An Invisible Thread Read online

  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.

  Maurice was ten when he moved into room 305 at the Brooklyn Arms. A grand, gothic sixteen-story building on Ashland Avenue, it was once known as the Granada, a posh residential hotel where wealthy families held weddings in the Forsythia Room and old ladies in white gloves had afternoon highballs. But by the 1970s, the prosperous tenants were gone and the Granada became the Brooklyn Arms.

  The hallways were slathered with oily brown paint, the water and electricity came and went, the rats were nearly as big as cats. The rooms had no kitchens, but many tenants set up makeshift cooking areas—skillets, hot plates, coffee pots—that posed a terrible safety risk. Any number of neglected conditions—faulty wiring, crumbling stairwells, drug deals gone wrong—could prove deadly at any instant.

  “Unless God spares them,” New York senator Patrick Moynihan said in a speech denouncing the hotel, “children are going to die there.”

  He would be proven right: in the mid-’80s two boys—friends of Maurice’s—tumbled to their deaths down a shaft while playing near a broken elevator door.

  Maurice moved into 305 with his mother, his grandmother, his two sisters, and, at varying times, his six uncles. Another man, Uncle Cheese—his aunt’s boyfriend—lived there, too. Sometimes as many as ten people were crammed in a single room. Maurice’s time there coincided with the advent of crack in New York City; between 1984 and 1990, the use of crack in the United States became a full-blown epidemic. A form of cocaine that could be smoked, crack was highly addictive, which meant greater demand, which meant more crime and violence. It was during the crack epidemic that the homicide rate for young black men in the United States more than doubled. Countless lives were laid waste, countless children stripped of their childhoods and shunted into foster care. In some ways, welfare hotels like the Brooklyn Arms were ground zero in the epidemic. It was there that crack was bought and sold, cooked and smoked, swallowing families whole.

  Ironically, crack hit the Brooklyn Arms at a time when Maurice’s mother was desperately trying to get clean. Not long after they moved there, she checked into an in-patient rehab center at Kings County Hospital. She stayed there for three months, ridding her body of poisons. Maurice cried every night while she was away. Finally, Uncle Dark couldn’t take the crying anymore, so he rounded up Maurice and his sisters and took them to the hospital to see their mother. They got there long after visiting hours were over, and a guard refused to let them in. Uncle Dark said, “I ain’t come up here for nothin’,” so he walked around the perimeter of the hospital yelling for Darcella.

  “Dee Dee!” he hollered. “Dee Dee, where you at?!”

  Soon Maurice was yelling too: “Mommy, Mommy, it’s me!”

  They walked and yelled and finally heard a faint
voice: “I’m over here.” Maurice saw his mother looking out a second-floor window. She was crying and saying, “My babies! My babies!” Darcella reached out her arms as if to grab her children from two stories up, and Maurice held out his arms as if to let her scoop him up. Finally she said, “You better get out of here before I get in trouble.”

  But Maurice refused to go; he cried and rolled on the ground and said, “I’m not leaving.” Uncle Dark slung Maurice over his shoulder and carried him away, the boy’s cries cutting through the night, bringing patients to their windows as Darcella disappeared inside.

  She made it home a few weeks later, clean for the first time in years. Maurice didn’t understand what rehab was, but he could see his mother was different, better, happier. She would spend more time with Maurice and his sisters; she’d ignore all the uncles as they came and went with their drugs. For the first time in his life, Maurice had a mother who wasn’t strung out all the time. For the first time he experienced something close to normalcy. The Brooklyn Arms, it turned out, wasn’t such a bad place after all.

  Until one day when Uncle Dark came home and said, “Yo, Dee Dee, come here. I want you to try somethin’. This is something different.”

  “No, man, I’m done,” she told him.

  “Yo, Dee, this ain’t nothin’ like the old stuff. This is freebase.”

  “I don’t care, I don’t care. I’m done.”

  Uncle Dark laid a rock of crack on the table.

  “Yo, Dee, you gotta try this high, you don’t know what you missing. And Dee, this shit don’t get you hooked.”

  Darcella stared at the rock for a long time. Finally she took it into the bathroom. She came out a minute later, and her eyes were watery. They were open as wide as fifty-cent pieces. Maurice was still too young to realize what exactly had happened, but he was old enough to think, This is not good.

  And just like that Darcella fell off the razor’s edge separating one world from another and tumbled permanently to the dark side.

  Room 305 became the crack headquarters of the Brooklyn Arms. Once Darcella got a taste for the drug, she became the biggest crack dealer in the hotel—bigger than any of the uncles. She was the first one to learn how to cook cocaine and turn it into crack; she taught her brothers how to do it, too. The uncles would buy coke from the Dominicans on upper Broadway and bring it home for Darcella to cook. Sometimes she went out and bought the drugs herself. Money poured in like never before, wads and wads of bills.

  Years later, Maurice guessed that in less than a year, with his mother and his uncles all dealing at once, at least a million dollars in cash passed through his apartment at the Brooklyn Arms.

  And all that money brought its own sense of stability: for the first time, Darcella had enough to buy her children shoes and coats and underwear. People treated his mother and uncles with respect, and that trickled down to Maurice, who felt important, too. Life had a rhythm to it, a predictable chaos. Maurice believed that, finally, he had a place he could call home.

  And then, the Brooklyn Arms erupted in flames.

