A Writer's Life (46 page)

Sidney Siller, the founder of the National Organization for Men, a thirteen-thousand-membership group begun in 1983, told a
Washington Post
reporter that John Bobbitt lacked demonstrative backers because men “don't come out and show support in the same way women do.” Alvin S. Baraff, director of the MenCenter counseling firm that started in Washington in 1984, defined the pro-Lorena campaign to the
Post
reporter as the “ultimate in male bashing,” and he added, “I think they are championing a true criminal. This woman does not deserve any support. This case is another indication of reverse discrimination and gender bias.”

While I had so far been gathering information in Virginia for less than three weeks, and knew that my early impressions might be altered as I extended my stay and learned more about this case, which the syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer called “politically correct revenge,” I thought that at least some of John Bobbitt's image difficulty with much of the public and the press was due to his inability to speak out effectively in his own behalf, being hampered by a congenital disorder that prompted him to repeat his words again and again, often in a hasty and garbled manner. He was the son of a mentally deficient Polish-American mother who resided in Niagara Falls, New York, and a father from Oklahoma who
was partly Native American and had abandoned the family when John was four or five years old. I also believed that John Bobbitt's physical appearance—his weight lifter's torso, his close-cropped haircut, his square-jawed, hazel-eyed, tattooed-armed, blue-collared, white working-class handsomeness, which had once appealed to the recruitment sergeant who had enlisted Bobbitt into the Marine Corps in 1987—was what lent credibility to the typecasting efforts of his wife's defenders to portray him in the media as a militaristic pretty-boy brute who had behaved so abominably toward his diminutive wife that she finally gave him what he had deserved. When he was out of work, which he frequently was after leaving the Corps, he had spent much of his time and money barhopping at night with other young, minimally educated, minimum-wage white males like himself. If there was a national poll seeking to identify America's least-cared-about category of men, this element would have probably headed the list. Unlike black men, who could attribute a lack of achievement to racial prejudice, there were no easy excuses for these whites who were frequently scorned as “trash” and who, unlike other minorities, lacked political defenders, affirmative-action qualifications, and the social concern of the larger population. They were an endangered species of misfits, obsolete American buffaloes ill-prepared to long survive in the quickly changing and highly technical climate of a nation in a period of ever-decreasing need for brawn except in contact sports, and in which the very nature of traditional masculinity as a worthy and singular definition was being debated, doubted, and often linguistically outmoded by the 1990s generation of young middle-class and upper-middle-class men and women from academia, politics, the law, and the media. As influences of national policy and opinion, these professionals not only mocked but sought to remake and modernize the manners and morals of lower-class men like John Bobbitt, and they no doubt believed, unless he could prove otherwise in court, that he was as his wife said he was.

Lorena Bobbitt was cheered by crowds of women as she walked out of the courthouse at the conclusion of the preliminary hearing. The prosecutor's evidence against her was ruled sufficient by Judge Gluchowski to force her to stand trial at a later date; meanwhile, she was free on bail. She smiled slightly as she passed bystanders and camera crews, walking arm in arm with the two female friends who had remained close to her throughout her ordeal and had been helpful to her ever since she had come to live in the United States and study at Northern Virginia Community College in 1987.

One of her companions was her employer at the nail salon, an attractive thirty-five-year-old blonde named Janna Biscutti, who had initially hired Lorena on a part-time basis six years earlier to help care for Janna's young son. Lorena had then been seventeen and not very fluent in English. She had been in Virginia for only a few months, and had been boarding with a Latin American immigrant family, having left her own family behind in Venezuela. She had been born in Ecuador in 1969, moving to Venezuela at the age of five with her parents and a younger sister and brother. Her father had found work in Caracas in a laboratory that made dentures. After she had graduated from high school in Caracas and had arrived in the United States to enroll at the community college in Virginia, her main hope was to become a dentist someday.

When not attending classes at the college, Lorena worked as a daytime nanny in Janna Biscutti's large home in Fairfax, Virginia. Janna, who had been born in Louisville, Kentucky, as Janna Abell, had made considerable amounts of money operating nail-sculpturing salons in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Janna had dropped out of two colleges in Kentucky and a third one in Tennessee after deciding that she no longer wished to become a plastic surgeon or a dermatologist. She opened her first salon as a nineteen-year-old in Vienna, Virginia, in 1977. In that same year she married a six-foot-four-inch civil engineer named Errol Biscutti, an Australian-Italian who had come with his family to the United States during his boyhood. One year after her marriage and now using her husband's surname, Janna Biscutti started a second salon in Georgetown, Virginia, and then a third in Great Falls, Virginia, in 1980. Janna would leave her husband in 1984 but would retain custody of their only child, Kyle Biscutti, who was four years old in 1988, when Janna employed Lorena to serve as the boy's nanny. Janna also taught Lorena how to drive, instructing her in a Mercedes 300-D sedan automatic so she could transport Kyle to and from his preschool activities. After Lorena had worked in this capacity for a little more than a year, and had improved her English—aided by regularly watching the children's TV show
Sesame Street
at Janna's home with Kyle—Janna released her from her child-rearing role (since Kyle had gone to live for a while with his father in California), and then, months later, Janna hired her to work in a nail salon.

