Breaking Night
A MEMOIR OF FORGIVENESS,
SURVIVAL, AND MY JOURNEY FROM
HOMELESS TO HARVARD
LIZ MURRAY
This book is dedicated to three people whose love made it possible.
TO EDWIN FERMIN, for the years behind us, for the years ahead of us, side-by-side. Thank you for taking care of my father when we needed you. Thank you for sharing your dreams with me and for being my family. Thank you for being my no-matter-what. When I look at all the good in my life, inside all of it, I see you.
TO ARTHUR FLICK, for the fishing trips, the motorcycle rides, the camping and each one of our adventures that I will always cherish. Thank you for being my Guardian Angel and my heart’s compass. You were right, Arthur, you do get to choose your family.
TO ROBIN DIANE LYNN—a Trusting, Powerful and Giving woman. Robin, you are a beautiful soul and the embodiment of contribution. This world was blessed to have you in it. Because of you, so many of us are blessed still. Thank you for showing me what it looks like to stand in a commitment, come what may.
“Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
—COACH JOHN WOODEN
Those who wish to sing always find a song.
—SWEDISH PROVERB
“Breaking Night”
URBAN SLANG FOR:
staying up through the night,
until the sun rises.
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1 - University Avenue
Chapter 2 - Middle of Everything
Chapter 3 - Tsunami Weather
Chapter 4 - Unraveling
Chapter 5 - Stuck
Chapter 6 - Boys
Chapter 7 - Breaking Night
Chapter 8 - The Motels
Chapter 9 - Pearls
Chapter 10 - The Wall
Chapter 11 - The Visit(or)
Chapter 12 - Possibility
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
A Personal Invitation from Liz Murray
About the Author
Praise for Breaking Night
Copyright
Prologue
I HAVE JUST ONE PICTURE LEFT OF MY MOTHER. IT’S 4 × 7, BLACK-AND-WHITE, and creased in different places. In it, she is seated slightly hunched, elbows touching knees, arms carrying the weight of her back. I know very little about her life when it was taken; my only clue is written in orange marker on the back. It reads: Me in front of Mike’s on 6th St. 1971. Counting backward, I know that she was seventeen when it was taken, a year older than I am now. I know that Sixth Street is in Greenwich Village, though I have no idea who Mike is.
The picture tells me that she was a stern-looking teenager. Her lips are pressed together in thought, offering a grimace for the camera. Framing her face, her hair dangles in beautiful wisps of black, smokelike curls. And her eyes, my favorite part, shine like two dark marbles, their movements frozen in time forever.
I’ve studied each feature, committing them to memory for my trips to the mirror, where I let my own wavy hair tumble down. I stand and trace similarities with the tip of my finger through the curve of each line in my face, starting with our eyes. Each pair offers the same small, rounded shape, only instead of my mother’s brown, I have Grandma’s rich yellow-green. Next, I measure the outline of our lips; thin, curvy, and identical in every way. Although we share some features, I know I’m not as pretty as she was at my age.
In my years with nowhere to live, behind the locked bathroom doors in different friends’ apartments, I’ve secretly played this game in the mirror throughout all hours of the night. Tucked in by their parents, my friends sleep while images of my mother’s graceful movements dance throughout my mind. I spend these hours in front of their bathroom mirrors, my bare feet cooled by gridded tiles, palms pressed on the sink’s edge to support my weight.
I stand there fantasizing until the first blue hints of dawn strain through the frosted bathroom glass and birds announce themselves, chirping their morning songs. If I’m at Jamie’s house, this is just the time to slip onto the couch before her mother’s alarm beeps her awake, sending her to the bathroom. If I’m at Bobby’s, the grinding noise of the garbage truck tells me it’s time to sneak back to the foldout cot.
I travel quietly across their waking apartments to my resting spot. I never get too comfortable with my accommodations, because I’m not sure if I will sleep in the same place tomorrow.
