Getting It Through My Thick Skull Read online

  I had only been working for about twenty minutes when I heard the doorbell chime. I shaded my eyes and looked through the glass French double doors that led from the dining room to the deck. A young girl was standing at the front door. I set the paintbrush on top of the open paint can and walked through the house, removing my painting gloves one finger at a time. “What can I do for you?” I asked when I reached the front door.

  “Are you Mrs. Buttafuoco?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” the girl asked.

  “Sure, no problem,” I replied, as I opened the screen door and walked out onto the stoop.

  The reassuring sounds of suburbia surrounded us: a car going down the street, lawnmowers and leaf blowers whining as neighbors tidied their lawns for summer. Noise from hammers and drills, along with faint laughter and teasing voices, drifted over from the beach club as my neighbors made repairs before the club officially opened for the season in four days.

  I glanced at the unfamiliar car parked across the street and saw a young man sprawled in the driver’s seat. My first thought was that these were teenagers looking for an estimate on a car repair. Over the years, people occasionally stopped by the house to ask my husband, Joey, an auto body specialist, to do a preliminary assessment. He and his brother Bobby worked in the family business his father, Cass, had founded: Complete Auto Body and Fender, Inc., located just a few miles away in the neighboring town of Baldwin. I stood outside now, gloves in hand.

  “I need to talk to you about your husband, Joey,” the girl began. I leaned against the wooden railing on the right side of the front stoop. The girl faced me, leaning against the left side. There were about five feet between us. She took a deep breath. “I came here to tell you that Joey is having an affair with my little sister,” she blurted out. This kid standing in front of me appeared to be about fourteen years old. My first reaction to this was simple disbelief. I didn’t feel upset or threatened. I just looked at her skeptically. “Your little sister?! How old are you?” “I’m nineteen.” She started to get nervous.

  “And how old is your little sister?”

  “She’s sixteen . . . didn’t you hear what I just told you?”

  “I heard you, but I’m having a little trouble believing you. What’s your name?” She hesitated.

  “Anne Marie.”

  “And where do you live, Anne Marie?”

  “In Bar Harbor . . .” the girl pointed directly behind me.

  I had lived in the area all my life. I knew where Bar Harbor was, and she had pointed in the wrong direction. Something was wrong here, but I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. Why was she so nervous? What was she lying about?

  “Aren’t you upset by what I’m telling you?”

  “What are you so nervous about, Anne Marie?” I asked. Apparently, I wasn’t reacting the way she’d expected. To be completely honest, though I acted nonchalantly, I was a little caught off guard by what she said, but I knew she was lying about something. I had a twelve-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter, and this encounter reminded me of the times I had caught them both in lies. This is exactly what I was dealing with now. Only this wasn’t my kid.

  The whole incident was starting to annoy me. I was busy. I had painting to do, and I wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, but I was tired of it already. She was becoming quite indignant; she could see that she wasn’t getting through to me. “Don’t you think it’s disgusting that a forty-year-old man is having sex with a sixteen-year-old?”

  What could I say to that?

  “Well, sure, but don’t make him forty yet; he’s only thirty-six.” I was half-smiling because I was being nice to her, trying to humor her. “I’m also having a hard time believing what you’re telling me,” I said. I pointed to the car across the street. “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s my boyfriend. I have proof !” she said abruptly. Suddenly, she thrust a Complete Auto Body shirt at me. I took it from her and examined it. It was one of the new white polostyle golf shirts with the company name and logo of a race car with checkers stitched on the left breast. Joey had just brought a stack of them home a few days before. “I found this in my little sister’s bed when I was making it! He came over during work and had sex with her and left his shirt!”

  It was definitely time to end this meeting. It had lasted no longer than two minutes, but this kid was sounding more and more like an idiot. “He left this in the bed and went back to work with no shirt on?” She didn’t have an answer for that one. “Look, Anne Marie, I don’t know what you want me to do about this, but I’ll go inside and call Joey and tell him you came by.” I was calm. Possibly a little annoyed, but my annoyance was directed more toward my husband at that moment. Joey was a big overgrown kid, my number one child. Long experience had taught me that whenever there was trouble, Joey was usually the culprit. What misunderstanding had he gotten mixed up in now? This Anne Marie was so obviously lying to me, but why? And for what?

