Authors: Liz Murray
“Well, glad to hear it, Lizzy. I was wondering about you. Good to know, good to know.” I was doing the right thing; there was no way to tell him that I was afraid of how far I’d fallen behind, that I wasn’t sure I could ever find my way back.
“Actually, I should get back to my homework now, Daddy, before it gets too late. I’m sorry. I’m glad you called though.” And I was. It had been too long without a phone call to help me paint a picture of what he was doing, knowing whether or not he was safe. We said good night and hung up. Sam looked at me with concern. “What’d he say?” she asked.
“Nothing, he just called to say hi, I guess. He’s living in a shelter. I don’t know, who knows.” Spread across the table, the bright blue map caught my eyes. Sam was hunched over it. In pen, she’d drawn a dotted line to represent the ideal route to travel cross-country. At the base of the line, she’d sketched two stick figure versions of us wearing big brimmed beach hats, our old-lady shades, and purses slung over our forearms. Her character was different only in that it had a Mohawk. Before she could ask more about Daddy, I slipped my finger quickly along the line and stopped, tapping on the West Coast, and asked, “Hey Sam, how long do you think it’ll take for us to get
there
?” I pointed to LA.
“Not long,” she answered. Then Sam grabbed the map and folded it in half, holding it so that New York directly touched California. “We’re practically there already,” she said.
We both laughed, more than the joke was worth.
High school was a place where Sam and I were registered, but showed up only to receive free train passes. We hung out at Fief’s or Bobby’s place or on Brick’s oversize couch, where I ignored the phone to avoid social services as we watched television throughout the working day. I “accidentally” broke Brick’s answering machine, and I learned to remain completely quiet for five minutes whenever the doorbell rang, in case of social worker visits. I was in the clear; I had become a pro at avoiding school, at avoiding Mr. Doumbia, at avoiding everything.
“You can’t procrastinate forever,” Lisa had scolded me one morning, zipping up her jacket before slamming the front door on her way out to school. By my behavior, you might have guessed that I was trying to prove her wrong.
I felt I’d given school one valid shot, being in strict attendance for two straight weeks before I gave in. But high school was just a different world altogether, one big crowded maze of responsibility that I had no idea how to navigate or care about. And it’s not like we intended to mess up so badly; the first cut day was only supposed to be a single Monday. Just one day.
Sam and I took the train downtown, to Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, a place that was vaguely familiar to me from childhood, when Daddy used to bring me with him to dig through the garbage. From those trips and from Ma’s stories, I knew the Village to be where all the interesting people were, identified by their multicolored hair and vintage clothing. We gathered $2.75 in change from all around Brick’s house, just enough to buy and split a hot dog and soda while we watched street performers in Washington Square Park. All around us, people were cool. By association, so were we.
We really were only going to cut school that Monday. But then, if I was going to take two days off, it was best to take them back to back. After all, my reason for being out a second day would be more credible if it came right after the first. I mean, who gets sick for just one day, right? And then maybe the third day wasn’t so bad if I missed the first two. After all, the reason must have to do with whatever ailment kept me home the first two days. But then if I missed Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then Thursday and Friday were hardly worth salvaging. There was always next week. Besides, we didn’t plan on doing this again. That is, until we overslept the following Monday, and the cycle started once more. Eventually, we’d missed so many days that it was hard to keep up in class. Oh well, there was always next semester.
In the meantime, there were other places to focus our energies. For our group of friends, Fief’s house was the hub of our neighborhood. With his dad at work all day, and his mom living there only part-time, that’s where everyone cut school. It was there I found that when I was willing to sit around and do a whole lot of nothing, lots of other people my age were willing to do the same. We made a routine of it, a carefree weekly schedule of simply being together. I had never been happier.
During these days we leaned on one another heavily, a little family free of judgments or clearly defined roles. Sam’s unconventional, indignant style was the focal point. And between Myers’s offbeat conversation topics, Bobby’s humor, Fief’s hospitality, and my affection and adoration for them all, we came together. Bobby, Sam, and I were really the heart of it. The circle expanded outward from there to include a list of names that came and went: Myers, Fief, Jamie, Josh, Diane, Ian, Ray, Felice, and many others. “The group” is what we called ourselves. Collectively, we let one day roll into the next, more or less uneventfully. We sat around barefoot in Fief’s graffiti-ridden apartment, taking turns sleeping and talking, but most of all laughing hysterically, together.
