An Invisible Thread (8 page)

The Bryant was in a busy but run-down stretch of midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks up from Times Square. It was a squat twelve-story building, with a limestone façade giving way to a corroded brick exterior. Down the block was the Ed Sullivan Theater that today houses the David Letterman show but in those days was where they taped the CBS sitcom
Kate & Allie
. Maurice would later tell me the sitcom helped him survive. He would go into the theater during tapings and sit in the audience, then go backstage and eat food set out on tables for the crew. After a while people assumed the boom guy, a tall black man, was his dad. The crew got to know him and let him hang around, but then the show went off the air. It was a good ride while it lasted.

Lisa and I walked up to the entrance of the Bryant. On the sidewalk outside, men and women milled around talking and yelling and laughing, and several children played and chased one another around parked cars. They were about Maurice’s age and I looked to see if he was there, but he wasn’t. We walked up three concrete steps and through the front door into the Bryant’s wide lobby, and there, too, life was spilling over: old women and young children and loud men—a noisy, chaotic scene. The lobby reeked of something: a stale, dirty smell. The walls were painted a glossy beige, and whatever furniture had once been there was long gone. The floors were grimy and littered with newspapers and coffee cups. Two overhead fluorescent bars lit the lobby with an eerie, flickering glow.

On one side, a uniformed guard sat in a small Plexiglas booth. He looked us over as we walked in and slid open a partition so he could hear us.

“We are friends of Maurice Mazyck,” I said. “We’d like to go up and see him.”

“Maurice, the little kid?” he said. “You know him?”

“Yes, we’re friends of his.”

The guard looked suspicious, but he came out of his booth and walked us to the elevators. The main elevator, with a crudely painted black door covered with scrawled graffiti, wasn’t working. The guard took us a little farther back to the freight elevator. He rang a buzzer, and another uniformed guard arrived to take us upstairs. The freight elevator rattled up to the fifth floor. The hallway was dark and dreary: no carpet, crumbling plaster walls, scattered trash, a strong smell of fried food. The baseboards were black with soot. Everything was strangely quiet, compared to the lobby. Save for a distant raised
voice, it seemed all but abandoned. We came to apartment 502, marked only by two numbered stickers—the 5 was missing—and the guard stood behind us, watching. I looked at Lisa, and her face told me she was thinking the same thing I was—we had crossed over into a world neither of us knew existed. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door of 502.

For a long time, nothing happened. No one stirred inside. I knocked again—still nothing.

“Go ahead. Knock again,” the guard said.

Finally, I heard a sound inside the apartment: shuffling footsteps coming to the door. A lock turned slowly, then another. The door creaked open.

A woman appeared and leaned against the doorframe. She had on brown sweatpants with no drawstring; the pants were sliding down past her underwear. She had on a stained white T-shirt and nothing on her feet. Her dark hair was matted and wild. Some of it covered her face; some of it stuck straight up. I couldn’t tell how old she was. She might have been eighteen or forty. She was bone-thin, and her movements were in slow motion. Her knees seemed close to buckling. She looked in our direction, but I could see she did not register our presence. She was in some kind of trance, awake but not really conscious. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but only a slurred, mumbled sound came out. She propped her head against the door frame. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

This was Maurice’s mother, Darcella.

There were many, many nights in Brooklyn when Darcella did not know where she and her children would sleep. The girls, Celeste
and LaToya, weren’t even ten yet, and Maurice was a tiny wisp of a thing, barely six. Their father, Morris, had just disappeared for good, so they were on their own. Some nights they stayed in shelters; some nights, with a cousin. Some nights Darcella would bring the children with her to a friend’s house to do drugs, and she’d pass out there. Maurice and his sisters would huddle together in a corner and sleep until morning came.

Some nights, the family would be rousted from wherever they were staying and sent into the streets. Maybe they’d overstayed their welcome in a cousin’s apartment; maybe there had been a fight at a shelter. Darcella would walk with her children down desolate streets, heading nowhere, and sing to them so they would feel less afraid. She had a beautiful voice; when she was younger she had sung in a church choir. Maurice loved hearing her sing. He liked when she sang uplifting gospel hymns, but most of all Maurice loved it when his mother made up songs on the spot. She’d point out something on the street and work it into a lyric: an abandoned car, a stray cat, a junkie in an alley. And the sweet, lilting chorus was always the same:

How can this be
Me and my three
Living so desperately

If they were lucky, they found a shelter to take them in for the night.

