Muck City

by Bryan Mealer

  “My parents thought I liked going to Red Lobster for the food,” Jessie said, “but it was really to hear those stories. My dad’s super quiet, but if you get to see the side that I saw, he’s very funny.”

  Jessie had recently graduated from the University of South Florida, where he’d played his father’s position and become a star on his own merit. But his chances at playing professionally had been dashed after a foot injury his senior season. He was now living in Tampa and considering a career in coaching.

  Hester’s two youngest boys remained at home. Jarron was a freshman at Glades Central and Jymetre was eight. There was rarely a moment when Hester did not have at least one of them by his side.

  After school, Jarron would usually sit in the truck and wait for practice to end, fighting boredom with homework or video games. (“I’m just not into football,” he once said. “Nobody seems to understand that.”) Jymetre, however, was a born player and student of the game. He could recite the Raider route tree like it was Mother Goose, much to the pleasure of Jet’s assistants. Later in the season, even when the Raiders played on the road, Jymetre would shadow his father along the sideline at most every game. With his hair done in perfect cornrows and always clutching a football like a teddy bear, he would gaze at the procession of violence, profanity, and blood with a look of wonderment. Come Saturday mornings, he would shine as quarterback, receiver, and running back on his own little league team in Wellington.

  “The boy just cries whenever he loses,” his father once said with a glow of pride on his face. “He takes it real, real hard.”

  Throughout Hester’s own days as a young player, watching friends wave to their fathers sitting in the bleachers, he’d always had to settle for his grandfather, Willie, whom he loved.

  Growing up, he knew his real father’s name was Lorenzo. He also knew he’d been a decent player for the Lake Shore Bobcats, and that he no longer lived in Belle Glade. For most of Jessie’s childhood, Lorenzo was just a myth that would take blurry form whenever strangers stopped him with the occasional “Don’t you look like yo daddy!” or whipped him into confusion with “Aint we cousins?”

  But after Jessie’s senior season, after the All-American selection and publicized commitment to Coach Bowden and the Seminoles, Lorenzo suddenly appeared like some rare species out of the wild.

  He stopped by the house one afternoon, but Jessie chose to speak with him out in the yard, rather than invite him inside. After all, the man was a stranger.

  “I’ve been hearing about what you’ve become,” Lorenzo said.

  The first thing Jessie noticed about his father was how polite and well dressed he was, how fit and healthy. A man with a fine life somewhere else—Washington, D.C., he said. It was as if Lorenzo had been watching all that time from behind some invisible curtain, through the dark nights with Cora’s fits and Anthony’s seizures, the pangs of hunger and thousands of hours under the sun, just waiting for the right time to spring.

  “I wanted to see him,” Hester said, “to see what I came from. But there was no emotion, no thoughts in my head. At that point, there was nothing that man could do for me.”

  Jessie shook his father’s hand and posed for a couple of pictures. He thanked Lorenzo for bringing him into the world, then asked him to forget about ever having a relationship. They would see each other only one other time, when Lorenzo appeared at RFK Stadium when the L.A. Raiders played the Redskins. When Hester’s boys asked if they could ever meet their grandfather, he told them no.

  “Your history starts here,” he said. “This is where history begins.”

  To sort through his own history was a confusing and painful endeavor. Lorenzo, for what he was worth, had pulled free a telling strand and left it buzzing like a live wire. A few months before his visit, it was discovered that Jessie had a half brother named Steve Sneed, a boy his own age whom everyone called Clyde. But this was more than just a small-town coincidence. Clyde also happened to be Jessie’s teammate on the Raiders—and one of his best friends since elementary school.

  The tight web of relations in Belle Glade often meant a shared ripple when tragedy struck. Several nights after the team returned home from Texas, there was a double shooting on MLK Boulevard that left a thirty-year-old barber named Adrian Brown dead. The day after the murder, it was revealed at practice that Brown was a former quarterback for the Raiders and a distant cousin to both Coach Q and a sophomore running back named Aaron Baker. The young woman who carried water for the team had sat with Brown while he died.

