Secrets, Aids And Faith: The Story Of Joyce Claypool Fireworks Every Night

Second of four parts

Doug Claypool used to brag there weren’t 10 people together who could tell his life story. He was too good at keeping secrets.

His tastes reflected those of a lot of men who attended high school in the 1970s. He liked rock music - Bob Seger, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Stevie Nicks. He preferred long-haired women, grilled steak, Budweiser and Marlboros.

Growing up in Idaho’s Silver Valley, he took mining classes in high school. After graduation, he installed cable TV boxes, drove a cab, sold magazines and boxed in the Marine Corps.

He was 6-foot-1 and muscled. Thick eyebrows partially framed his brown eyes. Women who liked men tall, dark and handsome loved Doug.

“What I wouldn’t give to look like this guy,” his friend Steve Olson said.

Olson used to study Doug with women during the fall of 1981 when the two were students in a truck-driving class at Spokane Falls Community College. He admired how effortlessly Doug attracted them and kept them interested just by sitting still and listening.

Doug would charm women within a few minutes of sitting down with a beer at his favorite bar, Spokane’s Studio K. Women came up to their table, already knowing Doug’s name.

Olson never got to hear what Doug said to women when he got them alone. “Music must have come out of his mouth,” he speculated. Doug had manners. He also had a moral code: He slept with a lot of women, but never virgins, not wanting the responsibility for a woman’s fall.

Raised a Catholic, he was a former altar boy. He had two older sisters, a mother who his friends thought controlled too much of Doug’s life and a father who some said had been unfaithful to Doug’s mother. His parents were divorced.

Today, Doug’s father is dead. His mother and other family members refused to talk about him.

‘I don’t belong to anybody’

One fall night at the community college, a long-haired woman named Joyce Macko asked Doug for a ride home. Doug smiled when Joyce’s mother showed up and Joyce snapped, “I have a ride, Mom.”

He took her to the South Hill apartment building his mother managed, and where he lived and worked as groundskeeper. They shot pool and talked for an hour.

He drove her home, mentioning he would be at a truck-driving practice that weekend in the college parking lot. Sitting in the car before she got out, Doug watched Joyce extract a packet of birth control pills from her purse, punch out one and pop it into her mouth.

“I wanted him to know I was safe,” Joyce said.

That weekend when Joyce arrived at truck-driving practice, she didn’t see Doug. She walked to a van where the instructor and some students stood.

“Where’s Claypool?” she asked.

“You stay away from me,” the instructor teased. “I don’t know what you did to Claypool Thursday night, but he came down to the Lucky Penny and informed us to stay away from you because you were his.”

“There’s no ring on my finger,” Joyce answered flippantly. “I don’t belong to anybody.” Her words masked her true feelings. It touched her Doug told other men to stay away. She felt herself catch fire when she saw him emerge from Olson’s car, all legs and tousled brown hair.

“Emotionally I was a lost cause,” she said. “I was so in love with being in love it was first-come, first-served.”

Fantasies of gold

Both Joyce and Doug wanted sex, but finding places to be alone was a problem when they first dated. Joyce lived at home and Doug lived with his mother at the apartment complex.

Once Doug took Joyce to a hotel where they stayed until 6 a.m. Plotting excuses for Joyce’s parents on the way home, Doug said, “We could tell them we went over to Idaho and got married.”

Joyce laughed, but she considered it practically a proposal.

“Those were the little things that hooked me,” she said. She told friends she would marry this man, that she’d do anything for him. She hadn’t loved anyone this much since the rich boy who had been the object of her obsession in grade school and junior high.

Meanwhile, Doug dreamed about striking it rich. If you got him talking long enough he’d tell you about a gold mine his dad knew of near Libby, Mont. Doug wanted to stake a claim and work it. He just needed investors.

“Doug always had dreams and plans, schemes and scams,” his friend Olson said.

That winter, Doug disappeared. Joyce knew only that he was working for a woman named Peggy Patterson.

Olson called her “that Peggy gal.” She had daughters Joyce’s age and Joyce suspected Doug was dating one.

Rather than drop him, Joyce hovered within Doug’s orbit by working for his mother at the apartment complex. In mid-January Doug reappeared and asked Joyce to go skiing with him at Mount Spokane.

On the mountain, he told her excitedly that Peggy Patterson wanted to loan him $50,000 to open the gold mine. There was a catch. She wouldn’t do it unless he married her.

Jealousy and anger flooded Joyce. “She’s twice your age,” she said. “How dare she think you don’t already have a girlfriend?”

“I love you, not her,” Doug reassured her. On the way home they stopped at Olson’s apartment where they made love. Doug told Joyce he wanted her to be the mother of his children.

