by Rick Bragg
Patricia Abbott, Earl’s widow, played the church organ in the middle of a field of new grass.
I went to look at the new church the other day. It seemed like a fine church, a modern-looking sanctuary with a lot of angles, the way they build churches now. I couldn’t help but think back to Hollis Crossroads, the last time I had been in a church that did not involve a wedding or funeral, or work. I bet it is still standing. A hurricane couldn’t knock it down. I hope they still have Dinner on the Ground. I would like to see it, see all those people coming together like that, sometime when I drive by. Maybe I would even stop.
No, I reckon not.
32
Dining out with no money, and living with no life
I come from a place where every town has one certified nut bag. Every society needs one, I guess.
I know New York is a big place, but it seems to have a few more than its share. It would be hard to shoot an arrow down any street in the five boroughs—well, maybe not Staten Island—and not skewer a nut bag sooner or later. I do not say this unkindly. I consider myself a nut bag, too.
But of all the unusual people I met in my brief time in that unusual city, perhaps the most unusual was the man who would become known as the Serial Diner.
I met him in May 1994. An old girlfriend, Rachel, told me that her sister, a public defender in Manhattan, was representing a man who was systematically eating his way into prison. “Sounds like a newspaper article to me,” she said.
“Has to be,” I said.
I have always been a one-dimensional reporter. I find rich people dull, lulled by their own comfort. When you have nothing, it forces your mind into gymnastics. Some days, your imagination has to do a double-back-flip just to find a way to eat. That is why I feel such affection for Gangaram Mahes.
He was between court hearings, in the holding cell downtown, just a roly-poly, bald-headed man, who talked to me through a cage. He told me his entire life story from behind that wire screen, but he had to rush the ending. They were serving chicken for lunch. “Tasty,” he said.
“He is a thief who never runs,” I wrote, “a criminal who picks his teeth as the police close in. To be arrested, to go home to a cell at Rikers Island, is his plan when he picks up the menu. Homeless off and on for several years, he steals dinner from the restaurants because he wants the courts to return him to a place in New York where he is guaranteed three meals a day. In a prison system filled with repeat offenders, he is the city’s only serial diner. He has committed the same crime at least 31 times, always pleads guilty and never urges his lawyer to bargain for a reduced sentence. He is just tunneling inside again, with knife and fork.”
He could snatch a purse or shoplift from a bodega, but he has settled on this, at least in part because he figures it doesn’t really hurt anyone. The loss he forces on the restaurant owners will be recovered with the first overpriced meal. That is one reason why he prefers to dine in midtown, because—in a place where a chicken salad sandwich can cost fifteen dollars—he figures he is just one more thief.
But he knows the police will not see it that way. They will come and get him, and take him home.
“It’s tough on the outside,” said Mahes. This stay, for ninety days, he earned for stealing a swordfish steak.
To him, as violent and demeaning as jail sometimes is, it is better than drifting from shelter to shelter or living in cardboard boxes. “I like to live decent,” he said. “I like to be clean.”
Christina Swarns, Rachel’s sister and the young Legal Aid lawyer defending him, made sure I saw the seriousness of his case, made sure I wouldn’t write some wiseass piece about him.
“It’s funny at first, ‘The Serial Eater,’ ” she said. “But it’s a very sad thing. How bad is it, his life, that he would prefer prison?”
“On one hand,” I wrote, “is a man who goes to jail at will without hurting anyone, who steals only expensive New York restaurant food. Instead of throwing a rock through a window, he orders a T-bone. On the other hand is a man who seems to have abandoned hope of ever having anything better, who prefers society’s idea of punishment to his place in the society, said Ms. Swarns. In the past two years, he has seldom been free more than a few days before enjoying an illegal entree. He patronized the American Festival Cafe and the Taj Mahal in Manhattan, and Tony Roma’s in two boroughs. He chooses restaurants that are not too cheap, not too expensive. If a restaurant is too pretentious, it might not seat him. If it is too cheap, he might not be arrested for stealing its food. ‘If they really wanted to punish him,’ said Ms. Swarns, ‘they would stand outside Rikers and say, “You go away.’ ” Instead, Mahes does 90 days for stealing fish. It costs taxpayers $162 a day to feed, clothe and house him at Rikers Island His 90-day sentence will cost them $14,580, to punish him for refusing to pay the $51.31 check. In five years he has cost them more than $250,000.”