  The shooting revealed just how closely violence touched every player. Those living downtown knew well the sound of gunfire in the night and the thumping blades of the Trauma Hawk, whipping through the dark to save someone in their golden hour. Nearly every player on the Raiders’ roster had lost an immediate family member to violence, drugs, or illness. Heart disease was chronic in the Glades, as were diabetes and the organ failure that ensued.

  Coach Q had recently lost a daughter to kidney disease. Baker had lost his mother to drugs. Robert Way’s stepfather, Xavier Evans, had watched his mother, four uncles, and a sister slowly die of AIDS. The virus had devastated Hester’s family as well. AIDS later killed his half brother, Steve Sneed, as well as his younger sister, Agnes, who passed away in 2001 after struggling for years with drug addiction. She was forty years old.

  Death was ever present and real, acknowledged each morning on players’ Facebook pages that read, “I thank God for lettin me see anotha day.”

  There were pages set up in memoriam for Willie “Gene” Thomas, the friend of Robert Way whose murder still reverberated across the school and team. So did the recent killing of a former student named Ja’Quavious Willingham, who was shot in a parking lot in West Palm Beach.

  Willie Gene’s death had come as the result of a long-standing beef between gangs in South Bay and the trailer park next to Glades Central. It was a feud that crackled to life every few weeks. One afternoon the entire team was evacuated from the practice field after gunshots rang out from the warren of trailer homes, which sat just across the fence. Inside, while coaches played reruns of Hawaii Five-O, the boys carried on as usual. “Damn,” said Don’Kevious, whose neighborhood was once again under fire, “this shit always be happening, man.”

  The beef penetrated deep into the school, but it was one that Hester and his staff had managed to neutralize on the team. Two of the starting running backs, Baker and Tyrone Page, hailed from the trailer park and South Bay, respectively, as did several other players. Geography had never interfered on the field. But off the field, players often lived in fear.

  Page’s own father had been murdered when the boy was just three: Twonreon Johnson was sitting in his mobile home in Wingate, North Carolina, talking on the phone with a girlfriend when a group of men threw open the door and shot him in the chest.

  Page was living in South Bay with his grandma at the time. As he got older, friends and relatives constantly commented that he was a spitting image of his dad: dark skin, the angular face, and deep-set eyes that could smolder.

  But for Tyrone, his father appeared in his memory only twice. The first was when he was two or three. Twonreon handed him a couple of dollars and told him to go across the road to the little grocery. “I don’t even remember what I bought,” said Page. The second memory was of seeing his father’s body lying in the casket. Tyrone had tried to cry, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even tell you what his dad had been doing in North Carolina in the first place. The man’s whole existence, and the origins of his own, were forever wrapped in mystery.

  For having been around such a short time in his son’s life, Twonreon’s death had cast a long shadow, one that haunted Page and clouded the image whenever he tried to picture his own future. Lately, he said, he was having problems with trailer-park kids at school. The boys were following him to class, eyeballing him in the hallways. When he’d been sitting outside the Pizza Hut recently, a few had crept past in their car and pointed at
him. Page felt marked. In his heart, he feared his father’s same tragic end.

  He’d steered clear of this beef by attending Royal Palm Beach High School near the coast, driving thirty minutes each morning to class. But like Davonte, who also lived in South Bay, he’d transferred to Glades Central for his senior year in order to bolster his chances of recruitment.

  As a running back, he’d already had eleven carries against Skyline for forty-two yards. Coach Randy had recognized his potential for both trouble and greatness, and latched on to him. He began calling both Page and Baker on the weekends, getting them out of Belle Glade for day trips to Orlando and West Palm, exposing them to people and culture, trying to let in a little light and positive reinforcement. He hoped, by season’s end, to also get them a highlight reel.

  “I’m looking to get as far away from this place as possible,” Page said. “My dad lived until he was twenty-one years old. If I stick around here, I probably won’t even make it that long.”

