by Wallace Ford
Every step, every breath, every moment, everything, reminded me of Charmaine, and everything ripped open the wounds in my very soul. She and I had been together for so long that I had stopped imagining being without her. And now, I was incomplete. I was off balance, all the time.
A thousand times a day, I turned expecting to see her smile. A thousand times, I heard the phone ring and expected to hear her voice. A thousand times, I reached for her hand and grasped nothing but air. And it seemed as if a thousand times a day, tears came to my eyes for no reason except that she was gone from my life.
Our sons needed me, now more than ever. Morningstar and my partners depended on me, now more than ever. And so, after Charmaine’s death, after her funeral, after placing an urn with her ashes on a special shelf in our living room, I knew that life had to go on. But knowing it and doing it were two entirely different things. And I found myself suffering more than I ever did when I knew that she was dying.
I thought of myself as living in a special kind of hell. A hell that I didn’t deserve. A hell that would last forever. A hell from which there was no escape. I wished for relief from this awful misery. I prayed for relief from this awful misery. And there was no relief, no answer to my prayers. Or so it seemed at the time.
CHAPTER 4
Sture
Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide
It occurs to me that it might be a good idea for me to let everyone know who’s who in this story. My name is Sture Jorgensen, I was born in Norway and came to New York City to find a better life than what I knew in Bergen, and, like those of many immigrants to America, so many of my dreams have come true.
I started out living in Queens on the couch of my sister, Ilse, washing so many dishes in so many restaurants that I lost count of both a long, long time ago. And then I got my big break.
While working at the Water Club, one of the great restaurants in New York City, I filled in for a waiter friend who had a date with a double-jointed contortionist that just couldn’t wait. I guess I impressed the owner, Buzzy O’Keefe, and from that night on, my life was different.
I became a full-time waiter, and then a host and maitre d’ of the entire restaurant. During this dizzying rise to the heights of the restaurant universe, I met Paul Taylor, and in the process, I was introduced to a fascinating part of New York City and America, The Pride.
Paul is a tall, elegant and profoundly brilliant black attorney who is a part of this informal grouping called The Pride. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, but you would be hard-pressed to ever remember him telling anybody about his many credentials.
Paul has worked pretty much his entire professional life as an attorney, managing an eclectic practice that has included movie stars, investment banks and countries in the Caribbean and Africa. He has lived a life that most of us only dream about, traveling the world, dining in the best restaurants and staying in the best hotels on the planet. Loving and being loved by some of the most beautiful women on the planet as well.
But even with Paul Hiawatha Taylor, all is not what it seems. Along with all the glamour and pleasure and outright opulence, he has his private pain. A few years before we met, his father died suddenly in the hospital after a “routine surgery” was botched in some unfathomable, unknowable manner. A few months later, his younger brother died in a hang gliding accident in the mountains of Northern California.
And then, the woman whom I heard Paul describe as the love of his life, the beautiful lounge singer Samantha Gideon, died of throat cancer a few years after he and I met. It was an awful event that was simultaneously devastating and transforming for Paul.
After Samantha’s death, Paul seemed to be more serious about his work than he had ever been. Most of us didn’t think Paul could be more driven or obsessed with work ... and we were wrong. He was the driving force behind the Morningstar deal that merged the firms owned by Diedre, Jerome and Gordon. And after Gordon’s sabotage fiasco in New Orleans, Paul was the one who kept everyone on course so that the firm was able to become the successful enterprise that he had envisioned in the first place.
As interestingly, he reunited with his ex-wife, Diedre, and soon after the Morningstar deal was closed and the firm had recovered from Gordon’s broadside, they remarried, and now they have a young son. Paul calls their son, Paul Jr. or P.J., the Last Gasp of the Baby Boom. Paul always has had a talent for truly surprising his friends and adversaries, and this was just one more example of this quirky talent of his.
Paul had been a regular patron of the Water Club when we first became acquaintances, then friends and finally partners in the restaurant-club, Dorothy’s By the Sea, that Paul, Jerome Hardaway and Diedre Douglas now own—in which I am a very minority partner, no pun intended.
In retrospect, it would seem that I knew about The Pride before I learned about it. After all, Paul Taylor was not the first or only black patron of the Water Club. However, since there were so few blacks that were customers of the restaurant, I would always notice them. And since far fewer were anything like regular customers, it was hard not to remember the repeat visitors. And in any event, it would have been almost impossible to forget Paul Taylor.
Working at the Water Club was an education for me in many ways. I learned, for example, that clowns and idiots come in any and all colors, that there are as many black idiots and clowns as white idiots and clowns. There are the kind that are too loud, too ostentatious, too ready to treat waiters and restaurant staff as their own personal servants, or worse.
But Paul is the person who introduced me to The Pride. I can still remember his exact words:
“The Pride” is the term that I have used to refer to the black men and women, lions and lionesses actually, who have risen to prominence on Wall Street, in corporate America and in the canyons of its law firms, accounting firms and management consulting agglomerations. Being in New York, I am, of course, speaking of the New York version of The Pride. But The Pride is in Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami, New Orleans, Oakland, San Francisco, Denver, St. Louis and Los Angeles. Actually, The Pride is to be found all over America.
