March 15, 2003

Dear Jenna,

Hello, baby. How are you? It has been a long winter here. I’m starting to enjoy retirement. I no longer feel like I need to be doing something all the time. I have the gym and my motorcycle, and I’m happy.

I will be leaving New Jersey and the woman I have been living with there this month. Her gifts no longer outweigh her neediness. I’m throwing everything I own away and moving with just a change of clothes, the leather jacket you bought me for my fortieth birthday, and a picture of your mother.

I know this book you are writing is important to you, so I think that it’s time for me to tell you a little bit about your mother and how we met. Maybe it will help you understand some things about yourself.

This letter is very difficult for me to write. As you know, I have told you very little about Judy. And the reason is because I wanted to protect you. I didn’t want you to spend your childhood depressed about her loss. I was trying to spare you the suffering I’ve gone through until I saw that you were strong enough. Of course, I underestimated you. You’ve always been strong enough.

There was nobody else in the world for me besides Judy. She was the only woman I ever loved. For the twelve years we were together, I didn’t even look at another woman. Finding her was like a fairy tale. You read about these perfect love stories but you never think they’re going to happen to you.

The time when I met her was a real wild one for me. I was running around Reno with Bobby Jolson, Johnny Anastasia (the nephew of Albert Anastasia of Murder Incorporated), and Frank Sinatra Jr., who was appearing at the Harrah’s club. I was going out with a Marilyn Monroe impersonator named Barbara at the time. It was nothing serious. Without all the makeup and hair, she looked more like Sonny Liston.

We used to hang out at the Golden Hotel, and your mother was dancing in a show there. Barry Ashton was the producer, and it was called the Golden Girls. They held a seat for me every night at the bar directly in front of the stage, and they wouldn’t put anyone in my chair until the show started and they were sure I wasn’t coming.

From the moment I first laid eyes on Judy, I knew she was the one, even though she was one of dozens of identically costumed women onstage. She just radiated in comparison with everyone else. To this day, I still can’t explain it. I certainly wasn’t expecting it. It’s like what my mother always used to say about being struck by lightning. I looked at her and she looked at me, and I went, “Whoa!” That was it. It was amazing. That had never happened to me in my life. I was sitting there with Bobby Jolson, and I poked him in the side and said, “Do you see that girl right there with the long black hair like Cleopatra? That is the girl I’m going to marry.”

After the show each night, the girls would flock around the bar and mingle with the gamblers. And every girl would come out, except Judy. Afterward I used to take everyone to Bill Harrah’s house, because he was a pretty good friend. Whenever he had a party, he’d put on a show. He’d take care of the celebrities —Danny Thomas, Mickey Rooney— and I’d bring the girls. I’d hire three limos to take everyone from the revue up, but Judy never came. She would always just stay in the dressing room until everyone was gone.

Finally, one night, I went to the maître d’ and gave him $50, which was a lot of money in those days, and said, “You gotta make her come out.”

And do you know what happened? She got mad. She had your temper. “I’m not going to come out,” she told the maître d’. “I don’t want to meet that guy.”

But he told her she didn’t have a choice. When she walked into the bar, she radiated grace. She looked too fragile and innocent for this earth. I said to her, “I really enjoy watching you dance. Can I buy you a drink?”

She ordered a Coke. Since she thought I was someone important, she patronized me. But she would not look me in the eye. She made it perfectly clear that she was doing this against her will. We chatted for a minute, and then I said, “It was really nice meeting you.” I turned around and began talking to the idiot ventriloquist in the show. Judy was stunned. She expected me to hit on her and brag about myself like every other creep in the place.

The next night after the show I bribed the maître d’ again. Judy came out and sat at the bar. I completely ignored her and talked to the idiot ventriloquist and a red-headed friend named Mary.

I had never dated Mary, but she went over to Judy anyway and said, “You stay away from my man.”

Judy must have been shocked. “I know he’s interested in you, and he’s mine,” Mary told her.

I had no idea at the time that she had done this. I walked up to Judy a few minutes later and said, “Oh, hi, Judy. How are you?” And then I left again.

The next night, I paid off the maître d’ yet again. But this time, I brought my mother with me. When Judy came out, I introduced her to my mother and the three of us had a nice, long conversation. I wanted to ask Judy out so badly. It was hard to hold myself back.

A couple other girls in the show told me that Judy was dating a bartender who worked down the street. I had hired a couple of bodyguards, some University of Nevada football players I was paying twenty dollars and free drinks to per night. I had made a few enemies in town and Poochie, who was guarding Frank Sinatra Jr., had made some tacit threats against me. So, in any case, I sent my bodyguards to talk to Judy’s boyfriend. After that, he backed off. She never knew why he broke up with her, other than the fact that she wouldn’t have sex with him. She was twenty, and still a virgin.

Two nights later, I decided to finally ask your mother out. I invited her to join me to see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform next door at Harrah’s. She accepted. When we walked into Harrah’s, she towered over me in her high heels.