Your tax dollars at work.
It occurs to me, as I look around me in the visiting room, that I have seen the inside of a lot of prisons for a man who has committed relatively few crimes. All around us are inmates who just want to go home. Mahes is already there. He has no expectations, so there are no disappointments: he does not envy people who are free, because they are free to suffer.
Life is eating, eating is life. “Last night,” he told me, “we had beef stew.”
He is a talker, this Gangaram. He poured his life story out to me and I didn’t even have to ask a question. Raised in poverty and fear as a child in Guyana, he left for the United States in 1976, when he was 18. His myth of New York shimmered in the distance. “I thought it was going to be milk and honey,” he said. What he found was a country in a recession, with lines for gas, lines for work. Looking for refuge again, he joined the army. The army took care of its own; clothed them, fed them. He would have stayed, but five years and one drug addiction later he was on the street. He wandered to Florida and Virginia to pick collards and peaches in migrant camps where conditions were barely human. One camp fed its workers just once a day. He went home to Guyana, and returned to the South Bronx with a wife, who left him. For years he drifted, homeless, drinking himself happy. “I would drink to forget how the day passed.” By the late 1980s, the one constant in his life was jail. He had done time for a string of misdemeanors. Jail took care of its own; clothed them, fed them. Getting inside was easy. All he had to do was pretend to be part of the mainstream, the middle class. Then, when the waiter brought the check, he told the truth.
“But in that golden space of time between being shown to his table and the second the check arrives,” I wrote, “he is as good as anybody. He has the same rights, the same respect, the same choices. He can ask for a corner table. He can ask for one with a view. Because he looks like everyone else, he is, temporarily. He just happens to be an awful tipper, at the moment of truth. He likes a glass of Johnnie Walker and the chicken and rib platter at Tony Roma’s. ‘No dessert, but they did offer.’ He was fond of the buffet at an Indian restaurant in midtown, but it closed.”
A shadow passes over his face as he wonders aloud if he had anything to do with that. “The curried lamb,” he said, wistfully.
He is in the Big House this time because of a night out at the American Festival Cafe at Rockefeller Center. “He had very good taste,” the manager recalled. “I think he was drinking Chivas Regal.”
I ask him if he is planning to continue this life forever, and he says that no, he thinks about doing right, getting a job, but the routine is so easy, so dependable. He has no family, no friends, just a plan for getting by, that works.
I think about him, too, from time to time. I wonder if he is in or out, and then I realize that it really doesn’t matter. Wherever he is, he’s eatin’ good.
The Times had agreed to put me up free for my first six months, and as that deadline neared I began to search for an apartment of my own. I settled on the Upper West Side, near the corner of 110th and Broadway. The homeless were five to a block, there had been a
fatal stabbing two doors down. It was a real neighborhood.
I told my momma it was safe as a church.
I had two rooms, a galley kitchen and a view of nothing. It cost just $1,185.50 a month, and it was on the subway line to Times Square, a straight shot. Across the street there was a place that sold hot dogs for fifty cents.
I told my momma I was eating right.
My belongings arrived in early July. I walked around the opened boxes and thought to myself that a thirty-five-year-old man should have more stuff than this. There was a couch and chair, book shelves, a bed, a television and stereo, some pictures.
I told my momma my life was rich and full.
It took me a day or two to get the pictures nailed up and the books on the shelves, some of the same books my daddy had bought me so many years before. I tried to remember how many cities those books had been in, but I lost count. I wondered if he would have ever believed it, that his son would be sitting in New York, holding a copy of Riders of the Purple Sage.
