An Invisible Thread (22 page)

One day at his grandmother’s Section 8 apartment in Brooklyn, Maurice counted the number of people in the tiny room. There were twelve. Not all of them lived there, but they were there a lot—cousins, uncles, friends, drug connections, people from the neighborhood, addicts sleeping it off. This was the way Maurice lived: fighting for space in a filthy room. But after his mother was sent to prison—after he lost the one person he loved most of all—Maurice couldn’t take the craziness anymore. And so he just left.

Maurice knew the streets well. Big dining rooms and giant jugs of quarters and gift-wrapped presents might baffle him, but the streets were something he understood in and out. He’d grown at least three inches since I’d met him, and he was tall for his age, lean and strong—closer now to being a man than a boy. He was
confident in his ability to survive off the grid; he knew how to scrounge for meals and elude cops and act tough when he had to. And, at least two or three times a month, he could still meet me in the city. Those meetings, I found out, were more important for Maurice than ever. They were the only dose of normalcy in a world that was becoming increasingly hostile to him.

Maurice knew where he would sleep—at the rundown Kung Fu Theater on 42nd Street in Times Square. It was officially known as the Times Square Theater, but they ran kung fu movies around the clock. Maurice would panhandle the money for a ticket, find a seat in the back, curl up there, and sleep through the night, the shrill cracks of kung fu fights filling his head. During the day he’d panhandle for more ticket money and go to the theater across the street to watch the Eddie Murphy movie
Coming to America
over and over again. He must have seen it three hundred times. He knew all the dialogue by heart.

He’d sneak into the YMCA on West 59th Street to steal a shower, and every once in a while he’d go back to Brooklyn to check on his grandmother. He never stayed long, and no one asked where he was going or where he slept. For a while he still attended I.S. 131, but eventually he was moved to another school—an alternative school. He didn’t know what that meant until he noticed most of the students had profound mental and emotional problems. He didn’t feel he belonged, and after just a few months he stopped going. By the time he was sixteen, he was done with school altogether.

The challenge for Maurice now was to find a way to make money. He didn’t want to panhandle anymore. There was an obvious solution, a blindingly apparent and available option: he could, like
nearly every other man in his life, sell drugs. There was nothing else that would earn him anywhere near the amount of money he could make from selling crack. He’d seen how lucrative the business was, watched his uncles peel off twenties and hundreds from fat rolls of bills. And he knew how to do it: knew where to buy the drugs, how to cut them, where to sell them. He could have walked into the drug trade in a second and made hundreds of dollars his first day. When he was homeless and living in a movie theater, he thought about it—thought about it long and hard. He was fighting himself and trying to find a reason he shouldn’t give in to the call and the cash of crack.

But something held him back. Something told him it was a dead-end choice. Instead, Maurice walked into a messenger agency in midtown Manhattan. These were agencies that hired young men and teenagers to ferry packages from company to company on foot. The first agency sent Maurice away, and the second, and the third, but he kept at it. Finally, Bullet Messenger Manpower agreed to give him a try. Maurice picked up files and letters and legal documents and ran them across town, into subways, and up and down the island of Manhattan, making around eight dollars an hour. He gave up panhandling for good.

Maurice liked getting a paycheck and cashing it and having money he’d earned with good, hard work. He liked the money so much, he wanted more. He’d seen how it takes smarts and energy to be successful at selling drugs, and he knew he had both. He knew he could outhustle anyone on the streets. He knew he could master the salesmanship: the buying and selling and moving of merchandise. So he got in the business of selling—not drugs, but blue jeans.

Maurice would go to Chinatown and buy knockoff Guess jeans for seven dollars a pair, then resell them for as much as forty dollars. This was the late ’80s, and the bootleg jeans business was burgeoning in New York City. At first he sold the jeans to other messengers, then branched out to drug dealers and their girlfriends. He found he could make several hundred dollars a week selling jeans. Every few days he went to Brooklyn and gave some of the money to his grandmother, so she could buy food and take care of herself. He didn’t tell her where he got the money, and she didn’t ask. Maurice knew that selling fake jeans was illegal, but he was homeless, destitute, and uncertain about his future. Under those circumstances, drawing a clear line between right and wrong is not always a simple thing to do. The imperative for Maurice was to stay alive and to make enough money to help his family; under that pressure, the choice he made—to sell blue jeans instead of crack cocaine—was, to him, the right and reasonable choice.