Lorena had meanwhile met Lance Cpl. John Bobbitt one evening at a dance hall near the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. He had recently been transferred there from Okinawa. He was twenty; she was eighteen. She was a virgin and had never seriously dated anyone before, and John Bobbitt's vision of romance had previously been limited
to seeing bar girls in the Orient. After going out with each other for less than eight months, and having a courtship that consisted mainly of weekend meetings and sharing fast food in shopping malls, John and Lorena decided to marry. This decision lessened Lorena's anxiety about her impermanent presence in America, since she was here on a student visa, and for John Bobbitt the advantages of marriage would include moving from his crowded barracks into an apartment and extending to his bride the medical care that was provided free by the military. Inviting neither family nor friends to attend their hastily arranged civil ceremony in Stafford, Virginia, John and Lorena stood in front of a magistrate on June 18, 1989, to be pronounced husband and wife.

It was four years later, shortly before 5:30 in the morning on June 23, 1993, that Lorena drove speedily to Janna Biscutti's home in Fairfax, Virginia, banging on the front door loudly and ringing the bell repeatedly until the door had been opened by Janna's second husband, a Saudi Arabian-born mortgage banker named Nizzar Suleiman. It was Suleiman who awakened his sleeping wife on the second floor. After Janna had come down and had finally understood what the hysterical and barely articulate Lorena Bobbitt was saying about what she had done with a kitchen knife, Janna immediately telephoned the police and escorted Lorena to the station house—as Janna would, six weeks later, on August 4, accompany Lorena to and from the preliminary hearing.

Lorena's other close companion at the courthouse—the person who had first provided Lorena with a home upon her arrival in America—was a stout, dark-haired, and conservatively dressed woman of fifty-nine named Erma Castro, who, like Lorena, had been born in Ecuador, but she was a full-time resident of Virginia and had been an American citizen for nearly twenty years. Erma lived with her husband, Jose Castro, an engineer, and their two teenage daughters, in a newly developed suburban community, and she was employed as an administrator within an agency that catered to the area's immigrant settlers and their children. She assisted these families in filling out government forms and often volunteered as a translator for Spanish-speaking people who were having difficulty reading instructions written in English.

In the early fall of 1987, as Lorena was preparing for college, Erma Castro met her through a mutual friend and soon offered her a rent-free room in the Castro home
if
she would promise to keep up with her studies and set a good example for Castro's daughters, who were a few years younger than Lorena. For at least a year, Erma was happy with the arrangement. But after Lorena had met and begun to go out with John Bobbitt, in October 1988, Erma Castro's attitude quickly changed. She was unimpressed
with John Bobbitt, having spoken with him a few times when he had come to the house, and she was worried about what might happen to Lorena as a result of dating him.

I became aware of Erma Castro's feelings even though I never communicated with her directly—she neither returned my phone calls nor answered my letters, and she did not receive me when I showed up at her workplace without an appointment—but I
had
gained access to a transcript of a pretrial interview that she had been legally bound to give during the late summer of 1993 to John Bobbitt's attorney in order to allow the latter to better defend his client in the upcoming marital sexual abuse case. Not only Castro but others who would later testify in the Manassas courthouse—a group that would include Janna Biscutti, Nizzar Suleiman, and Lorena Bobbitt herself—had been summoned to appear individually for pretrial interviews in the office of John Bobbitt's attorney in Alexandria, Virginia. These interviews were actually depositions. People being deposed were under oath to tell the truth. They were entitled to bring their own lawyers for guidance, but it was John Bobbitt's defense attorney in this instance who directed the questioning from within his office in Alexandria, and the laws of perjury applied there as much as if the witnesses were being interrogated in court. A stenographer was present to record every word. A typed transcript was made of each and every deposition. And thus, after I had obtained copies of these depositions, I had as accurate an account as I was likely to get from the vantage point of those who were among the most qualified to comment on the maiming of John Bobbitt, and to explain why and how the incident had occurred.