During the show, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and ran next door to Harold’s, where Trini Lopez was playing later that night. I slipped the maître d’ there fifty dollars to take care of us. Then I returned to Harrah’s and told Judy that we should go see Trini Lopez.

The staff at Harold’s pulled a Goodfellas for us. They picked up a table and walked it all the way to the front of the stage. They moved everyone out of the way, put the table down, and seated us. She just looked at me. She was impressed. She thought I had juice.

If only she knew my real job: I was working at a grocery store every single day.

For three weeks straight, I watched Judy perform at the Golden Hotel. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. We went on a few dates in that time. And eventually she decided that she was ready to have sex with me. She had come to the conclusion that I would be the one. Of course, I wasn’t ready yet to commit myself to her, but I didn’t tell her that.

She told her roommate to get lost and invited me to her apartment. I went up there and knocked on the door, and a short woman with long blond hair, huge bangs, no makeup, and jeans answered the door. I asked her if Judy was home. And she said, “Larry, I am Judy.”

I couldn’t figure out what had happened to my black-haired Cleopatra. It turns out she was wearing a wig onstage every night. I had no idea.

This is probably too much information, but we had sexual relations. When it was over, we lay in bed together, side by side, and I wept. I cried.

And I knew right then and there what I wanted. I told her, “We are going to get married.”

From that day on, your mother and I were inseparable. For the first time ever with a woman, I was honest. I told her everything about myself: not just about the grocery store, but that I was making money on the side hijacking trucks and selling the furs and stereos. I had a certain lifestyle and, if I truly loved her, I needed to be honest about it.

When her contract with the Golden Girls ended, she went on the road dancing. Afterward, she went into the Folies Bergères at the Tropicana in Vegas. I quit my job, sold everything I had, got in my car, and drove to Vegas. And we got married.

If she had lived, I would have still been married to her to this day. I never would have left her. Let me tell you, it was the best twelve years of my life. Even if I had the worst life in the world afterward, I knew I’d always have that. Who gets so lucky? And then to have you and Tony to carry it on? She was an amazing woman, Jenna. She never fought, she never raised her voice, she never drank or did drugs. And she never had a single blemish on her face. She had you when she was thirty-two, and she had her showgirl body back in a week. Her stomach was rock hard.

You look so much like her: your eyes, your nose, your bone structure. Your hands and your feet are carbon copies of hers. All of your mannerisms are the same: the way you walk, the way you turn your back, even the way you cock your head. She used to watch TV like that. I would always think that she was staring at me and say, “Huh?” And she’d look at me funny and say, “I was watching TV.”

She was so shy, but when she was onstage she just lit up the world. And that’s exactly how you are. To this day, whenever you walk in the room, I always get that feeling I had when I was around her. You may think that’s weird.

I don’t know if you know this, but we tried for seven years to have children. She told me back then that she knew she was going to die of cancer. I was in total denial. She was the fittest girl in the world. She never even had as much as a cold or a toothache in her life. I have no idea how she knew. She just felt it. And she wanted to have children before she died. That was all we talked about.

We tried everything to get her pregnant. We would have gone to a gypsy and put cucumbers up our asses if it would have helped. We didn’t care what it took. Eventually, we realized, the problem was not physical. It was psychological. She was blocking her ability to have a child. And you don’t know this either, but we became Scientologists for a while. Judy’s brother, Dennis, was always a spiritual seeker. He gave me a job at the TV station and then turned us on to Scientology. He had been on L. Ron Hubbard’s boat with him.

Dennis found Scientology a little expensive, but it did us a lot of good and made me a little more compassionate and empathetic. We became clear and did the whole thing, and Judy still couldn’t get pregnant. We finally decided to adopt but, seven days before the adoption went through, Judy came home from the doctor and said, “I’m pregnant.”

It wasn’t easy for her. After the first three months, she was so sick she had to stay in bed for the rest of her pregnancy. We believed then that anything we did while Tony was in the womb was capable of planting something in his subconscious. So we never swore, didn’t watch anything violent on television, played only the best music, and sweet-talked Tony nonstop. After a very painful delivery for your mother, Tony was born. He was a sickly baby and allergic to everything, even mother’s milk and almost every formula on the market. It took me nine days just to find a formula he could keep down.

Once Judy knew psychologically that she could have a child, it was easy after that. You were a snap. You came out with a big grin on your face. She had no problems at all. She didn’t gain any extra weight and was active until the day we went to the hospital. I was afraid of having three more years of what I went through with Tony, but you were perfect and quiet and slept all night. You were a joy as a child.

Then, of course, everything went bad. It began when Judy went to the doctor to have a mole removed. We sent it to the lab and it came back malignant. The tentacles had gotten into the lymph nodes, which swelled so much that Judy started feeling lumps under her arms. Even though Judy had predicted it so many times, I was in denial. But we couldn’t stop it from spreading.

After my time in Vietnam, I thought I could take anything. But I was not prepared for something like this. It was the worst thing I’ve ever been through. Her stomach would get so bloated, like she was pregnant, and I would have to take her to the hospital and hold her down while they shoved a needle in her to withdraw all the fluid. And she would scream at the top of her lungs. They couldn’t give her a sedative because they were afraid it would stop her heart. It was awful, Jenna. I’m surprised they didn’t ring a bell outside to cover up the screams.

