Authors: Liz Murray
In the corridor leading out of our apartment, I would be lookout, while he hung back. I felt daring, like a character from Daddy’s favorite cop show,
Hill Street Blues
; like we were partners in crime.
“Let me know when,” he’d whisper, dressed and ready to go, ducking behind the living room partition, waiting for my signal.
“Now.” On his way out, Daddy always gave a nod of acknowledgment, something that sent a rush of happiness through me. We were a team. “Don’t worry,” I’d whisper down the hall behind him, “you’re covered.”
And how could I go to bed when Ma became giddy setting up their “works” while she waited for Daddy to return with the drugs? There was no way I could pass up these brief moments when she was talkative, a thrill emanating through her bright amber eyes. School could not have been a more distant notion when Ma and I spent our own special time together. We would sit in the living room, talking about her adolescence in the late sixties and early seventies in Greenwich Village.
“You should have seen me, Lizzy. I used to wear thigh-high leather boots with clog heels.”
“Really?” I pretended she hadn’t repeated these stories a hundred times, and instead acted as though each detail was new to me, feigning shock and curiosity.
“Yup, you bet. I had an Afro too. I’ve always had kinky hair; that’s from my Italian side. Everyone did stuff like that, though. Your father had huge sideburns,
muttonchops
. Seriously!”
Ma talked to me like an old friend on those nights, sparing no detail about her street life, the drug scene, sex with her old boyfriends, and especially her hurt feelings about her childhood. I acted as if there were nothing surprising or vulgar about what Ma shared. Instead, I played it cool and tried to make Ma feel listened to, nodding agreement for things that I hardly understood at all. Ma never noticed. She only continued on, lost in her stories.
The fun part of the night would always come when Ma’s past occurred to her as a positive thing, a sort of adventure. But I knew this was temporary, a side effect of her anticipation of shooting up. Later—on the other side of her high, when she was coming down and the drug had begun to lose its effect—the very same thoughts would depress her. I’d be there for the letdown, too. If I didn’t listen when she needed to confide in someone, then who would? But first, there was this short, wonderful window of time while we waited. I frequently checked the windows for Daddy, as Ma told her stories, full of rare joy.
“Man, I was always trippin’ then! Yeah, acid can really mess with you, Lizzy. Especially when you’re at a concert. Don’t you do acid, okay? It’ll make you think all sorts of things that aren’t real. It’s funky like that.”
Before Daddy’s heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway, Ma laid out spoons to cradle the powder, in which she would later deposit a syringe’s worth of warm water to dissolve it. Old plastic wonton soup bowls held the water. She placed them beside the shoelaces, which were used to draw up veins; they always used separate syringes to shoot up. Our conversation continued as she inspected each needle, holding it up to the pulsing fluorescent light before placing it back down on the black Formica surface of the kitchen table. My watching her set up their “works” was part of the routine.
“Yup, I used to get modeling offers all the time. Most of the agents wanted sex, though. Watch out for guys like that, they’re everywhere. Just a sec”—she’d break away to squirt water out of a syringe to test it. “Yeah, I’m telling you, guys can be scumbags, but I had a lot of fun back then anyway.” As she spoke I followed the dried, spattered blood spots along the wall behind her, from the times they missed veins. If it weren’t for the absence of a sterilization process, the ritual might resemble a doctor’s aide laying out tools for some minor surgery. Soon Daddy would return with the small foil package—the remedy for their ailment.
Every night was like this. While Ma and Daddy injected themselves with cocaine and ran in and out, like a tag team, I stayed close by and shared the night with them. While Lisa slept in her bed, I had them all to myself; I helped keep them safe. And even if they were high, they were still right there, within my reach.
Ma’s and Daddy’s reactions to the powder were always the same: eyes flung wide open, as though in perpetual shock; small, involuntary twitches running over their faces like electrical surges. Ma was moved by some reflexive force to circle the room, sniffling, holding her fingers pinched shut, directing her speech to the ceiling. At this stage of her high, she never made eye contact.
Roughly twenty minutes later, when she began to come down from the pleasurable part of her habit, the broken version of Ma returned. Her shift in storytelling reflected the change.