Because we were afraid of getting our friends in trouble, it was rare for anyone to do drugs inside the apartments we skipped school in. At most, someone would smoke weed in a back room, or in the hallway. As for myself, I was repulsed by drugs and alcohol and didn’t go near either of them. Even the smell of beer on someone’s breath made me sick to my stomach. Part of this had to do with everything I saw Ma and Daddy suffer through, but the other part was due to specific things Ma said directly to me. Several times in my childhood when I was with Ma as her high was coming down, she’d turned her attention to me with a grave look in her eyes that was haunting. She cried and pleaded with me, “Lizzy, don’t ever get high, baby. It ruined my life. You’d break my heart if you ever got high. Don’t ever get high, never, okay, baby?” With dried blood spattered on her arm, her eyes manic with concern, and her voice filled with love, it was probably the most compelling anti-drug message anyone could have given me. So I never got high, not once. And apart from some harmless teasing from my friends that I was the “straight edge,” no one pressured me to. Besides, we had other things to keep us entertained.
While other kids developed critical writing skills and picked up arithmetic and science, we conducted experiments of our own. Such as, a spoonful of water, when poured onto a scorching-hot stove burner, breaks into little, audibly bouncing beads. And when you place a lightbulb in the microwave—for the five seconds it’s safe to do so—it performs a strobe light show of neon pink, green, and orange. Random experimental mixtures from Fief’s cabinet could sometimes yield something edible. Water balloons, when chucked at high speeds from open windows, caused a few minutes of uncontrollable laugher. Every day together was another layer of insulation from the bustling world around us, my experience made richer by my love for Bobby and Sam.
Still, at some point in each day, Ma’s illness called me back to reality, back to the stale, inert feeling of Brick’s apartment. I could push it away for only a matter of hours before images from previous days came roaring back in. I knew that without my returning to help, Ma could be slumped over in her bedroom doorway, stuck; unable to lift her own weight off the toilet; or crying helplessly for water from her room. So I made regular rounds to check in on her, parting from my friends, to visit what I knew to be her deathbed. I found it hard to admit to myself that it was a trip that I was becoming more and more reluctant to make.
SAM AND I WEREN’T PREPARED FOR BOYFRIENDS, FOR THE INFLUENCE
that loving a guy can have on your whole life. I can’t help but think that maybe if we had been ready, if someone had told us, things would have turned out differently.
Carlos came into the picture as a guest of the group, but by the sheer magnitude of his personality, he moved to center stage almost immediately. One lazy autumn day, as we walked up the stairs to Fief’s apartment, we heard the argumentative banter of male voices echoing through the hall.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Sam.
“Yeah, sounds like someone let a lunatic loose from the nutty bin.”
“No, I mean, I think it’s coming from Fief’s house.”
As we approached the door slowly and creaked it open, one voice, with a rich, news-announcer quality to it, boomed loudly above the rest.
“Son, son. Take this,” the voice prompted. “Give it your best shot. Tell me what you have to lose. . . . Well then,
go on
!”
When we turned the corner into Fief’s living room, we came onto a scene: some familiar and a few unfamiliar faces, around seven people altogether, crouched over a game of dice. Fief hung back, leaning against the wall. When I looked his way for an explanation, he shrugged. There, in the center of the action, I spotted the owner of the voice.
He was a stranger, this tall, slim Puerto Rican guy. His dark, wavy hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail. His dress was ghetto sharp. Dominating his face were expressive brown eyes set just above a cluster of freckles sprinkled across his wide cheeks. There was something about the way he moved, the power in his voice—I couldn’t stop watching him. He clapped his hand hard onto a guy’s back, who with the prompt tossed two dice, dense, little red cubes, roughly against the wall. For a moment, their clicking descent was the only noise in the room. Then people shouted and raised their arms. Someone pointed and laughed into the face of the thrower.
“Whoa,” the impressive stranger yelled. “So close, Papa. Give it up now, that’s
your
slip.” A gangly-looking guy, whom I’d seen around Fief’s place only a few times, had suffered the loss. Defeated, he counted money into the stranger’s hand.
“Who’s up?” the stranger called out.
“Sam, have you seen that guy here before?” I asked her over the noise.
“Nah,” she said.
I remained in the doorway of the musty room, my eyes trailing from the graffiti on the wall to the ongoing game, for at least another twenty minutes. Sam lost interest and walked into the kitchen to rummage through Fief’s fridge. Finally, after collecting another round of cash from losing participants, the stranger snatched up his dice and called an abrupt end to the game.
“That’s it, gentlemen, until next time.” Hisses and noises of protest passed through the room. “I would go on,” he announced, looking down, running money through his hands, “but I’m busy. I’m taking
her
out to eat. So blame her,” he said. Suddenly, without looking up, he pointed a finger from the cash-filled fist straight at me. He resumed counting. I completely froze. A few of the guys looked up for a moment, but lost interest. Until then, I hadn’t known he saw me in the room at all. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t glanced my way once.