  And then, because my parents raised me to be polite, I said briskly, “Thanks for coming by.” I turned to my right, and got my thumb caught on the handle of the screen door. That split second would be the end of my life as an anonymous housewife in suburban Long Island. An explosion went off on the right side of my head—and everything went black.

  When I related the story about the polo shirt, Joey spoke up right away. “I only gave one of the new polo shirts out to a customer, and that was to Mr. Fisher’s daughter,” he said immediately. The name certainly didn’t ring any bells.

  It did draw quite a reaction from the two police detectives who had been standing by my bedside taking down my statement. “Who’s that? Who’s Mr. Fisher’s daughter?” they asked, and crowded around Joey.

  “Mr. Fisher . . . he’s a customer, and so is his daughter Amy,” Joey said. “She’s gotten in a few minor accidents. We’ve fixed her car a few times.”

  “Describe her,” they ordered.

  “Small, long dark hair, brown eyes . . .” Joey shrugged. “Just a regular teenage girl.”

  “Does that sound like a description of the girl who assaulted you?” one of the detectives asked.

  “Yes, it sounds like her, but she said her name was Anne Marie.” I was certain of that.

  Joey said that there was a picture of this girl—Mr. Fisher’s daughter—taken with a Polaroid camera, floating around the shop somewhere. He told us that Amy was a very insecure teenager who flaunted her sexuality to get attention. All the guys at the shop certainly noticed the young girl in her skimpy outfits, but deemed her somewhat pathetic—she tried too hard to get noticed.

  Joey called his father, Cass, from the hospital and asked him to talk to the guys who worked in the shop. Joey was sure that one of them had the Polaroid in his toolbox. Eventually, the picture was located and made its way to my room. “Is this her?” a detective asked. I peered at the picture with my one good eye. “Yes, it could be.” To be honest, the photo was of a plain-looking young girl—just like that Anne Marie character. There was nothing about her that could be described as distinguishing; she was just another teenage kid with long brown hair and brown eyes.

  The detective wanted to know if Joey had a current telephone number for her. “Well, sure,” he said. “She’s a regular customer, and so are her parents. We have the number at the office.” Cass relayed the number to the police, and they asked Joey to give her a call. “It’s kind of suspicious for me to call her, isn’t it? We don’t have her car in the shop. There’s no reason for me to call her!” Joey protested.

  “Don’t worry about that; we just need you to call her,” the police officer said firmly. Joey agreed to do whatever they asked, and the two detectives hustled him out the door. He gave me a bewildered look before they vanished into the waiting room. I was equally baffled. What could cause a young girl, a customer, to do something like this?

  While Joey was gone, I was briefed by the doctors and nurse
s and was surprised to learn that it was now Friday, May 22. I was told that my neighbor, a retired police officer, had seen me collapsed on the porch and raced to my assistance. The hospital staff had given me only fifty-fifty odds for survival. The bullet had shattered my jawbone and nicked my carotid artery, causing me to lose half the blood in my body. After opening me up, the surgeons deemed it too risky to remove the bullet, as it had lodged very near my spine. Countless tiny nerves had been destroyed, causing paralysis on the entire right side of my face. My head had swollen to twice its normal size. After a great deal of poking, prodding, and testing to determine that I wasn’t paralyzed or brain-damaged, I was left alone to ponder my new reality—a bullet in my skull for the rest of my life. I kept trying to articulate just how much I hurt, but I couldn’t find the words for the burning ache deep inside my head. I was put on a strict schedule of heavy painkillers to be administered once every four hours, and by the time three hours had passed I was literally shaking in anticipation of the next shot.

  Joey returned, pulled up a chair, and told me what had happened. “We went back to our house, Mare, and the cops wrote out a bunch of questions for me. I had to follow their script exactly. I called her, she answered, and I asked her how she was doing. She sounded fine. I asked her if she’d heard about you, and she said, yeah, she had, it was terrible. Then I asked her to meet me on Merrick Road in half an hour, and she agreed. The cops went off to meet her—I’m sure they’ve gotten her by now—and I came right back here.

