He hadn’t had a proper home in ten years. And now he had one.
Maurice moved his mother into the apartment while he stayed with Meka in Brooklyn. He and Meka fought a lot, but they also had their share of fun. They liked going to Coney Island, and Maurice was proud of the giant stuffed white teddy bear he won there in a game. The day he found out Meka was pregnant was another one of the great days of his life. He had never thought about having children, never pictured himself bouncing a son on his knee, but now that he was facing fatherhood he felt nothing but elation. He didn’t know why it meant so much to him to have a child. He just knew that it did.
Maurice was there at St. Vincent’s Hospital in downtown Manhattan when Meka gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He held his tiny, gnarled son and kissed him on the forehead. Earlier he’d told Meka what he’d like to name his son, and she told him she liked the name and it was fine with her.
And so that night, he held his firstborn son, Maurice.
The next day he left the hospital and took the subway to his apartment to see his mother. She was living there with his sister LaTonya and her young son; his sister Celeste’s young daughter was visiting. Maurice turned the corner, looked up at his apartment, and stopped dead in his tracks.
All he saw was charred, smoldering holes where the windows once were.
Maurice ran upstairs, terrified for his family. His apartment had been gutted in a fire. He asked neighbors about his mother, but no one knew what had happened. Only later that day did Maurice discover his mother and sister and niece and nephew were safe and sound. He also found out what had caused the fire.
His niece and nephew had been playing with a lighter and set fire to Maurice’s giant white teddy bear; the apartment went up in flames.
In an instant, Maurice was homeless again.
When Maurice told me he had a son, I was not happy at all. Of course I knew he was going to have children some day, but he was only nineteen and I felt he was too young, too unsettled, to have a child of his own. I told him it was irresponsible to bring a baby into the world, given his circumstances, and how terrified I was that the cycle that had consumed his parents and nearly consumed him was now starting again. Maurice understood how I felt, and all he told me was that he would be okay.
“Don’t worry, Laurie. I got this,” he said.
Because of my reaction, he didn’t ask me to come see his new son, nor did he bring him around when we met in the city. I wish I could have been happier for him and more supportive, but I just couldn’t. I was worried the responsibility of having a son might push Maurice into making bad decisions. I was also having a hard time seeing Maurice as a full-grown man. I had met him only eight years earlier when he was just a child himself. And here he was, a father, charged with raising a child of his own. To be honest, the thought of that terrified me. I believed in Maurice and I knew he was special, but I felt that whatever gains he had made since meeting me were fragile. Not because of him, but because of the world he lived in.
I wonder, also, if my own baby issues had something to do with my reaction. This was right around the time it was becoming clear to me that I would never have children of my own. Something I had wanted more desperately than anything else was slipping away, and there was nothing I could do about it. And here was Maurice, too young to be a father, not ready for the responsibility, having a son at nineteen. Did some part of me resent how cavalierly he seemed to be approaching fatherhood? Was I mad at God for how unfair it seemed? Perhaps.
What helped me deal with it was seeing how thrilled Maurice was to be a father. He told me he wanted his son to have all the things he never had and to never know the kind of troubles he had faced every day. I could see Maurice’s face light up whenever he talked about his son. He called him Junior and showed me pictures, and he promised over and over that he would be a good father to his boy. I realized that if I believed in Maurice, I had to believe in him through even the most difficult of times. I had to let Maurice live his own life.
Sometime after his son’s first birthday, Maurice and I got together in Manhattan. Christmas was coming up, and the winter air was thin and cold. Maurice and I talked about Meka and about Junior and about how he was doing.
Then Maurice did something he had never done before.
He asked to borrow money.
He said Meka had seen a winter coat she loved, and he wanted to buy it for her. He said the coat cost three hundred dollars.
“Maurice, that’s pretty expensive for a coat,” I said.
“But she saw it and she really likes it, and I want to get it for her,” he said.
I had never even considered what I would do if Maurice asked me for money. I thought back to when I had given him the choice between cash and brown bag lunches and he had chosen the lunches hands down. I’d spent thousands and thousands of dollars on Maurice, but our relationship had never been about money. I was taken aback that he was asking for money now.
I’d also been feeling guilty about spending less time with him and about how I had reacted to his son, and so I told him I’d make him a deal.
“I will give you two hundred dollars outright, but I will loan you the other hundred. You have to start paying me back immediately. I don’t care if it’s a quarter a week, but you have to pay me back. Do you understand, Maurice?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “And thank you so much, Laurie.”
We walked to an ATM, I pulled out three hundred dollars, and he hugged me and thanked me again. Then we went our separate ways.
The next Monday, when we were set to get together, I didn’t hear from Maurice. I didn’t hear from him the Monday after that. A month went by, then another.
And just like that, Maurice disappeared from my life.
