He's a Rebel Read Online Free PDF

Delicatessen—Spector could inhale a truly astonishingcartload of hot pastrami, though none of it ever padded his bony frame. They also belonged to a Fairfax High social club called the Chapparals and bowled at the Pan Pacific, an indoor mall.
    Spector dated a few times, but to most girls he was spooky. His glaring eyes and ashen complexion kept them at a distance. It wasn’t until a pretty blonde girl named Donna Kass sidled up to him that he found himself in a relationship. Bright and chirpy, Donna was fifteen, a year younger, but where the other girls saw only Spector’s exterior, she saw much more.
    â€œPhil was not a handsome guy, not at all. He was very pale and had no chin. Not real masculine,” Kass acknowledged. “My mother used to say he was sick, but he wasn’t, he just looked like he was. But there was something so funny-looking about him that he was cute to me. My mother thought he was vile looking, but there was something very captivating there. He had these delicate hands, small, not stubby but very pretty. His hands looked like they would never have worked in a field. They were very white, with callouses from the guitar.
    â€œMy mother always felt Phil was crazy. She thought that someday he would wind up committing suicide. I didn’t see that then. He was a normal kid, he didn’t drink or use drugs, although he might have smoked a cigarette once or twice. Phil turned to music to show the world he could compete, but he was doing all right. He was the town crier in school, he danced, he was a cheerleader—but there was a genius about him that went beyond all that. Sometimes geniuses step one step beyond what the rest of us can understand. That’s what I saw in him.”
    As her father had died recently, Donna was receptive to an older boy with the kind of quiet maturity Phil had. “I was crazy about him,” she said. “I had never really had a boyfriend before, and he was a very brilliant guy. God, he was brilliant. He was a great historian—he knew
everything
about Lincoln. He was intense and very inward, but he had a great personality, he was charming. Phil was just so different from everybody else. He was not the run-of-the-mill kid.”
    But there was another side to him, a despair and an estrangement that became obvious to Donna whenever his family would enter his life. Their dates would always be at her house, where they’d play Ping-Pong and Phil would sit at the piano in the living room and play for her. “In the artistic sense, you sensed there was a soulof an artistic genius there. I mean, he could hear a song and play it right away, on the piano or the guitar. He was amazing/’ Donna knew little about his family, and she could tell he was keeping her away from it. Unfortunately, that was impossible.
    â€œI think he was very frustrated,” Kass recalled. “They watched over his every move. If he would come to my house, they would call fifteen times: ‘Come home, come home.’ He was very, very angry about it. He was an angry person.
    â€œWe’d be on the phone talking for the longest time and his mother would come in and he’d want to hang up.”
    It was as if the Spector women believed that little cherry-cheeked Donna Kass was trying to “steal” Phil from them. “I always felt they were in love with him or something. They treated him like he was a god. They protected him, and they wanted to protect him from me.” What hurt Bertha and Shirley the most, and likely intensified the arguments, was that Phil seemed not to return their idea of adoration. Indeed, Phil’s misery could be measured by his contrasting mood in the rare moments when he spoke of his father.
    â€œPhil was very insecure, and the reason was his father,” Kass thought. “He told me his father died of a heart attack, but I found out that was not true. I don’t remember him ever telling me how he died,