This is where I was born.
This is where she died.
I can close my eyes and still see it.
It’s cold outside. There are no leaves on the trees.
The concrete is cracked and broken.
Cathy has to take the bus.
She doesn’t know where Joe is.
The bedroom is empty.
I am alone.
I am Lamar Joseph Odom.
And I am alive.
I was born in the autumn of her twenty-third year. She had always wanted a child. A boy who would grow to be handsome and tall. When she got pregnant, she was living with her mother in an upstairs bedroom and working for the New York City Department of Transportation in Queens.
Joseph Odom was a charismatic Vietnam War vet who worked as a janitor in the Woodside Houses projects in Queens. My mother was visiting a friend there when Joe first noticed her and won her over with his good looks and an easy brand of charm. She liked his smile; he liked her round, pretty eyes. He was twenty-three. She was twenty-one and just finding her way in the world.
Shortly after their first encounter, Cathy Mercer, tall, lithe, and beautiful, was walking by Woodside when Joe saw her again. He was cutting the grass, and his boots were stained green. He shut off the mower and met her at the sidewalk.
“What’s up, Slim?” he said. That’s what he would call her. A cute nickname to break the ice and set him apart from the other guys.
“Nothing, just trying to get home,” Cathy replied. “But I don’t have a token.” She needed to jump on the 7 train. Joe had but one subway token in his pocket. He needed it to get home.
“Take mine,” he said. He reached in his pocket and placed the token in her palm. Cathy smiled and gave him her number.
“You gonna call me, right?” she asked.
“I got the number memorized.”
My father walked the seventy-two blocks home. He repeated her phone number the whole way. That token, something so small yet quintessentially New York, is the beginning of my story.
Joe grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, long before the hipsters invaded.
“We was on the block,” my dad told me, years later. “We had to do for ourselves. It wasn’t pretty like it is now. We had drugs and temptation. We were young and innocent. Our lives were at stake.”
My dad first tasted marijuana at fourteen. From there he dove headfirst into hard drugs. He hustled on the block. He dealt to pimps, gangsters, and bangers. He’d get a fix from a neighborhood dealer with the promise of more to come if he could sell on the street.
He often found himself holed up in an abandoned building getting high. His parents were furious when he dropped out of high school his sophomore year. When Joe finally told his father, he ordered Joe into the family car, a 1968 Cadillac Eldorado. They drove for two hours, talking about repercussions and dreams and where Joe’s life was headed.
Back in the driveway, my grandfather put the car in park. They sat in silence for ten minutes. He looked at Joe and saw himself in the youngest of his five children. This boy, who was bright and tall and strong, began to cry.
“I’m a drug addict,” Joe said.
“I know, son,” said his father.
The next day my dad enlisted in the army. There was a recruitment office near their apartment. Two weeks later he was shipped to Fort Dix in New Jersey to begin his military training. Shortly after, he was deployed to Saigon. He reached the rank of E-4 Specialist and trained with M16s.
The experiences in a foreign land traumatized him.
He returned to Brooklyn a broken man. He was introduced to heroin in Vietnam. Many soldiers used it to deal with the stress of taking human life. It was how they coped. They were made to kill people they didn’t know. They pulled the triggers and stood there as the bodies dropped. It destroyed my father psychologically. Any empathy he had evaporated.
Joe moved back into his parents’ apartment. He was twenty-two and paranoid, depressed, anxious, and without direction. He looked over his shoulder on the rare occasions he left the apartment. And he only left in search of a fix. Within the year, Joe contacted a Veterans Affairs administrator who had one arm and an addiction of his own. He helped my father get back on his feet. That’s how Joe got the job at the Woodside Houses.
Cathy and Joe didn’t know each other very well, and in many ways, they never would. But Joe said they would give birth to a prince.
The things a man will tell a woman.
So, love blossomed in the ghetto. Concrete gave way to something softer. Joe loved her. Cathy would tell her friends about this guy from Woodside. She wanted a husband and a son and a home. They had started something that could not be undone. Their lives would take disparate paths, but ones that would forever be bound by me . . . the only thing they truly had in common.
I weighed seven pounds, fourteen ounces when I came into the world. “Man, he is long,” said Joe at St. John’s Hospital just past noon on the first Tuesday of November. “And he looks just like me. We done good, babe.”
I would be at once precious and tormented. Cherished and forgotten.
My grandmother Mildred Mercer was born to a family of sharecroppers and former slaves in rural Athens, Georgia, in 1934. When she was in her twenties, after scraping together twenty-nine dollars for a seat on the Greyhound, where she was relegated to the back of the bus with no air-conditioning, she and her sister moved to a tough working-class neighborhood in the Bronx in search of jobs and with designs on settling down and starting families of their own.
When Mildred had her first daughter, Cathy Celestine Mercer, they moved to a modest two-bedroom house on 131st Street and Linden Boulevard in South Ozone Park, Queens, just north of John F. Kennedy International Airport. My grandparents plopped down $250 for the down payment. The small abode was Queens through and through with its black gate and awning-covered porch, which was fronted by a row of tidy bushes. Their neighbors were bus drivers and toll workers and street sweepers and clerks in local government offices. They had found their heaven in the middle of New York’s biggest and most Italian borough.
I grew up in Grandma Mildred’s house, and it was always the center of neighborhood activity on 131st Street. Whenever there was a major life milestone or tragedy, our family and close neighbors gathered at the house. Graduations, birthdays, wakes, and new jobs were all reasons to get together over a barbecue in the backyard to either celebrate or commiserate.
My grandmother was the matriarch, setting house rules and curfews, and making certain that bellies were always full of her turkey wings, cabbage, fried chicken, and dumplings. I lived in this house growing up, except for a short time right after Joe and Cathy got married.
It was 1985, and I was six years old. And for the brief time Joe and Cathy were married, we lived in an apartment near the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens. I was part of a complete family.
But the tranquility and good times were short-lived. I have to search deep in my mind to find happy moments from my childhood. And I still have to convince myself that they actually happened. The only memories that come forth easily involve fear, pain, and anxiety. The smell of Mildred’s meals starts to fade and my mother’s angelic smile blurs in my memory. All that’s left is a frightened, powerless ten-year-old boy.