In the eight years since I’d met Maurice, the longest we’d ever gone without talking or seeing each other was three weeks. We’d each become an automatic part of the other’s routine, and our conversations and outings were, at least to me, integral to my life. Now, all of a sudden, he was gone. I knew Maurice lived in Brooklyn, but I didn’t have his address—he’d always kept me away from wherever he lived, preferring just to meet me in Manhattan. And I didn’t have a phone number for him. This was still before cell phones, and I wasn’t even sure he had a landline. After I moved to White Plains, Maurice would always call me at my office on Mondays to confirm we were getting together. I could always count on hearing from him sooner or later.
But now, nothing. He’d been missing for eight months when my birthday rolled around, and I was sure I’d hear from him then. Since I’d met him, he’d never forgotten to call me and wish me a happy birthday. But that day passed, too, with no word. I started poring through phone books and calling every Mazyck I could find, to no avail. Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then another birthday, and still nothing. I told my assistant Rachel at Teen People magazine, where I was working, that if anyone named Maurice should call, she should find me and put it through immediately. On the streets of Manhattan I’d think I had seen him on a corner or in a bus, but it was never him. I had to face the possibility that Maurice could be out of my life for good. I even started worrying he might be dead.
Looking back now, the story of what happened to Maurice brings to mind one of the great themes of mythology—what Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. It is a voyage many of us have had to make in one way or another. It happens on our path to discovering who we are and what we are made of. When we are young and full of energy but still naïve about the world, we are lured into a dark, mysterious forest—a forest that seduces us with the promise of great things. There we face challenges more intense than we could have fathomed, and how we fare in those challenges determines who we become. If we make it out of the forest alive, we are wiser and stronger, and the gifts we bring back with us will make the world a better place. The hero’s journey is a journey of self-discovery.
Maurice disappeared from my life so that he could enter that dark forest.
> Maurice’s voyage began with a betrayal. He knew his father had done drugs, and of course he knew his mother was an addict. He knew all his uncles and practically every other adult in his life were involved in drugs. But there was one person who hadn’t been sucked into the vortex, one person who, through it all, had stayed clean. And that was Maurice’s grandmother, Rose.
Maurice believed for most of his young life that Grandma Rose did not do drugs. She was the one who kept everything together while his mother was out scoring or in jail. She was the one who would comfort Maurice, tell him what a good boy he was, and tell him not to worry, that his mother would be home soon because she loved him more than anything. His grandmother was the rock in their crazy family. When he was young, Maurice noticed his grandmother never slept at night—she just stayed up in her chair—and he asked her why.
“Because I gotta watch out for my kids,” she’d say. “I’m always watching over you.”
Maurice believed that was true. His grandmother was his protector.
Then, around the time his son was born, Maurice learned his grandmother had cancer and was in a hospital for treatment. That by itself was a terrible blow, but then Maurice heard one of his aunts say Rose had asked for a bag of dope.
“What are you talking about?” Maurice asked her. “What would she be doing with a bag of dope?”
His aunt told him Rose did drugs all the time.
Maurice was crushed. Slowly, he put the pieces together: the reason she stayed up all night was to do her drugs without the children seeing. In the mornings she’d nod off and sleep during the day. Maurice felt angry and betrayed, and he rushed to the hospital to confront his grandmother. He got there too early for visiting hours, but he’d been in the hospital before and knew his way around. He snuck in through the basement and went to the fifth floor. He walked into Rose’s room and found her in bed, hooked to a respirator, but her oxygen mask had come off and her gown was filthy. It looked to Maurice like no one was taking care of her, and he started yelling for a doctor or nurse, demanding they come and take care of his grandmother. Instead, two security guards grabbed Maurice, subdued him, and ushered him out of the hospital.
His grandmother died that night. He never got to talk to her.
He carried the betrayal with him for a while, but over time he realized his grandmother hadn’t betrayed him at all. Yes, she had succumbed to drugs, but she had kept her addiction a secret from Maurice so that he could see the best in her. And she had been his protector; she had steered him away from drugs, ever since the day she handed him that joint and then took it away. She had seen something special in Maurice, and she had done everything she could to keep him safe, right up to the day she died.
But now, she was gone. She could not be his protector anymore. That’s when Maurice realized he was no longer the one who needed protection.
He had a family now, and he had to become a protector for them.
In fact, his family was growing. Four months after Junior was born, Maurice and Meka split up; they simply fought too much to make it work. Maurice had seen his parents spend all their time fighting, and he didn’t want that for Junior. They agreed to raise Junior together, even though they were apart. Then Maurice met a beautiful girl named Michelle and fell in love. Michelle liked that Maurice was quiet and reserved—that he didn’t need to be seen and heard like all the other noisy boys she knew. He saw the same quality in her—she was smart, centered, sure of herself. And Michelle had a tough exterior—quick to fight and slow to trust. For her, compromising meant ceding control, and that was something she’d never do. Maurice sat her down and told her, “I’m not always going to have everything you want, but if you stick with me you will always have everything you need. Ride out the tough times with me and trust me, and we will make it together.”
Michelle looked into his eyes and said, “I got you.”
“I got you,” Maurice said.
