It was the summer of my undoing, and San Francisco had lost its never-never land appeal for me once and for all. The year was 1980, the year John Lennon was gunned down on the sidewalk outside The Dakota. The smart Beatle was gone forever. Mourning was in the air. It was also the year a teenage girl was killed without much fanfare. Less than two inches of column space in The Chronicle. We were once the best of friends, she and I. The news of her death was a fact of my life I put away cleanly in the back corner of my brain cabinet. I didn’t want to feel the leaden sadness of it. I still don’t.
Regardless of what I want or don’t want, something is moving me towards unpacking the premature death of Patricia Margaret Vance. I’ve no clue what the driver for this undertaking is exactly. I’ve given up searching for the why of it. Searching for a why feels pointless at times. If there is such a phenomenon as survivor’s guilt, then I imagine that is what I have. I am always wanting to label complicated feelings. I am that person who should never go on WebMD. I am too eager to pathologize my experiences; that’s what my therapists told me at least.
It wasn’t as though it was a huge surprise that this was my friend’s destiny. She and I and a third friend were what in the jargon of today would be referred to as “incorrigibles.” I want to blame the times: so many of us were carried along in the wake of the tail end of the sixties. It was a rite of passage to blow your mind out if you were young. We were old enough to see the tectonic shifts in the culture at large, but too aloof for politics. Except on the most personal level. Our parents were the targets. We rebelled primarily through drugs. There was a bit of promiscuity and pretty crime thrown in for good measure. This describes the peer group I ultimately found myself seeking out. There were a few of my friends who didn’t need to rebel; those were the friends who I could never keep. One of us would ultimately pull the plug on the relationship. The friends I did pursue, and who included me, were the ones my mother labeled as “disturbed.”
It had been 36 years since my friend was murdered when I wrote this. I don’t know why, but I assumed when I heard of her death they had caught the perpetrator. Maybe the mind wants to fill in information holes with neat resolutions and narratives with closure.
I made a lot of assumptions about her case. Just like I painted a picture of what life for Patty Vance was like. I break up the timeline of her life into two periods. Before prostitution and after prostitution. The AP era is a vision out of Bosch, or more specifically Martin Scorsese. It reads as melodramatic when I write this, but I imagine her like a slightly older version of the Jodi Foster character in Taxi Driver, Iris.
There is something intoxicating about feeling like you’re the center of attention. Even if the person shining his beam on you is a pimp plotting your exploitation. Though the audience is never sure what drove Iris from her home, I concoct more wrongs than the obvious. This is the vision of the BP period, the jigsaw piece missing from the movie. Her mother was an alcoholic, which is generally hard on anyone.
I have to believe life was hard for Patty. There are no ways to describe living with an alcoholic parent that don’t sound tired and cliched. I want to say that her mother was a black hole that pulled each of the family members into its darkness. It equally felt like her mother was the eye of some interminable storm and anyone nearby spun out from her center. However, neither of these metaphors holds exactly.
Chekov’s thesis that all families are unhappy in their own way, then surely it is the case that alcoholic homes are all miserable in their own way. I can’t say what happened in the Vance home as I didn’t experience it much first hand. So, I can’t know what it was like for Patty growing up. But I do know that it always appeared as though the family lived in some unnamed, low-grade chaos. It may have been partly the stress of a family of five living on one man’s trucker’s paycheck.
Her father, Harold, likely saw himself as helpless in the face of his wife’s alcoholism. He used retreat as a survival strategy from what I could tell. He was always in a state of leaving. That is the way I remember so many men from my childhood. Who could blame Harold, I think now. Though that may be my selfish instincts kicking in. The children should come first for the most part. But like in all things, there is a line. What good is any parent if he colludes in his own self destruction? An overstatement you say? Live with an alcoholic and then talk to me.
I want to believe that in her BP period there was an event, a first-mover if you will, that led her down a dangerous path. Surely, someone took advantage of her trusting, generous nature. Or her need to be needed. All there was to point to, to focus any real blame on, was her mother’s addiction.
Her brother was disdainful of Patty, for sure, but it seemed normal. Her life held nothing of interest to him. Her interests did not center around sports, so Harold could not relate. I can only hope that his disinterest meant that he didn’t somehow take his pain out on her. He outwardly appeared to be the most confident person in the world, but I am reminded by his yearbook pictures that there was a sadness in his eyes, always. At least a vacancy.
When I really took the time to look at Harold and Patty, I realized that they were the oldest teenagers I had ever met. I had been through a bit of trauma myself at a young age, but there are degrees to which someone is marked by suffering. Their wounds seemed to cut deeper, went to places I couldn’t fathom. I had alcoholics galore in my family: a stepfather, a grandfather, a father. But it didn’t grind down my spirit completely. I maintained some core thing that was undoubtedly my savior. Or I am simply lucky.
I assumed the San Francisco Police Department would be forthcoming with whatever files or information I requested, but that wasn’t to be. I thought I might strong arm someone into giving me information. Strong arm being code for my having control of the situation. I want to take control of the information to make sense of it. What perhaps the lesson in this is, you can’t control the things you wish to.
Lo and behold the day finally came when the SFPD agreed to reopen the case.
