BW: That ain’t on me. I got a son, and I raise that
boy right. Clarence gonna be fifteen next month.
He knows if I ever see him lift a pipe or a needle,
he’s gonna feel a pain a lot worse than what those
drugs can do to him. Grown-ups make their own
decisions. I ain’t got no sympathy for a grown
man who uses. But a child, that’s on the parent.
If you can’t raise your boy or girl right, and they
end up sucking on a pipe, well, then, that’s on the
parents. There’s a manhole in my street. City ain’t
never bothered to fix it. But I know it’s there and
step around that sucker. Someone else falls in? It’s
their own damn fault for being stupid.
Butch Willingham had a son. Clarence. It was a long
shot, but there was a chance.
Using my cell phone, I went to 411.com and plugged
in the name Clarence Willingham. Two matches came
back; one living in Crown Heights, the other by Mor
ningside Park on 107th Street.
I called the first number. A man picked up.
“Yeah?”
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“Hi…is this Clarence Willingham?”
“Um, no,” the man said, sounding irritated. “This
was Clarence Willingham.”
“Excuse me?”
“My name is Clarence Savoy now. Just got married
last month.”
“You…married…oh, I get it. Was your father Butch
Willingham?”
“Butch?” the man said with a high-pitched laugh.
“Try Albert. But close.” Then Clarence Savoy hung up.
I tried the second number. It rang half a dozen times
but didn’t go to voice mail. I let it keep ringing. After
three more rings, a man picked up. He sounded tired,
like I’d just woken him from a nap.
“Who’s this?”
“Is this Clarence Willingham?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Clarence, was your father named Butch?”
“Yeah, the hell’s this about?”
“My name is Henry Parker. I’m a reporter. I was
wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
I told Clarence about his father and Jack’s book. I
needed to know if he knew anything else about his
father’s murder or business practices. Clarence was
eight years old when his father died. There’s a chance
he remembered something.
“I don’t talk about this stuff over the phone,”
Clarence said.
“Well, my story is running tomorrow,” I lied. “If you
see me in person, we can talk about you giving me in
formation as an unnamed source. If you don’t cooper
ate, I can’t promise anything.”
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Jason Pinter
I heard a rustling noise in the background. Then a
female voice said, “Who is it?”
I must have interrupted Clarence. Too bad for him.
He shushed whoever was there and said, “Listen,
man, I’ll tell you whatever I know about my dad, but
this is opening some seriously old wounds.”
“Great. I’ll be there in half an hour. What’s your
address?”
He gave me his address, which I jotted down before
hanging up.
I checked my watch. It was almost noon. I stopped
at a Staples store and bought a new tape recorder, some
pens and paper. These were the tools I brought along
when conducting interviews, when talking to sources.
I hadn’t used them much recently because this investi
gation had been more personal than professional. I
thought everything revolved around my father’s arrest.
Only now could I see how wrong I’d been.
28
I kissed Amanda goodbye, made sure I was presentable
and headed uptown to meet Clarence Willingham.
I rode the 2 train to 116th and Lenox Avenue. It was
a hot day outside, the breeze that had felt so cool on our
balcony gone.
Morningside Park was actually part of a cliff that sep
arated Manhattan from Morningside Heights. It was
also the location of a massive protest in 1968, when
students of Columbia University staged a sit-in in and
around the proposed construction of a gymnasium on
the park grounds. With separate east and west entrances,
many assumed this was to segregate the gym between
black and white. University spokesmen denied the
claims, but abandoned the plans after students barri
caded themselves inside numerous university buildings.
After a group of students opposed to the protests
blockaded the occupied buildings, police came in to end
the struggle. Over one hundred and fifty students were
injured during the forced removal, and over seven
hundred were arrested. Because of the terrible public re
lations, specifically stemming from the student-on
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Jason Pinter
student violence, Columbia scrapped its plans and built
an underground gym instead. Ironically the blueprints
for the gym were then sold to Princeton University,
which appropriated them for their own use.
The address Clarence gave me was for a five-story
brownstone within walking distance of the park. A
pretty nice neighborhood. The Columbia campus stood
directly on the opposite side of Morningside Park, and
though Clarence did live far from student housing, the
university owned such huge swaths of real estate in
upper Manhattan that the neighboring streets were clean
and graffiti free, devoid of clutter and garbage. It must
have looked great in a brochure.
Before turning onto Clarence’s block, I called
Amanda’s cell phone. She picked up, answering with a
hard-to-distinguish, “Heh-wo?”
