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Kathleen recalled. “Nothing ever happened, but she was uncomfortable. She’d wake up and he would be beside her, staring at her.”
    But all these heart-to-heart talks did not really clear the air, or convince Gia that her parents were better off apart. Nor did they lay the groundwork for coping with the adolescent traumas to come.
    Drugs and alcohol were two of Kathleen’s biggest concerns. She had recently driven by Lincoln when Gia hadn’t come home from school and found the fourteen-year-old passed out on the front lawn from a lunchtime vodka chugalug contest. “She picked her up every day after that,” recalled Karen Karuza. “Drove up in her big white Cadillac, with her fur coat and big blond hair. She gave us all rides home.”
    Henry was also getting tired of the spent joints he kept finding in the front yard, which led him and Gia to have frequent arguments about drugs. “I’m totally against drugs, one hundred percent,” Henry explained, “but then Gia would come back at me because I drank. She’d say drinking was the same thing. I’d say, but when a person drinks they don’t do it to get drunk. When a person does drugs, they do it to get high, to escape. When a person drinks, they do it just to drink, not to get drunk. It’s not the intent when they start out. Maybe they
get
drunk, or maybe they get a little high. But how many times do they get high when they drink compared to the times that they don’t? But with drugs, you do it to get high. Not too many people I know drink to get a high.”
    Abused substances had always been a big issue between Gia and Henry. “From the beginning, she confronted him about drinking,” Kathleen recalled. “It was a big joke. The first time she met him, he had stopped on the way home and had a couple of drinks. She started imitating him—just the way he held his keys in his hand, and the way he walked after he had a few drinks. Henry’s not an alcoholic or anything,but he drinks a little too much socially. I say he has a problem; he says he doesn’t.
    “But Gia was just disrespectful to him about it. Once, Gia and Michael grew marijuana plants on the TV. Henry was into plants at the time, and the big joke was that he was really admiring this marijuana plant, not knowing what it was. I finally made them get rid of it because it showed such a lack of respect for him.
    “I also had a big problem with her taking drugs, but you couldn’t stop her. She would go into my bathroom in the back of the apartment, open the window and smoke pot. Then she’d spray perfume all over.”
    Gia tried to point out that her mother, like most mothers in America, wasn’t exactly drug-free. “Gia told me about her mom taking diet pills to lose weight,” recalled one high school friend, “and she would get mad at me when I did diet pills. I was always obsessed with my weight and always did diet pills to get weight off me. She’d say, ‘I love you just the way you are.’ But, I think it bothered her mostly because of her mom. From what she told me, her mom took a lot of diet pills. To us, she was like a speed freak, really.”
    “I was
strictly legit, “
Kathleen said. “Over the years I’ve been on diet pills. But, I’ve always taken legitimate drugs and never taken the amount that was prescribed. I don’t want to become drug dependent, and I always felt like the doctor was giving me more than I possibly needed. I also took some kind of tranquilizer for a short period of time because I noticed that traffic was really bothering me. One doctor prescribed Quaaludes, and I would be so nervous taking them. I would announce I was taking a Quaalude and the kids would roll on the floor laughing, ‘Oh, Mom’s taking a
Quaalude!’ “
    But it wasn’t long before Kathleen Sperr was wishing that drugs and alcohol were her biggest child-rearing concern. While cleaning Gia’s bedroom one day, Kathleen began going through her daughter’s dresser drawers. It was something she did