I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  But having escaped the city itself, the new arrivals were still on the hook for those problems, at least when it came to paying taxes. The landfill therefore had enormous symbolic significance for many white Staten Islanders. They felt like they paid more than their fair share of taxes and got to babysit the troubled city’s stinking trash for their trouble. Their resentment was real, as palpable as the smell of the city’s largest dump.

  So by the time 1993 came around, white Staten Island voted as a bloc to help elect Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who’d run on a law-and-order platform. Already “law and order” was proving to be a euphemism for something else. Rudy had been a successful prosecutor and portrayed himself as a friend of the police department and enemy of crime—but he’d proven himself among outer-borough white New Yorkers with stunts like marching with a mob of protesting police officers who burst across barricades and rumbled through lower Manhattan denouncing the city’s then mayor, a black man named David Dinkins (“The mayor’s on crack!” protesting cops chanted). The “law and order” candidate, in other words, wasn’t so hung up on law or order, not exactly. But to the white ethnic voters who’d deliver him the mayoralty, he’d proven that he would take their side in a fight and put their enemies—the black and brown people who’d driven them to the outer boroughs and even taken over City Hall—back in their place.

  After the election, Giuliani closed the Staten Island dump down and began sending thousands of tons of New York’s garbage not to other white neighborhoods in the city but to the people of Virginia. Hilariously, Giuliani told Virginians they owed it to New York to take its garbage because Virginian tourists took in New York’s great musicals and museums. We bless you with our culture, you take our garbage, that’s the deal. It was, the mayor said, a “reciprocal relationship.”

  Virginia reciprocated the relationship all right. When New York imposed the country’s highest cigarette taxes under its next mayor, Michael Bloomberg, adding almost six dollars per pack to retail prices within the city, smugglers began heading to other states. Virginia and other low-tax states of the South began flooding New York with cheap smokes brought in by canny street arbitrageurs, who undercut New York’s tax laws one illicit trunkful at a time.

  Eric Garner became one of those smugglers. He had several employees and regularly sent mules on runs to Virginia, where they filled their trunks with wholesaled cartons. He was shrewd with money and ran a tight ship. Fifty dollars plus expenses is what he supposedly paid his drivers. They never got caught and brought hundreds of cartons back to Staten Island every few months.

  In Virginia, Garner was paying around five dollars a pack. In New York, the highly taxed cigarettes sold legally in stores at about fourteen dollars a pack. The low-tax policies of the South instantly created a booming pseudo-criminal trade in cities like New York, but that didn’t seem to bother the southern pols who Giuliani had once insisted should be thankful for New York’s great stage shows. Despite repeated calls from inside the state and out to raise cigarette taxes to help end the smuggling problem, the government of Virginia, for instance, would continually refuse to raise taxes by even a symbolic amount.

  Garner would split the difference and sell packs for around nine bucks. And sometimes he would sell individual cigarettes, known as loosies, upping the profit margin even more—two for a dollar, a rate of ten bucks per pack. He sold a variety of brands in cartons and packs, but loosies were almost always Kools or Newports. It was a feature of the Garner brand.

  When he sold loosies, he was always reaching into a pocket with those same fingers he had just used to wipe his runny nose with, then handing over the cigarettes. The dopers and wine-heads who were many of his customers would hesitate, then look up at the unsmiling big man and quickly take his cigs before he changed his mind. Garner’s friends often doubled over laughing watching these transactions.

  Garner was six foot three and weighed 350 pounds. He was serious and formidable to look at, but few people on the street had ever seen him truly angry. The one exception was when another young cigarette seller, also named Eric, called him “Big Dummy.” It was a nickname from Sanford and Son some of Garner’s friends used to throw at him to try to get a rise out of him.

  He took the abuse from friends, but this younger Eric wasn’t enough of a friend to get away with it, and when he tried, Garner went nuts. He took off after the kid but didn’t get very far. Once a great athlete, Garner couldn’t run anymore. Out of breath on sore feet, he gave up the chase.