  “I gotta tell ya, Mare, I’m not sure she had anything to do with this,” Joey said. “She sounded perfectly normal on the phone. She wasn’t freaked out that I mentioned the shooting or panicking that I called or anything. I don’t know . . . I just don’t know.” I sure as hell didn’t know either. Neither of us had any idea what strategy the cops were using, or why it had been so important for Joey to personally make that call. Looking back, knowing what I know now, I believe that the cops were flying by the seat of their pants. No crime of this nature had ever occurred on their watch before. The shooting had been a complete mystery before I woke up and started talking.

  The cops had interviewed my entire family already, asking about grudges, motives, and any possible reason somebody might have to shoot me. Naturally, the husband is always the first suspect. Joey had been extensively questioned at the precinct while I was unconscious. If he hadn’t done it himself, then maybe he and Amy had somehow been cohorts. The cops wanted to hear how the two of them interacted, and they were also anxious to lure Amy out of the house so they could interview her. That phone call to Amy marked the beginning of a disastrously botched police investigation.

  LOCAL WOMAN IN MYSTERY SHOOTING and WOUNDED WOMAN IS IMPROVING read the headlines of two small stories in Newsday, the voice of Long Island, in the days immediately following the shooting. A strange incident, to be sure—a suburban wife and mother gunned down on her own front porch in broad daylight—but not front-page news by any means. However, the arrest of Amy Fisher became the biggest scandal to hit Long Island in ages. The idea that a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who lived in a waterfront home in the upper-class suburb of Merrick had committed such a violent act was shocking.

  The press started digging into every aspect of her life, interviewing Amy’s fellow students, neighbors, and teachers. A picture of an aloof teenager soon emerged, one who didn’t get along with her classmates or fit in at high school. She was a chronic runaway and had been involved in a fistfight with another girl at school that had led to a lawsuit. She was best known for dressing provocatively and bragging about her older lovers. Amy was no angel.

  The police, accompanied by Assistant District Attorney Fred Klein, came to my hospital room to give me a briefing. We learned that Amy Fisher had been interrogated for more than twelve hours before she admitted to shooting me. It soon became clear to all the authorities that this was not your average teenager; she was rude, contemptuous, and not scared in the least by her circumstances. Eventually, she acknowledged that she had used the name and hometown of one of her friends—Anne Marie from Bar Harbor—when she spoke to me. There was no “little sister.” Amy was an only child. I was stunned when I learned what Amy claimed had happened. According to her, she had been at my house for fifteen minutes, we’d had angry words, I had dismissed her, the two of us had struggled for the gun, and it accidentally went off. What a liar!

  Amy was charged with attempted murder, assault, and criminal use of a firearm and taken to Nassau County Correctional Center. She absolutely refused to give up the name of her accomplice, the boy I’d seen in the car. “Let me tell you, that is no normal seventeen-year-old,” Fred Klein said, shaking his head. I knew that already; I was just relieved that she was safely behind bars where she belonged. Klein placed a sign over my chest with my name on it and videotaped me for five minutes as I related the events leading up to the shooting and positively identified Amy as my assailant, using her picture. He needed the video as proof to present to a grand jury, as I was in no shape to appear personally.

  While Klein was proceeding by the book, the police had already bungled Amy’s arrest—badly. The cops had lured her out of the house with the call from Joey, ambushed her at their meeting spot, and then interrogated her, a minor, for twelve hours with no parent or attorney present. The details of this marathon interview and exactly what legal rights of Amy’s may have been violated would remain a mystery, as the interrogation had not been recorded or videotaped in any way except for some handwritten notes. Amy’s parents, meanwhile, had been frantic when she didn’t return home that night—apparently she had run away from home several times before. No one bothered to tell them that their daughter was in custody.