A marriage, a divorce

Doug married “that Peggy gal” a week later on Jan. 28, 1982, in Coeur d’Alene. They shared Peggy’s house on 63rd Street in southeast Spokane.

Joyce made excuses for Doug, saying he would be married to Peggy only a short time “like it was a plan or something,” Olson said. Joyce and Olson dated some, but all she could talk about was Doug.

Joyce’s mother tried to convince her to forget him. “He went and married another woman for money. For me, that would’ve been it,” her mother said. “I had been through so much hurt myself. I didn’t want to see Joycie go through what I had been through.”

Joyce wouldn’t listen. On Valentine’s Day, Doug snuck away from his wife to see Joyce. She gave him a $300 gold necklace and told him if she ever stopped loving him she would ask for it back.

Not long after that, Olson and Doug went out. After a long night, they ended up at Sam’s Pit, an after-hour ribs joint, later closed as a public nuisance because of drug trafficking.

“I’d never been there before,” Olson recalled. “It was this little house, but they could pack a lot of people in there. They’d give you Old Milwaukee beer wrapped in a paper towel.”

Olson watched Doug buy cocaine and snuff it up his nose. It was the first time he’d seen Doug use the drug.

When Olson got home that night his telephone rang. It was Peggy screaming that Doug had “got violent” and taken off. She was scared he would return and beat her.

“I guess he took off to Pendleton to some other gal he knew down there and took some stuff that didn’t belong to him,” Olson said.

Peggy Patterson Claypool got an attorney. On March 8, 1982, she filed for divorce and a restraining order. The order prevented Doug from harassing her, mortgaging or selling her property, withdrawing money or entering her safe deposit box.

“I am afraid of my husband,” she wrote in an affidavit. “Within the last few days he has physically beaten me and I therefore request that he be restrained from returning to the home where I and my children reside.”

Doug and Peggy agreed to a property settlement on May 2. Peggy kept her house, her 1981 Chevrolet Camaro, her jewelry and her separate property.

Doug kept anything he had before the marriage and promised to repay $2,300 in monthly installments once he got a job. He also agreed to pay bills he rang up during the five-week marriage. He owed Nordstrom $435, Pounder’s Jewelry $225, Chevron $235 and American Express $218.

A Montana memory

Long before the divorce was final, Doug and Joyce reunited. In her mind, they had never been apart.

Doug still talked about the gold mine. Joyce finally got to see it in June 1982 when they drove to Montana with Doug’s dad and two of his father’s friends.

Their first stop was the home of a 90-year-old man who had worked the mine with his family. He was the last survivor who knew where it was, and he was willing to tell them how to get there.

The old man’s directions took them up logging roads into the mountains. As they climbed they stopped occasionally to remove downed trees with a chain saw. Once, a grizzly crossed their path. Up a few more switchbacks, they saw a moose with her calf.

Finally, they found the mine, a hand-dug cave spewing cool air out the side of the mountain. Cart tracks ran from its mouth and broke off over the side of a cliff.

They camped near the mine while Doug and his dad extracted rock samples to assay. Joyce’s flimsy sleeping bag from her Girl Scout days wasn’t warm enough for Montana mountains in June. Doug loaned her his mummy bag and sat up all night tending the fire.

The trip was a good memory to hold onto in the days to come. Doug and Joyce didn’t have enough money to go back to school, much less work the mine. Joyce worked at Dick’s Drive-In. Doug drove a truck for a while, then got a job setting up for hotel banquets.

In the fall of 1982, they moved in together in a low-rent apartment above a downtown Spokane tavern. They had no telephone or television. Doug had sold his car. He had a small marijuana pipe and took a toke every two hours to stay a little high.

Joyce’s sister, Debbi, met Doug during that time.

“He had her involved in stuff that no older sister wants her little sister involved in,” Debbi said.

Following his increasingly exotic cravings, Doug took 19-year-old Joyce to sex parties and introduced her to men who photographed her nude. At first, she was flattered. She once thought herself ugly. Now she was learning to drive men wild.

Doug hinted to Joyce he wanted to sleep with a set of sisters. Then he convinced her Debbi agreed if Joyce was willing.

Joyce approached Debbi, who lectured her sister. “I’m not interested,” she said. “And if he loved you, Joyce, he wouldn’t be needing all these other women.”

Debbi later blamed Joyce’s willingness to stay with Doug on stubbornness. “She had told everyone she loved him, so she was going to do anything to make it work.”

Joyce said her motives were more complicated, mixed up with fantasies of perfect love and the idea that sexual degradation was somehow in her blood.

She saw herself as the creature of rape. Promiscuity was her destiny and Doug her reward. She still believed in God, but God couldn’t love her because she consciously chose the wrong path.

Joyce thought if she satisfied Doug’s kinky sexual urges he would stay with her.