“Amanda?” I said. “Everything okay?”
“Eating,” she said, removing whatever had been in
her mouth. “Chocolate-covered strawberry. I swear, we
need to move in here.”
“Where did you buy that?”
“I didn’t buy it. They were in a small tin by the tele
vision. I think they’re complimentary.”
“Amanda,” I said, shaking my head, “nothing in
hotels is complimentary. Check the box.”
“Hold on.” I heard her ruffling with something, then
whisper oh hell under her breath.
“What happened?”
“Um…you know that bonus I got for Christmas?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, it’s going to have to go toward paying off
these strawberries.”
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“It’s okay,” I said. “Just enjoy them. Watch some
thing crappy on television, I’ll be back later.”
“Okay, fine, I’ll finish them. Be careful, babe. See
you soon. Love you.”
“I love you, too.”
When I arrived at Clarence’s building I rang the
buzzer. I expected him to simply unlock the door, but
within a minute I saw a man coming down the stairs
toward me. He was wearing a bathrobe, loosely tied,
with white briefs and blue slippers. A
paunchy stomach
hung over the elastic band of the briefs. It was a comical
look, and it was safe to say he was coming to greet me
rather than go for a stroll.
He opened the door, and I extended my hand.
“Henry Parker, nice to meet you, Clar…”
Clarence was ignoring me. My hand sat there
unshook, a lonely hitchhiker. Clarence wasn’t even
looking at me, he was too busy looking down the street,
both sides, behind me, as though expecting a boogey
man or a ninja to jump out and kill him. His eyes flick
ered back and forth, widening and then closing. He
squeezed them shut hard, then opened them again.
Perhaps this allowed him to see better, or give him some
extrasensory perception.
When he seemed content that nobody was waiting
to jump out at him, he said, “You come alone?”
“Of course I did.”
“You sure about that?”
“Um…yeah. Pretty sure.”
“You a cop?”
I snorted out a laugh. “Are you serious? I said I was
a reporter.”
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Jason Pinter
“Cops lie. I don’t believe that BS about cops having
to declare themselves. If someone’s recording this, I’m
calling entrapment on your ass.”
I turned out all my pockets. Showed him I was
carrying nothing.
His brow furrowed. “That’s not an answer.”
“No. I’m not a cop, I’m a reporter.” I showed him my
business card.
“What’choo got in there?” he said, pointing to my
bag.
“Tape recorder, notepad.”
“You can’t bring that to my place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody records or writes down what I say. You
can’t deal with that, you can leave.”
I didn’t have much choice, so I said, “What do you
want me to do with my stuff then?”
“Bernita down the hall will watch it.”
“Bernita?”
“You can trust her. She got a plasma TV. Anytime
you have something you need stored safely, Bernita’s
your woman.”
I wasn’t quite sure how that was supposed to
convince me to leave my equipment with her. I guess I
didn’t have much of a choice but to trust Clarence’s
sterling recommendation of Bernita’s safe-deposit
skills.
“Okay, whatever you say.”
“All right. Come on.”
Clarence led me into the hallway, past a row of rusty
mailboxes and up the first flight of stairs. The building
smelled of mold, and the paint was chipping on the
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staircase railing. Clarence took a left and knocked on
the first door. A scraggly woman wearing a pink
bathrobe and smoking an unfiltered cigarette opened it.
I wondered if this was actually some sort of spa.
“Bernita,” he said. “This is Henry. He’s gonna be
leaving his bag with you for a while.”
Bernita’s apartment beyond her looked rather
massive, with a hallway splintering off to several dif
ferent rooms. The floors were scrubbed clean, and a
single dining table sat in the middle, uncluttered with
the exception of a pair of crystal candlesticks. It seemed
like quite a lot of space. Bernita wasn’t wearing a
wedding ring. The fact that she had at least three or four
rooms for what looked like herself made me all the
more conscious of my own dwelling.
“How long?” she said.
Clarence looked at me. “How long you need?”
“Hour. Two, tops.”
Clarence said, “Forty-five minutes.”
“Whatever,” she replied. Then she looked at me, her
upper lip curled back. “Henry. Ain’t never met a young
boy named Henry.”
Bernita closed the door before I could reply.
With my belongings safely—hopefully—squared
away, Clarence led me to the fourth floor. He lived in
apartment 4J. When we got to the door, Clarence stuck
his hand into his bathrobe pocket, pulling out a key
ring with at least thirty keys on it. I marveled at the
man’s security methods. Then he went to work unlock
ing the half a dozen dead bolts on his front door.
