Plum Island

Norm Appel was terrified to have children while drinking and taking pills. He discovered why. 

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I didn’t want children when Wendy and I married. I was afraid I wouldn’t be a good father, and for good reason: Though I kept it secret, I was drinking a lot at the time and taking lots of pharmaceuticals—mixing everything. How could I have another child in the family when I was still a child myself? It wasn’t that I didn’t love children; it’s just that I was terrified I would do something wrong if we had one. So it was five and a half years into our marriage before David was born. Twenty-two months later we had another boy, Michael.

David was a charming kid—handsome and bright—and he could get anyone to do just about anything. But there was something different about him. During those moments when I held David, it was as if he wasn’t really with me, as if his mind was somewhere else. A doctor once diagnosed him with dyslexia and hyperactivity disorder and prescribed Ritalin. We ended that relationship right away; we didn’t want David on drugs.

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My honest working career lasted from 1959 until 1976. I was an early investor in the cable TV industry, among other ventures. In 1977, Wendy and I divorced, and I retired from the business world completely. I was forty at the time; David was eight and Michael was six. I had joint custody of my sons—one week on and one week off. The first week that I had the kids, I took them to Disney World. The following week, when Wendy had custody, I danced at Studio 54 for two days straight, except for a two-hour break.

I eventually got into acting and modeling and would spend a lot of time hanging out at the old Travis Restaurant on Newbury Street in Boston, holding court and taking calls on the pay phone from my agent. I lived at the Copley Plaza hotel and then moved into a two-bedroom apartment at the Prudential Tower.

When they were with me, David and Michael stayed in the bedroom next to mine. The boys knew I was an alcoholic and a drug addict, so whenever I left my apartment, I would dead-bolt my bedroom door and lock my bedroom closet to keep them from finding my pills. But by the time he was ten, David knew where I kept the drugs and how to get to them. In his bedroom, he removed the heating grille and found a way through the ductwork into my room. Once in my bedroom, he would pick the lock on the closet. I figured this out after a friend of mine, who was staying at the apartment, saw David in the ductwork. She saw him as she was stepping out of the shower.

David began living on his own when he was sixteen, in an apartment in Boston not far from mine. Soon after moving into that apartment, he overdosed on drugs. We took him to the hospital, where they pumped his stomach. At about this same time I finally had enough of my own drinking and drugging and stopped. But I couldn’t do anything to help David.

Twenty years later, I’ve become friendly with the woman who lived in the apartment across the hall from David’s during those years. She has told me how her mother wanted to adopt him. She remembers David as the sweetest, most lovable kid. But she also told me how he would break into my apartment, get my keys, and take my car to pick up Michael at school. She, too, knew he was wild.

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David had a wonderful artistic sensibility. He pursued photography and went to Hawaii to work on his craft. He returned to Boston two years later, landing at my apartment and talking about a show he hoped to have presented in Provincetown through a connection he had made with Diane Arbus’s daughter. I never knew if he was telling the truth about the show, but within forty-eight hours he was driving me crazy, bringing people home at all hours of the night to that bedroom where he had climbed through the ductwork. Wendy had bought a tiny, two-bedroom shack on Plum Island, about an hour away on the North Shore of Massachusetts, so I told David to go there and stay for a while.

A couple of days later, I was shopping at the mall next to my apartment when I bumped into Wendy. She was on her way to lunch with a friend. We said hello to each other and went our separate ways. Then my cell phone rang, and it was Michael, my younger son. He had gone up to Plum Island to see David and found him in bed, not moving.

I found Wendy at the restaurant,  and we drove to the shack. When we arrived, police cars were parked outside. We would learn that David had died of an overdose of prescription drugs. He didn’t leave a note. I went into the shack and opened the door to the bedroom where David was. But I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t bear seeing him dead. So I closed my eyes and shut the door.