“He promised—Pop
swore
he’d get us out of there. He was going to take us to Paris, Lizzy. You know, I was his favorite daughter, I knew it and Lori knew it. Everyone knew it. His favorite. You know, he broke my collarbone when I was a kid, tried to throw me out the window!” she shouted, eyes fixed on the living room ceiling. Ma’s pain about her past broke my heart, everything her parents did to her I wished so badly I could take away. I wanted more than anything to take her pain away from her.
Behind her, Daddy twitched and fidgeted with his set of works, cleaning and re-cleaning them in super-slow motion—spilling things, tripping, fumbling, his mind warped from the effects of his high.
“It was the alcohol that made Pop that way, Lizzy. He was always sorry about that. He loved me. You think he loved me, don’t you?” Ma asked, chugging on her forty-ounce beer. This was the part when she started crying.
Many times Ma pulled down the neck of her T-shirt to expose her uneven collarbones. One bone jutted out, disjoined from its twin after her collision with the wall when she was a toddler. The fear on her face, real each time, told me that she was there again, reliving her memories. She shot up to feel better, to escape, but somehow the drugs always returned her to the trouble, as though it might be happening to her all over again, right there in our living room.
“I love you, Ma. I’m right here with you,” I’d assure her. “We all love you here, Ma.”
“I know, Lizzy.” But I could tell that my words never got through. Her sadness was just too thick; it drew her miles away from everything, from me.
While Ma spoke, I abandoned my needs—sleep, homework, television, and my toys, unused in my darkened bedroom. Her pain blanketed me in its urgency, so that it became difficult to realize that there was any distance—age-wise or responsibility-wise—between us.
So I learned to talk to her like a friend, even if I didn’t really know what I was saying. I insisted, “He must have loved you; he was your daddy. I think the beer made him angry, Ma. If he could have stopped, he would have been a good daddy for you.” If this provided any comfort for Ma, it was short-lived. It took her only a half hour to slip on her beige coat, filthy at its cuffs, so that she could return to the dark streets in search of the next hit, still wiping tears from her flushed face. Inside their bedroom, by the light of the street lamp streaking through our murky windows, Daddy fell into a catatonic slumber, deteriorated by the numerous highs he’d achieved this far into the night, but also jolted awake occasionally by the powder still surging through his system.
I went back to my place at the window, to make sure Ma made it up University Avenue. “9-1-1,” I’d mumble to myself, “9-1-1,” as she shrank down the avenue on her way back to the Aqueduct Bar so that she could set the whole routine in motion, all over again.
When she was out of my view, I counted half-hour chunks of time by the nightly sitcoms I enjoyed,
Cheers
and
The Honeymooners
. Television kept me company during all of the breaks in Ma and Daddy’s cycles. I usually rounded off my nights with these shows, then infomercials, and finally morning news announcements, around five a.m. As I got ready to take myself to bed, a faint blue filled the morning sky. By this time, the bars had finally locked their doors, so the only people still out on the street were prostitutes, homeless people, and drug addicts—all as penniless as Ma, and fruitless targets for panhandling. So Ma came home to stay. Safe at last, she collapsed into bed beside Daddy, exhaustion finally overtaking the need to use. Indeed, exhaustion was one of the few things that ever did. When I knew for sure she was in bed, I could finally relax and we could all get some rest.
At dawn, the only noise in our apartment was the upbeat music of early-morning news and Ma’s snoring. I readied myself for sleep, slipping into a long, blue nightgown sent from Long Island, Ma’s and Daddy’s bodies rising and falling as they drew breath, Ma still fully dressed, Daddy in his underwear. Snapping the television off, I settled into bed, knowing that if they didn’t need drugs so much, Ma and Daddy would spend more time with Lisa and me. They would make things better, if they could.
“Liz, get the hell out of bed!” Lisa had lost any patience for my truancy back when I was in kindergarten. By the time I was in first grade, she’d grown downright hostile.
“The same crap every day, get out of bed!” She stripped the blankets off me, sending shivers up my body. Outside the window, children clamored to catch a bus. A woman in a blue raincoat directed them by blowing her whistle. I couldn’t have gotten more than two hours’ sleep.
