lives suffering and recovering from the effects PURPLE continued from p. 10
‘Play with your toys’ Lenore remembers the dildos, too. However, these were not used in the erotic skits the children had to perform. “Those were for his own private measurements,” she said, “so he would know when we were big enough for him to enter us. That’s why Dorothy told me to stop doing it. I’ll never forget her telling me that.” They would only use the dildos in the basement, up to “several times a week, if we wanted to,” she said. Wilkie called them their toys. “He’d say, ‘Why don’t you go play with your toys?’ He would watch a lot.” In addition, Lenore and Jenean both recall their father making them watch him pee. Lenore noted this behavior is known as “grooming,” in which the predator conditions the victim. In fact, all of these behaviors — from pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities, indecent exposure of the genitals to a child, displaying pornography to a child, actual sexual contact with a child and viewing of the child’s genitalia — are textbook examples of sexual abuse.
Pre-Purple memories Lenore also remembers when Wilkie was on trial in Australia for attacking Dorothy, and how she cried because she was too young to attend. Both of his daughters recall how the family used to move, frequently and suddenly. Lenore said, even as a young girl, she figured this was because he had either gotten into trouble for some sexual or other incident or was running away from a girlfriend. Again, at least for Lenore, there were also some good memories mixed in with those of the chaotic sexual abuse. “He came home with an electric banana that he made in Australia, with lights that flashed in different times,” she said. “It was beautiful. It didn’t really look like a banana, it was like a tube.” She, too, remembers his high-octane beer, made in garbage cans, with sugar and yeast, and heated by light bulbs.
Curious about dad As for why she sought out her father after his release from prison, she said, “I was curious what he was like. Everybody had told Jenean and me, don’t try to find him, don’t talk to him.” It didn’t freak her out to see her former college professor father now as a longhaired hippie bedecked all in purple. “When I came to New York, I just accepted him,” she said. However, not long after she got the IUD, she left Wilkie because he wasn’t feeding her enough. The vegan diet Wilkie and Eve ate was too spartan for her. “In the morning, they would have a mung beansprout shake — with banana, whatever they had left over — and brewer’s yeast,” she recalled. “For lunch, they’d have like cantaloupe or salad or bread and some cheese. I split from him because I had to get something to eat.” TheVillager.com
PHOTO BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
A van parked on Avenue A last week sporting a message from September praising Adam Purple as the godfather of urban gardening and alerting people to his memorial at La Plaza Cultural in the East Village. None of his family members attended the memorial.
From Purple to trouble She wandered over to Washington Square, where she met a man who offered her a joint. It turned out, though, he was a pimp. “He was on the prowl,” she said. At first, she actually thought the idea didn’t sound too bad. “I thought, I liked sex and I liked money,” she said. But it soon became a nightmare and she found herself in the Bronx working as a prostitute that fall and winter. “The guy beat the s--t out of me a few times,” she recalled. “It was horrible, guns and chains. Yeah, I’ve seen it all, I haven’t done it all. He shaved my head. I got away, I went to a Krishna temple in Brooklyn.” She left the city, but returned a few years later, again at first living with her father on Forsyth St. After a painting job fell through, she found herself working as a prostitute again to make money. “When I came back at 19, I was walking the streets,” she said. “I wasn’t going to go to a massage parlor. “He was sort of a grouch the second time,” she recalled. “The first time he was just a pervert.” This time around, he complained about her cigarette smoking. “I rolled my own from a Drum pouch,” she said. “He used to smoke a pipe but quit. He was a macrobiotic vegetarian Zen Buddhist, so he didn’t like the tobacco in his pure peace.” Again, she left him, but once more ran into trouble. “I was on the streets,” she recalled. “These five
guys surrounded me with five guns. They drugged me with a mind-suggestive drug and made me do a triple-X-rated blackmarket film. They said, ‘You wanna make $25,000?’ I never got anything. Afterward, they dumped me in a bathroom in Grand Central.”
Homeless years For 24 years, starting at 16, Lenore was homeless. “I would sleep anywhere — side of the road, abandoned building, under a bridge, out in the woods,” she said. She sometimes would hang out with the Rainbow Family and also the STP (Sagittarius, Pisces, Taurus) Family, the latter sort of the forerunners to today’s train-hopping “crusty travelers.” “The STP was like the beginning of all that,” she said. Her lifestyle continued this way — homeless, prostitution off and on — until age 40, when she finally found a good program for the homeless in Montana, where she now lives in an apartment. “That’s when I got off the streets,” she said. Asked if she felt being raised in a hypersexualized environment — where the tots were “trained how to give pleasure to a man” — led her to become a sex worker, she said, “I do, definitely.”
‘Stepmother was guilty’ She also feels Romola was even more guilty than her husband, simply because Wilkie was so comPURPLE continued on p. 26 January 21, 2016
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