I got everything in its place, perfectly. I do not think of myself as anal-retentive, but when you have lived by yourself as long as I have, it takes a while to get the couch and chair lined up just right, and to decide which books should be on the second shelf, and the third, or maybe the fourth. Or maybe the whole shelf needs to move. But finally, the pictures were straight, the books aligned, the kitchen … well, since I didn’t own any dishes, there was not much to do there. Except for the forty-five-pound-pull Ben Pearson bow and arrows on the wall, a legacy from my childhood, it was a real New York apartment. I felt at home, more or less. I should have known better than to get comfortable.
The next day, the foreign desk asked me if I would like to go back to Haiti. A week later I was disembarking at what they used to call Duvalier Airport, searching the sky for smoke, and the ground for bodies, again.
I told my momma I was going to spend a few weeks in the Caribbean.
33
Buying bodies, eating lobster
Not much had changed in three years. The cruelties were still off the scale of sanity. Government thugs chased away the Argentinian ambassador by setting two live roosters on fire and flinging them, smoking, squawking, kicking, over the consulate wall. Men with machetes made a game of disfiguring beautiful women. Political prisoners, how many we will never know, just disappeared into mass graves. Pigs rooted for the bodies after every hard rain. The gleaming Mercedes and Land Rovers of the ruling class still hurtled past babies with protruding empty bellies. Horribly deformed children walked on all fours through the streets like animals. The police still killed the poor at random, and stole the bodies. That way they could charge their families as much as a hundred dollars to get them back, for burial. I would not want to come to Haiti in the nighttime. I would not want to wake up here the morning after, after dreams of a more sane life, and have this place be the first thing my eyes would see.
Every morning, photographers made “the body run.” They cruised the more isolated streets, roads and pig trails of Port-au-Prince just after dawn, and most days they found what they were looking for Bodies with their hands and feet bound by wire, their faces peeled away, fingers hacked off, probably for fun. Politics, Haitian style. The military government headed by the aristocratic Raoul Cedras sanctioned the killings and left the bodies in the street for the same reason politicians in my native South tacked cardboard political signs on fence posts, only I guess the dead are cheaper. The message was simple: Follow Aristide, and follow him to your death. As the U.S. government’s patience waned with the despotic military government, as ragged, half-starved Haitians continued to wash up on beaches in Fort Lauderdale, ruining the view from the condo canyons, the forced return of Haiti’s Savior seemed to inch closer. Haiti’s rulers, from the beginning, had known just one way to hold power: kill and kill and kill again.
My job was to write about those human rights abuses, and day after day after day I listened to the stories of frightened people, interviewing them behind the locked gates of safe houses and in dark rooms in the endless slums and, once, lying in the floorboard of my four-wheel-drive as I circled and circled the city, my eyes darting constantly to the rear-view mirror. Once again, I knew I really had no business here, no real experience at this, but I tried hard. To cover that story dispassionately was beyond me. It may be that it made me a poor analyst of the sociopolitical situation. I just know that word of it had to get out, had to ring out, and for the first time I truly realized the impact of the newspaper for which I worked.
An ultra-conservative commentator for a brainless cable TV show said we exaggerated the killing. I would have liked to have tied that son of a bitch to me with a rope, and made him see what I saw, hear what I heard.
I looked into the eyes of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls who had been gang-raped, and I will never forget the emptiness there, the blank, used-up, hopeless stares, as if someone had just snatched the life out of them and left the shell to wander. I shook the hands of men who had their fingers crushed with rifle butts, and sat under a tree with a man who had tried to hold a woman’s insides in her body after she had been hacked again and again with machetes. I don’t remember how many people I talked to who had seen their loved ones hauled away never to be seen again.