I looked around the crowded room, pointed at myself, and mouthed, “Me?” I was sure he’d seen me then, but he walked into the other room without answering. I saw him clasping hands with various people on his way out. I wondered for a moment whether I might have imagined the whole exchange. When he walked by me and began unsnapping the locks to the front door, my heart fluttered in my chest. I stood still, inhaling the sweet smell of his cologne. Sam stepped out of the kitchen, eating one of Fief’s ice cream bars, chocolate smeared on her fingers. The incident would make for a funny story once we got out of there.
The front door creaked open and he paused.
“Well? Are you coming or not?” he said. I looked around for who else he might have been addressing. “Yo, shorty, I don’t have all day.” He began tapping his foot.
“Do you mean me?” I asked.
He swept his arm forward, dramatically motioning out the door, and winked at me. We shared a smile.
I tried to look casual. “Can my friend come, too?”
His name was Carlos Marcano and he was almost eighteen years old. He grew up in the Bronx, like us. Abandoned by neglectful parents, he was raised on the streets, by street people who lived street lives. He had been stabbed. A scar on his left calf, a small, raised mound of flesh, was given to him by a female gang member who’d stuck him up using a busted bottle. When Carlos spoke, a string of jokes ran through most things he said, no matter how serious the subject matter. He was funny, with a dark sense of humor that appealed to me. Currently, he was crashing on a friend’s couch on Bedford Park Boulevard. One day, despite all his hardships, he was going to be a famous comedic actor.
“I’ve survived out here on my own, God bless. The man was looking out for me,” he’d said with his finger pointed skyward, during our first conversation in the diner. “I know you girls know what I mean. It’s rough out there, but you gotta keep your head up, don’t sleep.
Dream
, but don’t sleep. You feel me?”
For hours, he sat across from Sam and me, dazzling us with stories about his life riddled with fights, gang violence, and all kinds of extreme situations he’d found himself in, living on the streets. He was intelligent, resourceful, and most of all he was hilarious in spite of how dark life had been for him. Each story took on enormous dimension, sucking us in. Every so often, when he used a gesture that made him appear particularly handsome, Sam squeezed my leg under the table.
But the information that really endeared Carlos to me, absolutely sealed my fascination with him, didn’t surface until further along in the night, near the time we were getting ready to go. In a sense, Carlos explained, he’d really been on his own since his dad died from AIDS when he was nine. After all, his mother was a crackhead who never took care of him.
“She cared about that pipe more than she did me. I know it,” he said. “She worshipped the rock. I came up on my own.”
Right there, I started a mental checklist of our similarities. He knew about AIDS and drugs, and making it on your own, and he was still bright and forward-moving. He hid from nothing and no one. The outside world was no hurdle for him; it was a platform. I made the decision right there to try to be close to him. Carlos had learned to tap into his own strength in a way I hoped to do for myself. I was afraid that it was too soon to tell him how much we had in common; it would have sounded made up, there were that many similarities.
As he spoke of his loss of family structure, of how he came to be homeless, he stared dramatically out the diner window into the passing crowds.
“Moms took me from one relative to the next until I started going home with friends from school. After a while I didn’t know where I was anymore. That’s when I realized I had to start looking out for number one, because on the real, that’s all you got. But that’s a’ight, ’cause I keep it tight. Like a hetero in the prison shower, I don’t trust no one, I watch my own ass.”
By the time we finished up, Carlos had weaved a tapestry of hard-luck stories, managing to punctuate everything with outrageous humor. He could be talking about someone dying and then suddenly use some elastic facial expression to change the story into a joke, forcing us to laugh. With his lips, he made sound effects, whistles and beeps that startled the other customers. I didn’t mind their staring. Just like the attention Sam called to us, it was empowering. I told myself I’d stumbled onto a jackpot in Carlos, an overlooked treasure ignorantly unrecognized by others. Any gawking onlookers could blow it out their asses. That’s
their hangup.
He walked us back to Brick’s, stopping every so often to sing and dance, insisting on the utmost amount of foolishness we could stand. He stopped strangers on the street to compliment them on their skills in karate and basket-making, not addressing their confusion as he continued forward. He folded a paper bag over his head in the shape of a hat, crossed his eyes, and stopped more strangers to speak seriously to them about looking both ways when crossing the street. He was fearless, and it seemed magical.
The next several weeks were an exercise in pursuing Carlos, doing whatever I could to connect without seeming overeager. In Brick’s kitchen, twirling the curly phone cord around my finger into figure eights, I spent hours speaking with him, which was nothing next to the amount of time we spent walking the neighborhood some nights, enmeshed in long conversations, during which he would occasionally take my hand. Through the last of summer’s warmth, we lingered on the parkway, in nearby Harris Field, under the light of Bronx street lamps, sharing secrets, warming up to each other.