“When I was dating Doug I thought if I did every corrupt thing he could fantasize before we got married he would never cheat on me,” she said. “I put myself through hell trying to fulfill all his sexual fantasies.”

The bride wore jeans

Joyce knew there was more to life than a shoddy apartment and sex games. Looking for a better future, she signed up for six years in the Marines.

She would go to boot camp in the spring of 1983. That and living with Doug made poverty bearable.

He could be romantic. A few days before Christmas while they watched “Superman” on television at his mom’s place, Doug removed Joyce’s class ring from the fourth finger of her right hand and put a diamond ring in its place.

“There,” he said. “Does that fit better?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “But it’s on the wrong hand.”

After Doug’s brief marriage to Peggy, Joyce’s parents urged her to wait at least two years to marry him. Doug’s mother also opposed another wedding this soon.

But Doug wanted to marry Joyce before she shipped off to boot camp. He said he was afraid she would forget him and marry a handsome captain.

They wed in secret with Doug promising they would have a public wedding on their first anniversary. The brief ceremony took place in a judge’s chambers at the Spokane County Courthouse on March 18, 1983, at 8:30 a.m.

The bride and groom wore jeans. Joyce topped hers with a silver belt, a white shirt with a lace collar and a black bow that tied at the neck. Doug wore a long-sleeved shirt, brown leather vest and brown leather jacket.

The vest and jacket were leftovers from his Peggy days. So was Joyce’s engagement diamond.

Two friends never showed up, so the judge enlisted court workers to sign as witnesses.

Doug left town a day later on a truck-driving job. Joyce didn’t feel married. Somehow that made it all right to say yes to a man she always liked and enjoyed flirting with who asked her to have sex “just once” before she left for boot camp.

After that man, there were three others. One was a gay friend she thought she could convert from homosexuality.

Was she paying Doug back for Peggy? Trying once again to prove she was desirable? Making sure she had married the right man? She didn’t know. She was unfaithful just days after saying “I do.”

Lessons of boot camp

Boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., changed Joyce physically and mentally. Doug warned her to eat a lot at chow or the vigorous exercise would leave her starving. “Put whatever you can on your plate and eat as fast as you can,” he said. She gained 26 pounds.

Her hair, which reached the middle of her back, attracted repeated reprimands from drill instructors. Finally, she approached her senior drill instructor.

“Excuse me, Ma’am. The private wants to know if there’s any way the private’s going to make it if the private doesn’t cut her hair.”

“Not in my platoon, Private Macko. If you can’t cut your hair you must not want to be a Marine bad enough.”

She cut the hair Doug loved so much.

Boot camp switched on something inside her. She recognized in herself the girl who sold the most cookies in Girl Scouts and the young woman elected Honored Queen in Job’s Daughters. She worked hard, receiving an award for the highest academic record in the two platoons.

Doug jumped a cross-country bus to attend the ceremony at the end of boot camp. Joyce’s new friends had seen his picture and spotted him when he arrived.

“Macko, your husband’s here,” they told Joyce. “Man, is he good-looking.”

Standing with her platoon on the parade platform, Joyce could see Doug on the catwalk searching for her.

He scanned the faces in one platoon, then the other. His eyes rested on Joyce for several minutes. Then as if thinking “No, that couldn’t be her,” he started searching the other platoon again.

When they finally got together afterward, Doug took a long look. “Baby, you look really different,” he said. “I like it, but you look really different.”

Neither of them knew how deeply changed Joyce was.

Help from the Bible

After boot camp, Doug and Joyce’s roles changed. She now became the breadwinner. He turned into the camp follower.

They caught a bus for Millington, Tenn., where Joyce enrolled in air traffic control school.

Doug stocked supermarket shelves at night and got reacquainted with some Marine friends during the day. He sold marijuana, ignoring Joyce’s complaints he jeopardized her career. She prayed he wouldn’t get busted and he didn’t.

In October 1983, Joyce reported for duty with the Marines Air Traffic Control Squadron in Tustin, Calif.

Doug worked refilling pop machines on base, a job known as “throwing sodas” and typically filled by men married to servicewomen. The words on his baseball cap summed up his attitude toward his female boss: “You can’t fire me. Slaves have to be sold.”

Joyce was pregnant and longed to settle down. Doug still liked to go drinking at night. When she got home from work, she sometimes tried to keep him from leaving the house, only to get pushed aside.

In June, Joyce gave birth to Douglas Dale Claypool II, who would be known as Dale. The first six months with the baby were the happiest time in their marriage. Doug started reading the Bible and sometimes showed Joyce passages that spoke to him.

“It was always there for you to find,” she told him.

They moved to an apartment in Anaheim, close enough to Disneyland they could watch the fireworks from their balcony every night.

