I Can't Breathe Page 3

  There was a reason why Garner was tired. He had a second life apart from the straight pharmaceutical job.

  “I’m not going to sugarcoat shit,” Esaw says. “He was a drug dealer.”

  —

  Eric Garner hadn’t grown up wanting. His mother, Gwen, was a hardworking and dedicated woman who put in long hours first for the telephone company, then later for the post office, and ultimately as a subway operator. Throughout Eric’s childhood, there had always been food on the table, shoes on his feet.

  But Garner wasn’t even nineteen when he married a woman several years his senior with two children to feed, who also happened to have a taste for clothes and nice things. The reality of his financial situation at that moment hit the teenage Garner like a tidal wave. How did people live?

  He knew that other kids in the neighborhood where he grew up were making lots of money dealing drugs and through other hustles, but Eric Garner had a problem. He wasn’t a natural criminal.

  According to family legend, right around the time he got married, Garner planned to commit a burglary. He targeted a pizza place in his neighborhood. But when he actually broke into the place at night, he went into the kitchen and cooked himself a pizza instead of going straight for the cash. He ended up starting a small fire and fleeing without a dime. That, legend has it, was the end of his career as a burglar.

  Much later on in life, he would tell his kids that he turned to dealing crack cocaine at that time out of necessity. It was easy, it was there, and it was what everyone else did. And once he began to have his own children with Esaw, it became a way of life. He stopped questioning it.

  “Eric didn’t give a fuck,” Esaw puts it bluntly. “He had kids and was going to make the money.”

  Eric may have watched his mother work from the time he was born, but from a young age he also became accustomed to being the man of the house, an archaic role even then, and tried to impose a patriarchal ideal onto his marriage that never quite existed in his childhood. He wanted to be the family breadwinner, which meant he didn’t want his wife working outside the home. The implicit deal was that he would take care of the money while she would take care of him. In some ways, this worked out well because Esaw herself didn’t particularly want to work.

  “He didn’t want me to have to work,” Esaw says. “So I never had to.”

  When it came to how he was making his money, Eric made the drug dealer’s usual argument. “You’re against me selling drugs, but you don’t mind spending the money,” he’d say.

  Esaw was paralyzed by that logic. “It was like a catch-22,” she says. “I enjoyed the money, but the risk wasn’t worth it. I told him that no matter what, he was never going to get rich doing this, that he would most likely end up dead or in jail.”

  And it’s true, he didn’t get rich from selling drugs, but over the years, Eric’s family began to accumulate nice things. There was expensive furniture in the house and the kids would be dressed to the nines on the first day of school.

  And they drove nice cars. Eric had a lifelong fondness for Cadillacs. He had a gorgeous tan one in the nineties, with a hood so long his kids remember not being able to see to the end of it from inside the car.

  Garner didn’t work out on the street, at least not that his family observed. What they saw of his business was in little glimpses before a bedroom door slammed shut. Garner loaded raw product into vials and from time to time would get paged. He would slip out, quietly, and make a delivery. Sometimes he’d be gone for more than a day. Back at home, he would load and unload money and product into a safe that nobody was allowed to watch him open, although the kids were sometimes instructed by Pinky to try to catch the combination.

  He was making real money. But around that same time, he began to develop a quirk in his personality, one that would become a defining trait when he was a middle-aged man. Apart from the car, he spent all of his money on his wife and children, to the point where he wouldn’t buy himself even the most basic things. He began, slowly, to ignore himself.

  “Your sneakers have holes,” Esaw would say.

  “Yeah, but the kids need this and that.”

  “That’s fine, but you can get yourself a pair of sneakers,” she’d say.

  But he’d tune her out and keep wearing the shoes with holes in them. Even his pants started to deteriorate.

  “In the nineties, he had one pair of jeans,” Esaw remembers. “They were split from the right knee up to the crotch. Believe me when I tell you, he wouldn’t throw those away.”

  Garner began to develop a mania for saving. He had little piles of money stashed in different places for different things. He would keep cash in the soles of sneakers, in holes in walls, in the trunks of cars. He became phobic about spending and scrupulous about the way he played the drug game.

  “He never spent his re-up,” is how his wife puts it. In other words, he never touched the money he needed to buy the next package of drugs.

  Garner for the most part was mild mannered and soft-spoken. But he had a few sensitive spots, and one of them was his family. As Esaw remembers it, the one thing that was guaranteed to get her husband truly angry was implying that he wasn’t a responsible father. Eric was part of a generation of young black men for whom the worst insult was to be called a deadbeat, a word often thrown at black men of his father’s generation by white politicians, including New York’s own Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. These politicians and social scientists in the mid-sixties began to point fingers at the unemployed black male as the root of much inner-city evil. “Deadbeat dad” was the counter to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen,” an insult that cut to the core, and Garner would have none of it.

  “You could say anything to him, but if you called him a deadbeat dad, he’d go crazy,” Esaw says. “He’d say, ‘I take care of my kids! I’ll take care of them from a jail cell!’ ”

  As it turned out, he had to do exactly that. On July 13, 1994, Garner got arrested for selling crack cocaine. Even though it was his first serious offense, and there was no violence in the charge, he was sentenced to eighteen months to three years.