  In addition to the fact that he was well liked and rarely known to raise his hand to fight, there are two things the people on Bay Street almost all say about Eric Garner. They say he loved football, and he had a tremendous head for numbers.

  Garner could calculate the price of six different cigarette deals simultaneously and never be off by a cent. He was a little like the Harlem bookmaker from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, West Indian Archie, who never wrote a number down because he could keep them all in his head. Eric Garner’s skill ran in the family: Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, can rattle off addresses and phone numbers of distant relatives from fifty years ago.

  His facility with numbers went well with his love of football. Garner was the kind of person who studied sports statistics like a rabbi studying the Talmud. If you asked him how many receptions Amani Toomer had in 2002, he wouldn’t hesitate.

  “Eighty-two,” he’d say. “And for thirteen hundred and forty-three yards.”

  “He’d throw some number at you, and you’d be like, ‘Uh-uh, fuck that, that can’t be right,’ ” says one of his close friends, a tall street hustler from Brooklyn named John McCrae who spent months and years standing on the corner next to Garner. “And he’d look at you and with that deep voice of his, he’d say, ‘Google that shit.’ ”

  McCrae laughs at the memory. Almost everyone who knew Eric Garner does an Eric Garner impersonation. He had a unique voice. Some impersonations are more convincing than others. McCrae has clearly worked hard on his. He adjusts his voice downward to Teddy Pendergrass levels.

  “Google that shit.” McCrae laughs again. “And then you’d google it, and he’d be right every time. Motherfucker was always right. You couldn’t win an argument with him.”

  McCrae remembers another story. It was early May 2014. The name of Eric Garner was just over two months away from becoming known around the world. McCrae was standing on Bay Street with Garner when a figure came around the corner.

  It was Ibrahim Annan, moving slowly with his walker. McCrae raised an eyebrow. Everybody on Bay Street knew Annan, the music man. McCrae himself knew him pretty well but hadn’t heard from him in a while. He stared at the walker.

  “B, man, what the fuck?”

  “Cops beat me up,” Annan said.

  Annan stayed for a while and told his story of being stomped and choked and kicked. He even pulled out his cellphone to show an X-ray picture of his splintered ankle. Heads shook all around. McCrae and Annan both remember Garner listening to the story.

  After a few minutes, Annan shook hands with everyone and moved on.

  “Shit is fucked up,” McCrae said to Garner.

  Eric Garner nodded, staring off into the distance. He had other things on his mind.

  TWO PINKY

  Bored again?

  Interested in a new way to meet people?

  Just pick up the phone and dial…1-976-8585!…IT’S THE PARTY LINE!

  In the summer of 1987, a young woman with high cheekbones and long, ropelike black hair picked up the telephone. She was striking, and of mixed race, with a father who was Native American and a mother who was black and Jewish. Her name was Esaw, but everyone called her Pinky.

  The story went that when she was born, the doctor was confused by the little girl’s light skin and narrow eyes. He asked Esaw’s mother, “Is the father Oriental?”

  Her mother quipped, “No, but I ate Chinese food last night.”

  Mama Snipes was a performer who would still be doing r
aunchy stand-up comedy into her nineties. She looked down at her daughter’s pink skin and what she called her “chinky” eyes and called the child Pinky.

  Pinky was in an apartment on Twenty-Second Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood when she picked up the phone to call the Party Line that night. This was before the Internet, before chat rooms. The goofball TV ads for party lines were just about the most visible thing on the air in New York the late eighties, second only maybe to the schlock electronic-store ads put out by famed pitchmeister and con man “Crazy” Eddie Antar. The chat line wasn’t expensive. It was a flat rate, three dollars per call. You could talk all night if you met someone.

  Pinky put her ear to the phone.

  “Hello?”

  A deep voice answered. “Yeah, hello. How are you?”

  “I’m all right. How are you?”

  “I’m good.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Eric. What’s yours?”

  “Pinky.”

