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 Ma 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