  Though I became hazily aware of these facts during my subsequent daily briefings, I had no idea how these botched events would one day impact my future. I had more important things to worry about, like my rehabilitation, which was well under way. My fresh wound needed to be frequently cleaned out and rebandaged. This was accomplished by a nurse who inserted an extra-long wooden Q-tip directly into the bullet hole to swab out any debris and disinfect the area. Once clean, the area was packed with fresh cotton, which had to be poked in bit by bit, like stuffing a turkey. My head hurt constantly, horribly, all the time already. The searing pain I felt when the Q-tip entered and probed the wound was an indescribable level of torture. Three people had to hold me down for this procedure; otherwise I would have thrashed all the way off the bed. This cleaning had to be done four times a day, and the process never became any easier to bear. I soon began to cry the moment a nurse walked into my room carrying a Q-tip.

  I was also contending with a complete lack of balance. The doctors encouraged me to get up and start moving, and I was anxious to have my catheter and all the other tubes and machines removed. Dizzy is far too mild a word for the whirling feeling that overcame me when I tried to stand. I was physically incapable of standing up without a walker or people holding me up on both sides. My inner eardrum, and therefore my equilibrium, had been shattered by the bullet. I could not stand, even for a second, unaided. I had to be lifted from my walker to the toilet; otherwise I would crash to the floor in the split second I was unsupported.

  There was no way I could eat solid food. My esophagus was paralyzed, making it impossible to swallow real bites. I was living on Ensure and losing weight by the day. I had been in great physical condition before I was shot, which was a blessing. It made my recovery much easier, or so the hospital staff kept assuring me. It didn’t feel easy, that’s for sure.

  The Fishers brought in a high-priced, big-mouth lawyer named Eric Naiberg to represent Amy. He was faced with a big problem: his client had already admitted to committing the crime. It was basically an open-and-shut case, so he came up with a very effective defense: Joey made me do it. All of it! Eric, who loved the spotlight, was a master showman. He immediately began a relentless campaign to portray his client as a sweet, innocent girl, languishing in jail, who had b
een led astray by the big, bad auto mechanic. This defense was played out not in a courtroom, but in the media. And the press ate it up. He could have easily settled the matter quickly and legally by pointing out that his client hadn’t even been read her rights, among many other problems with her arrest. Instead, he went straight to the media to demonize Joey.

  The story already had all of the juicy elements of a cheesy soap opera or a massive train wreck, and reporters were relentlessly seeking out every dirty detail they could about Amy Fisher’s life (as short as it was), and by default, ours. A couple of days after Amy’s arrest, Joey and I sat in my hospital room and watched ourselves on every channel. The five o’clock news teaser echoed, “Joey Buttafuoco admits he had a brief relationship with Amy Fisher.” Now that was certainly news to me and a shock to my already traumatized system.

  Joe was sitting right next to my bed, holding my hand. He was so indignant, so outraged that he leaped to his feet like he’d been electrified. “What are they saying? What are they saying?” he shouted. “I didn’t tell them that! I never said anything like that!” It was less than a week after I’d been shot in the head, but my mind was still working well enough for me to ask, quite reasonably, “But Joe, then why are the police announcing that at a press conference?”

  “I don’t know! But I’m gonna get to the bottom of this!” He was practically foaming at the mouth. He ran out of my room into the outside waiting area, where my mother was sitting. “Mom!” She looked up and thought I had taken a sudden turn for the worse; he looked that upset. “You are not going to believe what they are saying about me on the news. They’re saying I had an affair with Amy Fisher! I didn’t, I didn’t!”

  “What?” my mother could hardly take this in.

  “They’re lying; the cops are lying! I never had an affair with that girl, and I never told them I did! How can they lie like this?!”

  My mother’s protective instincts kicked in immediately. Hadn’t we had enough trauma lately? It was the start of a huge rally around Joe by family, friends, and neighbors who knew us personally. To the rest of the world, it might have looked obvious, but no one close to us believed for a minute that Joe had had an affair with her. His denials were extremely convincing; his arguments completely justifiable. You see, up to this point in my life, everything was very simple and black-and-white. Burglars and killers were bad guys; cops were good guys. I’d never had any dealings with the police, but I assumed they generally did the right thing, helped people, and told the truth. Unfortunately, they were not doing so well on this particular case. And lawyers? Eric Naiberg was apparently free to go all over television and make the most outrageous accusations against Joey. No one ever issued a gag order. No one from the district attorney’s office ever told him to cool it. The man was everywhere, fanning the fire.