  • • •

  BUT, SADLY, SOMETIMES it didn’t matter how straight a path a player chose to walk, how careful a boy was of his ownself. The death of Pahokee’s Norman “Pooh” Griffith was a shocking reminder of such vulnerability. At Glades Central, it had come in August 2000 with the murder of senior linebacker Jyron Seider.

  Jyron was the son of Jay and Cathy Seider; Jay was the longtime girls’ track coach and athletic director at the time, and Cathy was one of Glades Central’s most beloved secretaries. Nicknamed “Big Country” because of his six-foot, 220-pound frame, Jyron was known as a go-getter. In addition to school and football, he worked as a short-order cook at Black Gold, pumped gas at Doc’s filling station, and even had a car-wash business on the side.

  He’d been waiting for his girlfriend to get her hair done one evening on MLK Boulevard, and joined a dice game to pass the time. As he played, a man approached the group and, for reasons unknown, shot Jyron in the forehead. Two different suspects were arrested, but charges against both were eventually dropped.

  The murder took place during the first week of football practice, two weeks before the opener. After Jyron’s funeral, the Raiders dedicated the season to his memory, scrawled his number, 54, on helmets and wristbands, and vowed to bring home a third straight championship in his honor. Throughout the season, they huddled around his jersey each game at halftime. Teammate Santonio Holmes also wore one of Jyron’s T-shirts underneath his uniform and remembered how his friend always had a way of showing up.

  “His spirit followed us each week,” he said.

  After winning their first four games that season, the Raiders ran into trouble one Friday night against the Cardinal Newman Crusaders. They were losing 27–18 in the third quarter, a twenty-five-game winning streak about to be snapped unless something happened, unless someone on the team stepped up.

  Then, suddenly, a bank of lights went out above the Raider bench, delaying the game and crushing the Crusaders’ momentum. “That’s Jyron! He’s trying to shake us up,” the Raiders screamed, then proceeded to score twenty-three points in the final twelve minutes to pull off the upset.

  In the regional playoff game against Rockledge, whose field-goal attempt with nine seconds remaining would have tied the score, they believed it was Jyron who summoned that gust of wind and blew it wide. And once they made it to the state championship game, it was Big Country whom the Raiders rallied behind as they were losing to the Titusville Astronauts. Jyron remained in their sights as they drove eighty yards in the final quarter to clinch the lead and secure the title. With the championship season delivered to their fallen friend, the team gathered round his jersey one last time, touched it, held it to their faces, and finally said good-bye.

  “It’s something that will never leave my memory,” said Holmes. “I will hold on to that experience forever.”

  • • •

  IN MID-SEPTEMBER, the Raiders hosted their first home game in Belle Glade, happy to have the trusted muck finally beneath their feet. As they dressed before warm-ups, the memorials and rituals for the dead and condemned were on full display. Tributes were scrawled on eye-black patches for those no longer with us: RIP GENE, for Willie “Gene” Thomas; RIP QUAY, for Ja’Quavious Willingham; RIP POOH, for Norman Griffith; RIP JUICY, for former Raider Stanfield Watson, killed in a car accident on Southern Boulevard. FREE SWIM: a tribute that was followed by a wide receiver’s downward gaze and the response, “Swim my homeboy locked up. He out in November.” Mario wore FREE CHRIS for his sister Canisa’s longtime boyfriend, who’d recently been jailed for an alleged shooting.

  Cubby said a prayer for his older sister crushed in the Haitian earthquake, her body now buried in the troubled ground of Leogane. Cornerback Crevon LeBlanc honored his father, who was struck by a heart attack on I-95 while en route to their family vacation. LeBlanc had practically run into the interstate to flag down a motorist for help, but it was too late. Now before each game, he discreetly took a handful of grass from midfield, crossed his chest, and let it scatter in the breeze.

  The orphans observed their own silent ceremonies. As with Mario, Baker whispered a prayer for both his mother and father, who were long dead. Greg Davis walked alone to the end zone to address his departed parents, took a quick knee, and asked them for guidance.

