Out of Bondage by Linda Lovelace Page B

to cook. When you can spend eight or nine hours putting together a little supper for two people, you can wind up making some pretty exotic creations. Because of all my spare time and my new hobby, Alice started to put on weight.
    And now the dream was back in full force. At the end of every day I would close my eyes and return to that rented cottage in California. The window beside my bed would be open and I would hear a small noise there. I would look up to see a man crawling in through my window. A stranger. I would lie there paralyzed with fear, unable to scream, and then I would see the other men, all five of them, surrounding my bed, staring at me. And when I awakened, after the beatings and the rapings, I would be crying uncontrollably and Larry would be rubbing my back and saying, “There, there, it’s going to be all right.”
    But was it? Was it ever going to be all right? All of our lives were centered around one fact of life: We must not be recognized. We were in hiding. We couldn’t even have mail delivered to our home. We took out a post office box in the small village of Belle Terre and since mail would sometimes come there addressed to Linda Lovelace, my arrivals provoked some of the broadest grins imaginable.
    Neither of our two children were to be born easily. Because of all those beatings, because of all the abuse my body had taken, I had to visit a specialist in New York City. The very day Dominic was born, Larry came home to find all of our belongings scattered throughout the house. There was an eviction notice posted to our cottage door giving us three days to vacate the premises. Although I’d never revealed my identity, the notice was addressed to “Larry Marchiano and Linda Lovelace.”
    Although I was depressed, I was nowhere near as depressed as I had once been. After all, I wasn’t being abused and I wasn’t being beaten and I wasn’t being forced to perform sexual acts with strangers. Except in my recurrent nightmare. Eviction? Compared to the past, eviction was a piece of cake. All that was happening to us was poverty. And I knew people could live through poverty.
    My son Dominic quickly became everything to me. My existence focused in on him and, to some extent, depended on him. The very first day I had him at home, I must’ve read him five books. I shared everything with him.
    And as Larry spent more and more time on the road, Dominic became my only company. I remember taking a pair of my old blue jeans and carefully cutting them into a pattern for blue jeans for Dominic. Today they’re on my young daughter’s Cabbage-Patch doll.
    A very bad moment came when we were forced to go on welfare. If there had been no baby, I would never have gone through that humiliation. But there was no choice. And on some of the coldest days that winter, Larry and I and the new baby would hitchhike to the welfare office. When the welfare people discovered my true identity—which they did soon enough—they questioned my every statement and took delight in passing me from one office to another for “interviews.”
    Finally, however, we got some money to live on. We were given a total of $452 a month. I found a house to rent for $250 a month. After paying for the basics—rent, electricity, car insurance, gas, heat and water—we were left with $54, which barely covered milk and diapers for the month.
    What really busted our budget was the fact that both Larry and I were smoking at that time. Ridiculous, right? Obviously, we had to give up cigarettes. Nothing could be clearer. Or harder to do. With the kind of pressure we were feeling, it was easier to give up food than cigarettes. So we wound up collecting cigarette butts from ashtrays, bumming from friends, doing everything except, of course, giving them up.
    Finally, though poorer than we had ever been in our lives, we at last were able to slow down and rest. Our little rented house was colored several different shades of yellow—canary yellow bricks,