  When Garner went away to prison, he and his wife fought. Their phone calls were tense.

  “One time, I was crying,” Esaw remembers. “I said, ‘Babe, I’m out here, I’m alone, I don’t have any money.’

  “And he said, ‘Baby, calm down. Go in the bathroom.’ ”

  Esaw had noticed that the medicine cabinet looked separated from the wall, but she hadn’t given it a second thought. Now Eric told her to move the medicine cabinet and stick her hand in the hole.

  There was five thousand dollars in cash inside.

  The money lasted awhile. But soon there was nothing left but promises and letters from jail.

  —

  After Eric came home from that first stint in jail, the family moved around for a while. Finally they settled for a time in a tough section of Brownsville, New York, in a little green four-story building on Mother Gaston Boulevard, between Liberty and East New York Avenues. The neighborhood landmarks were a junk pile in the alley next to the apartment building and a tire shop on the corner. There was a nearby public pool that stank of urine and was ringed with leering men out for a glimpse of little girls in bathing suits.

  The building’s stoop, situated behind a gate, was where people sat, smoked cigarettes, hung out, and sometimes drank a little, day and night.

  The family spent much of the late 1990s and early 2000s in this spot, and it was a complicated time for them, filled with pain and tragedy, but also some powerful memories of a group of people who stuck together through the toughest of situations. What the Garner kids—four now, from preschoolers to middle schoolers—experienced there was a parody of family life. For instance, sometimes Eric would get up and announce he had to go to “work.” All of his kids who were old enough to walk—Erica, Emerald, their little brother Eric Jr., sometimes even Esaw’s daughter Shardinee—would wrap their arms around Garner’s ankle
s, thighs, and arms and beg him not to go. They riffed on a running joke from the TV comedy Martin about Martin Lawrence’s friend Tommy, who was always pretending to go off to a job he didn’t have.

  “You ain’t got no job!” they’d say.

  But it was no good. He was so big, he’d just drag all the kids with him out the door, where they’d reluctantly turn him loose to the world.

  While Eric was home, the family had enough money for small luxuries—furniture, electronics, cars. But by now he was in and out of jail often, and the family’s fortunes waxed and waned with his presence. When he went away, all of the material things would vanish.

  The kids, for instance, all had TVs in their own rooms when Eric was home. When he went away to jail, the TVs would get sold and all of the kids would have to pile into Mom’s room to watch cartoons. Sometimes the kids would come home and watch their family furniture being moved out, like the sofa that his daughter Erica remembers being relocated to the apartment of the drug dealer up the hallway.

  When Garner wasn’t incarcerated, he loved to be home, a sometimes fatal flaw in his line of work. If hustling drugs is a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week job, Garner was short a day or two every week. The streets were where he reluctantly dragged himself to make money. On Sundays he didn’t like to budge from the couch and would frown if anyone walked in front of the game on television. And he would not miss holidays with his children, a trait passed down from his mother, who always got away from work to celebrate the holidays with her family when Eric was a kid.

  Esaw remembers one particular Halloween when they were living in East New York. The neighborhood had become too dangerous for trick-or-treating. So she went to the store and bought each of the kids a big bag of candy, and they had a pretend Halloween in the house.

  “We would go rent scary movies,” Esaw recalls now. “And we would all—we had a big king-size bed when we lived in Brooklyn, so we would all get up on the bed. It would be me, Eric, and all the kids.

  “And I let them eat candy, and we’d sit there and watch all the scary movies together. He made it his business that every Sunday and every holiday he spent with the kids, no matter what.”

  She laughs. “I know how it sounds, but if somebody called up and ordered five thousand dollars’ worth of crack, he would not leave the house. He would say, ‘Nope, this is a family day, see me tomorrow.’ ”

  Garner was no kingpin. He didn’t have the stomach for what it would take to get there.

  “He never killed anyone, and he wasn’t thugged out, you know?” Esaw explains. “He was a good guy. He just felt that was the only way he could take care of all of the kids that we had.”

  —

  Resentments built up over the years. Esaw had a way of getting under Eric’s skin that no one else could match. He was the kind of person who would take a ribbing for a long while before bursting, and she picked at this particular characteristic. When Esaw would start in on Eric, he would take it for a while, but eventually it would become too much. He’d put a fist through a wall, smash a television. “There was a lot of violence in the house,” daughter Erica remembers.

  Once, in the early 2000s, Eric went away to jail again. While he was gone, another neighborhood drug dealer, a man much younger than Eric, took an interest in his family, started to check in on his kids. When Esaw went out shopping, the young man would come by and help the girls with their homework, or so Erica remembers.

  By all accounts, there was nothing romantic going on between this man and Esaw. To the girls he was too young even to be a father figure and was more like a big brother.

  But when Eric got back from jail, he wasn’t pleased to see another man involved with his children.

  So one day the young man came by, expecting Esaw to be home and Eric out. But it was the other way around. He knocked on the door. Eric, back home now, leaped to his feet and yelled at the man through the door not to come around anymore. “Don’t talk to none of my kids. Don’t talk to my wife,” he said.