Darcella—uncommonly pretty, with dimples that sprang up whenever she smiled—began doing drugs shortly after Maurice was born. By then, everyone in her life was already an addict: her
husband, her many brothers, even her mother. The places she lived were havens for dealers and drug fiends. It was as if a relentless tide finally swept her under. When Maurice was an infant, she became addicted to heroin.

The addiction consumed her whole. She shot heroin into her veins right in front of her children. Young Maurice watched her drug ritual without understanding what it meant. All he knew was that when it was over, his mother was happy, and so it did not seem to him to be a hideous thing. He’d watch as Darcella gathered her works: the cap to a ketchup bottle, a syringe, a thick rubber band, a strip of tin foil, a cotton ball, a lighter, and a glassine packet of heroin. He’d watch as she filled the cap with water and gripped it with a pair of pliers. Then the heroin went in and on top of it a cotton ball that absorbed the dope. Then the lighter beneath the cap, heating it all up. She’d roll up the cotton ball and stick the syringe into it, drawing the heroin into the needle. Then she’d wrap the rubber band around her arm and pull it tight until a vein popped up and then press the needle into the vein and push down. Toward the end of a stash of heroin, after she’d shot up many times, she wouldn’t be able to find a vein in her arm, so she’d shoot herself in a branch of the ulnar artery in her hand, between the index and middle fingers.

As she injected, she’d say, “Oh, that’s good,” and her head would tilt back. She would hum a tune and wave her hand through the air to the melody, and she would drift, drift, drift away until there was no pain at all.

For Maurice, these were the best moments—when his mother found her peace. It was the moments that came before it, when she was fidgety, angry, hopelessly restless, that upset Maurice and made
him want to help his mother somehow. It happened once on the subway, the agitation and restlessness, and Darcella pulled out her works right there, right in front of everyone.

“Stand up around me,” she told her children, and Maurice and his sisters formed a wall so no one could see her shoot up. A minute later it was over, and the children sat down. Darcella was drifting and people were staring, but Maurice didn’t care, because his mother was happy now and that’s all that mattered to him.

Maurice did not understand what his mother was doing to herself, nor did he comprehend what she did to pay for her habit. All he knew was that men would come into their apartment—strange men—and leave a short while later. Sometimes, though, the men would never make it past the doorway. Sometimes they walked straight into a trap.

When they were living in the dangerous Marcy Projects in Bed-Stuy, Darcella often lured men to her apartment and gave them sex in exchange for money or drugs. But, more often than not, the promise of sex was just a ruse. Usually this happened late at night, while Maurice and his sisters were asleep on the tiger-striped living room sofa, but sometimes Maurice would be awake and watch it all go down. His uncle Juice, then sixteen, would stand behind the door holding a ten-pound dumbbell. He’d wait until Darcella brought the man inside, then jump out and hit the man on the head with the weight. They’d rifle through his pockets and take everything. Then Uncle Juice would drag him down to the lobby and leave him there. One time Juice didn’t even bother going to the lobby; he cold-cocked his victim, pushed him into the hallway, and left him there.
A short while later, cops knocked on the door and asked Darcella if she knew the man on the floor outside her apartment. She shrugged and said no, closed the door, came inside, and shot up the heroin she’d stolen.

Another night Maurice was awakened by screams. Uncle Juice had clocked a john, but he hadn’t hit him square and the man was still conscious—dazed and bleeding, but conscious. The man ran into the apartment, right past Maurice, screaming for help with Juice on his heels. The man ran into the bathroom, and Juice followed. There were loud bangs and more screams, and Maurice, terrified but curious, came around and peeked into the bathroom. He saw the man wedged between the tub and the toilet, trying to shield himself from Juice’s blows. The man was begging, pleading, cowering, and Darcella came in and said, “Give up the money.” Finally the man threw out a few crumpled bills. Darcella scooped them up, looked them over, and said, “How you think you gonna get anything with this?” Uncle Juice tried to find an angle to hit the man flush, and the man pleaded again for his life. Maurice saw then, for the first time, the cold, cold face of fear in a grown man, and it chilled him to the bone. When Grandma Rose finally came into the bathroom, he felt relief, because she would stop the assault and send the poor man on his way. The man seemed to sense this, too, and said to Rose, “Please, please, help me, please.”

