Getting It Through My Thick Skull Read Online Free PDF Page B

helm, so the paychecks continued. Cass’s main concern, of course, was that I get well. Joey cooked breakfast, washed dishes, packed lunches, grocery shopped, cleaned the house, did laundry, and drove the kids around without a complaint. He was also my nurse: cleaning my wound, refilling my prescriptions, sitting at my side during physical therapy, helping me walk, bathing me, and monitoring visits from my friends. He never wavered in his denials that he’d had nothing to do with Amy Fisher and that she was crazy. Everything he was saying made sense. It was the two of us against the world. Even massive amounts of painkillers didn’t dull my rage at this kid who’d tried to kill me and the public servants who were willfully destroying my husband’s reputation.
    One afternoon, I endured a particularly grueling session on the medieval torture machine. The reporters outside were especially rude and aggressive; I did my best to ignore their shouts as we slowly exited the car. Joey and I ascended the stairs—a painful ten-minute ordeal that left me exhausted and shaking from the effort of balancing. As I hobbled to my bed, I caught sight of myself in the full-length mirror and gasped. I walked toward my reflection and really looked at myself hard, head to toe. I weighed eighty-nine pounds—twenty pounds had vanished due to my liquid diet. My hair was completely shorn off and just starting to grow back in uneven patches. I was so emaciated that I looked like a little boy. A patch still covered my eye, and the bullet wound was heavily bandaged. I clutched the dresser for support and peered even closer. Loose skin drooped from the injured side of my face—the frozen half. I was virtually unrecognizable from the pretty, vital woman I’d been just a month before.
    This is what Amy Fisher had done to me. I was literally fighting for my life. Meanwhile, the entire world wanted to tune in to the Joey and Amy soap opera. Poor Amy ? People wanted to hear about how Joey had taken advantage of her ? How come nobody was interested in what she’d done to me ?

    I got a big jolt when Detective Marty Alger called me at home one day as I rested in bed. There were new developments that could possibly support a charge of premeditation. Apparently, two teenage boys had voluntarily shown up at the police station with their parents. Seeing the nonstop media coverage of every aspect of Amy Fisher’s life, they had gotten scared about something they’d done months before. Amy had approached a teenage boy the previous fall and told him some story about being in love with an older guy and how badly she wanted to get rid of his wife. When he mentioned that he had an old rifle lying around somewhere, Amy got very excited. She offered him $400 cash plus a blow job to go to my house and shoot me.
    Her would-be shooter was just a regular, somewhat nerdy seventeen-year-old boy—he wanted the money and the blow job, but he was no criminal. He had no intention of following through or shooting anybody. When the agreed-upon day came, he did nothing, and he told cops that Amy had screamed at him the whole ride home.
    Amy soon moved on to a different boy. This new kid just took her money and the blow job and didn’t even go near our house. Both boys swore they never had any intention of harming anybody; the police believed them.
    Amy’s frustration and obsession had clearly been growing for months. She couldn’t find anyone willing to do the deed despite handing out cash and sexual favors. Finding no one willing to shoot a perfectly innocent woman they didn’t even know, she eventually decided to do it herself. Amy’s mysterious “boyfriend” turned up as well. The teenage boy I’d seen sitting in the car outside my house that day was eventually located after a long investigation. It turned out that this kid, Peter, had given Amy a gun and driven her to my house. He’d stolen a license plate off a car in Brooklyn and put it on his car before