After a while, Maurice made enough to move out of the Kung Fu Theater. He began renting a room for forty-five dollars a night at a cheap hotel—the kind of place that rented by the hour, mostly to hookers and johns. It was dirty and noisy and dangerous, but to Maurice it was something else as well.

It was the first time in his life he had his own room, his own bed, his own shower.

In this way, Maurice survived. At one point, he checked into Covenant House, a home for wayward and runaway youth in Times Square, but Maurice didn’t like it there and quickly checked out. He even did something that was once unthinkable, he walked into the offices of the Bureau of Child Welfare. He hoped they’d send him
to a group home for boys where at least he’d get meals and a bed and a chance to figure things out. Instead, they pored through his files and discovered they’d once entrusted him to his grandmother’s care. They found out where she lived and sent Maurice right back to where he started.

So Maurice went right back out on the street.

And then his mother came home. She was released from prison after two and a half years, and the city assigned her a spot in a shelter in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Darcella was then given a two-room apartment, which meant Maurice could move in with her. And that’s what he did. It was just the two of them—his older sisters had moved in with boyfriends—and it was the best living arrangement Maurice had ever had. His mother was clean, at least for a while, and there were no cousins or uncles or drug fiends crowding them out. It was just Darcella and Maurice, a mother and her son.

Until the day Maurice came home and saw a short, skinny man sitting in the kitchen talking to his mother.

“Who’s that?” Maurice asked her.

“That’s your father,” she said.

He hadn’t seen his father since he was six years old—the day his mother showed up with a hammer to bring him home. That summer, Morris had asked to have his son live with him, and, for whatever reason, Darcella agreed. In those three months, Maurice nearly died of malnutrition. He developed ringworm and lost so much weight his ribs showed through his skin. His father’s gross neglect may have proved fatal, but Darcella arrived just in time and chased away Morris and his girlfriend with a hammer, taking her boy back
home. After that, Maurice’s father disappeared from his life. Now, many years later, he was back.

Maurice couldn’t believe how weak and frail his father was. The swagger and fearsomeness was gone; now he just looked old. Even so, the bad memories were still there, and Maurice wasn’t happy to see him.

“What’s he doin’ here?” he asked his mother. “Get him out.”

With that, Maurice turned and left, saying nothing to his father.

Not much later he heard through the streets that Morris had AIDS. Maybe he had contracted it through a dirty needle, maybe unprotected sex. Maurice would see his father on the street and steer clear of him, but he couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, too. Morris was once the most powerful man he knew, scared of no one, a terror to all, and here he was shuffling around like a man twice his age. One day Maurice saw his father stumble and fall on the sidewalk. Without thinking, he ran and helped him up. After that, they spoke every once in a while, which gave Maurice the chance to ask the question he’d always wanted to ask: “Man, why did you have to be that way? I should have wanted to be just like you, but you made me want to be nothing like you. Why’d you have to be that way?”

His father, his voice a near whisper, said, “It was the only way I knew.”

And then he apologized, over and over. “I’m sorry, son,” he said. “Don’t you know how sorry I am? Don’t ever be like me. I don’t want you to be like me.”

Maurice watched his father get weaker and skinnier. Toward the end, he ran into Maurice on the street and stopped him for a talk.

“I know I never did much of anything for you, but there’s one thing I want you to do for me.”

Maurice braced himself for the request.

“The one thing I ask of you,” he said, “is that you name your son Maurice.”

Maurice had always hated his name, because it had been his father’s name and his father’s name before that. He knew he would never give his own son that name, not in a million years. But the old man was sick and Maurice felt compassion, so he said to his father, “Yeah, okay, I will.”