As a charter member of The Pride, I know that we are the beneficiaries of the seismic changes that hit America in the sixties and seventies. It was a change that allowed some black men and women to actually achieve on the basis of their ability and some limited opportunity.
The Pride consists of some of the most interesting, talented, intelligent, bizarre, insufferable, heroic, treacherous and memorable people that I can ever hope to know. I don’t kid myself: whatever I see in The Pride—the good and the bad—is in me too.
Many of them I genuinely like and some I love like brothers and sisters. Others are just too grasping, self-centered and opportunistic to suit my tastes. However, these are character traits that have virtually insured their success in these United States of America.
Paul has been my mentor when it comes to The Pride, New York City, America and just life on this planet. He has been more than a partner and a business colleague. He has been a friend, and he is one of the people whom I admire most on this planet.
And then there is Jerome Hardaway. Jerome is one of the principals of Morningstar Financial Services, the financial services firm that was Paul’s brainchild and involved the merger of Jerome’s firm with those of Diedre Douglas and Gordon Perkins.
Jerome is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia’s School of Business, and he has, from the very beginning of his career, been one of the rising stars of Wall Street. His firm, the Hardaway Group, was one of the great success stories of the financial world when he joined in the merger that Paul had proposed.
But there is a lot more to Jerome’s story. For starters, this tall, elegant, articulate and remarkably controlled investment banker used to be a gangbanger in Philadelphia. With both feet on the highway to the penitentiary or the cemetery, he was plucked away from those bleak prospects by the Star Search Foundati
on, which, along with the National Scholarship Service for Negro Students and the A Better Chance Foundation, changed the lives of so many bright young black men and women in the 1960s and thereby changed America.
And so, Jerome went from the hard streets of Philly to the ivy-covered halls of Yale and Columbia, and then to Wall Street, to overwhelming financial and professional success. He also married Charmaine Cumberbatch, the lovely and loyal and incredibly supportive woman from Shaker Heights and Mount Holyoke who completed Jerome. They had two sons, a wonderful home, a wonderful life, and then multiple sclerosis struck her.
And that was when the whole world saw what Charmaine and their sons already knew: Jerome never wavered in his dedication to Charmaine. Despite his tremendous responsibilities running the Hardaway Group and then, as co-chair, Morningstar, he was with her for every doctor’s appointment, every treatment, every health episode.
Although he could afford all of the home-care personnel that they might have needed, he still attended to her, and the boys, constantly and without complaint or pause. He took the pledge of loyalty “through sickness and in health” literally, and he showed his love of Charmaine, with devotion and without complaint, to her dying day.
As fate would have it, multiple sclerosis was not what killed Charmaine. No one could have anticipated the breast cancer that struck her so suddenly and killed her with terrible swiftness. And when she died, it seemed to all of us—friends, family and colleagues—that the cancer almost killed Jerome too.
He survived, but sometimes, it seems just barely. I have read about the phenomenon of twins and how close they can be—so close that when one of them dies, the other one is psychically and spiritually and physically diminished. Even though Jerome and Charmaine were not biological twins, they were clearly that most unique of couples: true soul mates. And it was painful watching Jerome summon the courage and energy to try to cope with the astounding blow that life had dealt him.
And now, a few words about Gordon Perkins. Gordon was perhaps the most malevolent and dangerous person that I have ever had the misfortune to know. And I am sure that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of acquaintances of Gordon who feel the same way.
Born in New Rochelle, New York, to a middle-class family, Gordon displayed nothing in his early years to indicate that he would become a latter-day version of a cross between Gordon Gekko and Ras the Destroyer. To put it simply, he has always been an awful man.
Whether in his personal life or in business, he was not to be trusted. Correction: In all the years I have known him, and known of him, Gordon could always be trusted to do the wrong thing, the worst thing, in any situation—any time, anywhere.
It was common knowledge that Gordon borrowed money from his first father-in-law to start his investment-banking firm. What is not-so-commonly known is that when the company was assured of success, he sent his wife the check to pay off her father in full with divorce papers attached to the check.
Many members of The Pride, and others, thought they knew about the abuse and cruelty that Gordon visited upon his second wife, Kenitra Perkins. But Kenitra is the only one who knows the entire truth, and she has never told me the entire story. But I sense that it is too grisly and twisted to be recounted without the teller and the listener both recoiling in horror.
I would guess you could say that he is a little more trustworthy at the moment, since he has been laid up in the Critical Intensive Care Unit at New York Hospital for the past four years, trapped in a coma. More about how he got that way in a minute. But with Gordon, you can never really know.
I know that I still don’t trust Gordon, and I do know that Kenitra believes that the coma is all part of some bizarre and insane plot that Gordon has hatched to wreak more havoc in her life and to extract a few more triple-distilled ounces of pain and misery from her. I know that it sounds crazy. And I can’t say that I blame her in the least.