  In 1986 two children started a fire in their room. Their mother wasn’t home; she was out copping drugs. The children, too scared to run and too young to know better, hid in a closet. Smoke was everywhere. People were running and screaming. Maurice stood on the sidewalk and watched children—children he knew—stagger out stiff-armed and burned and crying. In all, four children died in the fire.

  Afterward, Mayor Ed Koch denounced conditions at the hotel and pledged to clean it up. Not much later, police raided the Brooklyn Arms. They banged on doors and slapped handcuffs on tenants. Maurice’s mother happened to be walking down the stairs at the very instant police were charging up. She convinced cops she was just a drug addict, only there to score, and not a dealer who sold drugs out of her room. The police let her walk, but two of Maurice’s uncles were arrested in the raid. Once again, Maurice stood on the sidewalk, watching police and camera crews swarm the place he called home. He watched the news crews leave that night, and he watched the dealers go back to dealing the minute they were gone.

  Just a few days after the raid, his uncle Limp got drunk and threw a brick threw the laundry room window, and Maurice and his family were kicked out of the Brooklyn Arms for good.

  At the Bryant, I looked past Darcella as she slumped against the door frame, into the room where Maurice lived. It was about twelve square feet, with two windows and a high ceiling. Toward the back there were two single beds with no sheets or pillows. There was a beat-up, beige La-Z-Boy chair and a half-sized refrigerator with a small TV balanced on top. Maurice would later tell me the fridge never—not once—had any food in it. All he ever found there were a plastic jug of water and a box of baking soda used for cooking drugs.

  That was it; there was nothing else in the room. It was dark and bare: no pictures on the walls, dim overhead lighting, no curtains, no kitchen. I saw an older woman sitting in the chair—this was Rose. I couldn’t see anyone else, but I would soon learn Maurice lived in that room with as many as twelve people—his mother and grandmother, his sisters, an aunt and her two young children, one uncle full-time, and two or three more uncles coming in and out. The five young children slept in the single beds at night while the adults stayed up and did drugs. When morning came, the children got up and the adults crashed and slept away the day. Sometimes the uncles would sleep on the floor, sometimes in the room’s one closet.

  Sometimes Maurice would take the closet for himself to get some privacy.

  “Hello, I’m Laura,” I finally said. “I’m friends with Maurice. Are you his mother?”

  The woman stared at us blankly, absorbing nothing.

  “Did Maurice mention the baseball game to you? I want to take him to a Mets game, and I need your permission, if that’s okay.”

  The woman slid farther down the door frame. Her eyes rolled farther back in her head. I had seen people too drunk to stand or too high to talk, but I had never, ever seen anyone as out of it as this. Finally, she steadied herself, turned, and slowly shuffled away. The security guard began moving toward the elevator.

  Then Grandma Rose came to the door. She was much more alert, and she looked us over and frowned and said, “What’s this?”

  “Hi, my name is Laura, and this is my friend Lisa. I’m friends with Maurice. I don’t know if he’s told you about me.”

  “He has,” Rose said.

  “Oh, okay. That’s good. Well, I want to take Maurice to a Mets game this weekend, and I need to get his mother’s permission.”

  I handed Rose the note and a pen. She took the piece of paper, signed her name. She said, “That’s fine,” and handed it back.

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “And can you tell Maurice to stop by my apartment when he gets the chance?”

  Rose said, “Yes,” and closed the door.

  The next day my intercom buzzed, and Steve the doorman told me Maurice was downstairs.

  “Send him up,” I said.

  Maurice came in with a serious look on his face. “Miss Laura,” he said, “you have to promise you’ll never go to that place again.”

  I told Maurice I had to go to get his mother’s permission.

  “You have to promise me you’ll never go back there again.”

  “Maurice, it’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. Nice white ladies should never be in a place like that. You can’t go back there. Promise me you won’t go back there.”

  I promised him that I wouldn’t, and I never did.

  At the time I thought Maurice was merely embarrassed by his living situation, but as I learned more about his family, I realized he was protecting me. He knew what his uncles were capable of; he knew how quickly someone could be victimized. Maurice never told a single relative where I lived or all that much about me.

  He did not want me to even brush up against his world.

  That Saturday Maurice met me in the lobby of the Symphony, and we went to the garage to get my car
and drive the twenty minutes up the Grand Central Parkway to Shea Stadium. Maurice was beyond excited; he was bouncing in the front seat. I’d asked my boss, Valerie, for the tickets, and she’d been nice enough to let me have them. They were unbelievable seats—a few rows behind first base. We walked through the concourse and into a tunnel. As the tunnel opened up and revealed the impossibly green grass of the infield, I looked at Maurice and saw his mouth fall open. It’s one thing to watch a game on a tiny black-and-white TV set. It’s another to see the ballplayers up close, playing catch in their bright white uniforms, hitting balls with a crisp crack of the bat. Like I said, baseball doesn’t mean much to me, but to boys it does. And to Maurice it was a little bit of heaven, a bigger thrill than he could have imagined. I don’t remember seeing him blink even once over the next three hours. He watched the game and ate hot dogs and sipped a soda and cheered the players, and, like every other kid in the park, he lost himself in the unfolding story of a simple baseball game.

  I can’t say if that was one of the happiest moments in Maurice’s young life, but I do know it was one of the happiest moments in mine.