A few days later, a neighbor told Maurice that his father had died that morning. It was Halloween day. Maurice went to the apartment where his father had been staying and found him lying on the floor beside a mattress. Maurice bent down and picked up his father, laying him on the bed. He was startled by how light he was. The toughest guy in Brooklyn, the king of the Tomahawks, was now just skin and bones. Maurice waited until an ambulance arrived. He watched the EMTs take his father away. Then he left the apartment and walked into the street.

At the time it happened, Maurice didn’t tell me his father had died. He was shielding me, as he usually did, from a sad and difficult chapter in his life, but the complex emotions he had for his father—the ragged, scarring, unfinished nature of their relationship—was something I would have been able to relate to. I could grasp as well
as anyone how a muddied family history could impact us as adults—how the things we carry with us from childhood define who we become.

Aside from our disagreements about Maurice—and that was no small thing—Michael and I were doing well as a married couple. Michael never said I couldn’t have Maurice in my life, and I kept seeing him. Eventually, Michael came with me to see him, and the three of us shared many meals and outings. Michael could see Maurice was special and finally began to understand why he was so important to me. He even relented and allowed me to invite Maurice to our home for Christmas one year. Nancy and her husband and Steven came up, too, and we all had a wonderful time—but it just wasn’t like the old days at Annette’s house. I still cannot say Michael ever bonded with Maurice in any meaningful way; he always kept a wall up between them. I was happy to have Maurice in our lives as much as he was, but it became painfully clear that my dream of having him move in with us was never going to happen. I never even brought it up.

Michael’s stubbornness worried me on another front, too. I was over forty years old now, and my window for having a baby was closing. Having children was not something Michael and I had specifically discussed before we got married, and, in hindsight, that was a terrible mistake. At the time, I was having so much fun with him and was so wrapped up in the romance that it didn’t occur to me to sit him down and have that conversation. I knew he loved me, and I assumed that’s what people who love each other do—have kids. I didn’t think it was going to be an issue.

So it was more than a year into our marriage when I finally sat him down and had the talk.

“I want to have a family,” I said. “I want to have children.”

Michael looked down at the floor, then back up at me.

“I’m not interested in having another kid,” he said.

I’d expected a little hemming and hawing, but his matter-of-fact tone, his decisiveness, was a shock. I told him how important it was to me to have children and what a great mother I was going to be, and wasn’t he even a little interested in seeing what our child would be like?

“Not even in the slightest,” he said.

He had two grown sons and loved them dearly. He was fiercely proud of them, but in his mind he was done raising children and that was that. I told him I would do all the work. I told him I’d get up for all the feedings. I told him I’d pay for a nanny—anything to make it as easy as possible. But Michael, as he had been about Maurice, didn’t budge. I kept at him, kept bringing it up; in about our thirtieth argument he finally laid down the law.

“It’s not up for discussion, Laura,” he said. “I’m absolutely not going to do it.”

I shrank away from him, defeated. I took my wound, nursed it as best I could, and I waited for it to heal and disappear. But what caused that wound remained as a source of pain. Over time that pain turned into resentment, and I tried to push that resentment down as far as it would go so I could keep on living. But it stayed there, below the surface but not that far down at all.

And so I slowly let go of my dream. I’d always wanted to have two children, because I never wanted my son or daughter to be an
only child. When I turned forty-two, I realized I’d all but run out of time to have two kids. Even if I could somehow miraculously convince Michael to change his mind, I’d probably only be able to have one child. It struck me that this would be selfish—that I’d be thinking only about myself and not about the child. I don’t remember when exactly it happened. Maybe there wasn’t a single moment, or day, or week. But over time, the dream that for years had been a nearly consuming passion simply ceased to be.

All of our stories, as much as they are about anything, are about loss. And, perhaps, they are about what might have been. I wanted happy, loving parents who danced waltzes in the living room. I wanted children of my own, desperately. We all want relationships that are healthy and resolved, and sometimes that simply doesn’t happen. But the beauty of life is that inside these disappointments are hidden the most miraculous of blessings. What we lose and what might have been pales against what we have.