“What the—” he starts to say, but he knows what’s going on.
I tell him, “I was on my way over to talk to you, but I guess it’s too late for that now.”
They read him his rights under the harsh lights of Shea while the fans cheer somebody’s throw-beating play. The cheers that he’ll never hear. And I can just imagine Felipe when he finds out tomorrow. When they all find out: “Dime que no es cierto, Fil.”
Which translates roughly as, “Say it ain’t so.”
Out of body
by Glenville Lovell
South Jamaica
Phisto remembered it like it was yesterday. The first time he saw a dead body. It was in the embalming room of his father’s funeral home. He was almost twelve years old, already bored with school and given to playing hooky, cruising around in stolen cars with his new friends from a Bloods gang that controlled the Baisley Projects.
That day the police had stopped them in a stolen green Caddy on Archer Avenue and had taken the older boys off to jail. He later found out the only reason he’d escaped a trip to the lockup was because one officer had known his old man. Turned out the tough-love cop wasn’t doing him any favor by not taking him to jail.
The cop drove him home and he almost bluffed his way out of trouble. But the guy refused to release him without first speaking to his parents. The house was empty that afternoon. His mother had died earlier in the year, and soon afterward, his eighteen-year-old sister ran off with the pastor who conducted his mother’s funeral.
The cop took him down to his father’s funeral parlor over there on Guy Brewer Boulevard about a mile away from where they lived on 178th Place, a quiet leafy neighborhood of one-and two-family homes dense with Caribbean immigrants like his father who’d settled there in 1960.
Phisto had never visited the funeral home until that day. He knew what his father did for a living. He knew that his father buried people. And made a pretty good living from it, evidenced by the latest appliances and new furniture they had in their one-family brick house, but it was never talked about in his company.
While the officer explained to his father why Phisto had arrived there in the back of a patrol car, his father showed no emotion, merely nodding and shaking his head. Moments after the blue-and-white drove off, his father exploded, displaying a temper that Phisto had heard his mother talk about but had never seen before.
His father took him down into the basement and ordered him to strip. Defiant, Phisto grabbed his crotch, aping the bad-boy posturing he’d picked up on the street. With this bluff, he tried to walk away. His father grabbed him in a choke-hold and slammed him to the ground. Phisto was surprised by his father’s strength. The slightly built man from the island of St. Kitts, though no more than a few inches taller than his son, was well-muscled with surprising power in his upper body from cutting sugar cane and working construction in his youth. With a piece of electrical cord, he tied his scrawny son to a chair next to the dead body he was preparing for burial and proceeded to rip Phisto’s clothes from his body until he was naked in the cold room.
Then the mortician went back to his work. The smell of embalming fluid soon filled Phisto’s lungs. The prickly odor knifed through his toughness and singed his palate until he puked all over himself. His father paid no attention to him at all. Singing cheerfully and going about his business, stepping over Phisto sitting there in his own vomit, admiring how craftily he’d restored the young woman’s face, mutilated by a jealous boyfriend after he’d killed her.
With nothing left in his stomach, Phisto leaned against the table leg. He was weak and bleeding where the wire chafed his wrist. Slime dripped from the corners of his mouth. From where he sat he could see the blood and fluid draining from the woman’s body, flowing down into the waste receptacle.
He glanced at the corpse’s face and felt a strange relief, a sort of bonding with something outside of himself. Quietly, as if he’d somehow acquired the facility to remove his spirit from his body, he stared at the pathetic little boy with spittle drooling from his mouth, trembling at his father’s feet. He saw himself, the pathetic little boy, rise up and walk over to his father and put his arm around the man’s shoulder and whisper, Thank you.
Then he headed out of the room, pausing at the door for one final glance at the sniffling kid sitting in vomit.
Phisto stored that dead woman’s face in his mind, embracing that stillness characterized by death as a part of himself. By the time his father released him two hours later, the smell of vomit and the sickly odor of embalming fluid had disappeared from his senses. He wasn’t even aware of the cold anymore. He could’ve sat there for another two hours as comfortably as if he were lounging poolside at the Four Seasons in Miami.
Years later, he came to realize that in those two hours he sat in that frigid room while his father worked on that body, he’d formulated the virtue that would rule his life: Feel no pain or remorse.
In 1984, he quit school at sixteen and started selling weed. In three months he had moved onto powder, making as much as $8,000 off an ounce. He struck a deal with some Colombians and by the end of the year was flipping $100,000 a week with rock houses in South Jamaica. In two years, he controlled the large housing projects which dominated the two sections of the southside. But he knew that this game wasn’t going to last, so he started taking business classes in sales and real estate. By the time the crack craze was over, he’d amassed a fortune and an army, and while maintaining his stranglehold on the drug trade, exporting to as far away as Texas, he had diversified his holdings into real estate in Atlanta, Miami, and the Caribbean.
People saw him as a drug lord. A gang leader. A killer. A psychopath. He laughed whenever he read those kinds of descriptions in the news. America worshipped psychopaths and other miscreants in the name of business. Just pick up Business Week or the Wall Street Journal or any major business magazine and you found profiles of men who ran businesses, who on the surface appeared to be legal, but with a little digging were discovered to be looting the companies, stealing employee pensions, and knowingly selling products that killed people. The newspapers and magazines lauded those muthafuckers as visionaries, but condemned people of a similar personality profile like himself, who did business on the margins of society. Ain’t that some shit.
Was he any different from the CEOs of big corporations in this country? He was just as charismatic, as visionary, as tough as a Steve Jobs. In fact, you could say he was tougher. He had never operated any business at a loss. If his businesses were listed on the stock market, the share values would rise every year. His underlings worshipped him just as shareholders worshipped the Bernie Ebberses or Jack Welches of the world. He did whatever he had to do to get the job done. Just as they did. And just as they were celebrated and applauded by their peers and profit-worshippers for their willingness to take chances, to be aggressive and visionary, so was he by the many people who depended on him for their survival.
There were two codes he lived by. They were ruthless, but effective. His first motto: Snitches must die. The silencing of witnesses was the rule he lived by and everyone in his orbit, including all the Baisley Projects, paid heed. Neither the NYPD nor the Feds had ever built a case against him.
The second motto: Accept no disrespect.
Which was why he had no choice but to put down Fred Lawrence in view of everyone in the playground in Baisley Pond Park. It was as necessary as any CEO firing a junior executive who disrespected him in public. As much as he liked the youngster, if he let the upstart get away with this, the mystique of being Phisto Shepherd would be destroyed. Forever. The youngster had stepped to him in a way that no one in their right mind should be tempted to do. And bragging on top of it. You disrespect Phisto and walk around bragging? That’s asking to be cut down. There’s no surer way to commit suicide than to disrespect Phisto Shepherd and brag on it.