Once Fort Knox was fully unlocked, he opened the
door and beckoned me inside.
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Jason Pinter
For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why he went
to such ridiculous lengths, because Clarence’s apart
ment was an absolute pigsty.
Garbage littered the floor like he was trying to save
room in the city landfills. Empty Chinese food and
pizza boxes were stacked in one corner. Beer cans were
strewn about, creating an aluminum carpet. I could
identify at least a half-dozen different brands, as well
as a few bottles of various liquors: José Cuervo, Cour
voiser, Hennessy. Clearly, Clarence Willingham was
not picky when it came to his booze.
“Take a seat,” he said, gesturing to a beanbag chair
crisscrossed by duct tape like a low-budget surgical
patient. I sat down, immediately feeling the beans
shifting under me. The last beanbag chair I’d sat in was
during college, and I’m pretty sure a box of wine was
involved. “Can I get you a drink? Beer? Soda?
Absinthe?”
I was tempted to ask for the absinthe out of curiosity,
but decided I wasn’t that thirsty. “Thanks, I had lunch
before I came.”
“Suit yourself, man.” Clarence reached under a desk
and pulled out a small wooden box. He opened it, and
took out what appeared to be a piece of rolling paper
and a bag of pot. He looked as me, pleased. “This is
some pure hydro. Fifty bucks a gram. You can snag an
ounce in Washington Square Park for about six hundred.
Sometimes you go up by the George Washington
Bridge, around 179th Street, you find some real fiends
who’ll sell it for cheaper, but it won’t be as good. And
you’d be surprised at how many of the kids from
Columbia deal right in Morningside Park.”
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“Thanks for the info,” I said, “but I gave up smoking
in college. I eat enough Cheetos these days as it is.”
“Suit yourself, reporter man.”
Clarence sprinkled some of the weed onto the paper.
Then he spent a minute picking through it, removing any
clumps or twigs. Once the mixture was in a slight cone
shape—wide to narrow—he began to roll. Clarence stared
at the joint with an almost trancelike intensity. He began
in the middle, using his thumbs to roll it evenly, gradu
ally moving his fingers to the ends of the paper. Once it
was a cylinder, he licked the top edge of the paper and
folded it over. When that was completed, he took a small
piece of thicker paper and rolled it tightly into a spiral.
He inserted that into one end of the joint. Clarence twisted
the end without the roach so nothing would fall out.
> Taking the joint between his thumb and index finger,
Clarence held it to his lips, sparked a lighter and took
a deep drag. He drew it deep into his lungs, his eyes
closing as the end of the joint glowed. Finally he
removed it from his lips and puffed out a dark cloud that
hung over his room for a minute before disappearing.
When all that was done, he opened his eyes, looked
at me, held out the joint. “Best weed you’ll smoke in
this city.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m working.”
“Whatever. So you said you wanted to talk about my
pops. What about him?”
“Your dad was Butch Willingham.”
“S’right.” Clarence took another drag. I noticed a
small corner of his upper lip was turned up. Either he
wasn’t entirely fond of speaking about his father, or
hadn’t in a long time.
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Jason Pinter
“Was he a good father?”
Clarence held out the joint. I don’t think he meant it
that way, but I saw that as somewhat of an answer.
“No better or worse, s’pose.”
“How do you mean that?”
“I know a lot of kids my age who had more’n I did.
Know a lot that had less. My dad, he didn’t have much
of an education. No college, no high school. Dropped
out at fourteen, spent the rest of his life slinging rock.
That’s all the man knew. As far as I knew he was good
at it.”
“How so?”
“Kept me well fed. My moms died when I was a kid
and I never had no brothers or sisters, so it was all up to
him. He made sure I went to school, beat my ass if I didn’t
get good grades. I know a lot of dads who bought the rock
my dad sold and just sunk into a hellhole because of it.
My dad never smoked, never drank. To him this was his
livelihood, like someone who goes to a plant, punches a
clock. He didn’t take his work home with him.”
“I find that a little hard to believe. I mean…” I
motioned to the joint. Clarence laughed.
“Yeah, I used to do harder stuff. Crack. A little heroin
here and there. The weed’s a cooling-down drug. I’ll get
off it at some point.” He took another long, deep, drawnout puff, then smiled lazily. “Just not yet.”
“The sins of the father,” I said under my breath.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. So do you remember when your father
was killed?”
“Remember?” Clarence said, coughing into his fist.
“I was the one that found him.”
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