I know that some of them could have lied to me, some of them almost certainly did, and I tried to use in the newspaper only what I was most certain of. I remember one morning standing outside an old monastery, staring down at a bloodstain on a driveway. The night before, a beloved priest had been shot to death by thugs loyal to the military government, as he fumbled with the gate. The priest had been troublesome to the rich. He had once tried to organize the laborers who worked their fields. The government, of course, denied any involvement, and could not explain how the police arrived even before anyone called them, and took the body away.
As I looked down at that stain, I knew it would be hard to write too much or too strongly of the people who spread this misery. If they would kill a priest, why would they not kill a peasant without a second thought, or torture them for sport, or debase them. Common sense told me that much.
Sometimes it was unclear who was to blame. I walked through a nursery where the babies were doomed by a lack of medicine, medicine I would later learn was stolen by the military. But the military blamed the embargo, said it was killing the poor. One man stood over an emaciated baby, trying to get the child to grasp his finger with its tiny hand. The child—strange, I cannot remember if it was a boy or girl—lay as if dead. I took the man out in the hall and gave him some money, I cannot remember how much, and he grabbed both my hands and pressed his forehead to them.
I talked to a man who ran an orphanage who showed me the complaints he had filed with police, who had targeted the older children. I talked to a young prostitute who was forced to submit a dozen, two dozen, countless times a day, to soldiers who never paid. Her one possession was a tiny television. The soldiers destroyed it.
And around and around and around it goes. We are staying, me and most of the other reporters, in a nice hotel called the Montana, up the mountain in Pétionville. A man with a sawed-off shotgun guards the gate. But somehow the body merchants always sneak through. They lurk in the lobby, and sidle up to you with a polite “Monsieur? Excuse me, please. But I have a body for you.” They offer to take you to a place where a body has been dumped, for a price.
At the bar of the Montana Hotel, the foreign correspondents drink rum punches and discuss which restaurants are still open and which have been closed by the impending hostilities. A few of them befriend me, help me, and I will always appreciate that. One of the first people I see is Daniel Morel, but a different one. He has a wife and child now, and has a little more gray in his beard. He still looks like a man you do not want to mess with on a dark night. “New York Times?” he says, and laughs out loud. I am not sure if he is happy for me, or incredulous, but again he leads me to the good stories.
It would be a lie to sa
y we had it rough there. On Fridays, as the people starved down the hill, there was shrimp curry. On Sundays, there was lobster on the grill. You couldn’t even hear the gunshots, we were up so high.
The uprising I had predicted never came, of course. Only Clinton could force change now. The only question then was whether it would be a shooting war to bring Aristide back, or a negotiated return.
God help me, but as I watched the people suffer under the government’s brutality, I wished for a war. I knew it could not last long. The commander in chief only came in from 2 P.M. to 4 P.M. They had only one functioning aircraft, and while none of the boats in the Haitian navy could run, one of them could float.
Their weapons were good only for terror of an unarmed civilian population. I knew that, with the first sight of a U.S. Marine, they would run.
I will never forget the night I heard a plane—it sounded like it was running too good to be Haitian—buzz by the hotel late one night. I thought the invasion was on. I thought the Americans were coming, and I jumped up and ran downstairs to find that the only thing that had dropped onto Haiti that night were transistor radios, which the U.S. government had parachuted down as instruments of propaganda. I later learned that the bad guys were confiscating them and selling them. As one of my uncles used to say, what a way to run a whorehouse.
The military tried to work its population into some kind of anger at the expected invasion, but the big despots had to bribe smaller despots with rum just to get them out in respectable numbers. I saw one man at both an anti-Aristide meeting and a pro-Aristide meeting a week apart. The government had voodoo priests block off the streets with hexes painted on the blacktop. A volunteer militia trained in the city square with rifles that had no bullets. The rifles were taken back up again after CNN had shot footage of the defiant Haitians. Cedras knew better than to let the people take weapons home. They might find a bullet somewhere. “So, what good is a militia if the attack comes at night?” I asked one officer. He shrugged.