Doug quit his job and cared for Dale while Joyce worked.

Then the world shifted. Doug returned to truck driving. They moved on base. Drugs called again.

Today, Joyce wonders if she and Doug were too much alike, strong-willed, passionate and addicted - he to drugs, she to sex. As she built her military career, his habit threatened to pull them down. She rebelled by cheating on him.

She turned to the Bible. In 1 Corinthians 7:16, she read words that convinced her to stick with Doug:

“For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband, whether you will save your wife?”

Powerless to stop him

“Doug could be a real beautiful person,” California neighbor Penny Inks said. “He was real supportive to neighbors and friends when they needed it.” When Inks’ ex-husband showed up and started removing things from her apartment, Doug stopped him.

But Doug’s judgment sometimes alarmed Penny. “He once lit a joint right in front of my son, who was 4 or 5 at the time. I had to take it away from Doug and say, ‘What are you doing?”’

Dale was almost 1 when Joyce got pregnant again. Christopher Aaron Claypool was born Valentine’s Day 1986. By then, Doug worked as a process server. He met people who took cocaine and methamphetamines.

“He’d disappear for days and she didn’t know where he was,” Penny remembered.

Joyce felt powerless watching Doug’s free fall. She found syringes at home and Doug asked her to shoot up with him. She refused. She suspected he was having affairs.

One night when Joyce came home from work, the boys were asleep and Doug was missing. She found him hiding under Chris’ crib. He was high on methamphetamine and thought the military police were after him. Finally, Joyce reported Doug’s problem to the base’s drug treatment unit.

Doug entered a month-long residential treatment program in Tustin, but four hours after he got out, he was shooting up again.

Joyce prayed, and sometimes he prayed with her. He tried rehab again. For a while, he went with her to Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, a large church whose pastor had a radio program.

“I wanted to be the one to save him,” Joyce said. “But only the Lord can save.”

She knew the AIDS virus could be transmitted between drug users sharing syringes. Doug told her he never used a dirty needle.

“I asked Doug all the right questions and he told me all the right lies,” she said.

“She closed her eyes”

A possible escape from Doug’s temptations came when the Marine Corps asked Joyce to go to Japan for three years with her family. They both wanted to go.

At the last minute, her orders were changed to a one-year unaccompanied tour, meaning she would have to leave Doug and the boys behind or accept what was called “discharge for non-availability.”

She never found out if the change was based on Doug’s drug problem.

Joyce took the discharge, and the family returned to Spokane in April 1987. She got pregnant again at the end of the summer.

Doug worked at Spokane Steel Foundry, then quit to take a job on an Alaskan fishing boat. When he lost that, Joyce and the kids went on welfare. Doug entered the Salvation Army’s Booth Care Center, a drug treatment program in Spokane, in January 1988.

There was a family story that Doug’s father once cursed him by saying, “I hope you have three sons who are worse than you are.”

Doug talked about that when he said he wanted a girl this time. Joyce’s doctor wanted to induce childbirth at the end of March.

Doug suggested waiting until April 1. He wanted to foil the so-called curse with an April Fool’s Day surprise.

Kara Christena Claypool was born April 1, 1988. Doug picked her birthday. The date was also Good Friday.

They rented a house on South Perry where Joyce got to know a neighbor, Karen Dublin.

“We sat and talked during the day,” Dublin said. “We sat outside and drank coffee or sat inside and watched soap operas. We talked all day long.”

Dublin suspected Doug’s drug habit. She noticed Joyce taking the children and leaving for days, abandoning the house to Doug and his friends, some of them women with whom Doug seemed quite friendly.

“I just wouldn’t see her for a few days. Doug was on a roll. She knew she couldn’t control him when he was on a roll.

“Joyce never said a bad thing about Doug,” Dublin said. “To be honest, I don’t know another woman who would have put up with what he did to her. She closed her eyes.”

One less secret

Often on Joyce’s TV soap operas two people fell in love, but one would harbor a secret that would later tear them apart.

“Tell her now,” Joyce would say to the television. “If you’d just tell her now everything would be fine.”

One month after Kara’s birth Doug stood in the living room and told Joyce he thought he had AIDS.

“What do you mean you think you have AIDS?” Joyce asked. “Do you think you’ve been exposed? You can’t just get AIDS.”

Doug told her he visited friends who had AIDS to compare symptoms. He had trouble breathing and a dry cough. He thought he had pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, the most common life-threatening infection in people with AIDS.

“You need to be tested,” Joyce said.

“I’d rather die not knowing,” Doug said.

“You need to be tested,” she repeated. Her brain kicked into a practical mode, the air traffic controller in her taking charge as the instrument panel went wild. “Because if you have it, I need to be tested. And if I have it, the kids need to be tested.”

Saturday: A Child’s Courage.

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