Lying on my back, I run my fingertips over my face in the dark, and I envision my mother. The symmetry of our lives has become clearer to me lately. She was homeless at sixteen too. Ma also dropped out of school. Like me, Ma made daily decisions between hallway or park, subway or rooftop. The Bronx, for Ma, also meant wandering through dangerous streets, through neighborhoods with lampposts littered with flyers of police sketches and sirens blaring at all hours of the night.
I wonder if, like me, Ma spent most days afraid of what would happen to her. I’m afraid all the time lately. I wonder where I will sleep tomorrow—at another friend’s apartment, on the train, or in some stairwell?
Tracing my fingertips over my forehead, down to my lips, I long to feel my mother’s warm body embracing me again. The thought sends tears streaming from my eyes. I turn to my side, wiping my tears away, covering myself with my borrowed blanket.
I push the feeling of needing her far out of my mind. I push it beyond these walls lined with Bobby’s family portraits; past the drunken Latino men just outside, slamming down winning hands of dominoes, seated atop milk crates on Fordham Road; away from the orange blinking lights of the bodegas and over the rooftops of this Bronx neighborhood. I force my thoughts to fade until the details of her face blur. I need to push them away if I am ever to get some sleep. I need sleep; it will be only a few more hours before I’m outside on the street again, with nowhere to go.
Ma, 6th Street, Greenwich Village, 1971
Chapter 1
University Avenue
THE FIRST TIME DADDY FOUND OUT ABOUT ME, IT WAS FROM BEHIND glass during a routine visit to prison, when Ma lifted her shirt, teary-eyed, exposing her pregnant belly for emphasis. My sister, Lisa, then just over one year old, sat propped against Ma’s hip.
Reflecting on this time in her life, Ma would later explain, “It wasn’t supposed to turn out that way, pumpkin. It wasn’t like me and Daddy planned for this.”
Even though she’d been on her own and in trouble with drugs since age thirteen, Ma insisted, “Daddy and me were gonna turn around. Somewhere down the line, we were gonna be like other people. Daddy was gonna get a real job. I was gonna be a court stenographer. I had dreams.”
Ma used coke, shooting dissolved white dust into her veins; it traveled through her body much like lightning, igniting her, giving the feel, however fleeting, of something forward-moving, day in and day out.
“A lift,” she called it.
She started using as a teenager; her own home had been a place of anger, violence, and abuse.
“Grandma was just nuts, Lizzy. Pop would come home drunk and beat the crap out of us, with anything—extension cords, sticks, whatever. She would just go clean the kitchen, humming, like nothing was happening. Then just act like Mary-friggin-Poppins five minutes later, when we were all busted up.”
The oldest of four children, Ma often spoke of the guilt she harbored for finally leaving the abuse—and her siblings—behind. She went out on the streets when she was just thirteen.
“I couldn’t stay there, not even for Lori or Johnny. At least they had mercy on Jimmy and took him away. Man, you bet your ass I had to get out of there. Being under a bridge was better, and safer, than being there.”
I had to know what it was M
a did under bridges.
“Well, I dunno, pumpkin, me and my friends all hung out and talked . . . about life. About our lousy parents. About how we were better off. We talked . . . and I guess we got high, and after that, it didn’t matter where we were.”
Ma started out small, smoking grass and sniffing glue. During the years of her adolescence, moving between friends’ couches and earning her living through teen prostitution and odd jobs like bike messengering, she moved on to speed and heroin.
“The Village was a wild place, Lizzy. I had these thick, tall leather boots. And I didn’t care if I was skinny as hell; I wore short shorts and a cape down my back. Yeah, that’s right, a cape. I was cool, too. Jivin’, man. That’s how we used to talk. Pumpkin, you should have seen me.”
By the time Ma met Daddy, coke had become a popular seventies trend, alongside hip-huggers, muttonchops, and disco music. Ma described Daddy at the time they first hooked up as “dark, handsome, and smart as hell.”