Rose told Juice, “Club him and get him out of here. We tryin’ to sleep.”

Juice hit the man again, and the man finally gave in. They fleeced him and dragged him out, closing the door behind him.

Other times, it wasn’t strange men who came to the apartment;
it was the police: loud banging on the door and three or four uniformed cops coming in, grabbing Darcella by the arms and dragging her away handcuffed while Maurice and his sisters yelled for them to let her go, let her go. Darcella would come back later that day and disappear into a brand-new batch of heroin. Many years later Maurice learned his mother was a part-time informant for the NYPD. She’d rat out drug dealers at the Marcy Projects, and in exchange the cops would cut off a bit of the heroin they confiscated and let her keep it. When they wanted to talk to her, they’d come and arrest her, so her cover wouldn’t be blown.

But then Darcella vanished for a week. She finally returned in a wheelchair, both legs in full-length casts. She told Maurice she’d been in a car accident, and he believed her. Until he started hearing whispers on the streets. The projects talk, and Maurice learned a drug dealer had discovered his mother was a snitch and broken both her legs. Maurice asked his uncles about it; they told him to shut up.

Drugs were a part of Maurice’s life as far back as his memory goes and even farther. Drugs nearly killed him when he was just one. After his birth in Kings County Hospital on Clarkson Avenue in Brooklyn, Maurice and his family moved in with his mother’s older sister, Belinda, in a run-down two-story house. Young Maurice liked to sleep in his aunt’s bed in her second-floor room, and most nights that was fine with her. But some nights Aunt Belinda got high on cocaine, and if she smoked too much coke, she’d have Maurice stay with his mother on the first floor.

On one of those nights, not long after shooing Maurice away, Aunt Belinda accidentally lit her bed on fire. Her boyfriend tried
to douse it, but he used alcohol instead of water and only made it worse. Firemen came and put out the blaze, but by then Aunt Belinda had burned to death. The bed where Maurice normally slept was a charred black pile of ash.

Between that fire and the time I met him, Maurice lived in at least twenty different apartments, shelters, or welfare hotels. He’d moved more often than most people do in a lifetime, often after just a day or two in one place. For a while his family lived in the Van Dyke Houses, a public housing complex in Brownsville known then and now for its rampant crime and drugs. From there they moved to the infamous Marcy Projects, a similarly sprawling collection of neglected buildings and concrete courtyards.

The next stop was an Emergency Assistance Unit—a temporary shelter for families on their way to other, more permanent housing. After a short stay there, they were on to the Roberto Clemente shelter in the Bronx, six hundred cots in the middle of a warehouse and two bathrooms. Maurice had his own cot, but not for long: some clothing was stolen, Darcella confronted some people, and a fight broke out. After just three days it was back to the EAU.

From there they moved to a shelter on Forbell Street, on the border of Queens and Brooklyn. This one was better—eight or nine rooms with twenty cots in each. A modest cafeteria, even a small rec room for kids. But the Fordell was not permanent housing, so after five months it was time to move again. A series of seedy, dangerous welfare hotels came next: the Bullshippers Lodge in Brooklyn, a motel by the airport in Queens, a nameless place on Washington Avenue—filthy, dreary rooms with mirrors on the ceiling and mice crawling up the walls. Between families some of the rooms were
used by hookers; on the way in Maurice would often find semen or condoms on the sheets. After a few days it was back to Fordell, before being shipped out again.

Finally, the family was back at EAU. But since they’d been in the system so long, they were given a take-it-or-leave-it choice. It was either the Brooklyn Arms or the streets. The Brooklyn Arms, Maurice had heard people say, was the worst of New York City’s sixty notorious welfare hotels. You’ll get mugged there. You could get killed there. Destitute people often chose the streets over the Brooklyn Arms, feeling they’d be safer. And now Maurice was on his way there—the very worst place he could imagine.