“Liz, I got to thank you.” Carlos turned to me one night as we stopped in front of Brick’s building, his dark eyes staring intently into mine.
“What for? What’d I do?” I asked hopefully.
“For one, you ain’t like any other shorty I ever met. I just got this feeling like I can tell you whatever. I trust you. That’s it, Liz, I trust you. And I ain’t
never
felt that before. On the real, God bless you.” I tried my best to hide the excitement rushing through me. He suggested that we round the block just one more time; there was something he had to tell me. Taking my hand tightly, he made me promise not to tell anyone about a $7,000 inheritance his father left him, that he would receive when he turned eighteen.
“They’re all snakes out there, that’s why you gotta keep the grass cut low, Shamrock. To see the snakes coming a mile away.” He’d nicknamed me Shamrock when he found out I was Irish. “Especially when people know you’re loaded. They start thinking, What could that money get me? People are greedy, but I trust you. I want to share everything with you.”
“Listen, Carlos,” I said, ignoring the part he’d addressed to me. I was too excited at the idea that he was going to finally get off the streets. “This is what you’ve been waiting for, you could finally get your own apartment.” I squeezed his hand and smiled. But he didn’t smile back, just stared intently, directly into my eyes.
“Shamrock, maybe you didn’t hear me. I want you with me on this. This is the start
we
need.” I couldn’t hold back my smile; my body tensed with excitement.
“I am not like those people. I just want you to be happy, Carlos.”
“
You
make me happy, shorty. Don’t doubt it.”
When we went to hug each other good night, he suddenly hoisted me over his shoulder with an ease that made me realize his strength, charging forward with my body as a pretend battering ram for the lobby door. I screamed with laughter.
“Boooom!” he bellowed, thrusting the door open ahead of me with his hand. Moments later, with all the force in my body, I had to drag Carlos away from the buzzers to stop him from whistling to Brick over the intercom to make me laugh more. Because boarding the elevator meant saying good-bye for the night, it was a task that we stretched out for half an hour, time filled with eagerly made plans for when we might see each other next.
For every third truant day of mine throughout September, notices arrived in the mail from John F. Kennedy High School, informing the parent or guardian of ninth grader Elizabeth Ann Murray to please phone the principal’s office. I made a routine out of popping the mailbox to intercept them, so that I could rip the paper into tiny shreds and send them floating down the trash compactor chute like confetti—problem solved. But I hit a snag one day when I discovered an envelope bearing that all-too-familiar emblem from Child Welfare. The notice, presented in boldfaced type, called for a mandatory meeting with Brick to discuss my future in his care, as well as the option of placement back into the system. I couldn’t go back in the system; I wouldn’t. But I didn’t know how to go to school, either. I didn’t know what to do.
Outside of my friends, little grabbed my attention. After all, I kept thinking, I could always go to school later. It seemed like things were working out fine without it. With the exception of Bobby, no one in the group was going anyway. And Carlos kept talking about our plans with the money: We would get an apartment somewhere on Bedford Park, and Sam would live with us. Sam and I would go back to high school then, and all three of us would get jobs to keep up with the rent, but first we needed a stable place that was all our own.
So it’s not that I wasn’t going to go to school at all; it just didn’t fit in with my plans at the moment. I would go back soon, just like I would talk to Ma about all the important things I wanted to express to her, soon. Like letting her know that no matter what she might have done, I understood that she loved me; I saw how hard she tried. Most of all, she should know not to worry. I would go back to school. I would be okay, somehow. Just not today, I kept thinking, not right now. Life seemed to be rushing in on me, and all I felt I could do was duck and cover. Not now. Later, I kept telling myself.
Of course, this avoidance was growing increasingly difficult to accomplish. Child Welfare’s letter was not the only reminder that I was procrastinating with everything important in my life. Not when my mother’s habit of achieving drunkenness before noon each day was wearing on her and on me, while I was there, picking up the pieces.
She’d stumble back to Brick’s from Madden’s, barely able to stand, covered in vomit, sometimes in blood if she’d fallen down. Once in a while strangers—a chubby crossing guard, a nearby super, an Irish man from the bar—carried her back, bewildered to see my young face answering the door ready to collect her.
Without meaning to, they asked some of the toughest questions. “Where is your father?” some of them would want to know. “Will she be okay from here?” I didn’t know how to say, “My father’s in a shelter and no, she won’t be okay, she’s dying. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” All I could do was take her inside and thank them before shutting the door. The rest was for me to work through, alone. I’d take my mother and clean her up; help her, naked and vulnerable, into a warm bath; shampoo her hair as clumps of it came out in my hands. Sometimes she’d vomit in the tub and we had to start all over again.