Each day, by the force of some mysterious strength within her, Lisa rose without prompting to the screech of her alarm, ran water over her face, and took down one of two or three tired shirts from the hook outside her closet. Once dressed, she began our routine battle on her way out the door.
She started off gently, nudging my shoulder and calling out, “Lizzy, it’s time to get up. . . . Liz, it’s morning,” smoothly and encouragingly. But it didn’t take her long to learn that she needed a much firmer approach to get me conscious, let alone dressed.
Months passed with Lisa ripping the sheets off me dozens of times, exposing my legs and arms to the shocking cold of our rarely heated apartment. In defense, I would curl up in a ball and grip my pillow while she jerked at its free corners, fighting to loosen my grip. In those moments, I hated her more than the idea of going to school; more than the faces of the awful, taunting children I kept in mind throughout my entire struggle to stay home. And I especially resented the pleasure that I sensed she took from volunteering to take on the role of my disciplinary figure.
“I’m your older sister,” she’d scream. “You have to listen to me. I’ll dump cold water on your head if you don’t
move your ass
!”
She meant it too. Lisa splashed a cup of ice cold water right on my head, and I was furious with her. But even being wet and cold couldn’t get me out of bed on some days.
On those mornings after staying up with Ma and Daddy, it felt as though I’d just laid my head down for a moment before Lisa was standing over me, angry and frustrated. On this particular morning, grudgingly, I dressed in whatever clothing I had tossed aside the night before, tiptoeing around cautiously, so as not to wake Ma or Daddy. But Lisa didn’t seem to notice they were sleeping. She shouted out the time of day every five minutes to warn me we’d be late if we didn’t move it. Outside, the cold air hitting my face woke me a little; but the fluorescent lighting and noisy classrooms of P.S. 261 had an adverse effect. They made me sleepy, and this made my head feel fuzzy; and by then all my interest in learning was gone.
Each day, Mrs. McAdams dictated lessons on reading, which I could already somewhat do on my own. Ma had read enough of
Horton Hears a Who!
at my bedside so that I figured out how to read it on my own, which led to trying to read other things, like Lisa’s third-grade English lessons and little bits of Daddy’s true crime books that he left all over our apartment. This made it easy to ignore the step-by-step explanation of proper spelling and grammar, and let my exhaustion take over. This was when I’d drift, letting my vision sweep the room in rocking motions until my eyes eventually closed shut.
I wondered, half-conscious, if Ma had woken up yet. If so, was she watching
The Price Is Right
without me? Was she in the mood to go for a walk? If I were home, would she take me out with her?
When Mrs. McAdams finished the reading lesson, she reviewed some math problems that I didn’t, in any way, recognize. Each minute in class felt like an hour. While she spoke, I often killed time dreaming up reasons I’d give the school nurse for needing to be sent home early: stomachache, flu, fever, plague. They were at least half true. Every time Mrs. McAdams looked over the room to randomly call on a student to answer a question, my stomach was racked with sharp pains and I felt so shaky I thought I might puke.
When the bell finally rang, I quickly stuffed the pages into my bag. I always tried to slip out ahead of the rest of the students. They made me nervous. Walking between them as I left class, tension tightened my whole body. At least, I thought, Ma had finally scraped all of the lice off my head, using quell and a comb. Still, I was clearly different from them all. They knew it, and so did I; their stares proved it. My dirty clothing hung heavily off my body. My socks were always weeks old, and I wore my underwear until the crotch dissolved away into nothing. I was aware of the stench I gave off, so I knew they must have been aware, too.
Who cares what people think?
Daddy had said.
that’s their hang-up.
I tried to tell myself their judgment shouldn’t matter. I was, in one way, going through life much faster than all of them—who else cursed freely in front of their parents, went to bed anytime they wanted, knew about sex, and could demonstrate, crudely, how to mainline drugs when they were just six years old? This knowledge did give me some feeling of maturity around them. Still, in ways that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, the other kids seemed far more
together
than I was, in the sense that they were actual kids. It was intimidating, the way they mingled so easily with one another and made friends, or raised their hands to answer the teacher’s questions, exuding so much confidence. Maybe I was growing up faster, but I worried that I might be skipping too many steps along the way, taking shortcuts that left me feeling scattered, full of holes. Different.