  Eric said hi again. Things were going well, but then Pinky asked, “Eric, how old are you?”

  “Eighteen.” He was not quite seventeen.

  “And I thought, ‘He’s too young,’ ” Pinky recalls today. “So I said, ‘Next!’ and left him behind.”

  She moved on and talked to a few more guys on the line, but none of them impressed her. There were even a few racist chatters, she remembers. “They were idiots,” she says now, laughing. “So I said, ‘Eric, are you still there?’ ”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Well, you can take my personal number, and we can talk on our personal line.”

  Eric Garner brightened and took Pinky’s number and called right back. He was living at his grandmother’s high-rise apartment in the Coney Island Houses at the time. He always spent holidays and summers at his grandmother’s project home near the famed beachfront amusement park.

  He stayed on the phone with Pinky Snipes for hours that night, talking about all sorts of things, but mostly about his family. He spoke about his mother and about how, without his father in the house (Elliott Garner had died when Eric was five), he felt like he had to be the man in the place, the disciplinarian. He had a brother and a sister and also lived with two young cousins whose parents had died and who had moved in with Eric’s mother.

  “He talked a lot about that, about feeling the responsibility, being responsible before he was responsible, if that makes sense,” she says. “He’d tell his little sister to do something, and she’d say, ‘You’re not my daddy!’ And he’d say, ‘But I’m your big brother. You’ve got to listen to me.’ ”

  There is a story in family legend that Eric’s little sister, Ellisha, once had a boy call the family’s Brooklyn apartment while she was still in elementary school. Eric took the phone and hung up on him. When she ran to complain to her mother (“Eric hung up on my friend!”), her big brother snapped back.

  “You shouldn’t have boys calling you,” he said. “You’re still seeing a pediatric doctor!”

  Eric went on and on to Pinky that night, about things that interested her and things that didn’t. He talked about cars. He wanted to be a mechanic and talked about going to a technical school in Ohio to study diesel engines.

  Pinky for her part talked a little less. She didn’t tell Eric right away that she had a baby daughter named Shardinee, or that she was several months pregnant with another child, from a man she’d already broken up with.

  Their conversation went on so long that Eric’s grandmother intervened. “Get off the phone!” Pinky heard her shouting.

  Finally he said, “I want to take you on a date.”

  “Well,” Pinky said, “I have a child.”

  Eric didn’t hesitate. “Then we’ll go somewhere kid friendly,” he said.

  Pinky didn’t spend much time preparing for their first date. She met him straight after a shift scooping ice cream, her nine-month-old daughter in tow.

  “I was working at that time at a Häagen-Dazs in Grand Central Station,” she remembers. “So I had on a red Häagen-Dazs sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. When I get off the train at Coney Island, here comes Eric in dress pants, a dress shirt, and nice shoes.”

  She told Eric she didn’t expect him to be so dressed up.

  “I wanted to make a good impression,” he told her.

  They went to the kiddie park at Coney Island. It was a warm evening and you could smell the ocean. They took her baby, Shardinee, on all the rides: the pony carts, the jumping motorcycles, the fire engines, and the dizzy dragons. After a little while Pinky got bored with the kid stuff. She decided to take Eric on some rides she wanted to go on, starting with the Tilt-a-Whirl.

  Eric Garner as a teenager didn’t yet have the health problems he would have later in life. He wasn’t overweight. But he was a big, imposing man, six foot three, well over two hundred pounds. And he was afraid of the Tilt-a-Whirl.

  “I was shocked,” Esaw recalls. “Big as he was, he was scared as hell of those rides. I convinced him to go on the Ferris wheel, and you know how they have the carts that swing and the carts that are still? He wanted to sit in one of the still ones.”

  She laughs. “I said, ‘No way.’ We got in the swinging one, and the whole way up, he was wailing like a bitch. I’m serious, he was like, ‘I want my mommy!’ And I said, ‘Big as you are, you’re crying for your mother?’ ”

  Still, she liked him. And she liked the way he was with her daughter. Eric Garner, by all accounts, from people who knew him as a young man and as an older one, was good with kids. Next to his love of football, it’s the one thing almost everyone who knew him mentions.