Tony and me in 1975.

And then there was the chemo. She was allergic to the medicine that stopped the nausea. I would hold her for hours while she threw up. I would have it all over me, and it would be all over the room. You don’t know how hard it is to see someone you love in that much pain in front of you. I did everything I could to save her. I went down to Mexico and got this weird shit called laetrile, a cancer drug that was illegal here. And we tried so many radical surgeries that the doctors eventually said they couldn’t take anything else out. It was god-awful. The hospital costs exhausted my insurance. I was making over $120,000 a year as president of Channel 13, but the bills stripped me clean.

Her oncologist finally gave us a prescription for morphine and said to just let her go home and die. I took a leave of absence and slept in a chair next to her bed. Every four hours I’d give her a shot of morphine. Sometimes I’d let her come out of the morphine a little, and I’d sit her up on the bed and bring you and Tony in. But she deteriorated so quickly that she didn’t want you two in the room anymore. She wanted you to remember her while she was vital. In less than a year, she went from a beautiful thirty-two-year-old woman who turned heads to an invalid who looked like she was ninety. She lost all her hair, and was just withered skin and bones. It was so terrible. I’d take her to the bathroom and wash her and give her more morphine as the pain kept intensifying. I was so worried that you would be scarred from hearing her scream in her room and seeing me pace the house like a nervous wreck all night.

I felt so useless: I literally exhausted everything I could do. When she was sleeping, I’d go into the living room and stare at a TV that wasn’t on. I’d just sit there and vacillate between wanting her to live, even if she had to live like that, and wanting her to die. After she did die, I felt guilty for years for having those thoughts.

I kept telling myself, “I spent ninety days in a dirt hole in Africa waiting to be executed. If I can handle that, I can handle this. I’m going to be okay. She’s going to be okay.”

But it just got worse. The last couple of weeks she was barely lucid because of all the morphine. The night she died I was sitting in the living room, staring at the blank TV screen, when I heard her gagging. I ran into the room and her body was convulsing violently. I tilted her head back to open her airway and give her CPR. I’m sorry, Jenna. I have to stop writing for a moment and collect myself. I’ve never told anybody this.

Okay.

She started gurgling and aspirating, and then went quiet. I knew she was gone. I felt the artery in her neck. It had stopped. I opened her right eye and it was fully dilated. Then I went to the living room and called an ambulance. As soon as you heard the siren, you started screaming. Tony came into the hallway, and I grabbed him and put him back in his room and shut the door. I didn’t want either of you to see your mother like that. I think those things stick with you, whether you are aware of them or not.

You never wanted to be alone after that. And you became afraid of the dark. You would always sleep in your brother’s room with the lights on. You weren’t even two, Jenna, but subconsciously I think you remember her talking to you while she was sick. I think to some degree you blocked out the memories.

For me, everything changed dramatically after Judy was gone. My mother and Judy’s mother came over the night she died, but her mother left right away. So my mom and a friend of hers stayed and cleaned everything out. I couldn’t touch her stuff. I went into the room a couple days later, and it was like she never existed.

Before your mother died, we were a close family. We had big Thanksgiving dinners at her family’s house and we all got along great. But after she died, everyone abandoned us. We never saw her family or mine. They didn’t even come to her funeral: all the pallbearers were my friends. Judy’s parents took you guys out once, but they brought you back in fifteen minutes. They couldn’t stand being reminded of your mother. They would call you Judy all the time.

The bank didn’t even wait for her to get cold before they seized everything we had. I owed half a million dollars in hospital bills, so they came with a moving truck and a tow truck. They took two cars, a boat, a motorcycle, all my stock, and an apartment building I owned in North Las Vegas. They even took your toys. And I was still $24,000 in debt. All I had was you, Tony, and $3,000 in cash. That was it.

We moved into a trailer. I never thought we’d end up in a trailer. No one stopped by and the phone never rang. People don’t want to be around death and grief. It’s one of those things a person has to go through on their own. It was such a daunting future without her, Jenna. For a year, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was a challenge just walking and chewing gum at the same time.

Do you remember going to her gravesite with me? I used to take you and Tony there every Sunday for a couple years, but then I felt that it was too debilitating for you. And for me. I was diagnosed with nervous exhaustion. I developed facial tics that didn’t go away until years afterward.

That woman was my life. There was nobody else in the world for me. And I’ve never been able to recover from that loss. Never. You spend the rest of your life searching. And then you get to a certain point and you give up. I stumbled around for six years just trying to be happy again, trying to figure out how to raise you and your brother. But slowly I learned. And the most important thing I learned was to love being a father.

Anyway, I am looking forward to coming out to Phoenix for your wedding to Jay in June. I think you’ve finally picked a good one.

Love,

Dad

P.S. You asked about your childhood diary and, believe it or not, I found it. I’ll bring it with me.