  For Boobie, death and mourning mixed in a pageant of seventeen tattoos spread across his naked frame. His right arm read RIP DERRICK CLARK for his brother killed in a car accident. And across the left, IN MEMORY OF CASSANDRA GIBSON. The masks for comedy and tragedy peered out from both shoulders. LAUGH NOW and CRY LATER hung like headlines over his chest.

  As with death and incarceration, there were rituals involved with winning. Pickles brought good luck. So did the Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum that statistics coach Dennis Knabb handed out before every game, the little green sticks carrying the same weighted juju as a service rifle. Davonte stuck a rosary down his right sock. Several coaches wore the same clothing every Friday, even down to the same socks and underwear. And for away games, the bus carrying offense always pulled out of the parking lot before the bus carrying defense.

  But few team rituals carried more importance than the game-day prayer by the flagpole, administered by the team’s longtime spiritual adviser, Desmond Harriott. Pastor Dez was a grandfatherly Jamaican with silver in his temples and a deep, resonant voice that appealed to heaven in Queen’s English. Surrounded by scruffy teenagers with their foul street patois and sagging jeans, he always appeared like the archetypical Irish priest in the boys’ home, something out of an old Cagney film. Two of his sons had also been Raiders; one had been drafted by the Chicago Bears and later played in the Canadian pro league.

  “Give us strength, O Lord,” Dez began, his voice cutting through the hot September wind. He asked God to place his angels around each boy to protect him from injury and harm, to make sure the quarterback’s aim was true and his receivers’ hands did not fail in their work. He gave thanks for the talent placed in every boy.

  “And one last thing, Father God,” he concluded. “We ask you for the victory.”

  • • •

  FOR ALL THEIR attention to ritual and prayer, the Raiders’ performance that evening began disastrously. All week at practice, coaches had warned that American Heritage, a private school in Delray Beach, was not to be taken lightly. Last season they’d tacked up 129 yards against the Raiders by air and another hundred on the ground and had led 14–0 before the half. Glades Central had barely escaped with the win.

  Just as Hester predicted, the Stallions came out strong and bent on revenge. They rushed Mario from the first snap and rattled his cage, sending him into a panic. The Raiders were forced to punt, and once they had the ball again, Mario fumbled on the Raider twenty-yard line, allowing the Stallions to kick a field goal and take an early lead. The mood was frantic on the sideline as the great warship came under attack and began taking water.

  Hester had seen it coming. Nothing had gone right that day. Everything j
ust felt off, out of sorts. In the shop classroom where they’d retreated after the prayer to watch film and change, his coaches had lost control. Orders were ignored. Instead of watching film as they were instructed, players had spiraled off into their own orbits, blasting music, watching porn on their smart phones, wandering around campus looking for girlfriends. And once the team was suited, the coach had gone ballistic when several players turned up with black socks instead of the uniform white. Little things. Trivial when looked upon individually, but crucial to the discipline of a winning squad.

  Immaturity was certainly nothing novel for a high school football team. But moments such as these brought to light the generational divide. They underscored a common perception by former players that their proud tradition was in danger of extinction, slowly withering in the soft hands of today’s spoiled youth.

  It was a conversation you heard throughout the Glades, that the trouble with boys today—from crime downtown to the lack of discipline on the field—was because they no longer had to work, that because of better unemployment benefits and labor laws, kids today had never come to appreciate what they had from the perspective of a vegetable row. Since fewer people traveled for the harvests the way they once did, parents had lost that grip of control. And despite working two jobs and barely keeping the lights on, many parents still insisted on spoiling their children with flat-screen televisions, PlayStations, new phones, and designer sneakers. Lost in the process was a work ethic and a mental toughness that carried onto the gridiron, and with it an attention to the little things.

  It was true that on the Raider squad there were only about five boys who’d joined their families on mule trains or in packinghouses during corn season. Aside from those few, no one had ever bent over a row of vegetables or lost a drop of sweat for a wage. In their defense, the players would tell you that summers were too busy with football practice and out-of-town seven-on-seven tournaments. The kids felt pressured to attend those tournaments in order to get playing time, which was the only way to get exposure and college scholarships, which is what everybody seemed to expect from them anyway.