An Invisible Thread (5 page)

I mean, the blood was
gushing
. Fortunately I had a good friend, Kim, who lived down the street, so I wrapped my finger in a towel and ran over to her apartment. She took me to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital, where we sat for four hours while people with real emergencies—a gunshot wound, a cratered intestine, some sort of head trauma—were wheeled in ahead of my silly kitchen mishap. Finally it was my turn, and a doctor shot up my finger with Novocain and got out a stitching needle. I started crying so loudly he brought a nurse over to help him, and then another one, and the three of them did their best to keep me conscious while sealing up my fingertip with eight stitches. What can I say? I’ve been terrified of needles since I was a little girl.

When I got home just before midnight, I collapsed into bed. I hadn’t eaten a thing, hadn’t done my hair, hadn’t painted my nails. Early the next morning I bolted out of bed, threw my hair in a ponytail, and rushed to my interview on West 46th Street. Somehow I got there at seven fifteen, just as planned. The guy interviewing me, David, came in the waiting room, took a look at my heavily bandaged finger, and asked what happened.

“Oh, I cut my finger last night.”

“I hope it wasn’t serious.”

“No, no, not too bad.”

“Did you need stitches?”

“Yeah, eight of them.”

“Eight?” he said. “By God, you almost cut your finger off.”

Then he looked at his watch.

“You know, this is a highly competitive business, and punctuality is extremely important. I’m impressed you got eight stitches last night and you’re still fifteen minutes early.”

My interview was off to a good start.

David walked me over to his desk in a big bullpen office and frowned as he looked over my résumé. “You have no sales experience,” he said. “You have no advertising experience. You didn’t go to college.”

I’d expected to hear that, and I knew just what to say.

“Look,” I told him, “I know I don’t have a lot of experience. But I can tell you this. If you think
you
work hard, just watch me because I will work twice as hard as you. And if you hire me, I can promise you this: you will never, ever regret it.”

And then the clincher:

“David, I’m not looking for a lot of breaks in life. But I
am
looking for
one
.”

David hired me three days later. Sometimes one good break is all you need.

When I met Maurice, I’d long since buried the last of any insecurity I felt at not having a degree. I’d certainly never lied about it if anyone brought it up—“No, I never went to college,” I’d say
before steering the conversation elsewhere—but by 1986 this thing that had been a burden to me was now a badge of honor. I was the scrappy underdog, raised from humble roots and making her way in the world just fine.

I had a closet full of stylish Albert Nipon dresses and a silver LeBaron in the garage. I had a fabulous tan-canvas-and-brown-leather Ghurka attaché case I had paid three hundred dollars for and a Ghurka appointment book to match. I filled my cozy L-shaped studio at the Symphony with nice furniture and, every now and then, fresh flowers, and all these things—all the markers that in 1980s Manhattan defined how successful you were as a person—all these material comforts, truly and genuinely made me happy.

But they did not make me feel
fulfilled
. Even then, I had a vague sense something was missing. I was pursuing one dream—having a successful career—at the expense of everything else. I loved what I did, and I did it with passion, but my job was so consuming I didn’t have time to realize what I was missing out on in life. There was almost nothing that could pull my attention away from work.

But for a couple of days after meeting Maurice, I was distracted. I made my phone calls and went to my meetings, yet found myself thinking about him a lot. I wanted to know more about him, starting with why he was on the streets begging for change.

I decided I wasn’t going to wait for Maurice to call me.

I was going to go out and find him.

The Thursday after my lunch with Maurice, at the end of a long day at work, I went back to the corner where we met. I didn’t see him at first—it was around seven thirty, the end of rush hour, and the sidewalks were still busy. But then, in the very spot where I had left him, there he was. He was wearing the same ratty burgundy sweats, the same dirty white sneakers. When he saw me coming, he smiled. This time, the smile didn’t vanish so quickly.

“Hi, Maurice,” I said.

