In the spring of 1983, Gia left New York for the last time. She went first to her mother’s house, but the situation was very uncomfortable. Kathleen feared for Gia’s life and was profoundly disappointed over the fall of Gia’s career: the increasingly tempestuous relationship between Gia and Rochelle just fanned the emotional flames.
The living situation came to a head after a string of events that would be played out again and again in the coming years. The previous spring, Gia’s mother and stepfather had dragged her to a pool party for their Corvette Club in the hope that she would meet a nice young man. She was introduced to, among others, Gayton Goffredo. “After the splash party,” recalled Gayton, “the mom came up and said, ‘What do you think of Gia? Do you know who she is? She’s one of the hottest models on
Cosmo
and
Vogue
and so on.’ I don’t really think she was gay. I thought she was bisexual, maybe, because she did seem to have an interest in me. Kathy tried to get us together. The impression I got was that she didn’t want her daughter to be gay, and thought I could possibly straighten her out.”
They went out once, an afternoon at a car show which Gayton vividly remembered more for the ride over than the actual event. As they approached a turnpike toll booth, Gia asked if he liked the shirt she was wearing, then said
she
didn’t and proceeded to remove it—with nothing on underneath—and put on another. Then she asked him to pull over to a rest stop, disappeared into the bathroom for fifteen minutes, and came back “whacked.” Almost a year passed before he heard from her again.
In May of 1983, Gia called to see if he wanted to come to a John Cougar concert with her: she liked the singer because of his music and because he sort of looked like her. When Gayton arrived to pick Gia up, she told him that a friend of hers would be coming as well and instructed him to drive to Rochelle’s grandmother’s apartment in Jenkintown
to pick her up. Once at the concert, after an appropriate amount of Valiums and mushrooms had been consumed, the three wandered around until Gia disappeared. When the concert ended and Gia still couldn’t be found, Rochelle and Gayton waited in the parking lot and then returned to Jenkintown to wait for a call.
In the meantime, Rochelle made Gayton something to eat. Rochelle remembered nothing at all happening between them, but Gayton recalled, “I started getting intimate with Rochelle, it got pretty far and then that was it. I saw I wouldn’t get anywhere, so I left.” Early the next morning, Gayton was awakened by his mother, who said Gia was on the phone: she was screaming that she had been left at the arena and had to take a $30 cab ride home and she wanted the $30 from him,
immediately.
He went over, gave her the money, and as he was about to leave, Rochelle pulled up. The girls had a terrible fight in the driveway, with Gia accusing Rochelle of sleeping with Gayton.
In Rochelle’s mind, she and Gia had just broken up. So she got together with her married friend, Ken, and they decided to move to Atlantic City together and make a go of it. They packed up his car, drove down and took a suite at the Kentucky Hotel until they could find a place. As they were moving things from the car into the hotel room, Gia pulled up—Rochelle’s grandmother, who didn’t approve of Ken because he was married, had told her where they’d gone. Gia was dressed up in men’s sharkskin pants, cowboy boots, a yellow cashmere sweater. She asked Rochelle if she could talk to her in her car for a second. When Rochelle got into the red Fiat, Gia slammed down the gas and drove her away, eventually losing Ken, who gave chase.
“She had this all set up,” recalled Rochelle. “She had the Rolling Stones’ ‘Tell Me You’re Coming Back to Me’ cued up on her tape deck, she had bought a rose. She said, ‘Here—is that what you want?’ Then she looked at me and grabbed my hand and said, ‘If you want to stay with him, you can stay with him,’ and then she lowered her voice and said, ‘but you’re gonna break my heart’ That’s the way I like to remember Gia, because she looked great, she sounded great, she wasn’t high, she was real sincere and
sweet and romantic. She said, ‘Do you love him or me?’ I said, ‘I love you, but he’s better for me.’
“I made her take me back to the hotel. My whole life was in the back of Ken’s car. We went back, he was sitting there in his car. She walked up and told him to roll down his window. He did, and she punched him in the face.