  At some point the door opened and an epic melee ensued just outside the apartment. The kids remember seeing their father coming back into the house with a hand wrapped in a towel, and there was blood everywhere.

  The young man was very seriously hurt. Garner, considerably bigger than this younger man, had grabbed him by the head and pulled him so fiercely he yanked two of his dreads out.

  When the fight was over, Garner walked in a trancelike state over to the bedroom and placed the two curls on Esaw’s television. Then he sat, defeated and miserable, and waited.

  Police came knocking shortly thereafter. All four of Eric’s natural children—Erica, Emerald, Eric Jr., and even little baby Emery—were in the apartment. When he opened the door, Eric found himself staring at the barrel of a police officer’s gun. The kids could see it, too.

  Eric was taken away. He got two years.

  Garner’s daughters were furious that he had left them and gone away to jail yet again and began rebelling against him. He was only in Rikers Island, not far away, but they didn’t visit as they had before. Instead they gave him an ultimatum: they wanted him to commit to being around more often or they would continue to withhold their presence from him.

  Garner, in prison, responded in despair and fury. He wrote a devastating letter renouncing forever the children he felt had now betrayed him. Later, he regretted it and would work for years to repair things with his kids, but for a stretch of years in the mid-2000s while he served out his bid, the family was almost completely in schism and Garner was alone.

  When he came home from jail after the assault case, they had a family conference, and Garner’s children insisted that he give up drug dealing and commit to being in their lives full-time.

  Weeping, he promised.

  THREE PEDRO

  In his childhood years, Pedro Serrano was easy to spot on the streets of the North Bronx. There was a hit new movie out in the early nineties called Boyz n the Hood, and Pedro was like a Puerto Rican version of Morris Chestnut’s Ricky character, the kid carrying a football everywhere he went. And just like in the movie, he walked in a foursome, with friends nicknamed Freckle-Faced Ivan, Little Man Ivan, and Karate Pete.

  But there were some sections of the North Bronx neighborhood where you weren’t welcome if you weren’t white. Pedro knew from very early on, for instance, that he and his friends weren’t allowed on some stretches of 187th Street, in Bronx’s Little Italy. He learned the lesson the hard way.

  “I remember turning a corner on my bicycle and a whole group of white people coming out of nowhere, chasing me back in the other direction,” he says. “You got good at running when you grew up around there.”

  As he got older, he was presented with a problem: how to go to junior high at MS 45 on 189th Street. He couldn’t walk straight to class, because that would take him right through the Italian neighborhood. One day, he and his three friends walked past an Italian social club, one of those mysterious cafés with the blacked-out windows. A man Pedro assumed was the owner pulled a gun on him and his friends.

  “Get in the fucking store,” he said.

  The man was drunk and apparently upset about an incident involving his daughter and some other Hispanic kids from a nearby neighborhood. That had nothing to do with Pedro, who was just a little kid. It didn’t matter.

  “He threatened us,” he remembers. “He’s like, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ ” A door-to-door salesman came in and discovered the bizarre scene, allowing Pedro and his friends to escape.

  He never forgot that day. From then on, in order to get to school, he took a long detour, traveling many blocks out of his way north to Fordham Road and heading west before turning south back to school.

  “It was a racial divide,” he says. “That’s just the way it was.”

  Like a lot of the people who grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Eric Garner’s youth, Serrano was raised in a world with rigid borders.

  “I grew up with k
ids who didn’t even know what it was to go six blocks away from home,” he says now. “You paid a price for crossing the line.”

  In the early nineties, just as Eric Garner was settling into a career as a drug dealer, New York was ground zero for what would become a nationwide revolution in policing strategies. People like Pedro Serrano didn’t know much about the new enforcement techniques, other than that they meant more contact with the cops.

  The newspapers called the program “Stop, Question, and Frisk.” Pedro didn’t know what it was called, but he soon learned to accept a strict new street-interrogation program as an extension of the same dynamic he’d dealt with in childhood.

  “Now if you went in the wrong neighborhood, a police car was coming by,” he remembers. “Cops would jump out and say, ‘Hey, what the fuck are you doing here? You don’t belong here.’ ”

  Then the Stop-and-Frisk ritual would start. The kids didn’t know anything about how it was supposed to work, but they knew exactly how it did work, which was that the police would put you up against a wall and empty your pockets every time they saw you, especially if you were walking with friends.

  It happened so often that Pedro and his friends learned to assume the position as the police car rolled up. The instinct to put hands up on the wall was so immediate that he often didn’t have time to carefully put down whatever he was carrying, usually a football or a basketball.

  “The football would go bouncing down the sidewalk, every time,” he recalls. Then the cops, mostly all white, would start rifling through the kids’ pockets in search of drugs or guns or whatever, feeding them attitude the whole way, swearing at them, calling them animals and other names.

  A few times, Pedro talked back.

  “Then they’d slap you on the back of the head and be like, ‘Shut the fuck up, you little spic,’ ” he says. “They didn’t even try to hide the fact that they were racist.”