by Liz Murray
At night, Ma would take breaks from shooting up to visit my bedside and tuck me in, sing to me, just one verse of “You Are My Sunshine.” She’d smile at me, rubbing her fingers through my hair. She’d kiss my face and tell me her children were the best thing that ever happened to her. “You and Lisa are my angels, my babies,” she’d say, and I knew I was loved. The smell of her Winston cigarettes and the faint, sour smell of coke always lingered—scents that lulled me to sleep.
One winter night, around four a.m. when Daddy was exhausted, he gave in to my demands for a walk around the neighborhood in the virgin snow. The early-morning hour and the new snow, which sparkled like a bed of bright diamonds beneath the glow of Bronx street lamps, insulated us, and made it seem as if the crunching underfoot was the only sound for miles. The more I pressed him, the more we walked. He told me stories of his psychology studies in college; he taught me things he’d learned there, insisting I would need them someday. “I love you, Lizzy,” he told me. We walked for miles that night without seeing another soul in the empty, snow-covered streets, until it felt as if there really was no one else; as if Daddy belonged only to me and the world belonged only to us. And I knew I was loved.
Drugs were like a wrecking ball tearing through our family, and even though Lisa and I were impacted, I couldn’t help but feel that Ma and Daddy were the ones who needed protecting. I felt like it was my job to keep them safe. There was just something so fragile about them; the way their addiction made them barrel out of the house in total disregard of their safety, at all hours of the night, despite the many news reports about neighborhood rapes, muggings, and cab drivers being shot for their earnings within a ten-block radius of our apartment building.
As though she were impervious to harm, and as though she weren’t legally blind, Ma bounded up University Avenue, fearless, throughout the night, even though her vision made it tricky to navigate the darkened Bronx streets. Ma was blind enough to pass someone she knew on the sidewalk—even her family—without recognizing them. But she was familiar enough with shapes and movements to distinguish a moving vehicle from a parked one, or a person approaching her from one walking away, and even a green traffic light from a red one. Still, that did not stop her from encountering dangerous situations.
A handful of times, Ma was attacked in our neighborhood. These incidents horrified me and I pleaded with her to stay home, but nothing could stop Ma when she wanted to get high. One night she was robbed at knifepoint. More than likely, she had been unable to see her attackers targeting her, something an average-sighted person could have spotted. She came home with a black eye, a busted lip, and a story about how the mugger had gotten furious when he found nothing of value on Ma, and had taken it out on her face.
Another time, she came home making her typical single-minded dash from the front door to kitchen with her bag of coke, and it actually took a moment for me to notice the foot-long rip down the side of her jeans and her bloody leg. Ma told me she was hit by a car.
“Nothing serious, Lizzy. It wasn’t going that fast, I got right up. Same thing happened when I was a bike messenger. I’m fine,” she said, cutting her story short to ask Daddy for her syringe. Ma was either oblivious to the fact that these moments were brushes with death, or she didn’t care. It was hard to tell. The only thing that was clear was that when Ma was bent on having something, she was willing to do anything for it.
Blind as she was, Ma had spent three weeks in the seventies working as a bike courier on the busy streets of Manhattan. Of course, they didn’t normally hire the near-blind, but Ma needed cash and didn’t tell her employer about her impairment. Instead, she borrowed a friend’s mountain bike, and because they paid her by the package, she plowed into traffic at life-threatening speeds. Ma had given up on the job after her second accident, but only because her friend’s bike was totaled and she had no replacement. That’s just the way Ma was, unstoppable when she was determined to get something; unafraid and seemingly unaware of how fragile her life could be.
Daddy wasn’t much better at taking care of himself. On drug runs, he would race up University Avenue through gang territories, the dangerous streets of Grand Avenue and 183rd. Once, he’d returned home badly injured, fresh blood spilled over his face, down onto his neck and shirt. A man had beaten Daddy’s head into the cement just down the block, and it had taken him almost an hour to stagger home. But by the very next day, Daddy was out of the house again, copping drugs. Like Ma, his addiction was so strong that he gambled with his safety night after night, seeing only the destination ahead of him and not the hazards around him. That destination was the blue door on Grand Avenue, where he climbed the stairs to smooth out Ma’s crinkled dollar bills, giving them over to the drug dealers in exchange for the packages of powder that ruled my parents’ world.
Sleep on school nights was impossible. Somebody had to watch the windows and time how long they took to come back. Somebody had to keep them safe. If not me, then who? Thirty to forty minutes for a drug run was about the average time it took. Too much longer and that meant there was trouble. “9-1-1,” I’d think to myself as I leaned out the window to watch Daddy trek the avenue, shrinking over the curve of University, on his way to another pickup. If he ran into any trouble, I had my plan set. We frequently lost our home phone to unpaid bills, but I could be down at the corner pay phone in moments.
But my responsibilities for the evening did not end there. As Ma and Daddy made their endless drug runs, I passed the hours alongside my parents, searching for other ways that I might be helpful. Ma and Daddy were willing to include me in their activities, and I was thrilled to be a part of them. One way I figured I could be most useful was to help Daddy sneak past Lisa, who was sure to protest if she caught him on his way out. Given that her room was right beside the front door, leaving the house undetected was always tricky for Daddy. That’s where I stepped in.
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 wa
s 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.