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Lenore today. For 24 years, until age 40, she was homeless. “I couldn’t cope,” she said of her life before. “I was really emotionally disturbed. When you’re on the streets, nobody cares. But where I live now has a really good homeless program.”
Purple survivors still healing PURPLE continued from p. 11
pletely bonkers. “David had an excuse for being out of it,” she said. “He was so, so, so, so insanely genius that he couldn’t get to reality. Life was a game. Romola was no innocent bystander. She should have been prosecuted. “Oh, he was crazy,” she said of her father. “I’m sure he had a diagnosis if he ever went to a shrink. He was a genius and a strange duck and he did the best he could.” Romola, in one of her letters to Jenean and Lenore’s grandparents when Wilkie was facing prison, had written that he could have avoided jail and been out on bond if he only submitted to psychological treatment. “He was too good for that,” Lenore said. “He could play games with anybody. Oh, they would have locked him up if they could have, but he wouldn’t let ’em.”
Purple’s positive legacy Of the four women, Lenore and Jenean — but especially Lenore — despite Wilkie’s sexual deviancy, still value his contributions as a guerilla gardener and sustainability pioneer. “He showed me his plan for greenhouses and [ecologically based] cities, his urban planning,” Lenore said. “He was way ahead of his time, in terms of an ecological, carbon-safe environment. That’s his gift to the world, not his urban gardening. What he did before, it still counts — and also what he did after. He reinvented himself. I don’t care what anyone else says, it counts.” Another of his best traits was his resourcefulness, she said, a product of his rural Missouri roots. “Reusing, recycling — he was from the old school. He grew up on a farm,” she said. His father was German — very strict — she said. But he died when Wilkie was young in an electrical fire in a printing shop he had in the back of their property. She thinks that printing shop inspired Wilkie’s trademark rolled-up leaflets ad-
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January 21, 2016
vocating the likes of “World Bike-in,” “General Rent Strike,” “World Orgy” and “World S--t-in” that he would hand out to people as he biked up to Central Park to scoop up horse manure for the garden.
Therapy and recovery Like Jenean and Lenore, Dorothy turned to therapy in midlife to help her, at last, deal with the traumatic feelings she had locked away deep inside. Her therapist taught her to forgive, “or it eats you up inside,” Dorothy said. Still, she can never fully forgive Wilkie for what he did to her. “I think he ruined things for me,” she said. “It’s very hard to recover.” Of the memorial service that was held for Wilkie at La Plaza Cultural, she said, “He doesn’t really deserve it. He was a monster. When they rang me to tell me he was dead, I thought, ‘Thank God’ — and then I said I shouldn’t say that because I forgive him. It was a reflex,” she said with a laugh. Lenore has been twice married and twice divorced. She just turned 58 and is finally trying to quit smoking. Dorothy, who worked as a taxi dispatcher, has a daughter. Diane, who has children of her own and has also had horses, has worked many jobs, her longest as a coal miner. “I was one of the first women to work at a coal mine in Wyoming,” she said. “I can operate heavy machinery. But I feel like I have a glass wall above me — I just could not break into the field.” A loner, she recently joined a motorcycle club that includes police officers. Riding and hanging out with them, she said, she finally feels “safe.” Jenean, who has a son and worked in the mental-health field, four years ago pulled up stakes and moved to an “intentional community” in the Northwest to find herself. She had said she decided to tell her story to The Villager to highlight the issue of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which she self-diagnosed after other menPURPLE continued on p. 27 TheVillager.com