You just would have to know Gordon Perkins to know what I mean.
CHAPTER 5
Kenitra
My Favorite Things
From the first time I saw him lying in that hospital bed, intubated, wired and monitored like some kind of monstrous experiment gone awry, I couldn’t banish the thought that I was looking at some kind of malevolent creature that was simply at rest. He reminded me of a somnolent cobra: sleeping, but always dangerous, always vicious, and always to be avoided at all costs.
From the very first time that I saw Gordon in the hospital, I never stood close to his bed. When the doctors suggested that speaking to him might stimulate some kind of neural response that would bring his brain out of hibernation, I simply went mute. The thought of Gordon awake and alive made my flesh crawl.
I remember that September day when Paul Taylor called to tell me the news of the New Orleans debacle. I was still living in our Park Avenue apartment at the time, the site of so many degrading scenarios that I never felt completely clean when I walked across the threshold.
I also remember that there was nothing that Paul told me that surprised me. Certainly, the cocaine binge was not a shock to me. Gordon had used the seemingly satanic power of coke to control my body and my mind, and to abuse both, to an extent I never would have believed if I hadn’t lived it all for myself.
The hookers, the involvement of Jerome’s former protégé, Ray Beard, certainly were not surprises. For Gordon, screwing women was not a sexual experience; it was a power experience. And he was addicted to power.
Gordon was also addicted to corruption; he enjoyed corrupting other people—men, women, it made little difference to him. He always enjoyed exerting his power by bringing people down, by making them confront their frailties, in the cruelest and most undeniable ways possible. So it was no surprise to me that Raymond Russell Beard III, who seemed to me a sycophantic wannabe, would come under Gordon’s spell—and be doomed like some pedestrian house fly caught in a kaleidoscopic web from which there was no escape.
Ray is lucky that he didn’t die. I guess. Although, I hear that after spending a couple of years in a rehabilitation home trying to recover from the near-fatal stroke and heart attack that he suffered during the New Orleans Fiasco, he was trying to get Jerome to put in a good word for him at Morningstar, as he wanted to get back into the finance business. And through it all, his wife, Monique Jefferson, the news reporter that he married just before his near-death experience in New Orleans, has stayed with him.
I had lunch with Monique during a few of my infrequent visits to New York, and she told me how she practically held his hand during the seemingly eternal rehabilitation process—helping him learn how to read, how to speak, how to walk, how to care for himself. And she was the one who went to Jerome to beg him to give Ray another chance. Paul told me that he, Diedre and Jerome were thinking about it.
I am still in awe of Monique. Her loyalty to Ray, in spite of his obvious weakness and very public betrayal of her, is based in either true love or true stupidity. But, to be kind and to be honest, having gotten to know Monique, I am certain that it is a matter of true love. And who am I to question someone’s choice of lovers? After all, I married Gordon Perkins.
But that September evening, I remember that I hoped and prayed that Gordon would die, all the time knowing that fate would not be that kind to me or to the world. And I remember Paul telling me that he would help me out of the terrible place in which I found myself even as it seemed that his grand plan for Morningstar was collapsing around his ears. And I will always be grateful to Paul for his kindness during my moment of need even though he himself was facing disaster at the very same time.
Well, Paul may not be a magician, but he could have given Merlin and David Copperfield runs for their money over those next few weeks. While somehow managing to repair the damage that Gordon had visited upon the Morningstar joint venture—and upon his partners, Jerome and Diedre—he also found the time to trace some ten million dollars that Gordon had put in a Bahamian account in my name, thinking he would hide this money
from his new partners—and from me.
Paul told me that he routed the money through a bank in Geneva, then to a bank in the Isle of Man and finally to a bank in Vanuatu to which only he and I had access. He also helped me purchase a modestly palatial condominium with three bedrooms and a gorgeous view of the Pacific Ocean in Venice Beach, California. His thinking, with which I agreed, was that Venice Beach was far enough off the beaten path that very few members of The Pride would be poking into my business. And since I lived practically next to LAX (Los Angeles International Airport), I could still get to New York to check on Gordon and my other business matters from time to time.
It was during that time, that I began to see Sture—and that was when my life changed again.
CHAPTER 6
Gordon
Bitches’ Brew
During all the time before my “accident,” I could always count on one friend. The Dark Lord. He seemed to be the only one who cared about the same things that mattered to me. While he never shared any of the cocaine that I would offer him, he always seemed to come around when I had a few lines or grams or ounces around. Sometimes he would bring the coke to me.
And it was the Dark Lord who always seemed to have the right idea at the right time. Whether it was tying up Kenitra and beating her and abusing her in the most creative ways or devising the best way to subvert the Morningstar merger, it was the Dark Lord who was there at my side.
But during my hospital confinement, for many months I found that I was fully conscious twenty-four hours a day but unable to move or speak or respond to any external stimuli. At first, I thought that I had simply lost my motherfucking mind and that I was imprisoned in my own body for the rest of my life. And the strangest thing was that all the while that I felt fully conscious, I also don’t think that I ever actually went to sleep.