“Hello, Miss Laura.” I was surprised by the formality. Someone along the way had taught him to be polite.

“How are you, Maurice? Are you hungry?”

“I’m starving.”

We went back to McDonald’s. He ordered the same thing as
before—Big Mac, fries, thick chocolate shake—and I did, too. This time, Maurice ate more slowly. I asked him to tell me about his family.

He explained that he lived at the welfare hotel with his mother, Darcella; his grandmother Rose; and his sisters, Celeste and LaToya. This was the truth, but not the whole truth, as I would later learn. Early on, Maurice did not share all the details of his life and withheld the particularly grim ones. I thought at the time it was because he was embarrassed. Or maybe he didn’t want to scare me away. If he’d wanted my sympathy, he would have told me one or two of the really bad things about his life, but he didn’t. He wasn’t looking for anyone’s sympathy. He was only looking to survive.

“What about your father?” I asked.

“He’s not around.”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s just gone.”

“What about your mother? Does she know you’re out here on the street?”

“Nah, she don’t care.”

I couldn’t believe this was true, but then, I knew nothing about his mother’s life. Maurice came and went as he pleased; no one ever asked him where he’d been or where he was going, no matter the time of day or night. He answered to no one, and, in turn, no one really looked out for him.

When I met him, Maurice had received only two gifts his entire life.

One was a little Hess truck his uncle Dark gave him when he was four.

The other was a present from Grandmother Rose on his sixth birthday.

“Here you go,” she said, handing him a tiny white thing.

It was a joint.

Grandmother Rose was four foot eleven and hard as a two-by-four. Born in the backwoods of North Carolina, she grew up in dire poverty and learned early on how to handle adversity. She handled it by being tougher than anyone who stood in her way. Rose was pretty, with bright eyes and a curling smile, and men fought for her attention. But sooner or later they all learned the same thing: Rose took nonsense from no one. She liked to say, “I’ll take you off the count,” which meant she’d kill you and wipe you off the grid.

This was no idle threat: Rose always carried a sharp straight razor she nicknamed “Betsy.”

Maurice liked tagging along with Rose; he liked her toughness. They were together on the subway when a man made the mistake of stepping on Rose’s Timberland boots. Rose got up and pushed the man clear down the subway car, yelling, “Jack, step back, my Timberlands in the way!”

The man, overmatched, could only say, “Lady, you’re crazy.”

That’s when Maurice, just a kid, told him, “Yo, you better shut up.” He knew if the man said the wrong thing, he’d get Betsy.

Even those closest to Rose were vulnerable. One of her boyfriends, Charlie, was a tall and skinny fellow with a pretty bad stutter. Maurice got a kick out of their bickering, because Charlie’s stuttered taunts just sounded silly. But then one night Charlie went too far.

“R-R-R-R-Rosa,” he said. “I will m-m-m-m-mess you up.”

Rose jumped at him with Betsy in her hand and sliced him from his face down to his chest. Maurice, too shocked to cower, stood there watching Charlie bleed all over the sofa.

“Y-Y-Y-You’re crazy!” is all Charlie could say.

Rose told him, “You’re lucky I missed the jugular.”

Rose had six sons who stayed in her orbit long into adulthood, spinning away and inevitably slinking back. Maurice knew them as his uncles—a collection of men who, for better or worse, showed him how to live on the streets.

The oldest was an ex-Marine who returned from Vietnam more than a little off. Maurice enjoyed his walks with Uncle E, except when he would suddenly take off running and leave Maurice in the street. Later, Maurice would ask, “Uncle E, what happened?”

“Didn’t you seem ’em?” he would say. “The Viet Cong. They was chasing me. Those slant-eyed bastards was chasing me.”

Like all his brothers, Uncle E was in the drug business, but he was a minor player, a low-stakes guy. More often than not his brothers kept him away from the deals and only called on him to help with enforcement. He was good at it, not because he was especially strong or violent, but because he enjoyed cooking up schemes to isolate and punish his family’s rivals. “War training,” he’d say.