“Then I got in Ken’s car and told him what I wanted and
he
took off with me. Gia chased after us through Atlantic City. The cops finally pulled her over. She didn’t have any license or anything. They put her in jail and her new sister-in-law, who lived down there with her brother Joey, went down and got her. I went back to the hotel with Ken, waited for him to fall asleep, and went down, got my stuff, and met them. We stayed with a friend of Gia’s father’s, and then we decided to get a place in Philly.”
Kathleen had wanted Gia to leave anyway, because she couldn’t handle the pressure. “I was having cataract surgery done,” she recalled, “and the doctor said I shouldn’t have any kind of excitement. By that point I just couldn’t deal with her and I decided it was time to look out for
me. “
But, in the kind of emotional flip-flop that was becoming typical of the relationship between mother and daughter, Kathleen then tried to stop Gia from moving.
“I remember being in the middle of those two,” said Rochelle, “and literally holding them apart from swinging at each other. Gia wanted to leave her mother’s house, and Kathleen tried to stop her from taking her own things—her guitar, her clothes. Her mother would not let her take the stuff.”
Gia rented a trinity house—the traditional Philadelphia small home with three stacked rooms and a basement kitchen—in a gentrified courtyard on Bainbridge Street. The house was a block off of South Street, which had become, since the mid-seventies, the pop-cultural heir to Sansom Village. The cornerstones of what was called South Street’s renaissance were the TLA (a former experimental theater, once under the direction of Andre Gregory, that had been converted into a rep cinema), music clubs like J. C. Dobb’s and Grendel’s Lair and a number of funky shops and restaurants. South Street now truly was, like the words of the
1963 Orions’ hit, “the hippest street in town.” On weekend evenings, it was overrun by teenagers from across the Delaware Valley. As the disco club culture began to subside, South Street also became one of the easiest places in town to buy drugs.
Gia was still in a methadone program. But she continued to use heroin. And when money from modeling residuals was low, she was forced to hit up everyone she knew for cash, or to take items of hers—or anyone else’s—to the pawn shop at Seventh and South.
“I gave her money,” said photographer Joe Petrellis, “I sent messengers to her house. I did the wrong thing. But I didn’t know what else to do. I always had a little guilt that if I had talked to her mother and gotten them together … I regret the fact that we didn’t all get together and get her into somewhere good, so she could work with a good psychiatrist.
“But, I could’ve helped her. I know if I had, if I took her out and spent time with her and showed a genuine caring twenty-four hours a day, she might’ve come around a little bit. When you get into that pit, it’s the hardest thing in the world to climb out.
“And she always said, ‘I’m not hurtin’ anybody.’ And she could be as high as a kite and she could talk to you just like I’m talking to you, you wouldn’t always know. I never saw her cry, she would always bounce back and start to
laugh.
I told her about a friend that died and she laughed, she said, “They’re better off.’”
“Those years were just unbelievable,” Kathleen recalled. “I just told my ex-husband that he should be prepared for any news because she was capable of anything. People in that situation will do anything for drugs—hook, steal, I’ve had people tell me they’ve seen what amount to smoker films of Gia. I just tried to prepare myself. I knew that any day I could get a call and she’d be dead.”
“She didn’t talk about her family very much, which we found very unusual,” recalled one of her counselors at the methadone program. “But in her circumstance, we didn’t have a lot of time. I would have a session with her once a week, twice when it was necessary. And a lot of the time when a client was doing that poorly, the family distanced
themselves. Families were being taught that whole tough love approach; we believed the family had disassociated with her. We certainly weren’t ready to try to introduce the family into treatment. But, remember, there is only so much these programs can do.”
Few of the patients who used the center in West Philadelphia were actually there to stop taking drugs. And patients were mixing drugs in new and different ways, creating highs that were confounding to counselors trained to treat old-fashioned junkies. The only way to be sure if someone was using was to force them to take a urine test. But failing a “urine” didn’t really mean anything. Counselors couldn’t legally withhold methadone, the primary drug used to help junkies kick heroin, because a patient tested positive for drugs. A failed urine test usually meant that the methadone dose would be
increased,
on the assumption that drugs were used because the dosage was too low and wasn’t “holding” the patient. This made many counselors uncomfortable, because they knew that clients became dependent on methadone just as easily as heroin. And clients felt less pressure to stop using methadone, which cost, at this facility, $20 to $50 a week on a sliding scale, and was often even covered by medical insurance.
