Jason to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.
On Jan. 2, 1994, Dana received another long letter from Rick, who had not communicated with her since his last letter in 1991. He called Tom and Dana “spoiled little brats” for acting irresponsibly during the break-up of their marriage and demanded the return of his belongings. He included copies of Dana’s previous notes thanking him for the loan, so she could not later claim they were gifts. Now living on food stamps and Medi-Cal, Rick said he was about to undergo major surgery after breaking his back in an accident on Memorial Day that had left him completely disabled. Rick was angry that Dana hadn’t returned his phone calls. When he did get her on the phone, she was angry with him because he wanted his microwave back, “and that’s fucked!” Rick railed at Dana for that remark because he never mentioned his microwave, but Dana was compelled to assume what he was thinking, making herself a victim again. Rick’s reply seemed to cut to the heart of one of Dana’s most troubling personality traits, that of perceived slights by others and her desire for revenge. “I never had the intention to play nasty tricks on you the way you seem to need to do to others … I have seen you in action and have heard you tell me in conversations how you planned to get even with various people for supposed indiscretions that you assume have been perpetrated against you.”
Rick also cut to the heart of Dana’s empty soul that seemed never to be filled. “Anything you personally have done for me I feel has been done with a selfish motive beneath it. You think because you have done someone a kindness they must tell you how much they love you, and love you, and love you …
“Eventually, whether you want to or not, you will have to face the truth of your life, even if it’s with the last breath you take…”
Rick called Dana again on Sunday, January 30, two weeks after his back surgery, and said he would “come unglued” if she didn’t return his call. She called a couple of hours later, saying, “Do us both a favor, fuck off and die.” Rick said he just wanted his stuff back and Dana hung up on him. She called him several times that day, letting the phone ring 10 or 15 times, knowing that it would take him that long to get to the phone because of his back surgery, and hung up once he answered the phone. She called one last time and shouted, “Are you so pissed off you could stroke out and die? I hope so!”
Rick had had enough. He called his local police department in Alhambra to report a threatening phone call. The detective got ahold of Dana the next day and she agreed never again to call and harass him. Dana later said, “Yeah, I was a bitch. He deserved it.”
Dana had the post-holiday blues and sank into another round of depression and vodka-drinking. She tried a couple of part-time jobs, but found them demeaning. She tried to put time into silk-screening, but was restless and bored. Things weren’t working out with Jim. If she was going to move out, she’d need a place to live. She went over and asked her parents about moving in with them. They said it would be OK, but they were already starved for closet space. It would be tight.
Jeri had another suggestion.
“Why don’t you move in with Norma? The condo has tons of room.”
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1994, 9:30 A.M.
Tom had a funny feeling. Dana had called his parents’ house and asked to meet with him. He didn’t want Dana to have his phone number or know where he was living. If she needed to reach him, she called his parents’ house. He agreed but, at the last minute, got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was unmistakable. He hadn’t felt that way since their honeymoon.
Tom didn’t call to cancel, he just didn’t show up.