They moved into an apartment on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, and they had a son they named Jalique.
Maurice did not tell me about Jalique when he was born. He had seen how I reacted to Junior’s birth, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell me he’d had another child. When he had borrowed the money from me, it wasn’t to buy a coat for Meka.
It was to buy two winter coats, for Junior and Jalique.
What upset Maurice during that time was the feeling he was letting me down. He believed I felt he was irresponsible, and I guess I did. I wish I could go back and not be as hard on him. I didn’t know my feelings would bother him as much as they did. Perhaps I should have known, but I didn’t. One of the reasons he didn’t call me was because he couldn’t bear to be a disappointment to me.
The other reason was his realization that he needed to find a way to support his new family. He wasn’t the little kid who ate steak and cookies with me any longer; he was a father now. He knew he couldn’t depend on me, or anyone else, to feed him or clothe him or otherwise support him. He had to find a way to do it on his own. That’s when he made a difficult decision: he was going to temporarily leave his family and go to North Carolina to try to set up a business.
Maurice’s plan was to bring jeans and other clothing with him from the city to sell in North Carolina, which was a couple of steps behind New York in terms of fashion. If he could set up a pipeline, all he’d have to do is send the clothing down and get money sent back to him in New York. Michelle was dead set against the trip; she didn’t like who he was going with. Maurice was traveling with two people he knew who were in the drug business, and Michelle was afraid they were going to North Carolina to sell drugs. She trusted Maurice and didn’t believe he would ever sell drugs himself, but both Maurice and Michelle knew that being around bad people could lead to as much trouble as being a bad person. Nothing good could come of this trip, Michelle thought, and she begged Maurice not to go.
But Maurice felt it was something he had to do, so he kissed his sons good-bye, told Michelle he loved her, and got on a Greyhound bus heading south.
He went to Raleigh and Fayetteville, Greensboro and Clinton. He missed Michelle and the children and called home whenever he could, promising he’d be home soon. He didn’t tell Michelle things weren’t going well in North Carolina. The men he was traveling with were getting in trouble with drug dealers and local girls and their boyfriends. There were constant fights and threats. Maurice found that, try as he might to steer clear of trouble, he often found himself right in the middle of it. He’d seen how his father acted in such situations, had seen Uncle Limp and Uncle Dark being tough when they needed to be, and so his instinct was to stand and fight—to be the tough guy from New York who could handle the local gangsters. He’d been taught to prove to people that he wasn’t a chump. And as long as he was around a bad element, he would have to keep on proving it.
For a while he stayed in a run-down trailer with a man named Crickett. He noticed Crickett owned a lot of guns. When he saw them, Maurice knew he didn’t belong in that trailer. He was starting to realize this kind of life wasn’t for him. One morning he went to a service at the local Pentecostal church, and afterward the preacher came up to him and pulled him out of the crowd.
“Son, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but the Lord said, ‘It is time for you to go home.’ He has some work for you to do. Go home.”
Maurice shrugged him off. He still had business to take care of.
“If you don’t leave tonight,” the preacher continued, “there will be dire consequences. Your place is at home.”
That night, while sitting in the trailer with Crickett and his friends, Maurice heard the screech of cars pulling up. Earlier, one of the men Maurice had come down with had fought with a local woman, and now the woman’s brothers and cousins were there to set things straight. Maurice heard yelling and cursing and pounding on the trailer, and as soon as he stepped outside, he heard the first gunshot.
He dove behind a parked car and huddled against the front tire. He heard
a bullet whiz past him; another shattered the windshield. The gunshots were impossibly loud, so loud he could barely think. He saw Crickett and his friends shooting back, ducking and firing and ducking again. Maurice prayed for the shooting to stop, but it just kept going—a hundred gunshots ringing in the night.
Then Crickett tossed a gun toward Maurice.
Maurice’s father would have picked up the gun, and his uncles would have, too. Now, it seemed, it was his turn. Maurice stayed close to the tire and thought about what the preacher hold told him: “dire consequences.” He thought about Michelle waiting for him in Brooklyn. He thought about his son Junior and his son Jalique and how when he held them in his arms he felt like more of a man than when he did anything else.
And he thought about me.
There wasn’t time during the gunfight to think about all the ways that I had nagged him. Don’t be late. Punctuality is important. Smoking is bad. Do your homework. Sit up straight. Clean your clothes. Be polite. There wasn’t time to reflect on the trips to Annette’s house and the dinners at the Hard Rock and the warm cookies. There was no chance to remember the moment when he told me he loved me and realized that I loved him, too. With the shrill blast of bullets echoing in his ears, he could not think back to the first baseball game he and I went to, or forward to the first game he and his sons would see together.
In the chaos and the hail of bullets, with a loaded gun at his feet, Maurice could only form four words in his head: This is not me.
He never picked up the gun. After twenty seconds that seemed more like twenty hours, the shooting stopped and the shooters drove away. Crickett looked down at Maurice in disgust.
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