There was also Uncle Dark, named for his dark skin. He was the smart one, or at least smart enough to rustle up occasional work on a meat-delivery truck while also dealing cocaine during his shift. Before long, he gave up on legitimate work and threw himself full-time into dealing drugs. He had a reputation in Brooklyn as a gangster
dealer: he’d sell you what you needed, but if you somehow got on his bad side, you’d quickly regret it.

Another brother was known to everyone as Uncle Limp, because he had a bad leg. When he was in prison, he’d signed up with the Five Percent Nation, a Harlem offshoot of the Nation of Islam, and he had a lot of theories about God and the devil and the role of the black man in society. Every time he went to jail, he came back with bigger and fancier words, until no one knew what he was saying. “The Asiatic black man is a personification of the esoteric powers of God,” he’d announce. To Maurice, he was the uncle who made no sense.

Uncle Old, the second-oldest brother, was the meanest of the bunch. They called him Uncle Old, because he seemed like the old man of the group, in that he took care of business with ruthless authority. He was short, like Maurice’s father, and he was reflexively violent—he believed boys like Maurice needed a whipping at home in order to learn how to fight on the streets. And so Maurice absorbed a torrent of smacks and punches from him. When Maurice was young, he heard rumors Uncle Old had killed several men.

Uncle Old was also the biggest and most successful drug dealer of all the uncles. When the crack epidemic hit New York City like a hurricane in the 1980s, he made his mark, buying cocaine from Dominican distributors on 145th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, then bringing it home to cook into crack and resell in Brooklyn. Sometimes he’d take young Maurice with him to pick up the drugs. Men with machine guns frisked Maurice for weapons, then held a pistol to his head while his uncle scored the drugs. Maurice, just ten, did not feel scared to have a gun trained on him. He’d learned by then that this was just procedure.

The baby of the group, just four years older than Maurice, wasn’t nearly as hardened. He was the handsome one, the one the girls loved, and Maurice knew him as Uncle Nice or sometimes Uncle Cassanova. He was also one of the smarter brothers, though that didn’t do him much good. As a drug dealer he was hapless and often wound up in jail. He is in federal prison today, doing ten years for drug trafficking.

And there was the aspiring hip-hopper, who gave himself the rap name Juice. Uncle Juice was terrified of police and so never joined his brothers in dealing drugs. But he smoked more marijuana than all of them combined. His fondness for pot kept him in a perpetual haze, spinning rhymes that went nowhere, like his dreams. On 9/11, Uncle Juice should have been at the World Trade Center where he sometimes worked as a freelance messenger. But that day he was too high to get in on time and, instead, watched the first plane hit the Twin Towers on TV.

“Michelle,” he told his wife, “I ain’t going in today ’cause a plane hit my building.”

“Derek, stop playing,” she said.

Uncle Juice then noticed the tower he worked in had not been hit, so he put on his clothes and got ready to go in. He was lacing up his sneakers when the second plane struck.

“Plane hit the other building,” he announced, plopping on the sofa and rolling another joint. “Now I really ain’t going in.”

A few days later, Maurice asked him, “Uncle Juice, do you know how lucky you are?”

“Not lucky,” Juice said. “I knew the planes were coming. The rats in the towers told me.”

“And that,” he told Maurice, by way of offering a little advice, as uncles often do, “is why you never go to work on time.”

Over the years the uncles came and went. Sometimes none of them were around; sometimes only one or two; other times all six. To Maurice, they were family. They were the only family he knew.

And together with his mother and his grandmother, they were the people who cared most about him in the world. By outside standards they may not have appeared to care much about Maurice at all, but in a city that seemed hostile, in a series of welfare hotels and shelters that housed the crazy and the violent, Maurice’s relatives were his only protectors. He knew whose side he was on. He knew where he was safest, if not from all harm, then at least from the worst of it.