Andrea is nineteen, white and HIV positive. She told me she was with Williams for a month or so at the end of 1996 and that she always “despised” him.
“Always?”
“The whole time.”
“But you say you were with him for a month, so there must have been an upside. Was it really just that he bought you presents and took you to restaurants?”
“He made me feel like I was somebody, like I was special. He was always there, and my other boyfriends were never there.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, the sex was great. And he held me in his arms when we slept, and that was important to me. And he kissed me real softly … I thought I loved him, but it was only infatuation. I wanted him because he was something I was told I couldn’t have.”
Andrea claims she used a condom with every man she was with until Williams. She claims he wouldn’t hear of using one, though she also insists, “He told me when we first had sex that he put on a condom.” To accept that requires believing that she never touched him, never paid attention, that she simply lay back, closed her eyes and took it.
“Oh, I never touched men. I never played with them or nothing; I think that’s disgusting. I never did oral sex either. I try not to look at them too often—their penis, I mean, it’s ugly.”
Great sex? “They can go down on me. And I make sure I always get mine.”
Andrea has been in and out of psych wards, group homes and jails since childhood. When she was four her mother’s fiancé took her to a park and abused her in some way involving oral sex. Her mother, Wendy, traces Andrea’s problems to that event. “At that age,” she says, “there’s part of them that understands it’s violating and part of them that enjoys it.” She says Andrea became obsessed with sex from that moment. At six she was on Ritalin. At twelve she ran away from a group home in Florida and met up with a man who was twenty. She told him she was seventeen, though seven years later, without makeup, she still has a baby-doll face. She remembers sitting on the edge of the bed in a motel, her knees shaking, before he took her virginity. “I thought I was going to be with him for a while,” she said. “A week later he was charged with armed robbery, and I felt like such an idiot.” In the years that followed she’d come home to her mother’s comfortable house, stay awhile, wind up in another institution, run away again and again—selling drugs, being pimped on the street, taking up with men for a ride or a place to stay. “I thought the end point would come when I got caught or when I was dead,” she said. “On the street you always have to watch your back. HIV was the least of it.”
It still is, in a way. Maybe not for Andrea—who dyed her blond hair black to avoid being recognized, lives at home again and strives to maintain the disciplines of safe sex and a medication schedule—but for many young women in America. “It’s the life that is lethal,” Amber Hollibaugh had said. But the life can’t be prosecuted; Nushawn Williams will have to do. He can stand in for every man who ever violated Andrea and every man who violated the others—and there are probably more fathers and brothers and boyfriends in that company than anyone wants or dares to take account of. He can pay for every rotten thing that ever happened to them that nobody knows how to deal with. If in the end he is convicted, none of the Andreas or Andreas-to-be will be stronger or safer, but somebody will call it justice.
Andrea said, “He was the only man who ever scared me.” And although that is hard to believe set beside the frightful details of her life (just as it is hard to believe that she didn’t know he sold drugs, that she always used condoms until she met him, that she had intercourse with only nine or ten men in her life, that she never before had a sexually transmitted disease and therefore knows her infection traces back to him), by all reports their time together was brutal. Yet the knives are drawn for him not for beating her but for holding her in his arms, kissing her softly, fucking her often and well—for the only things in a world of pain and binds from which she exacted a little pleasure and commanded a little power.
The frenzy over just how many teenagers are having sex in Chautauqua County, protected or unprotected, obscured a series of more unpleasant truths about the county’s families. “It’s still a great place to raise a family” was not only on the lips of politicians and the head of the PTA; even Andrea’s mother had said it, allowing that things had gone awry in her own case. In their descent upon Jamestown, journalists had sought out various family folk who had lived upstairs, next door or otherwise in proximity to Nushawn Williams. These people were offered in stable counterpoint to his volatile world—much as the Post-Journal runs engagement notices of recent high school graduates on one day and mugshots of area men for whom there are outstanding warrants on the next.
Right before Christmas, I was at the Chautauqua County Jail visiting a former girlfriend of Williams named Amber when I learned that a woman who had appeared in the media as the mother-next-door was also being held there. It seems the woman had written a bunch of bad checks—possibly in hopes of accomplishing something before the holidays that would calm her husband’s temper—but the details are sketchy, and her arrest was never reported. Amber, on the other hand, was a minor celebrity. She had spent considerable time with Williams and, in a manner that revealed as much bravery as vulnerability, had shaken up Jamestown by telling reporters that although she was angry at Face, her eighteen-year-old heart wouldn’t let her join in reflexive condemnation. “He’s not a monster,” she’d simply said. “I did once love him.” Afterward, she says, some plainclothes cops pulled up alongside where she was walking and promised to laugh at her funeral. Her father said, “I hope she dies.” Amber was arrested outside a county clinic after receiving her HIV test results (negative, which she says she reveals only because a rumor mill insists she’s positive). She was sentenced to serve a year for running up $600 on a stolen Sears credit card and for a drug sale she got busted on because a cousin agreed to wear a wire and set her up. Shortly after the press bus left in November, Amber said, the father-next-door was also in jail.
“He’s what I call a good friend but a bad man,” she said. It was a distinction she’d made before about men who love their neighbors and hurt their lovers. This man is in his twenties, with many children. But he did it right. He’s married, he doesn’t cheat, doesn’t sell drugs, and although the family doesn’t have much—he doesn’t work often—on the outside it puts up a fair face. On the inside it’s hell. In the days of high panic, his wife told the media that she’d counseled Williams to get away from his girlfriends if he couldn’t restrain his anger. Now people tell me they wonder if she’ll live to see her own children grown.
The Division of Criminal Justice Services states that domestic violence in Chautauqua County is increasing, from 232 reported cases in 1993 to 566 in 1996. The suicide rate is not comforting either. On the Tuesday before New Year’s, a twenty-nine-year-old woman had been dead on the couch for twelve hours when she was found by a caseworker. Her children, three and four years old, circled in confusion close by. Crime is low by state standards, but it’s the tenuousness of things more than the upward curve of any statistic that unsettles: the notices around town about a young woman who vanished, the drinkers at the precipice of rage, the unprompted warnings from people on the streets that perhaps you should be frightened when nothing seems frightening. On the social charts, teen pregnancy and car accidents involving twenty-five-to thirty-nine-year-olds under the influence are also up, after having dropped a few years back. The rate of child abuse more than doubled, from twenty per 1,000 to fifty-one per 1,000, between 1991 and 1993. This rate is about twice as high as in the rest of the state outside of New York City, and it represents only reported cases. Around the corner from one of the houses where Williams lived bumper stickers announce, WHAT THIS COUNTRY NEEDS IS A BREATH OF FRESH PRAYER, and after posters of his face went up, Lucy Zulick of Good Shepherd Mission Outreach, an evangelical church in the nearby