Recent federal budget cuts—from a Reagan White House that believed in just saying “just say no” instead of prevention
or
treatment—even further scaled back what could be accomplished. Professional medical and psychological staff were laid off, hours were scaled back: the seven-day-a-week facility was cut back to six, with Saturdays only for dispensing methadone. And the state of Pennsylvania added to the problem by overhauling its archaic mental health laws and making involuntary commitments nearly impossible. Self-destructive patients couldn’t be committed for treatment unless they tried to kill themselves, and no drug addictions were considered suicidal behavior.
“Gia was not our client with the most need,” recalled the counselor. “We had females selling their bodies. I had a guy who tried to ‘take off—take off means to shoot—in his temple and on the inside of his eye. I had a patient who came in, she had a hole in her arm that was as big as a coffee cup. Gia wasn’t homeless. I had patients who came
in with no home, hadn’t eaten in days, had children who were hungry, were in abuse situations. These were the kinds of cases that made you go home and want to cry. Especially when there were children involved. Gia had a lot more than a lot of others. That young lady who came with her? Sure, we tried to discourage that association, at least until she got a grip on what her real problem was. But a lot of people didn’t have anyone to come in with them
at all “
Gia wasn’t considered a difficult client. She seemed to listen and try to follow advice—although her counselors heard from other clients that she was using, and even “tricking” for drugs. She just wasn’t really improving. The staff did have one brainstorm about how to help her. They wanted to fix her up with the only other famous person in their program. David Uosikkinen was the drummer with the local rock band, the Hooters, who were finally getting some national recognition. Uosikkinen was also a longtime heroin addict, who was still several years from cleaning up (which he finally did). The staff felt that Gia and David, both in the public spotlight, might understand each other.
But the match never got made, and it wasn’t long before Gia stopped coming around the program altogether. Her counselors never heard from her again.
A
s Gia’s condition deteriorated, there was more finger-pointing over who was to blame for this tragedy. As the cycle of her cleaning up and using again continued—borrowing money, apologizing, then stealing, apologizing—the people who Gia’s life touched went through cycles of their own. They blamed themselves, feeling guilty they hadn’t done more to help her. They blamed others. Kathleen largely blamed Rochelle for corrupting her daughter. She said Rochelle kept Gia on drugs as a way to keep control of her. Rochelle blamed Gia’s mother for not giving Gia the love and attention she needed as a child, and for writing Gia off as hopeless after her modeling career had been ruined.
“Kathleen really did just ignore the drug thing like it wasn’t happening,” Rochelle said. “I came
after
the problem. Yeah, the mother was convinced that I was the problem. But that’s because she has a problem in her head believing that
she
caused Gia to be the way she was. I mean, when Gia was really bad, she would cry, ‘Why did my mother leave me when I was eleven? She was my best friend, why did she leave me?’ I know I didn’t have any answer for her.”
Gia wasn’t sure who or what to blame anymore. “She told me once that she thought she was possessed,” said John
Long. “Gia was obsessed with
The Exorcist,
which she had seen when she was thirteen or fourteen. She wasn’t a Catholic, but she had been raised Catholic enough that when she saw
The Exorcist
she was really scared and really traumatized. She said that she thought she might be possessed, and that was what was wrong with her—why she couldn’t fall in love with the right person, of the right sex, why she had this desire for things that weren’t good for her.”
The cycles of addiction were maddening: the hours of lucidity, the hours of panic and desperation, and then, the stunned euphoria. It was far too easy to write off the junkie as the victim of some self-imposed terminal illness. The frustration was that each day, each hour, offered a hope for a complete recovery, a hope dashed so often that even the loyal began not to bother. “Dope ain’t no joke,” Gia wrote in her journal, “after one too many pokes, where’s the laughter, insane passion, why is my face so ashen? Living without dreams.”