“He just got things, ya know? When most of the guys I hung around didn’t know their ass from their elbow, your father had something about him. I guess you could say he was sharp.”
Daddy came from a middle-class, Irish Catholic family in the suburbs. His father was a shipping boat captain and a violent alcoholic. His mother was a hardworking and willful woman who refused to put up with what she called “foolishness” from men.
“All you need to know about your grandfather, Lizzy, is that he was a nasty, violent drunk who liked to bully people,” Daddy once told me, “and your grandmother didn’t tolerate it. She didn’t care how unpopular divorce was back then, she got herself one.” Unfortunately for Daddy, when his parents’ marriage ended, his father left him, and he never came back.
“He was a real piece of work, Lizzy. It’s probably better he wasn’t around, things weren’t easy and he only would have made them worse.”
People who knew Daddy when he was growing up describe him as a lonely child and a “hurt soul” who never seemed to get over his father’s abandonment and his resulting status as “latchkey kid.” His mother took on a demanding full-time job to make ends meet and she worked long hours while Daddy was mostly alone, searching for an outlet, someone or something to connect with. Most nights, he spent evenings by himself, or in the homes of friends, where he became a fixture in other people’s families. Back at his house, he and Grandma grew distant, and things were mostly serious and silent between them.
“Your grandmother wasn’t the talkative type,” he told me one day, “which was very Irish Catholic of her. In our family, if you said the words ‘I feel,’ they better be followed with ‘hungry’ or ‘cold.’ Because we didn’t get personal, that’s just how it was.”
But what Grandma lacked in warmth, she made up for in her tireless devotion to securing her son’s future. Determined not to let Daddy suffer from the absence of his father, Grandma set out to give him the best education she could afford. She worked two bookkeeping jobs in order to put her only child through the best Catholic schools on Long Island. At Chaminade, a school with a reputation for being rigorous and elite, Daddy shared classes and a social life with a more well-to-do crowd than he’d ever known existed. Most of his classmates were given new cars as gifts on their sixteenth birthdays, while Daddy took two buses to school, his mother praying that the monthly tuition check wouldn’t clear through the bank before her paycheck did.
The irony was, as much as this upper-class, private school setting was meant to position Daddy for a life of success, instead, it would put my father at odds with himself forever: in this environment he became both well-educated and a drug addict.
Throughout his late teen years, Daddy read the great American classics; vacationed in his classmates’ beachfront summer homes, ignoring his mother’s incessant phone calls; and as a pastime, popped amphetamines beneath the bleachers of the high school football field.
Though he’d always been quick to learn and absorbed much of his rigorous education, the drugs made it hard to concentrate in school, so he slacked on homework and dozed in class. In his last year, Daddy applied and was admitted to a college located right in the heart of New York City. When graduation rolled around, he just barely squeaked by. Manhattan was meant to be his real start in life, college his springboard. But it wasn’t long before his high school setting recast itself around him, except now he was older and not in the suburbs of Baldwin, New York, but in the center of everything. In a few years’ time, Daddy came to apply his aptitude more toward peddling drugs than his college work. Slowly, he rose to the top ranks of a small clique of drug pushers. Being the most educated member of the group, he was nicknamed “the professor,” and was looked to for guidance. He was the one who drew blueprints for the group’s schemes.
Daddy abandoned school when he was two years into a graduate degree in psychology, a time during which he also gained some experience in social work, earning slightly above minimum wage. But the upkeep involved maintaining two very separate lives—a legitimate attempt at the “straight life” versus the “high life”—required too much effort. His lucrative drug earnings had a gravity far too powerful; it simply outweighed what an average life seemed to offer. So he rented an East Village apartment and worked full-time in the drug trade, surrounded by odd, lower-Manhattan types with criminal records and gang affiliations—his “crew.” It so happened that Ma was hitting the same scene, right around this same time, floating in the same offbeat crowd.
