An Invisible Thread Read online

  The really big prize for me was American Express. Their ad team was flirting with the idea of buying space in USA Today, but they weren’t at all sure if we could deliver the kind of production quality they insisted on for their ads. I spent months and months cajoling them to take the plunge. I knew that getting such a prestigious account would be huge for the paper and also pretty important for me. My contacts there were two imposing, impenetrable women, and for countless meetings and lunches I felt like I was getting nowhere. But then, one afternoon, I was at my desk when one of the stoic women called: American Express was in for two pages. If they were happy with how the ad looked and where it was positioned, I was pretty sure they’d end up buying more. And they did, eventually running nearly a hundred pages of ads. That was a huge score for me, my proudest moment at USA Today. When I met Maurice, I was at the top of my game.

  It was a long, long way from where I had come.

  My dream, coming out of high school in Huntington Station, the town in Long Island where I grew up, didn’t require that I get a college degree. What I really wanted to be was a stewardess. I’d been a terrible student, anyway, and the only thing I knew I wanted to do was get out of my hometown and see the world. I figured working in the airline industry was the way to make that happen.

  But first, I got a job as a secretary at an insurance firm. I worked for three sweet old guys in fat ties and short-sleeve shirts, typing letters, taking dictation, answering phones. Since my office skills weren’t quite up to snuff, I signed up for secretarial school, and it was there, amid the clacking Remingtons, that I met a woman who worked for Icelandic Airlines.

  She told me they were hiring office staffers. Not my dream job, to be sure—I’d be at a desk instead of in the clouds—but it was a start. I made an appointment with the airline to take a typing test, and I practiced my typing night after night. When I took the test I marshaled every last bit of my focus and walked out sure I’d banged out sixty immaculate words in a minute.

  I failed the test.

  I was mortified, so I asked the administrator—no, pleaded—if I could walk around the block and come back and take the test again. “Please, please, I was nervous. I didn’t do anywhere near my best.” The administrator took pity on me and sent me around the block, and when I came back I took a deep breath and pounded the keys again.

  And I failed again.

  Now the administrator really felt sorry for me. My two failed tests gave me a chance to talk to her, to blow past the formality and be a real person, vulnerable but determined, a little goofy but a lot resourceful—and this, I would soon learn, was my strength. The administrator decided she liked me, and she recommended me for a job as a receptionist.

  On the way to work on my last day at the insurance firm, driving along Northern State Parkway in my beloved beige 1964 Volkswagon, I felt like my life, at nineteen, was finally beginning. I passed a car carrying two nuns, and they looked at me and gave me two beatific smiles. I smiled back as beatifically as I could. Then I said, “See you later, girls,” and I gunned the VW. I moved from the slow lane into the fast lane, and then I felt myself lose control of the car—I’d cut across a crevice in the pavement dividing the lanes, and the car jumped just for an instant. My hands came off the wheel, and before I knew it the car was swerving toward the metal parkway divider. I got really scared, grabbed the wheel, and turned it sharply to the right. The VW spun around three times before flipping over and landing upside down on the side of the road.

  And then there was silence, and broken glass was everywhere. I was lying on the inside roof of the car, staring up at the seats. I looked to my left and I saw them—the two nuns, worried looks on their faces. A businessman who pulled over after seeing the accident took off his suit jacket, laid it across the bottom of the broken driver’s-side window, and pulled me out. The nuns tried to comfort me as I cried hysterically.

  An ambulance took me to the hospital, and I learned that other than a couple of black eyes and losing my voice from all the crying, there was nothing wrong with me, I’d survived the crash without a scratch. I looked around for the two nuns, but they weren’t there. Maybe they had been my guardian angels, cushioning me from more serious injury. Maybe God had other plans for me.

  The Icelandic office was on 50th Street and Fifth Avenue, the very heart of Manhattan. Across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a hundred yards from Saks Fifth Avenue, around the corner from 30 Rock—I felt like I was “That Girl,” and if I’d worn a beret I’d have tossed it in the air every day. The job wasn’t too exciting—I answered phones, ushered people in and out, that kind of thing—but I still loved it because the experience was new and exciting. Eventually I got promoted to secretary and then to telephone sales, a fancy name for reservations. Most thrilling of all was that the hopelessly naïve premise of my dream—that working for an airline would somehow make me a world traveler—actually proved to be true. I got incredible discounts on plane and hotel tickets—so incredible that I’d routinely grab a girlfriend and fly to Rome on a Friday evening, spend Saturday shopping in the Trastevere district, and be back in New York City by Sunday night. Another time I got round-trip tickets to Kitzbühel, Austria, plus six nights in a classy chalet, all for fifty-seven dollars! It’s hardly surprising I stayed at Icelandic for five years.

  But after a while I was itching to do more, and what I saw other people doing, what I thought I could be really good at, was sales. Talking to people, building trust, schmoozing them at lunches, getting them to see things your way—I felt like maybe that could be my calling. The only problem at Icelandic was that the nontelephone sales staff was all male—except, of course, for Gudrun.

  Gudrun was a statuesque Scandinavian beauty who was the office’s token female sales rep. I figured out pretty quickly I could never hope to supplant her. Yes, I was charming and persuasive in my own nudgy way, and, sure, I was a fairly cute and certainly perky brunette. But Gudrun was tall and blonde and gorgeous and quite possibly a mythical Nordic goddess. I knew I’d hit the glacier ceiling at Icelandic, and if I wanted a career in sales I’d have to go somewhere else. I gave myself exactly six months to find a job in sales.

  Then I saw an ad in the New York Times: “Sell Advertising Space for Twice Weekly Travel Trade Publication.” I didn’t have anywhere near enough experience, nor did I know anything about advertising, but I called anyway and wrangled an interview. The night before I was due in the offices of Travel Agent magazine, I planned to cook myself a nice dinner, shampoo and blow-dry my hair, do my nails, and get a good night’s sleep—then bounce out the door the next morning and be fifteen minutes early. But plans don’t always go… well, according to plan. As I was cutting the tips off asparagus stalks, I nearly sliced off the top of my left index finger.

  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 sh
ift. 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.