No one had been more prescient than Erma Castro in foreseeing the incompatibility that was destined to doom the relationship between John Bobbitt and Lorena; and, as Castro declared in her deposition, she had urged Lorena from the beginning to stay away from the muscular marine. Castro was a traditional Latin American matron, a natural duenna rooted in centuries of trepidation toward visiting conquistadors. Were her own daughters ever to elicit the attentions of such men as John Bobbitt—men who mumbled, men of low income and rank, men who were ill-prepared to support a wife and a family and who yet sought sexual pleasure from women—Castro would have bolted every window and door of her home, would have prevented her daughters from receiving phone calls, and would not have allowed them out of her sight. Her daughters often referred to her as “old-fashioned,” she acknowledged to Bobbitt's attorney during the deposition, but after Lorena had disregarded her advice and had married John Bobbitt—and had subsequently been abused by him and had ended up being arrested by the police for slicing off his penis—
Erma Castro recalled that she had gathered her daughters around her and declared: “This is what happens if you don't obey what your mother or your parents say or [when] some friend, some older adult person, tells you who has your good in her mind. And I told them to see this as an example that they should never disregard … and they should be respectful to—if they don't want to listen to the old-fashioned voice—at least to the commandment that God gives to us. Because God gives the freedom to think and to choose the right and the wrong, and it is their decision. I just tell you, see what happens when young people don't listen, don't want to listen to your parents.”

After being asked by the attorney if Lorena had ever discussed her private life with Erma Castro prior to her eloping with John Bobbitt, Castro replied, “I'm very conservative and I don't like to talk about that, but one night she came to my bed and she said, ‘Mrs. Castro, can I talk with you?' I say, ‘Yes, Lorena, what happened?' She started crying. I say, ‘Lorena, don't be upset, tell me.' ” Lorena remained hesitant as she selected the words, Castro recalled, and she herself found it difficult to draw her out, because what Lorena was asking (and it took Castro some time to figure it out) was embarrassing to them both. Castro found it no less embarrassing
now
, at this deposition, to be queried about it by a male stranger, albeit an attorney in front of whom she had sworn to tell the whole truth. Finally, she acknowledged what Lorena had asked her: Was it all right for a married couple ever to have anal sex?

Castro had responded, “Are you
crazy?
No, you
never
do that! And don't let
him
do that even if he asks that!” Although Lorena had promised to follow her advice, Castro said again,
“Don't
let men do that!”

But with all of Lorena's good intentions, the discussion had troubled Erma Castro. While she had initially admired the young woman's courage in coming alone to study in the United States, she was now beginning to feel uncertain about wanting to continue as Lorena's guardian. “I took her in my home because she was very anxious to become a professional,” Castro explained to the attorney, adding that during Lorena's first year in college she had been an “A and B student,” but “when she was with John, she got an F.” Not only was Lorena “seeing him behind my back,” Castro continued, but he never seemed to have any money when they went out on dates. It was Lorena, using funds she was earning as Janna Biscutti's nanny, who picked up the checks when she and John Bobbitt went out for hamburgers, pizzas, or ice cream. Castro had learned this from one of her daughters, and it further diminished what little respect she had for him as a proper man for Lorena. “He was not responsible,” Castro concluded when speaking to the attorney; John Bobbitt lacked the kindness and
generosity that courting men traditionally bestowed upon their girlfriends, “at least in the beginning.” Castro wondered what John Bobbitt did with the money he received from the Marine Corps, and why Lorena would tolerate his being so cheap when he was out with her. Was Lorena trying to buy his affections, seeing him as a means of marrying her way into America? Castro had once seen a young Russian woman on a television show who admitted that she had paid an American man to marry her in order to secure her residency in the United States, and it occurred to Castro that Lorena might be having similar thoughts. But when Castro had questioned her about this, Lorena immediately denied it, saying for the first time, “Oh, Mrs. Castro, I love him, I love him.” After hearing this, Castro became even more alarmed, she told the attorney; she had an emotional girl on her hands who
thought
she was in love, but who was too young and naïve to know what love was, and who was soon likely to lose her virginity (if she had not already) to this American cheapskate who had seemingly won her heart by allowing her to wear his Marine Corps jacket. Castro believed that she should immediately share her concerns with Lorena's family in Venezuela, and so she placed a call and spoke to Lorena's mother. “I told her Lorena has a boyfriend, and I don't like it and I'm afraid something might happen,” Castro recounted to the attorney; and when the latter asked how the girl's mother had reacted, Castro replied, “She was crying.”