Years down the line, they connected at a mutual friend’s loft apartment. Speed and coke were distributed as casually as soft drinks, and people discoed the night away surrounded by soft glowing lava lamps, the air perfumed by incense. They’d met a few times before, when Daddy’d dealt Ma speed or heroin. Coming from the streets, Ma’s first impressions of Daddy were something like an encounter with a movie star.
“You just had to see the way your father worked the room,” she’d tell me. “He called all the shots, commanded respect.” When they hooked up, Ma was twenty-two and Daddy was thirty-four. Ma dressed for the seventies, in flower-child blouses and nearly invisible short-shorts. Daddy described her as radiant and wild-looking with long, wavy black hair and bright, piercing amber eyes. Daddy said he took one look at her and loved her innocence, yet also her toughness and her intensity. “She was unpredictable,” he said. “You couldn’t tell if she was calculating or totally naïve. It was like she could go either way.”
They connected immediately, and in many ways became like any other new couple, passionate and eager to be with each other. But instead of taking in movies or hitting restaurants, shooting up was their common ground. They used getting high to find intimacy. Slowly, Ma and Daddy abandoned their crowds to be together, taking long walks down Manhattan streets, clasping hands, warming up to each other. They carried small baggies of cocaine and bottles of beer to Central Park, where they perched on hilltops to sprawl out in the moonlight and get high, anchored in each other’s arms.
If my parents’ lives had held different degrees of promise before they met, it didn’t take long for their paths to run entirely parallel. The premature start of our family leveled them, when they began living together in early 1977. Lisa, my older sister, was born in February 1978, when Ma was twenty-three.
In Lisa’s infancy, my parents initiated one of Daddy’s more lucrative drug scams. The plot involved faking the existence of a doctor’s office in order to legitimize the purchase of prescription painkillers that Daddy said were “strong enough to knock out a horse.” Typically reserved for cancer patients on hospice, just one of the tiny pills had a street value of fifteen dollars. On his graduate student clientele alone, Daddy could use phony prescriptions to unload hundreds of these pills per week, earning Ma and Daddy thousands of dollars every month.
Daddy went through great pains to avoid getting caught. Patience and attention to detail would keep them out of jail, he insisted. “It had to be done right,” he said. Meticulously, Daddy used the pho
ne book along with maps of all five boroughs of New York City to carefully create a schedule of pharmacies they would hit systematically, week by week. The riskiest part of the scam, by far, was actually walking into the pharmacy to collect on a prescription, a task made riskier by the pharmacist’s legal obligation to phone doctors and verify all “scripts” for pain pills as strong as these.
Daddy devised a way to intercept pharmacists’ calls. The phone company at the time didn’t verify doctors’ credentials, so Daddy frequently ordered and abandoned new phone numbers under names he picked out of thin air, or sometimes he drew ideas from his former professors, Dr. Newman, Dr. Cohen, and Dr. Glasser. The pharmacists did indeed reach a doctor at the other end of their phone calls; a secretary even patched them through. But really it was only Ma and Daddy working together as a team. They worked long days, utilizing rent-by-the-week rooms in flophouses across New York City while friends cared for Lisa, who at that time was only a few months old.
The prescriptions themselves Daddy created with the help of his crew. He gave friends in a printing shop a cut of his profits in exchange for an ongoing supply of illegal, custom-made rubber stamps bearing the names of the phony doctors and a supply of legitimate-looking prescription pads. With the help of his connections, and for the cost of twenty-five dollars per pad, Daddy transformed blank prescriptions into gold, a stamp-by-stamp moneymaking machine. By design, Daddy said, his plan was “airtight” and would have continued to work if not for Ma’s slipup.
Though he did claim responsibility for at least half of the mistake, admitting, “We never should have been using from our own supply, that’s a rookie move. Getting hooked on your own stash fogs your head, makes you desperate.”