  Eric liked Pinky. Esaw says she was the first girl he ever brought home to his mother. Eric’s mother, Gwen, was on her guard.

  “She’d heard rumors that I was twenty-five and had three kids,” Esaw recalls now. “And I said, ‘No, I’m twenty and I have one.’ ”

  Eric was still in high school when they met. Esaw remembers helping Eric with a paper that he wasn’t terribly interested in writing. “It was something about Christopher Columbus, the Niña, the Pinta, the Santa Maria,” she says. “Something about Columbus and the three boats.”

  They separated for a while after that summer. Eric said he was going away to technical school in Ohio. Pinky was getting ready to have her baby. Eric asked if he could check in on her after she delivered. She said yes.

  In January 1988, Eric called.

  “What did you have?” he asked.

  “A girl,” Pinky said. “Her name is Dorothy.”

  They started seeing each other again. Eric had given up on technical school and was trying his hand at different jobs at the time. One was as a security guard at an A&P on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, a few blocks from Pinky’s place. One time, she remembers, one of her neighbors knocked on her door with a surprise.

  “Pinky,” she said. “There’s a cop downstairs to see you.”

  “A cop?” she said. “What cop?”

  She went downstairs and there was big, lumbering Eric, in his security guard uniform. “That was the cop,” she says, laughing.

  She fell for him. “It was the way he accepted me and my daughter,” she says. “That’s why I fell in love with him.”

  They got married on August 26, 1989, and went on to have four children. Erica was born in 1990, then came Emerald in 1991. Eric Jr. was born in 1994, and the youngest boy, Emery, was born in 1999.

  One of the first places they lived was 2359 Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. It’s an eccentric choice of location for a young family, right across the street from the Bronx Zoo. And not just any part of the Bronx Zoo, but the elephant cage. Kids love zoos, obviously, but there were other factors.

  “We had the pleasure of smelling elephant dung for years,” she said. “I used to fill the place with Renuzit packets just to try to fight the smell. All those years, we never once took the kids to the damn zoo.”

  It wasn’t a perfect marriage, but in a weird w
ay Esaw and Eric were a fit, personality-wise. Pinky was direct and had inherited her mother’s sharp tongue. When she felt he needed it, she would get in Eric’s face.

  Garner, on the other hand, was a big fan of the path of least resistance. Although he liked to argue for fun, real confrontation was something he typically tried to avoid. Even as a child, he never talked back to his mother, preferring to wait her out rather than take her on. “Eric never, ever raised his voice at me, he never talked back to me,” his mother recalls. She laughs. “In his mind, I guess he said, ‘I wish she would shut up so I can get on doing what I got to do.’ ”

  In the early years, they had what seemed on the outside like a pretty normal family life. Throughout most of his younger years, Eric Garner worked square jobs. After the security guard job he worked at the Greyhound terminal at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. Pinky remembers coming down from the Bronx on Eric’s paydays, bringing little Erica in a baby carrier and holding her two little girls, Shardinee and Dorothy, by the hand. They’d meet up at Eric’s job and then go out to Sizzler together. “Sizzler was a big thing back then,” she says. “It was a family tradition.”

  Eric was a pretty good mechanic, but his skills became outdated quickly. “He was really good, until they came out with computerized cars,” Esaw says. “He was lost in the computers.”

  Later, when the family moved away from the elephant cage to Brooklyn, Eric supposedly got another job, this one with the help of Pinky’s mother, whose day job was in quality control at a pharmaceutical company. Garner, too, was there for a short while, until, she says, he took a nap during a break one day and didn’t wake up in time to go back to his shift. He was fired.

  Years later, Garner’s friends on the streets of Staten Island would tell stories about how he worked such long hours on the street that he would sometimes fall asleep standing up. To this day, people on Bay Street do affectionate impressions of the great man snoring on his feet.